The same paperweights bearing emerald-blue views touched up with mother-of-pearl beneath convex glass were on sale in the shops near the spring and no doubt the same orchestra on the stand in the park was playing potpourris of opera, and the same maples were casting their lively shade over small tables where people drank coffee and ate wedge-shaped slices of apple tart with whipped cream.
“Look, do you see those windows?” he said, pointing with his cane at the wing of the hotel. “It was there we had that pretty little tournament. Some of the most respectable German players took part. I was a boy of fourteen. Third prize, yes, third prize.”
He replaced both hands on the crook of his thick cane with that sad, slightly old-mannish gesture that was natural to him now, and bent his head as if listening to distant music.
“What? Put on my hat? The sun is scorching, you say? I’d say it is ineffective. Why should you fuss about it? We are sitting in the shade.”
Nevertheless he took the straw hat extended to him across the little table, drummed on the bottom where there was a blurred dark spot over the hatmaker’s name, and donned it with a wry smile—wry in the precise sense: his right cheek and the corner of his mouth went up slightly, exposing bad, tobacco-stained teeth; he had no other smile. And one would never have said that he was only beginning his fourth decade: from the wings of his nose there descended two deep, flabby furrows, his shoulders were bent; in the whole of his body one remarked an unhealthy heaviness; and when he rose abruptly, with raised elbow defending himself from a wasp, one saw he was rather stout—nothing in the little Luzhin had foreshadowed this lazy, unhealthy fleshiness. “But why does it pester me?” he cried in a thin, querulous voice, continuing to lift his elbow and endeavoring with his other hand to get out his handkerchief. The wasp, having described one last circle, flew away, and he followed it with his eyes for a long time, mechanically shaking out his handkerchief; then he set his metal chair more firmly on the gravel, picked up his fallen cane and sat down again, breathing heavily.
“Why are you laughing? Wasps are extremely unpleasant insects.” Frowning, he looked down at the table. Beside his cigarette case lay a handbag, semicircular, made of black silk. He reached out for it absently and began to click the lock.
“Shuts badly,” he said without looking up. “One fine day you’ll spill everything out.”
He sighed, laid the handbag aside and added in the same tone of voice: “Yes, the most respectable German players. And one Austrian. My late papa was unlucky. He hoped there would be no real interest in chess here and we landed right in a tournament.”
Things had been rebuilt and jumbled, the wing of the house now looked different. They had lived over there, on the second floor. It had been decided to stay until the end of the year and then return to Russia—and the ghost of school, which his father dared not mention, again loomed into view. His mother went back much earlier, at the beginning of summer. She said she was insanely homesick for the Russian countryside, and that protracted “insanely” with such a plaintive, aching middle syllable was practically the sole intonation of hers that Luzhin retained in his memory. She left reluctantly, however, not really knowing whether to go or stay.
It was already some time since she had begun to experience a strange feeling of estrangement from her son, as if he had drifted away somewhere, and the one she loved was not this grown-up boy, not the chess prodigy that the newspapers were writing about, but that little warm, insupportable child who at the slightest provocation would throw himself flat on the floor, screaming and drumming his feet. And everything was so sad and so unnecessary—that sparse un-Russian lilac in the station garden, those tulip-shaped lamps in the sleeping car of the Nord Express, and those sinking sensations in the chest, a feeling of suffocation, perhaps angina pectoris and perhaps, as her husband said, simply nerves.
She went away and did not write; his father grew gayer and moved to a smaller room; and then one July day when little Luzhin was on his way home from another hotel—in which lived one of those morose elderly men who were his playmates—accidentally, in the bright low sun, he caught sight of his father by the wooden railings of a hillside path. His father was with a lady, and since that lady was certainly his young red-haired aunt from St. Petersburg, he was very surprised and somehow ashamed and he did not say anything to his father.
Early one morning a few days after this he heard his father swiftly approach his room along the corridor, apparently laughing loudly. The door was burst open and his father entered holding out a slip of paper as if thrusting it away. Tears rolled down his cheeks and along his nose as if he had splashed his face with water and he kept repeating with sobs and gasps: “What’s this? What’s this? It’s a mistake, they’ve got it wrong”—and continued to thrust away the telegram.
Chapter 5
He played in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Odessa. There appeared a certain Valentinov, a cross between tutor and manager. Luzhin senior wore a black armband—mourning for his wife—and told provincial journalists that he would never have made such a thorough survey of his native land had he not had a prodigy for a son.
He battled at tournaments with the best Russian players. He often took on a score of amateurs. Sometimes he played blind. Luzhin senior, many years later (in the years when his every contribution to émigré newspapers seemed to him to be his swan song—and goodness knows how many of these swan songs there were, full of lyricism and misprints) planned to write a novella about precisely such a chess-playing small boy, who was taken from city to city by his father (foster father in the novella). He began to write it in 1928—after returning home from a meeting of the Union of Émigré Writers, at which he had been the only one to turn up. The idea of the book came to him unexpectedly and vividly, as he was sitting and waiting in the conference room of a Berlin coffeehouse.
As usual he had come very early, expressed surprise that the tables had not been placed together, told the waiter to do this immediately and ordered tea and a pony of brandy. The room was clean and brightly lit, with a still life on the wall representing plump peaches around a watermelon minus one wedge. A clean tablecloth ballooned gently and settled over the connected tables. He put a lump of sugar in his tea and watching the bubbles rise, warmed his bloodless, always cold hands on the glass.
Nearby in the bar a violin and piano were playing selections from La Traviata—and the sweet music, the brandy, the whiteness of the clean tablecloth—all this made old Luzhin so sad, and this sadness was so pleasant, that he was loath to move: so he just sat there, one elbow propped on the table, a finger pressed to his temple—a gaunt, red-eyed old man wearing a knitted waistcoat under his brown jacket. The music played, the empty room was flooded with light, the wound of the watermelon glowed scarlet—and nobody seemed to be coming to the meeting.
Several times he looked at his watch, but then the tea and the music bemisted him so mellowly that he forgot about time. He sat quietly thinking about this and that—about a typewriter he had acquired secondhand, about the Marinsky Theater, about the son who so rarely came to Berlin. And then he suddenly realized that he had been sitting there for an hour, that the tablecloth was still just as bare and white.… And in this luminous solitude that seemed to him almost mystical, sitting at a table prepared for a meeting that did not take place, he forthwith decided that after a long absence literary inspiration had revisited him.
Time to do a little summing up, he thought and looked round the empty room—tablecloth, blue wallpaper, still life—the way one looks at a room where a famous man was born. And old Luzhin mentally invited his future biographer (who as one came nearer to him in time became paradoxically more and more insubstantial, more and more remote) to take a good close look at this chance room where the novella The Gambit had been evolved. He drank the rest of his tea in one gulp, donned his coat and hat, learned from the waiter that today was Tuesday and not Wednesday, smiled not without a certain satisfaction over his own absentmindedness and immediately upon returning home removed the black metal cover from his typewriter.
The most vivid thing standing before his eyes was the following recollection (slightly retouched by a writer’s imagination): a bright hall, two rows of tables, chessboards on the tables. A person sits at each table and at the back of each sitter spectators
