The Luzhin Defense (5 page)

Carefully the door was opened. Luzhin senior came in—on tiptoe. He had been prepared to find the violinist still talking on the telephone and had thought to whisper very tactfully: “Continue, continue, but when you finish the audience would very much like to hear something more.” “Continue, continue,” he said mechanically and was brought up short upon seeing his son. “No, no, I’ve already
finished,” replied the violinist, getting up. “Excellent chessmen. Do you play?” “Indifferently,” said Luzhin senior. (“What are you doing here? You too come and listen to the music …”) “What a game, what a game,” said the violinist, tenderly closing the box. “Combinations like melodies. You know, I can simply
hear
the moves.” “In my opinion one needs great mathematical skill for chess,” said Luzhin senior. “And in that respect I … They are awaiting you, Maestro.” “I would rather have a game,” laughed the violinist, as he left the room. “The game of the gods. Infinite possibilities.” “A very ancient invention,” said Luzhin senior and looked around at his son: “What’s the matter? Come with us!” But before reaching the drawing room Luzhin contrived to tarry in the dining room where the table was laid with refreshments. There he took a plateful of sandwiches and carried it away to his room. He ate while he undressed and then ate in bed. He had already put the light out when his mother looked in and bent over him, the diamonds around her neck glinting in the half-light. He pretended to be asleep. She went away and was a long, long time—so as not to make a noise—closing the door.

He woke up next day with a feeling of incomprehensible excitement. The April morning was bright and windy and the wooden street pavements had a violet sheen; above the street near Palace Arch an enormous red-blue-white flag swelled elastically, the sky showing through it in three different tints: mauve, indigo and pale blue. As always on holidays he went for a walk with his father, but these were not the former walks of his childhood; the midday cannon no longer frightened him and father’s conversation was
unbearable, for finding a pretext in last night’s concert, he kept hinting that it would be a good idea to take up music. For lunch there was the remains of the paschal cream cheese (now a squat little cone with a grayish shading on its round summit) and a still untouched Easter cake. His aunt, the same sweet copper-haired aunt, second cousin to his mother, was gay in the extreme, threw cake crumbs across the table and related that for twenty-five rubles Latham was going to give her a ride in his “Antoinette” monoplane, which, by the way, was unable to leave the ground for the fifth day, while Voisin on the contrary kept circling the aerodrome like clockwork, and moreover so low that when he banked over the stands one could even see the cotton wool in the pilot’s ears. Luzhin for some reason remembered that morning and that lunch with unusual brightness, the way you remember the day preceding a long journey. His father said it would be a good idea after lunch to drive to the Islands beyond the Neva, where the clearings were carpeted with anemones, and while he was speaking, the young aunt landed a crumb right in Father’s mouth. His mother remained silent. Suddenly after the second course she got up, trying to conceal her face twitching with restrained tears and repeating under her breath “It’s nothing, nothing, it’ll pass in a moment,” hastily left the dining room. Father threw his napkin on the table and followed her. Luzhin never discovered exactly what had happened, but passing along the corridor with his aunt he heard subdued sobs from his mother’s room and his father’s voice remonstrating and loudly repeating the phrase “imagining things.”

“Let’s go away somewhere,” whispered his aunt in an
embarrassed and nervous manner, and they entered the study where a band of sunbeams, in which spun tiny particles of dust, was focused on an overstuffed armchair. She lit a cigarette and folds of smoke started to sway, soft and transparent, in the sunbeams. This was the only person in whose presence he did not feel constrained, and now it was especially pleasant: a strange silence in the house and a kind of expectation of something. “Well, let’s play some game,” said his aunt hurriedly and took him by the neck from behind. “What a thin little neck you have, one can clasp it with one hand.…” “Do you know how to play chess?” asked Luzhin stealthily, and freeing his head he rubbed his cheek against the delightful bright blue silk of her sleeve. “A game of Snap would be better,” she said absentmindedly. A door banged somewhere. She winced and turned her face in the direction of the noise, listening. “No, I want to play chess,” said Luzhin. “It’s complicated, my dear, you can’t learn it in an instant.” He went to the desk and found the box, which was standing behind a desk photograph. His aunt got up to take an ashtray, ruminatively crooning in conclusion of some thought of hers: “That would be terrible, that would be terrible …” “Here,” said Luzhin and put the box down on a low, inlaid Turkish table. “You need the board as well,” she said. “And you know, it would be better for me to teach you checkers, it’s simpler.” “No, chess,” said Luzhin and unrolled an oilcloth board.

“First let’s place the pieces correctly,” began his aunt with a sigh. “White here, black over there. King and Queen next to each other. These here are the Officers. These are the Horses. And these, at each corner, are the
Cannons. Now …” Suddenly she froze, holding a piece in mid-air and looking at the door. “Wait,” she said anxiously. “I think I left my handkerchief in the dining room. I’ll be right back.” She opened the door but returned immediately. “Let it go,” she said and again sat down. “No, don’t set them out without me, you’ll do it the wrong way. This is called a Pawn. Now watch how they all move. The Horse gallops, of course.” Luzhin sat on the carpet with his shoulder against her knee and watched her hand with its thin platinum bracelet picking up the chessmen and putting them down. “The Queen is the most mobile,” he said with satisfaction and adjusted the piece with his finger, since it was standing not quite in the center of the square. “And this is how one piece eats another,” said his aunt. “As if pushing it out and taking its place. The Pawns do this obliquely. When you can take the King but he can move out of the way, it’s called check; and when he’s got nowhere to go it’s mate. So your object is to take my King and I have to take yours. You see how long it all takes to explain. Perhaps we can play another time, eh?” “No, now,” said Luzhin and suddenly kissed her hand. “That was sweet of you,” said his aunt softly, “I never expected such tenderness … You are a nice little boy after all.” “Please let’s play,” said Luzhin, and moving in a kneeling position on the carpet, reached the low table. But at that moment she got up from her seat so abruptly that she brushed the board with her skirt and knocked off several pieces. In the doorway stood his father.

“Go to your room,” he said, glancing briefly at his son. Luzhin, who was being sent out of a room for the first time in his life, remained as he was on his knees out of sheer
astonishment. “Did you hear?” said his father. Luzhin flushed and began to look for the fallen pieces on the carpet. “Hurry up,” said his father in a thunderous voice such as he had never used before. His aunt hastily began to put the pieces any which way into their box. Her hands trembled. One Pawn just would not go in. “Now take it, take it,” she said. He slowly rolled up the oilcloth board and, his face darkened by a sense of deep injury, took the box. He was unable to close the door behind him since both hands were full. His father took a swift stride and slammed the door so hard that Luzhin dropped the board, which immediately unfolded; he had to put the box down and roll up the thing again. Behind the door of the study there was at first silence, then the creak of an armchair under his father’s weight, and then his aunt’s breathless interrogative whisper. Luzhin reflected disgustedly that today everyone had gone mad and went to his room. There he immediately set out the pieces as his aunt had shown him and considered them for a long time, trying to figure something out; after which he put them away very neatly in their box. From that day the chess set remained with him and it was a long time before his father noticed its absence. From that day there was in his room a fascinating and mysterious toy, the use of which he had still not learned. From that day his aunt never again came to visit them.

A week or so later, an empty gap occurred between the first and third lesson: the geography teacher had caught a cold. When five minutes had passed after the bell and still no one had come in, there ensued such a premonition of happiness that it seemed the heart would not hold out
should the glass door nonetheless now open and the geography teacher, as was his habit, come dashing almost at a run into the room. Only Luzhin was indifferent. Bent low over his desk, he was sharpening a pencil, trying to make the point as sharp as a pin. An excited din swelled around him. Our bliss, it seemed, was bound to be realized. Sometimes however there were unbearable disappointments: in place of the sick teacher the predatory little mathematics teacher would come creeping into the room, and, having closed the door soundlessly, would begin to select pieces of chalk from the ledge beneath the blackboard with an evil smile on his face. But a full ten minutes elapsed and no one appeared. The din grew louder. From an excess of happiness somebody banged a desk lid. The class tutor sprang up out of nowhere. “Absolute quiet,” he said. “I want absolute quiet. Valentin Ivanovich is sick. Occupy yourselves with something. But there must be absolute quiet.” He went away. Large fluffy clouds shone outside the window; something gurgled and dripped; sparrows chirped. Blissful hour, bewitching hour. Luzhin apathetically began to sharpen yet another pencil. Gromov was telling some story in a hoarse voice, pronouncing strange obscene words with gusto. Petrishchev begged everyone to explain to him how we know that they are equal to two right-angled ones. And suddenly, behind him, Luzhin distinctly heard a special sound, wooden and rattly, that caused him to grow hot and his heart to skip a beat. Cautiously he turned around. Krebs and the only quiet boy in the class were nimbly setting out light little chessmen on a six-inch board. The board was on the desk bench between them. They sat extremely uncomfortably, sideways. Luzhin, forgetting to finish sharpening his pencil, went up to them. The players
took no notice of him. The quiet boy, when trying many years later to remember his schoolmate Luzhin, never recalled that casual chess game, played during an empty hour. Mixing up dates he extracted from the past a vague impression of Luzhin’s once winning a school match, something itched in his memory, but he could not get at it.

“There goes the Tower,” said Krebs. Luzhin followed his hand, thinking with a tremor of momentary panic that his aunt had not told him the names of all the pieces. But “tower” turned out to be a synonym for “cannon.” “I didn’t see you could take, that’s all,” said the other. “All right, take your move back,” said Krebs.

With gnawing envy and irritating frustration Luzhin watched the game, striving to perceive those harmonious patterns the musician had spoken of and feeling vaguely that in some way or other he understood the game better than these two, although he was completely ignorant of how it should be conducted, why this was good and that bad, and what one should do to penetrate the opposite King’s camp without losses. And there was one kind of move that pleased him very much, amusing in its sleekness: Krebs’s King slid up to the piece he called a Tower, and the Tower jumped over the King. Then he saw the other King come out from behind its Pawns (one had been knocked out, like a tooth) and begin to step distractedly back and forth. “Check,” said Krebs, “check” (and the stung King leaped to one side); “you can’t go here and you can’t go here either. Check, I’m taking your Queen, check.” At this point he lost a piece himself and began insisting he should replay his move. The class bully filliped Luzhin on the back of the head and simultaneously with his other hand knocked the board onto the floor. For the
second time in his life Luzhin noticed how unstable a thing chess was.

And the following morning, while still lying in bed, he made an unprecedented decision. He usually went to school in a cab and always made a careful study of the cab’s number, dividing it up in a special way in order the better to store it away in his memory and extract it thence whole should he require it. But today he did not go as far as school and forgot in his excitement to memorize the number; fearfully glancing around he got out at Karavannaya Street and by a circular route, avoiding the region of the school, reached Sergievskaya Street. On the way he happened to run into the geography teacher, who with enormous strides, a briefcase under his arm, was rushing in the direction of school, blowing his nose and expectorating phlegm as he went. Luzhin turned aside so abruptly that a mysterious object rattled heavily in his satchel. Only when the teacher, like a blind wind, had swept past him did Luzhin become aware that he was standing before a hairdresser’s window and that the frizzled heads of three waxen ladies with pink nostrils were staring directly at him. He took a deep breath and swiftly walked along the wet sidewalk, unconsciously trying to adjust his steps so that his heel always landed on a join between two paving slabs. But the slabs were all of different widths and this hampered his walk. Then he stepped down onto the pavement in order to escape temptation and sloshed on in the mud along the edge of the sidewalk. Finally he caught sight of the house he wanted, plum-colored, with naked old men straining to hold up a balcony, and stained glass in the front door. He turned in at the gate past a spurstone showing
the white marks of pigeons, stole across an inner court where two individuals with rolled-up sleeves were washing a dazzling carriage, went up a staircase and rang the bell. “She’s still asleep,” said the maid, looking at him with surprise. “Wait here, won’t you? I’ll let Madam know in a while.” Luzhin shrugged off his satchel in businesslike fashion and laid it beside him on the table, which also bore a porcelain inkwell, a blotting case embroidered with beads, and an unfamiliar picture of his father (a book in one hand, a finger of the other pressed to his temple), and from nothing better to do he commenced to count the different hues in the carpet. He had been in this room only once before, last Christmas—when, on his father’s advice, he had taken his aunt a large box of chocolates, half of which he had himself eaten and the remainder of which he had rearranged so that it would not be noticed. Up until just recently his aunt had been at their place every day, but now she had stopped coming and there was something in the air, some elusive interdiction, that prevented him from asking about it at home. Having counted up to nine different shades he shifted his gaze to a silk screen embroidered with rushes and storks. He had just begun to wonder whether similar storks were on the other side as well when at last his aunt came—her hair not yet done and wearing a kind of flowery kimono with sleeves like wings. “Where did you spring from?” she exclaimed. “And what about school? Oh what a funny boy you are.…”