Kasparov moved swiftly from board to board as if someone were pacing him in a race, pushing pawns and pieces ahead. He is beautiful when he plays, a wild creature. His body is tense, his face taut, punishing, at times fierce, as if he is about to physically attack. I have seen top grandmasters wither from his fury, becoming disheveled, alarmed (although others are caught in the jet stream of his energy and genius and play their inspired best against him). He paused at one board, his bottom lip stuck out, mirroring an inner churning.
As he thought, there was a sway to his body, a connection between the mind that created games brimming with complexity so deep that few in the world could fully understand them, and the long graceful sweep of his arm moving a bishop across a diagonal, the athletic move from board to board. Indeed, he said later, he is a rhythm player, making better and better moves when he is on the beat from game to game.
Suddenly, Dan-Antoine appeared, speaking into a microphone in mellifluous French, an arm around Kasparov’s shoulder, asking Garry—who for a few seconds looked like a man emerging from a dream—to tell the audience who was giving him a hard time. I had never seen this before in any kind of formal chess event. Games are typically played in religious silence, but Kasparov wanted chess fans to feel the fear and excitement. He realized that for the game to succeed as a professional sport, fans had to identify with the players, as they do in other sports. In Dan-Antoine’s tournament the following weekend in Paris, there would be close-ups of Kasparov’s face projected on two large screens, so that the fan could feel his exhilaration and wonder, or his anger and mortification if he should lose. “Chess is a passionate game, but people don’t know. The game can’t exist in empty space—it needs a public.”
Towards this end, from time to time in the exhibition, Kasparov had agreed to edify fans about why he was doing well or badly, which was a little bit like a general giving away his war plan in the middle of the battle. Then he was back to his games, whirling around the room, snatching pieces, calculating, grimacing, rocking on his heels. When games turned his way, he was relentless, pressing, pushing pieces ahead, his knuckles white with struggle. He was lusty to win, and the more he won the more the crowd cheered.
“He is a ferocious attacker, he keeps increasing the pressure,” explained one young master, thrilled to be in the presence of his hero. “Top grandmasters flinch under the tension of his style and confidence. You can tell from their moves that these guys are scared. They don’t play normally against him. Their attacks are either wild and hopeless or they play very timid moves.”
Of course, Kasparov occasionally loses. When he makes a weak move in an exhibition, there is no attempt to conceal his emotions, to maintain a poker face as he would against Karpov. After a blunder, his jaw clenches tight and he shakes his head, no, no. The pain ripples through him. “When I make a mistake, I feel it earlier than my opponent. I feel vulnerable and angry at myself. Losing is a shock. I feel punished by the gods, because I’ve got this talent and I don’t feel that any opponent should beat me.”
In Lille, Garry won all twenty of his games and the fans were rapturous. “I feel happy but exhausted,” he said afterwards. “If they get something, I must lose something.”
Exhausted, to be sure. He had just overcome twenty players, and now his mind was flooded with calculations and scores of chess positions; a few of them, the most interesting, he would wrestle with in his head for months—searching for moves that might have been a little better, like figuring out a clever retort after the argument is over. “If only I had done it better. It’s a pity,” he said in Paris the next week, after losing a game in a simultaneous exhibition. Chess does not allow for revisions: no takebacks. The moment is lost forever, but still the scene plays over and over in your head and will not leave you in peace.
Kasparov’s face looked drained. I shook his hand and the muscles in his arm were slack. It was time to give back-to-back press conferences. Where would he find the energy? We walked to a large trailer overfilled with photographers and journalists.
“Four years ago Margaret Thatcher made a comparison between interest in chess and politics,” he began, his words full of snap and irony. “She said politicians and chess players are always in time trouble. Today I get scared when I see politicians playing chess. One is so easily tempted to sacrifice a pawn. Why not sacrifice a small Baltic pawn?” Of course. Kasparov had primed himself for the European press by invoking Gorbachev’s disingenuousness. Gorbachev could nearly always be counted upon to bring him back to life.
Thirty or forty journalists sat ready with their questions about the exhibition and the coming match against Karpov, while Kasparov lectured to them about Gorbachev’s treachery in the Baltics. Then he allowed a few questions about chess:
“I believe in human beings. That’s why I believe I will be replaced by a human being, not a computer.”
“For chess I devote less time than I want, and for leisure I devote less time also.”
“Must you hate your opponent to win?” someone asked.
“Sorry, I’d have to hate so many people.”
“Have you ever been to Cuba?”
“I never visit communist countries, except my own.”
You could see that Kasparov enjoyed lobbing his one-liners at the reporters, presenting firsthand evidence that chess players were not narrow, cerebral creatures. For the same reason, he relishes his regular visits on the David Letterman show, practicing his jokes beforehand, working to overcome his serious turn of mind. It is an occasion to demonstrate to millions that he can banter silliness with the best—who would expect it? But his performance in press conferences is often very crafty. One-liners and chess insights are all directed toward warming up his audience, preparing them for tough political talk. “My country is the kingdom of convex mirrors,” he said to a reporter, who scribbled down each word. The world champion was determined to use his status as a sportsman to publicize his political point of view. When a reporter asked for his observations about the upcoming generation of chess players in the Soviet Union, he answered that with his country in chaos and misery, chess was simply not very important now; in fact many of the top players were leaving to live in other parts of the world, where they could live a normal life. He was impatient with questions about Karpov’s style and stressed that the most significant aspect of the coming match would be its political overtones. “For years, Karpov has been the symbol of the system. I am known as the Soviet sportsman who fights to destroy this system, who is trying to organize democratic forces to build a normal society.”
A few days later, we were eating in a restaurant in Paris, and Kasparov was speaking with great exhilaration. After lunch, he would give another simultaneous exhibition against selected students, most of them master strength, and then there would be a press conference and television interviews. If he lost two or three games, it would be written about in European newspapers and chess players would begin to wonder if the champ was slipping, if maybe Karpov would beat him in the fall. But while we talked about hockey (his political infighting at home had made it possible for the Soviet Viacheslav Fetisov to play for the New Jersey Devils in the National Hockey League), Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men was one of his favorite novels), Camus (“he is too wishy-washy”) and Gorbachev (the criminal), the events of the afternoon did not exist for him. His concentration and passion for conversation was tactile. He held forth on one topic or another as if it was hugely important, and did not notice what was going on across the restaurant or at the other end of the table.
When Kasparov enters into a conversation, there is a sense of commitment and importance to the encounter, almost as if there has been a contractual arrangement. Whether speaking with a student or a famous movie actress, he seems to want to squeeze the moment for its possibilities, to complete it like the last pages of a book. Once, in New York, I watched him talking about a chess position with an amateur player while Mayor Dinkins stood by awkwardly, waiting to have a word wi
th him. I think an hour would have passed this way if Andrew Page had not stepped in to make a smooth transition, and even at that, Kasparov appeared to be pained to break off the discussion.
A conversation with him is rarely casual. Kasparov’s face is etched with purpose; he is out to learn or to teach. At times he was dogmatic, lecturing, and then for no apparent reason, accessible and open to suggestion. To hold his attention you must be intense and honest, at your best, or he will walk away—you sense this while you talk. Over the course of several hours with him, switching gears and trying to match his intensity can be exhausting.
About a half hour before it was time to leave for the exhibition, Kasparov became very quiet. He pinched his eyes and appeared to be distracted. After a time, he rested his head on the table. His silence was very loud, awkwardly loud. Although conversation went on around him and people looked at him from across the room, he remained perfectly still.
During my days with him in France, there were other moments like this when he fell into an uneasy repose, suddenly becoming silent and unapproachable. “He has bursts of tremendous energy and then becomes exhausted,” said Andrew Page. But during some of these quiet times, Kasparov did not seem to be resting. Occasionally, his lips moved. He mumbled a little, as if conferring with another part of himself, and he appeared to be in pain. In France, I found his moodiness confusing. As I have said, I knew little about the events in Baku. I did not understand that he was grieving and depressed. At the time, perhaps he didn’t fully appreciate what was wrong with himself. “I am not only a troublemaker. I’m a troubled soul,” he told me, enigmatically. Under normal circumstances, Kasparov is an emotional man, but for at least a year after the loss of his home, his moodiness became more pronounced, good humor gave way inexplicably to painful awkward silences. Despair was Garry’s ready companion, and he complained almost daily to friends of a lack of energy and wondered if he was physically ill.
While traveling through France, Kasparov gathered himself in his brooding way for the next public event, where more often than not he was outgoing, friendly and quick-witted. But sometimes he would appear before a group of journalists and simply have no energy to answer their questions. At a press conference in Lyon, where the second half of the championship would be played the following winter, Kasparov appeared exhausted and without color. Standing beside a smiling Michel Noir, mayor of the city and a leading political figure in France, Kasparov’s answers to the press were often no more than a quiet word or two, and all the while he was looking at the door.
Occasionally protocol and small talk seemed to overwhelm him. One afternoon in Paris, he had been signing autographs and answering stale questions at an elegant cocktail party given in his honor. After forty-five minutes of this, he whispered, “I must leave.” I chased him out the door and down a winding street. For all of his tactical and strategic ability, Kasparov has a terrible sense of direction, as I do, and I worried about how we would ever find our way back. Kasparov walks at the pace that most middle-aged men jog, so keeping up with him without running was very awkward. Nevertheless, I tried to do it, and at the same time to keep track of the heedless turns he was making. Kasparov increased his blistering pace, smiled, pumped his arms and like a kid playing hooky reveled in his escape into the fine sunny afternoon.
After not speaking for a while, he slowed down and said, “My wife Maria is twenty-six. We should have one or two children, but look at this life that I live. When would I see them? What do you think?” I told him that, for me at least, children were the most important thing, and he nodded. I had the feeling he was deciding right then. When we managed to find our way back, Kasparov neatened his tie and was ready to be world champion again.
Sometimes a reluctant world champion, though. Bridling against the constraints of his title, wishing to be other things as well, Kasparov cannot bear the idea that he is what he is and that’s it. With energy and purpose that borders on greed, he strives to make himself better, smarter, broader. He is his own work in progress, constantly analyzing himself, working at a facet of his being, whether it be a political idea, a chess opening or a psychological frailty.
“Sometimes it strikes me that I could go back, I could change.” He mused often about his lost youth. At times he spoke of it as if he were searching for a child who was lost and wandering somewhere. “I am trying to do something,” he said, with a painful stutter. “To keep these childish corners of my mind. For example, I eat ice cream. It is sweet, you know. And sometimes I try to be involved in something silly.”
One morning, at the exclusive St. James Club, where he stays in Paris, he ate an omelette, and with a draft of a political speech attacking Gorbachev and the editorials of a half-dozen newspapers strewn around, he watched cartoons on television. Watching this serious young man with graying hair watch cartoons was very moving. He was purposeful about enjoying himself, as if the diversion were a medicine prescribed for his soul.
A few days after I arrived, we began to have long talks without the tape recorder. “Leave it off, Fred,” he would say to me. Talking was also self-prescribed medicine. For a time, it quieted the demons inside. Then, after hours of speaking about everything under the sun—nuclear arms, Hemingway, abortion, wives, sex, death—he would suddenly grow silent, and if I tried to say a word or two, he would mumble something, an impatient admonition from far off or an annoyed glance which said, Not now—can’t you see that I am preoccupied? Then there were times when Garry stared at me for a response, but I had to guess the question. It was a disarming question, something like, so what do you think of me, of my politics, of my life? I would say a few words. Sometimes a smile was enough or a touch on the wrist. After dinner we would walk for miles, all the while talking, and afterwards he would make long distance phone calls around the world until one or two A.M., when he finally felt tired enough to sleep. He said to me that being alone for more than a few hours was unnerving, and this bothered him. He decided that he would have to tackle the problem head-on. But he had little time in his schedule to practice being alone.
Kasparov dined in only the finest restaurants in Paris. Dan-Antoine was a master of selection. One night we ate beside a lovely river, another at the edge of a forest. One night Le Grand Véfour, the next, Les Jardins de Bagatelle, the next, La Tour d’Argent. The food arrived looking more like a sculpture than lobster, or bass or duck. At an outdoor restaurant, with the air fragrant with spring flowers and peacocks strolling nearby, Kasparov looked at the gorgeous dishes before us and roared like a barbarian, “Food, food.” But more often than not, Kasparov was wired with political insights and barely noticed the food growing cold before him. At more than a few of these fantastic meals, his face grew dark with fury over Gorbachev and with me for asking annoying questions. “Go away, Fred . . . go back to America. We will remember who were our friends.” Then he would grow silent. It was hard for me to eat under such conditions. I became sorry I had ever heard of Gorbachev.
“In the West, Gorbachev is viewed as the man who wants to destroy the communist system,” he told me frequently. “I believe that he is trying to save the system. He is the last communist dictator. Why else does he organize ethnic clashes within the various republics? Russians against Moldavians, Georgians against Abkhazians.”
One fantastic course after the next grew cold while he talked and then he threw down his food in seconds. “Now is the time when we must defeat communism. We must do it now. History does not often give a second chance.” Kasparov was in such a rush to get his ideas out, as if the ideas would fly away, the moment would be lost. I had rarely in my life had a chance to sample food like this, but Kasparov spoke with such fervor that picking up a fork felt rude and inappropriate. And then, when I tried to scarf down the langouste, côtelette or canard at his pace, my stomach was in a knot.
Throughout France, Garry was rushing—rushing to eat, rushing to walk, rushing to drive. For all that, he was always late. If he was due somewhere across Paris at eight, th
at was the time he might think about getting dressed. He left late for exhibitions, fancy dinners and even appointments on television, which gave his publicists heart failure and promoters headaches. I think he warmed up that way, prepared himself by allowing the tension to build, forestalled leaving until he felt purpose and fire. I also think he believed that being world champion, being Kasparov, gave him the right to be spoiled and even outrageous. Lateness was his calling card. He was never guilty about it. Why? He was busy doing something else. Then, when everyone was irritated, he came striding into the press conference or the three-star restaurant at a walk that was nearly a sprint, radiating energy, smiling, a modern hero.
In chess, as in life, Garry knew that his colossal energy was his most effective ally. When he was inspired and vigorous, his expression was fixed and impenetrable, his body hard, bridling itself back and bursting to begin, like a runner before a race; he had no doubt that he would win. Without his energy, Garry felt nervous about playing chess or meeting an important business contact or giving an interview. Kasparov searched for energy, mined it in strange ways, such as arriving late, or allowing his anger to build and then transforming it into inspired moves or passionate ideas.
One afternoon, he reluctantly agreed to talk a little about chess. We began walking through Paris to find the right place to talk. He decided that we would find a bench to sit on. We passed many benches along broad tree-lined avenues. Each was not quite right. One was in the sun. One was in the shade. One had old bird droppings. He was becoming a little tense, rejecting benches. We returned to his suite at the St. James Club, walked past a half-dozen people seated formally on leather couches in the lobby waiting to see Kasparov as if he were a head of state. He walked briskly past them without noticing.
Mortal Games Page 7