The Luzhin Defense (3 page)

In this way an hour went by. Suddenly he heard the noise of voices and the whine of the front door. Taking a cautious look through the little window he saw below his father, who like a young boy ran up the stairs and then, before reaching the landing, descended swiftly again, throwing his knees out on either side. The voices below were now clear: the butler’s, the coachman’s, the watchman’s. A minute later the staircase again came to life; this time his mother came quickly up it, hitching up her skirt, but she also stopped short of the landing, leaning, instead, over the balustrade, and then swiftly, with arms spread out, she went down again. Finally, after another minute had passed, they all went up in a posse—his father’s bald head glistened, the bird on mother’s hat swayed like a duck on a troubled pond, and the butler’s gray crew cut bobbed up and down; at the rear, leaning at every moment over the balustrade, came the coachman, the watchman, and for some reason the milkmaid Akulina, and finally a black-bearded peasant from the water mill, future inhabitant of future nightmares. It was he, as the strongest, who carried Luzhin down from the attic to the carriage.

Luzhin senior, the Luzhin who wrote books, often thought of how his son would turn out. Through his books (and they all, except for a forgotten novel called
Fumes
, were written for boys, youths and high school students and came in sturdy colorful covers) there constantly flitted the image of a fair-haired lad, “headstrong,” “brooding,” who later turned into a violinist or a painter, without losing his moral beauty in the process. The barely perceptible peculiarity that distinguished his son from all those children who, in his opinion, were destined to become completely unremarkable people (given that such people exist) he interpreted as the secret stir of talent, and bearing firmly in mind the fact that his deceased father-in-law had been a composer (albeit a somewhat arid one and susceptible, in his mature years, to the doubtful splendors of virtuosity), he more than once, in a pleasant dream resembling a lithograph, descended with a candle at night to the drawing room where a
Wünderkind
, dressed in a white nightshirt that came down to his heels, would be playing on an enormous, black piano.

It seemed to him that everybody ought to see how exceptional his son was; it seemed to him that strangers, perhaps, could make better sense of it than he himself. The school he had selected for his son was particularly famous for the attention it paid to the so-called “inner” life of its pupils, and for its humaneness, thoughtfulness, and friendly insight. Tradition had it that during the early part of its existence the teachers had played with the boys during the long recess: the physics master, looking over his shoulder, would squeeze a lump of snow into a ball; the mathematics master would get a hard little ball in the ribs as he made a run in
lapta
(Russian baseball); and even the headmaster himself would be there, cheering the game on with jolly ejaculations. Such games in common no longer took place, but the idyllic fame had remained. His son’s class master was the Russian literature teacher, a good acquaintance of Luzhin the writer and incidentally not a bad lyric poet who had put out a collection of imitations of Anacreon. “Drop in,” he had said on the day when Luzhin first brought his son to school. “Any Thursday around twelve.” Luzhin dropped in. The stairs were deserted and quiet. Passing through the hall to the staff room he heard a muffled, multivocal roar of laughter coming from Class Two. In the ensuing silence, his steps rang out with a stressed sonority on the yellow parquetry of the long hall. In the staff room, at a large table covered with baize (which reminded one of examinations), the teacher sat writing a letter.

Since the time of his son’s entrance to the school he had not spoken to the teacher and now, visiting him a month later, he was full of titillating expectation, of a certain
anxiety and timidity—of all those feelings he had once experienced as a youth in his university uniform when he went to see the editor of a literary review to whom he had shortly before sent his first story. And now, just as then, instead of the words of delighted amazement he had vaguely expected (as when you wake up in a strange town, expecting, with your eyes still shut, an extraordinary, blazing morning), instead of all those words which he himself would so willingly have provided, had it not been for the hope that nonetheless they would eventually come—he heard chilly and dull phrases that proved the teacher understood his son even less than he did. On the subject of any kind of hidden talent not a single word was uttered. Inclining his pale bearded face with two pink grooves on either side of the nose, from which he carefully removed his tenacious pince-nez, and rubbing his eyes with his palm, the teacher began to speak first, saying that the boy might do better than he did, that the boy seemed not to get on with his companions, that the boy did not run about much during the recess period.… “The boy undoubtedly has ability,” said the teacher, concluding his eye-rubbing, “but we notice a certain listlessness.” At this moment a bell was generated somewhere downstairs, and then bounded upstairs and passed unbearably shrilly throughout the whole building. After this there were two or three seconds of the most complete silence—and suddenly everything came to life and burst into noise; desk lids banged and the hall filled with talking and the stamp of feet. “The long recess,” said the teacher. “If you like we’ll go down to the yard, and you can watch the boys at play.”

These descended the stone stairs swiftly, hugging the
balustrade and sliding the soles of their sandals over the step rims well polished by use. Downstairs amid the crowded darkness of coat racks they changed their shoes; some of them sat on the broad windowsills, grunting as they hastily tied their shoelaces. Suddenly he caught sight of his son, who, all hunched up, was disgustedly taking his boots from a cloth bag. A hurrying, tow-haired boy bumped into him and, moving aside, Luzhin suddenly caught sight of his father. The latter smiled at him, holding his tall astrakhan
shapka
and implanting the necessary furrow on top with the edge of one hand. Luzhin narrowed his eyes and turned away as if he had not seen his father. Squatting on the floor with his back to his father, he busied himself with his boots; those who had already managed to change stepped over him and after every push he hunched himself up still more as if hiding in a dark nook. When at last he went out—wearing a long gray overcoat and a little astrakhan cap (which was constantly being tipped off by one and the same burly boy), his father was already standing at the gate at the other end of the yard and looking expectantly in his direction. Next to Luzhin senior stood the literature teacher and when the large gray rubber ball the boys used for soccer happened to roll up to his feet, the literature teacher, instinctively continuing that enchanting tradition, made as if he wanted to kick it, but only shifted awkwardly from foot to foot and almost lost one of his galoshes, and laughed with great good humor. The father supported him by the elbow, and Luzhin junior, grasping the opportunity, returned to the vestibule, where all was now quiet and where the janitor, concealed by clothes racks, was heard yawning blissfully.
Through the glass of the door, between the cast-iron rays of the star-shaped grille, he saw his father suddenly remove his glove, quickly take leave of the teacher and disappear through the gate. Only then did he creep out again, and, carefully skirting the players, make his way left to where firewood was stacked under the archway. There, raising his collar, he sat down on a pile of logs.

In this way he sat through approximately two hundred and fifty long intermissions, until the year that he was taken abroad. Sometimes the teacher would suddenly appear from around a corner. “Why are you always sitting in a heap, Luzhin? You should run about a bit with the other boys.” Luzhin would get up from the woodpile, trying to find a point equidistant from those three of his classmates who were especially fierce at this hour, shy away from the ball propelled by someone’s resounding kick and, having reassured himself that the teacher was far off, would return to the woodpile. He had chosen this spot on the very first day, on that dark day when he had discovered such hatred and derisive curiosity around him that his eyes had automatically filled with a burning mist, and everything he looked at—out of the accursed necessity of looking at something—was subject to intricate, optical metamorphoses. The page with crisscross blue lines grew blurry; the white numbers on the blackboard alternately contracted and broadened; the arithmetic teacher’s voice, as if steadily receding, would get more and more hollow and incomprehensible, and his desk neighbor, an insidious brute with down on his cheeks, would say with quiet satisfaction: “Now he’s going to cry.” But Luzhin never once cried, not even in the lavatory
when they made a concerted effort to thrust his head into the low bowl with yellow bubbles in it. “Gentlemen,” the teacher had said at one of the first lessons, “your new comrade is the son of a writer. Whom, if you haven’t read him, you should proceed to read.” And in large letters he wrote on the board, pressing so hard that the chalk was pulverized crunchingly beneath his fingers: T
ONY’S
A
DVENTURES
, S
ILVESTROV AND
Co.
PUBLISHERS
. During two or three months after that his classmates called him Tony. With a mysterious air the downy-cheeked brute brought the book to class and during the lesson stealthily showed it to the others, casting significant glances at his victim—and when the lesson was over began to read aloud from the middle, purposely mangling the words. Petrishchev, who was looking over his shoulder, wanted to hold back a page and it tore. Krebs gabbled: “My dad says he’s a very second-rate writer.” Gromov shouted: “Let Tony read to us aloud!” “Better to give everybody a piece each,” said the clown of the class with gusto, and took possession of the handsome red and gold book after a stormy struggle. Pages were scattered over the whole classroom. One of them had a picture on it—a bright-eyed schoolboy on a street corner feeding his luncheon to a scruffy dog. The following day Luzhin found this picture neatly tacked on to the underside of his desk lid.

Soon, however, they left him in peace; only his nickname flared up from time to time, but since he stubbornly refused to answer it that too finally died down. They stopped taking any notice of Luzhin and did not speak to him, and even the sole quiet boy in the class (the sort there is in every class, just as there are invariably a fat boy, a
strong boy and a wit) steered clear of him, afraid of sharing his despicable condition. This same quiet boy, who six years later, in the beginning of World War One, received the St. George Cross for an extremely dangerous reconnaisance and later lost an arm in the civil war, when trying to recall (in the twenties of the present century) what Luzhin had been like in school, could not visualize him otherwise than from the rear, either sitting in front of him in class with protruding ears, or else receding to one end of the hall as far away as possible from the hubbub, or else departing for home in a sleigh cab—hands in pockets, a large piebald satchel on his back, snow falling.… He tried to run ahead and look at Luzhin’s face, but that special snow of oblivion, abundant and soundless snow, covered his recollection with an opaque white mist. And the former quiet boy, now a restless émigré, said as he looked at a picture in the newspaper: “Imagine, I just can’t remember his face.… Just can’t remember.…”

But Luzhin senior, peering through the window around four o’clock, would see the approaching sleigh and his son’s face like a pale spot. The boy usually came straight to his study, kissed the air as he touched his father’s cheek with his and immediately turned away. “Wait,” his father would say, “wait. Tell me how it was today. Were you called to the blackboard?”

He would look greedily at his son, who turned his face away, and would want to take him by the shoulders, shake him and kiss him soundly on his pale cheek, on the eyes and on his tender, concave temple. From anemic little Luzhin that first school winter came a touching smell of garlic as a result of the arsenic injections prescribed by the doctor. His
platinum band had been removed, but he continued to bare his teeth and curl his upper lip out of habit. He wore a gray Norfolk jacket with a strap at the back, and knickerbockers with buttons below the knee. He would stand by the desk, balancing on one leg, and his father did not dare to do anything against his impenetrable sullenness. Little Luzhin would go away, trailing his satchel over the carpet; Luzhin senior would lean his elbow on the desk, where he was writing one of his usual stories in blue exercise books (a whim which, perhaps, some future biographer would appreciate), and listen to the monologue in the neighboring dining room, to his wife’s voice persuading the silence to drink a cup of cocoa. A frightening silence, thought Luzhin senior. He’s not well, he has a painful inner life of some sort.… Perhaps he shouldn’t have been sent to school. But on the other hand he has to get used to being with other lads.… An enigma, an enigma.…

“Well, take some cake, then,” the voice behind the wall would continue sorrowfully, and again silence. But sometimes something horrible occurred: suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, another voice would reply, strident and hoarse, and the door would slam as if shut by a hurricane. Then Luzhin senior would jump up and make for the dining room, holding his pen like a dart. With trembling hands his wife would be setting aright an overturned cup and saucer and trying to see if there were any cracks. “I was asking him about school,” she would say, not looking at her husband. “He didn’t want to answer and then—like a madman …” They would both listen. The French governess had left that autumn for Paris and now nobody knew what he did there in his room. The wallpaper
there was white, and higher up was a blue band on which were drawn gray geese and ginger puppies. A goose advanced on a pup and so on thirty-eight times around the entire room. An étagère supported a globe and a stuffed squirrel, bought once on Palm Sunday at the Catkin Fair. A green clockwork locomotive peeped out from beneath the flounces of an armchair. It was a nice bright room. Gay wallpaper, gay objects.