Once, during a bloodcurdling ride home on the icy streets of Chicago, I asked him why he was doing it all. He was doing it for God, he said. God had instructed him to put people together, to spread His love, and that became his mission. I was uncomfortable, afraid that he might proselytize, so I didn’t ask him anything beyond that. But he never asked people about their religion, never flaunted his faith, never tried to call them to the Lord; his faith in soccer was unconditional; people’s belief in the game was enough for him. He told me that, after his retirement, he was planning to buy a piece of land in Florida and build a church, and put a soccer field next to it. He was planning to spend the rest of his life preaching. After the sermons, his flock would play and he would referee.
A few years after that conversation, at the end of the summer, German retired. One of the last weekends before he stopped showing up by the lake, we were playing in sweltering heat. Everybody was testy; hummingbird-size flies were ravenous; the field was hard, humidity high, humility low; a few scuffles broke out. The sky was darkening over the line of skyscrapers along Lake Shore Drive, rain simmering in the clouds, about to boil over. And then a cold front hit us, as if somebody had opened a gigantic cooler, and rain arrived abruptly. I’d never seen anything like that: the rain started at the other end of the field and then moved across it toward the far goal, steadily advancing, like a German World Cup team. We bolted away from the rain, but it quickly caught up with us and in no time we were soaked. There was something terrifying about the blind power of the sudden weather shift, about its violent randomness—as rain washed in waves over us, nothing depended on our minds or wills.
I ran toward German’s van, as toward an ark, escaping the flood. There were other guys there already: German; Max from Belize; a man from Chile (consequently known as Chile); Rodrigo, German’s mechanic, who miraculously kept the van alive for more than twenty years; and Rodrigo’s droopy, bare-chested buddy, who didn’t seem to speak English at all, sitting on the cooler, occasionally handing out beers. We took shelter in the van; the rain clattered against the roof, as though we were in a coffin, somebody dropping shovelfuls of dirt on us.
So I asked German if he thought he’d be able to find people to play with in Florida. He was sure he’d find somebody, he said, for if you gave and asked for nothing in return, someone was bound to take. Suddenly inspired, Chile rambled off something that seemed to be a badly learned lesson from a New Age manual, something vapid about unconditional surrender. People in Florida are too old and they can’t run, I said. If they’re old, German said, they are close to entering eternity, and what they need is hope and courage. Soccer would help them on the way to eternal life, he said.
Now, I’m an atheist man, vain and cautious. I give little, expect a lot, and ask for more—what he was saying seemed far too heavy, naïve, and simplistic. It would have, in fact, seemed heavy, naïve, and simplistic if the following was not taking place:
Hakeem, the Nigerian who somehow found a way to play soccer every day of his life, runs up, soaked, to the van and asks us if we’ve seen his keys. Are you out of your mind, we say, as the rain is pouring through the window. Can’t you see it’s the end of the fucking world, look for your keys later. Kids, he says, I’m looking for my kids. Then we watch Hakeem running through the rain, collecting his two terrified kids hiding under a tree. He moves like a shadow against the intensely gray curtain of rain, the kids hanging on his chest like little koalas. Meanwhile, on the bike path, Lalas (nicknamed after the American soccer player) stands beside his wife, who is in a wheelchair. She has a horrific case of fast-advancing MS and cannot move fast enough to get out of the rain. They stand together, waiting for the calamity to end: Lalas in his Uptown United T-shirt, his wife under a piece of cardboard slowly and irreversibly dissolving in the rain. The Tibetan goalie and his Tibetan friends, whom I’d never seen before and never would after that day, are playing a game on the field, which is now completely covered with water, as if running in slow motion on the surface of a placid river. The ground is giving off vapor, the mist touching their ankles, and at moments it seems that they’re levitating above the flood. Lalas and his wife are perfectly calm watching them, as if nothing could ever harm them. (She has passed away since that day, somebody rest her soul.) They see one of the Tibetans scoring a goal, the rain-heavy ball sliding between the hands of the goalie, who lands in a puddle. He is untroubled, smiling, and from where I sit, he could well be the Dalai Lama himself.
So this, ladies and gentlemen, is what this little narrative is about: the rare moment of transcendence that might be familiar to those who play sports with other people; the moment, arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy an ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours; the moment that perishes—as moments tend to—when you complete a pass. And all you are left with is a vague, physical, orgasmic memory of the evanescent instant when you were completely connected with everything and everyone around you.
THE PATINA
After German left for Florida, I played in a park at Belmont, south of Uptown. It was a wholly different crowd: a lot more Europeans, thoroughly assimilated Latinos, and a few Americans. Often, when I got too excited and demanded, shall we say, that other players stay in their position and play for the team, someone would tell me, Relax, it’s just exercise…, whereupon I’d suggest that if they couldn’t play the way the game’s supposed to be played, they should fuck themselves and go and run on a fucking treadmill. No Uptown player would’ve ever said a thing like that. Relaxation never played any part in our game.
One of the Belmont people was Lido, a seventy-five-year-old Italian. Even the slowest ball was capable of outrunning him, so when the teams were picked he was never counted as a player—we just tolerated his being on the pitch, safe in the assumption that he would have little impact. Like many a man over fifty, Lido was totally delusional about his physical prowess. He truly believed he was still as great a player as he might’ve been some fifty years ago. Topped with a lamentable toupee he never failed to wear, which would turn to cover his eyes if he headed the ball, he was prone to discussing, after he lost the ball, all his brilliant intentions and all your obvious errors. Lido was a good, decent man. (He passed away in 2011, somebody rest his soul.)
I’d retained the habit of showing up early for games, forever tormented by the possibility of not being allowed to join in. Lido lived nearby and was often there before everyone else. Now and then, he’d arrive flustered and annoyed because he’d seen one of our American fellow players hiding in the park, careful to stay away from us in order to avoid the pregame chitchat. What kind of people are they? Lido grumbled. What are they afraid of? Such a thing would never happen in Italy, he said. Lido was originally from Florence and proudly wore a purple Fiorentina jersey. In Italy, he said, people are always happy to talk to you and help you. If you’re lost and ask them for directions, they’re willing to leave their stores and houses unattended to take you where you need to go. And they talk to you nicely, politely, and not like these—and he flung his hand dismissively toward the trees and bushes behind which the shy Americans were cowering. When I asked him how often he went to Italy, he said he didn’t go too often. In Florence, he kept a beautiful Ferrari, he explained, and there were a lot of jealous people there: they would steal his wheels, smash his blinkers, scratch the doors with a nail, for no reason other than sheer malice. He didn’t like to go, he said, because people in Italy are not very nice. When I cautiously reminded him that just a few sentences ago Italians had been incredibly nice, he nodded and exclaimed, Yes, yes, very nice! and I gave up. It seemed that Lido was able to hold in his head two mutually exclusive thoughts without inner conflict—a quality, I realized in a flash, not uncommon among artists.
Lido had come to Chicago in the fifties. In Florence, he and his brother had a business restoring Renaissance frescoes and old paintings, apparently a dime a dozen ove
r there. After they’d arrived in America, they figured there were a lot of paintings in need of restoration over here and they started a business. He’d been doing pretty well since, which allowed him to enjoy life to its full extent. He’d been spotted with a young, endowed beauty or two clinging to his forearms or enjoying a ride in his American Ferrari. Besides the beauties, he seemed to have had several wives. The most recent wife was eighteen or so and was, rumor had it, a mail-order bride who came from a small town in Mexico.
Once, while waiting for the Americans to overcome their shyness, Lido explained to me how dilettantes and buffoons had ruined, under the pretense of restoring it, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Despite my rich ignorance on the matter, he outlined for me all the errors they had committed—they had, for example, used solvent and sponges to take the patina off the frescoes. Lido insisted that I imagine that, and I did: I obediently imagined sponging the helpless Michelangelo. Lido got all worked up and, at that moment, cleaning up the Michelangelo with sponges and solvent verily appeared to me as a grievous act—I pictured a God far too pale to be omnipotent, or even moderately powerful.
But the idiots in charge of the restoration, Lido went on, did eventually realize they had screwed up the creation of the Universe according to Michelangelo and they begged Lido to come over to fix it. Instead of coming to their aid, Lido sent them a five-page invective, in essence suggesting that they shove the sponges and solvent up their asses. What they didn’t understand, Lido said, was that the patina is the essential part of the fresco, that the world the Almighty created on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was incomplete until the mortar fully absorbed the paint, until the inchoate universe turned a little darker. It wasn’t a sunny day when God created the world, Lido thundered; devoid of the patina it was all worth shit.
As he told me this, Lido was sitting on his ball (size 4, overinflated) and, in his righteous ire, he made the wrong move and slid off it, tumbling onto the ground. I helped him get up, feeling the wrinkled, worn-out skin on his elbow, touching his human patina.
Then the sheepish Americans finally emerged out of the bushes and trees, the rest of the soccer players arrived, and Lido—the man who took any disrespect toward Michelangelo and the Creation as a personal insult—installed himself in the attack, ready as ever to score a spectacular goal.
Whoever created Lido ought to be satisfied: Lido was one of those rare humans who achieved completion. The rest of us had no choice but to roll in the dirt, get weather-beaten, and accumulate a patina, hoping to earn our right to simply, unconditionally be. And when I passed the ball to Lido that day—fully aware that it was going to be miskicked and wasted—I had the pleasant, tingling sensation of being connected with something bigger and better than me, a sensation wholly inaccessible to those who think soccer is about exercise and relaxation.
THE LIVES OF GRANDMASTERS
1
I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight, because I still have a chessboard on whose side my father inscribed, with a soldering iron, “Saša Hemon 1972.” I loved the board more than chess—it was one of the first things I owned. Its materiality was enchanting to me: the smell of burnt wood that lingered long after my father had branded it; the rattle of the thickly varnished pieces inside, the smacking sound they made when I put them down, the board’s hollow wooden echo. I can even recall the taste—the queen’s tip was pleasantly suckable; the pawns’ round heads, not unlike nipples, were sweet. The board is still at our place in Sarajevo, and, even if I haven’t played a game on it in decades, it is still my most cherished possession, providing incontrovertible evidence that there once lived a boy who used to be me.
The branded board was the one Father and I always played on. It would be my job to set up the pieces, after he offered me the choice of one of his fists, enclosing a black or a white pawn. More often than not, I’d choose the hand with the black piece, whereupon Father would dismiss my attempt to negotiate. We’d play and I’d lose, each and every time. My mother objected to his never letting me win, as she believed that children needed to experience the joy of victory to succeed. Father, on the other hand, was ruthlessly firm in his conviction that everything in life had to be earned and that wanting victory always helped achieve it. As an engineer who had faith in unsentimental reasoning, he believed in the hard benefits of knowledge acquired by trying and failing—even if, as in my case, it was exclusively failing.
I would not have admitted it then, but I did crave his furtive encouragement; that is, I wanted Father to let me win, but I didn’t want to know that. I was not capable of thinking more than one or two moves in advance (my preferred activities were always soccer and skiing, where you make decisions by improvising inside a vanishing moment). I regularly blundered, leaving my king hopelessly isolated or not spotting the imminent execution of the queen. I reliably fell into all of my father’s traps and was much too quick to resign so as to spare myself further humiliation. But more of it was inevitable, as Father would force me to retrace all of the missteps leading to my demise. He prodded me to think about chess in a focused manner—and, by extension, to think thoroughly about everything else: life, physics, family, homework. He gave me a chess textbook (by, of all people, Isidora’s father) and, move by move, we analyzed the games played by the great grandmasters such as Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tal, Spassky, Fischer, et cetera. Patient though Father was with me, I could seldom see all the glorious possibilities of a wise opening or a clever sacrifice. He was trying to take me to a far-too-distant horizon, with all the mysterious comforts of chess architecture, as far as I was concerned, deferred into a dubious future. Going over the grandmasterly games felt too much like school—occasionally interesting, often straining my mind in unpleasant ways. Even so, when alone, I’d try to study chess, hoping that I could glean a simple trick or two before the next game and catch my father by surprise. Instead, I constantly and quickly hit the low ceiling of my abstract-thinking abilities. It didn’t help that grandmasters such as Capablanca, Alekhine, and Fischer appeared to be obsessive hermits; I was not a writer yet and could not appreciate the devout artist producing painfully inapplicable art. And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.
Compared with the other kids my age, however, I was not all that bad at chess. The games I played with my friends mainly consisted of blunders and oversights, but I often won them. We played chess the way we played all the other childhood games: heedlessly pursuing the rush of an arbitrary victory, already invested in the next thing to do. I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all. I’d managed to acquire a repertoire of standard openings and attack strategies and was thus capable of committing fewer blunders and outlasting my opponents. I sought opponents who eagerly fell into my textbook traps and subsequently submitted themselves to wholesale destruction. Trash-talking had far more value to me than the highfalutin beauty of brilliant combinations.
When I was in fourth grade, a teacher was assigned to organize an in-school tournament in order to assemble a chess team for an intraschool competition. I signed up. I wanted to challenge myself and go it all alone, but I foolishly told my father about it, so that when I went to play, one Saturday morning, he insisted on accompanying me. He coerced the teacher, who really did not care that much about chess, into letting him rearrange the desks, set up the boards, and design the score chart. Not only was he much too involved, he was the only parent involved. In the fourth-grade classroom, furnished with the little desks and chairs, he stood out like a giant. Everyone knew whose father he was.
It is highly possible that I would’ve done better in that tournament had my father’s chess shadow not loomed over me as he watched at my shoulder. I kept staring at the board, envisioning all the error
s and possibilities from his point of view, but I saw nothing. One’s good fortune is often in the failings of others, so I managed to win some games. It is likely that my father simply distracted the other kids more than me, intimidating them with his silent, coaching presence.
Whatever might have happened, I made it onto the chess team, and a couple of weeks later we took a bus to play against a blind children’s team at their school in Nedžarići—a neighborhood so far off for me at that time it was practically a different city. I went as the fifth of eight boards, but it turned out that only four boards were needed, so I spent the day loitering in the depressing hallways of the ramshackle school for the blind and occasionally witnessing the blind kids tearing my teammates to humbled shreds. I had passionately wanted to play, but, watching the slaughter, I was glad to be spared. The blind kids frowned and shook their heads over the boards, clutching pieces with spikes on the underside, then palpating the squares for the holes to fit them in.
I tried to picture a mental space within which the game existed for them, an interiority where all the combinations, all the lines of advance and defensive positions, were—evidently—sharply outlined. But what I saw instead—and what, I thought, they had no way of seeing—was the banal solidity of nonnegotiable physical reality, the ineluctable modality of the visible, past which I could see nothing. A ten-year-old boy, I happily operated in exteriority, retreating inside only when I was reading. The world in all its hackneyed, stubborn concreteness could never be fully suspended for me so that I could think inside the abstract space of the game. When I played with my father, for instance, his very corporeal presence was a terrible distraction. I could never separate the game from our relationship and everything surrounding it: his knee jumped at a rapid speed, jerked by his compulsive foot; his big hands with flat, wide thumbs moved the pieces with defeating confidence; he nodded as he discovered opportunities fully invisible to me; the smell of food floated from the kitchen; my mother lingered on the horizon, imploring my father, yet again, not to checkmate me. Whereupon he would checkmate me.
The Book of My Lives Page 11