Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  And so Yasser Seirawan rooted for Karpov.

  When Josh and I visited Garry the afternoon after game 2, he was wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt, he hadn’t shaved and his broad smile was ecstatic against the darkness of his clothing and beard.

  “So what did you think of my opening, Josh?” he asked immediately.

  “I loved it, but will you try it in the next game when you have white?”

  “Why not? He had all summer to prepare. He showed his best defense against my king pawn opening and look what happened. Right now he has no defense to e4!”

  This was a very funny idea, that the ex–world champion might be feeling defenseless against White’s first move of the game, but there was also some truth in it. Karpov had taken one of his sick days to try to figure out what to do about his seriously weakened Zaitsev, and analysts who the day before had been predicting a long tough match, were now speaking of Kasparov’s winning in a blowout. While we chatted, Klara passed Garry a piece of chocolate and he took a bite. Then after a minute she passed him a seedless grape. “Mama, please,” he said, with a trace of exasperation. She held it in her hand until he put it into his mouth. Klara was forever placing delectables before him. She calmed herself by feeding Garry the most shapely chicken breast, the loveliest red apple.

  We had planned to take a walk that afternoon in Central Park. Garry asked if Josh and I would mind waiting for a few minutes while he spoke with his trainers. When he left the room, I said to Klara, “You look very happy today.” Immediately, her expression slid into guardedness. “I will be happy after twenty-two more games,” she said gravely. And then, after a long pause, “You can have no idea what it’s been like, four championships in three years. We have been through all of the emotions.” She gestured with her hands to show that the family had become bloated from so much winning and losing. “You will be happy when he is finished with his chess life,” I said. She nodded, as though trying to imagine it. It was painful for Klara to attend these championships, but for Garry it was a necessity. His mother was a spiritual advisor and he relied upon her intuitions. He has said that his mother has powers that he cannot explain; her presence gives him confidence and a feeling of well-being.

  For ten minutes or so, Garry walked in and out of rooms down the hall, presumably looking in on the analysis of his little team of grandmasters. Then he settled in a room directly across from us, where we could see him reading The New York Times. After a few minutes, I walked over to him and said something. He was annoyed that I had interrupted him and burrowed into the paper. More time passed. Garry did this and that. Made a phone call. Read an article in a Russian newspaper. He passed me the op-ed section of the Times and asked me to read a column by Abe Rosenthal. Soon he would feel like walking in the park and we would go. His sense of timing bordered on the superstitious; life’s little harmonies must always be considered, or else. He ministered to himself by doing things precisely when they felt right to him, not only big things, such as leaving the GMA, but many little things. A day was like a chess game. The advantages built upon one another. The walk would be better for leaving at precisely the right instant. The evening’s training would be better for an invigorating walk spiced by good political conversation. Then, with his appetite piqued by this day of perfectly-timed moments, he would enjoy a late hearty meal, followed by an absorbing movie, a Western maybe. He would play better tomorrow for this close attention to his inner timing.

  Grandmaster Mikhail Gurevich came into the room to make a phone call. Afterwards, he asked me questions about what he had to do to apply for credit cards, and we spoke at some length about credit references. He knew little about such things, but, like Kasparov, he felt that communism was finished in his country and he was preparing himself. Preparing for a new life of paying off the bank, I couldn’t help thinking. I asked him how he would describe the work of the team. “We are a small but very productive factory of ideas,” he answered, in his deep soulful voice. Gurevich was a very brilliant chess player, at the time ranking number seven in the world. Working for Kasparov for six months was a double-edged proposition. The money was good and Kasparov’s ideas were often inspiring, but all of Gurevich’s energy went into the preparation of the other man. “Too much analysis and not enough playing,” complained another grandmaster, Sergey Dolmatov, who also worked for Garry through the training period and the match. “The problem with all this analyzing is that you make mistakes and don’t get punished, as you do in games.” In Thomas Mann’s novel The Beloved Returns, characters who live in close proximity to the genius Goethe are warped by his power and forget who they are. For Kasparov’s trainers, all world-class grandmasters with their own career aspirations, working for Kasparov held the same threat. Consequently, while doing his best work for Garry, it seemed to me that during the course of the match, Gurevich also worked at trying to maintain his own sense of self. In the mornings, he slept late, which was annoying to Klara. During analysis sessions, he argued his points of view against Kasparov more boldly than the others, as if to shield himself from the power of Kasparov’s chess vision. In casual conversation, instead of Garry’s last game against Karpov, he would talk about his family or the craziness of Rustam Kamsky or the next tournament he would play in or the need to get credit cards.

  Garry walked back into the room, smiling, finally ready to go to the park. He had just given a phone interview about game 2 and was feeling pleased. He considered it “a great accomplishment for the art of chess,” but he was trying to restrain his happiness, guarding against overconfidence, like his mother. “The match is in the early stage,” he said. “One game doesn’t mean a thing.” It sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. Jacket in hand, he noticed that Josh was sitting over a chessboard in a corner of the room, studying a position in game 2 several moves after the bishop sacrifice. If in the next weeks analysis showed that the position held saving moves for Karpov, then the great win would be tarnished, as Seirawan had predicted. Josh moved the pieces in a variation that Karpov might have tried. Kasparov’s neck craned toward the position. Soon they were both sitting at the board, pointing at squares.

  “Don’t you think it’s still winning?” he asked Josh.

  “Well, what would you play if he had gone here and here?” Josh asked, pointing. They analyzed for about twenty minutes, mostly without talking or moving the pieces, shrugging, smiling, pointing, nodding. Kasparov was neither patronizing nor overpowering, as he might have been if he had been looking at this same position with a grandmaster.

  “Well, the position is completely winning,” Garry said.

  “Well, it’s almost winning,” Josh answered.

  “Practically winning,” Garry offered as a compromise.

  Then, as we were about to walk out the door, Klara called from the little kitchen that we must wait a few minutes, she was preparing the snack. Garry was now more than ready to leave, striding in place. There wouldn’t be enough time for the walk he had looked forward to. There was a television interview to do after lunch. Then he had to study. But Klara also listened to inner voices and believed that the little perfect moments added up. She knew that the walk wouldn’t be entirely successful without the snack. If he didn’t eat, she would fret about the afternoon’s study, everything would be thrown off. “Ma, Ma!” he called in the direction of the kitchen, impatiently. These two intuitive heavyweights were temporarily out of synch. When she was ready, Klara came into the room with a bag full of cut-up apples and bananas for me to carry. Garry was supposed to eat them while walking around Central Park at his blistering pace.

  In game 3, Kasparov again played the King’s Indian defense with black. Lately, the King’s Indian had been taking a pasting from players current with opening theory, but it was Kasparov who created the cutting edge of theory. With his penchant for complications and his desire to win with black, it was a reasonable choice. Then, on the tenth move, Kasparov sacrificed his rook for Karpov’s dark square bishop and a pawn, a
speculative sacrifice at the beginning of the game. Karpov was forced to think about it, while trying to shut out the loud rustling and whispering of the audience. Whenever Kasparov played, there was the anticipation of something unusual and the expectation of greatness. Audience excitement after a dramatic move is a tangible advantage for the world champion, a pressure the opposing grandmaster feels on top of the pressure of Kasparov’s advancing pieces. Kasparov’s expression was brutal: I am coming for your throat, Tolya; I have prepared another new idea for you; remember what I did in the last game? The whispering of fans was so loud that the arbiter had to make repeated calls for silence.

  A grandmaster normally fights for hours to gain equality for the black side, but Kasparov had thumbed his nose at the notion and given away material at the beginning for positional considerations. Perhaps more importantly, his exchange sacrifice (the sacrifice of a rook for a minor piece) had layered a clear and much-analyzed position with crags and crannies of complexity, creating a position very difficult to evaluate. Either man could easily lose his way. The player with greater material, Karpov in this case, knew that there might be a crippling response to Kasparov’s ploy. If he could find it, during the limited time he had to look (in the first time control, each player had two and a half hours for the first forty moves), then he was likely to win. This was Kasparov’s simple but audacious challenge: Can you see as much as I can, Tolya?

  At the start of play, minor pieces—bishops and knights—are considered to be worth about three pawns each, and rooks, five pawns. Had there been no positional consideration to Kasparov’s sacrifice, he would have come out of the exchange the equivalent of a pawn down, a losing hand. Now, however, Kasparov had a strong hold on the center of the board with his pieces and central pawn. He had both his bishops, which are often more powerful together than a bishop and knight, or two knights. His dark square bishop also had the potential of becoming a super piece, since it could roam the dark squares freely with no Karpov bishop left to oppose it. Were these considerations worth the sacrifice of material?

  While the question was being debated by Karpov, and by the chess masters on three floors of the Macklowe complex, Kasparov stunned the house yet again. He offered Karpov a queen sacrifice for Karpov’s rook and knight. While Karpov tried to decide whether or not to take her, the arbiter called again and again for silence. A speculative queen sacrifice, unlike most deeply conceived and artistic chess moves, is accessible even to beginners. For even if you cannot calculate the variations, or fully understand the rationale, you cannot miss the queen en prise. Karpov considered whether or not to take the queen for the next twenty minutes.

  “I am not sure that I could evaluate this position precisely if I had two months,” said one grandmaster. “Kasparov doesn’t have anything. He is going to lose,” said another.

  I sat alongside Masha and Klara in the front of the theater. I asked Masha, “What do you think?” and Garry’s mother flinched at the sound of my voice. Masha scanned her husband for some telltale sign. Garry sat like a Buddha, focused inward, no movement, except every few minutes he stole a glance at Karpov’s nodding face.

  “I think it’s okay,” she said. Klara’s face was pained and she never said a word. Each night she sat like this, not speaking, suffering, like the mother in John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea staring out at the black, stormy Atlantic waiting for her sailor son to return. Klara would not smile during the games or say hello or good evening. Part of it was worry, and another part her belief that her own distraction or happiness or anticipation of the win would curse her son’s effort. Klara believed that if her focus was pure, Garry would never let down his guard; that his success to some extent hinged upon the purity of her vigil. But this was hard on Masha, who was new to Garry’s chess life and was a very different kind of personality. She could not match Klara’s intensity, and she sometimes looked a little lost sitting beside her emotional mother-in-law, as if she weren’t holding up her end. One could imagine her trying to reconcile her love for Garry with the strain of these games she could not begin to understand, her quick mind wandering illicitly to questions of her own life, what great novel she might be translating in Moscow had she not given herself to traveling around the world with Garry, worrying over the details of his day, wondering how the baby they wanted so much would change the shape of their lives together. Would she still be able to travel with him to tournaments? Would he play better or worse without her? Would Garry find time to spend with the baby? And how wonderful Garry would be later that night if he won. He would tell jokes and laugh through dinner. He would chase her around the big dining room table and gather her up in his arms. She would giggle while he kissed her. He must win. She could not bear to think of how gloomy and tense the night would be if he lost.

  She clenched her fists tight and rooted, Garry’s best fan, while Klara sat at her elbow radiating her powerful, even censorial suffering. Masha’s vulnerability and lack of pretense was a moving statement in its own right. This was her first world championship with Garry, and in her understated way she was making a place for herself on the Kasparov team, bringing aboard optimism and a schoolgirl’s smile suggesting the chance that even while Garry faced off against Darth Vader Karpov, there was life besides chess, an idea that Klara might have considered heresy. Josh, who was again with Bruce Pandolfini in the broadcast booth, was very excited about Garry’s queen sacrifice. When he walked past us on a break, he gave Masha the thumbs-up sign, and she signaled back and smiled.

  The game had become an extended dare: Come fly with me if you are not afraid. “I was inviting him to play in a new territory,” said Garry. Taking the queen offered by the world champion was a macho move. You knew that if he offered her, there must be some good reason to decline. But how could a former world champion refuse Kasparov’s queen when he had been dared to take her? Karpov nodded as he calculated variations, his sallow face perspiring and taut.

  He took the queen.

  And now, the situation was nearly impossible to evaluate. When the exchanges were complete, Karpov was up the material equivalent of two pawns, but Black’s pieces were more dynamic. The second sacrifice had made a confused situation absolutely chaotic. Pieces were not where grandmasters expected them to be, and therefore their material value seemed liquid and uncertain. “It was like we were playing without the board,” said Kasparov. “We were making moves in open space. When you are playing in the air, the normal material values don’t work. How should one compare the value of his queen relative to the position I had? I don’t know. I was puzzled.” Kasparov rested a moment, his nose nuzzling the soft black hair above his wrist and on the back of his hand. It was a self-comforting habit of his, not unlike a child twisting his fingers in a curl. Klara couldn’t bear to look at the position, and held her face in her hands.

  In addition to imposing complexity, the world champion had introduced the atmosphere of immediate and deadly risk. It was as if his sacrifices had catapulted both of them onto a high wire. A small inaccuracy and one of them would fall. “It takes great energy to play this way,” he said. “Because any mistake could be your last mistake.”

  During the next few moves, while Kasparov’s kingside pawns edged forward, Karpov played passively, as though trying to catch his breath. He had a long-term positional idea, a reorganization of forces that would eventually lead to some counterplay, but Black was coming much too quickly. In his lazy plan, Karpov had hemmed in his light square bishop with one of his own pawns, and retreated his knight onto the back rank, where it blocked the path of his remaining rook. “It looks as though Karpov is being driven into the sea,” observed Pandolfini on the earphones. Suddenly Kasparov’s smaller black army was moving in for the kill. “After the queen sacrifice, I had some quality in return for his greater material,” said Kasparov, “but then [his passive moves] gave me some time. I could almost kill him in his camp. He was surrounded, no space, no air.”

  In this position, Karpov’s mighty que
en had become withered, virtually without power, with no place to go, and further, she was stepping on toes, restricting the mobility of Karpov’s other pieces. Nearly all the squares to which she might travel were defended by Kasparov’s active minor pieces. She was suffocating, in danger of being lost altogether, unless Karpov could find some clever defense. Karpov’s game seemed to be in shambles. In order to salvage something, he sacrificed the queen for a rook and a knight. The resulting endgame position was hugely in Kasparov’s favor. His two bishops were overpowering and his advancing pawns dominated the king-side, cutting off Karpov’s play. Kasparov had all but delivered his promised blitzkrieg. If he won this second game in a row, the match might well be over before it began, as he had predicted on Martha’s Vineyard.