A large volume of Pushkin with a picture of a thick-lipped, curly-haired boy on it was never opened. On the other hand there were two books, both given him by his aunt, with which he had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained.
But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion.
The conjuror whom his parents engaged to perform on Christmas day somehow managed to blend in himself briefly both Fogg and Holmes, and the strange pleasure which Luzhin experienced on that day obliterated all the unpleasantness that accompanied the performance. Since requests—cautious infrequent requests—to “invite your school friends” never led to anything, Luzhin senior, confident that it would be both enjoyable and useful, got in touch with two acquaintances whose children attended the same school, and he also invited the children of a distant relative, two quiet, flabby little boys and a pale little girl with a thick braid of black hair.
All the boys invited wore sailor suits and smelled of hair oil. Two of them little Luzhin recognized with horror as Bersenev and Rosen from Class Three, who at school were always dressed sloppily and behaved violently. “Well, here we are,” said Luzhin senior, joyfully holding his son by the shoulder (the shoulder slowly sliding out from under his hand). “Now I’ll leave you alone. Get to know one another and play for a while—and later you’ll be called, we have a surprise for you.” Half an hour later he went to call them. In the room there was silence. The little girl was sitting in a corner and leafing through the supplement to the review Niva (The Cornfield), looking for pictures.
Bersenev and Rosen were self-consciously sitting on the sofa, both very red and shiny with pomade. The flabby nephews wandered around the room examining without interest the English woodcuts on the walls, the globe, the squirrel and a long since broken pedometer lying on a table. Luzhin himself, also wearing a sailor suit, with a whistle on a white cord on his chest, was sitting on a hard chair by the window, glowering and biting his thumbnail. But the conjuror made up for everything and even when on the following day Bersenev and Rosen, by this time again their real disgusting selves, came up to him in the school hall and bowed low, afterwards breaking into vulgar guffaws of laughter and quickly departing, arm in arm and swaying from side to side—even then this mockery was unable to break the spell.
Upon his sullen request—whatever he said nowadays his brows came painfully together—his mother brought him from the Bazaar a large box painted a mahogany color and a book of tricks with a bemedaled gentleman in evening dress on the cover lifting a rabbit by its ears. Inside the box were smaller boxes with false bottoms, a wand covered with starry paper, a pack of crude cards where the picture cards were half jacks or half kings and half sheep in uniforms, a folding top hat with compartments, a rope with two wooden gadgets at the ends whose function was unclear. And there also were coquettish little envelopes containing powders for tinting water blue, red and green.
The book was much more entertaining, and Luzhin had no difficulty in learning several card tricks which he spent hours showing to himself before the mirror. He found a mysterious pleasure, a vague promise of still unfathomed delights, in the crafty and accurate way a trick would come out, but still there was something missing, he could not grasp that secret which the conjuror had evidently mastered in order to be able to pluck a ruble out of the air or extract the seven of clubs, tacitly chosen by the audience, from the ear of an embarrassed Rosen. The complicated accessories described in the book irritated him. The secret for which he strove was simplicity, harmonious simplicity, which can amaze one far more than the most intricate magic.
In the written report on his progress that was sent at Christmas, in this extremely detailed report where under the rubric of General Remarks they spoke at length, pleonastically, of his lethargy, apathy, sleepiness and sluggishness and where marks were replaced by epithets, there turned out to be one “unsatisfactory” in Russian language and several “barely satisfactory”s—among other things, in mathematics. However, it was just at this time that he had become extraordinarily engrossed in a collection of problems entitled “Merry Mathematics,” in the fantastical misbehavior of numbers and the wayward frolics of geometric lines, in everything that the Schoolbook lacked.
He experienced both bliss and horror in contemplating the way an inclined line, rotating spokelike, slid upwards along another, vertical one—in an example illustrating the mysteries of parallelism. The vertical one was infinite, like all lines, and the inclined one, also infinite, sliding along it and rising ever higher as its angle decreased, was doomed to eternal motion, for it was impossible for it to slip off, and the point of their intersection, together with his soul, glided upwards along an endless path. But with the aid of a ruler he forced them to unlock: he simply redrew them, parallel to one another, and this gave him the feeling that out there, in infinity, where he had forced the inclined line to jump off, an unthinkable catastrophe had taken place, an inexplicable miracle, and he lingered long in those heavens where earthly lines go out of their mind.
For a while he found an illusory relief in jigsaw puzzles. At first they were simple childish ones, consisting of large pieces cut out with rounded teeth at the edges, like petitbeurre cookies, which interlocked so tenaciously that it was possible to lift whole sections of the puzzle without breaking them. But that year there came from England the fad of jigsaw puzzles invented for adults—“poozels” as they called them at the best toyshop in Petersburg—which were cut out with extraordinary ingenuity: pieces of all shapes, from a simple disk (part of a future blue sky) to the most intricate forms, rich in corners, capes, isthmuses, cunning projections, which did not allow you to tell where they were supposed to fit—whether they were to fill up the piebald hide of a cow, already almost completed, or whether this dark border on a green background was the shadow of the crook of a shepherd whose ear and part of whose head were plainly visible on a more outspoken piece.
And when a cow’s haunch gradually appeared on the left, and on the right, against some foliage, a hand with a shepherd’s pipe, and when the empty space above became built up with heavenly blue, and the blue disk fitted smoothly into the sky, Luzhin felt wonderfully stirred by the precise combinations of these varicolored pieces that formed at the last moment an intelligible picture.
Some of these brain-twisters were very expensive and consisted of several thousand pieces; they were brought by his young aunt, a gay, tender, red-haired aunt—and he would spend hours bent over a card table in the drawing room, measuring with his eyes each projection before trying if it would fit into this or that gap and attempting to determine by scarcely perceptible signs the essence of the picture in advance.
From the next room, full of the noise of guests, his aunt would plead: “For goodness’ sake, don’t lose any of the pieces!” Sometimes his father would come in, look at the puzzle and stretch out a hand tableward, saying: “Look, this undoubtedly goes in here,” and then Luzhin without looking round would mutter: “Rubbish, rubbish, don’t interfere,” and his father would cautiously apply his lips to the tuffed top of his son’s head and depart—past the gilded chairs, past the vast mirror, past the reproduction of Phryne Taking Her Bath, past the piano—a large silent piano shod with thick glass and caparisoned with a brocaded cloth.
Chapter 3
Only in April, during the Easter holidays, did that inevitable day come for Luzhin when the whole world suddenly went dark, as if someone had thrown a switch, and in the darkness only one thing remained brilliantly lit, a newborn wonder, a dazzling islet on which his whole life was destined to be concentrated. The happiness onto which he fastened came to stay; that April day froze forever, while somewhere else the movement of seasons, the city spring, the country summer,
