The Luzhin Defense (16 page)

“That was a little too harsh,” said the father in a whisper. “I’m not defending her, of course. But, you know, all kinds of things happen. The man overtired himself, and had a breakdown. Perhaps after this shock he’ll really change for the better. Look, I think I’ll go to see what she’s doing.”

And the following day he had a long conversation with the famous psychiatrist in whose sanatorium Luzhin was staying. The psychiatrist had a black Assyrian beard and moist, tender eyes that shimmered marvelously as he listened to his interlocutor. He said that Luzhin was not an epileptic and was not suffering from progressive paralysis, that his condition was the consequence of prolonged strain, and that as soon as it was possible to have a sensible conversation with Luzhin, one would have to impress upon him that a blind passion for chess was fatal for him and that for a long time he would have to renounce his profession and lead an absolutely normal mode of life. “And can such a man marry?” “Why not—if he’s not impotent.” The professor smiled tenderly. “Moreover, there’s an advantage for him in being married. Our patient needs care, attention
and diversion. This is a temporary clouding of the senses, which is now gradually passing. As far as we can judge, a complete recovery is under way.”

The psychiatrist’s words produced a small sensation at home. “That means chess is kaput?” noted the mother with satisfaction. “What will be left of him then—pure madness?” “No, no,” said the father. “There’s no question of madness. The man will be healthy. The devil’s not as black as his painters. I said ‘painters’—did you hear, my pet?” But the daughter did not smile and only sighed. To tell the truth she felt very tired. She spent the larger part of the day at the sanatorium and there was something unbelievably exhausting in the exaggerated whiteness of everything surrounding her and in the noiseless white movements of the nurses. Still extremely pale, with a growth of bristle and wearing a clean shirt, Luzhin lay immobile. There were moments, it is true, when he raised one knee under the sheet or gently moved an arm, and changing shadows would flit over his face, and sometimes an almost rational light would appear in his eyes—but nonetheless all that could be said of him was that he was immobile—a distressing immobility, exhausting for the gaze that sought a hint of conscious life in it. And it was impossible to tear one’s gaze away—one so wanted to penetrate behind this pale yellowish forehead wrinkling from time to time with a mysterious inner movement, to pierce the mysterious fog that stirred with difficulty, endeavoring, perhaps, to disentangle itself, to condense into separate human thoughts. Yes, there was movement, there was. The formless fog thirsted for contours, for embodiments, and once something, a mirror-like glint, appeared in the darkness, and in this dim ray Luzhin
perceived a face with a black, curly beard, a familiar image, an inhabitant of childish nightmares. The face in the dim little mirror came closer, and immediately the clear space clouded over and there was foggy darkness and slowly dispersing horror. And upon the expiry of many dark centuries—a single earthly night—the light again came into being, and suddenly something burst radiantly, the darkness parted and remained only in the form of a fading shadowy frame, in the midst of which was a shining, blue window. Tiny yellow leaves gleamed in this blueness, throwing a speckled shadow on a white tree trunk, that was concealed lower down by the dark green paw of a fir tree; and immediately this vision filled with life, the leaves began to quiver, spots crept over the trunk and the green paw oscillated, and Luzhin, unable to support it, closed his eyes, but the bright oscillation remained beneath his lids. I once buried something under those trees, he thought blissfully. And he seemed on the point of recalling exactly what it was when he heard a rustle above him and two calm voices. He began to listen, trying to understand where he was and why something soft and cold was lying on his forehead. After a while he opened his eyes again. A fat woman in white was holding her palm on his forehead—and there in the window was the same happy radiance. He wondered what to say, and catching sight of a little watch pinned on her breast, he licked his lips and asked what time it was. Movement immediately began around him, women whispered, and Luzhin remarked with astonishment that he understood their language, could even speak it himself.
“Wie spät ist es
—what time is it?” he repeated. “Nine in the morning,” said one of the women. “How do you feel?” In
the window, if you lifted yourself a little, you could see a fence that was also spotted with shadow. “Evidently I got home,” said Luzhin pensively and again lowered his light, empty head onto the pillow. For a while he heard whispers, the light tinkle of glass.… There was something pleasing in the absurdity of everything that was happening, and it was amazingly good to lie there without moving. Thus he imperceptibly fell asleep and when he awoke saw again the blue gleam of a Russian autumn. But something had changed, someone unfamiliar had appeared next to his bed. Luzhin turned his head: on a chair to the right sat a man in white, with a black beard, looking at him attentively with smiling eyes. Luzhin thought vaguely that he resembled the peasant from the mill, but the resemblance immediately vanished when the man spoke:
“Karasho?”
he inquired amiably. “Who are you?” asked Luzhin in German. “A friend,” replied the gentleman, “a faithful friend. You have been sick but now you are well. Do you hear? You are quite well.” Luzhin began to meditate on these words, but the man did not allow him to finish and said sympathetically: “You must lie quiet. Rest. Get lots of sleep.”

Thus Luzhin came back from a long journey, having lost en route the greater part of his luggage, and it was too much bother to restore what was lost. These first days of recovery were quiet and smooth: women in white gave him tasty food to eat; the bewitching bearded man came and said nice things to him and looked at him with his agate gaze, which bathed one’s body in warmth. Shortly Luzhin began to notice that there was someone else in the room—a palpitating, elusive presence. Once when he woke up someone noiselessly and hastily went away, and once when he
half dozed, someone’s extremely light and apparently familiar whisper started beside him and immediately stopped. And hints began to flicker in the bearded man’s conversation about something mysterious and happy; it was in the air around him and in the autumn beauty of the window, and it trembled somewhere behind the tree—an enigmatic, evasive happiness. And Luzhin gradually began to realize that the heavenly void in which his transparent thoughts floated was being filled in from all sides.

Warned of the imminence of a wonderful event, he looked through the railed head of his bed at the white door and waited for it to open and the prediction to come true. But the door did not open. Suddenly, to one side, beyond his field of vision, something stirred. Under the cover of a large screen someone was standing and laughing. “I’m coming, I’m coming, just a moment,” muttered Luzhin, freeing his legs from the sheet and looking with bulging eyes under the chair beside the bed for something to put on his feet. “You’re not going anywhere,” said a voice and a pink dress instantaneously filled the void.

The fact that his life was illumined first of all from this side eased his return. For a short while longer those harsh eminences, the gods of his being, remained in shadow. A tender optical illusion took place: he returned to life from a direction other than the one he had left it in, and the work of redistributing his recollections was assumed by the wondrous happiness that welcomed him first. And when, finally, this area of his life had been fully restored and suddenly, with the roar of a crumbling wall, Turati appeared, together with the tournament and all the preceding tournaments—this happiness was able to remove Turati’s
protesting image and replace the twitching chessmen in their box. As soon as they came to life, the lid was re-slammed upon them—and the struggle did not continue for long. The doctor assisted, the precious stones of his eyes coruscating and melting; he spoke of the fact that all around them was a bright, free world, that chess was a cold amusement that dries up and corrupts the brain, and that the passionate chess player is just as ridiculous as the madman inventing a
perpetuum mobile
or counting pebbles on a deserted ocean shore. “I shall stop loving you,” said his fiancée, “if you start thinking about chess—and I can see every thought, so behave yourself.” “Horror, suffering, despair,” said the doctor quietly, “those are what this exhausting game gives rise to.” And he proved to Luzhin that Luzhin himself was well aware of this, that Luzhin was unable to think of chess without a feeling of revulsion, and in some mysterious fashion Luzhin, melting and coruscating, and blissfully relaxing, agreed with his reasoning. And in the vast, fragrant garden of the sanatorium Luzhin went strolling in new bedroom slippers made of soft leather and registered his approval of the dahlias, while beside him walked his fiancée and thought for some reason of a book she had read in childhood in which all the difficulties in the life of a schoolboy, who had run away from home together with a dog he had saved, were resolved by a convenient (for the author) fever—not typhus, not scarlet fever, but just “a fever”—and the young stepmother whom he had not loved hitherto so cared for him that he suddenly began to appreciate her and would call her Mamma, and a warm tearlet would roll down her face and everything was fine. “Luzhin is well,” she said with a smile, looking at his
ponderous profile (the profile of a flabbier Napoleon) as it bent apprehensively over a flower, which maybe might bite. “Luzhin is well. Luzhin is out for a walk. Luzhin is very sweet.” “It doesn’t smell,” said Luzhin in a thick, small voice. “Nor should it smell,” she replied taking him by the arm. “Dahlias aren’t supposed to. But see that white flower over there—that’s Mister Tabacum—and
he
has a strong smell at night. When I was little I always used to suck the sap out of the corolla. Now I don’t like it any more.” “In our garden in Russia …” began Luzhin and became thoughtful, squinting at the flower beds. “We had these flowers over here,” he said. “Our garden was quite a presentable one.” “Asters,” she explained. “I don’t like them. They’re coarse. Now in our garden …”

In general there was a lot of talk about childhood. The professor talked about it too and questioned Luzhin. “Your father owned land, didn’t he?” Luzhin nodded. “Land, the country—that’s excellent,” continued the professor. “You probably had horses and cows?” A nod. “Let me imagine your house—Ancient trees all around … the house large and bright. Your father returns from the hunt …” Luzhin recalled that his father had once found a fat, nasty little fledgling in a ditch. “Yes,” replied Luzhin uncertainly. “Some details,” asked the professor softly. “Please. I beg you. I’m interested in the way you occupied yourself in childhood, what you played with. You had some tin soldiers, I’m sure.…”

But Luzhin rarely grew enlivened during these conversations. On the other hand, constantly nudged by such interrogations, his thoughts would return again and again to the sphere of his childhood. It was impossible to express
his recollections in words—there simply were no grown-up words for his childish impressions—and if he ever related anything, then he did so jerkily and unwillingly—rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number. His preschool, pre-chess childhood, which he had never thought about before, dismissing it with a slight shudder so as not to find dormant horrors and humiliating insults there, proved now to be an amazingly safe spot, where he could take pleasant excursions that sometimes brought a piercing pleasure. Luzhin himself was unable to understand whence the excitement—why the image of the fat French governess with the three bone buttons on one side of her skirt, that drew together whenever she lowered her enormous croup into an armchair—why the image that had then so irritated him, now evoked in his breast a feeling of tender constriction. He recalled that in their St. Petersburg house her asthmatic obesity had preferred to the staircase the old-fashioned, water-powered elevator which the janitor used to set in motion by means of a lever in the vestibule. “Here we go,” the janitor said invariably as he closed the door leaves behind her, and the heavy, puffing, shuddering elevator would creep slowly upwards on its thick velvet cable, and past it, down the peeling wall that was visible through the glass, would come dark geographic patches, those patches of dampness and age among which, as among the clouds in the sky, the reigning fashion is for silhouettes of Australia and the Black Sea. Sometimes little Luzhin would go up with her, but more often he stayed below and listened to the elevator, high up and behind the wall, struggling upwards—and he always hoped, did little Luzhin, that
it would get stuck halfway. Often enough this happened. The noise would cease and from unknown, intermural space would come a wail for help: the janitor below would move the lever, with a grunt of effort, then open the door into blackness and ask briskly, looking upwards: “Moving?” Finally something would shudder and stir and after a little while the elevator would descend—now empty. Empty. Goodness knows what had happened to her—perhaps she had traveled up to heaven and remained there with her asthma, her liquorice candies and her pince-nez on a black cord. The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question—where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away?

With an involuntary movement of the soul he looked for these paths in the sanatorium garden, but the flower beds had a different outline, the birches were placed differently, and the gaps in their russet foliage, filled with autumn blue, in no way corresponded to the remembered gaps into which he tried to fit these cut-out pieces of azure. It seemed as though that distant world was unrepeatable; through it roamed the by now completely bearable images of his parents, softened by the haze of time, and the clockwork train with its tin car painted to look like paneling went buzzing under the flounces of the armchair, and goodness knows how this affected the dummy engine driver, too big for the locomotive and hence placed in the tender.