by Brad Ashlock
The first board dated back to the 17th Century, though its pieces were only replicas from that period. There were several beautiful sets he had won in tournaments, a replica of a surreal set designed by Man Ray, one board autographed by his favorite World Champion and late friend, Mikhail Tal, and second to last was his father’s old set, the board blackened with age, the pieces smooth with wear and wobbly on their crooked bases. The last set, which he had acquired at an auction for $17,000 American (a rare indulgence, but an investment all the same), had belonged to the Mad Monk, Rasputin. Naumkin had always been fascinated by the mysterious figure and by how hard it was for his assassins to kill him (Rasputin had been poisoned, beaten, shot, and drowned before giving up the ghost). The wooden playing board was a replica, the original having been lost, but experts had authenticated the pieces. They were hand-carved marble in the old Teutonic, blocky style, and reminiscent of Vikings.
Naumkin, going around the table to face the black pieces, passed the display case and sat in the dining room before the tournament set. Next to the set was one of Dvoretsky’s training manuals. Naumkin flipped through it, found a position he thought would challenge his student, Cal Burgess, who would be arriving in two hours for his Saturday lesson. The boy came twice a week, Wednesdays at six and Saturdays at three. Naumkin’s other student, Jeffrey Hore (the last name always brought a little smile to Naumkin’s face), came only once a week, on Tuesdays.
Naumkin closed the Dvoretsky book and arranged the pieces from memory to the tabia of an opening he was teaching Cal. This starting point was the beginning position of the deceptively innocuous Levitsky Attack. It was something of a surprise weapon, being relatively rare, and generally led to comfortable solid positions for White, but if black chose a hyper-aggressive variation and chased White’s bishop with pawns, things could get sharp. It was nothing Cal couldn’t handle. For an American, the ten-year old was a hell of a chess player. Cal had probably started too late in life to a achieve the Grand Master title, but the boy was already an Expert, and in a few years, Naumkin hoped, would become a decent National Master.
Winning wasn’t everything. Naumkin tried to instill this truism into his boys. Chess was not some base sport or petty game to fulfill one’s fragile ego; chess was a mirror. How you played reflected who you were. How you lost reflected even more. Chess sharpened one’s logic, one’s pattern recognition, taught one to relish victory and learn from defeat. Chess was a hard thing to define. More than a game, less than a science, surely a struggle, yet it wasn’t quite any of these things. It seemed to slip between the fingers of the taxonomist to cuddle somewhere between the duckbilled platypus and the works of Jacques Derrida. Naumkin knew chess was more than a game, he knew from experience that chess, at least in his case, was a kind of messiah. It had saved his life. He kept this fact secret from his young, sheltered pair of students. It wasn’t for their ears; it was just something between him and the sixty-four squares. Besides, to speak of that time again, Naumkin thought, would choke his own throat.
He sighed, his hand hovering over the pieces until settling upon a white knight that he developed to the c3 square. The move brought out an undeveloped piece, strengthened the center, but it didn’t threaten anything. Cal wouldn’t choose it. Naumkin put the knight back to its starting square then considered attacking d5 with the c-pawn. This move reminded him of Cal. The impudent sally was risky, loose, yet vigorous. What would it lead to? Naumkin shuffled several pieces, mumbling to himself. The position for White, though playable, left many holes to defend on the Queenside. The simple knight move, superficially, seemed more natural. Naumkin reopened the Dvoretsky book and scanned the analysis of the position. Yes, it confirmed that the knight move was correct.
He set the book aside and glanced at his watch. Cal would arrive in about twenty minutes. He placed all the chess pieces back on their starting squares, went to the kitchen, put the greasy frying pan in with the other dirty dishes, and washed the lot. After wiping down the counters, he poured two mugs to the brim with cider, and heated them in the microwave. Seconds before the oven beeped, Cal was rapping on the front door.
He was a gangly boy, tall for his age, with buckteeth enmeshed in orthodontic hardware that appeared to be developed sometime during the 12th Century. He had unkempt, straight brown hair that hung over his wire-rimmed glasses in a greasy mop-top. Cal waved to his chess teacher behind the window of the screen-door, his breath fogging the glass. Naumkin motioned to the boy and then took the mugs of steaming cider out of the microwave. He set them on the counter next to the sink and sprinkled cinnamon into them while Cal sat on the floor to unbuckle his boots. Cal crossed the kitchen in his socks, coat in hand, and sat at the dining room table before the chessboard. The coat fell into a bundle at his feet. Cal was wearing a yellow too shirt depicting Bruce Lee. Naumkin set the mugs on the table on coasters and then sat across from Cal at the table.
“Thanks, Mr. Naumkin,” Cal said lifting the hot mug off the coaster to his lips.
“You’re welcome, Cal.” Naumkin’s Ukrainian accent, tinged with Russian, had softened since his defection to the US in 1980, but it was still thick. “How was your recital? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.”
Cal slurped, wiped his mouth with his sweatshirt sleeve, and said, “It’s OK, Mr. Naumkin. It went pretty well. My piano teacher says I have potential.”
Naumkin raised his eyebrows and parted his lips.
“Potential?” he finally managed before washing the word out of his mouth with a dose of cider.
Call looked at Naumkin and they shared a knowing smile.
“Your piano teacher sounds like an ass.”
The boy ran his fingers over the heads of the chessmen, his digits robotically moving to the rhythm of music scales. “She’s a woman,” Cal said. “I don’t think you can call a woman an ass.”
“Of course you can.” Naumkin looked to the boy and added: “You shouldn’t, but you can. She’s superficial.”
“You never met her.”
“I don’t need to. Potential. You have potential. Wonderful. Deep. Did that knowledge shatter your world?”
Cal shrugged and pawed the Dvoretsky book.
“Maybe she’s a good teacher. What do I know? You have to choose your own masters, Cal. It takes more than knowledge to be a teacher. A lot more, I think.”
“She’s not as good as you,” Cal said.
“Well, put the book away. And stop fidgeting! What are we here for?”
“To play chess.”
“Right. To play chess.”
In a blur of hands and chessmen, Naumkin set up the starting position for the Levitsky attack. He then went into the sub-variation in which White’s dark bishop retreats from Black’s kingside pawnstorm. He looked to the boy.
Cal sat up in his chair and leaned over the board, his arms folded on the table. He brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes, and then hovered his hand above his queen’s knight like a conjurer over a magic hat. He tilted his head, ran a tongue over his braces, and grabbed the pawn Naumkin predicted he would grab, and thrust it forward. Cal looked to the Grand Master expectantly.
“You have potential,” Naumkin said, bringing out his queen.
“A potential problem?” the boy asked, making another pawn move.
“The problem is your Queenside. Too many holes.”
“But you’re too underdeveloped. You shouldn’t take the pawn.”
“I’ll survive. Best was Knight to c3. See, I check, you interpose, pawn takes, pawn takes, and then you are left with two isolated pawns. They will fall.”
Cal sighed.
“I know you want to attack, attack, attack,” Naumkin said, “but that is not good chess. Not from this opening.”
“Maybe I should play a different opening. Maybe a King’s pawn.”
It was Naumkin’s turn to sigh. “You know how you are with complications. You get so excited I don’t even think you’re looking at the position in front of you. You make too
many tactical blunders in those situations. I know it’s exciting to attack, but first you have to put your own house into order. This game is filled with attackers. Mindless bullies who rely on cheap shots and intimidation. I’ve seen you play beautifully, Cal. You’re at your best with slow buildups to solid positions, outmaneuvering your opponent, waiting to leap on weaknesses.”
“My dad says I play to passively. Too many draws.”
“Better draws than losses. Safety first!”
Cal finished his cider and bobbed his head in affirmation. “I thought the Knight move looked right,” he said.
Naumkin smiled and nodded. “So how is your father? He never comes in with you anymore.”
“He’s all right. He works a lot.”
“Yes. And he’s got you working a lot, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Piano lessons, chess lessons and that accelerated math class. How’s that going, Cal?”
“It’s college level algebra. It’s not that hard.”
Naumkin nodded again and noised, “Ah,” before draining his mug. “That’s good.”
They went over the Levitsky Attack for the next forty minutes, and finished the day with Cal’s favorite training exercise: speed chess. Naumkin set the chess clock, giving Cal five minutes and himself three. They played six games, Cal drawing two, and coming very close to having his teacher’s head in a final flurry of pieces, shouts, and laughter. Cal heard his father’s truck pull up in the driveway and looked up from the board to Naumkin.
“Good game,” Naumkin said as Cal’s father honked from the drive.
“Good game.”
Cal gathered his coat and slipped on his boots. Naumkin held the screen door open for the boy who slipped out into the garage and turned quickly around flashing that stainless steel bucktoothed grin.
“See you Wednesday,” Naumkin said as the boy disappeared out the side door of the garage.
Naumkin shut the screen door and then the main door after it. He went to the kitchen, fixed himself a liverwurst sandwich on toast, and brought it along with a bottle of cream soda to the living room. He set the plate and beverage on a kidney-shaped glass table in front of a leather divan, dug through a pile of pillows for the correct remote control (he had three of them), and turned on the television. Chomping into his sandwich, he flipped through the local stations , and, not finding anything, grabbed another remote, switched to his satellite, and surfed channels until stopping on the Discovery Channel. He loved Shark Week.
After finishing lunch, he turned the television off, curled up on the divan, and took a nap. When he awoke, the house was bathed in red light and deepening shadows. He lay there another ten minutes until the sun had completely set before he decided to rise. He dumped his dish into the sink and tossed the empty bottle of cream soda into the recycle box in the garage. He returned to the living room and flicked on the lights. The house was always well kept. Naumkin had never been a slob, but Jenny had been almost neurotic when it came to housecleaning. Her constant vacuuming, dusting, window washing, sink scrubbing, bed making, and counter wiping had often got on Naumkin’s nerves. Now he coveted her eccentric cleanliness. He vacuumed twice a week, always used coasters, and tried to do everything as she had done. The clean house made Naumkin feel that Jenny was still around.
The angled windows in the high ceilings of the living room showed a sliver of bright red sky enhaloed by a midnight blue that darkened to blend into the newborn night. Naumkin recalled meditating on the log in Dudley’s woods, the feeling of rising up into layers of air to a point of smoked glass. Were the dogs that had circled his ATV watching him as he sat down at the base of the hill, eyes closed. Was it the scent of pines that had awoken him, or their animal odor? Maybe the dogs brought the cursed smell of the pines along with them and the snow and dirt, the white and brown, the fear. They came from the pines. Naumkin looked away from the sliver of red in the sky and shook his head. He tried to assure himself that he had been alone down on that log. Wasn’t he just being a paranoid old man? Besides, they were just mutts, probably harmless and probably just nosing around for a garbage can to upturn, a car to sleep under, and a hand to scratch their flea-bitten bellies.
The hallway leading from the kitchen and dining room, which Naumkin had been standing in while admiring the sky, led to the living room and a wooden spiral staircase. Beyond the wide hallway adjacent to the living room was a bathroom bracketed by two guest rooms. Naumkin took a few steps down the hall to the staircase and ascended to the second floor. To his left was the master bedroom and to his right awaited his study. The area between these two rooms was open and, beyond a wooden railing, overlooked the living room. Naumkin opened the door to his study, switched on the light at his desk, and turned on his computer.
He had a specially designed program that aided him in writing his chess literature. There are several ways to describe a chess move. The “Queen’s Knight to Queen’s Bishop Two (QKnt-QB2) was completely archaic and had been replaced decades ago by the streamlined algebraic system, which simply turned the chessboard into a basic grid of numbers and letters. This was adequate, but still caused some confusion when it came to the symbols used for the pieces themselves. Nf3 is fine to show that the knight has moved to the f3 square in English speaking countries (N is used for the Knight because the letter K is reserved for the King). In Russian, for example, a letter that’s not even in the English alphabet denotes the Knight. Naumkin’s solution was figurative notation, which used the coordinate grid of algebraic notation, but replaced letters for the pieces with little diagrammatic symbols: the Knight was a horse in profile, the King a large crown with a cross atop it; pawns looked like pawns, just like the figures shown in newspaper chess problems. With his computer program, he could change the color of these symbols from black to white, and he could even create complete diagrams of the positions he wanted.
He was currently working on an in-depth book of his own best games entitled Tigran Naumkin, Master of Defense. This would fulfill his obligations to Gambiteer Press, and be his final book. He would still submit the occasional article to the popular chess periodicals at his leisure, but essentially, aside from coaching Cal Burgess and Jeffrey Hore, he was done with chess. He’d probably quit coaching the boys as well within a year. Jeffrey was a good kid, but Naumkin would especially miss Cal. Naumkin had never had children of his own. Cal really gave his life a sense of purpose now that Jenny had passed. The boy would get his teeth fixed, a haircut, and put on thirty pounds of muscle in the next six years, and would be pursuing girls instead of checkmates.
The computer screen blurred; Naumkin wiped the tears that had welled in his eyes, and then began adding notes to a game in which he had forced a miraculous draw by repetition on a young and hungry Bobby Fischer back in 1968. He worked for an hour, rechecked his analysis on Fritz (a powerful chess program), and finally shut the computer down and went to bed.
As Tigran Naumkin lays his head on a pillow in the dark, that red sliver in the sky above his house is overwhelmed by December-tempered night. Outside, the temperature plummets. The wind strengthens and gathers bits of ice from the shingles of Naumkin’s roof and blows it down against the leafless trees below. Naumkin’s four-wheeler path is lost in the gloom. The maples sway ominously. Down Naumkin’s trail, over the sandy hills, the white and brown of the field has flattened, on this moonless evening, to a uniform shade of midnight. The dark in the field is nothing compared to the shadows playing in Dudley’s woods. At night, though, the forest seems to belong to no man. Over the pile of boulders and then beneath the fallen maple tree, Naumkin’s gate to the forest, the ice-heavy wind presses, cutting between the trees, rolling up the hills and then down to acres of pines. The wind does not penetrate that part of the forest. It blows westward, gathering snow on its way and blasting it now across a hidden back road that winds on and on to a gate that divides the wind into a hundred parts to die upon a flat plain of snow, a yard, Gordon Dudley’s private estate.
The ice the gale has carried from Naumkin’s roof joins the high drifts against the wrought iron gate. In the summer, the endless grounds are a lush expanse of manicured green; now, the gates hold back only tundra topped with a sheet of paper-thin ice. Beyond the tundra, ten acres beyond the gate, Gordon Dudley’s sanctuary, his mansion, Lusker House, winks via the light of a second-story window. A little girl, eight years old, looks out the pane. She has long brown hair, a pretty face, and she is staring out across the tundra, her eyes spent of tears.
* * *
Naumkin ate poached eggs on buttered toast, washed it down with grapefruit juice, then waddled in his bathrobe to the divan to watch Meet The Press. It was almost ten in the morning; he liked to sleep in on Sundays, eat a decent breakfast, and then indulge in a few hours of speculative talking heads. Would the Bush administration attack Iraq? What was America going to do about North Korea? Who would run for the Democratic Presidential nomination now that Gore was out? Tigran Naumkin loved games; politics was no exception. He fished a remote control from between the cushions of the divan, realized it was the wrong one, and grabbed another on the kidney-shaped glass table before him. He turned up the volume, sat back, and rubbed his knee. Last night had been cold. His bones always ached after a chilly night.