Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Igor had elaborate rationalizations for the compromises he made. He especially liked to talk about some Ancient Greek word called phronesis. “Is big experience, not in mind, is in gut,” he said. “Tell you when to play safe, when to make draw.”

  To Lisa, all this bourgeois shit sounded like a trench Igor could no longer climb out of. It probably began as a playful path through a flowery field; he enjoyed it so much that he walked there every day. The clean air of rivers and great forests had promised broad possibility. But millions of his heavy footfalls had slowly opened a crack in the soft earth. Now the trench was so deep that Lisa could only see the top of his bald head. Igor could no longer see over its rim, to view the desolation of the shoveled landscape that surrounded his rut.

  Fallen into the phony compromises of the adult world, Igor was no different from the tired men in Fresno—they also could not study their own games. Wooden beams, coated with words like phronesis, held the hard-packed earth back. Fooling with it invited structural collapse. And so the trench got deeper, and marched Igor into the mindlessness of repeating the same moves over and over. He was somehow still travelling around the country in a Greyhound bus, trying to win the Church’s Fried Chicken Grand Prix.

  *

  That evening, the patterns rose up easily into Lisa’s consciousness, as if they were old friends coming to see her. At the old photocopies of the mate-in-twos Ruth had made her, she shouted: “Not so easy, Mr. Bambeezy!” And: “Are ya in the lurch? Take that, Mr. Church!” These patterns shot Lisa upward, and she sped ever faster through the transparent likenesses of a more pure self.

  When she came down, out of the geometry, Lisa began to notice the many physical histories of Ruth’s old photocopies. Oily thumbprints showed how rigidly she had grasped the pages. She saw the exclamation points next to her favorite problems. And she came to the page still stained with her angry tears, permanently smudging the play of the pieces within the little black box that had brought so much grief. Such a long time ago! Jan had not wanted the problems in her house, and had stolen them from her. But Lisa had been a novice then. Now she was strong, and properly owned them. Stupid Jan, she would never get it.

  The analysis of her chess would begin the next day. Lisa was sure. For they had finished Igor’s game. Lisa knew that Igor would want to examine her struggle with Zarra. They would need the carbon copy of the game score. Russian tradition demanded that they have it with them, which was really pretty old school, because the Polgar Championship had been the one tournament where all of her moves, along with the time she had spent on each one, had been electronically transmitted to the internet, for everyone to see.

  From the shoe box where she kept her game scores, Lisa took out the painful memory that was now a crinkly wad. She had angrily mashed it after the game. Oblong, it looked like it had been hewn together in the wash.

  *

  “You have?”

  Lisa understood what he meant. And she placed her wad squarely between herself and the board. But she couldn’t open it.

  The strong and hairy forearm reached across the board to pick up the crusty spitball. He worked patiently, turning the papier-mâché, feeling for a hook with which he might unfold his student’s game score. But it was difficult; Igor’s fingernails were short. As Igor tried to untangle her game, Lisa said matter-of-factly, “There was nothing I could do. She played a perfect game.” Igor was so lean that she could see his veins and tendons bob with the delicate motions of his fingers.

  Lisa remembered her loss to Zarra like this: Emma Woodhouse has all the advantages—her father is rich; she knows how to play the piano and sing; her manners are so much better than mine. My language is poor. Mr. Elton and Mr. Knightley want her. I am a low-born Smith of uncertain parentage. She pretends to be my friend, and says that I can rise as high as her. But I can’t marry those great men. I must learn to content myself with the farmer boy.

  Lisa watched Igor use his massive palm like a clothes iron, smoothing the sheet. And she remembered what the analysis of a move should be. She should let the opponent’s move fall like a pebble onto the surface of her well. The rippling should be a sensual reflection of all her prejudices. In the most complex of positions, this first splash might be the only thing she could know. That’s why Lisa had to remain pure, to accept and know the pebble.

  The pebble would continue to fall through a spectrum of light. If she could be strong, and wall off the trivial chatter of the world, she would be able to stop time, and gently turn the pebble through her wavelengths. There would be nothing but her and the pebble. Lisa heard Igor’s Soviet coach in her mind: Igor Vasilyevich, turn all your intellectual aggression upon the pebble’s future variations and intents. Dig, Igor Vasilyevich, and your well will grow deeper.

  The analysis lasted nearly two weeks. And in that time Lisa came to see that her pieces did lack manners, that their vocabularies were crude, and that she was in fact low born. Yes, she could occasionally shine with a youthful bloom, but that ruddy beauty would only gain her an introduction into the drawing-rooms of nobility.

  In Zarra’s thought, Lisa saw the nascent outline of ancestral elegance, like a charcoal drawing of a great masterpiece. And Igor pointed to this higher mind, upward from their current analysis, by offering Lisa moments from the games of Zarra’s grandfather, a man known as Big Mikh. Groping in the unresolved ambiguity of that grandmaster’s positions, Lisa was unable to give the pieces direction. And her pieces soon lost all measure of justice, pillaging for petty goods and throwing up rash architecture as they waited for imprisonment and death. Igor let her try again. But she could never find the deep baritone that would command the ennobling ambitions of all the pieces. And when Igor disclosed this voice, and the pieces suddenly knew themselves as if they had never forgotten, Lisa heard the divine mandate of kings.

  It’s so unfair! Lisa complained to herself. Why couldn’t I be born Jewish? Why didn’t I grow up in Brooklyn? I’m branded by the low speech and thought of my school. And I’m cursed by Jan’s low aspirations. In the analysis, Lisa didn’t want to play her own position. She didn’t believe in it. She wanted to play with Zarra’s pieces, and prove her own pieces into the nothingness. Let Igor defend her side. And he did.

  But he did so quietly. It was Igor’s habit to forcefully envelop the heads of his pieces in the powerful flesh of his fingers and palm. He would shove and drill. But in this analysis, Igor lightly moved each piece from its base. Lisa was used to hearing the pieces shriek and growl underneath the violence of Igor’s mind. But now everything was hushed, and the largeness of Igor suddenly vacated, as if he were channeling something without body or human disappointment.

  In the beginning, Igor’s suggestions were small bureaucratic hindrances to the destiny of Zarra’s victory. Yes, Igor, I see that she also has to file her taxes, and that her servants might give her some lip. But that doesn’t change the structure of the game. But Igor’s softly spoken moves began to clear the brush from paths Lisa had not seen. She did not want to admit to these unseen opportunities. And she tried to refute them.

  Once, after it seemed like both camps had bedded down for the night, Igor snuck over the demilitarized zone and rudely murdered all of Zarra’s pieces in their sleep. “I kill like Odysseus!” he screamed with boyish joy.

  Igor always let her try again, any position she wanted. Then he would crush Zarra’s pieces again, and again. Days of this nastiness persisted, and the grime became more difficult to wipe away from the smoothness of Zarra’s thought.

  As the game progressed, and the position of her own pieces worsened, Lisa gathered the weight of Zarra’s advantages and lustily pressed against the weak points of her own position. Lisa understood the principle of destruction: to press upon the frailty of one point, then alternate to another, waiting for the tired rubber band to break. But she was not prepared for the flexibility Igor and her own pieces demonstrated. She stood like an arthritic secretary with a repetitive motion disorder watching an
advanced yoga class for the first time. She pushed on the kingside, and Igor performed the camel pose. She shot her cannons at the queenside, and he did the pigeon. With confident tanks Lisa came crashing through the middle, and Igor collapsed into the plough. At first, these deep bends seemed abject; they were chained to the black memory of her own fatalistic hopelessness. But Igor performed these defensive poses for days, and her pieces began to smile upon their oppressor, arching like wise trees to a storm that will water them and pass.

  *

  The slamming bumpiness of SFO-LON-SKG and the bus to Chalkidiki battered Lisa. Voices came to her as if she were at the bottom of a pool. Igor sounded like he was shouting, trying to greet the other veterans in the hotel lobby. Lisa itched, and she was unable to find anything admirable in the new faces. She wanted her body to be translucent, the world entering her thoughts without diffraction.

  Suitcases banged the white tile floor. Little boys squealed in languages Lisa couldn’t understand. And parents kept coming up to Igor, asking him urgent questions about this and that, the when and the where—as if he would know! All this noise crowded in between Lisa and her teacher.

  “This not your room, Lisa,” Igor said. “I stay with head coach, GM Melikset Matikozyan. You with Zarra down hall, here key, room 517. Only couple hour rest before opening ceremony.”

  Lisa preferred to knock, not feeling entitled to put her key into the door. A gangly beanstalk of a man came to the door. He looked down on Lisa and called out: “לדירה שלך נמצא כאן, Zarra.”

  Zarra bounded to the door. With laughing smiles she cried, “Yelizaveta! Welcome!” Then she hugged Lisa. “Yelishka, this is my grandfather, Viktor. Viktor, this is my sweet Yelishka.”

  Lisa’s eyed widened, but she was shy and didn’t say anything at first. Sitting on her bed, prompted by the usual questions of travel, Lisa could only say, “Are you really Big Mikh?” Viktor laughed, and said that he was nobody special; that he was only a coach for the Israeli team. Lisa was very tired, but she had to ask. So she got out her board and set up one of his positions. “How did you find this move?” she asked. Lisa expected a deep revelation, but Viktor shrugged and said only, “It sometimes happen.” That’s all he said. “No, really, please tell me,” she demanded. But Big Mikh only ever said, “It sometimes happen.” And that is what Lisa fell asleep thinking: It sometimes happen.

  The colorful dances of the opening ceremony were long over by the time Lisa found herself hurrying downstairs to the flutter of nervous kids and coaches who jostled around the long computer printouts that announced who would play whom in the first round. The European teams lounged nearby on couches. Their governments had paid for them to arrive early, to tour the ruins and play blitz chess on the decks of clear blue hotel pools. Lisa found herself mostly alone; Igor had to help the boys as well.

  There was a security checkpoint at the entrance of the playing hall. A gruff man with ungroomed stubble slowly moved a black wand over Lisa’s body as if it were a comb, checking for hidden chess computers or transmitting devices. Stoic voices announced that anyone not seated at the board within ten seconds of the gong would be forfeited, and that permission was required to use the bathroom.

  An electric cord ran from Lisa’s board to a cable underneath the long table. The moves of her game would be broadcast over the internet. An olive-skinned girl, wrapped in a black headscarf, came to the board. Her face seemed closed down, like a mummy. She didn’t even look up. Lisa held out her hand. But her opponent wouldn’t take it. Igor had taught Lisa that this ritual was sacred. He said that the handshake staged the violence and death of chess in a spirit of enlightened friendship. But her opponent would not shake Lisa’s hand. She wouldn’t even look at Lisa. Lisa knew that Igor would be scandalized by this offence against chess culture. A camera was on her; she could see it. And Igor would be showing an arbiter the offence in the coaches’ lobby that very moment.

  But no one came to help Lisa. Alone with her pieces, her first several moves were anxious. The unfriendly face across from her wanted to roll over her, joylessly and mechanically, like a bulldozer over a chicken coop. The girls on the neighboring boards were possessed by that same brutal determination. Lisa was startled. This was not the world that had been promised her. These girls were supposed to be her friends, her peers. They were supposed to show her something beautiful. They were going to show her something that would help her explain herself to Jan. Winning had not been the point, right? That you won was supposed to be a measure of the depth of your meditation. Isn’t that what Ruth said?

  Lisa’s mind found itself up in the rafters of the playing hall, among hundreds of fanciful flags that shone like popular girls with bright colors and makeup. Up there, her mind squirmed, like a worm placed on an implacably large sheet of smooth plastic, unable to burrow. Playing for her country seemed as remote to Lisa as playing for her school and Mr. Reese.

  Like a friend who comes to free you from prison, chess softly called to Lisa. Come away! Let’s leave this thoughtlessness. Lisa watched her opponent’s pieces leave the center to earnestly chase down a pawn on the side of the board. You may have my pawn. Lisa davened inside the mysterious weight of the center squares, and angry whips with flayed ends flew out to lick the walls protecting the enemy king. A fissure appeared; like fungi entering the leg of a weakened patient, the central power popped the king’s fortress. The mate-in-twos rejoiced at the little naked man in the shower. “Dance!” they shouted.

  *

  Lisa really needed to find Igor after the game. He had to hear about the center and her opponent’s offence against chess culture (had he already filed a complaint?). But when she finally came upon him in the most removed room of the playing hall, it was obvious that he hadn’t been following her game, either on the TV screen or on the computer. He was laughing with other old men, huddled around some plastic tables they had dragged from somewhere else. They joked about poisoned pawns and encircling maneuvers that came from behind.

  The captain of the American squad, Melikset Matikozyan, introduced himself to Lisa. At the top of his loose shirt a silver cross clung to a clump of white chest hairs, like a baby kanga struggling to find its mother’s pouch. Lisa dumbly stared at the mysterious symbol as she remembered what Igor had said about him. Melik had been the childhood coach of Levon Aronian, now the number two player in the world. Melik had been in his late twenties, his mind long initiated into a chess that could trace its lineage within the Russian and Armenian traditions. Melik had moved in with Levon’s family, to suckle the young boy’s mind. Igor said that American kids had no chance.

  Melik addressed the old men as “The Senate,” and told them a story of how a grandmaster named Dvoirys had taken a ballpoint pen to his forehead, crying “Idiota” with each stab, blood spilling all over his scoresheet and board. The men of the Senate nodded knowingly. Lisa too thought she knew what it felt like when the pieces no longer answered her commands. She already knew the terror of the gap between what she should be and who she was.

  Into this circle of friendship, Igor solemnly submitted his earnest question: “You think we try for see something in the chess that we not find in the life?” But they laughed at him. And a chorus began: “Come on man, CHESS IS LIFE! CHESS IS LIFE! Fischer said that shit man, CHESS IS LIFE!” Then Julian, a coach for the Mexican team, broke into song with the Eastern European variation of this line: “No man, CHESS IS MY WIFE!” And they were soon swaying to the refrain as if it were the end of the evening, their liter-sized beers quickly refilled. “CHESS IS MY WIFE! CHESS IS MY WIFE!”

  Lisa pestered Igor. She wanted him to be scandalized by the handshake that didn’t happen. “Leave me, Lisa. I with old friends now,” Igor said. But her opponent hadn’t analyzed the game with her! And it was his job to help her. She hung about Igor’s oversized knee as if she were beseeching an indifferent god, using the very brief interludes of conversation to complain.

  “OK, OK, Lisa. Am I babysitter or somethi
ng?” Igor took Lisa over to one of the coaches of the Iranian team. With fake solemnity he told his friend, “You know, Elshan, Ivanchuck say that if you wish for progress make in the chess you must realize that chess is everything. Ab-so-lute-ly everything.” Both men smiled at the childish beauty of this sentiment. And then Igor continued: “But you remember what chess told Chucky after he lose to child from Philippines and declare retirement?” Both men rose their heads and voices to deliver the well-known answer together: “Chucky can quit chess, but chess can’t quit Chucky!”

  As the entire Senate laughed, and even Lisa smiled, Lisa overheard Igor softly telling Elshan of her grief. Elshan only asked, “Is she a Jew?” Lisa was again disqualified, reminded of her low birth. But then Elshan said in perfect English, “Come Lisa, let us go find Dorsa.” And he led her off to the Iranian huddle while Igor remained with his friends.

  “دعونا نحلل لعبة نظركم,” Elshan told the girl who had not shaken Lisa’s hand, Dorsa Karimi. “One thousand years ago, before chess came to the west,” Elshan told Lisa and Dorsa, “the queen was called ‘ferz.’ The ferz was the counselor, and that is who I shall be.” As they played out the first moves of the game Dorsa muttered monosyllabic dissatisfactions to Elshan. Lisa didn’t know what her words meant, but she recognized the guilt Dorsa’s pieces felt: as if all of their moves had been wrong, and losing was inevitable. With Elshan, Lisa also became a ferz—originally a kind of powerless man who never moved more than one square from the king. Together they sought the true causes of Dorsa’s defeat, lifting the ghosts and accusations from her pieces.

  Then Dorsa started saying things in English, like “wtf?” and “Yolo.” These phrases felt like a warm sun burning off the East Bay’s morning fog, and Lisa laughed heartily. She imagined Dorsa learning English through Facebook posts and illegally downloaded American movies, where pop-up advertisements push sex with a lipstick lady popping out of a spandex suit. Dorsa soon trusted herself to complete sentences. And it turned out that her English was really good.