The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was this old man who explained to Luzhin the simple method of notation in chess, and Luzhin, replaying the games given in the magazine, soon discovered in himself a quality he had once envied when his father used to tell somebody at table that he personally was unable to understand how his father-in-law could read a score for hours and hear in his mind all the movements of the music as he ran his eye over the notes, now smiling, now frowning, and sometimes turning back like a reader checking a detail in a novel--a name, the time of the year. "It must be a great pleasure," his father had said, "to assimilate music in its natural state." It was a similar pleasure that Luzhin himself now began to experience as he skimmed fluently over the letters and numbers representing moves. At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments--he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel. These possible continuations that explained the essence of blunder or foresight Luzhin gradually ceased to reconstruct actually on the board and contented himself with perceiving their melody mentally through the sequence of symbols and signs. Similarly he was able to "read" a game already perused once without using the board at all; and this was all the more pleasant in that he did not have to fiddle about with chessmen while constantly listening for someone coming; the door, it is true, was locked, and he would open it unwillingly, after the brass handle had been jiggled many times--and Luzhin senior, coming to see what his son was doing in that damp uninhabited room, would find his son restless and sullen with red ears; on the desk lay the bound volumes of the magazine and Luzhin senior would be seized by the suspicion that his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women. "Why do you lock yourself up?" he would ask (and little Luzhin would draw his head into his shoulders and with hideous clarity imagine his father looking under the sofa and finding the chess set). "The air in here's really icy. And what's so interesting about these old magazines? Let's go and see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees."

  Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes. Green needles adhered to their delicately brick-colored caps and sometimes a blade of grass would leave on one of them a long narrow trace. Their undersides might be holey, and occasionally a yellow slug would be sitting there--and Luzhin senior would use his pocketknife to clean moss and soil from the thick speckled-gray root of each mushroom before placing it in the basket. His son followed behind him at a few paces' distance, with his hands behind his back like a little old man, and not only did he not look for mushrooms but even refused to admire those his father, with little quacks of pleasure, unearthed himself. And sometimes, plump and pale in a dreary white dress that did not become her, Mrs. Luzhin would appear at the end of the avenue and hurry toward them, passing alternately through sunlight and shadow, and the dry leaves that never cease to occur in northern woods, would rustle beneath the slightly skewed high heels of her white slippers. One July day, she slipped on the veranda steps and sprained her foot, and for a long time afterwards she lay in bed--either in her darkened bedroom or on the veranda--wearing a pink negligee, her face heavily powdered, and there would always be a small silver bowl with boules-de-gomme--balls of hard candy standing on a little table beside her. The foot was soon better but she continued to recline as if having made up her mind that this was to be her lot, that this precisely was her destiny in life. Summer was unusually hot, the mosquitoes gave no peace, all day long the shrieks of peasant girls bathing could be heard from the river, and on one such oppressive and voluptuous day, early in the morning before the gadflies had yet begun to torment the black horse daubed with pungent ointment, Luzhin senior stepped into the calash and was taken to the station to spend the day in town. "At least be reasonable, it's essential for me to see Silvestrov," he had said to his wife the night before, pacing about the bedroom in his mouse-colored dressing gown. "Really, how queer you are. Can't you see this is important? I myself would prefer not to go." But his wife continued to lie with her face thrust into the pillow, and her fat helpless back shook with sobs. Nonetheless, in the morning he left--and his son standing in the garden saw the top part of the coachman and his father's hat skim along the serrated line of young firs that fenced off the garden from the road.

  That day Luzhin junior was in low spirits. All the games in the old magazine had been studied, all the problems solved, and he was forced to play with himself, but this ended inevitably in an exchange of all the pieces and a dull draw. And it was unbearably hot. The veranda cast a black triangular shadow on the bright sand. The avenue was paved with sunflecks, and these spots, if you slitted your eyes, took on the aspect of regular light and dark squares. An intense latticelike shadow lay flat beneath a garden bench. The urns that stood on stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals. Swallows soared: their flight recalled the motion of scissors swiftly cutting out some design. Not knowing what to do with himself he wandered down the footpath by the river, and from the opposite bank came ecstatic squeals and glimpses of naked bodies. He stole behind a tree trunk and with beating heart peered at these flashes of white. A bird rustled in the branches, and taking fright he quickly left the river and went back. He had lunch alone with the housekeeper, a taciturn sallow-faced old woman who always gave off a slight smell of coffee. Afterwards, lolling on the drawing room couch, he drowsily listened to all manner of slight sounds, to an oriole's cry in the garden, to the buzzing of a bumblebee that had flown in the window, to the tinkle of dishes on a tray being carried down from his mother's bedroom--and these limpid sounds were strangely transformed in his reverie and assumed the shape of bright intricate patterns on a dark background; and in trying to unravel them he fell asleep. He was wakened by the steps of the maid dispatched by his mother.... It was dim and cheerless in the bedroom; his mother drew him to her but he braced himself and turned away so stubbornly that she had to let him go. "Come, tell me something," she said softly. He shrugged his shoulders and picked at his knee with one finger. "Don't you want to tell me anything?" she asked still more softly. He looked at the bedside table, put a boule-de-gomme in his mouth and began to suck--he took a second, a third, another and another until his mouth was full of sweet-thudding and bumping balls. "Take some more, take as many as you wish," she murmured, and stretching one hand from under the bedclothes she tried to touch him, to stroke him. "You haven't got tanned at all this year," she said after a pause. "But perhaps I simply can't see, the light here is so dead, everything looks blue. Raise the Venetian blinds, please. Or no, wait, stay. Later." Having sucked his boules-de-gomme to the end he inquired if he could leave. She asked him what he would do now and would he not like to drive to the station and meet his father off the seven o'clock train? "Let me go," he said. "It smells of medicine in here."

  He tried to slide down the stairs the way they did at school--the way he himself never did it there; but the steps were too high. Beneath the staircase, in a cupboard that had still not been thoroughly explored, he looked for magazines. He dug out one and found a checkers section in it, diagrams of stupid clumsy round blobs on their boards, but there was no chess. As he rummaged on, he kept coming across a bothersome herbarium album with dried edelweiss and purple leaves in it and with inscriptions in pale violet ink, in a childish, thin-spun hand that was so different from his mother's present handwriting: Davos 1885; Gatchina 1886. Wrathfully he began to tear out the leaves and flowers, sneezing from the fine dust as he squatted on his haunches amid the scattered books. Then it got so dark beneath the stairs that the pages of the magazine he was again leafing through began to merge into a gray blur and sometimes a small picture would trick him, because it looke
d like a chess problem in the diffuse darkness. He thrust the books back anyhow into the drawers and wandered into the drawing room, thinking listlessly that it must be well past seven o'clock since the butler was lighting the kerosene lamps. Leaning on a cane and holding on to the banisters, his mother in mauve peignoir came heavily down the stairs, a frightened look on her face. "I don't understand why your father isn't here yet," she said, and moving with difficulty she went out onto the veranda and began to peer down the road between the fir trunks that the setting sun banded with bright copper.

  He came only around ten, said he had missed the train, had been extremely busy, had dined with his publisher--no, no soup, thank you. He laughed and spoke very loudly and ate noisily, and Luzhin was struck by the feeling that his father was looking at him all the time as if staggered by his presence. Dinner graded into late evening tea. Mother, her elbow propped on the table, silently slitted her eyes at her plate of raspberries, and the gayer her husband's stories became the narrower her eyes grew. Then she got up and quietly left and it seemed to Luzhin that all this had happened once before. He remained alone on the veranda with his father and was afraid to raise his head, feeling that strange searching stare on him the whole time.

  "How have you been passing the time?" asked his father suddenly. "What have you been doing?" "Nothing," replied Luzhin. "And what are you planning to do now?" asked Luzhin senior in the same tone of forced jollity, imitating his son's manner of using the formal plural for "you." "Do you want to go to bed or do you want to sit here with me?" Luzhin killed a mosquito and very cautiously stole a glance upwards and sideways at his father. There was a crumb on his father's beard and an unpleasantly mocking expression gleamed in his eyes. "Do you know what?" his father said and the crumb jumped off. "Do you know what? Let's play some game. For instance, how about me teaching you chess?"

  He saw his son slowly blush and taking pity on him immediately added: "Or cabala--there is a pack of cards over there in the table drawer." "But no chess set, we have no chess set," said Luzhin huskily and again stole a cautious look at his father. "The good ones remained in town," said his father placidly, "but I think there are some old ones in the attic. Let's go take a look."

  And indeed, by the light of the lamp that his father held aloft, among all sorts of rubbish in a case Luzhin found a chessboard, and again he had the feeling that all this had happened before--that open case with a nail sticking out of its side, those dust-powdered books, that wooden chessboard with a crack down the middle. A small box with a sliding lid also came to light; it contained puny chessmen. And the whole time he was looking for the chess set and then carrying it down to the veranda, Luzhin tried to figure out whether it was by accident his father had mentioned chess or whether he had noticed something--and the most obvious explanation did not occur to him, just as sometimes in solving a problem its key turns out to be a move that seemed barred, impossible, excluded quite naturally from the range of possible moves.

  And now when the board had been placed on the illuminated table between the lamp and the raspberries, and its dust wiped off with a bit of newspaper, his father's face was no longer mocking, and Luzhin, forgetting his fear, forgetting his secret, felt permeated all at once with proud excitement at the thought that he could, if he wanted, display his art. His father began to set out the pieces. One of the Pawns was replaced by an absurd purple-colored affair in the shape of a tiny bottle; in place of one Rook there was a checker; the Knights were headless and the one horse's head that remained after the box had been emptied (leaving a small die and a red counter) turned out not to fit any of them. When everything had been set out, Luzhin suddenly made up his mind and muttered: "I already can play a little." "Who taught you?" asked his father without lifting his head. "I learned it at school," replied Luzhin. "Some of the boys could play." "Oh! Fine," said his father, and added (quoting Pushkin's doomed duelist): "Let's start, if you are willing."

  He has played chess since his youth, but only seldom and sloppily, with haphazard opponents--on serene evenings aboard a Volga steamer, in the foreign sanatorium where his brother was dying years ago, here, in the country, with the village doctor, an unsociable man who periodically ceased calling on them--and all these chance games, full of oversights and sterile meditations, were for him little more than a moment of relaxation or simply a means of decently preserving silence in the company of a person with whom conversation kept petering out--brief, uncomplicated games, remarkable neither for ambition nor inspiration, which he always began in the same way, paying little attention to his adversary's moves. Although he made no fuss about losing, he secretly considered himself to be not at all a bad player, and told himself that if ever he lost it was through absentmindedness, good nature or a desire to enliven the game with daring sallies, and he considered that with a little application it was possible, without theoretic knowledge, to refute any gambit out of the textbook. His son's passion for chess had so astounded him, seemed so unexpected--and at the same time so fateful and inescapable--so strange and awesome was it to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces--all this was so strange and awesome that Luzhin senior was incapable of thinking of the game, and while he feigned concentration, his attention wandered from vague recollections of his illicit day in St. Petersburg, that left a residue of shame it was better not to investigate, to the casual, easy gestures with which his son moved this or that piece. The game had lasted but a few minutes when his son said: "If you do this it's mate and if you do that you lose your Queen," and he, confused, took his move back and began to think properly, inclining his head first to the left and then to the right, slowly stretching out his fingers toward the Queen and quickly snatching them away again, as if burned, while in the meantime his son calmly, and with uncharacteristic tidiness, put the taken pieces into their box. Finally Luzhin senior made his move whereupon there started a devastation of his positions, and then he laughed unnaturally and knocked his King over in sign of surrender. In this way he lost three games and realized that should he play ten more the result would be just the same, and yet he was unable to stop. At the very beginning of the fourth game Luzhin pushed back the piece moved by his father and with a shake of his head said in a confident unchildlike voice: "The worst reply. Chigorin suggests taking the Pawn." And when with incomprehensible, hopeless speed he had lost this game as well, Luzhin senior again laughed, and with trembling hand began to pour milk into a cut-glass tumbler, on the bottom of which lay a raspberry core, which now floated to the surface and circled, unwilling to be extracted. His son put away the board and the box on a wicker table in the corner and having blurted a phlegmatic "good night" softly closed the door behind him.

  "Oh well, I should have expected something like this," said Luzhin senior, wiping the tips of his fingers with a handkerchief. "He's not just amusing himself with chess, he's performing a sacred rite."

  A fat-bodied, fluffy moth with glowing eyes fell on the table after colliding with the lamp. A breeze stirred lightly through the garden. The clock in the drawing room started to chime daintily and struck twelve.

  "Nonsense," he said, "stupid imagination. Many youngsters are excellent chess players. Nothing surprising in that. The whole affair is getting on my nerves, that's all. Bad of her--she shouldn't have encouraged him. Well, no matter...."

  He thought drearily that in a moment he would have to lie, to remonstrate, to soothe, and it was midnight already....

  "I want to sleep," he said, but remained sitting in the armchair.

  And early next morning in the darkest and mossiest corner of the dense coppice behind the garden little Luzhin buried his father's precious box of chessmen, assuming this to be the simplest way of avoiding any kind of complications, for now there were other chessmen that he could use openly. His father, unable to suppress his interest in the matter, went off to see the gloomy country doctor, who was a far better che
ss player than he, and in the evening after dinner, laughing and rubbing his hands, doing his best to ignore the fact that all this was wrong--but why wrong he could not say--he sat his son down with the doctor at the wicker table on the veranda, himself set out the pieces (apologizing for the purple thingum), sat down beside the players and began avidly following the game. Twitching his bushy eyebrows and tormenting his fleshy nose with a large hairy fist, the doctor thought long over every move and from time to time would lean back in his chair as if able to see better from a distance, and make big eyes, and then lurch heavily forward, his hands braced against his knees. He lost--and grunted so loudly that his wicker armchair creaked in response. "But look, look!" exclaimed Luzhin senior. "You should go this way and everything is saved--you even have the better position." "Don't you see I'm in check?" growled the doctor in a bass voice and began to set out the pieces anew. And when Luzhin senior went out into the dark garden to accompany the doctor as far as the footpath with its border of glowworms leading down to the bridge, he heard the words he had so thirsted to hear once, but now these words weighed heavy upon him--he would rather not have heard them at all.

  The doctor started coming every night and since he was really a first-rate player he derived enormous pleasure from these incessant defeats. He brought Luzhin a chess handbook, advising him, however, not to get too carried away by it, not to tire himself, and to read in the open air. He spoke about the grand masters he had had the occasion to see, about a recent tournament, and also about the past of chess, about a somewhat doubtful rajah and about the great Philidor, who was also an accomplished musician. At times, grinning gloomily, he would bring what he termed "a sugarplum"--an ingenious problem cut out of some periodical. Luzhin would pore over it a while, find finally the solution and with an extraordinary expression on his face and radiant bliss in his eyes would exclaim, burring his r's: "How glorious, how glorious!" But the notion of composing problems himself did not entice him. He dimly felt that they would be a pointless waste of the militant, charging, bright force he sensed within him whenever the doctor, with strokes of his hairy finger, removed his King farther and farther, and finally, nodded his head and sat there quite still, looking at the board, while Luzhin senior, who was always present, always craving a miracle--his son's defeat--and was both frightened and overjoyed when his son won (and suffered from this complicated mixture of feelings), would seize a Knight or a Rook, crying that everything was not lost and would himself sometimes play to the end a hopelessly compromised game.