And that day on the garden terrace, where bright yellow wasps kept settling on the iron tables and moving their lowered antennae—that day when he started to speak of how he had once lived in this hotel as a small boy—Luzhin began with a series of quiet moves, the meaning of which he himself only vaguely sensed, his own peculiar declaration of love. “Go on, tell me more,” she repeated, despite having noticed how morosely and dully he had fallen silent.
He sat leaning on his cane and thinking that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there, and simultaneously he tried to remember what exactly he had just been talking about.
A waiter with a dozen empty beer mugs hanging from his crook’d fingers ran along the wing of the building, and Luzhin remembered with relief that he had been speaking about the tournament that once took place in that very wing. He grew agitated and hot, and the band of his hat constricted his temples, and this agitation was not quite comprehensible yet. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll show you. It must be empty there now. And cool.” Stepping heavily and trailing his cane which grated along the gravel and bounced against the doorstep, he entered the door first. How ill-bred he is, she reflected and caught herself shaking her head, and then accused herself of introducing a slightly false note—his manners had nothing at all to do with ill-breeding. “Here, I think it’s this way,” said Luzhin and pushed a side door.
A fire was burning, a fat man in white was shouting something and a tower of plates ran past on human legs. “No, farther,” said Luzhin and walked along the corridor. He opened another door and almost fell: steps going down, and some shrubs at the bottom, and a pile of rubbish, and an apprehensive hen, jerkily walking away. “I made a mistake,” said Luzhin, “it’s probably here to the right.” He removed his hat, feeling burning beads of sweat gather on his brow.
Oh, how clear was the image of that cool, empty, spacious hall and how difficult it was to find it! “Let’s try this door here,” he said. The door proved to be locked. He pressed the handle down several times. “Who’s there?” a hoarse voice said abruptly, and a bed creaked. “Mistake, mistake,” muttered Luzhin and went farther; then he looked back and stopped: he was alone. “Where is she?” he said aloud, shuffling his feet as he turned this way and that.
Corridor. Window giving on garden. Gadget on wall, with numbered pigeonholes. A bell whirred. In one of the pigeonholes a number popped up awry. He was bemused and troubled, as if he had lost his way in a bad dream—and he quickly walked back, repeating under his breath: “Queer jokes, queer jokes.” He came out unexpectedly into the garden, and there two characters were sitting on a bench and looking at him curiously. Suddenly he heard laughter overhead and raised his face. She was standing on the little balcony of her room and laughing, her elbows propped on the railings, her palms pressed against her cheeks, and shaking her head with sly reproachfulness.
She looked at his ample face, the hat on the back of his head, and waited to see what he would do now. “I couldn’t keep up with you,” she cried, straightening up and opening her arms in some kind of explanatory gesture. Luzhin lowered his head and entered the building. She supposed that in a moment he would knock on her door and she decided not to let him in and say the room was untidy. But he did not knock. When she went down to supper he was not in the dining room. He’s taken offense, she decided and went to bed earlier than usual.
In the morning she went out for a walk and looked to see if he was waiting in the garden, reading his newspaper on a bench as usual. He was not in the garden, he was not in the gallery, and she went for a walk without him. When he did not appear for dinner and his table was taken by an ancient couple who had long had their eye on it, she asked in the office if Mr. Luzhin was sick. “Mr. Luzhin left this morning for Berlin,” replied the girl.
An hour later his baggage returned to the hotel. The janitor and a bellboy, with matter-of-fact indifference, carried in the bags which that morning they had carried out. Luzhin was returning from the station on foot—a stout, doleful gentleman, crushed by the heat and in shoes white with dust. He rested on all the benches and once or twice plucked a blackberry, grimacing from the sourness.
While walking along the highway he noticed a fair-haired small boy following him with tiny steps, holding an empty beer bottle in his hands, and lagging behind on purpose and staring at him with unbearable childish concentration. Luzhin halted. The boy also halted. Luzhin moved, the boy moved. Then Luzhin lost his temper and threatened him with his cane. The other froze, grinning with surprise and joy. “I’ll …” said Luzhin in a deep voice and went toward him, his cane raised. The small boy jumped and ran off.
Grumbling to himself and breathing hard through the nose, Luzhin continued on his way. All at once an extremely well-aimed pebble hit him on the left shoulder blade. He let out a cry and turned around. Nobody—an empty road, woods, heather. “I’ll kill him,” he said loudly in German and walked on faster, trying to weave from side to side the way, he had read somewhere, men do when they fear a shot in the back, and repeating his helpless threat. He was quite exhausted, panting and almost crying by the time he reached the hotel. “Changed my mind,” he said, addressing the office grille as he went by. “I’m staying, changed my mind.…”
“She’s sure to be in her room,” he said as he went up the stairs. He burst in upon her as if he had butted the door with his head, and dimly catching sight of her reclining in a pink dress on the couch, he said hastily: “H’llo—h’llo,” and strode all around the room, supposing that everything was working out very easily, wittily and entertainingly, and simultaneously suffocating with excitement.
“And therefore in continuance of the above I have to inform you that you will be my wife, I implore you to agree to this, it was absolutely impossible to go away, now everything will be different and wonderful,” and at this point he settled on a chair by the radiator and, covering his face with his hands, burst into tears; then trying to spread one hand so that it covered his face he began with the other to search for his handkerchief, and through the trembling wet chinks between his fingers he perceived in duplicate a blurry pink dress that noisily moved toward him. “Now, now, that’s enough, that’s enough,” she repeated in a soothing voice. “A grown man and crying like that.” He seized her by the elbow and kissed something hard and cold—her wristwatch. She removed his straw hat and stroked his forehead—and swiftly retreated, evading his clumsy, grabbing movements.
Luzhin trumpeted into his handkerchief, once, once more, loudly and juicily; then he wiped his eyes, cheeks and mouth and sighed with relief, leaning on the radiator, his moist bright eyes looking in front of him. It was then that she realized clearly that this man, whether you liked him or not, was not one you could thrust out of your life, that he had sat himself down firmly, solidly and apparently for a long time. But she also wondered how she could show this man to her father and mother, how could he be visualized in their drawing room—a man of a different dimension, with a particular form and coloring that was compatible with nothing and no one.
At first she tried fitting him this way and that in her family, among their milieu and even among the furnishings of their flat: she made an imaginary Luzhin enter the rooms, talk with her mother, eat home-cooked kulebiaka and be reflected in the sumptuous samovar purchased abroad—and these imaginary calls ended with a monstrous catastrophe, Luzhin with a clumsy motion of his shoulder would knock the house down like a shaky piece of scenery that emitted a sigh of dust.
Their apartment was an expensive, well appointed one, on the first floor of an enormous Berlin apartment house. Her parents, rich once more, had decided to start living in strict Russian style, which they somehow associated with ornamental Slavic scriptory, postcards depicting sorrowing boyar maidens, varnished boxes bearing gaudy pyrogravures of troikas or firebirds, and the admirably produced, long since expired art magazines containing such wonderful photographs of old Russian manors and porcelain. Her father used to say to his friends that it was particularly pleasant after business meetings and conversations with people of dubious origin to immerse himself in genuine Russian comfort and eat genuine Russian food.
At one time their servant had been a genuine Russian orderly taken from an émigré shelter near Berlin, but for no apparent reason he became extraordinarily rude and was replaced by a German-Polish girl. The mother, a stately lady with plump arms, used to call herself affectionately an “enfant terrible” and a “Cossack” (a result of vague and distorted
