The Luzhin Defense

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was during these first days of married life that Luzhin visited his father-in-law's office. His father-in-law was dictating something, but the typewriter stuck to its own version--repeating the word "tot" in a rapid chatter with something like the following intonation: tot Hottentot tot tot tot do not totter--and then something would move across with a bang. His father-in-law showed him sheafs of forms, account books with Z-shaped lines on the pages, books with little windows on their spines, the monstrously thick tomes of Commercial Germany, and a calculating machine, very clever and quite tame. However, Luzhin liked Tot-tot best of all, the words spilling swiftly out onto the paper, the wonderful evenness of the lilac lines--and several copies at the same time. "I wonder if I too ... One needs to know," he said, and his father-in-law nodded approvingly and the typewriter appeared in Luzhin's study. It was proposed to him that one of the office employees come and explain how to use it, but he refused, replying that he would learn on his own. And so it was: he fairly quickly made out its construction, learned to put in the ribbon and roll in the sheet of paper, and made friends with all the little levers. It proved to be more difficult to remember the distribution of the letters, the typing went very slowly; there was none of Tot-tot's rapid chatter and for some reason--from the very first day--the exclamation mark dogged him--it leapt out in the most unexpected places. At first he copied out half a column from a German newspaper, and then composed a thing or two himself. A brief little note took shape with the following contents: "You are wanted on a charge of murder. Today is November 27th. Murder and arson. Good day, dear Madam. Now when you are needed, dear, exclamation mark, where are you? The body has been found. Dear Madam! Today the police will come!!" Luzhin read this over several times, reinserted the sheet and, groping for the right letters, typed out, somewhat jumpily, the signature: "Abbe Busoni." At this point he grew bored, the thing was going too slowly. And somehow he had to find a use for the letter he had written. Burrowing in the telephone directory he found a Frau Louisa Altman, wrote out the address by hand and sent her his composition.

  The phonograph also provided him with a certain amount of entertainment. Its chocolate-colored cabinet under the palm tree used to sing with a velvety voice and Luzhin, one arm around his wife, would sit on the sofa and listen, and think it would soon be night. She would get up and change the record, holding the disc up to the light, and one sector of it would be a silky shimmer, like moonlight on the sea. And again the cabinet would exude music, and again his wife would sit next to him, and lower her chin onto interlaced fingers and listen, blinking. Luzhin remembered the airs and even attempted to sing them. There were moaning, clattering and ululating dances and a most tender American who sang in a whisper, and there was a whole opera on fifteen records--Boris Godunov--with church bells ringing in one place and with sinister pauses.

  His wife's parents used to drop in frequently and it was established that the Luzhins would dine with them three times a week. The mother tried several times to learn from her daughter a detail or two about their marriage and would ask inquisitively: "Are you pregnant? I'm sure you're going to have a baby soon." "Nonsense," replied the daughter, "I've just had twins." She was still her usual calm self, still smiled the same way with her brows lowered and still addressed Luzhin by his surname and by the second person plural. "My poor Luzhin," she would say, tenderly pursing her lips, "my poor, poor man." And Luzhin would rub his cheek on her shoulder, and she would think vaguely that there were probably greater joys than the joys of compassion, but that these were no concern of hers. Her only care in life was a minute-by-minute effort to arouse Luzhin's curiosity about things in order to keep his head above the dark water, so that he could breathe easily. She asked Luzhin in the mornings what he had dreamed, enlivened his matutinal appetite with a cutlet or English marmalade, took him for walks, lingered with him before shopwindows, read War and Peace aloud to him after dinner, played jolly geography with him and dictated sentences for him to type. Several times she took him to the museum and showed him her favorite pictures and explained that in Flanders, where they had rain and fog, painters used bright colors, while it was in Spain, a country of sunshine, that the gloomiest master of all had been born. She said also that the one over there had a feeling for glass objects, while this one liked lilies and tender faces slightly inflamed by colds caught in heaven, and she directed his attention to two dogs domestically looking for crumbs beneath the narrow, poorly spread table of "The Last Supper." Luzhin nodded and slit his eyes conscientiously, and was a very long time examining an enormous canvas on which the artist had depicted all the torments of sinners in hell--in great detail, very curiously. They also visited the theater and the zoo, and the movies, at which point it turned out that Luzhin had never been to the movies before. The picture ran on in a white glow and finally, after many adventures, the girl returned--now a famous actress--to her parents' house, and paused in the doorway, while in the room, not seeing her yet, her grizzled father was playing chess with the doctor, a faithful friend of the family who had remained completely unchanged over the years. In the darkness came the sound of Luzhin laughing abruptly. "An absolutely impossible position for the pieces," he said, but at this point, to his wife's relief, everything changed and the father, growing in size, walked toward the spectators and acted his part for all he was worth; his eyes widened, then came a slight trembling, his lashes flapped, there was another bit of trembling, and slowly his wrinkles softened, grew kinder, and a slow smile of infinite tenderness appeared on his face, which continued to tremble--and yet, gentlemen, the old man had cursed his daughter in his time.... But the doctor--the doctor stood to one side, he remembered--the poor, humble doctor--how as a young girl at the very beginning of the picture she had thrown flowers over the fence at him, while he, lying on the grass, had been reading a book: he had then raised his head and had seen only a fence; but suddenly a girl's head with parted hair rose on the other side and then came a pair of eyes growing ever bigger--ah, what mischievousness, what playfulness! Go on, Doctor, jump over the fence--there she runs, the sweet nymph, she's hiding behind those trees--catch her, catch her, Doctor! But now all this is gone. Head bowed, hands limply hanging, one of them holding a hat, stands the famous actress (a fallen woman, alas!). And the father, continuing the trembling, slowly opens his arms, and suddenly she kneels before him. Luzhin began to blow his nose. When they left the movie house he had red eyes and he cleared his throat and denied that he had been crying. And the following day over morning coffee he leaned an elbow on the table and said thoughtfully: "Very, very good--that picture." He thought a bit more and added: But they don't know how to play." "What do you mean, they don't know?" said his wife with surprise. "They were first-class actors." Luzhin looked at her sideways and immediately averted his eyes, and there was something about this she did not like. Suddenly she realized what was up and began to debate with herself how to make Luzhin forget this unfortunate game of chess, which that fool of a director had seen fit to introduce for the sake of "atmosphere." But Luzhin, evidently, immediately forgot it himself--he was engrossed in some genuine Russian bread that his mother-in-law had sent, and his eyes were again quite clear.

  In this way a month passed, a second. The winter that year was a white, St. Petersburg one. Luzhin was made a wadded overcoat. Indigent refugee Russians were given certain of Luzhin's old things--including a green woolen scarf of Swiss origin. Mothballs exuded a rough-edged melancholy smell. In the entrance hall hung a condemned jacket. "It was so comfortable," implored Luzhin, "so very comfortable." "Leave it alone," said his wife from the bedroom. "I haven't looked at it yet. It's probably teeming with moths." Luzhin took off the dinner jacket he had been trying on to see whether he had filled out much during the past month (he had filled out, he had--and tomorrow there was a big Russian ball, a charitable affair) and slipped lovingly into the sleeves of the condemned one. A darling jacket, not the slightest trace of moth in it. Here was just a tiny hole in the pocket, but not right
through like they sometimes were. "Wonderful," he cried in a high voice. His wife, sock in hand, looked out into the entrance hall. "Take it off, Luzhin. It's torn and dusty, goodness knows how long it's lain about." "No, no," said Luzhin. She inspected it from all sides; Luzhin stood and slapped himself on the hips, and it felt, incidentally, as if there were something in his pocket; he thrust his hand in--no, nothing, only a hole. "It's very decrepit," said his wife, frowning, "but perhaps as a work coat ..." "I beg you," said Luzhin. "Well, as you wish--only give it to the maid afterwards so she can give it a good beating." "No, it's clean," said Luzhin to himself and resolved to hang it somewhere in his study, in some little nook, to take it off and hang it up the way civil servants do. In taking it off he again felt as if the jacket were a trifle heavier on the left side, but he remembered that the pockets were empty and did not investigate the cause of the heaviness. As to the dinner jacket here, it had become tightish--yes, definitely tightish. "A ball," said Luzhin, and imagined to himself lots and lots of circling couples.

  The ball turned out to be taking place in one of the best hotels in Berlin. There was a crush near the cloakrooms, and the attendants were accepting things and carrying them away like sleeping children. Luzhin was given a neat metal number. He missed his wife, but found her immediately: she was standing in front of a mirror. He placed the metal disk against the tender hollow of her smooth, powdered back. "Brr, that's cold," she exclaimed, moving her shoulder blade. "Arm in arm, arm in arm," said Luzhin. "We have to enter arm in arm." And that is how they entered. The first thing Luzhin saw was his mother-in-law, looking much younger, rosy red, and wearing a magnificent, sparkling headdress--a Russian woman's kokoshnik. She was selling punch, and an elderly Englishman (who had simply come down from his room) was quickly becoming drunk, one elbow propped on her table. At another table, near a fir tree adorned with colored lights, there was a pile of lottery prizes: a dignified samovar with red and blue reflected lights on the tree side, dolls dressed in sarafans, a phonograph, and liqueurs (donated by Smirnovski). A third table had sandwiches, Italian salad, caviar--and a beautiful blond lady was calling to someone: "Marya Vasilyevna, Marya Vasilyevna, why did they take it away again ... I had asked ..." "A very good evening to you," said somebody close by, and Mrs. Luzhin raised an arched, swanlike hand. Farther on, in the next room, there was music, and dancers circled and marked time in the space between the tables; someone's back banged into Luzhin at full speed, and he grunted and stepped back. His wife had disappeared, and searching for her with his eyes he set off back to the first room. Here the tombola again attracted his attention. Paying out a mark every time, he would plunge his hand into the box and fish out a tiny cylinder of rolled-up paper. Snuffling through his nose and protruding his lips, he would take a long time to unroll the paper, and finding no number inside would look to see if there was one on the other, outer side--a useless but very normal procedure. In the end he won a children's book, Purry-Cat or something, and not knowing what to do with it, left it on a table, where two full glasses were awaiting the return of a dancing couple. The crush and the movement and the bursts of music now got on his nerves and there was nowhere to hide, and everyone, probably, was looking at him and wondering why he did not dance. In the intervals between dances his wife looked for him in the other room, but at every step she was stopped by acquaintances. A great many people attended this ball--there was a foreign consul, obtained with great difficulty, and a famous Russian singer, and two movie actresses. Somebody pointed out their table to her: the ladies wore artificial smiles, and their escorts--three well-fed men of the producer-businessman type--kept clucking their tongues and snapping their fingers and abusing the pale, sweating waiter for his slowness and inefficiency. One of these men seemed particularly obnoxious to her: he had very white teeth and shining brown eyes; having dealt with the waiter he began to relate something in a loud voice, sprinkling his Russian with the most hackneyed German expressions. All at once, she felt depressed that everyone was looking at these movie people, at the singer and at the consul, and nobody seemed to know that a chess genius was present at the ball, a man whose name had been in millions of newspapers and whose games had already been called immortal. "You are amazingly easy to dance with. They have a good floor here. Excuse me. It's terribly crowded. The receipts will be excellent. This man over here is from the French Embassy. It is amazingly easy dancing with you." With this the conversation usually ended, they liked to dance with her but they did not know exactly what to talk about. A rather pretty but boring young lady. And that strange marriage to an unsuccessful musician, or something of that sort. "What did you say--a former socialist? A what? A player? A card player? Do you ever visit them, Oleg Sergeyevich?"

  In the meantime Luzhin had found a deep armchair not far from the staircase and was looking at the crowd from behind a column and smoking his thirteenth cigarette. Into another armchair next to him, after making a preliminary inquiry as to whether it was taken or not, settled a swarthy gentleman with a tiny mustache. People still continued to go by and Luzhin gradually became frightened. There was nowhere he could look without meeting inquisitive eyes and from the accursed necessity of looking somewhere he fixed on the mustache of his neighbor, who evidently was also staggered and perplexed by all this noisy and unnecessary commotion. This person, feeling Luzhin's gaze on him, turned his face to him. "It's a long time since I was at a ball," he said amiably and grinned, shaking his head. "The main thing is not to look," uttered Luzhin hollowly, using his hands as a form of blinkers. "I've come a long way," explained the man. "A friend dragged me here. To tell the truth, I'm tired." "Tiredness and heaviness," nodded Luzhin. "Who knows what it all means? It surpasses my conception." "Particularly when you work, as I do, on a Brazilian plantation," said the gentleman. "Plantation," repeated Luzhin after him like an echo. "You have an odd way of living here," continued the stranger. "The world is open on all four sides and here they are pounding out Charlestons on an extremely restricted fragment of floor." "I'm also going away," said Luzhin. "I've got the travel folders." "There is nothing like freedom," exclaimed the stranger. "Free wanderings and a favorable wind. And what wonderful countries.... I met a German botanist in the forest beyond Rio Negro and lived with the wife of a French engineer on Madagascar." "I must get their folders, too," said Luzhin. "Very attractive things--folders. Everything in great detail."

  "Luzhin, so that's where you are!" suddenly cried his wife's voice; she was passing quickly by on her father's arm. "I'll be back immediately, I'll just get a table for us," she cried, looking over her shoulder, and disappeared. "Is your name Luzhin?" asked the gentleman curiously. "Yes, yes," said Luzhin, "but it's of no importance." "I knew one Luzhin," said the gentleman, screwing up his eyes (for memory is shortsighted). "I knew one. You didn't happen to go to the Balashevski school, did you?" "Suppose I did," replied Luzhin, and seized by an unpleasant suspicion he began to examine his companion's face. "In that case we were classmates!" exclaimed the other. "My name is Petrishchev. Do you remember me? Oh, of course you remember! What a coincidence. I would never have recognized you by your face. Tell me, Luzhin ... Your first name and patronymic? ... Ah, I seem to remember--Tony ... Anton ... What next?" "You're mistaken, mistaken," said Luzhin with a shudder. "Yes, my memory is bad," continued Petrishchev. "I've forgotten lots of names. For instance, do you remember that quiet boy we had? Later he lost an arm fighting under Wrangel, just before the evacuation. I saw him in church in Paris. Hm, what's his name now?" "Why is all this necessary?" said Luzhin. "Why talk about it so much?" "No, I don't remember," sighed Petrishchev, tearing his palm from his forehead. "But then, for instance, there was Gromov: he's also in Paris now; fixed himself up nicely, it seems. But where are the others? Where are they all? Dispersed, gone up in smoke. It's odd to think about it. Well, and how are you getting on, Luzhin, how are you getting on, old boy?" "All right," said Luzhin and averted his eyes from the expansive Petrishchev, seeing his face suddenly as it had been then
: small, pink, and unbearably mocking. "Wonderful times, they were," cried Petrishchev. "Do you remember our geographer, Luzhin? How he used to fly like a hurricane into the classroom, holding a map of the world? And that little old man--oh, again I've forgotten the name--do you remember how he used to shake all over and say: 'Get on with you, pshaw, you noodle'? Wonderful times. And how we used to whip down those stairs, into the yard, you remember? And how it turned out at the school party that Arbuzov could play the piano? Do you remember how his experiments never used to come off? And how we thought up a rhyme for him--'booze off'?" "... just don't react," Luzhin said quickly to himself. "And all that's vanished," continued Petrishchev. "Here we are at a ball.... Oh, by the way, I seem to remember ... you took up something, some occupation, when you left school. What was it? Yes, of course--chess!" "No, no," said Luzhin. "Why on earth must you ..." "Oh, excuse me," said Petrishchev affably. "Then I'm getting mixed up. Yes, yes, that's how it is.... The ball's in full swing, and we're sitting here talking about the past. You know I've traveled the whole world.... What women in Cuba! Or that time in the jungle, for instance ..."