Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  As the night went on, Garry looked at his poor play from many angles. He tried to be analytic, but his reason was shaded by self-reproach. He was trying to-spit out a part of himself. “From the start of the match, I didn’t have enough energy, and then every game has been a big fight, with me pushing the attack, Karpov trying to hold. The sixth game was very bad for me. A bad sign. Since 1984, I’ve had this rule to seal on the forty-first move. Seal the move, Garry. Think about it for five or ten minutes, and seal. I’m sure I would have found the winning move. It wasn’t so difficult. . . . Yesterday, the instant I took my hand off the queen, I wanted to resign, but then I went back to my room off-stage and said to myself, okay, let’s see what he plays. There were three ways to win and Karpov didn’t find any of them. With the move Karpov played, he gave me a great chance to save the game. He was still better, much better, but maybe I could draw. But then I made a second blunder. Two blunders in one game. Unbelievable. I had already resigned in my soul. A mental block. Unbelievable. . . .

  “Five years ago I had this impression: To beat Karpov was like lifting a world record weight.” Garry grunted with the effort of hefting six hundred pounds. “In this match I’m still thinking this way, but it doesn’t make any sense. At this point in our careers, I am a much better player than Karpov. I think this is obvious. He is no longer a world record weight for me. Just do it easy. Relax, Garry. Don’t be so tense. But I can’t do it. Why can’t I do it? For me this is so unpleasant, this contradiction. You see, Karpov didn’t deserve to win. I did it to myself. Anyone with two eyes can see that. All these mistakes. I’ve given him a chance . . . It’s a good lesson. I deserved to lose. The anger is only against myself. I lost it. I made the mistakes.”

  We turned on the television and watched a horror movie, and afterwards we talked about Gorbachev and the likely possibility of war in the Middle East, but the conversation looped back to losing. The way he saw it, the central problem in the match wasn’t Karpov, but himself. He had to understand Kasparov better to beat Karpov. “I believe that before you can judge the value of a policy, you have to understand the objectives,” he said. “What is the American administration trying to accomplish in the Middle East? What is the goal? Have two hundred thousand American boys been shipped to Saudi Arabia to protect American interests? To create a free oil market? Or to remove Saddam Hussein and destroy Iraqi forces? Now it seems to me that nobody knows what the goal is, including Mr. Bush. In the newspaper, I read that Senator Dole says, ‘We’re fighting for oil’ Then it’s Mr. Bush, ‘No, we’re fighting for democracy.’ Nobody in the world knows exactly what America is trying to achieve. Maybe the same thing is wrong in this fifth match against Karpov. Coming into this, it was important for me to demonstrate the art of chess, but somehow in doing that I have lost my way, I’ve neglected to win games where I’ve had an advantage. In game three, for example, when I sacrificed the queen with a great position, I was feeling the greatness of the game, and said to myself, ‘I’ve got it.’ But I didn’t have it yet. The same thing happened again in game six. Okay, I’ve played a great game, but not yet. Seal the move, Garry.

  “In the beginning of the match, I was so pleased with the high quality of the games that I forgot that the art should serve the match. At the heart of this, I suppose, is the conflict between the artist and the sportsman. But for sure, art is not the sufficient goal in a world championship. In the history books, brilliant wins and lucky wins look the same. The second game was a masterpiece and the seventh game was a game of blunders, but in the history books they are scored one win for Kasparov and one win for Karpov. From this point, I have to remember that my goal is to win the match. I have to win the match.”

  * * *

  But Garry’s resolution and lengthy soul-searching that weekend was less than effective. Game 8 reproduced the frustrations of game 6. Kasparov built up a massive attack and then allowed it to slip away. He seemed to lose his mettle at the critical moment. When he needed a few bold moves to put Karpov away, he lost heart and played safely. But even while his attack was formidable, he appeared restrained in front of his pieces, his body heavy and plodding. There was no intimidating glare, no contesting of the space above the board. As usual, Karpov was in time trouble. As he sweated and quivered from strain, he found the best moves, and it was Kasparov who lost his cool and blundered a pawn.

  “The young Kasparov would have won this game easily,” he said to me afterwards. “Any Kasparov would have won.” Garry had become an insecure player, second-guessing himself at the critical moments. He was playing without flow. He should have lost this game. During the adjournment session, Kasparov was unshaven and his clothes were rumpled. He looked beaten. In his heart, he felt beaten. Somehow he managed a staunch defense and drew after eighty-four moves.

  We continued to meet regularly. Garry would often refer to the young Kasparov, as though he were a missing person. There were few smiles, no banter. One evening, Masha said to me that the hair of her twenty-seven-year-old husband was becoming gray before her eyes. There was a predictable arc to our meetings. For an hour or so, Garry would talk about his bad play and wonder what was wrong. He complained of having no energy. Garry had been in the best physical condition of his life eight weeks before on Martha’s Vineyard, but now his body had gone flaccid. He rarely left the hotel, except to play Karpov. I suggested that he needed physical exercise, at the least to begin walking. But he cringed at the thought. The city seemed a fearful place under these circumstances. On one or two occasions, I coaxed him to take a late-night walk and his gait was slow and stiff. He smirked, as if to say, look how I am walking.

  I would try to reassure him. Once I said to him, “Try not to worry so much about winning. Worry has become your enemy. Just play the games. Try to enjoy the games a little. The winning will come if you can loosen up.” I had said similar words to Josh at times when his game had gone sour. “I’m sure things will turn around,” I said to Garry.

  “I hope so,” he answered in his littlest voice.

  As the New York half of the match drew near the end, it became clear to me that Kasparov’s depression had more to it than his poor play. At the end of each visit, he wanted to talk about events in the Soviet Union. He was thinking more about Soviet politics than he had during the first weeks of the match. He spoke with sadness about the miners’ strike in his country, and with anger about Gorbachev’s recent demands for increased power and the decision to send Yergeny Primakov to the Middle East as a special envoy to head off a U.S. war against Iraq. Kasparov considered the “special envoy” a publicity stunt to demonstrate to the Soviet people that Gorbachev was still a formidable world leader more or less in step with George Bush. “I wonder if George Bush knows where Mr. Primakov was last January,” said Garry. “He was in Baku for ten days during the genocide of Armenians. He is responsible for mass killings. He had Soviet troops standing by, but he did absolutely nothing to stop the killing. Then he conducted the invasion of the city with these troops on January twelfth, when the city was absolutely empty. Primakov has great experience for the Middle East; he knows how to send Muslims to kill Christians.”

  After the games Armenian-Americans would pass pieces of paper and books on stage for Garry’s autograph. One of the books was a lengthy and gruesome account of the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait. Kasparov read this litany of murder and rape and often talked about it. He asked all of his friends to read the book. Garry’s chess variations had become reinfected with memories of the loss of his home, and with worry about missing friends and members of his family. At the time, he had still not told me the details of his last weeks in Baku, but he remarked that he would never be able to return to see the grave of his father. Increasingly, Garry felt leaden. He complained frequently about having no energy, and on stage he appeared listless. He also complained that the ceilings in the hotel were too low and that the air was foul and that the city was too noisy. He felt trapped, and yearned for clean air and space. We talked about
depression, and putting a name on how he felt was somewhat reassuring. It suggested an end to it somewhere ahead. I described the aftermath of a boating accident several years before, when Josh and I had nearly been killed. For more than a year afterwards, I told him, everything seemed gloomy, life had no purpose and I often felt fearful. “It passes,” I said, and he nodded.

  On the day before the eighth game, Kasparov had received a phone call from an Armenian advocate, a lawyer. The man said that an old Armenian lady, a distant relative of Garry’s who lived in New York, wanted to come to the Regency Hotel to visit. “I was willing to break my training routine to meet her,” he said, “because as a child I had heard wonderful stories of her rich and prosperous life in the States.” While he told me the story of this woman and her family, he became very emotional.

  “When she was a girl, she lived in Azerbaijan in an area which was decimated by the revolution. In 1918 and 1920, there had been horrible slaughters of Armenians, a million people had died, and the surviving Armenian population lived in terror. In 1921, the Nagorno-Karabakh region, with a predominantly Armenian population, was forcibly made a part of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. This was another big wound to the Armenians living there. Like everyone else, this woman, then in her twenties, had lost members of her family and was desperate to leave, to find a place to begin a normal life. Somehow she managed to save a little money and emigrated to the United States in 1922.

  “The rest of her family stayed behind and their lives were difficult, at best. She had two brothers. In 1937, her oldest brother, who was the father of four children, was branded an enemy of the people and sent to a labor camp. He committed suicide there. The younger brother came to live with his dead brother’s children, three boys and a girl. The youngest of the boys eventually married my mother’s sister, and I’ve heard about the trials of this family mainly from him and from my aunt. Anyhow, the surviving brother struggled to support them as a builder. His niece, the oldest of the children, had been born in 1922, the same year her aunt left for the States. She also worked hard to help the family. In Baku, this girl became one of the best teachers of English. She made her money preparing students and doing some translating. I took some lessons from her when I was a boy.

  “It is a typical story for this time in Azerbaijan. Survival was a struggle. The family had little money. The uncle and his brother’s eldest daughter worked to help the three younger children get an education. During Khrushchev’s time, the dead brother’s reputation was cleared—he was ‘rehabilitated,’ that was the term they used. There were government decrees, with lists of people who were no longer considered enemies of the people. Little good it did.

  “This family had more than its share of problems. The surviving brother had a daughter, and when she was grown and married, she gave birth to an abnormal child, Down’s syndrome. Soon after, this woman died of cancer and her husband abandoned the family. The support and care for this Down’s baby passed to her father, an old man now, and the rest of the family. Meanwhile, the daughter of the dead brother lost her husband. She was also getting old now. Okay, what I am describing here is not a tragedy. In all families, people get sick and grow old. But this family wasn’t very successful. None of them. They grew old with less than their measure of happiness.

  “But during these troubled years, this family often thought of the lady, a member of their family, after all, who had escaped this misery to live in the United States. Several times she had visited and brought presents, and because she lived in America, they concluded that she was very wealthy, that she must live in a wonderful mansion and drive a large shiny car. In their minds, over the decades, their missing aunt became the American dream. The splendor of her life grew to fairy-tale proportions. Thinking about her made them happy. One of us has done well. As a boy I heard about the good fortune of this woman, but in truth I didn’t think much about it.

  “In 1988, in response to the Armenian demand that the Nagorno-Karabakh be reunited with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, things became bad for Armenians living in Sumgait. For this poor family, and for other Armenians, history was repeating itself. There was a big campaign to move all Armenian people out of Baku, too. All Armenian people lost their jobs. My mother’s sister, a dentist, lost her job at the end of 1989. It didn’t matter that she was my aunt.

  “The Armenian population of Baku lived in terror. People could feel that horrors were coming. Everyone understood that you should leave as soon as possible, but it is difficult to pack up and leave your home.

  “In 1990, the central government orchestrated the pogroms against Armenians living in Baku. My people, Armenians, were raped, tortured and killed.

  “Those of the old lady’s family who survived were very badly off. Her brother and his niece were very old now and they had no money. They were jobless, homeless. They had to emigrate to Yerevan, Armenia. They were lost there in an ocean of refugees, two hundred thousand Armenian refugees. It was just after the earthquake and the entire population was suffering. They were old people, ripped out of their lives.

  “Not knowing what else to do, these people wrote their wealthy relative in America: Can you help us?

  “When my mother and I heard that this old rich lady was coming to visit, it made us very happy. Probably she would bring money to send back to her poor relatives in Armenia.

  “She arrived at the Regency Hotel with the lawyer who takes care of her family. I interrupted my preparations to meet her. When I came into the room, I was very surprised. This very frail old woman wore the clothing of a poor person. She cried and cried. She said that she had heard that her family was miserable. She wept for her brother with no place to live, who tried to care for this abnormal child. She said that this tragedy was the fault of the communist system, an evil which had forced her to emigrate nearly seventy years before.

  “Finally, her lawyer explained that the woman had brought money to be distributed among members of the family. I said that I would make sure that the people received it. I was handed a thick envelope. Inside was seven thousand dollars. ‘This is her life savings,’ said the lawyer. For a moment, I was speechless. “Her life savings?” For all of these years, I had heard about this wealthy relative living in America. The bills in the envelope were tens and twenties, old bills. She had been collecting them for decades, maybe hiding them in a box under her mattress. Seven thousand dollars in seventy years.

  “‘We cannot take this,’” I said, intending to send money to her relatives myself.

  “‘I have to give it to them,’” the woman insisted.

  “I asked the lawyer to leave the room with me for a few minutes. I asked if the woman had any other means of support and he answered that she had a pension. ‘She believes that her life savings must be distributed to her relatives suffering in the Soviet Union’ he said, describing a sacred duty. I had a quick word with my mother, who said, ‘You know, it’s holy money. You cannot reject it. It is a last will. It must be heeded.’

  “The woman wanted the money divided among her surviving relatives, but the major share would go to her homeless brother so that he might be able to buy a little house. A place to live quietly and die quietly. I said to her, “Then send all the money to him, and let me look after the others.” But no, it was important to her to send a little to each of them.

  “This is a story that for me demonstrates the wheel of history. The Armenian lady emigrated to save herself from communism. And now she had to use her life savings to help her relatives after the tragedy organized by the communists once again. It is a tragedy of the Armenian nation and a tragedy of the human mind warped by communism. These poor people from my homeland have lost their sense of the world. I don’t think this old lady tried to mislead her relatives in Azerbaijan by pretending to be wealthy. Her relatives had this impression because of the poverty of their own lives and their distorted image of the West. They don’t know what it means to be rich, what it means to be poor. Today they are h
omeless, jobless and must accept aid from a poor lady in New York. But a last irony in the story is that the four thousand dollars she sent to her brother in Armenia will be enough to make a big impact. It will be enough to buy a house. A final resting place.”

  In early November, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev’s popularity was at a low ebb in the Soviet Union. There were serious meat and bread shortages in Moscow. Gorbachev had been jeered by the military as well as the liberal press, and Moscow intellectuals were calling for his resignation. All over the Soviet Union, regions were asking for more autonomy, and from his home in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn belittled Gorbachev’s reforms and called for the dismantling of the Union. But in Washington, George Bush continued to offer the Soviet leader unflinching support and his highest praise. He applauded Gorbachev’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.

  “In the Soviet Union, the response to Gorbachev’s winning the Nobel prize is very bad,” said Kasparov one evening over dinner. “He is hated in my country. People demonstrate against the inhumanity of his policies. For example, a large protest was held recently by the Committee of the Soldiers’ Mothers to protest the death of boys in Afghanistan and of many thousands who died because of the feudal structure of the Red Army. The mothers of tens of thousands of dead soldiers consider it a mockery that Gorbachev won the Nobel prize.”

  Garry was reading all the political news from home that he could get his hands on. He was placing daily calls to Moscow. “You cannot isolate yourself from current events,” he said. “How can I not be affected by events in the Soviet Union? I have relatives. I receive phone calls and I know how bad it is.” He and I were talking much more about Soviet affairs than about the match. The political turmoil and crumbling economy at home provided something of an escape from the grim chess life in New York, but it did little to help his game. Kasparov again played badly in game 9, and would have lost if not for a huge blunder by Karpov. Game 9 was a draw. In the tenth game, playing with the white pieces, Garry had no stomach for the fight. He offered a draw on the eighteenth move, which was highly unusual for him, and Karpov accepted. Andrew Page, who had dashed back to England for the day, said over the phone, “Garry’s playing these games like he doesn’t want to win.” Andrew decided that Garry just wanted to be finished with the match, to get on with the next phase of his life. I took this to mean a career in politics.