The Luzhin Defense (19 page)

Whistling loudly she walked to the bedroom, and the whistle was immediately cut short: Luzhin, covered to the waist by an eiderdown, his starched shirtfront undone and bulging, was lying on the bed with his hands tucked under his head and emitting a purring snore. His collar hung on the foot of the bed, his trousers sprawled on the floor, their suspenders spread out, and his dress coat, set crookedly on the shoulders of a hanger, was lying on the couch with one tail tucked underneath it. All this she quietly picked up and put away. Before going to bed she moved back the window curtain to see if the blind had been lowered. It had not been. In the dark depths of the courtyard the night wind rocked a shrub and in the faint light shed from somewhere unknown something glistened, perhaps a puddle on the stone path that skirted the lawn, and in another place the shadow of some railings fitfully appeared and disappeared.
And suddenly everything went dark and there was only a black chasm.

She thought she would fall asleep as soon as she jumped into bed but it turned out otherwise. The cooing snore beside her, a strange melancholy, and this dark, unfamiliar room kept her suspended and would not allow her to slip off into sleep. And for some reason the word “match” kept floating through her brain—“a good match,” “find yourself a good match,” “match,” “match,” “an unfinished, interrupted match,” “such a good game.” “Give the Maestro my anxiety, anxiety …” “She could have made a brilliant match,” said her mother clearly, floating past in the darkness. “Let’s drink a toast,” whispered a tender voice, and her father’s eyes appeared round the edge of a glass, and the foam rose higher, higher, and her new shoes pinched a bit and it was so hot in the church.

The long trip abroad was postponed until spring—the sole concession Mrs. Luzhin made to her parents, who wanted at least for the first few months to be near at hand. Mrs. Luzhin herself somewhat feared Berlin life for her husband, entwined as it was with chess memories; it turned out, however, not to be difficult to amuse Luzhin even in Berlin.

A long trip abroad, conversations about it, travel projects. In the study, which Luzhin had become very fond of, they found a splendid atlas in one of the bookcases. The world was shown at first as a solid sphere, tightly bound in a net of longitudes and latitudes, then it was rolled out flat, cut into two halves and served up in sections. When it was rolled out, some place like Greenland, which at first had been a small process, a mere appendix, suddenly swelled out almost to the dimensions of the nearest continent. There were white bald patches on the poles. The oceans stretched out smoothly azure. Even on this map there would be enough water to, say, wash your hands—what then was it, actually—so much water, depth, breadth.
Luzhin showed his wife all the shapes he had loved as a child—the Baltic Sea, like a kneeling woman, the jackboot of Italy, the drop of Ceylon falling from India’s nose. He thought the equator was unlucky—its path lay mostly across oceans; it cut across two continents, true, but it had no luck with Asia, which had pulled up out of the way. Moreover it pressed down and squashed what it did manage to cross—the tips of one or two things and some untidy islands. Luzhin knew the highest mountain and the smallest state, and looking at the relative positions of the two Americas he found something acrobatic in their association. “But in general, all this could have been arranged more piquantly,” he said, pointing to the map of the world. “There’s no idea behind it, no point.” And he even grew a little angry that he was unable to find the meaning of all these complicated outlines, and he spent hours looking, as he had looked in childhood, for a way of going from the North Sea to the Mediterranean along a labyrinth of rivers, or of tracing some kind of rational pattern in the disposition of the mountain ranges.

“Now where shall we go?” said his wife and clucked slightly, the way adults do to indicate pleasant anticipation when they begin to play with children. And then she loudly named the romantic spots. “First down here, to the Riviera,” she suggested. “Monte Carlo, Nice. Or, say, the Alps.” “And then this way a bit,” said Luzhin. “They have very cheap grapes in the Crimea.” “What are you saying, Luzhin, the Lord have mercy on you, it’s impossible for us to go to Russia.” “Why?” asked Luzhin. “They invited me to go.” “Nonsense, stop it please,” she said, angered not so much by Luzhin’s talking of the impossible as by his referring
obliquely to something connected with chess. “Look down here,” she said, and Luzhin obediently tranferred his gaze to another place on the map. “Here, for instance, is Egypt, the pyramids. And here is Spain where they do horrible things to bulls.…”

Knowing that Luzhin had probably already been more than once in many of the towns they might have visited, she did not name the large cities in order to avoid any harmful reminiscences. A superfluous caution. The world in which Luzhin had traveled in his time was not depicted on the map, and if she had named him Rome or London, then from the sound of these names on her lips and from the big whole note on the map he would have imagined something completely new, never seen before, and not in any circumstance that vague chess café, which was always the same whether situated in Rome or London or even in that innocent Nice, so trustfully named by her. And when she brought innumerable folders back from the railroad office, the world of his chess-playing trips separated, as it were, still more sharply from this new world, where the tourist strolled in his white suit with a pair of binoculars on a strap. There were black palms silhouetted against a rosy sunset and the reversed silhouettes of the same palms in the rosy Nile. There was an almost indecently blue gulf, and a sugary white hotel with a multicolored flag waving in the opposite direction to the smoke of a steamer on the horizon. There were snowy mountaintops and suspension bridges, and lagoons with gondolas, and an infinite number of ancient churches, and a narrow cobbled lane, and a small donkey with two thick bales on its sides.… Everything was attractive, everything was entertaining, everything
sent the unknown author of the brochures into transports of praise.… The musical names, the millions of saints, the waters that cured all sicknesses, the age of a town rampart, hotels of the first, second, third class—all this rippled before the eyes and everything was fine, Luzhin was awaited everywhere, they called him in voices of thunder, they were driven wild by their own hospitality, and without asking the owner they distributed the sun.

It was during these first days of married life that Luzhin visited his father-in-law’s office. His father-in-law was dictating something, but the typewriter stuck to its own version—repeating the word “tot” in a rapid chatter with something like the following intonation: tot Hottentot tot tot tot do not totter—and then something would move across with a bang. His father-in-law showed him sheafs of forms, account books with Z-shaped lines on the pages, books with little windows on their spines, the monstrously thick tomes of Commercial Germany, and a calculating machine, very clever and quite tame. However, Luzhin liked Tot-tot best of all, the words spilling swiftly out onto the paper, the wonderful evenness of the lilac lines—and several copies at the same time. “I wonder if I too … One needs to know,” he said, and his father-in-law nodded approvingly and the typewriter appeared in Luzhin’s study. It was proposed to him that one of the office employees come and explain how to use it, but he refused, replying that he would learn on his own. And so it was: he fairly quickly made out its construction, learned to put in the ribbon and roll in the sheet of paper, and made friends with all the little levers. It proved to be more difficult to remember the distribution of the letters, the typing went
very slowly; there was none of Tot-tot’s rapid chatter and for some reason—from the very first day—the exclamation mark dogged him—it leapt out in the most unexpected places. At first he copied out half a column from a German newspaper, and then composed a thing or two himself. A brief little note took shape with the following contents: “You are wanted on a charge of murder. Today is November 27th. Murder and arson. Good day, dear Madam. Now when you are needed, dear, exclamation mark, where are you? The body has been found. Dear Madam! Today the police will come!!” Luzhin read this over several times, reinserted the sheet and, groping for the right letters, typed out, somewhat jumpily, the signature: “Abbé Busoni.” At this point he grew bored, the thing was going too slowly. And somehow he had to find a use for the letter he had written. Burrowing in the telephone directory he found a Frau Louisa Altman, wrote out the address by hand and sent her his composition.

The phonograph also provided him with a certain amount of entertainment. Its chocolate-colored cabinet under the palm tree used to sing with a velvety voice and Luzhin, one arm around his wife, would sit on the sofa and listen, and think it would soon be night. She would get up and change the record, holding the disc up to the light, and one sector of it would be a silky shimmer, like moonlight on the sea. And again the cabinet would exude music, and again his wife would sit next to him, and lower her chin onto interlaced fingers and listen, blinking. Luzhin remembered the airs and even attempted to sing them. There were moaning, clattering and ululating dances and a most tender American who sang in a whisper, and there was a whole
opera on fifteen records—
Boris Godunov
—with church bells ringing in one place and with sinister pauses.

His wife’s parents used to drop in frequently and it was established that the Luzhins would dine with them three times a week. The mother tried several times to learn from her daughter a detail or two about their marriage and would ask inquisitively: “Are you pregnant? I’m sure you’re going to have a baby soon.” “Nonsense,” replied the daughter, “I’ve just had twins.” She was still her usual calm self, still smiled the same way with her brows lowered and still addressed Luzhin by his surname and by the second person plural. “My poor Luzhin,” she would say, tenderly pursing her lips, “my poor, poor man.” And Luzhin would rub his cheek on her shoulder, and she would think vaguely that there were probably greater joys than the joys of compassion, but that these were no concern of hers. Her only care in life was a minute-by-minute effort to arouse Luzhin’s curiosity about things in order to keep his head above the dark water, so that he could breathe easily. She asked Luzhin in the mornings what he had dreamed, enlivened his matutinal appetite with a cutlet or English marmalade, took him for walks, lingered with him before shopwindows, read
War and Peace
aloud to him after dinner, played jolly geography with him and dictated sentences for him to type. Several times she took him to the museum and showed him her favorite pictures and explained that in Flanders, where they had rain and fog, painters used bright colors, while it was in Spain, a country of sunshine, that the gloomiest master of all had been born. She said also that the one over there had a feeling for glass objects, while this one liked lilies and tender faces slightly
inflamed by colds caught in heaven, and she directed his attention to two dogs domestically looking for crumbs beneath the narrow, poorly spread table of “The Last Supper.” Luzhin nodded and slit his eyes conscientiously, and was a very long time examining an enormous canvas on which the artist had depicted all the torments of sinners in hell—in great detail, very curiously. They also visited the theater and the zoo, and the movies, at which point it turned out that Luzhin had never been to the movies before. The picture ran on in a white glow and finally, after many adventures, the girl returned—now a famous actress—to her parents’ house, and paused in the doorway, while in the room, not seeing her yet, her grizzled father was playing chess with the doctor, a faithful friend of the family who had remained completely unchanged over the years. In the darkness came the sound of Luzhin laughing abruptly. “An absolutely impossible position for the pieces,” he said, but at this point, to his wife’s relief, everything changed and the father, growing in size, walked toward the spectators and acted his part for all he was worth; his eyes widened, then came a slight trembling, his lashes flapped, there was another bit of trembling, and slowly his wrinkles softened, grew kinder, and a slow smile of infinite tenderness appeared on his face, which continued to tremble—and yet, gentlemen, the old man had cursed his daughter in his time.… But the doctor—the doctor stood to one side, he remembered—the poor, humble doctor—how as a young girl at the very beginning of the picture she had thrown flowers over the fence at him, while he, lying on the grass, had been reading a book: he had then raised his head and had seen only a fence; but suddenly a girl’s head with
parted hair rose on the other side and then came a pair of eyes growing ever bigger—ah, what mischievousness, what playfulness! Go on, Doctor, jump over the fence—there she runs, the sweet nymph, she’s hiding behind those trees—catch her, catch her, Doctor! But now all this is gone. Head bowed, hands limply hanging, one of them holding a hat, stands the famous actress (a fallen woman, alas!). And the father, continuing the trembling, slowly opens his arms, and suddenly she kneels before him. Luzhin began to blow his nose. When they left the movie house he had red eyes and he cleared his throat and denied that he had been crying. And the following day over morning coffee he leaned an elbow on the table and said thoughtfully: “Very, very good—that picture.” He thought a bit more and added: But they don’t know how to play.” “What do you mean, they don’t know?” said his wife with surprise. “They were first-class actors.” Luzhin looked at her sideways and immediately averted his eyes, and there was something about this she did not like. Suddenly she realized what was up and began to debate with herself how to make Luzhin forget this unfortunate game of chess, which that fool of a director had seen fit to introduce for the sake of “atmosphere.” But Luzhin, evidently, immediately forgot it himself—he was engrossed in some genuine Russian bread that his mother-in-law had sent, and his eyes were again quite clear.

In this way a month passed, a second. The winter that year was a white, St. Petersburg one. Luzhin was made a wadded overcoat. Indigent refugee Russians were given certain of Luzhin’s old things—including a green woolen scarf of Swiss origin. Mothballs exuded a rough-edged
melancholy smell. In the entrance hall hung a condemned jacket. “It was so comfortable,” implored Luzhin, “so very comfortable.” “Leave it alone,” said his wife from the bedroom. “I haven’t looked at it yet. It’s probably teeming with moths.” Luzhin took off the dinner jacket he had been trying on to see whether he had filled out much during the past month (he had filled out, he had—and tomorrow there was a big Russian ball, a charitable affair) and slipped lovingly into the sleeves of the condemned one. A darling jacket, not the slightest trace of moth in it. Here was just a tiny hole in the pocket, but not right through like they sometimes were. “Wonderful,” he cried in a high voice. His wife, sock in hand, looked out into the entrance hall. “Take it off, Luzhin. It’s torn and dusty, goodness knows how long it’s lain about.” “No, no,” said Luzhin. She inspected it from all sides; Luzhin stood and slapped himself on the hips, and it felt, incidentally, as if there were something in his pocket; he thrust his hand in—no, nothing, only a hole. “It’s very decrepit,” said his wife, frowning, “but perhaps as a work coat …” “I beg you,” said Luzhin. “Well, as you wish—only give it to the maid afterwards so she can give it a good beating.” “No, it’s clean,” said Luzhin to himself and resolved to hang it somewhere in his study, in some little nook, to take it off and hang it up the way civil servants do. In taking it off he again felt as if the jacket were a trifle heavier on the left side, but he remembered that the pockets were empty and did not investigate the cause of the heaviness. As to the dinner jacket here, it had become tightish—yes, definitely tightish. “A ball,” said Luzhin, and imagined to himself lots and lots of circling couples.