A fat-bodied, fluffy moth with glowing eyes fell on the table after colliding with the lamp. A breeze stirred lightly through the garden. The clock in the drawing room started to chime daintily and struck twelve.
“Nonsense,” he said, “stupid imagination. Many youngsters are excellent chess players. Nothing surprising in that. The whole affair is getting on my nerves, that’s all. Bad of her—she shouldn’t have encouraged him. Well, no matter.…”
He thought drearily that in a moment he would have to lie, to remonstrate, to soothe, and it was midnight already.…
“I want to sleep,” he said, but remained sitting in the armchair.
And early next morning in the darkest and mossiest corner of the dense coppice behind the garden little Luzhin buried his father’s precious box of chessmen, assuming this to be the simplest way of avoiding any kind of complications, for now there were other chessmen that he could use openly. His father, unable to suppress his interest in the matter, went off to see the gloomy country doctor, who was a far better chess player than he, and in the evening after dinner, laughing and rubbing his hands, doing his best to ignore the fact that all this was wrong—but why wrong he could not say—he sat his son down with the doctor at the wicker table on the veranda, himself set out the pieces (apologizing for the purple thingum), sat down beside the players and began avidly following the game.
Twitching his bushy eyebrows and tormenting his fleshy nose with a large hairy fist, the doctor thought long over every move and from time to time would lean back in his chair as if able to see better from a distance, and make big eyes, and then lurch heavily forward, his hands braced against his knees. He lost—and grunted so loudly that his wicker armchair creaked in response. “But look, look!” exclaimed Luzhin senior. “You should go this way and everything is saved—you even have the better position.” “Don’t you see I’m in check?” growled the doctor in a bass voice and began to set out the pieces anew. And when Luzhin senior went out into the dark garden to accompany the doctor as far as the footpath with its border of glowworms leading down to the bridge, he heard the words he had so thirsted to hear once, but now these words weighed heavy upon him—he would rather not have heard them at all.
The doctor started coming every night and since he was really a first-rate player he derived enormous pleasure from these incessant defeats. He brought Luzhin a chess handbook, advising him, however, not to get too carried away by it, not to tire himself, and to read in the open air. He spoke about the grand masters he had had the occasion to see, about a recent tournament, and also about the past of chess, about a somewhat doubtful rajah and about the great Philidor, who was also an accomplished musician. At times, grinning gloomily, he would bring what he termed “a sugarplum”—an ingenious problem cut out of some periodical.
Luzhin would pore over it a while, find finally the solution and with an extraordinary expression on his face and radiant bliss in his eyes would exclaim, burring his r’s: “How glorious, how glorious!” But the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him whenever the doctor, with strokes of his hairy finger, removed his King farther and farther, and finally, nodded his head and sat there quite still, looking at the board, while Luzhin senior, who was always present, always craving a miracle—his son’s defeat—and was both frightened and overjoyed when his son won (and suffered from this complicated mixture of feelings), would seize a Knight or a Rook, crying that everything was not lost and would himself sometimes play to the end a hopelessly compromised game.
And thus it began. Between this sequence of evenings on the veranda and the day when Luzhin’s photograph appeared in a St. Petersburg magazine it was as if nothing had been, neither the country autumn drizzling on the asters, nor the journey back to town, nor the return to school. The photograph appeared on an October day soon after his first, unforgettable performance in a chess club.
And everything else that took place between the return to town and the photograph—two months after all—was so blurry and so mixed up that later, in recalling this time, Luzhin was unable to say exactly when, for instance, that social evening had taken place at school—where in a corner, almost unnoticed by his schoolfellows, he had quietly beaten the geography teacher, a well-known amateur—or when on his father’s invitation a gray-haired Jew came to dinner, a senile chess genius who had been victorious in all the cities of the world but now lived in idleness and poverty, purblind, with a sick heart, having lost forever his fire, his grip, his luck.…
But one thing Luzhin remembered quite clearly—the fear he experienced in school, the fear they would learn of his gift and ridicule him—and consequently, guided by this infallible recollection, he judged that after the game played at the social evening he must not have gone to school any more, for remembering all the shudders of his childhood he was unable to imagine the horrible sensation he would have experienced upon entering the classroom on the following morning and meeting those inquisitive, all-knowing eyes. He remembered, on the other hand, that after his picture appeared he refused to go to school and it was impossible to untangle in his memory the knot in which the social evening and the photograph were joined, it was impossible to say which came first and which second.
It was his father who brought him the magazine, and the photograph was one taken the previous year, in the country: a tree in the garden and he next to it, a pattern of foliage on his forehead, a sullen expression on his slightly inclined face, and those narrow white shorts that always used to come unbuttoned in front. Instead of the joy expected by his father, he expressed nothing—but he did feel a secret joy: now this would put an end to school.
They pleaded with him during the course of a week. His mother, of course, cried. His father threatened to take away his new chess set—enormous pieces on a morocco board. And suddenly everything was decided of itself. He ran away from home—in his autumn coat, since his winter one had been hidden after one unsuccessful attempt to run away—and not knowing where to go (a stinging snow was falling and settling on the cornices, and the wind would blow it off, endlessly reenacting this miniature blizzard), he wandered finally to his aunt’s place, not having seen her since spring. He met her as she was leaving.
She was wearing a black hat and holding flowers wrapped in paper, on her way to a funeral. “Your old partner is dead,” she said. “Come with me.” Angry at not being allowed to warm himself, angry at the snow falling, and at the sentimental tears shining behind his aunt’s veil, he turned sharply and walked away, and after walking about for an hour set off for home. He did not remember the actual return—and even more curiously, was never sure whether things had happened thus or differently; perhaps his memory later added much that was taken from his delirium—for he was delirious for a whole week, and since he was extremely delicate and high-strung, the doctors presumed he would not pull through.
It was not the first time he had been ill and when later reconstructing the sensation of this particular illness, he involuntarily recalled others, of which his childhood had been full: he remembered especially the time when he was quite small, playing all alone, and wrapping himself up in the tiger rug, to represent, rather forlornly, a king—it was nicest of all to represent a king since the imaginary mantle protected him against the chills of fever, and he wanted to postpone for as long as possible that inevitable moment when they would feel his forehead, take his temperature and then bundle him into bed.
Actually, there had been nothing quite comparable to his October chess-permeated illness. The gray-haired Jew who used to beat Chigorin, the corpse of his aunt’s admirer muffled in flowers, the sly, gay countenance of his father bringing a magazine, and the geography teacher petrified with the suddenness of the mate, and the tobacco-smoke-filled room at the chess club where he was closely surrounded by a crowd of university students, and the clean-shaven face of the musician holding for some reason the telephone receiver like a violin, between shoulder and cheek—all this participated in his delirium and took on the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board.
Upon his recovery, a taller and thinner boy, he was taken abroad, at first to the Adriatic coast where he lay on the garden terrace in the sun and played games in his head, which nobody could forbid him, and then to a German resort where his father took him for walks along footpaths fenced off with twisted beech railings.
Sixteen years later when he revisited this resort he recognized the bearded earthenware dwarfs between the
