The Luzhin Defense (6 page)

Two hours later he again emerged onto the street. His satchel, now empty, was so light that it bounced on his shoulder blades. He had to pass time somehow until the
usual hour of return. He wandered into Tavricheski Park, and the emptiness in his satchel gradually began to annoy him. In the first place the thing he had left as a precaution with his aunt might somehow get lost before next time, and in the second place it would have come in handy at home during the evenings. He resolved to act differently in future.

“Family circumstances,” he replied the next day when the teacher casually inquired why he had not been in school. On Thursday he left school early and missed three days in a row, explaining afterwards that he had had a sore throat. On Wednesday he had a relapse. On Saturday he was late for the first lesson even though he had left home earlier than usual. On Sunday he amazed his mother by announcing that he had been invited to a friend’s house—and he was away five hours. On Wednesday school broke up early (it was one of those wonderful blue dusty days at the very end of April when the end of the school term is already imminent and such indolence overcomes one), but he did not get home until much later than usual. And then there was a whole week of absence—a rapturous intoxicating week. The teacher telephoned his home to find out what was the matter with him. His father answered the phone.

When Luzhin returned home around four o’clock in the afternoon his father’s face was gray, his eyes bulging, while his mother gasped as if deprived of her tongue and then began to laugh unnaturally and hysterically, with wails and cries. After a moment’s confusion Father led him without a word into his study and there, with arms folded across his chest, requested an explanation. Luzhin, holding
the heavy and precious satchel under his arm, stared at the floor, wondering whether his aunt was capable of betrayal. “Kindly give me an explanation,” repeated his father. She was incapable of betrayal and in any case how could she know he had been caught? “You refuse?” asked his father. Besides, she somehow seemed even to like his truancy. “Now listen,” said his father conciliatorily, “let’s talk as friends.” Luzhin sighed and sat on the arm of a chair, continuing to look at the floor. “As friends,” repeated his father still more soothingly. “So now it turns out you have missed school several times. So
now
I would like to know where you have been and what you have been doing. I can even understand that, for instance, the weather is fine and one gets the urge to go for walks.” “Yes, I get the urge,” said Luzhin indifferently, growing bored. His father wanted to know where exactly he had gone for a walk and whether his need of walks was long-standing. Then he reminded him that every man has his duty as citizen, as family man, as soldier, and also as schoolboy. Luzhin yawned. “Go to your room!” said his father hopelessly and when his son had left he stood for a long time in the middle of his study and looked at the door in blank horror. His wife, who had been listening from the next room, came in, sat on the edge of the divan and again burst into tears. “He cheats,” she kept repeating, “just as you cheat. I’m surrounded by cheats.” He merely shrugged his shoulders and thought how sad life was, how difficult to do one’s duty, not to meet anymore, not to telephone, not to go where he was irresistibly drawn … and now this trouble with his son … this oddity, this stubbornness … A sad state of affairs, a very sad state.…

In Grandfather’s former study, which even on the hottest days was the dampest room in their country house no matter how much they opened the windows that looked straight out on grim dark fir trees, whose foliage was so thick and intricate that it was impossible to say where one tree ended and another began—in this uninhabited room where a bronze boy with violin stood on the bare desk—there was an unlocked bookcase containing the thick volumes of an extinct illustrated magazine. Luzhin would swiftly leaf through them until he reached the page where between a poem by Korinfski, crowned with a harp-shaped vignette, and the miscellany section containing information about shifting swamps, American eccentrics and the length of the human intestine, there was the woodcut of a chessboard. Not a single picture could arrest Luzhin’s hand as it leafed through the volumes—neither the celebrated Niagara Falls nor starving Indian children (potbellied little skeletons) nor an attempted assassination of the King of Spain. The life of the world passed by with a hasty rustle, and suddenly stopped—the treasured diagram, problems, openings, entire games.

At the beginning of the summer holidays he had sorely missed his aunt and the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers—especially that fragrant old man smelling at times of violets and at times of lilies of the valley, depending upon what flowers he had brought to Luzhin’s aunt. Usually he would arrive just right—a few minutes after Luzhin’s aunt had glanced at her watch and left the house. “Never mind, let’s wait a while,” the old man would say, removing the damp paper from his bouquet, and Luzhin would draw up an armchair for him to the table where the chessmen had already been set out. The appearance of the old gentleman with the flowers had provided him with a way out of a rather awkward situation. After three or four truancies from school it became apparent that his aunt had really no aptitude for chess. As the game proceeded, her pieces would conglomerate in an unseemly jumble, out of which there would suddenly dash an exposed helpless King. But the old gentleman played divinely. The first time his aunt, pulling on her gloves, had said rapidly, “Unfortunately I must leave but you stay on and play chess with my nephew, thank you for the wonderful lilies of the valley,” the first time the old man had sat down and sighed: “It’s a long time since I touched … now, young man—left or right?”—this first time when after a few moves Luzhin’s ears were burning and there was nowhere to advance, it seemed to Luzhin he was playing a completely different game from the one his aunt had taught him. The board was bathed in fragrance. The old man called the Officer a Bishop and the Tower, a Rook, and whenever he made a move that was fatal for his opponent he would immediately take it back, and as if disclosing the mechanism of an expensive instrument he would show the way his
Opponent should have played in order to avert disaster. He won the first fifteen games without the slightest effort, not pondering his moves for a moment, but during the sixteenth game he suddenly began to think and won with difficulty, while on the last day, the day he drove up with a whole bush of lilac for which no place could be found, and the boy’s aunt darted about on tiptoe in her bedroom and then, presumably, left by the back door—on this last day, after a long exciting struggle during which the old man revealed a capacity for breathing hard through the nose—Luzhin perceived something, something was set free within him, something cleared up, and the mental myopia that had been painfully beclouding his chess vision disappeared. “Well, well, it’s a draw” said the old man. He moved his Queen back and forth a few times the way you move the lever of a broken machine and repeated: “A draw. Perpetual check.” Luzhin also tried the lever to see if it would work, wiggled it, wiggled it, and then sat still, staring stiffly at the board. “You’ll go far,” said the old man. “You’ll go far if you continue on the same lines. Tremendous progress! Never saw anything like it before.… Yes, you’ll go very, very far.…”

It was this old man who explained to Luzhin the simple method of notation in chess, and Luzhin, replaying the games given in the magazine, soon discovered in himself a quality he had once envied when his father used to tell somebody at table that he personally was unable to understand how his father-in-law could read a score for hours and hear in his mind all the movements of the music as he ran his eye over the notes, now smiling, now frowning, and sometimes turning back like a reader checking a detail in
a novel—a name, the time of the year. “It must be a great pleasure,” his father had said, “to assimilate music in its natural state.” It was a similar pleasure that Luzhin himself now began to experience as he skimmed fluently over the letters and numbers representing moves. At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments—he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel. These possible continuations that explained the essence of blunder or foresight Luzhin gradually ceased to reconstruct actually on the board and contented himself with perceiving their melody mentally through the sequence of symbols and signs. Similarly he was able to “read” a game already perused once without using the board at all; and this was all the more pleasant in that he did not have to fiddle about with chessmen while constantly listening for someone coming; the door, it is true, was locked, and he would open it unwillingly, after the brass handle had been jiggled many times—and Luzhin senior, coming to see what his son was doing in that damp uninhabited room, would find his son restless and sullen with red ears; on the desk lay the bound volumes of the magazine and Luzhin senior would be seized by the suspicion that his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women. “Why do you lock
yourself up?” he would ask (and little Luzhin would draw his head into his shoulders and with hideous clarity imagine his father looking under the sofa and finding the chess set). “The air in here’s really icy. And what’s so interesting about these old magazines? Let’s go and see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees.”

Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes. Green needles adhered to their delicately brick-colored caps and sometimes a blade of grass would leave on one of them a long narrow trace. Their undersides might be holey, and occasionally a yellow slug would be sitting there—and Luzhin senior would use his pocketknife to clean moss and soil from the thick speckled-gray root of each mushroom before placing it in the basket. His son followed behind him at a few paces’ distance, with his hands behind his back like a little old man, and not only did he not look for mushrooms but even refused to admire those his father, with little quacks of pleasure, unearthed himself. And sometimes, plump and pale in a dreary white dress that did not become her, Mrs. Luzhin would appear at the end of the avenue and hurry toward them, passing alternately through sunlight and shadow, and the dry leaves that never cease to occur in northern woods, would rustle beneath the slightly skewed high heels of her white slippers. One July day, she slipped on the veranda steps and sprained her foot, and for a long time afterwards she lay in bed—either in her darkened bedroom or on the veranda—wearing a pink negligee, her face heavily powdered, and there would always be a small silver bowl with
boules-de-gomme
—balls of hard candy standing on a little table beside her. The foot was soon better but she continued to
recline as if having made up her mind that this was to be her lot, that this precisely was her destiny in life. Summer was unusually hot, the mosquitoes gave no peace, all day long the shrieks of peasant girls bathing could be heard from the river, and on one such oppressive and voluptuous day, early in the morning before the gadflies had yet begun to torment the black horse daubed with pungent ointment, Luzhin senior stepped into the calash and was taken to the station to spend the day in town. “At least be reasonable, it’s essential for me to see Silvestrov,” he had said to his wife the night before, pacing about the bedroom in his mouse-colored dressing gown. “Really, how queer you are. Can’t you see this is important? I myself would prefer not to go.” But his wife continued to lie with her face thrust into the pillow, and her fat helpless back shook with sobs. Nonetheless, in the morning he left—and his son standing in the garden saw the top part of the coachman and his father’s hat skim along the serrated line of young firs that fenced off the garden from the road.

That day Luzhin junior was in low spirits. All the games in the old magazine had been studied, all the problems solved, and he was forced to play with himself, but this ended inevitably in an exchange of all the pieces and a dull draw. And it was unbearably hot. The veranda cast a black triangular shadow on the bright sand. The avenue was paved with sunflecks, and these spots, if you slitted your eyes, took on the aspect of regular light and dark squares. An intense latticelike shadow lay flat beneath a garden bench. The urns that stood on stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals. Swallows soared: their flight recalled the motion
of scissors swiftly cutting out some design. Not knowing what to do with himself he wandered down the footpath by the river, and from the opposite bank came ecstatic squeals and glimpses of naked bodies. He stole behind a tree trunk and with beating heart peered at these flashes of white. A bird rustled in the branches, and taking fright he quickly left the river and went back. He had lunch alone with the housekeeper, a taciturn sallow-faced old woman who always gave off a slight smell of coffee. Afterwards, lolling on the drawing room couch, he drowsily listened to all manner of slight sounds, to an oriole’s cry in the garden, to the buzzing of a bumblebee that had flown in the window, to the tinkle of dishes on a tray being carried down from his mother’s bedroom—and these limpid sounds were strangely transformed in his reverie and assumed the shape of bright intricate patterns on a dark background; and in trying to unravel them he fell asleep. He was wakened by the steps of the maid dispatched by his mother.… It was dim and cheerless in the bedroom; his mother drew him to her but he braced himself and turned away so stubbornly that she had to let him go. “Come, tell me something,” she said softly. He shrugged his shoulders and picked at his knee with one finger. “Don’t you want to tell me anything?” she asked still more softly. He looked at the bedside table, put a
boule-de-gomme
in his mouth and began to suck—he took a second, a third, another and another until his mouth was full of sweet-thudding and bumping balls. “Take some more, take as many as you wish,” she murmured, and stretching one hand from under the bedclothes she tried to touch him, to stroke him. “You haven’t got tanned at all this year,”
she said after a pause. “But perhaps I simply can’t see, the light here is so dead, everything looks blue. Raise the Venetian blinds, please. Or no, wait, stay. Later.” Having sucked his
boules-de-gomme
to the end he inquired if he could leave. She asked him what he would do now and would he not like to drive to the station and meet his father off the seven o’clock train? “Let me go,” he said. “It smells of medicine in here.”