Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  “It wasn’t like cheating, what we did?” Lisa asked.

  “What you mean? You take Panda’s theme and play to resolution!”

  *

  Lisa sat up front with their host, Asa Silber, on the long ride out to his lake house. Igor said he wanted to sit in back. He had won both of his games, but he was tired, and needed a moment to close his eyes. Asa and Lisa were quickly off on a romp through Lisa’s now-famous game. And they began to eagerly follow the many paths of possibility that the game contained after her piece sacrifice. Asa shook his head violently at many of these variations, like a horse unhappy with his feed, and protested: “But you’re down a piece!”

  Lisa, struggling to explain herself, said: “C’mon, it’s just like game nine of the Tal-Botvinnik match.” As everyone knows a misty rainbow in the afternoon sun, Lisa thought all chessplayers knew this game. And she imitated Igor: “OK, structure different, but is same for way black not make for coordinate.” Asa thought it was hilarious, the way she talked like Igor. And it was in that happiness that Lisa understood that the position from Tal’s game had been inside her, swimming around, helping her channel the Panda. In her analysis of game nine with Igor, she had also repeatedly said “But I’m down a piece!” Somehow the idea of the position had given her direction. And she was able to summon the three chords of material, time and quality of position to flow through her like Igor’s ridiculous “pa, pa, paaa.”

  “Me and Igor ain’t playin’ no bougie chess!” Lisa yelled.

  “Ha ha! And what does that mean?” Asa asked.

  “It means I play like a badass,” Lisa answered.

  Asa smiled at Igor in his rearview mirror. After a time that seemed like forever, the tired man in the back seat said, “Bourgeois move is when don’t think for self, only follow safe expectation of others.”

  Enjoying the ease of her new friendship with Asa, Lisa did not notice what a long commute it was. But as they entered the house, Lisa had no conversation or social graces for Asa’s family. Time slowed for her. Eyes downcast, Lisa mumbled rehearsed answers to their well-meaning questions as to her favorite piece and when she had learned to play. They were shut out from chess. And the moment the conversation stopped addressing her directly she disappeared.

  Igor later gave Lisa a big old speech about Asa’s family. He said that Asa had grown up in a Jewish community in Detroit, and it was there that he learned to play chess. But the lox bagels Asa served them didn’t seem so strange. Igor said that the name of Asa’s eldest son was super Jewish. And that Elijah, now a senior in high school, had flawlessly adopted the Christian fervor of his mother and Fresno. Nor did his religious mother seem to feel any tension in marrying a Jew. But Lisa didn’t understand what the big deal was supposed to be. Igor said that Asa knew his last name had been shortened from the original Zilberstein, but that he didn’t know what it meant. Asa had no access to the playfulness of that German name’s Jewish construction. “Don’t you see, Lisa? We at end of history!”

  But that was just one of Igor’s speeches. Lisa didn’t sense any history as she entered the house. She didn’t think food or names were important. She couldn’t have told you the difference between the old and new testaments. She didn’t notice. She was a chess hunter. And in the same way she found the hustlers at Turk and Market, and the Ethiopian players at Colonial Donut in Oakland, she now found Dr. Silber’s two giant trophy cases. She tried to hide there, in a corner of the living room.

  Each case contained five levels, and on each level was a chess set. There was a Renaissance set, a Star Trek set, a Star Wars set, a space aliens set, and several ornately carved wooden sets. Lisa studied the collection intently. They were all she had in this foreign environment, non-regulation chess pieces offering her an oblique reflection of who she was.

  From the kitchen, Dr. Silber tried to introduce his daughter, Laynee, to Lisa—just one year older than her—and his wife, Roxie. But they weren’t chessplayers. Why don’t they just go away? Lisa thought. Like Jan and Frohlich with all their meaningless questions, they make me so tired.

  Lisa imagined Dr. Silber trying to seduce his children into the game with his space alien set—neon blue versus neon pink. But his children had not followed him, and now his weird sets were all that was left of his chess, like some kind of monument. Every day, he passes his sets in his living room. The trophy cases are like an altar to chess, the true path he didn’t follow. His chess set collection probably gets bigger and brighter every year, like the way Jan’s shoe closet grows as she gets older.

  “Uuha, Stephanie says I can keep studying French cuz there’s a tribe of Indians that speak it an’ I can talk to them when we go down to Mexico.” Like a little rubber ball, Laynee Silber bounced this and other text messages against the tired chessplayers.

  Her father asked Igor, “Do you like wine? My good friend gave me this bottle. He had a great career as an architect, but wine is what he loves best. So he gave it all up for a vineyard in Sonoma.” Silent, Igor turned the bottle. Dark shades wiggled from purple to black in his oversized pachyderm hands. And Lisa could tell he wanted to drink the whole bottle. He would bathe himself in the fancy wine words that Jan and Ted used, words like “terroir” and “mellowed tannic,” to elevate the bruises and deprivations of his life into fantasies of rich complexity.

  Laynee interrupted Igor’s ancient desire, “Hey so, are you a nerd like my dad?” As Igor looked up, Lisa saw that the wine was just a little plaything. There was a deeper, more powerful foe caged in Igor’s body. His name was vodka, and he grimaced like a naked wrestler next to the fancy California wine. Igor said, “I not know this word. Dad and me both chessplayer.” Lisa looked through the glass panes of the trophy cases, across the wide living room, and fixed her eyes on the foreign Russian: Really? You don’t understand? The word “nerd,” Igor, it’s a little ball of shit that you have to yank from the hairs of your ass. How can you not see how she hates us?

  Igor would never be able to understand how much she suffered. Lisa leaned her forehead against Asa’s trophy case. She had beaten her first master that day! It was something she had fantasized about. She had imagined that it would complete her. That win would make her special. Her achievement would be like a shield against all the ridicule and loneliness. But she felt empty.

  Laynee was normal. Standing in the dining room with Igor and her dad, she was natural in her flirty dress with its splashy colors. Jan wanted Lisa to dance lightly through life the way Laynee did, with the ease of beauty. And Lisa had wanted to! She wanted to please Jan so badly. But she had been awkward and fat. A Laynee had always been inside Lisa, but she would never come out. She arose only in private, as her accuser. She always had flouncy blonde hair, and Lisa hated that bitch.

  Lisa lightly banged her head against the glass pane of the trophy case, as if she were tapping out a telegraph. Asa crossed the room. He opened the case and took out his nicest wooden set. “Lisa,” he said, “you were telling me, in the car, about a position from the Tal-Botvinnik match. I nodded my head as if I knew it. But I don’t. Would you show it to me?”

  As Lisa and Asa set up the pieces, Laynee laughed at her father playfully, and said, “It’s the only religion my father has.”

  “For truth, they go now to temple,” Igor said.

  “I never really learned, didn’t want to,” Laynee said. “He was always so intense about it. But now I wish I could.”

  “Is possible for hear what they see,” Igor said.

  “What?”

  “You have sound system, yes? Please find this piece on the YouTube.” And Igor wrote down “RV 424; II Largo.” It was the same Vivaldi piece Igor and Lisa had listened to at the beginning of the summer. Laynee couldn’t find an interpretation with period instruments like they had heard at the conservatory. So Ofra Harnoy played a modern cello to an accompaniment of strings and what sounded like an organ. The modern cello was more robust; it lacked the fragile scratching, like turkey feathers on tin, that L
isa had heard from the scruffy boy’s instrument.

  During the analysis, Lisa playfully shouted things in Igor’s voice, like, “Zhou mus’ take opponient into deep dark forest where two plus two iz five.” And, “Zhou know, me and wife, we like opposite-colored bishops. Communication not so good.” Imitating her master was fun, and everyone loved it. But Laynee was mostly solemn. She stood close to the board and listened to the song several times. For Lisa, it was obvious how the song was like chess. But poor Laynee! She was among the chessless and would never get it.

  *

  Lisa lost her game the following morning. And she unloaded her grief upon Igor as he marched her through Fresno’s barren streets in search of food. “I mean, so I played queen takes b3 and I thought he had to play rook takes b3 when I then had rook a1 check! Bishop f1 rook takes f1 king takes f1 bishop h3 check king g1 rook a1 check and I have him, right, but he had the zwischenzug, knight f5 after bishop f1, and even then I could have survived . . .” Lisa assumed that everyone knew her subvariations. And the world—well, at least Igor—did not interrupt the myopic rhythm of her recounted moves. His head nodded “tak” to each of her moves. Lisa was describing a disease she was struggling to recover from with absurd sounding medical terms and Igor pretended that he knew what they meant.

  Igor said he had to find them something to eat. They only had thirty minutes until the next round. Downtown Fresno looked like a bomb had gone off in 1959 and they were only now allowed back in. Cracked facades spoke to a vibrant time before the Tal-Botvinnik match. Fresno’s old movie theatres now advertised “Iglesi a Victori osa, Domingo 9 a 11.” An army of homeless people gathered in the city’s main square in front of the courthouse. The jail had just spit them out, and they were trying to get back in. It was the only way out of the heat.

  But Lisa didn’t see any of that. She flagellated herself with the correct decisions that now seemed obvious. “I’m so retarded! How come I couldn’t just play knight takes pawn?”

  In ninety-six-degree heat, twenty minutes before the round, they entered a convenience store. The spent smell of stale crackers and month-old jelly beans greeted the players in a blast of forced air that pushed their sweaty clothes against them. The playing hall would also be cold. The sticky wet of their shorts and T-shirts would feel like Irkutsk by the end of the first hour.

  Uncle Smirnoff saw Igor. Snickers saw Lisa. ’Member me, old friend? ’Member our firs’ kiss? Your wittle baby teeth finding hidden nut in my warm chocolate? Lisa held four bars and a Coke in an unstable clutch of chest and hands. Igor shouted “Nyet!” and started pulling the candy away. Two bars fell like small wooden planks onto the linoleum. Lisa screamed as he forcibly unpried her thumb for the last two. The injustice! Honey. Don’t leave me. He can’t do that. You are free to love whomever you choose. Lisa expected the adult behind the counter to help. But the Pakistani man did not look at her. He didn’t care about the injustice she faced. “It’s my money, Igor! And it is healthy. It has peanuts, look!”

  Igor rudely dragged Lisa from the store, like Jan had once dragged her back to the inventory room. He cussed in Russian, and forced Lisa back to the hotel bar where he ordered two soups. White toast buttered into pliant submission came first. Lisa’s tongue sucked the salt from the floppy sponge until the beep of a microwave in the back of the kitchen announced the soup. Brined potatoes stuck up like icebergs within a gelatinous cream. “Eat, Lisa, eat,” he demanded. “The round is about to start.” Lisa swallowed too fast. And a hard lump soon sat at the bottom of her gut like a corn cob or an avocado peel that won’t compost in black earth.

  The round was late in starting. Ready, set, no wait, sorry, we still have some stuff to figure out. The father of Lisa’s next opponent politely guided Igor into a discussion of his son’s chess. How could he help the boy improve? The two men stood before tiny ten-year-old Kash Patel. He too was playing in the Open Section. Lisa peeped from behind, still angry and confused by Igor’s rough mistreatment of her. Kash’s mom served her son warm saag from a silver tiffin, and the smells of spinach, garlic and turmeric ran through each other like colored threads in an embroidery.

  Kash’s father, Vinay, placed a special cylindrical cushion on his son’s chair, giving Kash a whole extra foot so that he could properly reach his opponent’s pieces. Vinay then overlaid the cushion with a patterned Brahmin cloth, as if it were a prayer blanket. Kash sat still, a gentle fulfillment in his posture. Lisa fidgeted on the other side of the board. She needed to touch everything around her, like an infant harvesting bacteria.

  The first shivers of hotel cold reached Lisa’s sweaty clothes as the game began. Her pieces marched underneath the looming canopy of high rainforest trees, and foreign birds chattered her mind into misdirection. Why wasn’t Jan there, to give her a warm blanket and a hot soup?

  Igor was fighting it out, on board one. So she would too. She would find strength on the other side of pain. Lisa began rocking back and forth. She would not move too fast. Her body began to daven, like an old Jew studying his Talmud, rhythmically squeezing out the salty fidgets and the damp of her clothes. Lisa won, and Vinay Patel applauded her victory. He invited Lisa to join them outside for a Brahmin picnic while doctor Silber and Igor finished playing their games.

  *

  That evening, Laynee Silber came to sit with the exhausted chessplayers. Like cows whose feeding has been interrupted, they briefly looked up at the odd intruder, but then continued to speak in monosyllabic grunts and eat everything placed in front of them. The lush hair that tumbled down onto Laynee’s face and pajamas in great unbrushed clumps made Lisa nervous. As Laynee began speaking, Lisa said to herself, I can’t take her seriously.

  “Hey, so I couldn’t sleep last night, after we listened to the music. I had never really listened to classical music before. Anyways, I want to say I’m sorry for using the N-word. I had never really thought about it. All I could see was that whenever I thought of the word I thought of my brother. My brother’s this straight-A student, see. He’s always studying, always doing what he’s supposed to. And he’s always ahead of me, an’ I can never be as good as him. Jus’ about every class I have the teacher looks at me with big ol’ eyes and says ‘oh, so you’re Elijah’s sister,’ all loud, so the whole class hears. And everyone thinks on that first day of class that I’m supposed to be this star student of somethin’. So, what I’m trying to say is that I feel that weight pushing down on me all the time, and the only way I can push it off me, to feel like somebody too, is to call him a nerd. And that’s what everyone else calls him, so I hadn’t really even thought about it much til las’ night. An’ I was thinkin’ that maybe they call him a nerd because they also don’ want him or the other nerds to hold anything over us, an’ I thought that was kinda funny cuz my brother doesn’t really hold anything over us. It’s only the teachers that point to him, an’ tell us that we should be like him. But see, then I thought that’s kinda strange cuz the teachers aren’t really nerds themselves. I mean it’s not like they’re really that interested in the things they’re teaching, they’re not studying every night themselves or anything. They’re kinda like the rest of us, even if they do use my brother as someone to point to. An’ as I was sitting with you guys last night listening to the music and watching you talk about chess I suddenly realized that studying has to be so much more. Like a thick tree trunk that rises up from the beginning of time, everyone can come up to touch it. You just have to realize that it’s there. Last night I felt I could see past the teachers and my brother. And I realized that I was trapping myself by calling my brother and you guys the N-word. I don’t know if I will play chess or anything, but I do know that I want to experience more. I wanna hear more music, and I wanna talk to you guys.”

  Lisa shook with anger. But she hasn’t made the sacrifices! She probably plays soccer. Her hair bounces off her back as she trots over to the bench, she screams in delight, and giggles with an orange peel as her smile. Boys fetch brightly colored rings fro
m the bottom of her dad’s pool while she and her friends laugh and drink iced tea.

  But everyone loved her little speech. Asa proudly said, “My daughter’s a writer.” And as they were going off to bed, Lisa had to overhear Igor ask Laynee, “You make journal?”

  *

  Kayaks and paddleboats were moored to the Silbers’ island clubhouse. To get there, Lisa and Igor passed by a cement swimming pool. A float that looked like a tiger had lost most of its air. The burnt animal fat of the poolside grill glistened in the cool morning sun. They began to shamble over the wobbly rope bridge, out to the other side, where trees and boulders formed nooks of secrecy and adventure.

  But they only made it to the middle of the bridge. Lisa felt drawn to look into the lake, and Igor stood beside her. Yellows, greens and blacks flickered across the deep blue like quickly changing flowers. The bottomless quiet of that perfect dark blue would hush those deceits. Its warm bliss would cleanse her return. And she would again be whole and pure.

  “Do you think Asa would mind if we went in?” Lisa asked her coach.

  “No, he not mind, we go.”

  Lisa stumbled down the wobbly bridge to the shore and Igor was right behind her. But before they could get their shoes off, Asa honked the horn of his SUV and shouted, “Hey guys, we’re gonna be late for the round!”

  *

  It was the big game, the final round. Mr. Rasmussen, president of the Fresno Chess Club, proudly stood next to an old-fashioned demonstration board to play out the moves between Igor and his opponent, Enrico Guzman. A few fans had come to watch. Maybe they learned about the tournament from the newspaper article Mr. Rasmussen had maneuvered into the local paper. Maybe they heard the local talk show interview he had arranged for Igor. This battle would decide who won the tournament he had worked so hard to organize. Igor and his opponent were on the stage, with only Robert and his big board next to them. Everyone else was below.