And it was precisely on a blue background, surrounded by blue air, that the geography teacher had remained in her memory: he would dash noisily into the classroom in his usual impulsive manner and then melt away and vanish, yielding his place to another person, who also seemed to her unlike all the rest. The appearance of this person was preceded by lengthy admonitions on the part of the headmistress not to laugh, not on any account to laugh.
This was the first year of the Soviet regime; out of forty pupils in the class only seventeen remained, and every day they met the teachers with the question “Will there be lessons today?” and the latter invariably replied: “We still haven’t received final instructions.” The headmistress ordered there to be no giggles when the man came from the Commissariat for Popular Education, whatever he might say and however he might behave himself. And he came and took up his abode in her memory as an extraordinarily amusing person, a visitor from a different, absurd world. He was lame but very lively and squirmy, with quick, flickering eyes.
The girls were crowded in the hushed hall, and he walked back and forth in front of them, limping briskly and turning with simian agility. And as he limped past them, nimbly dragging his foot on its double heel and with his right hand, cutting the air up into regular slices, or else smoothing it out like cloth, he spoke swiftly and at length about the lectures in sociology he would be giving and about an imminent merger with a boys’ school—and restrained laughter made one’s jaws ache and caused spasms in one’s throat.
And later in Finland, which had remained in her heart as something more Russian than Russia, perhaps because the wooden villa and the fir trees and the white boat on the lake, black with the reflected conifers, were especially Russian, being treasured as something forbidden on the far side of the frontier. In this Finland which was still vacation land, still part of St. Petersburg life, she saw several times from afar a celebrated writer, a very pale man with a very conspicuous goatee who kept glancing up at the sky, which enemy airplanes had begun to haunt. And he remained in some strange manner beside the Russian officer who subsequently lost an arm in the Crimea during the civil war—a most shy and retiring boy with whom she used to play tennis in summer and ski in winter—and with this snowy recollection there would float up once more against a background of night the celebrated writer’s villa, in which he later died, and the cleared path and snowdrifts illumined by electric light, phantasmal stripes on the dark snow.
These men with their various occupations, each of whom tinted her recollection his own particular color (blue geographer, khaki commissar, the writer’s black overcoat and a youth all in white lobbing a fir cone with his tennis racket) were followed by glinting and dissolving images: émigré life in Berlin, charity balls, monarchist meetings and lots of identical people—all this was still so close that her memory was unable to focus properly and sort out what was valuable and what rubbish, and moreover there was no time now to sort it out, too much space had been taken up by this taciturn, fabulous, enigmatical man, the most attractive of all the men she had known.
His very art and all the manifestations and signs of this art were mysterious. She quickly learned that in the evenings after supper he worked until late at night. But this work was beyond the powers of her imagination, since there was nothing to link it to, neither an easel nor a piano, and it was just such a definite emblem of art that her thoughts reached out for. His room was on the first floor and men with cigars strolling in the darkness of the garden sometimes glimpsed his lamp and his inclined face. Somebody told her finally that he sat at an empty chessboard. She wanted to look for herself and one night, soon after their first conversation, she made her way along the footpath between the oleander bushes to his window.
But feeling a sudden awkwardness she went straight by without looking and came out into the avenue, where she could hear music coming from the kursaal, and then, unable to master her curiosity, she went back again to the window, but this time deliberately making the gravel creak so as to convince herself she was not spying. His window was open, the blind unlowered, and in the bright depth of the room she saw him take off his jacket, tense his neck muscles and yawn. And in the slow, massive motion of his shoulder, the image of which continued to heave and turn before her eyes as she hastily walked away in the darkness toward the illuminated terrace of the hotel, she fancied the presence of a mighty fatigue after undivulged but surely miraculous labors.
Luzhin was indeed tired. Lately he had been playing too frequently and too unsystematically; he was particularly fatigued by playing blind, a rather well-paid performance that he willingly gave. He found therein deep enjoyment: one did not have to deal with visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces.
When playing blind he was able to sense these diverse forces in their original purity. He saw then neither the Knight’s carved mane nor the glossy heads of the Pawns—but he felt quite clearly that this or that imaginary square was occupied by a definite, concentrated force, so that he envisioned the movement of a piece as a discharge, a shock, a stroke of lightning—and the whole chess field quivered with tension, and over this tension he was sovereign, here gathering in and there releasing electric power.
Thus he played against fifteen, twenty, thirty opponents and of course the sheer number of boards told—since it affected the actual playing time—but this physical weariness was nothing compared to the mental fatigue—retribution for the stress and rapture involved in the game itself, which he conducted in a celestial dimension, where his tools were incorporeal quantities. He also found a certain solace in these blind games and the victories they afforded him, for in recent years he had been having no luck at international tournaments; a ghostly barrier had arisen that kept preventing him from coming first.
Valentinov had happened to foretell this in the past, shortly before they parted. “Shine while you can,” he had said after that unforgettable tournament in London, the first after the war, when the twenty-year-old Russian player came out the victor. “While you can,” repeated Valentinov slyly, “because you won’t be a boy prodigy much longer.” And this was very important for Valentinov.
He was interested in Luzhin only inasmuch as he remained a freak, an odd phenomenon, somewhat deformed but enchanting, like a dachshund’s crooked legs. During the whole time that he lived with Luzhin he unremittingly encouraged and developed his gift, not bothering for a second about Luzhin as a person, whom, it seemed, not only Valentinov but life itself had overlooked. He showed him to wealthy people as an amusing monster, acquired useful contacts through him, and organized innumerable tournaments, and only when he began to suspect that the prodigy was turning simply into a young chess player did he bring him back to his father in Russia, and afterwards, like a kind of valuable, he took him away again when he thought that perhaps he had made a mistake, that the freak still had a year or two of life left in him.
When even this span had run out he made a gift to Luzhin of some money, the way one does to a mistress one has tired of, and disappeared, finding fresh amusement in the movie business, that mysterious astrological business where they read scripts and look for stars. And having departed to the sphere of jaunty, quick-talking, self-important con-men with their patter about the philosophy of the screen, the tastes of the masses and the intimacy of the movie camera, and with pretty good incomes at the same time, he dropped out of Luzhin’s world, which for Luzhin was a relief, that odd kind of relief you get in resolving an unhappy love affair.
He had become attached to Valentinov immediately—as early as the days of his chess tours in Russia—and later he regarded him the way a son might a frivolous, coldish, elusive father to whom one could never say how much one loved him. Valentinov was interested in him only as a chess player. At times he had about him something of the trainer who hovers about an athlete establishing a definite regime with merciless severity. Thus Valentinov asserted that it was all right for a chess player to smoke (since there was in both chess and smoking a touch of the East) but not in any circumstances to drink, and during their life together in the dining rooms of large hotels, enormous hotels deserted in wartime, in chance restaurants, in Swiss inns and in Italian trattorie, he invariably ordered mineral
