Searching for Bobby Fischer

by Fred Waitzkin

  We were confused about what to do next. Joshua’s eyes were smeared with sleep, and he was impatient to leave. “When are we going to the circus? You promised, Daddy.” Disgusted, I asked one of the journalists on his way out where people buy tickets to the match. “There are no tickets,” the man said, “not unless you know someone in the Politburo.”

  “Bruce Pandolfini. Bruce Pandolfini.” It was Dimitrije Bjelica, a torrent of glamor and good will. “I read your column in Chess Life. It is very good,” he said, smiling radiantly through his Black Sea tan. “Don’t worry, you will get your credentials. Believe me.” Bjelica offered to try to help us buy tickets that afternoon at the Hall of Columns. Then he said, “We will play some blitz, yes? I’m a FIDE master* and a very good speed player.” He added with a glint in his eye, “I’ve played hundreds of blitz games against Tal. I played him on the morning of the day he lost the world championship back to Botvinnik.”

  Moscow seemed to be teeming with chess challenges for Bruce, who looked miserable about it. Apparently Eastern European chess masters were curious to see how the master from Chess Life played the game about which he had written hundreds of columns. But Pandolfini hadn’t played a tournament game in more than twelve years and rarely had time for casual games. He no longer considered himself a player, but it was a difficult point for him to explain.

  At twenty-six, he had been among the fifty best chess players in the United States but recognized that he lacked the talent to become one of the fifty best in the world. A world-class player must have immense talent. It is like being an opera star: regardless of how hard you work, you must have the voice; there is no way around it. Pandolfini knew he would never be as good as the grandmasters whom he had admired as a boy, and he didn’t want to be a fringe player—a utility infielder, as it were, in the world of chess—so he stopped playing and devoted himself to teaching and writing. He is noncombative by nature, and a lover of the art of chess, and he had made a reasonable though often rocky life choice. But in fielding challenges within this dusty temple of chess, half a world away from the Manhattan Chess Club, the telephone, his students, his cramped little studio, his deadlines, his incomplete manuscripts, his beseeching and frustrated agent and editors, he was feeling counterfeit and trapped, like an aging gunfighter who has lost the speed of his draw.

  From the Central Chess Club, we took a taxi to the House of Trade Unions, an eighteenth-century palace in which the championship would be determined. A huge banner advertising the match billowed across Marx Prospect, but for all of Moscow’s chess fever, the games were played in a hall that was at least one-third empty. Like the Bolshoi Ballet or the Obraztsov Puppet Theater, the match was nearly impossible for a citizen to get into unless he was a party official or a friend of someone important. A phalanx of police stood behind steel barricades on the far side of the avenue near Red Square and ordered thousands of chess fans to keep moving. Many stoically circled the block as if awaiting a sudden biblical cloudburst of tickets. People craned their necks toward the squat dull-green building, which was badly in need of a paint job, and clumps of fans stopped and peered at posters featuring Karpov and Kasparov until the police prodded them on.

  The splendor and excitement of the games seemed to catalyze the frustration and despair of many Russians. A Jewish chess master ahead of us in line talked about his problems. “I am a despised enemy in my own land,” he said. “I am not allowed to work. I’m not allowed to play in most chess tournaments, and for the others I don’t have the rubles to enter. I’m not allowed to leave for Israel. How am I to survive?” Bitterly he explained that Russians with a politically dissident point of view received a fast nyet at the Central Chess Club, where people stood on line each day pleading for tickets.

  Inside the House of Trade Unions, just beyond the line of police, Karpov and Kasparov were making their first moves. Pandolfini, Josh and I walked around the block with the crowd. Men plotted to pay ten times the price of a ticket to the first seller, but there were no sellers. The scene was reminiscent of Madison Square Garden before the first Ali-Frazier fight, when people were desperately waving fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills for tickets. But this group was quieter, more resigned; they’d been through it all before.

  Occasionally when we swung past the front of the building a long, shiny Mercedes limousine would pull up and a Russian dignitary would walk into the House of Trade Unions. Everyone seemed to lean toward the big black car as if it were filled with largesse.

  Bruce and I felt ridiculous; apparently we had traveled to the Soviet Union for nothing. We considered asking someone going in with a ticket to tell Bjelica that we were waiting outside. But it was an unrealistic plan. How would someone find Bjelica among the thousands inside, and in any case what could he do?

  Then Pandolfini spotted a man wearing several cameras around his neck who had walked out of the faded building and was crossing the street. He ran off and spoke with the man, a photographer for a Russian magazine. When he returned a few minutes later, he had a ticket. Men standing nearby sighed and kept walking.

  I offered to go in and try to buy two more tickets. I felt bad about leaving Josh and Bruce walking around the block. But if I never got in again, at least I’d be able to describe the hall with Karpov and Kasparov sitting across from one another. I walked up to one of the police manning the barricades, half expecting to be furiously waved down the block, but at the sight of the ticket he shrugged and motioned me inside.

  KARPOV AND KASPAROV played in the Hall of Columns, a majestic room with snow-white Corinthian columns, walls hung with silky crepe and newly waxed parquet floors reflecting sparkling crystal chandeliers. A century earlier it had been a ballroom for Moscow’s rich and famous, including Tolstoy, Pushkin and Turgenev. These days it is used for important trade union conferences, concerts and special political speeches, as well as important chess matches. Kremlin watchers in the United States gauge the importance of a Soviet political event by whether it is held in a site such as the Hall of Columns or at a less prestigious location.

  Immediately on entering the hall, I was aware of the noise. People were greeting old friends, chatting, coughing, walking in and out. Television cameras were mounted in the center aisle. Technicians adjusted their cables and walked about with their tools clanging. Fifty or sixty photographers were close to the stage, jockeying for angles and snapping away. Although pocket chess sets were officially forbidden inside, hundreds of people were holding them in their laps, analyzing the present position. Friends argued about the game and lustily cheered moves. It sounded like a dinner at the old Lüchow’s on 14th Street in New York City.

  Despite the beauty of the setting, Bobby Fischer would never have agreed to play under such conditions; the noise would have driven him crazy. Nor would he have accepted the simple straight-backed chairs provided for the two players, which were similar to the ones occupied by their fans. In Iceland Fischer had bickered over the proximity of the audience and the placement of television cameras: at first he wanted them out of his field of view; then he didn’t want them at all. A close friend of Fischer’s had said that if Bobby had had his way, he would have played his matches in a sealed room located in the middle of a desert, miles from the tiniest distraction. But Karpov and Kasparov didn’t seem to mind the commotion.

  Before a critical move, the large room was quiet except for a rustle of anticipation. People were on the edge of their seats, waiting to cheer the home run, the game breaker. Would their man push the c-pawn or the f-pawn?

  In the final minutes of a close game, when the players had to move quickly because of the pressure of the clock—each man had to make his first forty moves in two and a half hours—the crowd roared like boxing fans at Madison Square Garden. An indignant referee waved his arms and white lights signaled silence, but no one paid any attention. A young man with the job of moving the pieces on the large display board ran feverishly back and forth from the players to the board. Sometimes in his anxiety he posted
a move incorrectly, and then the crowd would scream at him and the lights would flash again. The cacophony and the amateur staging gave tremendous urgency and dramatic appeal to the near-perfect chess being played.

  MANY PEOPLE IN the audience were able to speak a little English. I asked several whom they wanted to win. They seemed equally divided; both men were great heroes. Then I asked where I might buy two tickets, and although there were many empty seats, everyone answered that no tickets were available.

  I was approached by a delicate-looking man with thick-rimmed glasses who introduced himself as Volodja Pimonov. He spoke English well but with a little hesitation and a hint of a foreign accent. He was dressed in loafers, a western-cut gabardine jacket and a quiet but stylish sports shirt. From his dress and cultured use of language one might have guessed that he was a university professor. Later that afternoon I learned that he was a writer for the prestigious Soviet chess magazine 64, and a Shakespeare scholar. He was immediately sympathetic to my predicament and offered to lend me his ticket. It was my plan that Bruce bring Joshua into the hall, put him in a seat, then return for me.

  By the time I got outside the House of Trade Unions, two hours had passed, and Bruce and Josh looked a little desperate. For most of the time, they had been walking around the block. Josh was sleepy and hungry and had complained incessantly. Not knowing what else to do, Bruce had stopped and tried to play a game with him on his pocket set. When a policeman forced them to move they crouched behind a phone booth and resumed the game. With irritation, the same policeman again asked them to move on.

  I gave Bruce the two tickets, mine and Volodja’s, and sent him inside with Josh while I waited around the corner. I was uneasy about leaving Josh alone inside, but all went well.

  On the first floor of the House of Trade Unions was an elegant dining hall with delicious, inexpensive snacks: wineglasses of soda, silver trays piled with pastries, dishes of caviar alongside smoked salmon and sturgeon sandwiches. Tall walls of mirrors extended the palatial dining room into an infinity of appetizing selections. Josh ate piece after piece of French bread smeared with sour cream and caviar, until he spotted another little boy about his size munching chocolate pastries. Soon they were rolling toy cars across the shiny floor—Anton’s Zhiguli beeping at Josh’s Corvette—and talking at one another in Russian and English, which was more a challenge than an impediment. My son offered Anton a wad of bubble gum, and they began blowing bubbles.

  After a while, Josh asked for my pocket chess set. While they had been playing with their toys I had learned that Anton was the nine-year-old son of a Moscow chess master, Grigori Borganovic, and an enthusiastic student of the game. Beside studying with his father four times a week, he attended chess classes at the Pioneer Palace after school. Clearly he would be a formidable opponent, and I was reluctant to give Josh the set. “C’mon, Freddy,” Josh said with a swagger. “We’re just gonna play a little chess. What’s the big deal?” The big deal was that this would be Joshua’s first game in Russia, the citadel of chess, and he hadn’t been playing well all summer.

  In the first game, Anton played a Wilkes-Barre variation which my son had never seen before. “My God,” I thought, “even little Russians know everything about chess.” Josh played in the lackadaisical style he had developed the previous summer, looking longingly at pastries and smiling at passersby. Soviet fans holding cups of espresso paused to watch the two little boys play. Like players and kibitzers in Washington Square, the Russians were curious about little players; maybe one of them would be a world champion someday. Josh hardly glanced at the board, and when he took with his knight instead of checking with his bishop, he had a lost game. I smiled grimly at Anton’s father, patted his boy on the head and fought the urge to pull Josh from the room, shake him and exhort him to play harder. It seemed inappropriate for him to be taking the game so lightly. The boys giggled and set up their pieces again. They were playing with them much as children play with jacks in a playground.

  Later Volodja came into the dining hall and I thanked him for lending us his ticket. “It is nothing,” he said. He watched the children play for a few minutes. By now Josh was looking at the board and had got the hang of Anton’s Wilkes-Barre attack; he realized that if he checked with the bishop and retreated it, he was up a pawn with a good position. The two kids were playing in the shadow of Karpov and Kasparov, and from time to time tumultuous cheers filtered from the hall to this children’s game. Perhaps the boys fantasized that the cheering was for them.

  While we watched the children play, Volodja began to describe his life with disarming candor and passion. The fact that I was an American seemed to represent an opportunity for him. “When I married a Danish girl last year, I fell out of favor,” he began. “They feared, I suppose, that I would leave the country. It happens to all people who marry a foreigner. For months my boss at the magazine, Karpov’s friend Aleksandr Roshal, has been contriving reasons to fire me. He looks for any excuse. In one of my articles I misspelled the name of a player, and he used this as evidence of my incompetence. He wants me to leave the magazine because if I did emigrate he would be disgraced and perhaps lose his job. It is a common situation here. For example, a Jew is much less likely to be accepted into a medical school because he might try to emigrate, and this would hurt the teachers who had accepted him. If I lost my job it would be a disaster. I would lose my apartment and would have no money to send my wife. It is unlikely that I would be able to find another job.”

  Ironically, Volodja didn’t want to emigrate; he believed in communism. “I have applied to visit my wife in Denmark, but they won’t let me go,” he said with exasperation. “They are afraid I won’t come back. Can you imagine such a situation? I don’t want to give up my citizenship; I just want to be with my wife. It is an outrage that I can’t visit her. She is very poor and needs my help. The irony of it,” he said with disgust, “is that they have turned her from a communist into a right-wing person.”

  During our weeks in Moscow, we spent a great deal of time with Volodja Pimonov, and always when he spoke of his problems there was great intensity but little hope. He seemed reconciled to spending his life banging on closed doors, writing letters, filling out forms, begging bureaucrats to help, telling his story over and over to foreigners in Moscow. The telling itself had become an urgent ritual; he had become trapped in his story. “Thank you, but there’s nothing you can do”; he said this to me dozens of times with his charming smile and sad brown eyes.

  I asked Pimonov if he knew where I might be able to find Soviet champion Boris Gulko, and he shook his head sadly. “I don’t know what has happened to him. People say different things. I’ve heard that he is in jail, but I’m not sure. He is one of the greatest players in the world. If they had left him alone, he might have become world champion. But of course they don’t want a Jew to be world champion, particularly an outspoken Jew like Gulko.”

  When I mentioned the Russian grandmaster whom the defector in New York had urged me to bribe with pornographic magazines in order to meet Gulko, Volodja said that the man was playing in a tournament in Odessa and wouldn’t be able to help.

  Pimonov is a chess player of international master strength. Like devoted players everywhere, he seemed to consider chess as important as love and death. While he talked about his wife, I occasionally stole a glance at Joshua’s game. Volodja responded with a sympathetic smile or a fast glance at the position. My divided attention, an embarrassment to me, did not surprise or offend him. Often during our stay in Moscow he would hold forth on the tragedy of Jews in the Soviet Union, the evils of capitalism, nuclear arms or his own insoluble dilemma, his face showing pain, concern or moral outrage, but when the conversation turned to an intriguing issue of chess, his expression would immediately brighten. Before playing, he would become an enthusiastic young man, a bigger version of Josh, excited and concerned only about the coming game.

  I introduced Volodja to Pandolfini, who was also watching Joshua’s ga
me with more than passing interest. “Pandolfini, I’ve read your column in Chess Life for years,” Volodja began. “You are a national master, yes? I can’t wait until we have a chance to play some chess. I’m a good speed player.” Then he added shyly, “One year I nearly won the Moscow speed championship ahead of Tal. In the deciding game I was killing him. I had mate in three, but then my flag fell.”

  “Oh, great,” Bruce said to me under his breath. “Plays blitz as well as Tal and he wants Pandolfini.”

  By now Josh was winning game after game from Anton. He was in a rhythm, moving quickly, but concentrating for the first time in months. He was setting up attacks with diversionary feints. His pieces flowed to the right squares, and everyplace Anton moved there seemed to be a trap. Everything was working for Josh. He was like a basketball player who couldn’t hit anything but net. But the kids were still giggling, and Pimonov and Pandolfini and even Anton’s father were enjoying the games.

  When Joshua is playing poorly, I watch every move like a hawk and feel pricked by each mistake; later I can re-create the critical parts of the game—not that he wants to rehash it. But when he’s playing like this, I don’t follow the moves. I ride on top of the game, relishing the emphatic way he snaps a pawn ahead, the flash of his eyes, the assurance on his young face, the bright neatness of his plan. I realized that while we had been “training” for Moscow, I had become so consumed with motivating him to play well that I had forgotten how much he loves the game.

  * Fédération Internationale des Echecs, the international governing body for chess, headed by Florencio Campomanes of the Philippines. A FIDE master has gained his master’s rating in FIDE tournaments and is, generally speaking, somewhat stronger than a U.S.C.F. national master.