And in the vast, fragrant garden of the sanatorium Luzhin went strolling in new bedroom slippers made of soft leather and registered his approval of the dahlias, while beside him walked his fiancée and thought for some reason of a book she had read in childhood in which all the difficulties in the life of a schoolboy, who had run away from home together with a dog he had saved, were resolved by a convenient (for the author) fever—not typhus, not scarlet fever, but just “a fever”—and the young stepmother whom he had not loved hitherto so cared for him that he suddenly began to appreciate her and would call her Mamma, and a warm tearlet would roll down her face and everything was fine.
“Luzhin is well,” she said with a smile, looking at his ponderous profile (the profile of a flabbier Napoleon) as it bent apprehensively over a flower, which maybe might bite. “Luzhin is well. Luzhin is out for a walk. Luzhin is very sweet.” “It doesn’t smell,” said Luzhin in a thick, small voice. “Nor should it smell,” she replied taking him by the arm. “Dahlias aren’t supposed to. But see that white flower over there—that’s Mister Tabacum—and he has a strong smell at night. When I was little I always used to suck the sap out of the corolla. Now I don’t like it any more.” “In our garden in Russia …” began Luzhin and became thoughtful, squinting at the flower beds. “We had these flowers over here,” he said. “Our garden was quite a presentable one.” “Asters,” she explained. “I don’t like them. They’re coarse. Now in our garden …”
In general there was a lot of talk about childhood. The professor talked about it too and questioned Luzhin. “Your father owned land, didn’t he?” Luzhin nodded. “Land, the country—that’s excellent,” continued the professor. “You probably had horses and cows?” A nod. “Let me imagine your house—Ancient trees all around … the house large and bright. Your father returns from the hunt …” Luzhin recalled that his father had once found a fat, nasty little fledgling in a ditch. “Yes,” replied Luzhin uncertainly. “Some details,” asked the professor softly. “Please. I beg you. I’m interested in the way you occupied yourself in childhood, what you played with. You had some tin soldiers, I’m sure.…”
But Luzhin rarely grew enlivened during these conversations. On the other hand, constantly nudged by such interrogations, his thoughts would return again and again to the sphere of his childhood. It was impossible to express his recollections in words—there simply were no grown-up words for his childish impressions—and if he ever related anything, then he did so jerkily and unwillingly—rapidly sketching the outlines and marking a complex move, rich in possibilities, with just a letter and a number. His preschool, pre-chess childhood, which he had never thought about before, dismissing it with a slight shudder so as not to find dormant horrors and humiliating insults there, proved now to be an amazingly safe spot, where he could take pleasant excursions that sometimes brought a piercing pleasure.
Luzhin himself was unable to understand whence the excitement—why the image of the fat French governess with the three bone buttons on one side of her skirt, that drew together whenever she lowered her enormous croup into an armchair—why the image that had then so irritated him, now evoked in his breast a feeling of tender constriction. He recalled that in their St. Petersburg house her asthmatic obesity had preferred to the staircase the old-fashioned, water-powered elevator which the janitor used to set in motion by means of a lever in the vestibule. “Here we go,” the janitor said invariably as he closed the door leaves behind her, and the heavy, puffing, shuddering elevator would creep slowly upwards on its thick velvet cable, and past it, down the peeling wall that was visible through the glass, would come dark geographic patches, those patches of dampness and age among which, as among the clouds in the sky, the reigning fashion is for silhouettes of Australia and the Black Sea.
Sometimes little Luzhin would go up with her, but more often he stayed below and listened to the elevator, high up and behind the wall, struggling upwards—and he always hoped, did little Luzhin, that it would get stuck halfway. Often enough this happened. The noise would cease and from unknown, intermural space would come a wail for help: the janitor below would move the lever, with a grunt of effort, then open the door into blackness and ask briskly, looking upwards: “Moving?”
Finally something would shudder and stir and after a little while the elevator would descend—now empty. Empty. Goodness knows what had happened to her—perhaps she had traveled up to heaven and remained there with her asthma, her liquorice candies and her pince-nez on a black cord. The recollection also came back empty, and for the first time in all his life, perhaps, Luzhin asked himself the question—where exactly had it all gone, what had become of his childhood, whither had the veranda floated, whither, rustling through the bushes, had the familiar paths crept away?
With an involuntary movement of the soul he looked for these paths in the sanatorium garden, but the flower beds had a different outline, the birches were placed differently, and the gaps in their russet foliage, filled with autumn blue, in no way corresponded to the remembered gaps into which he tried to fit these cut-out pieces of azure. It seemed as though that distant world was unrepeatable; through it roamed the by now completely bearable images of his parents, softened by the haze of time, and the clockwork train with its tin car painted to look like paneling went buzzing under the flounces of the armchair, and goodness knows how this affected the dummy engine driver, too big for the locomotive and hence placed in the tender.
That was the childhood Luzhin now visited willingly in his thoughts. It was followed by another period, a long, chess period that both the doctor and his fiancée called lost years, a dark period of spiritual blindness, a dangerous delusion—lost, lost years. They did not bear recollection. Lurking there like an evil spirit was the somehow terrible image of Valentinov. All right, we agree, that will do—lost years—away with them—they are forgotten—crossed out of life.
And once they were thus excluded, the light of childhood merged directly with the present light and its flow formed the image of his fiancée. Her being expressed all the gentleness and charm that could be extracted from his recollections of childhood—as if the dapples of light scattered over the footpaths of the manor garden had now grown together into a single warm radiance.
“Feeling happy?” asked her mother dejectedly, looking at her animated face. “Shall we soon be celebrating a wedding?” “Soon,” she replied and threw her small round gray hat on the couch. “In any case he’s leaving the sanatorium in a day or two.” “It’s costing your father a pretty penny—about a thousand marks.” “I’ve just scoured through all the book stores,” sighed the daughter, “he absolutely had to have Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes.
And it turns out he’s never read Tolstoy.” “Naturally, he’s a peasant,” muttered her mother. “I always said so.” “Listen, Mamma,” she said, lightly slapping her glove against the package of books, “let’s make an agreement. From today on let’s have no more of these cracks. It is stupid, degrading for you, and, above all, completely pointless.” “Then don’t marry him,” said the mother, her face working. “Don’t marry him. I beseech you. Why, if you like—I’ll throw myself on my knees before you—” And leaning one elbow on the armchair she started with difficulty to bend her leg, slowly lowering her large, slightly creaking body. “You’ll cave the floor in,” said her daughter, and picking up the books went out of the room.
Luzhin read Fogg’s journey and Holmes’ memoirs in two days, and when he had read them he said they were not what he wanted—this was an incomplete edition. Of the other books, he liked Anna Karenin—particularly the pages on the zemstvo elections and the dinner ordered by Oblonski. Dead Souls also made a certain impression on him, moreover in one place he unexpectedly recognized a whole section that he had once taken down in childhood as a long and painful dictation.
Besides the so-called classics his fiancée brought him all sorts of frivolous French novels. Everything that could divert Luzhin was good—even these doubtful stories, which he read, though embarrassed, with interest. Poetry, on the other hand (for instance a small volume of Rilke’s that she had bought on the recommendation of a salesman) threw him into a state of severe perplexity and sorrow. Correspondingly, the professor forbade Luzhin to be given anything by Dostoevski, who, in the professor’s words, had an oppressive effect on the psyche of contemporary man, for as in a terrible mirror—
“Oh, Mr. Luzhin doesn’t brood over books,” she said cheerfully. “And he understands poetry badly because of the rhymes, the rhymes put him off.”
And strangely enough: in spite of the fact that Luzhin had read still fewer books in his life than she in hers, had never finished high school and had been interested in nothing but chess—she felt in him the ghost of a culture that she herself lacked. There
