It is amazingly easy dancing with you.” With this the conversation usually ended, they liked to dance with her but they did not know exactly what to talk about. A rather pretty but boring young lady. And that strange marriage to an unsuccessful musician, or something of that sort. “What did you say—a former socialist? A what? A player? A card player? Do you ever visit them, Oleg Sergeyevich?”
In the meantime Luzhin had found a deep armchair not far from the staircase and was looking at the crowd from behind a column and smoking his thirteenth cigarette. Into another armchair next to him, after making a preliminary inquiry as to whether it was taken or not, settled a swarthy gentleman with a tiny mustache. People still continued to go by and Luzhin gradually became frightened. There was nowhere he could look without meeting inquisitive eyes and from the accursed necessity of looking somewhere he fixed on the mustache of his neighbor, who evidently was also staggered and perplexed by all this noisy and unnecessary commotion.
This person, feeling Luzhin’s gaze on him, turned his face to him. “It’s a long time since I was at a ball,” he said amiably and grinned, shaking his head. “The main thing is not to look,” uttered Luzhin hollowly, using his hands as a form of blinkers. “I’ve come a long way,” explained the man. “A friend dragged me here. To tell the truth, I’m tired.” “Tiredness and heaviness,” nodded Luzhin. “Who knows what it all means? It surpasses my conception.” “Particularly when you work, as I do, on a Brazilian plantation,” said the gentleman. “Plantation,” repeated Luzhin after him like an echo.
“You have an odd way of living here,” continued the stranger. “The world is open on all four sides and here they are pounding out Charlestons on an extremely restricted fragment of floor.” “I’m also going away,” said Luzhin. “I’ve got the travel folders.” “There is nothing like freedom,” exclaimed the stranger. “Free wanderings and a favorable wind. And what wonderful countries.… I met a German botanist in the forest beyond Rio Negro and lived with the wife of a French engineer on Madagascar.” “I must get their folders, too,” said Luzhin. “Very attractive things—folders. Everything in great detail.”
“Luzhin, so that’s where you are!” suddenly cried his wife’s voice; she was passing quickly by on her father’s arm. “I’ll be back immediately, I’ll just get a table for us,” she cried, looking over her shoulder, and disappeared. “Is your name Luzhin?” asked the gentleman curiously. “Yes, yes,” said Luzhin, “but it’s of no importance.” “I knew one Luzhin,” said the gentleman, screwing up his eyes (for memory is shortsighted). “I knew one.
You didn’t happen to go to the Balashevski school, did you?” “Suppose I did,” replied Luzhin, and seized by an unpleasant suspicion he began to examine his companion’s face. “In that case we were classmates!” exclaimed the other. “My name is Petrishchev. Do you remember me? Oh, of course you remember! What a coincidence. I would never have recognized you by your face. Tell me, Luzhin … Your first name and patronymic? …
Ah, I seem to remember—Tony … Anton … What next?” “You’re mistaken, mistaken,” said Luzhin with a shudder. “Yes, my memory is bad,” continued Petrishchev. “I’ve forgotten lots of names. For instance, do you remember that quiet boy we had? Later he lost an arm fighting under Wrangel, just before the evacuation. I saw him in church in Paris. Hm, what’s his name now?” “Why is all this necessary?” said Luzhin. “Why talk about it so much?” “No, I don’t remember,” sighed Petrishchev, tearing his palm from his forehead. “But then, for instance, there was Gromov: he’s also in Paris now; fixed himself up nicely, it seems.
But where are the others? Where are they all? Dispersed, gone up in smoke. It’s odd to think about it. Well, and how are you getting on, Luzhin, how are you getting on, old boy?” “All right,” said Luzhin and averted his eyes from the expansive Petrishchev, seeing his face suddenly as it had been then: small, pink, and unbearably mocking. “Wonderful times, they were,” cried Petrishchev. “Do you remember our geographer, Luzhin?
How he used to fly like a hurricane into the classroom, holding a map of the world? And that little old man—oh, again I’ve forgotten the name—do you remember how he used to shake all over and say: ‘Get on with you, pshaw, you noodle’? Wonderful times. And how we used to whip down those stairs, into the yard, you remember? And how it turned out at the school party that Arbuzov could play the piano? Do you remember how his experiments never used to come off?
And how we thought up a rhyme for him—‘booze off’?” “… just don’t react,” Luzhin said quickly to himself. “And all that’s vanished,” continued Petrishchev. “Here we are at a ball.… Oh, by the way, I seem to remember … you took up something, some occupation, when you left school. What was it? Yes, of course—chess!” “No, no,” said Luzhin. “Why on earth must you …” “Oh, excuse me,” said Petrishchev affably. “Then I’m getting mixed up. Yes, yes, that’s how it is.… The ball’s in full swing, and we’re sitting here talking about the past. You know I’ve traveled the whole world.… What women in Cuba! Or that time in the jungle, for instance …”
“It’s all lies,” sounded a lazy voice from behind. “He was never in any jungle whatsoever.…”
“Now why do you spoil everything?” drawled Petrishchev, turning around. “Don’t listen to him,” continued a bald, lanky person, the owner of the lazy voice. “He has been living in France since the Revolution and left Paris for the first time the day before yesterday.” “Luzhin, allow me to introduce you,” began Petrishchev with a laugh; but Luzhin hastily made off, tucking his head into his shoulders and weaving strangely and quivering from the speed of his walk.
“Gone,” said Petrishchev in astonishment, and added thoughtfully, “After all, it may be I took him for somebody else.”
Stumbling into people and exclaiming in a tearful voice “pardon, pardon!” and still stumbling into people and trying not to see their faces, Luzhin looked for his wife, and when he finally caught sight of her he seized her by the elbow from behind, so that she started and turned around; but at first he was unable to say anything, he was puffing too much. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he muttered, still holding her by the elbow. “Calm down, please, Luzhin, that’s not necessary,” she said, nudging him slightly to one side so that the bystanders could not hear. “Why do you want to go?” “There’s a man there,” said Luzhin, breathing jerkily. “And such an unpleasant conversation.” “… whom you knew before?” she asked quietly. “Yes, yes,” nodded Luzhin. “Let’s go. I beg you.”
Half closing his eyes so that Petrishchev would not notice him, he pushed his way through to the vestibule, began to rummage in his pockets, looking for his tag, found it at last after several enormous seconds of confusion and despair and shuffled this way and that impatiently while the cloakroom attendant, like a somnambulist, looked for his things.… He was the first to get dressed and the first to go out and his wife swiftly followed him, pulling her moleskin coat together as she went.
Only in the car did Luzhin begin to breathe freely, and his expression of distracted sullenness gave way to a guilty half-smile. “Dear Luzhin met a nasty person,” said his wife, stroking his hand. “A schoolfellow—a suspicious character,” explained Luzhin. “But now dear Luzhin’s all right,” whispered his wife and kissed his soft hand. “Now everything’s gone,” said Luzhin.
But this was not quite so. Something remained—a riddle, a splinter. At nights he began to meditate over why this meeting had made him so uneasy. Of course there were all sorts of individual unpleasantnesses—the fact that Petrishchev had once tormented him in school and had now referred obliquely to a certain torn book about little Tony, and the fact that a whole world, full of exotic temptations, had turned out to be a braggart’s rigmarole, and it would no longer be possible in future to trust travel folders. But it was not the meeting itself that was frightening but something else—this meeting’s secret meaning that he had to divine. He began to think intensely at nights, the way Sherlock had been wont to do over cigar ash—and gradually it began to seem that the combination was even more complex than he had at first thought, that the meeting with Petrishchev was only the continuation of something, and that it was necessary to look deeper, to return and replay all the moves of his life from his illness until the ball.
Chapter 13
On a grayish-blue rink (where there were tennis courts in summer), lightly powdered with snow, the townsfolk were disporting themselves cautiously, and at the very moment the Luzhins passed by on their morning stroll, the sprightliest of the skaters, a besweatered young fellow, gracefully launched into a Dutch step and sat
