Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  I returned to my seat in the theater beside Masha. “What do you think of the position?” I asked her. “Maybe it’s a draw,” she said, fearing that it might be worse and hoping that I would contradict her.

  Klara’s countenance was unchanged from two and a half hours before. She looked off to the side through eyes that were glazed and distant. While Garry played, his mother experienced their doom. The loss of the game. The loss of the world championship. Her eyes were unfocused, like someone in a trance.

  I felt compelled to break through the black cloud. “Everyone in the pressroom thinks that Garry is winning,” I whispered to Masha.

  “Really,” she answered, terrifically surprised but at the same time trying not to betray any emotion to Klara. It was not suitable to appear happy next to a mother who was holding a tragic vigil. But from being a chess parent myself, I suspected that Klara was also playing a tricky high-stakes game. If she suffered the loss powerfully enough, maybe the gods would take pity. She had already endured so much pain of losing. Garry had no more energy to go on. They were both so needy. If she could convey this convincingly . . .

  On some level, Klara’s pain played a role in the game that was going on a dozen yards away. Garry has said that he is aware of his mother’s suffering while he plays and that her involvement is necessary. “We are connected,” he says. “One unit.” She concurs. “Every move he makes is a piece of my life.” They both feel that her suffering will enhance his power to win. But in the fifth hour of game 18, her anguish was starkly in counterpoint to what was happening on the chessboard. After thinking for an hour, Karpov had made a mistake declining Kasparov’s pawn sacrifice. He had hoped to maintain something of an attack, but his evaluation of the position was faulty. After Garry had deftly blocked all of Karpov’s play, he was up a pawn and going after another. Kasparov held a big advantage. He kept improving the placement of his pieces. He chased Karpov’s queen off a key central square and was preparing to push his passed pawn. He was playing wonderful chess. Garry looked toward our section in the audience and seemed to be sending a message. “Ma, Ma, will you look, I am winning.”

  It was a message that Klara did not want to hear. Garry turned our way three or four times, but she refused to meet his glance. Her face was averted to the side, as though to say, he has been winning many times in this match, and then he didn’t win.

  Garry was sobered. There were still obstacles. He needed to keep pushing Karpov’s pieces back, to restrict their movement. He planned to trade into an endgame, but first he wanted to increase his advantage. Advantages have a way of disappearing in the endgame against Karpov. Perhaps Garry reminded himself, I am winning but I have not yet won. I had winning positions in games 3 and 6, but I didn’t win.

  The big screen above the players showed a close-up of Masha. In the soft focus she looked like a tragic heroine. The moment the camera switched to Karpov, she giggled. Masha’s youthfulness and delight bubbled all around the edges of Klara.

  On the thirty-sixth move, Garry brought his rook to the seventh rank. Bruce Pandolfini calls a rook on the seventh “a pig.” The rook is a beast there, living in the enemy camp where it can feed on the opposing pawns. On the following move, Garry’s knight jumped to a strong central square, and every amateur in the theater could see that he was completely dominating Karpov.

  Karpov was pushing himself to the limit to defend. His lips quivered while he calculated variations, all losing. Every ten or fifteen seconds, he took little glances at Kasparov. The glances were like a nervous tic and Kasparov never looked up. He was riveted on the position. The silence in the theater was intense. Coughs sounded like little explosions. Karpov couldn’t find a way to squirm out of this one. He had started this game looking like a king and now the reality of losing was seeping into him. Karpov touched his forehead with a trembling forefinger. Losing game 18, probably losing the match. He was nearly forty years old now. Maybe he would never fully recover after losing this match that he had had every opportunity to win. His cheeks looked bloated. His glances at Garry were pathetic. What will you do to me next? Like a fish squirming on the deck. What will you do to me next? Kasparov wore his cold killer face. He loomed over Karpov, calculating the most efficient method to finish him. On the forty-first move, after taking his time to think, Kasparov walked briskly off the stage as though he had an appointment. He went to seal his move, without having to worry that the camera might record what he had written. Then he came back on stage to calculate one more time, to double-check.

  The following afternoon, when play resumed, Kasparov played swiftly and without error. He simplified into a rook and pawn endgame, which he won with economy and perfect technique.

  The next evening, when I arrived at 17 Boulevard des Bêlges the snow was falling hard with four or five inches already on the ground. Before I had taken off my overcoat in the hall, Garry and Masha came through the heavy front door behind me, covered with white flakes, stomping their new fleece-lined boots. They had been walking and were fresh and happy from the new snow, deciding which movie they would go to see tomorrow afternoon. They hugged and kissed in the hallway. There were ski resorts nearby, and Masha said how wonderful it would be to go on vacation. Garry was always so busy. They had never been on a vacation together. They made an unspoken pledge to do it. Arm in arm, they walked to the living room, where Garry glanced for several minutes at CNN. They were still holding hands, but she knew that she was losing him. He had been away from chess for the entire afternoon. The muscles in Garry’s face began to tighten. Karpov is always dangerous after he loses. He called sharply for Gurevich and Dolmatov, who were upstairs, and within a few minutes the three of them were in a foyer off the enormous living room, analyzing a variation in the King’s Indian defense.

  Garry had to decide what he would play on Wednesday with the black pieces against Karpov. The last three games had been wins. Karpov and Kasparov were passing the pressure back and forth with each game, and the pattern of wins now seemed as imposing as had been the long streak of draws. It was crucial to break the pattern. If Karpov won this next one, they would be even once more and it would be Kasparov’s turn to sweat it out. For the next game, Garry was inclined toward a variation which sacrificed an exchange for some initiative. He had played this in game 11. Both trainers thought it was too risky. Gurevich argued his point of view strongly in his deep, dramatic voice, moving his knight ahead, tapping it onto the square with the end of his forefinger to emphasize the problem with Kasparov’s setup. Kasparov, who was sitting on an edge of his chair, smirked at the move and threatened the knight, banging his pawn down as if it were a nail. They continued this way through the lengthy variation, with Gurevich tapping his pieces into place and Kasparov answering almost immediately with a move, followed by a resounding bang that echoed through the mansion.

  Masha and I were in the living room, glancing at CNN while we talked. “I never dreamed that I would fall in love with a chess player,” she said. “Because they are very reserved people, very diplomatic, but Garry wasn’t like that. From the beginning I was struck by how open he was to all fields. We never discussed chess. We talked about literature and the feeling of life or politics. When he read a novel, his appreciation of the characters and of the author’s theme was always unusual, something I didn’t understand or hadn’t looked for.

  “But then it seemed very scary to be in love with the world champion. Because there is so much hysteria about chess in the Soviet Union. He was hugely popular. So many girls wanted to be in love with him. I wondered, how will I cope with it? And then, when we were first married, there were difficulties. Now I know that chess is his obsession and I know when to be in the background. There are times when I should go away, but at first I didn’t know these things. I was newly married and in love and I thought that I should be in first place. It should be me and nothing else. At first, I felt hurt that there is chess and chess, and then Garry is a very social person; it was not only me. Garry belongs to th
e whole world and this was very hard to accept.”

  Play solid, was the message of Garry’s two trainers. If you draw the rest of your games you win the match. But each time they tried to exploit their material advantage against his more speculative variation, he improved his position. Inch by inch, his guys came ahead. “The difference between us is that Gurevich thinks that there is a good practical way to play,” said Garry. “He sometimes says to me, ‘Come on, Garry, you’re playing against human beings.’ But I want to find the best, best, best. I’m looking for the best move. I’m not playing against Karpov, I’m playing against God.” On each move Gurevich tapped his piece with his forefinger, a pleasing grace note, and Garry secured his own with a resounding rap. There seemed to be a tacit understanding that the trainers would not hammer their pieces into place as loudly as Kasparov.

  “For the first months of our marriage, Garry’s moodiness was difficult for me,” continued Masha. “He can be very nice, attentive, affectionate, and then suddenly he is engrossed in his thoughts, or for some reason that I don’t know he becomes gloomy. I’ve learned that it does no good to say, ‘Garry, please don’t let it happen.’ You have to cope with it, wait. It is best to let him live through it. Then soon he will talk about what has been bothering him, share his feelings. At first it was distressing to see how absolutely changed he would become. Often it was a concrete problem, but sometimes not, and I began to realize it is his nature. Of course the worst time of all for him is if he loses a game. He is almost destroyed. It is a tragedy for him. You have to understand that for a person like Garry, to win is indispensable. If he loses, it is as if he loses part of himself. For this reason, I cannot even bear to consider his loss of the championship.

  “Everyone thinks, world champion’s wife, wealth, pink colors. There is another side to this. Now, when he is defending the title there is so much more pressure than in his normal life, and that life is many times more concentrated and tense than the normal life of most people. Many working couples come home every day and share domestic problems. But Garry is on the road a lot and often I cannot travel with him. Sometimes when I am with him, I have problems to discuss, but I feel that I cannot because I don’t want to upset him, he needs to be in good form for a tournament or some public event. I try to protect Garry, but, you know, our lives are always on the surface. Everybody talks about us and all facets of our lives are written about. Journalists want more and more. I am a reserved person and I don’t like it.”

  Garry’s bang was lordly. You could hear it distinctly in the kitchen where Klara supervised Kadzhar’s cooking. It pleased her. Klara was smiling, tasting the potato soup. The phone rang. It was Garry’s friend Viacheslav Fetisov, defenseman for the New Jersey Devils, calling from New York to congratulate Garry on game 18. Klara was gracious on the phone, but she didn’t want to disturb Garry’s study, and Slava’s jubilation also made her uneasy. “Not another word about congratulations,” she chided. Klara felt as though she finally had things in order. Garry was leading the match, but was not overinflated with confidence. At this point, congratulations was not the right message, and besides, it was bad luck. During the match, Garry for the most part seemed oblivious to his mother’s magical thinking. As he had grown older, he professed to believe less in superstitions than he had as a teenager, when lucky numbers and the use of parapsychologists were factors in his chess life. Now his attitude seemed to be: Who knows about these things? There is probably nothing to it, but what’s the harm in covering all the bases?

  After a few minutes, Klara came into the little room where the men were analyzing. Klara was not someone who blended into the wood-work. Her face suggested the direction of a powerful mind. She sat at the table and, resting her chin in her hands, began to analyze. This was one of the rare times during the match that I saw her enjoy the chess. She had wrung all the dread and suffering out of herself the night before. I was struck by how well she understood the game. She commented on Garry’s weak pawn structure. She pointed at squares, made quiet suggestions. The two trainers were cordial. She was the boss.

  In a nearby room, Alexander Shakarov scrolled through game after game on a computer screen. He was checking for King’s Indian variations similar to the one that Garry had been looking at with Gurevich and Dolmatov. During the period of time that I had been a regular in Garry’s homes on Martha’s Vineyard, in New York, and now at the mansion in Lyon, Shakarov was almost always to be found sitting in front of the computer, like the radar man on a warship scouring the screen for bogeys. If he missed a little trick that someone had played in Bulgaria in 1976, it could cost Garry a game, it could cost him the championship. Garry and Shakarov had met in 1972, when Shakarov had been coach of the Azerbaijan junior team. They had worked together regularly since 1977, and I think that for Shakarov, life apart from Garry held little meaning. Love and loyalty were written on his gray, stern face. In January, 1990, after Azeri thugs had broken into Shakarov’s apartment in Baku, Kasparov had managed to save his friend’s family by using his local connections with the KGB. Sometimes Shakarov traveled abroad with Garry to tournaments, doing double duty as trainer and bodyguard. He guarded Garry so fervently that his manner was offputting. I believed he would not hesitate to step in front of a bullet for Garry.

  As the men analyzed, Klara grew bolder in her assessments. The trainers responded seriously to each of her observations. She began to push Garry to play a move, looked to the two trainers for support, and finally Garry said with exasperation, “Ma, Ma,” and turned his palms over, what are you doing? You are the mother, we are the grandmasters. She smiled and left the table with a girlish pout.

  Again and again, Garry demonstrated that his understanding of the key positions was deeper than that of his trainers. His analysis was wicked, teasing. They could see to a distant point, but he would show them what lurked around the corner. “When I started working with Garry in 1985, for the first week, I couldn’t sleep nights,” said Mikhail Gurevich. “Every day he demonstrated feats of mind that were absolutely incredible.” But this type of work was not the most comforting for a world-class grandmaster with championship dreams of his own. Garry’s sneers must have made wounds. Great as they were, for months Gurevich and Dolmatov had been repeatedly forced to see that they were not in Kasparov’s league.

  “Thank God, Garry is not the president of the United States,” Gurevich needled during dinner. “He thinks the United States should just drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq.” Indeed, this was a somewhat simplified version of Garry’s position. He had serious doubts that George Bush would push hard enough in a conventional war to finish off Saddam Hussein, and worried that the dictator was likely to remain a threat to peace for years. On other nights there were spirited arguments about the morality of using the big bomb, but during this dinner, Garry chewed his food and didn’t comment. He wasn’t in the mood for talking politics.

  Kadzhar cooked his massive meat meals in the most unpredictable fashion. When I came here for dinner, there were always eight or ten at the table and he had prepared liver for one, beef for another, fish for me, chicken for Klara, rice for Garry, potatoes for Gurevich, and on and on. I asked Masha, “How does he know what to give to whom?” “It is part of Kadzhar’s magic,” she answered. We all ate Kadzhar’s meals as though fortunate to have good food during bad times. Heavy and overcooked, they had little in common with the dainty sculptured delights Kasparov was served at Paul Bocuse in Lyon or at the Four Seasons in New York, but he seemed to appreciate these meals more. He ate with a peasant’s relish, spearing more meat from the platter in front of him, reaching for a tomato or pickle and taking a big bite, not talking, chewing with ardor, his lower lip glazed with Kadzhar’s sauce of sour cream and dill.

  “Fred, did you see the championship crown?” he asked me after dinner, referring to the Korloff trophy, forged of bronze and gold and studded with more than a thousand diamonds. According to the organizer, it was worth a million dollars and would go to the winner, i
n addition to his share of the prize fund. “Don’t you think it’s ugly?”

  “You could sell it,” I said.

  “But wouldn’t that be immoral?” I went to answer but he didn’t care to talk more about it. On most evenings I found Garry to be less accessible here in Lyon than in New York. He no longer seemed wounded and was much less inclined toward introspection. In New York, he had been beleaguered by a running commentary within himself about the nature of his problems, he had been thinking himself into paralysis. In Lyon, something had given and he was insatiable for the game.

  After Kadzhar’s high-cholesterol dinner and a piece of chocolate cake, Garry challenged grandmaster Zurab Azmaiparashvili to play blitz. Garry asked me to sit beside him, so that I might experience the heat and danger of the fray, but in truth, my sense was not of a man engaged in mortal combat; rather, Kasparov effortlessly directed great stores of energy and power towards poor Zurab. White or black, Kasparov was always the aggressor. He played each of the opening fifteen or twenty moves instantly. He built up a strong center with his pawns and pieces, as though laying the cinderblock foundation of a house. His center crawled ahead. Inexorably, he took more space, infiltrated Zurab’s defense. He played without emotion, delicate fingers not so much making moves as releasing force. Zurab looked as though his neck were in a noose. Once or twice each game Garry paused for ten or fifteen seconds to calculate, and the energy of his attack spilled ahead as he pointed in rapid-fire fashion from square to square, there, there, there, there, until he freed his men to finish the rout. In each game, Zurab pulled back, trying to figure out how to save himself. His army on the run, Azmaiparashvili was a gun-shy general, sweat running down his face, running out of time, blundering soldiers, getting mated. “Come on,” Garry said impatiently, giving him a move back. He didn’t want blunders ruining the game. Then he grew bored. Not enough resistance.