Free The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

course of a week. His mother, of course, cried. His father threatened to take away his newchess set—enormous pieces on a morocco board. And suddenly everything was decided of itself. He ran away from home—in his autumn coat, since his winter one had been hidden after one unsuccessful attempt to run away—and not knowing where to go (a stinging snow was falling and settling on the cornices, and the wind would blow it off, endlessly reenacting this miniature blizzard), he wandered finally to his aunt’s place, not having seen her since spring. He met her as she was leaving. She was wearing a black hat and holding flowers wrapped in paper, on her way to a funeral. “Your old partner is dead,” she said. “Come with me.” Angry at not being allowed to warm himself, angry at the snow falling, and at the sentimental tears shining behind his aunt’s veil, he turned sharply and walked away, and after walking about for an hour set off for home. He did not remember the actual return—and even more curiously, was never sure whether things had happened thus or differently; perhaps his memory later added much that was taken from his delirium—for he was delirious for a whole week, and since he was extremely delicate and high-strung, the doctors presumed he would not pull through. It was not the first time he had been ill and when later reconstructing the sensation of this particular illness, he involuntarily recalled others, of which his childhood had been full: he remembered especially the time when he was quite small, playing all alone, and wrapping himself up in the tiger rug, to represent, rather forlornly, a king—it was nicest of all to represent a king since the imaginary mantle protected him against the chills of fever, and he wanted to postpone for as long as possible that inevitable moment when they would feel his forehead, take his temperatureand then bundle him into bed. Actually, there had been nothing quite comparable to his October chess-permeated illness. The gray-haired Jew who used to beat Chigorin, the corpse of his aunt’s admirer muffled in flowers, the sly, gay countenance of his father bringing a magazine, and the geography teacher petrified with the suddenness of the mate, and the tobacco-smoke-filled room at the chess club where he was closely surrounded by a crowd of university students, and the clean-shaven face of the musician holding for some reason the telephone receiver like a violin, between shoulder and cheek—all this participated in his delirium and took on the semblance of a kind of monstrous game on a spectral, wobbly, and endlessly disintegrating board.
    Upon his recovery, a taller and thinner boy, he was taken abroad, at first to the Adriatic coast where he lay on the garden terrace in the sun and played games in his head, which nobody could forbid him, and then to a German resort where his father took him for walks along footpaths fenced off with twisted beech railings. Sixteen years later when he revisited this resort he recognized the bearded earthenware dwarfs between the flower beds, and the garden paths of colored gravel before the hotel that had grown bigger and handsomer, and also the dark damp wood on the hill and the motley daubs of oil paint (each hue marking the direction of a given walk) with which a beech trunk or a rock would be equipped at an intersection, so that the stroller should not lose his way. The same paperweights bearing emerald-blue views touched up with mother-of-pearl beneath convex glass were on sale in the shops near the spring and no doubt the same orchestra on the standin the park was playing potpourris of opera, and the same maples were casting their lively shade over small tables where people drank coffee and ate wedge-shaped slices of apple tart with whipped cream.
    “Look, do you see those windows?” he said, pointing with his cane at the wing of the hotel. “It was there we had that pretty little tournament. Some of the most respectable German