On the way he happened to run into the geography teacher, who with enormous strides, a briefcase under his arm, was rushing in the direction of school, blowing his nose and expectorating phlegm as he went. Luzhin turned aside so abruptly that a mysterious object rattled heavily in his satchel.
Only when the teacher, like a blind wind, had swept past him did Luzhin become aware that he was standing before a hairdresser’s window and that the frizzled heads of three waxen ladies with pink nostrils were staring directly at him. He took a deep breath and swiftly walked along the wet sidewalk, unconsciously trying to adjust his steps so that his heel always landed on a join between two paving slabs.
But the slabs were all of different widths and this hampered his walk. Then he stepped down onto the pavement in order to escape temptation and sloshed on in the mud along the edge of the sidewalk. Finally he caught sight of the house he wanted, plum-colored, with naked old men straining to hold up a balcony, and stained glass in the front door. He turned in at the gate past a spurstone showing the white marks of pigeons, stole across an inner court where two individuals with rolled-up sleeves were washing a dazzling carriage, went up a staircase and rang the bell. “She’s still asleep,” said the maid, looking at him with surprise. “Wait here, won’t you? I’ll let Madam know in a while.”
Luzhin shrugged off his satchel in businesslike fashion and laid it beside him on the table, which also bore a porcelain inkwell, a blotting case embroidered with beads, and an unfamiliar picture of his father (a book in one hand, a finger of the other pressed to his temple), and from nothing better to do he commenced to count the different hues in the carpet.
He had been in this room only once before, last Christmas—when, on his father’s advice, he had taken his aunt a large box of chocolates, half of which he had himself eaten and the remainder of which he had rearranged so that it would not be noticed. Up until just recently his aunt had been at their place every day, but now she had stopped coming and there was something in the air, some elusive interdiction, that prevented him from asking about it at home.
Having counted up to nine different shades he shifted his gaze to a silk screen embroidered with rushes and storks. He had just begun to wonder whether similar storks were on the other side as well when at last his aunt came—her hair not yet done and wearing a kind of flowery kimono with sleeves like wings. “Where did you spring from?” she exclaimed. “And what about school? Oh what a funny boy you are.…”
Two hours later he again emerged onto the street. His satchel, now empty, was so light that it bounced on his shoulder blades. He had to pass time somehow until the usual hour of return. He wandered into Tavricheski Park, and the emptiness in his satchel gradually began to annoy him. In the first place the thing he had left as a precaution with his aunt might somehow get lost before next time, and in the second place it would have come in handy at home during the evenings. He resolved to act differently in future.
“Family circumstances,” he replied the next day when the teacher casually inquired why he had not been in school. On Thursday he left school early and missed three days in a row, explaining afterwards that he had had a sore throat. On Wednesday he had a relapse.
On Saturday he was late for the first lesson even though he had left home earlier than usual. On Sunday he amazed his mother by announcing that he had been invited to a friend’s house—and he was away five hours. On Wednesday school broke up early (it was one of those wonderful blue dusty days at the very end of April when the end of the school term is already imminent and such indolence overcomes one), but he did not get home until much later than usual. And then there was a whole week of absence—a rapturous intoxicating week. The teacher telephoned his home to find out what was the matter with him. His father answered the phone.
When Luzhin returned home around four o’clock in the afternoon his father’s face was gray, his eyes bulging, while his mother gasped as if deprived of her tongue and then began to laugh unnaturally and hysterically, with wails and cries. After a moment’s confusion Father led him without a word into his study and there, with arms folded across his chest, requested an explanation. Luzhin, holding the heavy and precious satchel under his arm, stared at the floor, wondering whether his aunt was capable of betrayal. “Kindly give me an explanation,” repeated his father.
She was incapable of betrayal and in any case how could she know he had been caught? “You refuse?” asked his father. Besides, she somehow seemed even to like his truancy. “Now listen,” said his father conciliatorily, “let’s talk as friends.” Luzhin sighed and sat on the arm of a chair, continuing to look at the floor. “As friends,” repeated his father still more soothingly. “So now it turns out you have missed school several times. So now I would like to know where you have been and what you have been doing. I can even understand that, for instance, the weather is fine and one gets the urge to go for walks.” “Yes, I get the urge,” said Luzhin indifferently, growing bored. His father wanted to know where exactly he had gone for a walk and whether his need of walks was long-standing.
Then he reminded him that every man has his duty as citizen, as family man, as soldier, and also as schoolboy. Luzhin yawned. “Go to your room!” said his father hopelessly and when his son had left he stood for a long time in the middle of his study and looked at the door in blank horror. His wife, who had been listening from the next room, came in, sat on the edge of the divan and again burst into tears. “He cheats,” she kept repeating, “just as you cheat. I’m surrounded by cheats.” He merely shrugged his shoulders and thought how sad life was, how difficult to do one’s duty, not to meet anymore, not to telephone, not to go where he was irresistibly drawn … and now this trouble with his son … this oddity, this stubbornness … A sad state of affairs, a very sad state.…
Chapter 4
In Grandfather’s former study, which even on the hottest days was the dampest room in their country house no matter how much they opened the windows that looked straight out on grim dark fir trees, whose foliage was so thick and intricate that it was impossible to say where one tree ended and another began—in this uninhabited room where a bronze boy with violin stood on the bare desk—there was an unlocked bookcase containing the thick volumes of an extinct illustrated magazine.
Luzhin would swiftly leaf through them until he reached the page where between a poem by Korinfski, crowned with a harp-shaped vignette, and the miscellany section containing information about shifting swamps, American eccentrics and the length of the human intestine, there was the woodcut of a chessboard. Not a single picture could arrest Luzhin’s hand as it leafed through the volumes—neither the celebrated Niagara Falls nor starving Indian children (potbellied little skeletons) nor an attempted assassination of the King of Spain. The life of the world passed by with a hasty rustle, and suddenly stopped—the treasured diagram, problems, openings, entire games.
At the beginning of the summer holidays he had sorely missed his aunt and the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers—especially that fragrant old man smelling at times of violets and at times of lilies of the valley, depending upon what flowers he had brought to Luzhin’s aunt. Usually he would arrive just right—a few minutes after Luzhin’s aunt had glanced at her watch and left the house. “Never mind, let’s wait a while,” the old man would say, removing the damp paper from his bouquet, and Luzhin would draw up an armchair for him to the table where the chessmen had already been set out.
The appearance of the old gentleman with the flowers had provided him with a way out of a rather awkward situation. After three or four truancies from school it became apparent that his aunt had really no aptitude for chess. As the game proceeded, her pieces would conglomerate in an unseemly jumble, out of which there would suddenly dash an exposed helpless King. But the old gentleman played divinely. The first time his aunt, pulling on her gloves, had said rapidly, “Unfortunately I must leave but you stay on and play chess with my nephew, thank you for the wonderful lilies of the valley,” the first time the old man had sat down and sighed: “It’s a long time since I touched … now, young
