The Luzhin Defense Read Free

ground and turned into a permanent human dwelling, a peasant was chopping firewood. Suddenly all this was obscured by a mist of tears, his eyelids burned, it was impossible to bear what was about to happen—Father with a fan of tickets in his hands, Mother counting their baggage with her eyes, the train rushing in, the porter placing the steps against the car platform to make it easier to mount. He looked around. The little girl was eating her apple; the man in gaiters was staring into the distance; everything was calm. As if on a stroll he walked to the end of the station platform and then began to move very fast; he randown some stairs, and there was a beaten footpath, the stationmaster’s garden, a fence, a wicket gate, fir trees—then a small ravine and immediately after that a dense wood.
    At first he ran straight through the wood, brushing against swishing ferns and slipping on reddish lily-of-the-valley leaves—and his cap hung at the back of his neck, held only by its elastic, his knees were hot in the woolen stockings already donned for city wear, he cried while running, lisping childish curses when a twig caught him across the forehead—and finally he came to a halt and, panting, squatted down on his haunches, so that the cloak covered his legs.
    Only today, on the day of their annual move from country to city, on a day which in itself was never sweet, when the house was full of drafts and you envied so much the gardener who was not going anywhere, only today did he realize the full horror of the change that his father had spoken of. Former autumn returns to the city now seemed happiness. His daily morning walks with the governess—always along the same streets, along the Nevsky and back home, by way of the Embankment, would never be repeated. Happy walks. Sometimes she had suggested to him they begin with the Embankment, but he had always refused—not so much because he had liked the habitual from earliest childhood as because he was unbearably afraid of the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress, of the huge thunderlike percussion that made the windowpanes in the houses rattle and was capable of bursting one’s eardrum—and he always contrived (by means of imperceptible maneuvers) to be on the Nevsky at twelve o’clock, as far as possible from the cannon—whose shot, if he had changedthe order of his walk, would have overtaken him right by the Winter Palace. Finished also were his agreeable after lunch musings on the sofa, beneath the tiger rug, and at the stroke of two, his milk in a silver cup, giving it such a precious taste, and at the stroke of three, a turn in the open landau. In exchange for all this came something new, unknown and therefore hideous, an impossible, unacceptable world where there would be five lessons from nine to three and a crowd of boys still more frightening than those who just recently, on a July day, here in the country, right on the bridge, had surrounded him, aimed tin pistols at him and fired at him sticklike projectiles whose rubber suction cups had perfidiously been pulled off.
    The wood was still and damp. Having cried his fill, he played for a while with a beetle nervously moving its feelers, and then had quite a time crushing it beneath a stone as he tried to repeat the initial, juicy scrunch. Presently he noticed that it had begun to drizzle. Then he got up from the ground, found a familiar footpath and, stumbling over roots, started to run with vague vengeful thoughts of getting back to the manor: he would hide there, he would spend the winter there, subsisting on cheese and jam from the pantry. The footpath meandered for ten minutes or so through the wood, descended to the river, which was all covered with circles from the raindrops, and five minutes later there hove into sight the sawmill, its footbridge where you sank in up to the ankles in sawdust, and the path upward, and then—through the bare lilac bushes—the house. He crept along the wall, saw that the