“You haven’t got tanned at all this year,” she said after a pause. “But perhaps I simply can’t see, the light here is so dead, everything looks blue. Raise the Venetian blinds, please. Or no, wait, stay. Later.” Having sucked his boules-de-gomme to the end he inquired if he could leave. She asked him what he would do now and would he not like to drive to the station and meet his father off the seven o’clock train? “Let me go,” he said. “It smells of medicine in here.”
He tried to slide down the stairs the way they did at school—the way he himself never did it there; but the steps were too high. Beneath the staircase, in a cupboard that had still not been thoroughly explored, he looked for magazines. He dug out one and found a checkers section in it, diagrams of stupid clumsy round blobs on their boards, but there was no chess. As he rummaged on, he kept coming across a bothersome herbarium album with dried edelweiss and purple leaves in it and with inscriptions in pale violet ink, in a childish, thin-spun hand that was so different from his mother’s present handwriting: Davos 1885; Gatchina 1886.
Wrathfully he began to tear out the leaves and flowers, sneezing from the fine dust as he squatted on his haunches amid the scattered books. Then it got so dark beneath the stairs that the pages of the magazine he was again leafing through began to merge into a gray blur and sometimes a small picture would trick him, because it looked like a chess problem in the diffuse darkness.
He thrust the books back anyhow into the drawers and wandered into the drawing room, thinking listlessly that it must be well past seven o’clock since the butler was lighting the kerosene lamps. Leaning on a cane and holding on to the banisters, his mother in mauve peignoir came heavily down the stairs, a frightened look on her face. “I don’t understand why your father isn’t here yet,” she said, and moving with difficulty she went out onto the veranda and began to peer down the road between the fir trunks that the setting sun banded with bright copper.
He came only around ten, said he had missed the train, had been extremely busy, had dined with his publisher—no, no soup, thank you. He laughed and spoke very loudly and ate noisily, and Luzhin was struck by the feeling that his father was looking at him all the time as if staggered by his presence. Dinner graded into late evening tea. Mother, her elbow propped on the table, silently slitted her eyes at her plate of raspberries, and the gayer her husband’s stories became the narrower her eyes grew. Then she got up and quietly left and it seemed to Luzhin that all this had happened once before. He remained alone on the veranda with his father and was afraid to raise his head, feeling that strange searching stare on him the whole time.
“How have you been passing the time?” asked his father suddenly. “What have you been doing?” “Nothing,” replied Luzhin. “And what are you planning to do now?” asked Luzhin senior in the same tone of forced jollity, imitating his son’s manner of using the formal plural for “you.” “Do you want to go to bed or do you want to sit here with me?” Luzhin killed a mosquito and very cautiously stole a glance upwards and sideways at his father. There was a crumb on his father’s beard and an unpleasantly mocking expression gleamed in his eyes. “Do you know what?” his father said and the crumb jumped off. “Do you know what? Let’s play some game. For instance, how about me teaching you chess?”
He saw his son slowly blush and taking pity on him immediately added: “Or cabala—there is a pack of cards over there in the table drawer.” “But no chess set, we have no chess set,” said Luzhin huskily and again stole a cautious look at his father. “The good ones remained in town,” said his father placidly, “but I think there are some old ones in the attic. Let’s go take a look.”
And indeed, by the light of the lamp that his father held aloft, among all sorts of rubbish in a case Luzhin found a chessboard, and again he had the feeling that all this had happened before—that open case with a nail sticking out of its side, those dust-powdered books, that wooden chessboard with a crack down the middle. A small box with a sliding lid also came to light; it contained puny chessmen. And the whole time he was looking for the chess set and then carrying it down to the veranda, Luzhin tried to figure out whether it was by accident his father had mentioned chess or whether he had noticed something—and the most obvious explanation did not occur to him, just as sometimes in solving a problem its key turns out to be a move that seemed barred, impossible, excluded quite naturally from the range of possible moves.
And now when the board had been placed on the illuminated table between the lamp and the raspberries, and its dust wiped off with a bit of newspaper, his father’s face was no longer mocking, and Luzhin, forgetting his fear, forgetting his secret, felt permeated all at once with proud excitement at the thought that he could, if he wanted, display his art. His father began to set out the pieces.
One of the Pawns was replaced by an absurd purple-colored affair in the shape of a tiny bottle; in place of one Rook there was a checker; the Knights were headless and the one horse’s head that remained after the box had been emptied (leaving a small die and a red counter) turned out not to fit any of them. When everything had been set out, Luzhin suddenly made up his mind and muttered: “I already can play a little.” “Who taught you?” asked his father without lifting his head. “I learned it at school,” replied Luzhin. “Some of the boys could play.” “Oh! Fine,” said his father, and added (quoting Pushkin’s doomed duelist): “Let’s start, if you are willing.”
He has played chess since his youth, but only seldom and sloppily, with haphazard opponents—on serene evenings aboard a Volga steamer, in the foreign sanatorium where his brother was dying years ago, here, in the country, with the village doctor, an unsociable man who periodically ceased calling on them—and all these chance games, full of oversights and sterile meditations, were for him little more than a moment of relaxation or simply a means of decently preserving silence in the company of a person with whom conversation kept petering out—brief, uncomplicated games, remarkable neither for ambition nor inspiration, which he always began in the same way, paying little attention to his adversary’s moves.
Although he made no fuss about losing, he secretly considered himself to be not at all a bad player, and told himself that if ever he lost it was through absentmindedness, good nature or a desire to enliven the game with daring sallies, and he considered that with a little application it was possible, without theoretic knowledge, to refute any gambit out of the textbook.
His son’s passion for chess had so astounded him, seemed so unexpected—and at the same time so fateful and inescapable—so strange and awesome was it to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces—all this was so strange and awesome that Luzhin senior was incapable of thinking of the game, and while he feigned concentration, his attention wandered from vague recollections of his illicit day in St. Petersburg, that left a residue of shame it was better not to investigate, to the casual, easy gestures with which his son moved this or that piece.
The game had lasted but a few minutes when his son said: “If you do this it’s mate and if you do that you lose your Queen,” and he, confused, took his move back and began to think properly, inclining his head first to the left and then to the right, slowly stretching out his fingers toward the Queen and quickly snatching them away again, as if burned, while in the meantime his son calmly, and with uncharacteristic tidiness, put the taken pieces into their box. Finally Luzhin senior made his move whereupon there started a devastation of his positions, and then he laughed unnaturally and knocked his King over in sign of surrender.
In this way he lost three games and realized that should he play ten more the result would be just the same, and yet he was unable to stop. At the very beginning of the fourth game Luzhin pushed back the piece moved by his father and with a shake of his head said in a confident unchildlike voice: “The worst reply. Chigorin suggests taking the Pawn.” And when with incomprehensible, hopeless speed he had lost this game as well, Luzhin senior again laughed, and with trembling hand began to pour milk into a cut-glass tumbler, on the bottom of which lay a raspberry core, which now floated to the surface and circled, unwilling to be extracted. His son put away the board and the box on a wicker table in the corner and having blurted a phlegmatic “good night” softly closed the door behind him.
“Oh
