Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  “The so-called freedom of the press is very useful to Gorbachev. It is a charade. I could tell you about the freedom of the press in my country.”

  I asked what he meant and he shook his head, no. We had no common language. This was not shaping up to be the trip I had looked forward to. Paris was still visible in the rear view mirror, and Kasparov was angry with me about American public opinion and had made it clear that he didn’t want to discuss chess. What were we going to talk about for the next two weeks while traveling through France?

  With a gesture of his hand, he waved off my naive inquiry about his training camp in Baku. At the time I knew almost nothing about his aborted training session in Azerbaijan four months earlier. Despite an addiction to newspapers and TV news shows, like most people in the United States, I would have been hard-pressed to find the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan on a map, and I knew little about the long history of ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azeris. Kasparov found this irritating. During this trip to France, with the exception of one emotional exchange when I raised questions about the loss of his home, he shook his head, no, forbidden subject.

  “The Soviet correspondent from Moscow was on the radio this morning, criticizing me heavily for speaking out against Gorbachev in the West,” he said, “It made me very happy. They are taking me seriously.” A few weeks later in Moscow, Kasparov would become deputy chairman of a new opposition political movement called Democratic Russia. He described it as a loose coalition of individuals, including prominent intellectuals and politicians, who wished to change the existing social system to a democratic society with a free market system. Within the spectrum of membership there were those such as himself who advocated immediate and radical change, and others who favored a more moderate course. Kasparov’s huge popularity in the USSR and his connections in the West gave the new party instant credibility, and from its inception it was described in Western publications as the most organized and prominent anticommunist party.

  I asked Kasparov about the danger of his daily attacks on Gorbachev. “If you were to lose the match against Karpov, would you be vulnerable for reprisals?”

  “If you play a big game, there is always a big risk.” There was no fun, no adolescent posturing in these words. The dangers for a Soviet citizen criticizing the system were, of course, well-documented. Even during the past decade of relative liberalism, there had been examples of outspoken Soviet sportsmen having lost their privileges, their state subsidies and more, for attacking the communist system or for leveling criticisms at the central Sports Committee, which controlled the lives of Soviet athletes. One famous example was that of the chess grandmaster Boris Gulko, who in the late seventies had twice been Soviet champion and was among the several best players in the world. In 1978, when the grandmaster had become a dissident and made public his desire to leave the Soviet Union, Gulko had lost his state subsidy and had not been allowed to practice his profession.

  Kasparov was convinced that if he had lost to Karpov in 1985 in the first match or in the rematch, the repercussions to him would have been grave, perhaps similar to Gulko’s. “They would have tried to destroy me.” Nevertheless, since becoming champion, Kasparov had relentlessly and systematically used his title to gain time on Western talk shows and newscasts, and to obtain meetings with newspaper editors and government officials, to criticize the Soviet Sports Committee, the communist system, and eventually the Secretary General himself, becoming in effect Vladimir Posner’s opposition in the Western media.

  As he traveled the globe, giving speeches and press conferences, writing articles for The Wall Street Journal, The European and other publications, he accepted the fact that repercussions, including assassination, were possible. In Moscow, where Kasparov was as recognizable on the streets as Michael Jordan or Bill Bradley in the United States, he lived his life surrounded by six bodyguards.

  “Listen to me, Fred, in my country the fight against communism is nearly over,” he said, turning my way from the front seat of the Mercedes. “Communism is dead.”

  Perhaps he noticed my surprise. At the time no one in the United States was predicting the immediate collapse of Soviet Communism, nor the dismantling of the country. Opposition to Soviet power was still at the philosophical center of American foreign policy. My generation had eaten breakfast while reading about the intricacies of the Cold War and nuclear arms race. After decades of articles and editorials decrying the evils of communism, we had come to feel that communism was immutable and perhaps even necessary, like the devil. To me, Kasparov’s predictions seemed gratuitous, even frivolous.

  “Next year, in 1991, the Soviet Union will not exist. Definitely. Mark my words. Next year, there will be no more evil empire. We will have private property in my country. Many of the republics will have their independence.” Kasparov laughed at the outrageousness of his prophecy.

  “In October, 1989, I was at a party with Henry Kissinger and Jonathan Bush, the president’s brother, and the president of IBM was there also. They asked for my prognosis about Europe. I said there would be no communist regime in Europe by the end of the year. They laughed at me. But I could feel the mood of the people.” Kasparov inhaled deeply through his nose a couple of times to demonstrate the new political smell in the air.

  Kasparov was much more relaxed now, tapping his finger to the beat of music pulsing from fine speakers and quietly enjoying the speed of the Mercedes, which weaved past cars and trucks as if they were standing still. I noticed that the speedometer was edging past 190 and I nervously tried to remember my kilometers. Wasn’t that more than 100 miles per hour?

  There was no pressing appointment that evening in Lille. What was the rush? Why were we racing ahead? Over time, I would discover that Kasparov needed to speak, eat, walk, drive fast, that speed drove his ideas and brought a sense of well-being, that moving slowly made him edgy.

  His young life was a Cinderella story with dark and ironic turns, many of them self-created. Imagine a young man from a poor family in the provincial republic of Azerbaijan suddenly becoming as famous and powerful as a king. At twenty-seven years old, he was the greatest living practitioner of his art, perhaps the greatest of all time. He was wealthy. But he felt dissatisfaction more than success. He craved other things, different forms of expression, vaster audiences, bigger and more dangerous opponents. In a few months, he would play a deadly match against Karpov, with millions of dollars on the line, not to mention the prestige, but he could barely bring himself to think about chess. While his fans around the world wondered which opening variations he would play, Kasparov was obsessed with Gorbachev, at times so much so that he could not smile, could not taste his food. Months later, the focus and passion was likely to shift again. He seemed to know that about himself.

  “This life I lead, it’s like drugs,” he reflected in the car. “I know that the way I live is bad. I’m taking from the future. But I need it. My mind and nervous system need the tension. I don’t think that I could live the normal life. A house in the country. I need the big stage. I need to be at the front of the event.

  “I am like the raider, the soldier who uses the parachute and attacks from the rear. It is a very risky profession, but it is thrilling because there is a chance for a big result.” He added, “But a raider cannot make a mistake, because the first mistake is normally the last one.”

  “Does a raider feel fear? Does he fear death?”

  “Yeah, but what can I do?”

  On that somber note, the world champion dozed off in the front seat, and I was the only one fearing death. My fear was nothing so extravagant as political assassination by the KGB. I envisioned the blowout and the tumbling Mercedes. A lengthy obituary in The New York Times about the tragic early loss of the greatest chess player of all time, with a brief mention of a journalist who was accompanying him to an exhibition in Lille. No more going to chess tournaments with my kid, the two of us dreaming about the day he would win the world chess championship. I thought
it was a little strange that this man, who didn’t miss the subtlest nuance of a complex chess position, hadn’t noticed that I was terrified.

  “That’s the advertisement for my tournament,” said Dan-Antoine Blanc-Shapira, the thirty-year-old organizer of Kasparov’s next event, from the driver’s seat. The following weekend in Paris, he was producing the most lavish and technically sophisticated chess tournament of all time, featuring Kasparov. He turned up the volume on the radio. “The theme song,” he shouted above the pounding bass and electronic piano, an undulating refrain that seemed more a call for lust than an advertisement for an elite grandmaster chess tournament.

  Dan-Antoine was a handsome man who possessed the accommodating genius of Felix Krull. During each of the world champion’s trips to France, Dan-Antoine shepherded him around, attending to his tiniest needs with conviviality and élan. He arranged Kasparov’s travel schedule, selected restaurants, handled the press, drove the Mercedes. If Kasparov wanted speed, Dan-Antoine gave him speed.

  Dan-Antoine kept glancing my way as he translated the words of the radio announcement. ‘The strongest action tournament ever held . . . the biggest prize fund . . . infra-red earphones.” In this event, the Immopar Trophée, he would endeavor to convey the turbulent emotions of grandmaster chess through the use of larger-than-life video images—a media montage of the sometimes-agonized, sometimes-elated players, and state-of-the-art graphics demonstrating chess positions—as well as with sensuous rock music and intense nontechnical commentary coming over earphones to fans seated in the elegant Théâtre des Champs Elysées. When Kasparov was feeling interested in chess, he loved Dan-Antoine’s ideas for popularizing the game. As the Frenchman enthusiastically described the Immopar Trophée, I hunkered down behind the driver’s seat and tried to appear casual as I suggested that he keep his eyes on the road. The speedometer was sitting on 210.

  Kasparov slept like a baby, looking invulnerable in a sloppy-fitting leather jacket. We slowed down when we reached the outskirts of Lille. Kasparov woke up and scratched his head. Now he was a much softer man, younger. His face was slack, his eyes liquid and sad. He looked outside at the blackness and didn’t speak until we arrived at the hotel.

  Sometime later, I asked what he had been thinking about. “In a way, the trip to Lille was a journey back to the past for me,” he reflected. “Nineteen seventy-six was my first trip abroad, and I came to a small village near Lille. I remember small details—a soccer game, a dinner. I don’t remember the games, for some reason. Usually when I recall my early trips, I think of the games.

  “I had been growing up without a father and spent much time with my grandfather, my mother’s father. I loved him very much. We had a very small flat, but there was a big map in our dining room. We would look at this map and talk about distant places. I remember conversations about African revolutions, Latin America, Vietnam, Angola. Inevitably the discussion came around to communism. He was an old communist, almost fifty years in the Communist Party. Sometimes we quarreled, but they were great discussions. I felt that some things he said were wrong. I felt it, but I didn’t understand, I was too young.

  “And then I received this good news. I would be sent to France to play in the 1976 world junior championship at Wattigny. I was thirteen. I was so pleased to be going. For people in my country, it was unusual to travel even to Bulgaria or Rumania. But France . . . I had read many books, and understood that France was important for European culture. But we arrived at this village and it was so ordinary, a village anywhere. I had imagined something like Disneyland, but life is life.”

  Kasparov was born in Baku in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan on April 13, 1963. From his earliest years, it was apparent to members of his family that Garry was an unusual child. “When he was a little boy, still unable to speak, everyone noticed that he had thoughts in his eyes,” recalled his eighty-year-old grandmother, Suzanne Kasparova, a slight woman with white hair and a mind brimming with memories. She recalled that baby Garry made subtle distinctions and manifested decisiveness that was almost shocking. “The house was always crammed with people; Garry would enter the room and decide whom he wanted to be with. If there was no one, he just left,” she said, with an amused expression that I took to mean, “and he is the same way today,” for the world champion chooses his conversations with care and will sometimes avoid chitchat, even at the cost of being rude.

  When he was only a few months old, family members read to him; and when he started to talk, he had already accumulated a great deal of information and was almost immediately pronouncing whole sentences. No one in the family spoke baby talk to this serious child. It seemed inappropriate. “Adults in the family felt his wisdom,” said his aunt Nellia, “and so they didn’t bring him toys and games. They brought him books.”

  There are many stories about young Kasparov’s intellectual precocity. His aunt Nellia recalled that once, when Garry was two, they were riding on a trolley bus and he noticed that the buildings on one side had odd numbers and on the other side even. At five, his father bought him a globe and he immediately began to study it. Within months he had the knowledge of geography of an adult. His favorite early book was the encyclopedia. Overnight, it seemed to the family, Garry knew everything about this country and that one, which were the highest mountains, the longest rivers, the populations of countries. The young boy had a remarkable memory, to go along with an insatiable appetite for knowledge.

  When Garry was seven, his schoolteacher asked the children to write something, recalled his grandmother. “Most of them wrote a few words about mommy or daddy. Garry wrote three words: ‘peace, people, party.’ “The ideas he was beginning to discuss with her husband were making a deep impression. “Garry was fond of eating dinner with his grandfather,” said Nellia. “They started to eat, and soon they would be talking about politics and life. They would begin to argue. His mother and grandmother would try to stop them, because Garry would forget to eat.”

  Members of the family not only acknowledged Garry’s serious turn of mind, they cultivated it, and coddled him, as if they were all involved in sculpting a masterpiece. “Everyone in the family worked with him,” his grandmother said. He was lavished with attention, his needs carefully anticipated. Garry’s father resisted the desire to visit his close friends who lived in neighboring towns, because he was concerned about Garry’s schedule. He believed that the boy should always have his own room in which to sleep. His cousin Eugene, twenty-four, recalled with pride that Garry enjoyed riding his bike with him. Though they spent considerable time together, they rarely had conversations, Eugene said without resentment. “Garry wanted more to communicate with adults.” At first the family believed that Garry would make his mark in mathematics or the sciences, but they never doubted that there would be greatness in his life. And they banded together like a little team, Garry’s team, to support his development.

  Today the family lives in Moscow, and they are still, first and foremost, Garry’s team. Eugene frequently stops by Garry’s sprawling offices in the center of Moscow. Though he has little in common intellectually with his cousin, Garry is a big part of his life, and the love for his famous cousin shines in his eyes. Eugene’s mother, Nellia, comes by her sister’s apartment with cakes and pies that she knows Garry likes with his tea after lunch. But she also knows that he likes her to be around. The family seems to steady Garry. They are his foundation, his love, his talisman. He is more confident preparing to joust with Karpov, Gorbachev or Yeltsin, if he hears the faint voices of his aunt, grandmother and wife chatting with his mother in the kitchen.

  While he plays his games against Karpov thousands of miles away, back in Moscow the family suffers for him. They agonize as he struggles over the board, and afterwards they are so distraught they take tranquilizers to calm down. His games are religious moments to them. They believe that if they root hard enough, feel enough pain, Garry will feel their energy, and it will help him win. They point out that Garry has frequently demons
trated feats that tested credulity. At the age of six, he was beating his father at chess. At the age of nine, he won the chess championship of Baku, competing against many excellent local players who had studied the game their entire lives. “It was considered a miracle,” said his grandmother. “Everyone in the city knew him after this. There were magazine articles written about the miracle in Baku.”

  “You know, during the pogrom, Suzanne’s house was not touched,” added Nellia, “because everyone knew who was living there, the grandmother of Garry. He was loved by the whole city.”

  When he was little, Garry wanted to follow his father everywhere. But when Kim Weinstein became seriously ill, he decided not to see his son again, lest the impression of a dying man cause harm to the boy. “On the day of the funeral, Garry isolated himself in the bathroom and spent the whole day there,” said his grandmother. Members of the family understood that he was crying, but Garry was left alone. They sensed that he needed to grieve by himself.

  “Seven days after the funeral, Garry came to me and said that he would think his father was on a business trip and not dead,” recalled his mother, Klara. “He said, ‘For my life, I shall think of him on a business trip.’ After our conversation, he spoke to everyone as if his father were still alive. His teacher in school said he told his friends that his father was away traveling.” Seven-year-old Garry had decided upon this tactic to cope with his pain, and it is interesting that the family played along with his denial until Garry decided that he was ready to face his father’s death. Two years later, when he signaled that it was time, the family began softly pronouncing the father’s name and talking about the events of his life. Garry’s school friends were surprised to learn that his father had passed away so long ago. “This was when Garry started to play a lot of chess,” said Klara. “At the age of nine, he had switched to another life.”

  “You know, Garry’s life has been marked by big losses,” she continued. “His father, his grandfather, and now the loss of his home. After each loss there is deep mourning and then he acquires a new impulse, starts a new life. The more painful the loss, the more energy he has for the next phase of his life.”