The Luzhin Defense Read online

  In general there was a lot of talk about childhood. The professor talked about it too and questioned Luzhin. "Your father owned land, didn't he?" Luzhin nodded. "Land, the country--that's excellent," continued the professor. "You probably had horses and cows?" A nod. "Let me imagine your house--Ancient trees all around ... the house large and bright. Your father returns from the hunt ..." Luzhin recalled that his father had once found a fat, nasty little fledgling in a ditch. "Yes," replied Luzhin uncertainly. "Some details," asked the professor softly. "Please. I beg you. I'm interested in the way you occupied yourself in childhood, what you played with. You had some tin soldiers, I'm sure...."

  But Luzhin rarely grew enlivened during these conversations. On the other hand, constantly nudged by such interrogations, his thoughts would return again and again to the sphere of his childhood. It was impossible to express his recollections in words--there simply were no grown-up words for his childish impressions--and if he ever related anything, then he did so jerkily and unwillingly--rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number. His preschool, pre-chess childhood, which he had never thought about before, dismissing it with a slight shudder so as not to find dormant horrors and humiliating insults there, proved now to be an amazingly safe spot, where he could take pleasant excursions that sometimes brought a piercing pleasure. Luzhin himself was unable to understand whence the excitement--why the image of the fat French governess with the three bone buttons on one side of her skirt, that drew together whenever she lowered her enormous croup into an armchair--why the image that had then so irritated him, now evoked in his breast a feeling of tender constriction. He recalled that in their St. Petersburg house her asthmatic obesity had preferred to the staircase the old-fashioned, water-powered elevator which the janitor used to set in motion by means of a lever in the vestibule. "Here we go," the janitor said invariably as he closed the door leaves behind her, and the heavy, puffing, shuddering elevator would creep slowly upwards on its thick velvet cable, and past it, down the peeling wall that was visible through the glass, would come dark geographic patches, those patches of dampness and age among which, as among the clouds in the sky, the reigning fashion is for silhouettes of Australia and the Black Sea. Sometimes little Luzhin would go up with her, but more often he stayed below and listened to the elevator, high up and behind the wall, struggling upwards--and he always hoped, did little Luzhin, that it would get stuck halfway. Often enough this happened. The noise would cease and from unknown, intermural space would come a wail for help: the janitor below would move the lever, with a grunt of effort, then open the door into blackness and ask briskly, looking upwards: "Moving?" Finally something would shudder and stir and after a little while the elevator would descend--now empty. Empty. Goodness knows what had happened to her--perhaps she had traveled up to heaven and remained there with her asthma, her liquorice candies and her pince-nez on a black cord. The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question--where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away?

  With an involuntary movement of the soul he looked for these paths in the sanatorium garden, but the flower beds had a different outline, the birches were placed differently, and the gaps in their russet foliage, filled with autumn blue, in no way corresponded to the remembered gaps into which he tried to fit these cut-out pieces of azure. It seemed as though that distant world was unrepeatable; through it roamed the by now completely bearable images of his parents, softened by the haze of time, and the clockwork train with its tin car painted to look like paneling went buzzing under the flounces of the armchair, and goodness knows how this affected the dummy engine driver, too big for the locomotive and hence placed in the tender.

  That was the childhood Luzhin now visited willingly in his thoughts. It was followed by another period, a long, chess period that both the doctor and his fiancee called lost years, a dark period of spiritual blindness, a dangerous delusion--lost, lost years. They did not bear recollection. Lurking there like an evil spirit was the somehow terrible image of Valentinov. All right, we agree, that will do--lost years--away with them--they are forgotten--crossed out of life. And once they were thus excluded, the light of childhood merged directly with the present light and its flow formed the image of his fiancee. Her being expressed all the gentleness and charm that could be extracted from his recollections of childhood--as if the dapples of light scattered over the footpaths of the manor garden had now grown together into a single warm radiance.

  "Feeling happy?" asked her mother dejectedly, looking at her animated face. "Shall we soon be celebrating a wedding?" "Soon," she replied and threw her small round gray hat on the couch. "In any case he's leaving the sanatorium in a day or two." "It's costing your father a pretty penny--about a thousand marks." "I've just scoured through all the book stores," sighed the daughter, "he absolutely had to have Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes. And it turns out he's never read Tolstoy." "Naturally, he's a peasant," muttered her mother. "I always said so." "Listen, Mamma," she said, lightly slapping her glove against the package of books, "let's make an agreement. From today on let's have no more of these cracks. It is stupid, degrading for you, and, above all, completely pointless." "Then don't marry him," said the mother, her face working. "Don't marry him. I beseech you. Why, if you like--I'll throw myself on my knees before you--" And leaning one elbow on the armchair she started with difficulty to bend her leg, slowly lowering her large, slightly creaking body. "You'll cave the floor in," said her daughter, and picking up the books went out of the room.

  Luzhin read Fogg's journey and Holmes' memoirs in two days, and when he had read them he said they were not what he wanted--this was an incomplete edition. Of the other books, he liked Anna Karenin--particularly the pages on the zemstvo elections and the dinner ordered by Oblonski. Dead Souls also made a certain impression on him, moreover in one place he unexpectedly recognized a whole section that he had once taken down in childhood as a long and painful dictation. Besides the so-called classics his fiancee brought him all sorts of frivolous French novels. Everything that could divert Luzhin was good--even these doubtful stories, which he read, though embarrassed, with interest. Poetry, on the other hand (for instance a small volume of Rilke's that she had bought on the recommendation of a salesman) threw him into a state of severe perplexity and sorrow. Correspondingly, the professor forbade Luzhin to be given anything by Dostoevski, who, in the professor's words, had an oppressive effect on the psyche of contemporary man, for as in a terrible mirror--

  "Oh, Mr. Luzhin doesn't brood over books," she said cheerfully. "And he understands poetry badly because of the rhymes, the rhymes put him off."

  And strangely enough: in spite of the fact that Luzhin had read still fewer books in his life than she in hers, had never finished high school and had been interested in nothing but chess--she felt in him the ghost of a culture that she herself lacked. There were titles of books and names of characters which for some reason were household words to Luzhin, although the books themselves he had never read. His speech was clumsy and full of shapeless, ridiculous words--but in it there sometimes quivered a mysterious intonation hinting at some other kind of words, which were living and charged with subtle meaning, but which he could not utter. Despite his ignorance, despite the meagerness of his vocabulary, Luzhin harbored within him a barely perceptible vibration, the shadow of sounds that he had once heard.

  No more did her mother speak of his uncouthness or of his other defects after that day when, remaining in a genuflectory position, she had sobbed out everything to her heart's content, her cheek pressed against the arm of the chair. "I would have understood everything," she said later to her husband, "understood and forgiven everything if only she really loved him. But that's the dreadful part--" "No, I don't quite agree with you," interrupted her
husband. "I also thought at first that it was all mental. But her attitude to his illness convinces me to the contrary. Of course such a union is dangerous, and she could also have made a better choice ... Although he's from an old, noble family, his narrow profession has left a certain mark on him. Remember Irina who became an actress? Remember how she had changed when she came to us afterwards? All the same, disregarding all these defects, I consider him a good man. You'll see, he'll take up some useful occupation now. I don't know about you, but I simply can't bring myself to dissuade her any longer. In my opinion we should brace ourselves and accept the inevitable."

  He spoke briskly and at length, holding himself very straight and playing with the lid of his cigarette case.

  "I feel just one thing," repeated his wife, "She doesn't love him."

  11

  In a rudimentary jacket minus one sleeve Luzhin, who was being renovated, stood in profile before a cheval glass, while a bald-headed tailor either chalked his shoulder and back or else jabbed pins into him, which he took with astonishing deftness from his mouth, where they seemed to grow naturally. From all the samples of cloth arranged neatly according to color in an album, Luzhin had chosen a dark gray square, and his fiancee spent a long time feeling the corresponding bolt of cloth, which the tailor threw with a hollow thud onto the counter, unwrapped with lightning speed, and pressed against his protruding stomach, as if covering up his nakedness. She found that the material tended to crease easily, whereupon an avalanche of tight rolls of cloth began to cover the counter and the tailor, wetting his finger on his lower lip, unrolled and unrolled. Finally a cloth was chosen that was also dark gray, but soft and flexible, and even just a bit shaggy; and now Luzhin, distributed about the cheval glass in pieces, in sections, as if for visual instruction (... here we have a plump, clean-shaven face, here is the same face in profile, and here we have something rarely seen by the subject himself, the back of his head, fairly closely cropped, with folds in the neck and slightly protruding ears, pink where the light shines through ...) looked at himself and at the material, failing to recognize its former smooth, generous, virgin integrity. "I think it needs to be a bit narrower in front," said his fiancee, and the tailor, taking a step backward, slit his eyes at Luzhin's figure, purred with the polite trace of a smile that the gentleman was somewhat on the stout side, and then busied himself with some newborn lapels, pulling this and pinning that, while Luzhin in the meantime, with a gesture peculiar to all people in his position, held his arm slightly away from his body or else bent it at the elbow and looked at his wrist, trying to get accustomed to the sleeve. In passing, the tailor slashed him over the heart with chalk to indicate a small pocket, then pitilessly ripped off the sleeve that had seemed finished and began quickly to remove the pins from Luzhin's stomach.

  Besides a good business suit they made Luzhin a dress suit; and the old-fashioned tuxedo found at the bottom of his trunk was altered by the same tailor. His fiancee did not dare to ask why Luzhin had formerly needed a tuxedo and an opera hat, fearing to arouse chess memories, and therefore she never learned about a certain big dinner given in Birmingham, where incidentally Valentinov ... Oh well, good luck to him.

  The renovation of Luzhin's envelope did not stop here. Shirts, ties and socks appeared--and Luzhin accepted all this with carefree interest. From the sanatorium he moved into a small, gaily papered room that had been rented on the second floor of his fiancee's building, and when he moved in he had exactly the same feeling as in childhood when he had moved from country to town. It was always strange, this settling into town. You went to bed and everything was so new: in the silence of the night the wooden pavement would come to life for several seconds of slow clip-clop, the windows were curtained more heavily and more sumptuously than at the manor; in darkness slightly relieved by the bright line of the incompletely closed door, the objects stopped expectantly, still not fully warmed up, still not having completely renewed their acquaintanceship after the long summer interval. And when you woke up, there was sober, gray light outside the windows and the sun slipped through a milky haze in the sky, looking like the moon, and suddenly in the distance--a burst of military music: it approached in orange waves, was interrupted by the hurried beat of a drum, and soon everything died down, and in place of the puffed-out sounds of trumpets there came again the imperturbable clopping of hoofs and the subdued rattling of a St. Petersburg morning.

  "You forget to put out the light in the corridor," said, smiling, his landlady, an elderly German woman. "You forget to close your door at night." And she also complained to his fiancee--saying he was absentminded like an old professor.

  "Are you comfortable, Luzhin?" his fiancee kept inquiring. "Are you sleeping well, Luzhin? No, I know it's not comfortable, but it will all change soon." "There's no need to put it off any longer," muttered Luzhin, putting his arms around her and interlacing his fingers on her hip. "Sit down, sit down, there's no need to put it off. Let's do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Most lawful matrimony." "Yes, soon, soon," she replied. "But it can't be done in a single day. There's still one more establishment. There you and I will hang on the wall for two weeks, and in the meantime your wife will come from Palermo, take a look at the names and say: Impossible--Luzhin's mine."

  "It's mislaid," replied her mother when she inquired about her birth certificate. "I put it away and mislaid it. I don't know. I don't know anything." The document, however, was found pretty quickly. And in any case it was too late now to warn, to forbid, to think up difficulties. The wedding rolled up with fatal smoothness, and could not be stopped as if one were standing on ice--slippery, nothing to catch hold of. She was forced to submit and think up ways of embellishing and displaying her daughter's fiance so as not to be ashamed before other people, and she had to pluck up the courage to smile at the wedding, to play the role of the satisfied mother and to praise Luzhin's honesty and goodness of heart. She also thought of how much money had gone on Luzhin and how much more was still to go, and she tried to expel a terrifying picture from her imagination: Luzhin disrobed, aflame with simian passion, and her stubbornly submissive, cold, cold daughter. Meanwhile the frame for this picture was also ready. A not very expensive but decently furnished apartment was rented in the vicinity--on the fifth floor, it is true, but that did not matter--there was an elevator for Luzhin's shortness of breath, and in any case the stairs were not steep and there was a chair on every landing beneath a stained-glass window. From the spacious entrance hall, conventionally enlivened by silhouette drawings in black frames, a door to the left opened into the bedroom and a door to the right into the study. Farther down the right-hand side of the entrance hall was the door to the drawing room; the adjoining dining room had been made a little longer at the expense of the entrance hall, which at this point neatly turned into a corridor--a transformation chastely concealed by a plush portiere on rings. To the left of the corridor was the bathroom, then the servant's room and at the end, the kitchen.

  The future mistress of the apartment liked the disposition of the rooms; their furniture was less to her taste. In the study stood some brown velvet armchairs, a bookcase crowned with a broad-shouldered, sharp-faced Dante in a bathing cap, and a large, emptyish desk with an unknown past and an unknown future. A rickety lamp on a black spiraled standard topped with an orange shade rose beside a small couch, on which someone had forgotten a light-haired teddy bear and a fat-faced toy dog with broad pink soles and a black spot over one eye. Above the couch hung an imitation Gobelin tapestry depicting some dancing rustics.

  From the study--if the sliding doors were given a slight push--a through view opened up: the parquet floor of the drawing room and beyond it the dining room with its sideboard reduced by perspective. In the drawing room a palm gave off a glazed green light and little rugs were strewn about the floor. Finally came the dining room with the sideboard now grown to its natural size and with plates around the walls. Above the table a lone, fluffy, little toy devil was hanging from the low lamp. There was
a bay window and from there one could see a small public garden with a fountain at the end of the street. Returning to the dining table she looked through the drawing room into the distant study, at the Gobelin now in turn reduced, and then went from the dining room into the corridor and passed through the entrance hall into the bedroom. There, pressing close up to one another, stood two flocculent beds. The lamp turned out to be in the Mauritanian style, the curtains over the windows were yellow, promising a deceptive sunlight in the mornings--and a woodcut in the wall space between the windows showed a child prodigy in a nightgown that reached to his heels playing on an enormous piano, while his father, wearing a gray dressing gown and carrying a candle, stood stock-still, with the door ajar.

  Something had to be added and something taken away. A portrait of the landlady's grandfather was removed from the drawing room and the study was hastily cleared of an Oriental-looking small table inlaid with a mother-of-pearl chessboard. The bathroom window, whose lower part was of sparkly blue-frosted glass, turned out to be cracked in its upper, transparent part and a new pane had to be put in. In the kitchen and servant's room the ceilings were whitewashed anew. A phonograph grew up in the shade of the drawing room palm tree. But generally speaking, as she inspected and arranged this apartment "rented with a long view but at short notice"--as her father joked--she could not throw off the thought that all this was only temporary, that no doubt it would be necessary to take Luzhin away from Berlin, to amuse him with other countries. Any future is unknown--but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.

  But how gentle and sweet Luzhin was these days; how cozily he sat at the tea table in his new suit, adorned by a smoke-colored tie, and politely, if not always in the right places, agreed with his interlocutor. His future mother-in-law told her acquaintances that Luzhin had decided to abandon chess because it took up too much of his time, but that he did not like to talk about it--and now Oleg Sergeyevich Smirnovski no longer asked for a game, but disclosed to him with a gleam in his eye the secret machinations of the Masons and even promised to give him a remarkable pamphlet to read.