The Luzhin Defense

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "Let's go away somewhere," whispered his aunt in an embarrassed and nervous manner, and they entered the study where a band of sunbeams, in which spun tiny particles of dust, was focused on an overstuffed armchair. She lit a cigarette and folds of smoke started to sway, soft and transparent, in the sunbeams. This was the only person in whose presence he did not feel constrained, and now it was especially pleasant: a strange silence in the house and a kind of expectation of something. "Well, let's play some game," said his aunt hurriedly and took him by the neck from behind. "What a thin little neck you have, one can clasp it with one hand...." "Do you know how to play chess?" asked Luzhin stealthily, and freeing his head he rubbed his cheek against the delightful bright blue silk of her sleeve. "A game of Snap would be better," she said absentmindedly. A door banged somewhere. She winced and turned her face in the direction of the noise, listening. "No, I want to play chess," said Luzhin. "It's complicated, my dear, you can't learn it in an instant." He went to the desk and found the box, which was standing behind a desk photograph. His aunt got up to take an ashtray, ruminatively crooning in conclusion of some thought of hers: "That would be terrible, that would be terrible ..." "Here," said Luzhin and put the box down on a low, inlaid Turkish table. "You need the board as well," she said. "And you know, it would be better for me to teach you checkers, it's simpler." "No, chess," said Luzhin and unrolled an oilcloth board.

  "First let's place the pieces correctly," began his aunt with a sigh. "White here, black over there. King and Queen next to each other. These here are the Officers. These are the Horses. And these, at each corner, are the Cannons. Now ..." Suddenly she froze, holding a piece in mid-air and looking at the door. "Wait," she said anxiously. "I think I left my handkerchief in the dining room. I'll be right back." She opened the door but returned immediately. "Let it go," she said and again sat down. "No, don't set them out without me, you'll do it the wrong way. This is called a Pawn. Now watch how they all move. The Horse gallops, of course." Luzhin sat on the carpet with his shoulder against her knee and watched her hand with its thin platinum bracelet picking up the chessmen and putting them down. "The Queen is the most mobile," he said with satisfaction and adjusted the piece with his finger, since it was standing not quite in the center of the square. "And this is how one piece eats another," said his aunt. "As if pushing it out and taking its place. The Pawns do this obliquely. When you can take the King but he can move out of the way, it's called check; and when he's got nowhere to go it's mate. So your object is to take my King and I have to take yours. You see how long it all takes to explain. Perhaps we can play another time, eh?" "No, now," said Luzhin and suddenly kissed her hand. "That was sweet of you," said his aunt softly, "I never expected such tenderness ... You are a nice little boy after all." "Please let's play," said Luzhin, and moving in a kneeling position on the carpet, reached the low table. But at that moment she got up from her seat so abruptly that she brushed the board with her skirt and knocked off several pieces. In the doorway stood his father.

  "Go to your room," he said, glancing briefly at his son. Luzhin, who was being sent out of a room for the first time in his life, remained as he was on his knees out of sheer astonishment. "Did you hear?" said his father. Luzhin flushed and began to look for the fallen pieces on the carpet. "Hurry up," said his father in a thunderous voice such as he had never used before. His aunt hastily began to put the pieces any which way into their box. Her hands trembled. One Pawn just would not go in. "Now take it, take it," she said. He slowly rolled up the oilcloth board and, his face darkened by a sense of deep injury, took the box. He was unable to close the door behind him since both hands were full. His father took a swift stride and slammed the door so hard that Luzhin dropped the board, which immediately unfolded; he had to put the box down and roll up the thing again. Behind the door of the study there was at first silence, then the creak of an armchair under his father's weight, and then his aunt's breathless interrogative whisper. Luzhin reflected disgustedly that today everyone had gone mad and went to his room. There he immediately set out the pieces as his aunt had shown him and considered them for a long time, trying to figure something out; after which he put them away very neatly in their box. From that day the chess set remained with him and it was a long time before his father noticed its absence. From that day there was in his room a fascinating and mysterious toy, the use of which he had still not learned. From that day his aunt never again came to visit them.

  A week or so later, an empty gap occurred between the first and third lesson: the geography teacher had caught a cold. When five minutes had passed after the bell and still no one had come in, there ensued such a premonition of happiness that it seemed the heart would not hold out should the glass door nonetheless now open and the geography teacher, as was his habit, come dashing almost at a run into the room. Only Luzhin was indifferent. Bent low over his desk, he was sharpening a pencil, trying to make the point as sharp as a pin. An excited din swelled around him. Our bliss, it seemed, was bound to be realized. Sometimes however there were unbearable disappointments: in place of the sick teacher the predatory little mathematics teacher would come creeping into the room, and, having closed the door soundlessly, would begin to select pieces of chalk from the ledge beneath the blackboard with an evil smile on his face. But a full ten minutes elapsed and no one appeared. The din grew louder. From an excess of happiness somebody banged a desk lid. The class tutor sprang up out of nowhere. "Absolute quiet," he said. "I want absolute quiet. Valentin Ivanovich is sick. Occupy yourselves with something. But there must be absolute quiet." He went away. Large fluffy clouds shone outside the window; something gurgled and dripped; sparrows chirped. Blissful hour, bewitching hour. Luzhin apathetically began to sharpen yet another pencil. Gromov was telling some story in a hoarse voice, pronouncing strange obscene words with gusto. Petrishchev begged everyone to explain to him how we know that they are equal to two right-angled ones. And suddenly, behind him, Luzhin distinctly heard a special sound, wooden and rattly, that caused him to grow hot and his heart to skip a beat. Cautiously he turned around. Krebs and the only quiet boy in the class were nimbly setting out light little chessmen on a six-inch board. The board was on the desk bench between them. They sat extremely uncomfortably, sideways. Luzhin, forgetting to finish sharpening his pencil, went up to them. The players took no notice of him. The quiet boy, when trying many years later to remember his schoolmate Luzhin, never recalled that casual chess game, played during an empty hour. Mixing up dates he extracted from the past a vague impression of Luzhin's once winning a school match, something itched in his memory, but he could not get at it.

  "There goes the Tower," said Krebs. Luzhin followed his hand, thinking with a tremor of momentary panic that his aunt had not told him the names of all the pieces. But "tower" turned out to be a synonym for "cannon." "I didn't see you could take, that's all," said the other. "All right, take your move back," said Krebs.

  With gnawing envy and irritating frustration Luzhin watched the game, striving to perceive those harmonious patterns the musician had spoken of and feeling vaguely that in some way or other he understood the game better than these two, although he was completely ignorant of how it should be conducted, why this was good and that bad, and what one should do to penetrate the opposite King's camp without losses. And there was one kind of move that pleased him very much, amusing in its sleekness: Krebs's King slid up to the piece he called a Tower, and the Tower jumped over the King. Then he saw the other King come out from behind its Pawns (one had been knocked out, like a tooth) and begin to step distractedly back and forth. "Check," said Krebs, "check" (and the stung King leaped to one side); "you can't go here and you can't go here either. Check, I'm taking your Queen, check." At this point he lost a piece himself and began insisting he should replay his move. The class bully filliped Luzhin on the back of the head and simultaneously with his other hand knocked the board onto the floor. For the second time in his life Luzhin noticed how unstable a thing che
ss was.

  And the following morning, while still lying in bed, he made an unprecedented decision. He usually went to school in a cab and always made a careful study of the cab's number, dividing it up in a special way in order the better to store it away in his memory and extract it thence whole should he require it. But today he did not go as far as school and forgot in his excitement to memorize the number; fearfully glancing around he got out at Karavannaya Street and by a circular route, avoiding the region of the school, reached Sergievskaya Street. On the way he happened to run into the geography teacher, who with enormous strides, a briefcase under his arm, was rushing in the direction of school, blowing his nose and expectorating phlegm as he went. Luzhin turned aside so abruptly that a mysterious object rattled heavily in his satchel. Only when the teacher, like a blind wind, had swept past him did Luzhin become aware that he was standing before a hairdresser's window and that the frizzled heads of three waxen ladies with pink nostrils were staring directly at him. He took a deep breath and swiftly walked along the wet sidewalk, unconsciously trying to adjust his steps so that his heel always landed on a join between two paving slabs. But the slabs were all of different widths and this hampered his walk. Then he stepped down onto the pavement in order to escape temptation and sloshed on in the mud along the edge of the sidewalk. Finally he caught sight of the house he wanted, plum-colored, with naked old men straining to hold up a balcony, and stained glass in the front door. He turned in at the gate past a spurstone showing the white marks of pigeons, stole across an inner court where two individuals with rolled-up sleeves were washing a dazzling carriage, went up a staircase and rang the bell. "She's still asleep," said the maid, looking at him with surprise. "Wait here, won't you? I'll let Madam know in a while." Luzhin shrugged off his satchel in businesslike fashion and laid it beside him on the table, which also bore a porcelain inkwell, a blotting case embroidered with beads, and an unfamiliar picture of his father (a book in one hand, a finger of the other pressed to his temple), and from nothing better to do he commenced to count the different hues in the carpet. He had been in this room only once before, last Christmas--when, on his father's advice, he had taken his aunt a large box of chocolates, half of which he had himself eaten and the remainder of which he had rearranged so that it would not be noticed. Up until just recently his aunt had been at their place every day, but now she had stopped coming and there was something in the air, some elusive interdiction, that prevented him from asking about it at home. Having counted up to nine different shades he shifted his gaze to a silk screen embroidered with rushes and storks. He had just begun to wonder whether similar storks were on the other side as well when at last his aunt came--her hair not yet done and wearing a kind of flowery kimono with sleeves like wings. "Where did you spring from?" she exclaimed. "And what about school? Oh what a funny boy you are...."

  Two hours later he again emerged onto the street. His satchel, now empty, was so light that it bounced on his shoulder blades. He had to pass time somehow until the usual hour of return. He wandered into Tavricheski Park, and the emptiness in his satchel gradually began to annoy him. In the first place the thing he had left as a precaution with his aunt might somehow get lost before next time, and in the second place it would have come in handy at home during the evenings. He resolved to act differently in future.

  "Family circumstances," he replied the next day when the teacher casually inquired why he had not been in school. On Thursday he left school early and missed three days in a row, explaining afterwards that he had had a sore throat. On Wednesday he had a relapse. On Saturday he was late for the first lesson even though he had left home earlier than usual. On Sunday he amazed his mother by announcing that he had been invited to a friend's house--and he was away five hours. On Wednesday school broke up early (it was one of those wonderful blue dusty days at the very end of April when the end of the school term is already imminent and such indolence overcomes one), but he did not get home until much later than usual. And then there was a whole week of absence--a rapturous intoxicating week. The teacher telephoned his home to find out what was the matter with him. His father answered the phone.

  When Luzhin returned home around four o'clock in the afternoon his father's face was gray, his eyes bulging, while his mother gasped as if deprived of her tongue and then began to laugh unnaturally and hysterically, with wails and cries. After a moment's confusion Father led him without a word into his study and there, with arms folded across his chest, requested an explanation. Luzhin, holding the heavy and precious satchel under his arm, stared at the floor, wondering whether his aunt was capable of betrayal. "Kindly give me an explanation," repeated his father. She was incapable of betrayal and in any case how could she know he had been caught? "You refuse?" asked his father. Besides, she somehow seemed even to like his truancy. "Now listen," said his father conciliatorily, "let's talk as friends." Luzhin sighed and sat on the arm of a chair, continuing to look at the floor. "As friends," repeated his father still more soothingly. "So now it turns out you have missed school several times. So now I would like to know where you have been and what you have been doing. I can even understand that, for instance, the weather is fine and one gets the urge to go for walks." "Yes, I get the urge," said Luzhin indifferently, growing bored. His father wanted to know where exactly he had gone for a walk and whether his need of walks was long-standing. Then he reminded him that every man has his duty as citizen, as family man, as soldier, and also as schoolboy. Luzhin yawned. "Go to your room!" said his father hopelessly and when his son had left he stood for a long time in the middle of his study and looked at the door in blank horror. His wife, who had been listening from the next room, came in, sat on the edge of the divan and again burst into tears. "He cheats," she kept repeating, "just as you cheat. I'm surrounded by cheats." He merely shrugged his shoulders and thought how sad life was, how difficult to do one's duty, not to meet anymore, not to telephone, not to go where he was irresistibly drawn ... and now this trouble with his son ... this oddity, this stubbornness ... A sad state of affairs, a very sad state....

  4

  In Grandfather's former study, which even on the hottest days was the dampest room in their country house no matter how much they opened the windows that looked straight out on grim dark fir trees, whose foliage was so thick and intricate that it was impossible to say where one tree ended and another began--in this uninhabited room where a bronze boy with violin stood on the bare desk--there was an unlocked bookcase containing the thick volumes of an extinct illustrated magazine. Luzhin would swiftly leaf through them until he reached the page where between a poem by Korinfski, crowned with a harp-shaped vignette, and the miscellany section containing information about shifting swamps, American eccentrics and the length of the human intestine, there was the woodcut of a chessboard. Not a single picture could arrest Luzhin's hand as it leafed through the volumes--neither the celebrated Niagara Falls nor starving Indian children (potbellied little skeletons) nor an attempted assassination of the King of Spain. The life of the world passed by with a hasty rustle, and suddenly stopped--the treasured diagram, problems, openings, entire games.

  At the beginning of the summer holidays he had sorely missed his aunt and the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers--especially that fragrant old man smelling at times of violets and at times of lilies of the valley, depending upon what flowers he had brought to Luzhin's aunt. Usually he would arrive just right--a few minutes after Luzhin's aunt had glanced at her watch and left the house. "Never mind, let's wait a while," the old man would say, removing the damp paper from his bouquet, and Luzhin would draw up an armchair for him to the table where the chessmen had already been set out. The appearance of the old gentleman with the flowers had provided him with a way out of a rather awkward situation. After three or four truancies from school it became apparent that his aunt had really no aptitude for chess. As the game proceeded, her pieces would conglomerate in an unseemly jumble, out of which there would suddenly dash an exp
osed helpless King. But the old gentleman played divinely. The first time his aunt, pulling on her gloves, had said rapidly, "Unfortunately I must leave but you stay on and play chess with my nephew, thank you for the wonderful lilies of the valley," the first time the old man had sat down and sighed: "It's a long time since I touched ... now, young man--left or right?"--this first time when after a few moves Luzhin's ears were burning and there was nowhere to advance, it seemed to Luzhin he was playing a completely different game from the one his aunt had taught him. The board was bathed in fragrance. The old man called the Officer a Bishop and the Tower, a Rook, and whenever he made a move that was fatal for his opponent he would immediately take it back, and as if disclosing the mechanism of an expensive instrument he would show the way his Opponent should have played in order to avert disaster. He won the first fifteen games without the slightest effort, not pondering his moves for a moment, but during the sixteenth game he suddenly began to think and won with difficulty, while on the last day, the day he drove up with a whole bush of lilac for which no place could be found, and the boy's aunt darted about on tiptoe in her bedroom and then, presumably, left by the back door--on this last day, after a long exciting struggle during which the old man revealed a capacity for breathing hard through the nose--Luzhin perceived something, something was set free within him, something cleared up, and the mental myopia that had been painfully beclouding his chess vision disappeared. "Well, well, it's a draw" said the old man. He moved his Queen back and forth a few times the way you move the lever of a broken machine and repeated: "A draw. Perpetual check." Luzhin also tried the lever to see if it would work, wiggled it, wiggled it, and then sat still, staring stiffly at the board. "You'll go far," said the old man. "You'll go far if you continue on the same lines. Tremendous progress! Never saw anything like it before.... Yes, you'll go very, very far...."