There followed the happiest days of his life. “Perhaps,” Heinrich said, “the only truly happy days of it.”

Hand in hand they strolled through the Imperial Arboretum and the Imperial Rose Garden, through the Imperial Menagerie and the Imperial Portrait Gallery, the route he sometimes walked with Katharina when he sought to inform her about the ways of the world. In the arboretum he taught Ludmila about trees, first their nature, that is, their leaves and trunks, the range of their root systems, how they jostle with one another for sunlight, and then their meaning, the melancholy thoughts trees inspired in his head, thoughts that had their origins in his childhood experiences with trees, the way trees figured in his adolescence and in his early adulthood, the connotations of trees, their associations, gnarled knots that called to mind his mother’s father’s bent bulging fist gripping the knob of his cane, the gorgeous springtime flowering of a particular tree that reminded him of the dreadful, very drawn-out and very depressing springtime death of his beloved paternal grandmother long ago. Heinrich said: “I wanted to be transparent to her, Father—I wished Ludmila to know exactly what I was thinking when I looked at a tree.” The thought that a tree might put in his head a thought which she remained unaware of was actually painful to him; he felt the strange sensation that his head (which just a few weeks ago had been empty, continuous with everything else and the same as it) was teeming with personal arboreal associations which, if he didn’t want his head to shatter from the pressure, he had to reveal to Ludmila at once. In the rose garden he taught her about roses, first their nature, the purpose of their thorns and scents, and then their meaning, his own personal rose associations, of which, like his tree associations, Heinrich felt an urgent need to unburden himself, to share with her, lest his head shatter from the pressure of them. In the Imperial Menagerie he explained how the animals worked, how the hog worked, its nature, and what the animals, and particularly the hog, meant to him, what and whom he associated with them. Same with the portraits in the Imperial Portrait Gallery. He came to realize that the pressure he felt in his head, which was not unpleasant but which could only be relieved by disclosing to Ludmila with perfect precision what everything—hogs, trees, people, paintings, and everything else—evoked in him, in his head, was love. It was what love was. The feeling of being in love is the feeling, Heinrich realized, of one’s head being no longer equilibrated with the cosmos but being instead perilously albeit pleasurably out of equilibrium with it, overinflated with private associations that must at all costs be discharged, or pumped, into the head of the loved one. One’s head never feels more private, more cloistered, more one’s own, than when one is in love, love seals us in our head and our lover in our lover’s head, “Every single poet from Homer till now has got this backward, poets think love joins heads, fuses them together, when in fact it sequesters them.” This head sequestration was by no means an unpleasant phenomenon. The fervid urge to share one’s thoughts, in conversation, is the mental counterpart of the material urge to share one’s seed, in the carnal act, Heinrich observed, and how often after sharing with Ludmila that, say, the knot of this tree reminded him of his departed grandfather’s arthritic fist, darkened here and there by blood pooling beneath the skin, did he take her by the hand, dismiss the stonemason who’d been translating for them, and draw her down into the dirt.