by Brad Ashlock
Part I: At the Threshold
SNOW AND DIRT had followed the man on the four-wheeler his entire life. From the Ukraine to the lower peninsula of Michigan, it had followed; from 1931, the year he was born, to the first stomps of a new century, it had chased him across an ocean to blanket his world in relentless whites and browns. There was a twelve-year hiatus of this snow and dirt—usurped by New York’s slush and pavement—but the snow and dirt had soon recaptured its headdress as chief atmospheric. Actors were replaceable, scenes could be changed, entire plays substituted, but the old tattered backcloth of snow and dirt would remain fixed forever as the only scenery in the theatre of his life. He looked around at this, his final scene, surely, with his health, his last winter, and pondered the beauty of monotony.
Summers were unremarkable blips to him, half remembered dreams between wakeful winters. Warm grass and gentle breezes were abstract ideations to serve as structures for reality, for the concrete, for snow and dirt. Things started softly, events unfolded gently, spring blossomed into summer, but all these things would gather momentum, would become real and tumble out of fancy into ferocity. This was how he understood the world and this was how he played chess. Even now, an old man, half blind, puttering down a path through the dim woods on an ATV, he could discern hidden patterns, weave them together, and use his trusted intuition to fill in the gaps: three cigarette butts near the fallen maple, a flurry of rabbit tracks across the path, scattered brown leaves just ahead—a hunter had trespassed yesterday, missed a rabbit, got bored after several hours, and shot a squirrel nest.
This scenario flashed through his mind as easily as a five-move checkmate. He always began with the fanciful, the speculative, but then his razor-logic would shave the problem before him with surgical precision to a cold, almost dour solution, unarguable in its pragmatism, ugly in its objectivism, tinged, even in victory, with fear. This fear echoed the snow and the dirt, touching everything he did; the fear was his beautiful monotony. It had never left him. It followed in the wake of the dirt and snow, and stuck to his hands, his fingers, fingers that had spent decades pinching these chess pieces to erase the memory of pinching a trigger. Fear drove him. Fear had made him a champion. He played like a tightly coiled spring, always retreating, always compressing, only to wait in the dark to explode outward and shatter the over-extended opposition at the most crucial moment. He loved the counter-attack. Charge at me, use yourself up, then I will swoop down and sting you through the holes of your confused position.
That was decades ago in a country, a Super Power, which no longer even existed. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, they had called him, as a boy, Medvedkin, the Little Bear, because he would appear to be hibernating until the game had seemed to swing so far into his opponent’s favor that his loss, by a classical understanding, was inevitable. But that was when the Little Bear would awaken, that was when the Little Bear would stand upright, and with a roar dig those bear claws into a hidden weakness and squeeze the life out of the opponent’s position. His wins baffled the experts. He was sent to study with Grand Masters in Moscow, and six years later became the chess champion of that city. Chess had saved him from starvation and death, from poverty and sorrow, but it did not deliver him from the fear.
He slowed the four-wheeler when he crossed the makeshift bridge, five thick boards he had laid over a stream. The path would serpentine between the dense trees. He had carved the way with a machete and the ATV itself several summers ago. There were numerous tight curves before he arrived at the steep hill. Leaning forward, he gunned the throttle and catapulted up it as any decent twelve-year-old would. His reasons, as a septuagenarian, were, however, pragmatic: he feared if he went too slowly the four-wheeler might flip backwards and kill him. A child would have accelerated just for fun. Not Medvedkin, not as a child, certainly not as an old man. He reached the crest of the hill, then sped down a muddy road cut out of the brush three years ago by the DNR, then coasted to a stop.
Tigran Naumkin, the Little Bear, removed his balaclava; he wanted to feel the winter air. He had a long face, strong jaw, and pale blue eyes that shone like jewels set in candle wax. His thin lips pursed as his diamond-eyes scanned the field, the cold breeze tussling his thick gray hair. He secured the balaclava on the back of the ATV, then depressed the throttle with this thumb and puttered across the field to the edge of the woods. The field was about five acres long and three acres across. It was bracketed on one side by a dense wood, which Naumkin was heading toward, and opposite that by mounds of reddish sand. Between the woods and the sand stretched a tall barbed-wire fence demarcating land owned by the electric company. The field was contested, unincorporated property; no one was quite sure which government agency had the rights to it. Not even three police departments and the DNR could agree whose jurisdiction the stark patch of brush and mud fell into. The police didn’t really care, leaving the DNR to use it as a shortcut from the woods to highway M12.
A pair of DNR officers had stopped Naumkin last fall. The woods that bracketed the southern edge of the field belonged to Gordon Dudley. Naumkin had permission from Dudley to enjoy the woods at his leisure, but to get to them, Naumkin had to cross the field. The DNR officers had bolted in their truck from behind one of the sand hills, flashed their yellow lights, and stopped Naumkin on his four-wheeler. He had been riding without a license or helmet. Naumkin remembered the unpleasant big-shot DNR officer, dressed in Smokey the Bear brown, chewing a toothpick and resting his unpolished black boot on the front fender of the ATV. Instead of simply giving Naumkin a warning, the officer gave him a couple tickets. It cost Naumkin about $150, and the time it took to go to downtown Rogue and pay.
Naumkin, the memory tightening his face, glanced over his shoulder and accelerated across the brush and show of the field to the tree line of Dudley’s woods. The only way into the forest via ATV was up and over a pile of boulders. To save their plows, farmers had piled the rocks nearly a century ago. The pile was about six feet tall, the pockets between the large stones filled with snow. He drove up the pile, stopped at the top on a large flat wedge of granite, and surveyed the field, the sandy snow-peppered hills, and the barbed wire fence. About forty large wild turkeys were marching across the fence line toward the far sandy hills. Naumkin had noticed their distinctive forklike prints as he had crossed the field. The birds were big, black, and moved as one, a collective. Communist turkeys, he smiled to himself.
He turned away from the birds and went down the boulders into the woods. He put up a forearm to protect his face from a thorny branch, and stopped. He caught four deer bounding away into the dense tangles ahead, their white tails erect in alarm. The silence after their flight was the tranquil eternity between notes in a symphony. Naumkin squinted his left eye at the imaginary music and tilted his head as his thin lips curled into a perplexed smile. He glanced away from where the deer had gone and continued onward, around a few large trees to what he considered the gate of the forest.
A large maple had fallen some years ago. It had crashed between two smaller trees and wedged between them, its trunk falling diagonally from the hill in which it had been rooted to the pair of birches that now held it aloft some five feet above the snowy ground. It reminded Naumkin of an Asian city gate, the ones he had seen in New York’s Chinatown. This fallen tree outlined a kind of portal between worlds. Beyond it awaited trees, fallen leaves, a somber sky, and the ever-present snow and dirt. He liked to climb the hills, to exercise his limbs. The doctors had said walking would be good for his heart. All well and good, but he really trod around Dudley’s hills as a kind of meditation. Beyond the gate, he would not think of his Jenny, or his stepchildren, or his students, or his books, or his fear—he would simply be.
N
aumkin ducked to the right as he drove beneath the felled maple. He could feel the magic of the other side sprinkle over him like fairy dust. The air was different on this side of the gate. It was sweeter…darker. The air reminded him of the Ukraine; thick with cold, perfumed with earth and dead leaves, alive with playful yet dangerous shadows. Ahead and to the west trickled a half-frozen creek that had cut itself deep into the ground, its jagged bank spiked with roots and falled witch-fingered branches. Naumkin, as usual, parked the ATV on the edge of the creek, pocketed the keys, swept his right leg like a cowboy getting off a horse, over the top of the four-wheeler, and hopped off the seat. The frosted leaves protested with crackles beneath his boots. He took a deep breath of the magic air and watched the vaporous exhalation vanish before him into invisible mist. He put the balaclava in his coat pocket and proceeded between the trees to the bottom of the first large hill.
It was a sharp, hard climb, and reaching the top quickly was no small achievement for a middle-aged man, let alone one of Naumkin’s years. He only paused once, a few strides from the top, to catch his breath and rub his knee while leaning on one of the numerous birches that stuck from the side of the hill. Pushing off its trunk, he finished the climb and continued over the other side to the smaller knolls ahead.
Dudley’s woods stretched some fifty acres in this direction. Naumkin had learned that Gordon Dudley was of the famous Michigan Dudleys who supplied the world with Dudley Chocolates. Gordon (whose grandfather, Nathan Dudley, founded the company) was the current CEO of the corporation, a multi-millionaire, and, from what Naumkin could discern from their brief telephone conversation, a gentleman to boot. His property was certainly beautiful, Naumkin mused mounting another rise. He had heard rumors that Dudley was a recluse, and that the property nearest his house was a kind of fortress monitored by a hundred surveillance cameras and guarded by a pack of bloodthirsty bullmastiffs. Naumkin pushed this unlikely thought out of his mind as he descended to a flatter area of large, half-rotted trees connected by ropey vines. He despised gossip, wouldn’t spread it, and didn’t waste time considering it. Besides, he didn’t walk to think, he walked to simply be in the magical still air that belonged to a different time, maybe the future, maybe the past. The present just slipped away here like breath, maybe to fade into snow and rejoin the dirt of the ground. He was no longer in Gordon Dudley's woods, nor was he quite in the Ukraine during Stalin’s Terror, but he was someplace between these points, someplace frozen, white and brown.
He continued walking beneath the eyeless stares of the rotten trees with their telephone-wire vines, and then rested on a log, his hands on his knees, his head bowed. He caught his breath, pulled the balaclava over his cold head, and looked up. It was a gray afternoon, but here, above the area of dead trees, the sky seemed darker. Maybe a snow-heavy cloud had rolled overhead, the sky appeared too uniform for that. It was more like millions of layers of air, almost invisibly shaded, piled one atop another; the farther one peered through the stacked layers, the darker the sky became. Naumkin’s mind travelled up through the levels, toward the darkness, toward the sound of rushing wind and fleeting passages of purple outer space, higher and higher above the forest to the final layer, black like smoked glass, perfectly smooth and gleaming in his mind.
In this meditative state, his tired senses were heightened. Darkness crept over his sight, but his other senses amplified. He noticed the cold log become colder, the delicate knitting of the balaclava became coarse and fibrous, and there was a new smell. He inhaled, recognized the odor, and crashed down from the layers of overlapping sky to normal consciousness. He smelled pine. He stood and looked back the way he had come. He could see his footprints in the snow leading back through the area of half-rotten trees and vines, disappearing over an incline. He squinted at them. He wanted to follow them back out, away from this place, away from the smell of the pines that he knew were just beyond the nearby hill.
It wasn’t that simple. His urge to flee was counterbalanced by a nodus of ambiguous feelings hat tempted him to stay; feelings, if Naumkin had to describe them, that would be labeled as joyously suicidal ambivalence (a catchphrase he once gave to a sports reporter regarding Karpov’s play in a Championship game against Kasparov in 1984). He huffed, clapped his hands, and then rubbed them together to get the snow from the log off his gloves. It had been a pleasant enough walk, and a very relaxing period of meditation. He rarely meditated anymore. He used to do it all the time before key chess games. Bronstein, one of his favorite fellow Grand Masters, and a true friend, had taught him the technique in Zurich, 1953. The whiff of pine had ended the magic of the walk and the peace of meditation. He had an inhuman level of concentration honed by years of practice in noisy, dim tournament halls, but he could not abide pine.
He followed his tracks back to his four-wheeler and checked his watch. He had only walked for about an hour; he usually walked for three. Why did he go down by the dead trees? He habitually avoided that depressing area by cutting south to the power pylons and dirt bike trails on the edge of the frozen marsh. Inexplicable. He hated the pines, several acres of them, with their orange needles pricking through the snow, their flaky red trunks rooted in a ring of fallen cones. It was too quiet between them, too suffocating with their fragrance and their sticky sap. He shuddered and shook his head, climbed onto the ATV, and fished the key out of his coat. He put it in the ignition, began to turn it, but then paused.
The snow surrounding the four-wheeler had been disturbed. He got off the vehicle and went to his haunches. He removed a glove and circled his finger around the interior of a very large dog paw print, but there were even more varieties on the other side of the ATV. Naumkin put the glove back over his hand and rolled the balaclava off his face. He stood and looked out into the woods in the direction the deer had sprinted earlier. He looked back down at the paw prints and shook his head in disbelief. After recounting and coming up with the same figure, he felt a shiver run down his spine and noticed his hand tremble ever so slightly as he once again turned the key.
The ATV started and Naumkin, still feeling as if he was being watched, pulled away from the creek, ducked under the fallen maple tree, and finally up and over the pile of boulders. At the top, just to make sure nothing had followed, he looked over his shoulder. There was nothing but dead branches and the shadows between. He rolled down the other side of the rock pile into the field and sped back toward the trail that led home, imagining all the while the five or six dogs that had come out of the woods during his walk, encircled his ATV, and then, judging by the direction of the prints, followed him back toward the dead trees and the pines beyond. Naumkin tried to swallow, but could not.
He had seen plenty of coyotes in Dudley’s woods and in the field. Most hunters tried to shoot them on sight, which Naumkin did not approve of. However, the paw prints around his ATV were much too big for coyotes. Naumkin doubted the dogs were lost. Who owns five big dogs and loses them? None of the neighbors or distant farmers that Naumkin knew owned that many dogs, and none that size. He recalled a story, maybe it was in upstate New York, he couldn’t be sure, but it involved a jogger who was chased for half a mile by a pack of feral dogs. Naumkin couldn’t remember if the guy escaped unharmed , or if he had been mauled. The whole thing was creepy and might put a damper on future walks. He’d have to be careful.
He crossed over the makeshift bridge, passed the obliterated squirrel nest, cigarette butts, and rabbit prints, and shot up the trail to the edge of his backyard. He slowed as he went up a rise, then back down between some leafless maples and a patch of tall dead grass to the pole barn below. The ATV coasted across the gravel drive into the mouth of the barn. Naumkin parked it a couple inches from the front bumper of his tractor, pocketed the key, stepped outside and pulled down the heavy garage door behind him.
He trudged up the hill to his house. It was a two-story dwelling with gray siding and white trim. The recently plowed driveway led to a two-car garage that one had to go through to get
to the front door. Naumkin entered his garage and yanked his boots off and left them between the lawnmower and the old red station wagon he and Jenny had driven here to Rogue, Michigan from New York, New York some ten years ago. Naumkin had retired from chess tournaments at the time, and Jenny missed her children (from a previous marriage) who lived near Rogue in Grand Rapids. Michael, Robert, and Sissy were nice kids, but rarely visited after their mother’s death.
Naumkin opened the front door, went into the house, and put his coat, balaclava, and gloves in the closet. Maybe he was just feeling sorry for himself. Hadn’t Sissy and her kids stopped by on Thanksgiving, and just two weeks ago, Michael came and plowed the driveway. Robert now lived in Chicago, but he still called every six months or so, or sent letters with pictures of his wife and kids. Naumkin didn’t want to be one of those burdensome geezers barking complaints at the few people who still tried to maintain some contact with him. True, he was often lonely, and missed Jenny like nothing else, but Jenny’s children had their own lives to live. Besides, he always had his students and the game to occupy him.
He walked through the kitchen. The smell of bacon and eggs still hung in the air from this morning’s breakfast, the greasy pan black and shiny on the gas stove. Dirty plates called to him from the sink, but he ignored them and went to the dining room table. Upon it was an unrolled vinyl chessboard with white and blue squares. The pieces were standard tournament size and extra weighted. They were dingy and worn. Adjacent to the table stood a wide oak display case with glass doors. It had been designed to house china and glassware. With a simple flick of a switch, if Naumkin were so inclined to replace the internal bulbs that burned out five years ago, each white-frosted plastic shelf would glow with fluorescent light. Upon each of the three shelves, amid the shadows and dust, were three chess sets for a total of nine.