Tactics of Conquest (16 page)

What I saw in that transparent haze of renewed attention was that there was a means to defeat the fool. A position had created itself on the board almost as if it were natural law: my Bishop was wedged between both his Knights, simultaneously attacking, of course, but prohibited from capture because one was guarded by a Pawn, the other by his uncovered Queen ... but if I were to take the Knight, follow carefully now, the Knight guarded by the Pawn, then the capture would leave his King file open, permitting me to bring a Bishop into line.

He could not take the Bishop because it would leave a hanging Pawn ... and if I were then to take the open Rook behind the Bishop, I would have a devastating discovered check. The Bishop could go Queen-side, it could go down the line to double-check, it could pause to go nibbling on a Rook. And nothing to be done. The double-Knight maneuver pinned him.

He was helpless!

I almost gasped but did not: With an effort I was able to keep down the burbles and chokings of laughter which were, instead, like worms moving within the canister of gut, trying to find exit through the mouth. There is something about the mere glimpse of a win which will unsettle even the most amiable and restrained: I have known some who laughed out loud, others who might
have ejaculated cleanly within their trousers ... but the years of discipline held me in check and I did not laugh in Stiller’s face, although looking at his humble, stupid features, now conjoined as I was in a belief that the game was in hand, I proved able to hold down that laughter only through a great effort of will.

What I did was to stand with a little leap, and begin to pace through the spaces of the room, working out the carbonate knots of tension through sheer motion. I was afraid that if he saw my face he would glimpse intention ... and a sense of magic, so pervasive in the Royal Game, held that this could not possibly be.

At all costs he could not see my expression, I resolved. And so I paced through the hall, winding my way through the tables on which play continued, twenty different worlds whose interstices contained me like a sliding fish in net, until I came to a sheer, blank wall and I leaned against that wall, opening my mouth, taking the clear surfaces into my mouth like that fish puckering at the top of an aquarium. He would not see. I would not let him glimpse nor share my knowledge.

When I returned to the board the situation was unchanged. Stiller’s clock moved; he had not yet responded, although his chin was cupped in his splayed hand. The bursting aspect of the little freckles on his skin indicated that he was aware of some subterfuge. Like any master he had sensed rather than seen what was developing, but he did not know my language and I knew that he never would. My intention had gone beneath, over, through him. And even if he did see, what could he have done? The only conceivable response would have been to uncover one of the Knights, and bring it to a safe square. But even so the attack
would have proceeded, lacking only a move of development or so.

I had him.

He had used up five minutes and still remained rigid, locked to the board. An exceptionally slow player, Stiller had now used almost an hour and a quarter for those first sixteen moves ... which meant that he was going to get into time trouble sooner or later. Surely this had occurred to him as well. But shaking his head, giving odd little grunts and grumbles, Stiller yet refused to move.

I felt a flick of impatience. I wanted to grasp his pieces, force one into his hand. He had no right, confronted by the exquisite combination, to be so slow! Still, I could not force him.

Etiquette prevailed. Etiquette always prevails in tournament chess, although I desperately wanted to smash him. The aggressive underlay of chess, so often denied, is the basic component of the game. I could have wrung Stiller’s thick, palpitating neck for what he was doing to me. But one does not do this. One seeks the right move instead. I commenced to pace.

Pacing, then, I had a vivid image: I would leap upon the table, come down then upon Stiller with enormous force. I would rear a gigantic knee into his cheekbones, screaming, and clobber the chessmen to the ground. “You cannot do this to me!” I would scream. “Not when you’re defeated anyway, you fool. It would be one thing if you were winning, but you’re not; it’s hopeless. I’ve found the key to the victory and you’re helpless. So there’s nothing to do, give up, move!” But still he would not move, remaining in that posture over the chessmen.

Sitzfleisch
, I thought with rage: This tactic was common before the advent of the chess clock in
the late nineteenth century. Before that time there was no limit on moves or games, and a defeated player often could, by simple refusal to move, salvage victory, drive his infuriated opponent to grief and resignation.
Sitzfleisch
... the iron butt that can transcend all difficulties, control all circumstances by its simple unwillingness to be moved.

Surely Stiller could not be engaging in this tactic now. His clock was ticking away, now only an hour remained on it for his next twenty ... but yet he would not move. Something broke within me at this point. Surely if there had been a larger audience they might have noted that I was acting rather lunatic. I lumbered over to the referee, then, the referee a small, confused German, recruited from the city as a means of cutting expenses (the tour was in bad straits that year). I resisted an impulse to seize him by the lapels, settled instead for a winsome, stricken grin from which saliva welled and dripped. “Please,” I said, “you’ve got to do something. He won’t move.”

The referee looked at me without comprehension. Something wild and Teutonic passed over his face, then he looked at the floor. “I told you!” I shrieked. “He won’t move! You’ve got to make him move!”

The referee mumbled something, moved away. I stamped my feet in a rage, aware that I was now drawing some attention from a desultory little line of spectators in the hall. “Make him move!” I shouted. “Make him move!”

Stiller himself looked up from the board three yards away, and rubbed his palms. Up and down the line of tables, the frieze of concentration broke. Players were staring. “Please,” I said, appealing to them, “this cannot be permitted.”

“Really, David,” Stiller said, “this is not proper, it’s highly irregular, in fact. Allow me to consider my next move in peace.”

“Liar!” I said. “You have no next move! You’re not
going
to move, you’ll just sit there.”

“I’m definitely going to move if you’ll give me a chance. In these circumstances,” he said blandly, “how could I move?”

His demeanor was so mild, so apologetic, immersed in such sanctimony as to drive me to utter fury, and with a growl I leapt toward him, shrugging off the referee who made desperate little gestures of retrieval, then, with a sigh, gave the battle up and fell away as I launched myself upon my adversary. I felt the shocking contact of his flesh as I dove.

Chess is a game famed for its intellectual rather than physical contact, and therefore this plunge against Stiller was doubly shocking. Little sighs were torn out as I reached my hands toward his stalwart, Hebraic neck, wrung it. (I am not an anti-Semite but there is a certain characteristic of Jews, a repulsive amalgam of hard personality and soft physique which I find disgusting. I say this even though I am at least partly Jewish myself.) Oh, did I squeeze!

“Don’t do it,” he said, “David, don’t
gghh
, then,” his voice remitting to a kind of unintelligibility as he reeled from the board, Knights and Bishops falling like little warped pearls.

“You can’t do this to me!” I responded. I was vaguely conscious of forms hustling toward our little confrontation, attempting to separate us, but I could hardly be dissuaded. “I’m entitled to better than this. I’ve won the game fairly, you fool. You can’t just sit there and expect me to go away!” and so on and so forth, mumbles and curses meshing,
wringing his little neck until his kike’s head began to flap on his neck like a petal, and only at that moment did the hands of intervention assert themselves.

They came between us, pulling me from Stiller, he from me, and I saw him recede. Then I hit the floor, pinioned by referees, officials and a few involved spectators who had dashed from the benches to assist, becoming involved in the situation although FIDE is very much against this kind of thing. Lights swung above my line of sight like insects. I felt myself to be literally in extremis but this too, I advised myself, would pass, would pass.

An incident of this sort was unheard of in the Internationals but there is always a first time. “I’m sorry,” I said when I was able to recover breath, “truly sorry about this but he was, of course, cheating. He’s a big cheater and not only that, he’s a Jew.”

So I felt myself yanked, propelled through the air as I wavered in the supporting network of hands. “You’ve got to play the game fairly,” I nevertheless observed. “It’s a great game, but unless you honor the rules, what’s the point of it? It’s only a madness then; it is the rules which make it great, the strictures which shape it, the difficulties which lend genius.” Then I must have fainted, or at least I have little recollection of what went on for the next few moments. At one instant I was declaiming, and at the next there was a blank, aseptic pit, no sense of transition between the two and then—

I found myself in a small room at the rear of the hall being talked to earnestly by two officials. “We can’t have this sort of thing, David,” one of them said. I nodded; apparently I had remained conscious through all of this, although without memory,
and was trying to give a good account. So I deduced. “It’s a scandal. Stiller is being seen by a doctor right now, he may want to press charges for assault. The Germans are a very authoritarian people, you know.”

The other official, silent but equally involved, nodded vigorously at this. “Do you have any explanation for your conduct, David?” the first official asked. “Anything which can be said in your behalf, which we can take to FIDE?”

I shook my head weakly.

“I was afraid of that, David, but then, attacking opponents during a match is illegal. It goes counter to the spirit of the game which is one of the mind—”

“Go to hell,” I said. Spiritless and drained, there seemed yet to be some core of purpose. I dragged myself to my feet. “Go to hell!”

The official looked at me astonished. Such language is rarely heard at matches; Alekhine has been dead a long time. “David,” he said.

“I’m sick of our talk of intellect,” I said, “I’m sick of our cheap rationalizations. Chess is a game for failures and for physical cowards. Let’s face it. Besides, I had a clear line of attack, the game would have been mine in five moves more.”

“But—”

“But he wouldn’t accept the reality of his defeat The trouble with all chess players except me is that they won’t face reality! Reality for the game is itself. They’ve tried to make it a pure substitute, but it won’t work. Things will never change.”

Admittedly, I was gibbering in what was later considered an attack of deep shock. Anxiety neurosis. “I want to get out of the international circuit,” I said. “I want to get out of competitive chess, get married, live in the world, travel a bit
and
see
the places I stay in. I’m going to leave chess,” I said, the silent official unleashing a briskly mad series of nods then, as if I were addressing his own condition, and I found approbation in his eyes. “Get out,” I said, “meet people, circulate, get away from fools like Stiller.” And I stumbled toward the door of the anteroom, my intention quite clear, my intention to leave the hall and embark upon my life but—

As I went through the door I stumbled into the veritable arms of officials, reporters, honored guests, grandmasters—all of them shouting, “The board has been restored, the board is ready again, you must play, you must!” I tried to break free from their grasp and I could not. I found myself linked within that network of arms and conveyed once again into the hall, toward the board where all of the pieces were set up as before except that my Bishop flanking the Knights
en prise
had somehow been removed.

“Where is it?” I said. “Where the hell is my Bishop?” Referees, honored guests, grandmasters began to laugh. “Where is my
Bishop?
I’ve got my life tied up in that.”

“The position is as you left it,” they said, all of them talking in unison. “Nothing has changed, nothing has changed.” From a side door came the abused Stiller wearing a fresh set of clothing, a high-collared shirt concealing marks which I had left on his wretched neck, the neck swathed in white. He seated himself across the board, ostentatiously making no acknowledgment at all ... and without hesitation of any sort, brought his Queen down to Q7 and checked me thunderously. I looked at the board appalled. The mate was in one. Inevitable. “This is illegal!” I
screamed. “You’ve altered the pieces, you’ve changed—”

“Move!” the referee and honored guests bellowed, Stiller saying nothing, sitting modestly, his hands folded, looking down sweetly at the board in a distracted fashion. As I looked at him, looked at the board, looked at the referees and then the two FIDE officials (who had reappeared), it became quite apparent that the situation, perhaps, was out of control.

Looking at the clock I saw that I had an hour and a half left. Certainly enough. I would sit him out. I folded my hands and looked at the board, suspended in a haze of concentration from which I would not be diverted. I was not going to be checkmated. They were not going to do this to me.

It is possible that certain aspects of this memoir are fabricated, but not all of them are.

I look up at Louis as he completes his move and he is weeping. His face, still open, has come to darkness. Little patches of illness, seen as pits in the deep surfaces, his eyes shrouded, his neck thin and palpitating.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “My old, old friend, I am so terribly sorry.”

Looking at the board, seeing what he has done to me (or maybe I am only thinking of what I have done to myself; could such a thing as this truly be possible?), I have a dazzling moment of pure and brilliant insight which at last continues and does not deny me. It goes on and on, instead, trailing hot little flashes of light like dysentery cramping from the bowels ... and I see then what we have been, where we have gone, what we will become, but this insight cannot possibly last. No! It drains from me as those cramps dissolve themselves into the viscous and deadly fluids of elimination, and here I am again, looking at the board in the fluorescence, the lights of the hall harsh and bright. There are murmurs about me. I turn to connect with them but when I look, expectedly, there is no one there, only Louis and I. It has always been this way. Slowly then I subside
into my seat and the gelatinous substance I know as the Competition encases me once again. Ten games to five. Twenty-six games left to go.