Next to Luzhin senior stood the literature teacher and when the large gray rubber ball the boys used for soccer happened to roll up to his feet, the literature teacher, instinctively continuing that enchanting tradition, made as if he wanted to kick it, but only shifted awkwardly from foot to foot and almost lost one of his galoshes, and laughed with great good humor.
The father supported him by the elbow, and Luzhin junior, grasping the opportunity, returned to the vestibule, where all was now quiet and where the janitor, concealed by clothes racks, was heard yawning blissfully. Through the glass of the door, between the cast-iron rays of the star-shaped grille, he saw his father suddenly remove his glove, quickly take leave of the teacher and disappear through the gate. Only then did he creep out again, and, carefully skirting the players, make his way left to where firewood was stacked under the archway. There, raising his collar, he sat down on a pile of logs.
In this way he sat through approximately two hundred and fifty long intermissions, until the year that he was taken abroad. Sometimes the teacher would suddenly appear from around a corner. “Why are you always sitting in a heap, Luzhin? You should run about a bit with the other boys.” Luzhin would get up from the woodpile, trying to find a point equidistant from those three of his classmates who were especially fierce at this hour, shy away from the ball propelled by someone’s resounding kick and, having reassured himself that the teacher was far off, would return to the woodpile.
He had chosen this spot on the very first day, on that dark day when he had discovered such hatred and derisive curiosity around him that his eyes had automatically filled with a burning mist, and everything he looked at—out of the accursed necessity of looking at something—was subject to intricate, optical metamorphoses. The page with crisscross blue lines grew blurry; the white numbers on the blackboard alternately contracted and broadened; the arithmetic teacher’s voice, as if steadily receding, would get more and more hollow and incomprehensible, and his desk neighbor, an insidious brute with down on his cheeks, would say with quiet satisfaction: “Now he’s going to cry.” But Luzhin never once cried, not even in the lavatory when they made a concerted effort to thrust his head into the low bowl with yellow bubbles in it. “Gentlemen,” the teacher had said at one of the first lessons, “your new comrade is the son of a writer.
Whom, if you haven’t read him, you should proceed to read.” And in large letters he wrote on the board, pressing so hard that the chalk was pulverized crunchingly beneath his fingers: TONY’S ADVENTURES, SILVESTROV AND Co. PUBLISHERS. During two or three months after that his classmates called him Tony. With a mysterious air the downy-cheeked brute brought the book to class and during the lesson stealthily showed it to the others, casting significant glances at his victim—and when the lesson was over began to read aloud from the middle, purposely mangling the words.
Petrishchev, who was looking over his shoulder, wanted to hold back a page and it tore. Krebs gabbled: “My dad says he’s a very second-rate writer.” Gromov shouted: “Let Tony read to us aloud!” “Better to give everybody a piece each,” said the clown of the class with gusto, and took possession of the handsome red and gold book after a stormy struggle. Pages were scattered over the whole classroom. One of them had a picture on it—a bright-eyed schoolboy on a street corner feeding his luncheon to a scruffy dog. The following day Luzhin found this picture neatly tacked on to the underside of his desk lid.
Soon, however, they left him in peace; only his nickname flared up from time to time, but since he stubbornly refused to answer it that too finally died down. They stopped taking any notice of Luzhin and did not speak to him, and even the sole quiet boy in the class (the sort there is in every class, just as there are invariably a fat boy, a strong boy and a wit) steered clear of him, afraid of sharing his despicable condition.
This same quiet boy, who six years later, in the beginning of World War One, received the St. George Cross for an extremely dangerous reconnaisance and later lost an arm in the civil war, when trying to recall (in the twenties of the present century) what Luzhin had been like in school, could not visualize him otherwise than from the rear, either sitting in front of him in class with protruding ears, or else receding to one end of the hall as far away as possible from the hubbub, or else departing for home in a sleigh cab—hands in pockets, a large piebald satchel on his back, snow falling.… He tried to run ahead and look at Luzhin’s face, but that special snow of oblivion, abundant and soundless snow, covered his recollection with an opaque white mist. And the former quiet boy, now a restless émigré, said as he looked at a picture in the newspaper: “Imagine, I just can’t remember his face.… Just can’t remember.…”
But Luzhin senior, peering through the window around four o’clock, would see the approaching sleigh and his son’s face like a pale spot. The boy usually came straight to his study, kissed the air as he touched his father’s cheek with his and immediately turned away. “Wait,” his father would say, “wait. Tell me how it was today.
Were you called to the blackboard?”
He would look greedily at his son, who turned his face away, and would want to take him by the shoulders, shake him and kiss him soundly on his pale cheek, on the eyes and on his tender, concave temple. From anemic little Luzhin that first school winter came a touching smell of garlic as a result of the arsenic injections prescribed by the doctor. His platinum band had been removed, but he continued to bare his teeth and curl his upper lip out of habit.
He wore a gray Norfolk jacket with a strap at the back, and knickerbockers with buttons below the knee. He would stand by the desk, balancing on one leg, and his father did not dare to do anything against his impenetrable sullenness. Little Luzhin would go away, trailing his satchel over the carpet; Luzhin senior would lean his elbow on the desk, where he was writing one of his usual stories in blue exercise books (a whim which, perhaps, some future biographer would appreciate), and listen to the monologue in the neighboring dining room, to his wife’s voice persuading the silence to drink a cup of cocoa. A frightening silence, thought Luzhin senior. He’s not well, he has a painful inner life of some sort.… Perhaps he shouldn’t have been sent to school. But on the other hand he has to get used to being with other lads.… An enigma, an enigma.…
“Well, take some cake, then,” the voice behind the wall would continue sorrowfully, and again silence. But sometimes something horrible occurred: suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, another voice would reply, strident and hoarse, and the door would slam as if shut by a hurricane. Then Luzhin senior would jump up and make for the dining room, holding his pen like a dart. With trembling hands his wife would be setting aright an overturned cup and saucer and trying to see if there were any cracks. “I was asking him about school,” she would say, not looking at her husband. “He didn’t want to answer and then—like a madman …” They would both listen.
The French governess had left that autumn for Paris and now nobody knew what he did there in his room. The wallpaper there was white, and higher up was a blue band on which were drawn gray geese and ginger puppies. A goose advanced on a pup and so on thirty-eight times around the entire room. An étagère supported a globe and a stuffed squirrel, bought once on Palm Sunday at the Catkin Fair. A green clockwork locomotive peeped out from beneath the flounces of an armchair. It was a nice bright room. Gay wallpaper, gay objects.
There were also books. Books written by his father, with red and gold embossed bindings and a handwritten inscription on the first page: I earnestly hope that my son will always treat animals and people the same way as Tony, and a big exclamation mark. Or: I wrote this book thinking of your future, my son. These inscriptions inspired in him a vague feeling of shame for his father, and the books themselves were as boring as Korolenko’s The Blind Musician or Goncharov’s The
