The Luzhin Defense (7 page)

He tried to slide down the stairs the way they did at school—the way he himself never did it there; but the steps were too high. Beneath the staircase, in a cupboard that had still not been thoroughly explored, he looked for magazines. He dug out one and found a checkers section in it, diagrams of stupid clumsy round blobs on their boards, but there was no chess. As he rummaged on, he kept coming across a bothersome herbarium album with dried edelweiss and purple leaves in it and with inscriptions in pale violet ink, in a childish, thin-spun hand that was so different from his mother’s present handwriting:
Davos 1885; Gatchina 1886
. Wrathfully he began to tear out the leaves and flowers, sneezing from the fine dust as he squatted on his haunches amid the scattered books. Then it got so dark beneath the stairs that the pages of the magazine he was again leafing through began to merge into a gray blur and sometimes a small picture would trick him, because it looked like a chess problem in the diffuse darkness. He thrust the books back anyhow into the drawers and wandered into the drawing room, thinking listlessly that it must be well past seven o’clock since the butler was lighting the kerosene lamps. Leaning on a cane and holding on to the banisters, his mother in mauve peignoir came
heavily down the stairs, a frightened look on her face. “I don’t understand why your father isn’t here yet,” she said, and moving with difficulty she went out onto the veranda and began to peer down the road between the fir trunks that the setting sun banded with bright copper.

He came only around ten, said he had missed the train, had been extremely busy, had dined with his publisher—no, no soup, thank you. He laughed and spoke very loudly and ate noisily, and Luzhin was struck by the feeling that his father was looking at him all the time as if staggered by his presence. Dinner graded into late evening tea. Mother, her elbow propped on the table, silently slitted her eyes at her plate of raspberries, and the gayer her husband’s stories became the narrower her eyes grew. Then she got up and quietly left and it seemed to Luzhin that all this had happened once before. He remained alone on the veranda with his father and was afraid to raise his head, feeling that strange searching stare on him the whole time.

“How have you been passing the time?” asked his father suddenly. “What have you been doing?” “Nothing,” replied Luzhin. “And what are you planning to do now?” asked Luzhin senior in the same tone of forced jollity, imitating his son’s manner of using the formal plural for “you.” “Do you want to go to bed or do you want to sit here with me?” Luzhin killed a mosquito and very cautiously stole a glance upwards and sideways at his father. There was a crumb on his father’s beard and an unpleasantly mocking expression gleamed in his eyes. “Do you know what?” his father said and the crumb jumped off.
“Do you know what? Let’s play some game. For instance, how about me teaching you chess?”

He saw his son slowly blush and taking pity on him immediately added: “Or cabala—there is a pack of cards over there in the table drawer.” “But no chess set, we have no chess set,” said Luzhin huskily and again stole a cautious look at his father. “The good ones remained in town,” said his father placidly, “but I think there are some old ones in the attic. Let’s go take a look.”

And indeed, by the light of the lamp that his father held aloft, among all sorts of rubbish in a case Luzhin found a chessboard, and again he had the feeling that all this had happened before—that open case with a nail sticking out of its side, those dust-powdered books, that wooden chessboard with a crack down the middle. A small box with a sliding lid also came to light; it contained puny chessmen. And the whole time he was looking for the chess set and then carrying it down to the veranda, Luzhin tried to figure out whether it was by accident his father had mentioned chess or whether he had noticed something—and the most obvious explanation did not occur to him, just as sometimes in solving a problem its key turns out to be a move that seemed barred, impossible, excluded quite naturally from the range of possible moves.

And now when the board had been placed on the illuminated table between the lamp and the raspberries, and its dust wiped off with a bit of newspaper, his father’s face was no longer mocking, and Luzhin, forgetting his fear, forgetting his secret, felt permeated all at once with proud excitement at the thought that he could, if he wanted, display his art. His father began to set out the pieces. One
of the Pawns was replaced by an absurd purple-colored affair in the shape of a tiny bottle; in place of one Rook there was a checker; the Knights were headless and the one horse’s head that remained after the box had been emptied (leaving a small die and a red counter) turned out not to fit any of them. When everything had been set out, Luzhin suddenly made up his mind and muttered: “I already can play a little.” “Who taught you?” asked his father without lifting his head. “I learned it at school,” replied Luzhin. “Some of the boys could play.” “Oh! Fine,” said his father, and added (quoting Pushkin’s doomed duelist): “Let’s start, if you are willing.”

He has played chess since his youth, but only seldom and sloppily, with haphazard opponents—on serene evenings aboard a Volga steamer, in the foreign sanatorium where his brother was dying years ago, here, in the country, with the village doctor, an unsociable man who periodically ceased calling on them—and all these chance games, full of oversights and sterile meditations, were for him little more than a moment of relaxation or simply a means of decently preserving silence in the company of a person with whom conversation kept petering out—brief, uncomplicated games, remarkable neither for ambition nor inspiration, which he always began in the same way, paying little attention to his adversary’s moves. Although he made no fuss about losing, he secretly considered himself to be not at all a bad player, and told himself that if ever he lost it was through absentmindedness, good nature or a desire to enliven the game with daring sallies, and he considered that with a little application it was possible, without theoretic knowledge, to refute any gambit out of the textbook.
His son’s passion for chess had so astounded him, seemed so unexpected—and at the same time so fateful and inescapable—so strange and awesome was it to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces—all this was so strange and awesome that Luzhin senior was incapable of thinking of the game, and while he feigned concentration, his attention wandered from vague recollections of his illicit day in St. Petersburg, that left a residue of shame it was better not to investigate, to the casual, easy gestures with which his son moved this or that piece. The game had lasted but a few minutes when his son said: “If you do this it’s mate and if you do that you lose your Queen,” and he, confused, took his move back and began to think properly, inclining his head first to the left and then to the right, slowly stretching out his fingers toward the Queen and quickly snatching them away again, as if burned, while in the meantime his son calmly, and with uncharacteristic tidiness, put the taken pieces into their box. Finally Luzhin senior made his move whereupon there started a devastation of his positions, and then he laughed unnaturally and knocked his King over in sign of surrender. In this way he lost three games and realized that should he play ten more the result would be just the same, and yet he was unable to stop. At the very beginning of the fourth game Luzhin pushed back the piece moved by his father and with a shake of his head said in a confident unchildlike voice: “The worst reply. Chigorin suggests taking the Pawn.” And when with incomprehensible, hopeless speed he had lost this game as well, Luzhin senior again laughed, and with trembling
hand began to pour milk into a cut-glass tumbler, on the bottom of which lay a raspberry core, which now floated to the surface and circled, unwilling to be extracted. His son put away the board and the box on a wicker table in the corner and having blurted a phlegmatic “good night” softly closed the door behind him.

“Oh well, I should have expected something like this,” said Luzhin senior, wiping the tips of his fingers with a handkerchief. “He’s not just amusing himself with chess, he’s performing a sacred rite.”

A fat-bodied, fluffy moth with glowing eyes fell on the table after colliding with the lamp. A breeze stirred lightly through the garden. The clock in the drawing room started to chime daintily and struck twelve.

“Nonsense,” he said, “stupid imagination. Many youngsters are excellent chess players. Nothing surprising in that. The whole affair is getting on my nerves, that’s all. Bad of her—she shouldn’t have encouraged him. Well, no matter.…”

He thought drearily that in a moment he would have to lie, to remonstrate, to soothe, and it was midnight already.…

“I want to sleep,” he said, but remained sitting in the armchair.

And early next morning in the darkest and mossiest corner of the dense coppice behind the garden little Luzhin buried his father’s precious box of chessmen, assuming this to be the simplest way of avoiding any kind of complications, for now there were other chessmen that he could use openly. His father, unable to suppress his interest in the matter, went off to see the gloomy country doctor, who
was a far better chess player than he, and in the evening after dinner, laughing and rubbing his hands, doing his best to ignore the fact that all this was wrong—but why wrong he could not say—he sat his son down with the doctor at the wicker table on the veranda, himself set out the pieces (apologizing for the purple thingum), sat down beside the players and began avidly following the game. Twitching his bushy eyebrows and tormenting his fleshy nose with a large hairy fist, the doctor thought long over every move and from time to time would lean back in his chair as if able to see better from a distance, and make big eyes, and then lurch heavily forward, his hands braced against his knees. He lost—and grunted so loudly that his wicker armchair creaked in response. “But look, look!” exclaimed Luzhin senior. “You should go this way and everything is saved—you even have the better position.” “Don’t you see I’m in check?” growled the doctor in a bass voice and began to set out the pieces anew. And when Luzhin senior went out into the dark garden to accompany the doctor as far as the footpath with its border of glowworms leading down to the bridge, he heard the words he had so thirsted to hear once, but now these words weighed heavy upon him—he would rather not have heard them at all.

The doctor started coming every night and since he was really a first-rate player he derived enormous pleasure from these incessant defeats. He brought Luzhin a chess handbook, advising him, however, not to get too carried away by it, not to tire himself, and to read in the open air. He spoke about the grand masters he had had the occasion to see, about a recent tournament, and also about the past of chess, about a somewhat doubtful rajah and about the
great Philidor, who was also an accomplished musician. At times, grinning gloomily, he would bring what he termed “a sugarplum”—an ingenious problem cut out of some periodical. Luzhin would pore over it a while, find finally the solution and with an extraordinary expression on his face and radiant bliss in his eyes would exclaim, burring his r’s: “How glorious, how glorious!” But the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him whenever the doctor, with strokes of his hairy finger, removed his King farther and farther, and finally, nodded his head and sat there quite still, looking at the board, while Luzhin senior, who was always present, always craving a miracle—his son’s defeat—and was both frightened and overjoyed when his son won (and suffered from this complicated mixture of feelings), would seize a Knight or a Rook, crying that everything was not lost and would himself sometimes play to the end a hopelessly compromised game.

And thus it began. Between this sequence of evenings on the veranda and the day when Luzhin’s photograph appeared in a St. Petersburg magazine it was as if nothing had been, neither the country autumn drizzling on the asters, nor the journey back to town, nor the return to school. The photograph appeared on an October day soon after his first, unforgettable performance in a chess club. And everything else that took place between the return to town and the photograph—two months after all—was so blurry and so mixed up that later, in recalling this time, Luzhin was unable to say exactly when, for instance, that social evening had taken place at school—where in a corner,
almost unnoticed by his schoolfellows, he had quietly beaten the geography teacher, a well-known amateur—or when on his father’s invitation a gray-haired Jew came to dinner, a senile chess genius who had been victorious in all the cities of the world but now lived in idleness and poverty, purblind, with a sick heart, having lost forever his fire, his grip, his luck.… But one thing Luzhin remembered quite clearly—the fear he experienced in school, the fear they would learn of his gift and ridicule him—and consequently, guided by this infallible recollection, he judged that after the game played at the social evening he must not have gone to school any more, for remembering all the shudders of his childhood he was unable to imagine the horrible sensation he would have experienced upon entering the classroom on the following morning and meeting those inquisitive, all-knowing eyes. He remembered, on the other hand, that after his picture appeared he refused to go to school and it was impossible to untangle in his memory the knot in which the social evening and the photograph were joined, it was impossible to say which came first and which second. It was his father who brought him the magazine, and the photograph was one taken the previous year, in the country: a tree in the garden and he next to it, a pattern of foliage on his forehead, a sullen expression on his slightly inclined face, and those narrow white shorts that always used to come unbuttoned in front. Instead of the joy expected by his father, he expressed nothing—but he did feel a secret joy: now this would put an end to school. They pleaded with him during the course of a week. His mother, of course, cried. His father threatened to take away his new
chess set—enormous pieces on a morocco board. And suddenly everything was decided of itself. He ran away from home—in his autumn coat, since his winter one had been hidden after one unsuccessful attempt to run away—and not knowing where to go (a stinging snow was falling and settling on the cornices, and the wind would blow it off, endlessly reenacting this miniature blizzard), he wandered finally to his aunt’s place, not having seen her since spring. He met her as she was leaving. She was wearing a black hat and holding flowers wrapped in paper, on her way to a funeral. “Your old partner is dead,” she said. “Come with me.” Angry at not being allowed to warm himself, angry at the snow falling, and at the sentimental tears shining behind his aunt’s veil, he turned sharply and walked away, and after walking about for an hour set off for home. He did not remember the actual return—and even more curiously, was never sure whether things had happened thus or differently; perhaps his memory later added much that was taken from his delirium—for he was delirious for a whole week, and since he was extremely delicate and high-strung, the doctors presumed he would not pull through. It was not the first time he had been ill and when later reconstructing the sensation of this particular illness, he involuntarily recalled others, of which his childhood had been full: he remembered especially the time when he was quite small, playing all alone, and wrapping himself up in the tiger rug, to represent, rather forlornly, a king—it was nicest of all to represent a king since the imaginary mantle protected him against the chills of fever, and he wanted to postpone for as long as possible that inevitable moment when they would feel his forehead, take his temperature
and then bundle him into bed. Actually, there had been nothing quite comparable to his October chess-permeated illness. The gray-haired Jew who used to beat Chigorin, the corpse of his aunt’s admirer muffled in flowers, the sly, gay countenance of his father bringing a magazine, and the geography teacher petrified with the suddenness of the mate, and the tobacco-smoke-filled room at the chess club where he was closely surrounded by a crowd of university students, and the clean-shaven face of the musician holding for some reason the telephone receiver like a violin, between shoulder and cheek—all this participated in his delirium and took on the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board.