There was, true, a certain weakness on the Queen’s flank, or rather not a weakness but a slight doubt lest it was all fantasy, fireworks, and would not hold out, nor the heart hold out, for perhaps after all the voice in his ears was deceiving him and was not going to stay with him. But the moon emerged from behind the angular black twigs, a round, full-bodied moon—a vivid confirmation of victory—and when finally Luzhin left the balcony and stepped back into his room, there on the floor lay an enormous square of moonlight, and in that light—his own shadow.
Chapter 8
That to which his fiancée was so indifferent produced on Luzhin an impression nobody could have foreseen. He visited the famous apartment, in which the very air seemed colored with phony folklore, immediately after obtaining his first point by defeating an extremely tenacious Hungarian; the game, it is true, had been postponed after forty moves, but the continuation was perfectly clear to Luzhin. To a faceless taxi driver he read aloud the address on the postcard (“We’ve come. Zhdyom vas vecherom—Expecting you this evening”) and having imperceptibly surmounted the dim accidental distance, he cautiously tried to pull the ring out of the lion’s jaws.
The bell leapt into action immediately: the door flew open. “What, no overcoat? I won’t let you in …” but he had already stepped over the threshold, and was waving his arm and shaking his head in an attempt to overcome his shortness of breath. “Pfoof, pfoof,” he gasped, preparing himself for a wonderful embrace, and then suddenly noticed that his left hand, already extended to one side, held an unnecessary cane and his right his billfold, which he had evidently been carrying since he paid his taxi fare. “Wearing that black monster of a hat again …
Well, why are you standing there? This way.” His cane dived safely into a vaselike receptacle; his billfold, at the second thrust, found the right pocket; and his hat was hung on a hook. “Here I am,” said Luzhin, “pfoof, pfoof.” She was already far away at the far end of the entrance hall; she pushed a door sidewise, her bare arm extended along the jamb, bending her head and gaily looking up at Luzhin. And over the door, immediately over the lintel, there was a large, vivid oil painting that caught the eye. Luzhin, who normally did not notice such things, gave his attention to it because it was greasily glossed with electric light and the colors dazed him, like a sunstroke.
A village girl in a red kerchief coming down to her eyebrows was eating an apple, and her black shadow on a fence was eating a slightly larger apple. “A Russian baba,” said Luzhin with relish and laughed. “Well, come in, come in. Don’t upset that table.” He entered the drawing room and went all limp with pleasure, and his stomach, beneath the velvet waistcoat that for some reason he always wore during tournaments, quivered touchingly with laughter.
A chandelier with pale translucent pendants answered him with an oddly familiar vibration; and on the yellow parquetry that reflected the legs of Empire armchairs, a white bearskin with spread paws lay in front of the piano, as if flying in the shiny abyss of the floor. All sorts of festive-looking knickknacks were on numerous small tables, shelves and consoles, while something resembling big heavy rubles gleamed silver in a cabinet and a peacock feather stuck out from behind the frame of a mirror. And there were lots of pictures on the walls—more country girls in flowered kerchiefs, a golden bogatyr on a white draft horse, log cabins beneath blue featherbeds of snow.…
All this for Luzhin merged into an affecting glitter of color, from which a separate object would momentarily leap out—a porcelain moose or a dark-eyed icon—and then again there would be that gay rippling in his eyes, and the polar skin, which he tripped over causing one edge to reverse, turned out to have a scalloped red lining. It was more than ten years since he had been in a Russian home and now, finding himself in a house where a gaudy Russia was boldly put on display, he experienced a childish elation, a desire to clap his hands—never in his life had he felt so cozy and so at ease. “Left over from Easter,” he said with conviction, pointing with his auricular finger at a large gold-patterned wooden egg (a tombola prize from a charity ball).
At that moment a white double-leafed door burst open and a very upright gentleman with his hair en brosse and a pince-nez came swiftly into the room, one hand already stretched out. “Welcome,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” Here, like a conjuror, he opened a handmade cigarette case that had an Alexander-the-First eagle on the lid. “With mouthpieces,” said Luzhin, squinting at the cigarettes. “I don’t smoke that kind. But look …” He began to burrow in his pockets, extracting some thick cigarettes that were spilling from a paper pack; he dropped several of them and the gentleman nimbly picked them up. “My pet,” he said, “get us an ashtray. Please take a seat.
Excuse me … er … I don’t know your name and patronymic.” A crystal ashtray came down between them and simultaneously dipping their cigarettes they knocked the ends together. “J’adoube,” said the chess player good-naturedly, straightening his bent cigarette. “Never mind, never mind,” said the other quickly and expelled two thin streams of smoke through the nostrils of his suddenly narrowed nose. “Well, here you are in our good old Berlin. My daughter tells me you came for a contest.” He freed a starched cuff, placed one hand on his hip and continued: “By the way, I have always wondered, is there a move in chess that always enables one to win?
I don’t know if you understand me, but what I mean is … sorry … your name and patronymic?” “I understand,” said Luzhin, conscientiously considering for a moment. “You see, we have quiet moves and strong moves. A strong move …” “Ah yes, yes, so that’s it,” nodded the gentleman. “A strong move is one that,” continued Luzhin loudly and enthusiastically, “that immediately gives us an undoubted advantage. A double check, for example, with the taking of a heavyweight piece, or say, when a Pawn is queened. Et cetera. Et cetera. And a quiet move …” “I see, I see,” said the gentleman. “About how many days will the contest last?” “A quiet move implies trickery, subversion, complication,” said Luzhin, trying to please but also entering into the spirit of things. “Let’s take some position. White …” He pondered, staring at the ashtray. “Unfortunately,” said his host nervously, “I don’t understand anything about chess.
I only asked you … But that does not matter at all, at all. In a moment we’ll proceed to the dining room. Tell me, my pet, is tea ready?” “Yes!” exclaimed Luzhin. “We’ll simply take the endgame position at the point it was interrupted today. White: King c3, Rook al, Knight d5, Pawns b3 and c4. Black …” “A complicated thing, chess,” interjected the gentleman and jumped buoyantly to his feet, trying to cut off the flood of letters and numbers having some kind of relation to black. “Let us suppose now,” said Luzhin weightily, “that black makes the best possible move in this position—e6 to g5. To this I reply with the following quiet move …” Luzhin narrowed his eyes and almost in a whisper, pursing his lips as for a careful kiss, emitted not words, not the mere designation of a move, but something most tender and infinitely fragile.
The same expression was on his face—the expression of a person blowing a tiny feather from the face of an infant—when the following day he embodied this move on the board. The Hungarian, sallow-cheeked after a sleepless night, during which he had managed to check all the variations (leading to a draw), but had failed to notice just this one hidden combination, sank into deep meditation over the board while Luzhin, with a finicky little cough, lovingly noted his own move on a sheet of paper. The Hungarian soon resigned and Luzhin sat down to play with a Russian. The game began interestingly and soon a solid ring of spectators had formed around their table. The curiosity, the pressure, the crackling of joints, the alien breathing and most of all the whispering—whispering interrupted by a still louder and more irritating “shush!”—frequently tormented Luzhin: he used to be keenly affected by this crackling and rustling, and smelly human warmth if he did not retreat too deeply into the abysses of chess.
Out of the corner of his eye he now saw the legs of the bystanders and found particularly irritating, among all those dark trousers, a pair of woman’s feet in gleaming gray stockings and bluish shoes. These feet obviously understood nothing of the game, one wondered why they had come.… Those pointed shoes with transverse straps or something would be better clicking along the sidewalk … as far away as possible from here. While stopping his clock, jotting down a move or putting a captured piece aside he would glance askance at these motionless feminine feet, and only an hour and a half later, when he had won the game and stood up, tugging his waistcoat down, did Luzhin see that these
