She asked Luzhin in the mornings what he had dreamed, enlivened his matutinal appetite with a cutlet or English marmalade, took him for walks, lingered with him before shopwindows, read War and Peace aloud to him after dinner, played jolly geography with him and dictated sentences for him to type. Several times she took him to the museum and showed him her favorite pictures and explained that in Flanders, where they had rain and fog, painters used bright colors, while it was in Spain, a country of sunshine, that the gloomiest master of all had been born.
She said also that the one over there had a feeling for glass objects, while this one liked lilies and tender faces slightly inflamed by colds caught in heaven, and she directed his attention to two dogs domestically looking for crumbs beneath the narrow, poorly spread table of “The Last Supper.” Luzhin nodded and slit his eyes conscientiously, and was a very long time examining an enormous canvas on which the artist had depicted all the torments of sinners in hell—in great detail, very curiously. They also visited the theater and the zoo, and the movies, at which point it turned out that Luzhin had never been to the movies before.
The picture ran on in a white glow and finally, after many adventures, the girl returned—now a famous actress—to her parents’ house, and paused in the doorway, while in the room, not seeing her yet, her grizzled father was playing chess with the doctor, a faithful friend of the family who had remained completely unchanged over the years.
In the darkness came the sound of Luzhin laughing abruptly. “An absolutely impossible position for the pieces,” he said, but at this point, to his wife’s relief, everything changed and the father, growing in size, walked toward the spectators and acted his part for all he was worth; his eyes widened, then came a slight trembling, his lashes flapped, there was another bit of trembling, and slowly his wrinkles softened, grew kinder, and a slow smile of infinite tenderness appeared on his face, which continued to tremble—and yet, gentlemen, the old man had cursed his daughter in his time.…
But the doctor—the doctor stood to one side, he remembered—the poor, humble doctor—how as a young girl at the very beginning of the picture she had thrown flowers over the fence at him, while he, lying on the grass, had been reading a book: he had then raised his head and had seen only a fence; but suddenly a girl’s head with parted hair rose on the other side and then came a pair of eyes growing ever bigger—ah, what mischievousness, what playfulness!
Go on, Doctor, jump over the fence—there she runs, the sweet nymph, she’s hiding behind those trees—catch her, catch her, Doctor! But now all this is gone. Head bowed, hands limply hanging, one of them holding a hat, stands the famous actress (a fallen woman, alas!). And the father, continuing the trembling, slowly opens his arms, and suddenly she kneels before him. Luzhin began to blow his nose.
When they left the movie house he had red eyes and he cleared his throat and denied that he had been crying. And the following day over morning coffee he leaned an elbow on the table and said thoughtfully: “Very, very good—that picture.” He thought a bit more and added: But they don’t know how to play.” “What do you mean, they don’t know?” said his wife with surprise. “They were first-class actors.” Luzhin looked at her sideways and immediately averted his eyes, and there was something about this she did not like.
Suddenly she realized what was up and began to debate with herself how to make Luzhin forget this unfortunate game of chess, which that fool of a director had seen fit to introduce for the sake of “atmosphere.” But Luzhin, evidently, immediately forgot it himself—he was engrossed in some genuine Russian bread that his mother-in-law had sent, and his eyes were again quite clear.
In this way a month passed, a second. The winter that year was a white, St. Petersburg one. Luzhin was made a wadded overcoat. Indigent refugee Russians were given certain of Luzhin’s old things—including a green woolen scarf of Swiss origin. Mothballs exuded a rough-edged melancholy smell. In the entrance hall hung a condemned jacket. “It was so comfortable,” implored Luzhin, “so very comfortable.” “Leave it alone,” said his wife from the bedroom. “I haven’t looked at it yet. It’s probably teeming with moths.” Luzhin took off the dinner jacket he had been trying on to see whether he had filled out much during the past month (he had filled out, he had—and tomorrow there was a big Russian ball, a charitable affair) and slipped lovingly into the sleeves of the condemned one.
A darling jacket, not the slightest trace of moth in it. Here was just a tiny hole in the pocket, but not right through like they sometimes were. “Wonderful,” he cried in a high voice. His wife, sock in hand, looked out into the entrance hall. “Take it off, Luzhin. It’s torn and dusty, goodness knows how long it’s lain about.” “No, no,” said Luzhin. She inspected it from all sides; Luzhin stood and slapped himself on the hips, and it felt, incidentally, as if there were something in his pocket; he thrust his hand in—no, nothing, only a hole. “It’s very decrepit,” said his wife, frowning, “but perhaps as a work coat …” “I beg you,” said Luzhin.
“Well, as you wish—only give it to the maid afterwards so she can give it a good beating.” “No, it’s clean,” said Luzhin to himself and resolved to hang it somewhere in his study, in some little nook, to take it off and hang it up the way civil servants do. In taking it off he again felt as if the jacket were a trifle heavier on the left side, but he remembered that the pockets were empty and did not investigate the cause of the heaviness. As to the dinner jacket here, it had become tightish—yes, definitely tightish. “A ball,” said Luzhin, and imagined to himself lots and lots of circling couples.
The ball turned out to be taking place in one of the best hotels in Berlin. There was a crush near the cloakrooms, and the attendants were accepting things and carrying them away like sleeping children. Luzhin was given a neat metal number. He missed his wife, but found her immediately: she was standing in front of a mirror. He placed the metal disk against the tender hollow of her smooth, powdered back. “Brr, that’s cold,” she exclaimed, moving her shoulder blade. “Arm in arm, arm in arm,” said Luzhin. “We have to enter arm in arm.” And that is how they entered. The first thing Luzhin saw was his mother-in-law, looking much younger, rosy red, and wearing a magnificent, sparkling headdress—a Russian woman’s kokoshnik. She was selling punch, and an elderly Englishman (who had simply come down from his room) was quickly becoming drunk, one elbow propped on her table.
At another table, near a fir tree adorned with colored lights, there was a pile of lottery prizes: a dignified samovar with red and blue reflected lights on the tree side, dolls dressed in sarafans, a phonograph, and liqueurs (donated by Smirnovski). A third table had sandwiches, Italian salad, caviar—and a beautiful blond lady was calling to someone: “Marya Vasilyevna, Marya Vasilyevna, why did they take it away again … I had asked …” “A very good evening to you,” said somebody close by, and Mrs. Luzhin raised an arched, swanlike hand.
Farther on, in the next room, there was music, and dancers circled and marked time in the space between the tables; someone’s back banged into Luzhin at full speed, and he grunted and stepped back. His wife had disappeared, and searching for her with his eyes he set off back to the first room. Here the tombola again attracted his attention. Paying out a mark every time, he would plunge his hand into the box and fish out a tiny cylinder of rolled-up paper. Snuffling through his nose and protruding his lips, he would take a long time to unroll the paper, and finding no number inside would look to see if there was one on the other, outer side—a useless but very normal procedure.
In the end he won a children’s book, Purry-Cat or something, and not knowing what to do with it, left it on a table, where two full glasses were awaiting the return of a dancing couple. The crush and the movement and the bursts of music now got on his nerves and there was nowhere to hide, and everyone, probably, was looking at him and wondering why he did not dance. In the intervals between dances his wife looked for him in the other room, but at every step she was stopped by acquaintances.
A great many people attended this ball—there was a foreign consul, obtained with great difficulty, and a famous Russian singer, and two movie actresses. Somebody pointed out their table to her: the ladies wore artificial smiles, and their escorts—three well-fed men of the producer-businessman type—kept clucking their tongues and snapping their fingers and abusing the pale, sweating waiter for his slowness and inefficiency. One of these men seemed particularly obnoxious to her: he had very white teeth and shining brown eyes; having dealt with the waiter he began to relate something in a loud voice, sprinkling his Russian with the most hackneyed German expressions.
All at once, she felt depressed that everyone
