The daughter was completely indifferent to this gimcrack apartment, so unlike their quiet St. Petersburg house, where the furniture and other things had their own soul, where the icon-cabinet harbored an unforgettable garnet gleam and mysterious orange tree blossoms, where a fat, intelligent cat was embroidered on the silk back of an armchair, and where there were a thousand trifles, smells and shades that all together constituted something ravishing, and heartrending, and completely irreplaceable.
The young Russians who visited them in Berlin considered her a nice but not very interesting girl, while her mother said of her (in a low-pitched voice with a trace of derision) that she represented in the family “the intelligentsia and avant-garde literature”—whether because she knew by heart a few poems of the “Symbolist” Balmont that she had found in the Poetry Reader or whether for some other reason, remained unknown. Her father liked her independence, her quietness, and her particular way of lowering her eyes when she smiled. But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul’s instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching; to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten.
Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse—when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls—and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another’s torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it and she would die. Hence, she lived in perpetual, secret agitation, constantly anticipating a new delight or a new pity, and it was said of her that she adored dogs and was always ready to lend money—and listening to these trivial rumors she felt as she had in childhood during that game where you go out of the room and the others talk about you, and you have to guess who said what.
And among the players, among those whom she joined after a stay in the next room (where you sat waiting to be called and conscientiously sang something so as not to overhear, or else opened a chance book—and like a Jack-in-the-box a passage from a novel would spring up, the end of an unintelligible conversation), among those people whose opinion she had to guess there was now a rather taciturn man, difficult to budge and thinking completely unknown things about her. She suspected that he had no opinion at all, that he had no conception whatsoever of her milieu or the circumstances of her life, and so might blurt out something dreadful.
Deciding that she had been absent long enough, she gently passed her hand over the back of her head, smoothing down her hair, and returned smiling to the lobby. Luzhin and her mother, whom she had only just introduced to one another, were sitting in wicker armchairs beneath a potted palmetto, and Luzhin, his brows knitted, was examining his disgraceful straw hat which he was holding in his lap, and at that moment she was equally terrified by the thought of what words Luzhin was using about her (if, indeed, he was using any) and the thought of what impression Luzhin himself was making on her mother. The day before, as soon as her mother had arrived and begun to complain that her window faced north and the bedside lamp was not working, the daughter had related, trying to keep all her words on the same level, how she had become great friends with the famous chess player Luzhin. “No doubt a pseudonym,” said her mother, burrowing in her toilet case. “His real name is Rubinstein or Abramson.” “Very, very famous,” continued the daughter, “and very nice.” “Help me rather to find my soap,” said her mother.
And now, having introduced them and left them alone on the pretext of ordering some lemonade, she experienced as she returned to the lobby such a feeling of horror, of the irreparability of already completed catastrophes that while still some distance away she began to speak loudly, then tripped on the edge of the carpet and laughed, waving her hands to keep her balance. His senseless fiddling with the boater, the silence, her mother’s amazed, gleaming eyes, and the sudden recollection of how he had sobbed the other day, his arms round the radiator—all this was very hard to bear.
But suddenly Luzhin raised his head, his mouth twisted into that familiar, morose smile—and at once her fear vanished and the potential disaster seemed something that was extraordinarily amusing, changing nothing. As if he had waited for her return in order to retire, Luzhin grunted, stood up and gave a remarkable nod (“boorish,” she thought gaily, translating this nod into her mother’s idiom) before proceeding toward the staircase.
On the way he met the waiter bringing three glasses of lemonade on a tray. He stopped him, took one of the glasses, and holding it carefully in front of him, mimicking the swaying level of the liquid with his eyebrows, began slowly to mount the stairs. When he had disappeared round the bend she began with exaggerated care to peel the thin paper from her straw. “What a boor!” said her mother loudly, and the daughter felt the kind of satisfaction you get when you find in the dictionary the meaning of a foreign term you have already guessed. “That’s not a real person,” continued her mother in angry perplexity. “What is he? Certainly not a real person. He calls me madame, just madame, like a shop assistant. He’s God knows what. And I’ll guarantee he has a Soviet passport. A Bolshevik, just a Bolshevik. I sat there like an idiot. And his small talk …! His cuffs are quite soiled, by the way. Did you notice? Soiled and frayed.”
“What kind of small talk?” she asked, smiling from beneath lowered brows.
“ ‘Yes madame, no madame.’ ‘There’s a nice atmosphere here.’ Atmosphere! Quite a word, eh? I asked him—to say something—if it was long since he had left Russia. He simply was silent. Then he remarked about you that you like cooling ‘beverages.’ Cooling ‘beverages’! And what a mug, what a mug! No, no, let us steer clear of such characters …”
Continuing the game of opinions she hastened to Luzhin. In the course of his botched departure his room had been given to someone else and he had been assigned to another one higher up. He was sitting with his elbows on the table, as if grief-stricken, and in the ashtray an insufficiently stubbed cigarette was struggling to send up smoke. On the table and floor were scattered sheets of paper covered with writing in pencil. For a second she thought they were bills and she wondered at their number.
The wind blowing in through the open window gusted as she opened the door and Luzhin, coming out of his reverie, picked up the sheets of paper from the floor and neatly folded them, smiling at her and blinking. “Well? How did it go?” she asked. “It’ll take shape during the game,” said Luzhin. “I’m simply jotting down a few possibilities.”
She had the feeling she had opened the wrong door, entered where she had not intended to enter, but it was nice in this unexpected world and she did not want to go to that other one where the game of opinions was played. But instead of continuing to talk about chess Luzhin moved up to her together with his chair, grasped her by the waist with hands shaking from tenderness and not knowing what to undertake, attempted to seat her on his knees.
She pushed her hands against his shoulders and averted her face, pretending to look at the sheets of paper. “What’s that?” she asked. “Nothing, nothing,” said Luzhin, “notes on various games.” “Let me go,” she demanded in a shrill voice. “Notes on various games, notes …” repeated Luzhin, pressing her to him, his narrowed eyes looking up at her neck.
A sudden spasm distorted his face and for an instant his eyes lost all expression; then his features relaxed oddly, his hands unclenched of themselves, and she moved away from him, angry without knowing exactly why she was angry, and surprised that he had let her go. Luzhin cleared his throat and greedily lit a cigarette, watching her with incomprehensible mischievousness. “I’m sorry I came,” she said. “First, I interrupted your work …” “Not a bit of it,” replied Luzhin with unexpected merriment and slapped his knees.
“Second, I wanted to get your impressions.”
“A lady of high society,” answered Luzhin, “you can see that right away.”
“Listen,” she exclaimed, continuing to be cross, “were you ever educated? Where did you go to school? Have you ever met people at all,
