There was a bay window and from there one could see a small public garden with a fountain at the end of the street. Returning to the dining table she looked through the drawing room into the distant study, at the Gobelin now in turn reduced, and then went from the dining room into the corridor and passed through the entrance hall into the bedroom.
There, pressing close up to one another, stood two flocculent beds. The lamp turned out to be in the Mauritanian style, the curtains over the windows were yellow, promising a deceptive sunlight in the mornings—and a woodcut in the wall space between the windows showed a child prodigy in a nightgown that reached to his heels playing on an enormous piano, while his father, wearing a gray dressing gown and carrying a candle, stood stock-still, with the door ajar.
Something had to be added and something taken away. A portrait of the landlady’s grandfather was removed from the drawing room and the study was hastily cleared of an Oriental-looking small table inlaid with a mother-of-pearl chessboard. The bathroom window, whose lower part was of sparkly blue-frosted glass, turned out to be cracked in its upper, transparent part and a new pane had to be put in.
In the kitchen and servant’s room the ceilings were whitewashed anew. A phonograph grew up in the shade of the drawing room palm tree. But generally speaking, as she inspected and arranged this apartment “rented with a long view but at short notice”—as her father joked—she could not throw off the thought that all this was only temporary, that no doubt it would be necessary to take Luzhin away from Berlin, to amuse him with other countries. Any future is unknown—but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny’s natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.
But how gentle and sweet Luzhin was these days; how cozily he sat at the tea table in his new suit, adorned by a smoke-colored tie, and politely, if not always in the right places, agreed with his interlocutor. His future mother-in-law told her acquaintances that Luzhin had decided to abandon chess because it took up too much of his time, but that he did not like to talk about it—and now Oleg Sergeyevich Smirnovski no longer asked for a game, but disclosed to him with a gleam in his eye the secret machinations of the Masons and even promised to give him a remarkable pamphlet to read.
In the establishments that they visited to inform officials of their intention to enter into matrimony, Luzhin conducted himself like a grown-up, carried all the documents himself, reverently and considerately, and lovingly filled in the forms, distinctly tracing out each letter. His handwriting was small, round and extraordinarily neat, and not a little time was expended in unscrewing his new fountain pen, which he somewhat affectedly shook to one side before beginning to write, and then, when he had thoroughly enjoyed the glide of the gold nib, thrust back into his breast pocket with its gleaming clip outside. And it was with pleasure that he accompanied his fiancée around the stores and waited for the interesting surprise of the apartment, which she had decided not to show him until after the wedding.
During the two weeks that their names were hung up on view, various wide-awake firms began to send them offers, sometimes to the future groom and sometimes to the future bride: vehicles for weddings and funerals (with a picture of a carriage harnessed to a pair of galloping horses), dress suits for hire, top hats, furniture, wine, halls to rent and pharmaceutical appurtenances. Luzhin conscientiously examined the illustrated catalogues and stored them in his room, at a loss to know why his fiancée was so scornful of all these interesting offers.
There were also offers of another kind. There was what Luzhin called “a small à parte” with his future father-in-law, a pleasant conversation in the course of which the latter offered to get him a job in a commercial enterprise—later on, of course, not immediately, let them live in peace for a few months. “Life, my friend, is so arranged,” it was said in this conversation, “that every second costs a man, at the very minimum estimate, of a pfennig, and that would be a beggar’s life; but you have to support a wife who is used to a certain amount of luxury.”
“Yes, yes,” said Luzhin with a beaming smile, trying to disentangle in his mind the complex computation that his interlocutor had just made with such delicate deftness. “For this you need a little more money,” the latter continued, and Luzhin held his breath in expectation of a new trick. “A second will cost you … dearer. I repeat: I am prepared at first—the first year, let’s say—to give you generous assistance, but with time … Look, come see me sometime at the office, I’ll show you some interesting things.”
Thus in the most pleasant manner possible people and things around him tried to adorn the emptiness of Luzhin’s life. He allowed himself to be lulled, spoiled and titillated, and with his soul rolled up in a ball he accepted the caressive life that enveloped him from all sides. The future appeared to him vaguely as a long, silent embrace in a blissful penumbra, through which the diverse playthings of this world of ours would pass by, entering a ray of light and then disappearing again, laughing and swaying as they went.
But at unavoidable moments of solitude during his engagement, late at night or early in the morning, there would be a sensation of strange emptiness, as if the colorful jigsaw puzzle done on the tablecloth had proved to contain curiously shaped blank spots. And once he dreamt he saw Turati sitting with his back to him.
Turati was deep in thought, leaning on one arm, but from behind his broad back it was impossible to see what it was he was bending over and pondering. Luzhin did not want to see what it was, was afraid to see, but nonetheless he cautiously began to look over the black shoulder. And then he saw that a bowl of soup stood before Turati and that he was not leaning on his arm but was merely tucking a napkin into his collar. And on the November day which this dream preceded Luzhin was married.
Oleg Sergeyevich Smirnovski and a certain Baltic baron were witnesses when Luzhin and his bride were led into a large room and seated at a long, cloth-covered table. An official changed his jacket for a worn frock coat and read the marriage sentence. At this everyone stood up. After which with a professional smile and a humid handshake the official paid his respects to the newlyweds and everything was over. A fat janitor by the door bowed to them in expectation of a tip, and Luzhin good-naturedly proffered his hand, which the other received upon his palm, not realizing at first that this was a human hand and not a handout.
That same day there was also a church wedding. The last time Luzhin had been in church was many years ago, at his mother’s funeral. Peering further into the depths of the past he remembered nocturnal returns on Catkin Night, holding a candle whose flame darted about in his hands, maddened at being carried out of the warm church into the unknown darkness, and finally died of a heart attack at the corner of the street where a gust of wind bore down from the Neva. There had been confession at the chapel on Pochtamtskaya Street, and footfalls had a special way of resounding in its twilight emptiness and the chairs moved with the sound of throats being cleared, and the waiting people sat one behind the other, and from time to time a whisper would burst out from the mysteriously curtained corner.
And he remembered the nights at Easter: the deacon would read in a sobbing bass voice, and still sobbing would close the enormous gospel with a sweeping gesture.… And he remembered how airy and penetrating, so that it evoked a sucking sensation in the epigaster, the Greek word “pascha” (paschal cake) sounded on an empty stomach when it was pronounced by the emaciated priest; and he remembered how difficult it always was to catch the moment when the smoothly swaying censer was aimed at you, precisely at you and not at your neighbor, and to bow so that the bow came exactly on the thurible’s swing.
There was a smell of incense and the hot fall of a drop of wax on the knuckles of one’s hand, and the dark, honey-hued luster of the icon awaiting one’s kiss. Languorous recollections, duskiness, fitful gleams, saporous church air, and pins and needles in the legs. And to all this now was added a veiled bride, and a crown that trembled in the air over his very head and looked as if it might fall at any minute. He squinted up at it cautiously and it seemed to him
