Chapter 6
“Everything will be spilled, that’s certain,” said Luzhin, again taking possession of the handbag.
She quickly stretched forth her hand and moved her handbag farther away, banging it down on the table as if thereby to underline the interdiction. “You always have to fiddle with something,” she said amicably.
Luzhin looked at his hand, splaying the fingers and then closing them up again. The nails, tawny with nicotine, had ragged cuticles around them; fat little furrows ran across the finger joints, and a few hairs grew lower down. He placed his hand on the table next to her hand, milky-pale and soft to look at, with short, neatly trimmed nails.
“I regret not having known your father,” she said after a pause. “He must have been very kind, very earnest and very fond of you.”
Luzhin was silent.
“Tell me some more—how was your life here? Were you really a little boy once, running and romping about?”
He replaced both hands on his cane, and from the expression on his face, from the sleepy lowering of his heavy lids and from his slightly open mouth, looking as if he were about to yawn, she concluded that he had grown bored, that he was tired of reminiscing. And anyway, he reminisced coldly; she was puzzled that having lost his father only a month ago, he was now able to look dry-eyed at the hotel where they had lived together during his boyhood.
But even in this indifference, in his clumsy words and in the cumbrous stirrings of his soul, that seemed to be drowsily turning over and falling asleep again, she fancied she saw something pathetic, a charm that was difficult to define but one that she had felt in him from the first day of their acquaintance. And how mysterious it was that despite the evident tepidity of his relationship with his father, he had chosen precisely this resort and precisely this hotel, as if expecting to receive from these once-seen objects and landscapes the tingle he was unable to experience without outside assistance.
And he had arrived magnificently, on a gray and green day in a drizzling rain, wearing a disgraceful, black, shaggy hat and huge rubbers; and looking through the window at his figure as he clambered ponderously out of the hotel bus, she had felt that this unknown newcomer was someone quite special, unlike any other resident at the resort.
That same evening she learned who he was. Everybody in the restaurant looked at this stout, gloomy man who ate greedily and sloppily and sometimes became lost in thought, one finger stroking the tablecloth. She did not play chess, took no interest in chess tournaments, but somehow or other his name was familiar to her, it had unconsciously imprinted itself in her memory, though she was unable to recall when she had first heard it.
A German manufacturer who was a long-time sufferer from constipation and liked to talk about it, a man with a one-track mind, but who was good-natured and pleasant and dressed with some taste, suddenly forgot his constipation and, in the gallery where they were drinking the curative water, informed her of several amazing facts about the gloomy gentleman who now, having exchanged his shaggy fedora for an old boater, was standing before a small display window let into one of the columns and examining some handcrafted knickknacks that were being exhibited for sale. “Your fellow countryman,” said the manufacturer, indicating him with a jerk of the eyebrow, “is a famous chess player. He has come from Paris for the tournament that will be held in Berlin in two months’ time. If he wins he’ll challenge the world champion. His father recently died. It’s all here in the newspaper.”
She wanted to make his acquaintance, talk Russian—so attractive did he seem to her with his uncouthness, his gloominess and his low turndown collar which for some reason made him look like a musician—and she was pleased that he did not take any notice of her and seek an excuse to talk to her, as did all the other single men in the hotel. She was not particularly pretty, there was something lacking in her small regular features, as if the last decisive jog that would have made her beautiful—leaving her features the same but endowing them with an ineffable significance—had not been given them by nature.
But she was twenty-five, her fashionably bobbed hair was neat and lovely and she had one turn of the head which betrayed a hint of possible harmony, a promise of real beauty that at the last moment remained unfulfilled. She wore extremely simple and extremely well-cut dresses that left her arms and neck bare, as if she were flaunting a little their tender freshness. She was rich—her father had lost a fortune in Russia and made another in Germany. Her mother was due soon at the resort and since the advent of Luzhin the thought of her fussy arrival had become unpleasant.
She made his acquaintance on the third day after his arrival, made it the way they do in old novels or in motion pictures: she drops a handkerchief and he picks it up—with the sole difference that they interchanged roles. Luzhin was walking along a path in front of her and in succession shed: a large checked handkerchief that was unusually dirty and had all sorts of pocket debris sticking to it; then a broken and crushed cigarette minus half of its contents; a nut; and a French franc.
She gathered up only the handkerchief and the coin and walked on, slowly catching up with him and curiously awaiting some new loss. With the cane he carried in his right hand, Luzhin touched in passing every tree trunk and every bench, while groping in his pocket with his left, until finally he stopped, turned out his coat pocket, shed another coin, and started to examine the large hole in the lining. “Right through,” he said in German, taking the handkerchief from her hand (“This also,” she said in Russian). “Poor material,” he continued without looking up, neither switching to Russian nor showing any surprise, as if the return of his things had been quite natural. “Oh, don’t put them back there,” she said with a sudden peal of laughter.
Only then did he lift his head and glance morosely at her. His puffy gray face with its badly shaven, razor-nicked cheeks acquired a strange expression of bewilderment. He had wonderful eyes: they were narrow, even slightly slanting, and as if sprinkled with dust under their drooping lids; but through that fluffy dust there showed a moist bluish gleam containing something insane and attractive. “Don’t drop them again,” she said and walked away, feeling his glance on her back. That evening as she entered the restaurant she could not help smiling at him from afar and he responded with the same gloomy, crooked half-smile he sometimes bestowed on the hotel cat as it slipped noiselessly along the floor from one table to another.
And on the following day, in the hotel garden, among the grottoes, fountains and earthenware dwarfs, he went up to her and began in his deep and melancholy voice to thank her for the handkerchief and the coin (and from that time, dimly and almost unconsciously, he constantly watched to see whether she would drop anything—as if trying to reestablish some secret symmetry). “Don’t mention it, don’t mention it,” she replied and added many similiar words—the poor relations of real words—and how many there are of them, these little throw-away words that are spoken hurriedly and temporarily fill the void.
Employing such words and feeling their petty vapidity, she asked him if he liked the resort, was he there for long and did he take the waters. He replied that he did, was for long and took the waters. Then, fully aware of the stupidity of the question but incapable of stopping herself, she asked how long he had been playing chess. He gave no answer and turned away and she felt so embarrassed that she began to reel off a list of all the meteorological indications for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
He continued silent and she also fell silent, and then she began to rummage in her handbag, searching agonizingly for a topic and finding only a broken comb. Suddenly he turned his face to her and said: “Eighteen years, three months and four days.” For her this was an exquisite relief, and furthermore she was somehow flattered by the elaborate circumstantiality of his reply. Subsequently, however, she began to grow a little annoyed that he in his turn never asked any questions, taking her, as it were, for granted.
An artist, a great artist, she frequently thought, contemplating his heavy profile, his corpulent hunched body, the dark lock of hair clinging to his always moist forehead. And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts.
She had never been in close contact with such people—there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy. Here were her school reminiscences—the girls’ school in St. Petersburg, with an unusual bit of ivy on its frontage that ran along a short, dusty, tramless street, and
