by Jesse Kraai
What is the point of mating in two in a position like that? Lisa thought. She knew she would be able to mate, eventually. And problems? Chess had been about the conversation of the pieces. That’s what she wanted. That’s why she had come to Igor. The problems reminded Lisa of boys and their pointless math problems. Lisa allowed herself to doubt. And this comforted the failing she saw ahead of her. Maybe chess was bullshit, like everything else.
Lisa saw Ruth approach from a great distance, slowly pedaling up the gradual incline of the East Bay. Her great brown skirts bobbed up and down in the cavity of the old-style women’s bicycle. Ruth arose out of the darkness of the rainy season to meet Lisa on an unusually bright and hot day. She sweat.
Ruth listened to Lisa’s troubles and considered the great book she carried. “Copy shop,” she spoke into her phone. On the walk there, Ruth told Lisa that Igor was a troubled man. He was not to be taken lightly. And, as far as she knew, he hadn’t taken a student in a very long time.
“But,” Lisa said, wanting to defend the man she didn’t know, “aren’t the people who suffer always the heroes?”
“What?” Ruth said. “No! No they’re not. Listen Lisa: all Russian intellectuals have to choose, by the age of forty, between blunt racism and the notion that Jews conspire to control the world. But this age has passed Igor by long ago, and he still has not chosen his path. He is therefore a very confused man.”
Ruth made Lisa photocopies. She paid for them. And as she worked, she explained that she and Igor had been at several events together, at the Olympiad Team Championship and at a couple US Championships. Ruth had played in the women’s event while Igor played in the genderless equivalent. But, Ruth said, Igor probably wouldn’t remember her. He and the other Russians didn’t consider women’s chess to be the real thing. And he had always been drunk.
Ruth said that Igor was a legend. For he had escaped. The Soviet authorities allowed him to play in the prestigious Capablanca Memorial in Havana after he beat World Champion Anatoly Karpov in 1979.[1] On the way back, the big Soviet plane had to make an emergency refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland. And Igor simply walked off. “It’s not like he could have planned it, you see? He just grabbed his chance and jumped.”
When the photocopies of the first five hundred problems were made, Ruth said, “Listen, Lisa. This thirty-pound book, it’s a collection of the problems that Laszlo Polgar used to train his daughters, Judit, Zsofie and Zsuzsa. They all became champions. And Judit was the only woman to ever compete with the best men. I want you to learn from Igor. He can teach you in the Russian tradition. I didn’t have that chance, and it’s too late for me now.
“I will hold on to the book so your mom won’t have to see it. Believe me, I know what you’re up against. Just do as many as you can and then take what you have to him tomorrow afternoon.”
Lisa snuck the problems back to her room on the quiet side of the house, where her journal had abandoned her. She solved all night, without sleeping. The next day, she placed the photocopies inside her textbooks, and pretended to study what her teachers wanted while she actually did the problems.
But Lisa wasn’t even close to done. When the final bell rang she had only been able to do eighty-nine.
The many geometries of the problems felt like a cloth she was weaving together. They were her task. And she could not return to Igor until she was done. Yes, she had failed his test. But she would not go back half-naked.
Five days passed like this. She would have been a day earlier too. But one of the problems was incorrect. It was a great malevolence; a sloppy editor had miscast the problem, put some piece where it shouldn’t have been. And Lisa was forced to suffer a great deal before she realized that it had to be wrong.
Lisa retrieved the big book of problems from Ruth that afternoon and then simply left it on the grandmaster’s doorstep; tucked inside were several pages of her answers, written on thick paper that she had ripped out of her journal.
Igor caught Lisa by the liquor store. There he held her lower neck, backpack strap and upper arm in his left hand, as if she were a little plastic chess piece. She squirmed, for she had been taught that this was a very bad situation, but his grip was firm and easily prevented her from escaping.
“Come, Lisa. Let us sit for moment.” Igor pronounced it ‘momient,’ and the liquor store exhaled the sticky smell of spilt beer like a sewage vent. They sat on the concrete ground, underneath a yellow sign that read A&I LIQUOR. It blinked quickly and erratically, like the heart of a young mouse with an arrhythmia. “Now, Lisa. Tell about your chess.”
“One of the problems is wrong,” Lisa complained.
“Where are pieces?” he asked.
“I don’t have a set with me,” Lisa answered. Down the street she noticed a sign that read, NO DRINKING NO LOITERING.
“No, I mean in problem that wrong you, where are pieces?” Lisa began to reach into the unicorn for her photocopies, but Igor pushed her hand away with his huge palm.
“Where are pieces?” Igor repeated.
“How should I know? I have to see the problem.”
“Don’t need for see. Tell where pieces are.”
Lisa pushed her eyelids together tightly, trying to find the memory Igor pointed her back to. But she could only see black darkness. “I can’t see it,” Lisa said.
“Remember pain,” Igor said. And he waited.
Lisa remembered how the pieces had not gotten along. The miscast problem was like her own family: someone was in the wrong place, but no one knew who it was. She recalled the disagreements she had overheard, then the pieces slowly arose from their box: “Queen g7, king e6, knight e2 …”
Lisa watched the problem sink into Igor. It seemed as if he didn’t rush to prove himself to the solution, but let the notational placement of each piece drop like a pebble into his carved space. He must also have to confront the blank nothingness of sixty-four squares and pieces whose only meaning was a place on a grid. Too much information to hold. But then, in the man’s face, Lisa began to see the pieces talking to one another, each one looking to the others to find its role. Roles combined into alliances as the clatter of the street and its attendant smells faded. It was as if he saw possible mates before his mind thought to ask for the first move. The patterns were his old friends, and shortly after they bowed their greeting to one another they showed Igor the solution. Maybe there was a way to solve the problem.
Igor opened his eyes and moved away from the enemy king. “Queen c3,” he said.
His answer was wildly wrong. It wasn’t even on the right side of the board. Igor pointed to a woman across the street, entering a little shop called Sweet Cupcake. People sat outside on metal chairs and laughed underneath a smart blue and white awning. “This diabetes lady,” he said with scorn. “She kill best friend. Other friend only have one arm left; legs gone.”
He was insane. One step away from homelessness on the streets Jan and Ted had told her to avoid, like the crazy woman on the train platform. No one could listen to what he said.
Lisa unzipped her backpack and looked at the photocopies one last time. The offending problem was stamped with the word “Fuck” and crisscrossed with several angry lines. Igor’s answer wasn’t even close.
Ruth’s photocopies made a crinkly sound as they brushed up against the flank of the plastic unicorn. Then Lisa shoved the stupid problems into the cavern of her backpack. She zipped and strapped her unicorn with the efficiency of a schoolgirl who has to make a class and began walking toward the train. But she didn’t have anywhere to go.
From the daydream of wander—unaware of the exhaust from the cars, the grime in the sidewalk or the shouts of the drunks—announcements of a broader geometric vision began to fill Lisa’s mind. The justice of the problem’s geometric interconnection snapped her spine erect and she walked back to Igor, filled with the numbing wonder of a deeper truth.
Her thoughts had circled too intently on the squares housing the king, like a horde of
nine-year-old boys crowding the soccer ball on a large field. After Igor’s move, the king now had even more squares to move to, but Igor had foreseen death in each of his destinations. The variations had a dirty wit about them. They were fart jokes, laughing at all the phonies who pretended not to smell the world’s flatulence. And Lisa was suddenly the construction worker whose callused hands can see past all the prettily painted facades and touch the cheap drywall behind them.
“Is nice zugzwang, yes?”
But Lisa didn’t know this word.
“Zugzwang cruel inertia of the life,” Igor said. “Must move, player cannot sit, must go into emptiness.”
Jan had told Lisa that this was true. The cartilage of her nose had turned into bone in the months after her birth. The lower vertebrae of her tailbone would fuse when she stopped growing. She would lust. Someday she would experience something called menopause. Then she would die.
*
That evening, Lisa followed Jan around the big house. She watched Jan pause at individual pieces, all from her store: a ceramic coffee table, a great vase of blown glass, an ancient rocking chair. Lisa saw Jan ponder each for a moment, probably thinking about her business—but maybe also thinking beyond it. It was like following someone around a museum.
Lisa waited for Jan’s meditative state to develop, and the moment her eyes crossed from the bamboo placemat to the solstice light in the long window, Lisa ambushed her with an introduction to some of the new and powerful words: zugzwang, gegenspiel, zwischenzug. In her reflective state, Jan did find their pronunciation charming. “Help me, Ted!” Jan cried to the distant sound of the TV on the other side of the house. “Lisa is giving me the zugzwang.” She pronounced the a in zwang like “twang,” Igor said it more like “song.”
Lisa tried to get Jan to understand the words, without all the comic associations she was giving them. Jan said she couldn’t understand; Lisa thought she didn’t really try. These words, so alive and elastic when she was with Igor, now hardened. Like bricks, the words fell to the ground between Lisa and Jan and formed a small ledge. “Come on, Jan!” Lisa pulled on Jan, trying to get her over the little step. But she did not step over. Lisa tried easier words: “promotion,” “gambit,” “structure.” But Jan only shrugged. These words also fell. And now a proper wall stood between the two women.
Jan would not see the brilliant theocracy in front of Lisa. Above her, Ruth stretched out her hands, and called Lisa forth like a priestess. Ruth had once been rated 1900. She had played in the US Women’s Championship. Beyond her, Igor commanded the basilica. He had played with the best in the world. Their names hung like icons in Igor’s cathedral: Polgar, Kasparov, Fischer. Everyone knew their place in this world, and where they wanted to go.
Lisa came to the wall, and proudly told Jan about Igor and the problems she had secretly been doing. Lisa’s words and aspirations became quick darts and knives. She wanted to cut Jan, to make her bleed until she saw the truth. The conversation became loud. Jan said that Lisa had lost her trust. Ted came in and shouted about the crime and the unbelievable danger of Lisa being anywhere near Ashby Station. Needles, disease, and child-abductors clutched at his step-daughter there.
“Why don’t you just say that I can’t play chess?” Lisa shouted. “Isn’t that what you really want to do?”
But it was as if Jan had learned from their last argument—she didn’t care how right Lisa was. And all this stuff, about the bad neighborhood and the danger of unfamiliar men—it was like Jan and Ted weren’t answering to the truth of what Lisa was saying. They weren’t really listening to her. Chess was more fair. You either answered your opponent’s moves or you got crushed.
Jan and Ted forbade Lisa from studying with Igor. She could use her money from the Polgar Foundation to get a teacher from the Berkeley Chess School.
Defeated, Lisa went to the kitchen and found her old journal. It was still open, to her entry from January 30th. On the granite countertop’s white and blue-black swirls, Lisa’s thoughts about the rain had stood about like undignified beggars. No more; Lisa picked up the book and put it in the redwood dresser, where she had once searched for Grandma Lena’s journals, underneath the old clothes that Jan procrastinated giving away. She would study with Igor. She would find a way. And she was right. Jan stood with Ted on the other side of the wall with the rest of the chessless, with no access to meaning, stumbling from one superficial concern to the next.
*
Standing in his doorway the next day, Lisa told Igor about her plan: She would secretly arrive at his cottage, every afternoon, to study. Ruth would be the executor of the Polgar money. Ruth knew Zsuzsa Polgar personally, and could arrange everything easily. She wanted to help.
Igor contemplated the position for a time, and then said, “First Question: Father say no to chess; why?”
Lisa shrugged and said, “Cuz they’re stupid. They don’t even know how to move the pieces.”
Igor looked out above Lisa, into his thick kales. “Not satisfy for explain. Why does Lisa make her plan?”
Lisa became eloquent. She told Igor how unfair it all was; how Jan had gotten her into chess and now wouldn’t let her pursue it. And summer was coming; she should be free to do whatever she wanted. That was the bargain. Jan and the school always seemed to be saying, “just a little longer, then you’ll be free.”
Igor closed his eyes, as he had done when he solved the mate-in-two, and said, “Lisa think only about own pieces, injustice of their lives, about their intention and potential. But not think about opponent pieces. Lisa not sense danger. Lisa is right. Lisa is just. Gods smile to her. It not matter that position will not hold, that plan will be discovered. Light will fall upon Lisa’s moves and everybody will see how good she is because she right.” Igor laughed at Lisa. “Maybe Lisa think that everybody will dance around her and say how smart she is when plan is discovered.” Igor let out a sharp jangle of a growl, like a Shostakovich chord from the far left side of the piano.
Red shame rose into Lisa’s face. But she did not cry. And she did not run away. The garden light began to shift toward darkness, and the first evening breezes announced the cold summer fog. Softly, Igor began, “We must hinder plan of opponent. We call this prophylaxis. After all my years inside the chess, prophylaxis stay big surprise: We learn that stopping intention of opponent is for truth way for free own pieces. Is surprise because we wish for think our pieces are the movers and the shakers. But we must learn to move beyond own pieces. We cannot be trapped in their moods. We have to reach into pieces of opponent, and make for big understand that our pieces only know themselves inside of opponent wish for kill. We need to see him, opponent for us, like mirror. Big practice need to feel opponent, to feel man who wish for kill us.”
Lisa considered herself from this flipped perspective: The rain, Igor’s kale, the spider in the garden, the text about her; these were not things she reached out to and had deep thoughts about. They pushed in on her and told her who she was.
Igor said, “Lisa, do you wish me for be coach?”
“Yes!” Lisa shouted.
“OK. Maybe I show something. Let me play this position. Give father’s cell number.”
Ted wasn’t her real father; her real dad had died in a car crash when she was an infant. But Lisa didn’t tell Igor anything about that, and she gave him Ted’s number. Her coach assumed a mild face. His voice lost its guttural harshness, becoming feminine and smooth. His English was suddenly nearly perfect. And a meeting was arranged for coffee at the Orinda Starbucks in one hour. “Wait here for moment,” he said. “I walk you to train.”
When he returned, Igor’s bike shoes made an obnoxious click click upon the street. Dressed in tight green spandex, he was suddenly the splashy color in the neighborhood. And Lisa was embarrassed to be seen with him. He was trying to show her something, some kind of grandmaster move. But Lisa could not see what it was. Three features of the position kept coming back to her, startling her awareness:
&n
bsp; a) Bike outfits scandalized Lisa. Once, in the SUV with Jan, they had pulled up at a stoplight alongside her therapist, Dr. Frohlich. A suit of yellow spandex gripped his body. Lisa saw the points of two little tits, the indentation of his ass crack, and the snug balls of her counselor. Jan had waved to him, politely, as if nothing was strange, as if he wasn’t naked. Igor’s lean health chastised the way she had wanted to play the position: in secret, lying.
b) But was he really naked? Igor’s green spandex was as bright as Lisa’s blue top had been on that first day. Now it was as if he were returning that oversaturated color to Jan’s side of the mountain. He was wearing the uniform of her therapist and the professional men of Orinda. Jan probably wouldn’t talk to Igor if he dressed as he normally did. The original color of his clothes was always lost, faded and lightly torn, as if by a thousand brambles. That beaten-up look fit the slope of watery wind, where Ruth found heathered fabrics in secondhand stores.
c) The mountain was too big. In Orinda, the fog would often crest the ridge and begin to descend, gripping the slope like icing glacially falling down the side of a cake. But the white blanket rarely came all the way down. The great barrier protected Orinda from the infestations and cold on the other side. It seemed superhuman to climb over it. But Lisa believed Igor would do it, and that he was doing it for her.
*
Lisa met Igor outside the Berkeley Public Library. That was the arrangement. She again took the short shuttle from school to the train station. The other girls offered each other visions of summer: there were horses, European capitals and special schools. They went through the tunnel, to the other side of the mountain. Lisa went toward the water. A veteran of dangerous travel, Lisa now confidently stood upon the MacArthur Station platform. And she proceeded one stop past Ashby, to the stop at UC Berkeley, where Jan hoped she would attend school one day.