The Luzhin Defense

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "It's all lies," sounded a lazy voice from behind. "He was never in any jungle whatsoever...."

  "Now why do you spoil everything?" drawled Petrishchev, turning around. "Don't listen to him," continued a bald, lanky person, the owner of the lazy voice. "He has been living in France since the Revolution and left Paris for the first time the day before yesterday." "Luzhin, allow me to introduce you," began Petrishchev with a laugh; but Luzhin hastily made off, tucking his head into his shoulders and weaving strangely and quivering from the speed of his walk.

  "Gone," said Petrishchev in astonishment, and added thoughtfully, "After all, it may be I took him for somebody else."

  Stumbling into people and exclaiming in a tearful voice "pardon, pardon!" and still stumbling into people and trying not to see their faces, Luzhin looked for his wife, and when he finally caught sight of her he seized her by the elbow from behind, so that she started and turned around; but at first he was unable to say anything, he was puffing too much. "What's the matter?" she asked anxiously. "Let's go, let's go," he muttered, still holding her by the elbow. "Calm down, please, Luzhin, that's not necessary," she said, nudging him slightly to one side so that the bystanders could not hear. "Why do you want to go?" "There's a man there," said Luzhin, breathing jerkily. "And such an unpleasant conversation." "... whom you knew before?" she asked quietly. "Yes, yes," nodded Luzhin. "Let's go. I beg you."

  Half closing his eyes so that Petrishchev would not notice him, he pushed his way through to the vestibule, began to rummage in his pockets, looking for his tag, found it at last after several enormous seconds of confusion and despair and shuffled this way and that impatiently while the cloakroom attendant, like a somnambulist, looked for his things.... He was the first to get dressed and the first to go out and his wife swiftly followed him, pulling her moleskin coat together as she went. Only in the car did Luzhin begin to breathe freely, and his expression of distracted sullenness gave way to a guilty half-smile. "Dear Luzhin met a nasty person," said his wife, stroking his hand. "A schoolfellow--a suspicious character," explained Luzhin. "But now dear Luzhin's all right," whispered his wife and kissed his soft hand. "Now everything's gone," said Luzhin.

  But this was not quite so. Something remained--a riddle, a splinter. At nights he began to meditate over why this meeting had made him so uneasy. Of course there were all sorts of individual unpleasantnesses--the fact that Petrishchev had once tormented him in school and had now referred obliquely to a certain torn book about little Tony, and the fact that a whole world, full of exotic temptations, had turned out to be a braggart's rigmarole, and it would no longer be possible in future to trust travel folders. But it was not the meeting itself that was frightening but something else--this meeting's secret meaning that he had to divine. He began to think intensely at nights, the way Sherlock had been wont to do over cigar ash--and gradually it began to seem that the combination was even more complex than he had at first thought, that the meeting with Petrishchev was only the continuation of something, and that it was necessary to look deeper, to return and replay all the moves of his life from his illness until the ball.

  13

  On a grayish-blue rink (where there were tennis courts in summer), lightly powdered with snow, the townsfolk were disporting themselves cautiously, and at the very moment the Luzhins passed by on their morning stroll, the sprightliest of the skaters, a besweatered young fellow, gracefully launched into a Dutch step and sat down hard on the ice. Farther, in a small public garden, a three-year-old boy all in red, walking unsteadily on woolen legs, made his way to a stirrup-stone, scraped off with one fingerless little hand some snow that was lying there in an appetizing hillock and raised it to his mouth, for which he was immediately seized from behind and spanked. "Oh, you poor little thing," said Mrs. Luzhin, looking back. A bus went along the whitened asphalt, leaving two thick, black stripes behind it. From a shop of talking and playing machines came the sound of fragile music and someone closed the door so the music would not catch cold. A dachshund with a patched, blue little overcoat and low-swinging ears stopped and sniffed the snow and Mrs. Luzhin just had time to stroke it. Something light, sharp and whitish kept striking them in the face, and when they peered at the empty sky, bright specks danced before their eyes. Mrs. Luzhin skidded and looked reproachfully at her gray snowboots. By the Russian food store they met the Alfyorov couple. "Quite a cold snap," exclaimed Alfyorov with a shake of his yellow beard. "Don't kiss it, the glove's dirty," said Mrs. Luzhin, and looking with a smile at Mrs. Alfyorov's enchanting, always animated face she asked why she never came to visit them. "And you're putting on weight, sir," growled Alfyorov, squinting playfully at Luzhin's stomach, exaggerated by his wadded overcoat. Luzhin looked imploringly at his wife. "Remember, you're always welcome," she said, nodding. "Wait, Mashenka, do you know their telephone number?" asked Alfyorov. "You know? Fine. Well, so long--as they say in Soviet Russia. My deepest respects to your mother."

  "There's something a little mean and a little pathetic about him," said Mrs. Luzhin, taking her husband's arm and changing step in order to match his. "But Mashenka ... what a darling, what eyes.... Don't walk so fast, dear Luzhin--it's slippery."

  The light snow ceased to fall, a spot of sky gleamed through palely, and the flat, bloodless disk of the sun floated out. "You know what, let's go to the right today," suggested Mrs. Luzhin. "We've never been that way, I believe." "Look, oranges," said Luzhin with relish and recalled how his father had asserted that when you pronounce "leemon" (lemon) in Russian, you involuntarily pull a long face, but when you say "apelsin" (orange)--you give a broad smile. The salesgirl deftly spread the mouth of the paper bag and rammed the cold, pocked-red globes into it. Luzhin began to peel an orange as he walked, frowning in anticipation that the juice would squirt in his eye. He put the peel in his pocket, because it would have stood out too vividly on the snow, and because, perhaps, you could make jam with it. "Is it good?" asked his wife. Luzhin smacked his lips on the last segment and with a contented smile was about to take his wife's arm again, but suddenly he stopped and looked around. Having thought for a moment, he walked back to the corner and looked at the name of the street. Then he quickly caught up with his wife again and thrust out his cane in the direction of the nearest house, an ordinary gray stone house separated from the street by a small garden behind iron railings. "My dad used to reside here," said Luzhin. "Thirty-five A." "Thirty-five A," his wife repeated after him, not knowing what to say and looking up at the windows. Luzhin walked on, cutting snow away from the railings with his cane. Presently he stopped stock-still in front of a stationery store where the wax dummy of a man with two faces, one sad and the other joyful, was throwing open his jacket alternately to left and right: the fountain pen clipped into the left pocket of his white waistcoat had sprinkled the whiteness with ink, while on the right was the pen that never ran. Luzhin took a great fancy to the bifacial man and even thought of buying him. "Listen, Luzhin," said his wife when he had had his fill of the window. "I've wanted to ask you for a long time--haven't some things remained after your father's death? Where are they all?" Luzhin shrugged his shoulders. "There was a man called Khrushchenko," he muttered after a while. "I don't understand," said his wife questioningly. "He wrote to me in Paris," explained Luzhin reluctantly, "about the death and funeral and all that, and that he preserved the things left after the late father." "Oh, Luzhin," she sighed, "what you do to the language." She reflected a moment and added: "It doesn't matter to me, but I just thought it might be pleasant for you to have those things--as having belonged to your father." Luzhin remained silent. She imagined those unwanted things--perhaps the pen that old man Luzhin wrote his books with, some documents or other, photographs--and she grew sad and mentally reproached her husband for hardheartedness. "But one thing has to be done without fail," she said decisively. "We must go to the cemetery to see his grave, to see that it's not neglected." "Cold and far," said Luzhin. "We'll do it in a day or two," she decided. "The weather i
s bound to change. Careful, please--there's a car coming."

  The weather got worse and Luzhin, remembering that depressing waste patch and the cemetery wind, begged for their trip to be postponed to the following week. The frost, incidentally, was extraordinary. They closed the ice-rink, which was always unlucky: last winter it had been thaw after thaw and a pool in place of ice, and now such a cold spell that not even schoolboys were up to skating. In the parks little, high-breasted birds lay on the snow with feet in the air. The helpless mercury, under the influence of its surroundings, fell ever lower and lower. And even the polar bears in the zoo found that the management had overdone it.

  The Luzhin apartment turned out to be one of those fortunate flats with heroic central heating, where one did not have to sit around in fur coats and blankets. His wife's parents, driven insane by the cold, were remarkably willing guests of the central heating. Luzhin, wearing the old jacket that had been saved from destruction, sat at his desk, assiduously drawing a white cube standing before him. His father-in-law walked about the study telling long, perfectly proper anecdotes or else sat on the sofa with a newspaper, from time to time breathing deep and then clearing his throat. His mother-in-law and wife stayed by the tea table and from the study, across the dark drawing room, one could see the bright yellow lampshade in the dining room, his wife's illuminated profile on the brown background of the sideboard and her bare arms, which, with her elbows a long way in front of her on the table, she bent back to one shoulder, her fingers interlaced, or suddenly she would smoothly stretch an arm out and touch some gleaming object on the tablecloth. Luzhin put the cube aside, took a clean sheet of paper, prepared a tin box with buttons of watercolor in it and hastened to draw this vista, but while he was painstakingly tracing out the lines of perspective with the aid of a ruler, something changed at the far end, his wife disappeared from the vivid rectangle of the dining room and the light went out and came on again closer, in the drawing room, and no perspective existed any longer. In general he rarely got to the colors, and, indeed, preferred pencil. The dampness of watercolors made the paper buckle unpleasantly and the wet colors would run together; on occasion it would be impossible to get rid of some extraordinarily tenacious Prussian blue--no sooner would you get a small bit of it on the very tip of your brush than it would already be running all over the enamel inside of the box, devouring the shade you had prepared and turning the water in the glass a poisonous blue. There were thick tubes with India ink and ceruse, but the caps invariably got lost, the necks would dry up, and when he pressed too hard the tube would burst at the bottom and thence would come crawling and writhing a fat worm of goo. His daubings were fruitless and even the simplest things--a vase with flowers or a sunset copied from a travel folder of the Riviera--came out spotty, sickly, horrible. But drawing was nice. He drew his mother-in-law, and she was offended; he drew his wife in profile, and she said that if she looked like that there was no reason to marry her; on the other hand his father-in-law's high, starched collar came out very well. Luzhin took great pleasure in sharpening pencils and in measuring things before him, screwing up one eye and raising his pencil with his thumb pressed against it, and he would move his eraser over the paper with care, pressing with his palm on the sheet, for he knew from experience that otherwise there would come a loud crack and the sheet would crease. And he would blow off the particles of rubber very delicately, fearing to smudge the drawing by touching it with his hand. Most of all he liked what his wife had advised him to begin with and what he constantly returned to--white cubes, pyramids, cylinders, and a fragment of plaster ornament that reminded him of drawing lessons at school--the sole, acceptable subject. He was soothed by the thin lines that he drew and redrew a hundred times, achieving a maximum of sharpness, accuracy and purity. And it was remarkably nice to shade, tenderly and evenly, not pressing too hard, in regularly applied strokes.

  "Finished," he said, holding the paper away from him and looking at the completed cube through his eyelashes. His father-in-law put on his pince-nez and looked at it for a long time, nodding his head. His mother-in-law and wife came from the drawing room and also looked. "It even casts a tiny shadow," said his wife. "A very, very handsome cube." "Well done, you're a real cubist," said his mother-in-law. Luzhin, smiling on one side of his mouth, took the drawing and looked round the walls of his study. By the door one of his productions was already hanging: a train on a bridge spanning an abyss. There was also something in the drawing room: a skull on a telephone directory. In the dining room there were some extremely round oranges which everyone for some reason took for tomatoes. And the bedroom was adorned by a bas-relief done in charcoal and a confidential conversation between a cone and a pyramid. He went out of the study, his eyes roving over the walls, and his wife said with a sigh: "I wonder where dear Luzhin will hang this one."

  "You haven't yet deigned to inform me," began her mother, pointing with her chin to a heap of gaudy travel folders lying on the desk. "But I don't know myself," said Mrs. Luzhin. "It's very difficult to decide, everywhere's beautiful. I think we'll go to Nice first." "I would advise the Italian lakes," said her father, and, folding up the newspaper and removing his pince-nez, he began to relate how beautiful the lakes were. "I'm afraid he has grown rather tired of the talk about our journey," said Mrs. Luzhin. "One fine day we'll simply get in the train and go." "Not before April," said her mother imploringly. "You promised me, you know...."

  Luzhin returned to the study. "I had a box of thumbtacks somewhere," he said, looking at the desk and slapping his pockets (whereupon he again, for the third or fourth time, had a feeling there was something in his left pocket--but not the box--and there was not time to investigate). The tacks were found on the desk. Luzhin took them and hastily went out.

  "Oh, I quite forgot to tell you. Just imagine, yesterday morning ..." and she began to tell her daughter that she had been called by a woman who had unexpectedly arrived from Russia. This woman had often visited them as a young girl in St. Petersburg. It turned out that several years ago she had married a Soviet businessman or official--it had been impossible to understand exactly--and on her way to a spa, where her husband was going to gather new strength, she had stopped off for a week or two in Berlin. "I feel a bit awkward, you know, about a Soviet citizen coming to our place, but she's so persistent. I'm amazed she's not afraid to telephone. Why, if they learn in Sovietia that she rang me up ..." "Oh, Mamma, she's probably a very unhappy woman--she's broken out temporarily to freedom and she feels like seeing somebody." "Well then, I'll pass her on to you," said her mother with relief, "especially as it's warmer at your place."

  And several days afterward, at midday, the lady appeared. Luzhin was still slumbering, since he had slept badly the night before. Twice he woke up with choking cries, suffocated by a nightmare, and now Mrs. Luzhin somehow did not feel up to guests. The visitor turned out to be a slim, animated, nicely made-up, nicely bobbed lady who was dressed, like Mrs. Luzhin, with expensive simplicity. Loudly, interrupting one another, and assuring one another that neither had changed a bit, except perhaps to grow prettier, they went through to the study, which was cozier than the drawing room. The newcomer remarked to herself that Mrs. Luzhin ten to twelve years ago had been a rather graceful, lively little girl and now had grown plumper, paler and quieter, while Mrs. Luzhin found that the modest, silent young lady who used to visit them and was in love with a student, later shot by the Reds, had turned into a very interesting, confident lady. "So this is your Berlin ... thank you kindly. I almost died with cold. At home in Leningrad it's warmer, really warmer." "How is it, St. Petersburg? It must have changed a lot?" asked Mrs. Luzhin. "Of course it's changed," replied the newcomer jauntily. "And a terribly difficult life," said Mrs. Luzhin, nodding thoughtfully. "Oh, what nonsense! Nothing of the sort. They're working at home, building. Even my boy--what, you didn't know I had a little boy?--well, I have, I have, a cute little squirt--well, even he says that at home in Leningrad 'they wuk, while in Bellin the bo
ulzois don't do anything.' And in general he finds Berlin far worse than home and doesn't even want to look at anything. He's so observant, you know, and sensitive.... No, speaking seriously, the child's right. I myself feel how we've outstripped Europe. Take our theater. Why, you in Europe don't have a theater, it just doesn't exist. I'm not in the least, you understand, not in the least praising the communists. But you have to admit one thing: they look ahead, they build. Intensive construction." "I don't understand politics," said Mrs. Luzhin slowly and plaintively. "But it just seems to me ..." "I'm only saying that one has to be broad-minded," continued the visitor hastily. "Take this, for instance. As soon as I arrived I bought an emigre paper. Of course my husband said, joking, you know--'Why do you waste money, my girl, on such filth?' He expressed himself worse than that, but let's call it that for the sake of decency--but me: 'No,' I said, 'you have to look at everything, find out everything absolutely impartially.' And imagine--I opened the paper and began to read, and there was such slander printed there, such lies, and everything so crude." "I rarely see the Russian newspapers," said Mrs. Luzhin. "Mamma, for instance, gets a Russian newspaper from Serbia, I believe--" "It is a conspiracy," continued the lady. "Nothing but abuse, and nobody dares to utter a peep in our favor." "Really, let's talk about something else," said Mrs. Luzhin distractedly. "I can't express it, I'm very poor at speaking about these matters, but I feel you're mistaken. Now if you want to talk about it with my parents some day ..." (And saying this, Mrs. Luzhin imagined to herself, not without a certain pleasure, her mother's bulging eyes and strident cries.) "Well, you're still little." The lady indulgently smiled. "Tell me what you are doing, what does your husband do, what is he?" "He used to play chess," replied Mrs. Luzhin. "He was a remarkable player. But then he overstrained himself and now he is resting; and please, you mustn't talk to him about chess." "Yes, yes, I know he's a chess player," said the newcomer. "But what is he? A reactionary? A White Guardist?" "Really I don't know." laughed Mrs. Luzhin. "I've heard a thing or two about him," continued the newcomer. "When your maman told me you had married a Luzhin I thought immediately that it was he. I had a good acquaintance in Leningrad and she told me--with such naive pride, you know--how she had taught her little nephew to play chess and how he later became a remarkable ..."