The Luzhin Defense (20 page)

The ball turned out to be taking place in one of the best
hotels in Berlin. There was a crush near the cloakrooms, and the attendants were accepting things and carrying them away like sleeping children. Luzhin was given a neat metal number. He missed his wife, but found her immediately: she was standing in front of a mirror. He placed the metal disk against the tender hollow of her smooth, powdered back. “Brr, that’s cold,” she exclaimed, moving her shoulder blade. “Arm in arm, arm in arm,” said Luzhin. “We have to enter arm in arm.” And that is how they entered. The first thing Luzhin saw was his mother-in-law, looking much younger, rosy red, and wearing a magnificent, sparkling headdress—a Russian woman’s
kokoshnik
. She was selling punch, and an elderly Englishman (who had simply come down from his room) was quickly becoming drunk, one elbow propped on her table. At another table, near a fir tree adorned with colored lights, there was a pile of lottery prizes: a dignified samovar with red and blue reflected lights on the tree side, dolls dressed in
sarafans
, a phonograph, and liqueurs (donated by Smirnovski). A third table had sandwiches, Italian salad, caviar—and a beautiful blond lady was calling to someone: “Marya Vasilyevna, Marya Vasilyevna, why did they take it away again … I had asked …” “A very good evening to you,” said somebody close by, and Mrs. Luzhin raised an arched, swanlike hand. Farther on, in the next room, there was music, and dancers circled and marked time in the space between the tables; someone’s back banged into Luzhin at full speed, and he grunted and stepped back. His wife had disappeared, and searching for her with his eyes he set off back to the first room. Here the tombola again attracted his attention. Paying out a mark every time, he
would plunge his hand into the box and fish out a tiny cylinder of rolled-up paper. Snuffling through his nose and protruding his lips, he would take a long time to unroll the paper, and finding no number inside would look to see if there was one on the other, outer side—a useless but very normal procedure. In the end he won a children’s book,
Purry-Cat
or something, and not knowing what to do with it, left it on a table, where two full glasses were awaiting the return of a dancing couple. The crush and the movement and the bursts of music now got on his nerves and there was nowhere to hide, and everyone, probably, was looking at him and wondering why he did not dance. In the intervals between dances his wife looked for him in the other room, but at every step she was stopped by acquaintances. A great many people attended this ball—there was a foreign consul, obtained with great difficulty, and a famous Russian singer, and two movie actresses. Somebody pointed out their table to her: the ladies wore artificial smiles, and their escorts—three well-fed men of the producer-businessman type—kept clucking their tongues and snapping their fingers and abusing the pale, sweating waiter for his slowness and inefficiency. One of these men seemed particularly obnoxious to her: he had very white teeth and shining brown eyes; having dealt with the waiter he began to relate something in a loud voice, sprinkling his Russian with the most hackneyed German expressions. All at once, she felt depressed that everyone was looking at these movie people, at the singer and at the consul, and nobody seemed to know that a chess genius was present at the ball, a man whose name had been in millions of newspapers and whose games had already been called immortal.
“You are amazingly easy to dance with. They have a good floor here. Excuse me. It’s terribly crowded. The receipts will be excellent. This man over here is from the French Embassy. It is amazingly easy dancing with you.” With this the conversation usually ended, they liked to dance with her but they did not know exactly what to talk about. A rather pretty but boring young lady. And that strange marriage to an unsuccessful musician, or something of that sort. “What did you say—a former socialist? A what? A player? A card player? Do you ever visit them, Oleg Sergeyevich?”

In the meantime Luzhin had found a deep armchair not far from the staircase and was looking at the crowd from behind a column and smoking his thirteenth cigarette. Into another armchair next to him, after making a preliminary inquiry as to whether it was taken or not, settled a swarthy gentleman with a tiny mustache. People still continued to go by and Luzhin gradually became frightened. There was nowhere he could look without meeting inquisitive eyes and from the accursed necessity of looking somewhere he fixed on the mustache of his neighbor, who evidently was also staggered and perplexed by all this noisy and unnecessary commotion. This person, feeling Luzhin’s gaze on him, turned his face to him. “It’s a long time since I was at a ball,” he said amiably and grinned, shaking his head. “The main thing is not to look,” uttered Luzhin hollowly, using his hands as a form of blinkers. “I’ve come a long way,” explained the man. “A friend dragged me here. To tell the truth, I’m tired.” “Tiredness and heaviness,” nodded Luzhin. “Who knows what it all means? It surpasses my conception.” “Particularly when you work, as I do, on a
Brazilian plantation,” said the gentleman. “Plantation,” repeated Luzhin after him like an echo. “You have an odd way of living here,” continued the stranger. “The world is open on all four sides and here they are pounding out Charlestons on an extremely restricted fragment of floor.” “I’m also going away,” said Luzhin. “I’ve got the travel folders.” “There is nothing like freedom,” exclaimed the stranger. “Free wanderings and a favorable wind. And what wonderful countries.… I met a German botanist in the forest beyond Rio Negro and lived with the wife of a French engineer on Madagascar.” “I must get their folders, too,” said Luzhin. “Very attractive things—folders. Everything in great detail.”

“Luzhin, so that’s where you are!” suddenly cried his wife’s voice; she was passing quickly by on her father’s arm. “I’ll be back immediately, I’ll just get a table for us,” she cried, looking over her shoulder, and disappeared. “Is your name Luzhin?” asked the gentleman curiously. “Yes, yes,” said Luzhin, “but it’s of no importance.” “I knew one Luzhin,” said the gentleman, screwing up his eyes (for memory is shortsighted). “I knew one. You didn’t happen to go to the Balashevski school, did you?” “Suppose I did,” replied Luzhin, and seized by an unpleasant suspicion he began to examine his companion’s face. “In that case we were classmates!” exclaimed the other. “My name is Petrishchev. Do you remember me? Oh, of course you remember! What a coincidence. I would never have recognized you by your face. Tell me, Luzhin … Your first name and patronymic? … Ah, I seem to remember—Tony … Anton … What next?” “You’re mistaken, mistaken,” said Luzhin with a shudder. “Yes, my memory
is bad,” continued Petrishchev. “I’ve forgotten lots of names. For instance, do you remember that quiet boy we had? Later he lost an arm fighting under Wrangel, just before the evacuation. I saw him in church in Paris. Hm, what’s his name now?” “Why is all this necessary?” said Luzhin. “Why talk about it so much?” “No, I don’t remember,” sighed Petrishchev, tearing his palm from his forehead. “But then, for instance, there was Gromov: he’s also in Paris now; fixed himself up nicely, it seems. But where are the others? Where are they all? Dispersed, gone up in smoke. It’s odd to think about it. Well, and how are you getting on, Luzhin, how are you getting on, old boy?” “All right,” said Luzhin and averted his eyes from the expansive Petrishchev, seeing his face suddenly as it had been then: small, pink, and unbearably mocking. “Wonderful times, they were,” cried Petrishchev. “Do you remember our geographer, Luzhin? How he used to fly like a hurricane into the classroom, holding a map of the world? And that little old man—oh, again I’ve forgotten the name—do you remember how he used to shake all over and say: ‘Get on with you, pshaw, you noodle’? Wonderful times. And how we used to whip down those stairs, into the yard, you remember? And how it turned out at the school party that Arbuzov could play the piano? Do you remember how his experiments never used to come off? And how we thought up a rhyme for him—‘booze off’?” “…  just don’t react,” Luzhin said quickly to himself. “And all that’s vanished,” continued Petrishchev. “Here we are at a ball.… Oh, by the way, I seem to remember … you took up something, some occupation, when you left school. What was it? Yes, of course—chess!” “No, no,” said Luzhin. “Why on
earth must you …” “Oh, excuse me,” said Petrishchev affably. “Then I’m getting mixed up. Yes, yes, that’s how it is.… The ball’s in full swing, and we’re sitting here talking about the past. You know I’ve traveled the whole world.… What women in Cuba! Or that time in the jungle, for instance …”

“It’s all lies,” sounded a lazy voice from behind. “He was never in any jungle whatsoever.…”

“Now why do you spoil everything?” drawled Petrishchev, turning around. “Don’t listen to him,” continued a bald, lanky person, the owner of the lazy voice. “He has been living in France since the Revolution and left Paris for the first time the day before yesterday.” “Luzhin, allow me to introduce you,” began Petrishchev with a laugh; but Luzhin hastily made off, tucking his head into his shoulders and weaving strangely and quivering from the speed of his walk.

“Gone,” said Petrishchev in astonishment, and added thoughtfully, “After all, it may be I took him for somebody else.”

Stumbling into people and exclaiming in a tearful voice
“pardon, pardon!”
and still stumbling into people and trying not to see their faces, Luzhin looked for his wife, and when he finally caught sight of her he seized her by the elbow from behind, so that she started and turned around; but at first he was unable to say anything, he was puffing too much. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he muttered, still holding her by the elbow. “Calm down, please, Luzhin, that’s not necessary,” she said, nudging him slightly to one side so that the bystanders could not hear. “Why do you want to go?” “There’s a man
there,” said Luzhin, breathing jerkily. “And such an unpleasant conversation.” “…  whom you knew before?” she asked quietly. “Yes, yes,” nodded Luzhin. “Let’s go. I beg you.”

Half closing his eyes so that Petrishchev would not notice him, he pushed his way through to the vestibule, began to rummage in his pockets, looking for his tag, found it at last after several enormous seconds of confusion and despair and shuffled this way and that impatiently while the cloakroom attendant, like a somnambulist, looked for his things.… He was the first to get dressed and the first to go out and his wife swiftly followed him, pulling her moleskin coat together as she went. Only in the car did Luzhin begin to breathe freely, and his expression of distracted sullenness gave way to a guilty half-smile. “Dear Luzhin met a nasty person,” said his wife, stroking his hand. “A schoolfellow—a suspicious character,” explained Luzhin. “But now dear Luzhin’s all right,” whispered his wife and kissed his soft hand. “Now everything’s gone,” said Luzhin.

But this was not quite so. Something remained—a riddle, a splinter. At nights he began to meditate over why this meeting had made him so uneasy. Of course there were all sorts of individual unpleasantnesses—the fact that Petrishchev had once tormented him in school and had now referred obliquely to a certain torn book about little Tony, and the fact that a whole world, full of exotic temptations, had turned out to be a braggart’s rigmarole, and it would no longer be possible in future to trust travel folders. But it was not the meeting itself that was frightening but something else—this meeting’s secret meaning that he had to divine. He began to think intensely at nights, the way
Sherlock had been wont to do over cigar ash—and gradually it began to seem that the combination was even more complex than he had at first thought, that the meeting with Petrishchev was only the continuation of something, and that it was necessary to look deeper, to return and replay all the moves of his life from his illness until the ball.

On a grayish-blue rink (where there were tennis courts in summer), lightly powdered with snow, the townsfolk were disporting themselves cautiously, and at the very moment the Luzhins passed by on their morning stroll, the sprightliest of the skaters, a besweatered young fellow, gracefully launched into a Dutch step and sat down hard on the ice. Farther, in a small public garden, a three-year-old boy all in red, walking unsteadily on woolen legs, made his way to a stirrup-stone, scraped off with one fingerless little hand some snow that was lying there in an appetizing hillock and raised it to his mouth, for which he was immediately seized from behind and spanked. “Oh, you poor little thing,” said Mrs. Luzhin, looking back. A bus went along the whitened asphalt, leaving two thick, black stripes behind it. From a shop of talking and playing machines came the sound of fragile music and someone closed the door so the music would not catch cold. A dachshund with a patched, blue little overcoat and low-swinging ears stopped and sniffed the snow and Mrs. Luzhin just had time to stroke it. Something light, sharp and whitish kept striking them in the
face, and when they peered at the empty sky, bright specks danced before their eyes. Mrs. Luzhin skidded and looked reproachfully at her gray snowboots. By the Russian food store they met the Alfyorov couple. “Quite a cold snap,” exclaimed Alfyorov with a shake of his yellow beard. “Don’t kiss it, the glove’s dirty,” said Mrs. Luzhin, and looking with a smile at Mrs. Alfyorov’s enchanting, always animated face she asked why she never came to visit them. “And you’re putting on weight, sir,” growled Alfyorov, squinting playfully at Luzhin’s stomach, exaggerated by his wadded overcoat. Luzhin looked imploringly at his wife. “Remember, you’re always welcome,” she said, nodding. “Wait, Mashenka, do you know their telephone number?” asked Alfyorov. “You know? Fine. Well, so long—as they say in Soviet Russia. My deepest respects to your mother.”

“There’s something a little mean and a little pathetic about him,” said Mrs. Luzhin, taking her husband’s arm and changing step in order to match his. “But Mashenka … what a darling, what eyes.… Don’t walk so fast, dear Luzhin—it’s slippery.”

The light snow ceased to fall, a spot of sky gleamed through palely, and the flat, bloodless disk of the sun floated out. “You know what, let’s go to the right today,” suggested Mrs. Luzhin. “We’ve never been that way, I believe.” “Look, oranges,” said Luzhin with relish and recalled how his father had asserted that when you pronounce
“leemon”
(lemon) in Russian, you involuntarily pull a long face, but when you say
“apelsin”
(orange)—you give a broad smile. The salesgirl deftly spread the mouth of the paper bag and rammed the cold, pocked-red globes into it. Luzhin began to peel an orange as he walked, frowning in anticipation
that the juice would squirt in his eye. He put the peel in his pocket, because it would have stood out too vividly on the snow, and because, perhaps, you could make jam with it. “Is it good?” asked his wife. Luzhin smacked his lips on the last segment and with a contented smile was about to take his wife’s arm again, but suddenly he stopped and looked around. Having thought for a moment, he walked back to the corner and looked at the name of the street. Then he quickly caught up with his wife again and thrust out his cane in the direction of the nearest house, an ordinary gray stone house separated from the street by a small garden behind iron railings. “My dad used to reside here,” said Luzhin. “Thirty-five A.” “Thirty-five A,” his wife repeated after him, not knowing what to say and looking up at the windows. Luzhin walked on, cutting snow away from the railings with his cane. Presently he stopped stock-still in front of a stationery store where the wax dummy of a man with two faces, one sad and the other joyful, was throwing open his jacket alternately to left and right: the fountain pen clipped into the left pocket of his white waistcoat had sprinkled the whiteness with ink, while on the right was the pen that never ran. Luzhin took a great fancy to the bifacial man and even thought of buying him. “Listen, Luzhin,” said his wife when he had had his fill of the window. “I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time—haven’t some things remained after your father’s death? Where are they all?” Luzhin shrugged his shoulders. “There was a man called Khrushchenko,” he muttered after a while. “I don’t understand,” said his wife questioningly. “He wrote to me in Paris,” explained Luzhin reluctantly, “about the death and funeral and all that, and
that he preserved the things left after the late father.” “Oh, Luzhin,” she sighed, “what you do to the language.” She reflected a moment and added: “It doesn’t matter to me, but I just thought it might be pleasant for you to have those things—as having belonged to your father.” Luzhin remained silent. She imagined those unwanted things—perhaps the pen that old man Luzhin wrote his books with, some documents or other, photographs—and she grew sad and mentally reproached her husband for hardheartedness. “But one thing has to be done without fail,” she said decisively. “We must go to the cemetery to see his grave, to see that it’s not neglected.” “Cold and far,” said Luzhin. “We’ll do it in a day or two,” she decided. “The weather is bound to change. Careful, please—there’s a car coming.”