The Luzhin Defense

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "She's sure to be in her room," he said as he went up the stairs. He burst in upon her as if he had butted the door with his head, and dimly catching sight of her reclining in a pink dress on the couch, he said hastily: "H'llo--h'llo," and strode all around the room, supposing that everything was working out very easily, wittily and entertainingly, and simultaneously suffocating with excitement. "And therefore in continuance of the above I have to inform you that you will be my wife, I implore you to agree to this, it was absolutely impossible to go away, now everything will be different and wonderful," and at this point he settled on a chair by the radiator and, covering his face with his hands, burst into tears; then trying to spread one hand so that it covered his face he began with the other to search for his handkerchief, and through the trembling wet chinks between his fingers he perceived in duplicate a blurry pink dress that noisily moved toward him. "Now, now, that's enough, that's enough," she repeated in a soothing voice. "A grown man and crying like that." He seized her by the elbow and kissed something hard and cold--her wristwatch. She removed his straw hat and stroked his forehead--and swiftly retreated, evading his clumsy, grabbing movements. Luzhin trumpeted into his handkerchief, once, once more, loudly and juicily; then he wiped his eyes, cheeks and mouth and sighed with relief, leaning on the radiator, his moist bright eyes looking in front of him. It was then that she realized clearly that this man, whether you liked him or not, was not one you could thrust out of your life, that he had sat himself down firmly, solidly and apparently for a long time. But she also wondered how she could show this man to her father and mother, how could he be visualized in their drawing room--a man of a different dimension, with a particular form and coloring that was compatible with nothing and no one.

  At first she tried fitting him this way and that in her family, among their milieu and even among the furnishings of their flat: she made an imaginary Luzhin enter the rooms, talk with her mother, eat home-cooked kulebiaka and be reflected in the sumptuous samovar purchased abroad--and these imaginary calls ended with a monstrous catastrophe, Luzhin with a clumsy motion of his shoulder would knock the house down like a shaky piece of scenery that emitted a sigh of dust. Their apartment was an expensive, well appointed one, on the first floor of an enormous Berlin apartment house. Her parents, rich once more, had decided to start living in strict Russian style, which they somehow associated with ornamental Slavic scriptory, postcards depicting sorrowing boyar maidens, varnished boxes bearing gaudy pyrogravures of troikas or firebirds, and the admirably produced, long since expired art magazines containing such wonderful photographs of old Russian manors and porcelain. Her father used to say to his friends that it was particularly pleasant after business meetings and conversations with people of dubious origin to immerse himself in genuine Russian comfort and eat genuine Russian food. At one time their servant had been a genuine Russian orderly taken from an emigre shelter near Berlin, but for no apparent reason he became extraordinarily rude and was replaced by a German-Polish girl. The mother, a stately lady with plump arms, used to call herself affectionately an "enfant terrible" and a "Cossack" (a result of vague and distorted reminiscences from War and Peace); she played the Russian housewife superbly, had a weakness for theosophy and denounced the radio as a Jewish invention. She was very kind and very tactless, and sincerely loved the daubed, artificial Russia she had rigged up around her, but sometimes she became unbearably bored, not knowing exactly what was missing, for, as she put it, she for one had brought her own Russia with her. The daughter was completely indifferent to this gimcrack apartment, so unlike their quiet St. Petersburg house, where the furniture and other things had their own soul, where the icon-cabinet harbored an unforgettable garnet gleam and mysterious orange tree blossoms, where a fat, intelligent cat was embroidered on the silk back of an armchair, and where there were a thousand trifles, smells and shades that all together constituted something ravishing, and heartrending, and completely irreplaceable.

  The young Russians who visited them in Berlin considered her a nice but not very interesting girl, while her mother said of her (in a low-pitched voice with a trace of derision) that she represented in the family "the intelligentsia and avant-garde literature"--whether because she knew by heart a few poems of the "Symbolist" Balmont that she had found in the Poetry Reader or whether for some other reason, remained unknown. Her father liked her independence, her quietness, and her particular way of lowering her eyes when she smiled. But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching; to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse--when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls--and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it and she would die. Hence, she lived in perpetual, secret agitation, constantly anticipating a new delight or a new pity, and it was said of her that she adored dogs and was always ready to lend money--and listening to these trivial rumors she felt as she had in childhood during that game where you go out of the room and the others talk about you, and you have to guess who said what. And among the players, among those whom she joined after a stay in the next room (where you sat waiting to be called and conscientiously sang something so as not to overhear, or else opened a chance book--and like a Jack-in-the-box a passage from a novel would spring up, the end of an unintelligible conversation), among those people whose opinion she had to guess there was now a rather taciturn man, difficult to budge and thinking completely unknown things about her. She suspected that he had no opinion at all, that he had no conception whatsoever of her milieu or the circumstances of her life, and so might blurt out something dreadful.

  Deciding that she had been absent long enough, she gently passed her hand over the back of her head, smoothing down her hair, and returned smiling to the lobby. Luzhin and her mother, whom she had only just introduced to one another, were sitting in wicker armchairs beneath a potted palmetto, and Luzhin, his brows knitted, was examining his disgraceful straw hat which he was holding in his lap, and at that moment she was equally terrified by the thought of what words Luzhin was using about her (if, indeed, he was using any) and the thought of what impression Luzhin himself was making on her mother. The day before, as soon as her mother had arrived and begun to complain that her window faced north and the bedside lamp was not working, the daughter had related, trying to keep all her words on the same level, how she had become great friends with the famous chess player Luzhin. "No doubt a pseudonym," said her mother, burrowing in her toilet case. "His real name is Rubinstein or Abramson." "Very, very famous," continued the daughter, "and very nice." "Help me rather to find my soap," said her mother. And now, having introduced them and left them alone on the pretext of ordering some lemonade, she experienced as she returned to the lobby such a feeling of horror, of the irreparability of already completed catastrophes that while still some distance away she began to speak loudly, then tripped on the edge of the carpet and laughed, waving her hands to keep her balance. His senseless fiddling with the boater, the silence, her mother's amazed, gleaming eyes, and the sudden recollection of how he had sobbed the other day, his arms round the radiator--all this was very hard to bear. But suddenly Luzhin raised his head, his mouth twisted into that familiar, morose smile--and at once her fear vanished and the potential disaster seemed something that was extraordinarily amusing, changing nothing. As if he had waited for her return in order to retire, Luzhin grunte
d, stood up and gave a remarkable nod ("boorish," she thought gaily, translating this nod into her mother's idiom) before proceeding toward the staircase. On the way he met the waiter bringing three glasses of lemonade on a tray. He stopped him, took one of the glasses, and holding it carefully in front of him, mimicking the swaying level of the liquid with his eyebrows, began slowly to mount the stairs. When he had disappeared round the bend she began with exaggerated care to peel the thin paper from her straw. "What a boor!" said her mother loudly, and the daughter felt the kind of satisfaction you get when you find in the dictionary the meaning of a foreign term you have already guessed. "That's not a real person," continued her mother in angry perplexity. "What is he? Certainly not a real person. He calls me madame, just madame, like a shop assistant. He's God knows what. And I'll guarantee he has a Soviet passport. A Bolshevik, just a Bolshevik. I sat there like an idiot. And his small talk ...! His cuffs are quite soiled, by the way. Did you notice? Soiled and frayed."

  "What kind of small talk?" she asked, smiling from beneath lowered brows.

  " 'Yes madame, no madame.' 'There's a nice atmosphere here.' Atmosphere! Quite a word, eh? I asked him--to say something--if it was long since he had left Russia. He simply was silent. Then he remarked about you that you like cooling 'beverages.' Cooling 'beverages'! And what a mug, what a mug! No, no, let us steer clear of such characters ..."

  Continuing the game of opinions she hastened to Luzhin. In the course of his botched departure his room had been given to someone else and he had been assigned to another one higher up. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, as if grief-stricken, and in the ashtray an insufficiently stubbed cigarette was struggling to send up smoke. On the table and floor were scattered sheets of paper covered with writing in pencil. For a second she thought they were bills and she wondered at their number. The wind blowing in through the open window gusted as she opened the door and Luzhin, coming out of his reverie, picked up the sheets of paper from the floor and neatly folded them, smiling at her and blinking. "Well? How did it go?" she asked. "It'll take shape during the game," said Luzhin. "I'm simply jotting down a few possibilities." She had the feeling she had opened the wrong door, entered where she had not intended to enter, but it was nice in this unexpected world and she did not want to go to that other one where the game of opinions was played. But instead of continuing to talk about chess Luzhin moved up to her together with his chair, grasped her by the waist with hands shaking from tenderness and not knowing what to undertake, attempted to seat her on his knees. She pushed her hands against his shoulders and averted her face, pretending to look at the sheets of paper. "What's that?" she asked. "Nothing, nothing," said Luzhin, "notes on various games." "Let me go," she demanded in a shrill voice. "Notes on various games, notes ..." repeated Luzhin, pressing her to him, his narrowed eyes looking up at her neck. A sudden spasm distorted his face and for an instant his eyes lost all expression; then his features relaxed oddly, his hands unclenched of themselves, and she moved away from him, angry without knowing exactly why she was angry, and surprised that he had let her go. Luzhin cleared his throat and greedily lit a cigarette, watching her with incomprehensible mischievousness. "I'm sorry I came," she said. "First, I interrupted your work ..." "Not a bit of it," replied Luzhin with unexpected merriment and slapped his knees.

  "Second, I wanted to get your impressions."

  "A lady of high society," answered Luzhin, "you can see that right away."

  "Listen," she exclaimed, continuing to be cross, "were you ever educated? Where did you go to school? Have you ever met people at all, talked to people?"

  "I've voyaged a great deal," said Luzhin. "Here and there. Everywhere a little bit."

  "Where am I? Who is he? What next?" she asked herself mentally and looked round at the room, the table covered with sheets of paper, the crumpled bed, the washbasin--on which a rusty safety blade had been left lying--and a half-open drawer from which, snakelike, a green, red-spotted tie came crawling. And in the middle of this bleak disorder sat the most unfathomable of men, a man who occupied himself with a spectral art, and she tried to stop, to grasp at all his failings and peculiarities, to tell herself once for all that this man was not the right one for her--and at the same time she was quite distinctly worried about how he would behave in church and how he would look in tails.

  7

  Their meetings, of course, continued. The poor lady began to notice with horror that her daughter and the shady Mr. Luzhin were inseparable--there were conversations between them, and glances, and emanations that she was unable to determine with exactness; this seemed to her so dangerous that she overcame her repugnance and resolved to keep Luzhin by her as much as possible, partly in order to get a thorough look at him but chiefly so that her daughter would not vanish too often. Luzhin's profession was trivial, absurd.... The existence of such professions was explicable only in terms of these accursed modern times, by the modern urge to make senseless records (these airplanes that want to fly to the sun, marathon races, the Olympic games ...). It seemed to her that in former times, in the Russia of her youth, a man occupying himself exclusively with chess would have been an unthinkable phenomenon. However, even nowadays such a man was so strange that she conceived a vague suspicion that perhaps chess was a cover, a blind, that perhaps Luzhin's occupation was something quite different, and she felt faint at the thought of that dark, criminal--perhaps Masonic--activity which the cunning scoundrel concealed behind a predilection for an innocent pastime. Little by little, however, this suspicion dropped away. How could you expect any trickery from such an oaf? Besides, he was genuinely famous. She was staggered and somewhat irritated that a name should be familiar to many when it was completely unknown to her (unless as a chance sound in her past, connected with a distant relative who had been acquainted with a certain Luzhin, a St. Petersburg landowner). The Germans who lived in the hotel at the resort, heroically mastering the difficulty of an alien sibilant, pronounced his name with reverence. Her daughter showed her the latest number of a Berlin illustrated magazine, where in the section devoted to puzzles and crosswords they published a for some reason remarkable game that Luzhin had recently won. "But can a man really devote himself to such trifles," she exclaimed, looking at her daughter distractedly, "throw one's whole life away on such trifles? ... Look, you had an uncle who was also good at all sorts of games--chess, cards, billiards--but at least he had a job and a career and everything." "He has a career too," replied the daughter, "and really he's very well known. Nobody's to blame that you never took an interest in chess." "Conjurors can also be well known," said she peevishly, but nonetheless after some thought she concluded that Luzhin's reputation partially justified his existence. His existence, however, was oppressive. What particularly angered her was that he constantly contrived to sit with his back to her. "He even talks with his back," she complained to her daughter. "With his back. He doesn't talk like a human being. I tell you there's something downright abnormal there." Not once did Luzhin address a question to her, not once did he attempt to support a collapsing conversation. There were unforgettable walks along sun-dappled footpaths, where here and there in the pleasant shade a thoughtful genius had set out benches--unforgettable walks during which it seemed to her that Luzhin's every step was an insult. Despite his stoutness and short wind he would suddenly develop extraordinary speed, his companions would drop back and the mother, compressing her lips, would look at the daughter and swear in a hissing whisper that if this record-breaking run continued she would immediately--immediately, you understand--return home. "Luzhin," the girl would call, "Luzhin? Slow up or you'll get tired." (And the fact that her daughter called him by his surname was also unpleasant--but when she remarked upon it the other replied with a laugh: "Turgenev's heroines did it. Am I worse than they?") Luzhin would suddenly turn around, give a wry smile and plop down on a bench. Beside it would stand a wire basket. He would invariably rummage in his pockets, find some piece of paper or other, tear it ne
atly into sections and throw it into the basket, after which he would laugh jerkily. A perfect specimen of his little jokes.

  Nonetheless, despite those joint walks Luzhin and her daughter used to find time to seclude themselves and after each such seclusion the angry lady would ask: "Well, have you two been kissing? Kissing? I'm convinced you kiss." But the other only sighed and answered with assumed boredom: "Oh Mamma, how can you say such things ..." "Good long kisses," she decided, and wrote to her husband that she was unhappy and worried because their daughter was conducting an impossible flirtation--with a gloomy and dangerous character. Her husband advised her to return to Berlin or go to another resort. "He doesn't understand a thing," she reflected. "Ah well, it doesn't matter. All this will soon come to an end. Our friend will leave."

  And suddenly, three days before Luzhin's departure for Berlin, one little thing happened that did not exactly change her attitude to Luzhin but vaguely moved her. The three of them had gone out for a stroll. It was a still August evening with a magnificent sunset, like a mangled blood-orange pressed out to the very last drop. "I feel a bit chilly," she said. "Bring me something to put on." And the daughter nodded her head, said "uh-huh" through the stalk of grass she was sucking and left, walking fast and slightly swinging her arms as she returned to the hotel.

  "I have a pretty daughter, don't I? Nice legs."

  Luzhin bowed.

  "So you're leaving on Monday? And then, after the game, back to Paris?"

  Luzhin bowed again.

  "But you won't stay in Paris long, will you? Somebody will again invite you to play somewhere?"

  This is when it happened. Luzhin looked around and held out his cane.

  "This footpath," he said. "Consider this footpath. I was walking along. And just imagine whom I met. Whom did I meet? Out of the myths. Cupid. But not with an arrow--with a pebble. I was struck."