Farther, in a small public garden, a three-year-old boy all in red, walking unsteadily on woolen legs, made his way to a stirrup-stone, scraped off with one fingerless little hand some snow that was lying there in an appetizing hillock and raised it to his mouth, for which he was immediately seized from behind and spanked. “Oh, you poor little thing,” said Mrs. Luzhin, looking back. A bus went along the whitened asphalt, leaving two thick, black stripes behind it. From a shop of talking and playing machines came the sound of fragile music and someone closed the door so the music would not catch cold.
A dachshund with a patched, blue little overcoat and low-swinging ears stopped and sniffed the snow and Mrs. Luzhin just had time to stroke it. Something light, sharp and whitish kept striking them in the face, and when they peered at the empty sky, bright specks danced before their eyes. Mrs. Luzhin skidded and looked reproachfully at her gray snowboots. By the Russian food store they met the Alfyorov couple. “Quite a cold snap,” exclaimed Alfyorov with a shake of his yellow beard. “Don’t kiss it, the glove’s dirty,” said Mrs. Luzhin, and looking with a smile at Mrs.
Alfyorov’s enchanting, always animated face she asked why she never came to visit them. “And you’re putting on weight, sir,” growled Alfyorov, squinting playfully at Luzhin’s stomach, exaggerated by his wadded overcoat. Luzhin looked imploringly at his wife. “Remember, you’re always welcome,” she said, nodding. “Wait, Mashenka, do you know their telephone number?” asked Alfyorov. “You know? Fine. Well, so long—as they say in Soviet Russia. My deepest respects to your mother.”
“There’s something a little mean and a little pathetic about him,” said Mrs. Luzhin, taking her husband’s arm and changing step in order to match his. “But Mashenka … what a darling, what eyes.… Don’t walk so fast, dear Luzhin—it’s slippery.”
The light snow ceased to fall, a spot of sky gleamed through palely, and the flat, bloodless disk of the sun floated out. “You know what, let’s go to the right today,” suggested Mrs. Luzhin. “We’ve never been that way, I believe.” “Look, oranges,” said Luzhin with relish and recalled how his father had asserted that when you pronounce “leemon” (lemon) in Russian, you involuntarily pull a long face, but when you say “apelsin” (orange)—you give a broad smile. The salesgirl deftly spread the mouth of the paper bag and rammed the cold, pocked-red globes into it. Luzhin began to peel an orange as he walked, frowning in anticipation that the juice would squirt in his eye.
He put the peel in his pocket, because it would have stood out too vividly on the snow, and because, perhaps, you could make jam with it. “Is it good?” asked his wife. Luzhin smacked his lips on the last segment and with a contented smile was about to take his wife’s arm again, but suddenly he stopped and looked around. Having thought for a moment, he walked back to the corner and looked at the name of the street. Then he quickly caught up with his wife again and thrust out his cane in the direction of the nearest house, an ordinary gray stone house separated from the street by a small garden behind iron railings. “My dad used to reside here,” said Luzhin. “Thirty-five A.” “Thirty-five A,” his wife repeated after him, not knowing what to say and looking up at the windows. Luzhin walked on, cutting snow away from the railings with his cane.
Presently he stopped stock-still in front of a stationery store where the wax dummy of a man with two faces, one sad and the other joyful, was throwing open his jacket alternately to left and right: the fountain pen clipped into the left pocket of his white waistcoat had sprinkled the whiteness with ink, while on the right was the pen that never ran. Luzhin took a great fancy to the bifacial man and even thought of buying him. “Listen, Luzhin,” said his wife when he had had his fill of the window. “I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time—haven’t some things remained after your father’s death?
Where are they all?” Luzhin shrugged his shoulders. “There was a man called Khrushchenko,” he muttered after a while. “I don’t understand,” said his wife questioningly. “He wrote to me in Paris,” explained Luzhin reluctantly, “about the death and funeral and all that, and that he preserved the things left after the late father.” “Oh, Luzhin,” she sighed, “what you do to the language.” She reflected a moment and added: “It doesn’t matter to me, but I just thought it might be pleasant for you to have those things—as having belonged to your father.” Luzhin remained silent.
She imagined those unwanted things—perhaps the pen that old man Luzhin wrote his books with, some documents or other, photographs—and she grew sad and mentally reproached her husband for hardheartedness. “But one thing has to be done without fail,” she said decisively. “We must go to the cemetery to see his grave, to see that it’s not neglected.” “Cold and far,” said Luzhin. “We’ll do it in a day or two,” she decided. “The weather is bound to change. Careful, please—there’s a car coming.”
The weather got worse and Luzhin, remembering that depressing waste patch and the cemetery wind, begged for their trip to be postponed to the following week. The frost, incidentally, was extraordinary. They closed the ice-rink, which was always unlucky: last winter it had been thaw after thaw and a pool in place of ice, and now such a cold spell that not even schoolboys were up to skating. In the parks little, high-breasted birds lay on the snow with feet in the air. The helpless mercury, under the influence of its surroundings, fell ever lower and lower. And even the polar bears in the zoo found that the management had overdone it.
The Luzhin apartment turned out to be one of those fortunate flats with heroic central heating, where one did not have to sit around in fur coats and blankets. His wife’s parents, driven insane by the cold, were remarkably willing guests of the central heating. Luzhin, wearing the old jacket that had been saved from destruction, sat at his desk, assiduously drawing a white cube standing before him. His father-in-law walked about the study telling long, perfectly proper anecdotes or else sat on the sofa with a newspaper, from time to time breathing deep and then clearing his throat.
His mother-in-law and wife stayed by the tea table and from the study, across the dark drawing room, one could see the bright yellow lampshade in the dining room, his wife’s illuminated profile on the brown background of the sideboard and her bare arms, which, with her elbows a long way in front of her on the table, she bent back to one shoulder, her fingers interlaced, or suddenly she would smoothly stretch an arm out and touch some gleaming object on the tablecloth.
Luzhin put the cube aside, took a clean sheet of paper, prepared a tin box with buttons of watercolor in it and hastened to draw this vista, but while he was painstakingly tracing out the lines of perspective with the aid of a ruler, something changed at the far end, his wife disappeared from the vivid rectangle of the dining room and the light went out and came on again closer, in the drawing room, and no perspective existed any longer. In general he rarely got to the colors, and, indeed, preferred pencil.
The dampness of watercolors made the paper buckle unpleasantly and the wet colors would run together; on occasion it would be impossible to get rid of some extraordinarily tenacious Prussian blue—no sooner would you get a small bit of it on the very tip of your brush than it would already be running all over the enamel inside of the box, devouring the shade you had prepared and turning the water in the glass a poisonous blue.
There were thick tubes with India ink and ceruse, but the caps invariably got lost, the necks would dry up, and when he pressed too hard the tube would burst at the bottom and thence would come crawling and writhing a fat worm of goo. His daubings were fruitless and even the simplest things—a vase with flowers or a sunset copied from a travel folder of the Riviera—came out spotty, sickly, horrible. But drawing was nice. He drew his mother-in-law, and she was offended; he drew his wife in profile, and she said that if she looked like that there was no reason to marry her; on the other hand his father-in-law’s high, starched collar came out very well.
Luzhin took great pleasure in sharpening pencils and in measuring things before him, screwing up one eye and raising his pencil with his thumb pressed against it, and he would move his eraser over the paper with care, pressing with his palm on the sheet, for he knew from experience that otherwise there would come a loud crack and the sheet would crease.
And he would blow off the particles of rubber very delicately, fearing to smudge the drawing by touching it with his hand. Most of all he liked what his wife had advised him to begin with and what he constantly returned to—white cubes, pyramids, cylinders, and a fragment of plaster ornament that reminded him of drawing lessons at school—the sole, acceptable subject. He was soothed by the thin lines that he drew and redrew a hundred times, achieving a maximum of sharpness, accuracy
