Searching for Bobby Fischer (15 page)

TWO DAYS LATER
at the Moscow airport about two hundred people waited on line to clear customs. In front of us a Russian hockey team leaving for a match abroad was in festive spirits. The line moved quickly until we reached the agent. Pandolfini was taken away to a room and strip-searched; his notebooks, mostly analyses of the chess match, were taken away and photocopied. Three agents pored over each page of my notes, and for an hour several others listened to my little tape recorder. All my tapes of interviews in Russia, as well as the important pages from my notebook and my film, were already en route to New York. The cassettes I was carrying now had been recorded years before while I was doing a story in the Bahamas. The Russians were so intent on hearing fishing captains talk about the techniques of catching blue marlin that I didn’t think they’d let us leave.

For the first time during the trip, Josh looked scared. Where was Bruce? Could he go to the bathroom? They wouldn’t let me take him. At last, seconds before the gate closed, we were allowed to board our Finnair flight to Helsinki.

When the plane took off, Josh yawned and said, ‘The end.” Minutes later he was asleep in my lap, looking, for the first time since he’d waved good-bye to his mommy, like a very little boy.

I felt enormous relief, and then the heady sensation of having gotten away with something. We were all okay, I had my notes, and soon I’d be sharing stories and Russian caviar with my wife and friends.

But then I thought about Gulko and Volodja and others I’d met. I wouldn’t be able to call or write Volodja; it would be dangerous for him. I recalled a conversation with a famous Soviet grandmaster during our first week in Moscow. I had asked if he considered Gary Kasparov’s Jewish background a disadvantage in the match. The man became oddly foreboding. “Write nothing negative,” he’d said, waving his finger back and forth. “Nothing negative. The chess world is small, and your little son is part of that world.”

13

THE CHESS SHOP

T
he proliferation of subcultures and eccentricities in New York City tends to obscure the madness of a life devoted to solving complicated puzzles. The plight of brilliant jobless and even homeless chess players in Washington Square fits seamlessly into a landscape of unpublished poets hawking photocopies of poems in front of bookstores, painters showing their canvases on sidewalks and musicians playing outside concert halls, waiting to be discovered. Struggling artists live here amidst an illusory swirl of impending success.

Except for a handful, chess players don’t have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn’t make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn’t have it.

While thousands of basketball kids on the city’s playgrounds are convinced of their golden future in the NBA, chess children, except for the very youngest, respond with remarkable frankness and accuracy
when asked about their playing strength and potential in comparison to their peers. A twenty-year-old who has been playing and studying chess for seven or eight years and has gained a rating of, say, 2100, which places him in the top 3 or 4 percent of all the tournament players in the country, will have few illusions about becoming world champion, or even about playing a single game that will compare with the masterpieces of Alekhine or Bronstein. Despite his desire, he knows as well as he knows the spelling of his own name that he is simply not in the same league as other twenty-year-olds rated four hundred points higher. Still, more likely than not he will continue to devote a tremendous amount of time to chess, either because he loves the game more than anything else in his life, or because there is nothing else he can do as well, or in some cases because he simply can’t bear to give it up.

In New York City alone, there are hundreds of excellent but not exceptional chess players who spend most of their waking lives in coffee shops, parks, clubs and at tournaments, playing five-minute or five-hour games, studying books on openings and endgames and feeling confused about whether they are artists or reprobates. But in Greenwich Village, even such futility has a certain cachet. In the grim light of a New York winter, the regulars in the clubs, with their dog-eared books, creased clothing and singularity of purpose, seem to share an irreproachable nobility with the down-and-out heroes of Knut Hamsun novels or with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s hopelessly impoverished Warsaw writers. Somehow they are winners for clinging so fiercely to their ways.

Since becoming a chess parent, I tend increasingly to think of New York in terms of chess. Besides Madison Square Garden and a few favorite restaurants, the places I am most drawn to are the chess corner of Washington Square, the Village Chess and Coffee Shop on Thompson Street, Fred Wilson’s chess bookstore on East Eleventh Street, Bryant Park and the corner of Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue, where in the shadow of towering office buildings and X-rated movies, chess masters and even an occasional grandmaster sit on folding chairs and create gorgeous combinations against passersby for nickels and dimes despite the exhaust fumes and the cold. For me, Carnegie Hall has little to do with music;
rather, it is where the Manhattan Chess Club is located, and where Josh plays on Friday nights in the blitz tournaments.

At the end of a jog around Washington Square, I often stop by the chess shop on Thompson Street. Through the window, which is checkered with chess sets of exotic design for sale, I recognize nearly every player. Most of them are here every day that the weather keeps them from playing outdoors in Washington Square. A few play in the shop year round, regardless of the weather, as if this cramped little room, where players must pay seventy-five cents an hour, invests their avocation with more status than does the park. They play with unflinching seriousness, as if life depended upon the flick of a piece or the snap of the clock—and it does. Some of these men have lost jobs and wives playing night after night, usually against the same opponent. The ones who have one or two steady partners have become as tight-knit as a family and think the idea of playing someone new is ridiculous. After years of games against the same opponents, the moves have become more like old habits than chess, and taking on someone new would be risky.

One would think that when players sat with their faces only a few feet apart, their feet occasionally brushing beneath the table day after day, month after month, there would be some intimacy. But this doesn’t seem to be the case; the players know little about the private lives of their partners and aren’t curious to learn more. The game is everything. Partners are usually well matched, so a day’s success is generally based on who concentrates better and is more able to shut out distractions. “You can’t play well if you’re worrying about your wife or your job,” one man explained. But from time to time one of them will whisper conspiratorially to me that he will soon be giving up the game.

One man—I’ll call him Jim—made a small fortune in the stock market earlier in his life. For the past seven years, since his wife left him, Jim has played in the chess shop or, weather permitting, in Washington Square. During these years of thousands of games, Jim’s chess ability has neither improved nor declined, and his happiness in life relates to his daily success against one or two opponents. In 1986 Jim spoke to me about chess with distaste.
‘There’s no point to it,” he said. “It’s a hostile game. Everyone here hates one another.” His eyes glowing with intensity, he announced that soon he would give it up. Several months later he came over to me again and repeated his intention. It was as if the chess shop were a penal colony with walls and bars. A year ago, one of Jim’s regular partners suddenly disappeared. I knew him to be a gentle, literate man who was greatly distressed by his addiction and who often spoke of quitting; nevertheless, I was afraid something might have happened to him. But when I asked Jim, he disgustedly waved my question aside. The man was no longer around; that was all that mattered.

At times the Village Chess and Coffee Shop feels comfortable, like a familiar gallery in a museum. At the end of my evening jog, it is a pleasure to say hello to the players and to watch a few games—sometimes more than a few. It is remarkable how quickly the hours pass there. During the last couple of years, I’ve learned the mannerisms and styles of the players. Although I no longer play, I have acquired an appetite for chess literature and for watching games. In truth, I’ve become a persistent kibitzer, hooked on observing games in the same way that some are addicted to baseball or bridge or spy novels. In the evening, when I leave the coffee shop, I sometimes look back through the glass window at the faces riveted on the chess pieces. Night after night, the same men sit across from one another in the same chairs. They seem to have no sense of the passing of time.

14

JOSH AND BRUCE

W
ith its dense architecture and crafty manipulations, its subtle attacks, intensity and unexpected explosiveness, chess is like the city. Lives in small, thin-walled New York apartments are racked by differing sensibilities jangling at the edge of private space. Competing for territory, we attack one another in indirect ways. For example, in my building there is a man who tyrannizes his neighbors with his off-key attempts to be a jazz-and-blues singer. While he belts out his favorite standards, I cannot write. Whenever I mention my irritation to him in the hall or write him a note, he sings louder, as if trying to convince me that he really is an undiscovered talent. In a state of helpless rage, I contemplate clobbering him with a two-by-four as he races up the stairs after work, eager to begin crooning “Moonlight in Vermont.”

When it is time for Joshua’s chess lesson, I pray that my neighbor won’t sing the blues and that the super’s kids won’t jump on the trampoline upstairs. It is a special time: we take the baby to the sitter so she won’t pull the pieces off the board; Bonnie can’t run the dishwasher or washing machine; she tries to prepare dinner quietly because a dropped pot might cause Josh to lose his train of thought.

Week after week Bruce urges Josh to look deeper into the positions they study. While they commune over the pieces I sit in the kitchen wondering how the lesson is going. I’m tempted to watch, although I know that Joshua is distracted by my presence.
When I can’t bear to stay away any longer, I watch the two of them for a few minutes from across the living room. Typically, Bruce leans back in his chair and sips coffee. Josh sits at the board, his head cupped between his hands. I can see his eyes flashing from piece to piece, his face taut and serious. He can’t find the answer. He glances up at Bruce for help and then back at the board. His lips move, “Take, take, take, take, take, take,” while he nods his head to the beat of his mumbling. He is in trouble. Bruce won’t help and leans back in his chair with a supercilious expression that both spurs our son ahead and angers him. His brow furrows in frustration. The mate is eight moves from the position in front of him, and he isn’t allowed to move the pieces until he figures it out in his head. He almost has it, but not quite. At the point in his analysis where the lines have been cleared of pieces and the mate should be crystal clear, the king standing like a lone figure on an empty avenue, he gets lost. He doesn’t see the critical check, and after a few seconds the imagined position of the pieces grows fuzzy in his head and he must reconstruct it again. “Take, take, take, take, take, take . . . knight to f8,” he says without resolution.

“That’s a nice try, Josh. I considered it myself, but you can see why it doesn’t work, can’t you?”

“Because the queen protects along the diagonal,” Josh says glumly. He begins to chew on the neckline of his polo shirt while his teacher sips his coffee.

At the age of six, Josh resisted instruction, and Bruce taught him indirectly by playing speed games and offering delectable bribes for rare moments of seriousness, but by the time he was eight, their lessons often resembled meditations. When Josh looked up from a difficult position for a hint, Bruce would say inscrutably, “I am only here to help you look. You have to find the answer yourself.”

After years of study there is a tendency for young players to depend too much on their teachers, making moves mechanically in tournament games because it was suggested in a lesson that they were correct. Bruce has to be careful not to overteach. If Joshua’s imagination for combinations is constrained by too much information or by the fear of displeasing his teacher, then Bruce will
have done more damage than good. When Josh’s games become dry and repetitious, Pandolfini is angry with himself; it means that he has concentrated for too long on one aspect of the game and that his pupil has fallen into a rut. It is all too easy for a teacher to make such a mistake.

Joshua’s relationship with Bruce is delicate and always changing. At times there is great trust and warmth, as if Pandolfini were a third parent. Sometimes Josh feels that he will not be able to play without his teacher standing in the wings. When he is fresh and attentive, he inspires Bruce to teach long, ingenious lessons. By the end of a two-hour session, Josh has a bright pink spot on each cheek, and Bruce is pale, a little out of breath and completely drained. Nevertheless he will telephone a couple of hours later to mention a new idea to overcome a bad habit or to propose an extra lesson. During two- and three-day tournaments, he will call each night to go over the day’s games in search of an idea that might help on the following morning.