The Luzhin Defense Read Free Page A

drawing room window was open, climbed up by the drainpipe onto the green, peeling cornice and rolled over thewindowsill. Once inside the drawing room, he stopped and listened. A daguerreotype of his maternal grandfather—black sidewhiskers, violin in hand—stared down at him, but then completely vanished, dissolving in the glass, as soon as he regarded the portrait from one side—a melancholy amusement that he never omitted when he entered the drawing room. Having thought for a moment and moved his upper lip, which caused the platinum wire on his front teeth to travel freely up and down, he cautiously opened the door, wincing at the sound of the vibrant echo which had too hastily occupied the house upon the departure of its owners, and then darted along the corridor and thence up the stairs into the attic. The attic was a special one, with a small window through which one could look down at the staircase, at the brown gleam of its balustrade that curved gracefully lower down and vanished in the penumbra. The house was absolutely quiet. A little later, from downstairs, from his father’s study, came the muffled ring of a telephone. The ringing continued with intervals for quite a while. Then again there was silence.
    He settled himself on a box. Next to it was a similar case, but open and with books in it. A lady’s bicycle, the green net of its rear wheel torn, stood on its head in the corner, between an unplaned board propped against the wall and an enormous trunk. After a few minutes Luzhin grew bored, as when one’s throat is wrapped in flannel and one is forbidden to go out. He touched the gray dusty books in the open box, leaving black imprints on them. Besides books there was a shuttlecock with one feather, a large photograph (of a military band), a cracked chessboard, and some other not very interesting things.
    In this way an hour went by. Suddenly he heard the noise of voices and the whine of the front door. Taking a cautious look through the little window he saw below his father, who like a young boy ran up the stairs and then, before reaching the landing, descended swiftly again, throwing his knees out on either side. The voices below were now clear: the butler’s, the coachman’s, the watchman’s. A minute later the staircase again came to life; this time his mother came quickly up it, hitching up her skirt, but she also stopped short of the landing, leaning, instead, over the balustrade, and then swiftly, with arms spread out, she went down again. Finally, after another minute had passed, they all went up in a posse—his father’s bald head glistened, the bird on mother’s hat swayed like a duck on a troubled pond, and the butler’s gray crew cut bobbed up and down; at the rear, leaning at every moment over the balustrade, came the coachman, the watchman, and for some reason the milkmaid Akulina, and finally a black-bearded peasant from the water mill, future inhabitant of future nightmares. It was he, as the strongest, who carried Luzhin down from the attic to the carriage.

2
    Luzhin senior, the Luzhin who wrote books, often thought of how his son would turn out. Through his books (and they all, except for a forgotten novel called
Fumes
, were written for boys, youths and high school students and came in sturdy colorful covers) there constantly flitted the image of a fair-haired lad, “headstrong,” “brooding,” who later turned into a violinist or a painter, without losing his moral beauty in the process. The barely perceptible peculiarity that distinguished his son from all those children who, in his opinion, were destined to become completely unremarkable people (given that such people exist) he interpreted as the secret stir of talent, and bearing firmly in mind the fact that his deceased father-in-law had been a composer (albeit a somewhat arid one and susceptible, in his mature years, to the doubtful splendors of virtuosity), he more than once, in a pleasant dream resembling a lithograph,