The Luzhin Defense (8 page)

Upon his recovery, a taller and thinner boy, he was taken abroad, at first to the Adriatic coast where he lay on the garden terrace in the sun and played games in his head, which nobody could forbid him, and then to a German resort where his father took him for walks along footpaths fenced off with twisted beech railings. Sixteen years later when he revisited this resort he recognized the bearded earthenware dwarfs between the flower beds, and the garden paths of colored gravel before the hotel that had grown bigger and handsomer, and also the dark damp wood on the hill and the motley daubs of oil paint (each hue marking the direction of a given walk) with which a beech trunk or a rock would be equipped at an intersection, so that the stroller should not lose his way. The same paperweights bearing emerald-blue views touched up with mother-of-pearl beneath convex glass were on sale in the shops near the spring and no doubt the same orchestra on the stand
in the park was playing potpourris of opera, and the same maples were casting their lively shade over small tables where people drank coffee and ate wedge-shaped slices of apple tart with whipped cream.

“Look, do you see those windows?” he said, pointing with his cane at the wing of the hotel. “It was there we had that pretty little tournament. Some of the most respectable German players took part. I was a boy of fourteen. Third prize, yes, third prize.”

He replaced both hands on the crook of his thick cane with that sad, slightly old-mannish gesture that was natural to him now, and bent his head as if listening to distant music.

“What? Put on my hat? The sun is scorching, you say? I’d say it is ineffective. Why should you fuss about it? We are sitting in the shade.”

Nevertheless he took the straw hat extended to him across the little table, drummed on the bottom where there was a blurred dark spot over the hatmaker’s name, and donned it with a wry smile—wry in the precise sense: his right cheek and the corner of his mouth went up slightly, exposing bad, tobacco-stained teeth; he had no other smile. And one would never have said that he was only beginning his fourth decade: from the wings of his nose there descended two deep, flabby furrows, his shoulders were bent; in the whole of his body one remarked an unhealthy heaviness; and when he rose abruptly, with raised elbow defending himself from a wasp, one saw he was rather stout—nothing in the little Luzhin had foreshadowed this lazy, unhealthy fleshiness. “But why does it pester me?” he cried in a thin, querulous voice, continuing to lift his elbow
and endeavoring with his other hand to get out his handkerchief. The wasp, having described one last circle, flew away, and he followed it with his eyes for a long time, mechanically shaking out his handkerchief; then he set his metal chair more firmly on the gravel, picked up his fallen cane and sat down again, breathing heavily.

“Why are you laughing? Wasps are extremely unpleasant insects.” Frowning, he looked down at the table. Beside his cigarette case lay a handbag, semicircular, made of black silk. He reached out for it absently and began to click the lock.

“Shuts badly,” he said without looking up. “One fine day you’ll spill everything out.”

He sighed, laid the handbag aside and added in the same tone of voice: “Yes, the most respectable German players. And one Austrian. My late papa was unlucky. He hoped there would be no real interest in chess here and we landed right in a tournament.”

Things had been rebuilt and jumbled, the wing of the house now looked different. They had lived over there, on the second floor. It had been decided to stay until the end of the year and then return to Russia—and the ghost of school, which his father dared not mention, again loomed into view. His mother went back much earlier, at the beginning of summer. She said she was
insanely
homesick for the Russian countryside, and that protracted “insanely” with such a plaintive, aching middle syllable was practically the sole intonation of hers that Luzhin retained in his memory. She left reluctantly, however, not really knowing whether to go or stay. It was already some time since she had begun to experience a strange feeling of estrangement
from her son, as if he had drifted away somewhere, and the one she loved was not this grown-up boy, not the chess prodigy that the newspapers were writing about, but that little warm, insupportable child who at the slightest provocation would throw himself flat on the floor, screaming and drumming his feet. And everything was so sad and so unnecessary—that sparse un-Russian lilac in the station garden, those tulip-shaped lamps in the sleeping car of the Nord Express, and those sinking sensations in the chest, a feeling of suffocation, perhaps angina pectoris and perhaps, as her husband said, simply nerves. She went away and did not write; his father grew gayer and moved to a smaller room; and then one July day when little Luzhin was on his way home from another hotel—in which lived one of those morose elderly men who were his playmates—accidentally, in the bright low sun, he caught sight of his father by the wooden railings of a hillside path. His father was with a lady, and since that lady was certainly his young red-haired aunt from St. Petersburg, he was very surprised and somehow ashamed and he did not say anything to his father. Early one morning a few days after this he heard his father swiftly approach his room along the corridor, apparently laughing loudly. The door was burst open and his father entered holding out a slip of paper as if thrusting it away. Tears rolled down his cheeks and along his nose as if he had splashed his face with water and he kept repeating with sobs and gasps: “What’s this? What’s this? It’s a mistake, they’ve got it wrong”—and continued to thrust away the telegram.

He played in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Odessa. There appeared a certain Valentinov, a cross between tutor and manager. Luzhin senior wore a black armband—mourning for his wife—and told provincial journalists that he would never have made such a thorough survey of his native land had he not had a prodigy for a son.

He battled at tournaments with the best Russian players. He often took on a score of amateurs. Sometimes he played blind. Luzhin senior, many years later (in the years when his every contribution to émigré newspapers seemed to him to be his swan song—and goodness knows how many of these swan songs there were, full of lyricism and misprints) planned to write a novella about precisely such a chess-playing small boy, who was taken from city to city by his father (foster father in the novella). He began to write it in 1928—after returning home from a meeting of the Union of Émigré Writers, at which he had been the only one to turn up. The idea of the book came to him unexpectedly and vividly, as he was sitting and waiting in the
conference room of a Berlin coffeehouse. As usual he had come very early, expressed surprise that the tables had not been placed together, told the waiter to do this immediately and ordered tea and a pony of brandy. The room was clean and brightly lit, with a still life on the wall representing plump peaches around a watermelon minus one wedge. A clean tablecloth ballooned gently and settled over the connected tables. He put a lump of sugar in his tea and watching the bubbles rise, warmed his bloodless, always cold hands on the glass. Nearby in the bar a violin and piano were playing selections from
La Traviata
—and the sweet music, the brandy, the whiteness of the clean tablecloth—all this made old Luzhin so sad, and this sadness was so pleasant, that he was loath to move: so he just sat there, one elbow propped on the table, a finger pressed to his temple—a gaunt, red-eyed old man wearing a knitted waistcoat under his brown jacket. The music played, the empty room was flooded with light, the wound of the watermelon glowed scarlet—and nobody seemed to be coming to the meeting. Several times he looked at his watch, but then the tea and the music bemisted him so mellowly that he forgot about time. He sat quietly thinking about this and that—about a typewriter he had acquired secondhand, about the Marinsky Theater, about the son who so rarely came to Berlin. And then he suddenly realized that he had been sitting there for an hour, that the tablecloth was still just as bare and white.… And in this luminous solitude that seemed to him almost mystical, sitting at a table prepared for a meeting that did not take place, he forthwith decided that after a long absence literary inspiration had revisited him.

Time to do a little summing up, he thought and looked round the empty room—tablecloth, blue wallpaper, still life—the way one looks at a room where a famous man was born. And old Luzhin mentally invited his future biographer (who as one came nearer to him in time became paradoxically more and more insubstantial, more and more remote) to take a good close look at this chance room where the novella
The Gambit
had been evolved. He drank the rest of his tea in one gulp, donned his coat and hat, learned from the waiter that today was Tuesday and not Wednesday, smiled not without a certain satisfaction over his own absentmindedness and immediately upon returning home removed the black metal cover from his typewriter.

The most vivid thing standing before his eyes was the following recollection (slightly retouched by a writer’s imagination): a bright hall, two rows of tables, chessboards on the tables. A person sits at each table and at the back of each sitter spectators stand in a cluster, craning their necks. And now down the aisle between the tables, looking at no one, hurries a small boy—dressed like the Tsarevich in an elegant white sailor suit. He stops in turn at each board and quickly makes a move or else lapses briefly in thought, inclining his golden-brown head. An onlooker knowing nothing about simultaneous chess would be utterly baffled at the sight of these elderly men in black sitting gloomily behind boards that bristle thickly with curiously cut manikins, while a nimble, smartly dressed lad whose presence here is inexplicable walks lightly from table to table in the strange, tense silence, the only one to move among these petrified people.…

The writer Luzhin did not himself notice the stylized
nature of his recollection. Nor did he notice that he had endowed his son with the features of a musical rather than a chess-playing prodigy, the result being both sickly and angelic—eyes strangely veiled, curly hair, and a transparent pallor. But now he was faced with certain difficulties: this image of his son, purged of all alien matter and carried to the limits of tenderness, had to be surrounded with some sort of habitus. One thing he decided for sure—he would not let this child grow up, would not transform him into that tactiturn person who sometimes called upon him in Berlin, replied to questions monosyllabically, sat there with his eyes half closed, and then went away leaving an envelope with money in it on the windowsill.

“He will die young,” he said aloud, pacing restlessly about the room and around the open typewriter, whose keys were all watching him with their pupils of reflected light. “Yes, he will die young, his death will be logical and very moving. He will die in bed while playing his last game.” He was so taken with this thought that he regretted the impossibility of beginning the writing of the book from the end. But as a matter of fact, why was it impossible? One could try.… He started to guide his thought backwards—from this touching and so distinct death back to his hero’s vague origin, but presently he thought better of it and sat down at his desk to ponder anew.

His son’s gift had developed in full only after the war when the
Wunderkind
turned into the maestro. In 1914, on the very eve of that war which so hindered his memories from ministering to a neat literary plot, he had again gone abroad with his son, and Valentinov went too. Little Luzhin was invited to play in Vienna, Budapest and Rome.
The fame of the Russian boy who had already beaten one or two of those players whose names appear in chess textbooks was growing so fast that his own modest literary fame was also being incidentally alluded to in foreign newspapers. All three of them were in Switzerland when the Austrian archduke was killed. Out of quite casual considerations (the notion that the mountain air was good for his son … Valentinov’s remark that Russia now had no time for chess, while his son was kept alive solely by chess … the thought that the war would not last for long) he had returned to St. Petersburg alone. After a few months he could stand it no longer and sent for his son. In a bizarre, orotund letter that was somehow matched by its roundabout journey, Valentinov informed him that his son did not wish to come. Luzhin wrote again and the reply, just as orotund and polite, came not from Tarasp but from Naples. He began to loathe Valentinov. There were days of extraordinary anguish. There were absurd complications with the transfer of money. However, Valentinov proposed in one of his next letters to assume all the costs of the boy’s maintenance himself—they would settle up later. Time passed. In the unexpected role of war correspondent he found himself in the Caucasus. Days of anguish and keen hatred for Valentinov (who wrote, however, diligently) were followed by days of mental peace derived from the feeling that life abroad was good for his son—better than it would have been in Russia (which was precisely what Valentinov affirmed).

Now, a decade and a half later, these war years turned out to be an exasperating obstacle; they seemed an encroachment upon creative freedom, for in every book describing
the gradual development of a given human personality one had somehow to mention the war, and even the hero’s dying in his youth could not provide a way out of this situation. There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background. With the revolution it was even worse. The general opinion was that it had influenced the course of every Russian’s life; an author could not have his hero go through it without getting scorched, and to dodge it was impossible. This amounted to a genuine violation of the writer’s free will. Actually, how could the revolution affect his son? On the long-awaited day in the fall of nineteen hundred and seventeen Valentinov appeared, just as cheerful, loud and magnificently dressed as before, and behind him was a pudgy young man with a rudimentary mustache. There was a moment of sorrow, embarrassment and strange disillusionment. The son hardly spoke and kept glancing askance at the window (“He’s afraid there might be some shooting,” explained Valentinov in a low voice). All this resembled a bad dream at first—but one gets used to everything. Valentinov continued to assert that whatever was owed him could be settled “among friends” later. It turned out that he had important secret business affairs and money tucked away in all the banks of allied Europe. Young Luzhin began to frequent an eminently quiet chess club that had trustfully blossomed forth at the very height of civil chaos, and in spring, together with Valentinov, he disappeared—once more abroad. After this came recollections that were purely personal, unbidden recollections, of no use to him—starvation,
arrest, and so forth, and suddenly—legal exile, blessed expulsion, the clean yellow deck, the Baltic breeze, the discussion with Professor Vasilenko over the immortality of the soul.