Searching for Bobby Fischer (11 page)

During other nights out, Volodja had ordered for us, but in the Cosmos he whispered that the waiters must not hear him speak Russian; it could be dangerous. We ordered beefsteak and French fries. Soon a West German band started playing the latest European hits. We were sitting beside the dance floor, which was crowded with men in business suits dancing stiffly with busty women in tight skirts alongside a few gorgeously dressed Russian couples—the children of politicians, we were told—stylishly executing the newest Western dance steps. The darkened room seemed to move with slinky electronic rhythms and blinking lights.

Later, upstairs in our room, Volodja said wearily, “Several years ago I was shipped off to a collective farm. It is not unusual if the workers in the district cannot harvest the crops in time. But it was very strange—doctors and university professors living in a cramped and freezing hut. Our lives and careers were completely disrupted because the people in the village wouldn’t work.”

I was nervous when Volodja talked about his life in our hotel room. What if the room was bugged? It would take an army to listen to all the conversations in all the rooms of the Cosmos; still, during our stay we kept making resolutions to be discreet. Bruce and I continually cautioned Josh not to mention Volodja by name or to ask questions about the problems of Jewish chess players. He was confused about the need for secrecy and would say, “Who’s listening? The KGB? But who are the KGB? Why are they listening?” In any case we would eventually forget discretion and talk about everything.

At 10:30
P.M
. we watched a television special about the chess match, which was followed by the news. It was the week of President Reagan’s long-awaited meeting with Prime Minister Gromyko, and Moscow television was filled with images of chess and war. Newscasts began with stories about Karpov and Kasparov, followed by clips of Reagan pounding his fist like Mussolini or of U.S. Marines training with bazookas. One didn’t have to be a
grandmaster to conclude that while Russians engaged in their symphony of sport, Americans practiced war.

“What about that Korean spy plane?” Volodja asked.

“Terrible,” I answered sharply. I felt self-righteous about the Korean plane.

“You know,” Volodja said, “most of the European journalists here felt that the Korean plane was part of a spy mission. At the very least it was doing something provocative to see how we would respond.”

“Even if that’s so, what’s the justification for shooting it down? Why not force it to land?”

He nodded. “I think it was the second plane which caused the alarm here.”

“What second plane?” I hadn’t read about any second plane.

“Our radar showed one plane; then the blip broke into two. At first the two planes were flying close together; then the second plane, apparently smaller, flew off.”

“The story here is very different from the one in the States. We heard nothing about a second plane,” I said. Political conversations between us often ran up against such walls, for we made our judgments on the basis of different “facts.” Often we felt bewildered; who was right? “What do you think happened?” I asked. “Why was the plane shot down?”

“I think the generals were drunk that night.”

It seemed like a reasonable theory: generals in some backwater area, drunk on vodka. “Something like that will be the end of us all,” I said.

For the last several days, Josh had been coaxing Bruce and Volodja to play chess. Bruce searched for excuses, but this evening Josh insisted and had his way. In their first games, Bruce was deferential, attempting to lure Volodja into a kind of pas de deux. If he won a pawn, he acted as if it were an accident, or even offered a little apology. Volodja was oblivious and played for every advantage. While Pandolfini used timid, drawish openings, Volodja chose dynamic attacking lines from the latest issues of
Shakhmatnyi byulleten
and
64
. Again and again he wedged apart Pandolfini’s pawns with state-of-the-art opening traps. Bruce struggled and lost the
first six games, four of them on time. It seemed as if he wouldn’t be able to win a game. Volodja was a tiger, pouncing on each move. The instant the flag on Bruce’s clock fell Volodja immediately set up the pieces for the next game. For him these wins were like accumulating wealth. He was insatiable; perhaps winning helped him forget. Bruce hung on in weak positions, trying not to lose.

Josh was beside himself and couldn’t bear to look at the games. He believed his teacher’s playing strength was at least equal to Bobby Fischer’s and couldn’t imagine Bruce taking a beating. As the games continued, he became crazy with tension and bounced like a beach ball from sofa to bed to bathroom. When he knocked over a lamp, no one noticed.

After an hour or so, Bruce managed to draw a few games. This was the happiest part of the night for him. They were intricate positional games, well played, with a handshake at the end and no loser. But the competition turned sharply on one game. It was a rook-pawn ending in which Pandolfini’s passed pawn had advanced to the seventh rank, with his rook blocking the pawn’s advance. As Volodja pressed the clock he commented that Bruce was playing the ending incorrectly. “Otherwise you would have a won game,” he said confidently. But he was wrong; his opponent’s win was clear after three more moves.

Now Volodja started losing. Pandolfini played with a melancholic expression and, regardless of the time on the clock, moved his pieces in a calm, unhurried way. But he had become more familiar with his opponent’s style and choice of openings, and despite his demeanor his game had become more aggressive. Volodja played in a fury. He seemed to move faster and faster, banging the clock for emphasis but making mistakes. He had wanted to be invincible, and falling short of this, his game began to collapse. In his rush to win he knocked pieces from the board. In one game he hung his queen and barked at Josh to be quiet. Bruce kept trying to guide the marathon to a conclusion, but Volodja wouldn’t allow him to stop.

Josh fell asleep at two in the morning beneath a pile of bolster pillows. Each night in the hotel he carefully constructed a fort on top of his sheets, his protection from “the baddies who are listening.”

At three I walked downstairs with Volodja. The lobby was empty except for a dozen whores who chatted with the policemen near the front door. Emerging from the excesses of the past hours, Volodja’s face was timid and a little embarrassed. “Bruce’s knowledge of the endgame is sophisticated,” he said thoughtfully.

As he walked to the front door, I wondered what the guards would think: Who is this man leaving the hotel at this hour? Is he Russian? What would happen if they stopped Volodja and asked for his papers? But they didn’t.

Back in the room, Bruce was lying in bed looking as if he were about to burst into tears. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You couldn’t have played better.”

“And I hated every minute of it. Did you see how upset he became?”

It was a strange moment; we had traveled all the way to Moscow to see the world championship and to observe Russian chess life, and my son’s teacher was confessing that he couldn’t bear to play the game. He might lose, he might win; either way it was a crisis. “I like to draw,” Bruce said unhappily, “but that’s hard to do unless you play like Petrosian.”

DURING OUR SECOND
week in Moscow, Volodja became increasingly afraid. He had been observed spending afternoons with us at the match and driving us around Moscow. His boss, Aleksandr Roshal, accused him of subversive activity and threatened to fire him immediately if he continued to see us. Pandolfini and I felt terrible about having added to his difficulties, and we urged him to keep his distance, but Volodja wouldn’t hear of it and clung to us as to a lifeline. He asked dozens of questions about the professional opportunities that might be open to him in Europe or the United States, as if the answers would get him a visa. He was speaking to all of his friends, trying to track down Boris Gulko for us, and hoped that if I wrote about the dissident in Western magazines, I could also discuss his own situation in order to pressure the authorities to allow him to visit his wife.

One morning when he picked us up Volodja told us with great agitation that he had been fired. “To take away a man’s work, that’s fascism,” he said. “But if I call a press conference, I will be called
a political enemy and sent to prison. It’s ironical about Roshal,” he went on, talking about his boss, who was Karpov’s close friend. “For his whole life he has wanted to defect to the West. He has openly discussed it with his friends. Now he exercises tyranny against Jews and anyone else who wants to leave. Kasparov’s mother despises Roshal for his attitudes about Jews and is afraid that he will try dirty tricks during the match. I must call my friends this afternoon, the people I know who have applied for emigration and been turned down.”

“Why?”

“In circumstances such as mine, people have disappeared. I live by myself. Telling people about my situation is my only safeguard.”

10

THE PRESSROOM

I
n the Hall of Columns, Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov played on a stage flanked by two large display boards. Karpov wore a gray business suit; the challenger dressed more casually in a sports jacket and sweater. Sometimes Kasparov strolled the stage between moves with his hands behind his back, as if he were walking in a park. When he sat at the table, centered on a large oriental rug, he would scratch his tightly curled black hair and glance furtively at Karpov. He was a tense young man trying to appear relaxed. The older and more experienced Karpov rocked in his chair, and his eyes rarely left the board until he was sure of a win; then he would pick at his teeth and look out at the crowd like a king.

In the chess world Karpov is called the Fetus because of his diaphanous complexion and frail physical makeup. But in the early days of the match, while he built his lead, he grew immense. On the stage he seemed to tower above his younger and larger opponent, and when he looked at Kasparov he didn’t bother to hide his contempt.

For the first half hour of each game, Pandolfini, Josh and I would watch the two men from the balcony. Josh leaned his elbows on the railing and observed them through the wrong end of his binoculars. I was afraid he would drop the glasses and hit someone below on the head. After the opening moves we watched on television monitors in the pressroom on the third floor, but sometimes, when the players were under time pressure, we returned to the
balcony. Then Josh would root exuberantly for Kasparov and throw rapid analysis at Bruce while spectators seated nearby gave us dirty looks. Most of his blitz tactics were pure fantasy. Excited by the crowd and loyal to his man, my son saw sacrifices and mating combinations all over the board.

THE PRESSROOM ON
the third floor of the House of Trade Unions was jammed with chess stars of the past, notable Moscow personalities, journalists and television crews seeking interviews. There were banks of phones, telex machines and a score of screens showing closeups of the two brooding sportsmen. At demonstration tables clusters of grandmasters unraveled an infinity of possibilities.

When we were in the pressroom, Josh was on his own. He preferred to sit at the front table with a past United States champion, Grandmaster Arnold Denker, Gary Kasparov’s friend Eric Schiller, International Master Jonathan Tisdale and the oldest active grandmaster, Miguel Najdorf, a living legend in chess circles. Television commentators frequently questioned Najdorf, Denker and young Waitzkin about the newest wrinkle in the current game while crews filmed the interviews for millions around the world. Late at night we would watch Josh on the television in our room. During one interview he demonstrated a winning line for Kasparov with bubble gum all over his chin. Each time Yuri Averbakh, past president of the Soviet Chess Federation and a FIDE arbiter for the match, entered the room, he paused to give Josh a hug and smiled like a politician while photographers snapped their cameras.

The level of excitement at the match was equivalent to that at the Rose Bowl or an NCAA basketball championship, but from the point of view of an American who lacked sophisticated chess knowledge it would be difficult to say why. World championship chess is a strange and nearly unrecognizable relative of the game most amateurs play. Day after day passes without a checkmate, without a player either winning a piece outright or making a recognizable blunder. The two best players in the world calculate and conceive of strategies for long stretches of minutes and then make the quietest moves. In the middle game they often calculate ten or more moves ahead; in the endgame, when most of the pieces are off the
board, they may think ahead even further. According to a chess master who is also proficient at other games, Karpov’s and Kasparov’s deepest calculations, which involve the retention and mental manipulation of numerous possible positions, are roughly equivalent to doing the
New York Times
Sunday crossword puzzle in your head. They do all this in the hope of eventually weakening a square, doubling a pawn, giving a bishop a little more room, seizing an open file, overprotecting a strong point, improving the position of a developed piece or gaining a tempo. These advantages are hardly discernible. Each man tries to figure more deeply, but more often than not their calculations match perfectly, and a well-disguised offensive thrust is anticipated and answered with a compensating defensive move.

Grandmasters of approximately the same strength aren’t exactly playing to win but rather seek to maximize the possibilities of winning without taking an unacceptable risk. They are like two men balancing on a tightrope. Sometimes a player will strum the rope a little with a toe, as if idly passing time, in the hope that he will catch his opponent leaning the wrong way. But he knows that if he plucks the rope too hard, it is more likely that he will lose his own balance and tumble, rather than his opponent. While the game is being played in the air, the only ones who truly understand their sleepy feints, counterfeints, wiggles and taps are the two men on the rope. Far more often than not, the contest will end with both men still balanced.