Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Again, he read from the book. Then he spoke to Masha in Russian. I looked at him, and shrugged: What are you guys talking about? Garry took a deep breath. He was tired of translating for me, but he did. According to Garry, Bulgakov was the greatest of all Russian writers: Had I read Master and Margarita? I hadn’t. It was Garry’s opinion that this was the most important novel in the Russian language. Could I think of a similar example in American literature, a book that had influenced generations of writers? I mentioned Moby Dick, not quite able to recall from my college days exactly how Melville had changed the shape of American literature. Garry shook his head, no, he doubted that Moby Dick had been as influential as the Bulgakov novel. “Moby Dick was huge,” I quipped, stealing a line from my friend Steve Salinger’s novel, but wishing that I had been able to come up with a more crushing literary retort. Garry and I were peeved with one another. The match was too long. I was too much in his house. The unexpected days off would be a torture. Hoping for concordance, I mentioned that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were among my favorite writers, and Garry said that he had read them as a teenager and hadn’t liked them. He urged me to read Master and Margarita. How could he not like Tolstoy? I resolved not to read Master and Margarita.

  “Perhaps if you read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky when you are older, you will feel differently.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Some friends of Garry’s from Moscow dropped by, and he went with them into another room to talk. I began to think about leaving before the end of the match. For all practical purposes, the match was over. Garry would have to lose all three to lose the championship and I already had more than enough material for my book. I told Masha that I was thinking about going home early. There was a direct flight from Lyon that left at noon the following day. In order to go, I needed to talk to Garry for fifteen or twenty minutes about the past few games, for an article that he and I were coauthoring for the international weekly, The European. This change of plans made Masha uneasy, but I didn’t think too much of it. I had decided to go home for Christmas.

  Garry’s friends left after an hour, and he immediately went into the computer room and replaced Shakarov, who was pained to break off his search for dangerous variations, at the terminal. Garry called up a video game and began to play. After a few minutes, I walked over to him, and without looking up from the screen, he proposed that we should get together tomorrow, he was in a bad mood. I answered that I needed to speak with him for a few minutes this evening. “Go ahead, I’m listening,” he said, while punching the keys. Josh and I had played out this same scene many times in the past. “Go ahead, Dad, I’m listening.” I wanted to rip Garry’s hands off the keyboard. While he pushed the buttons and bobbed and weaved with his head, I explained that I wanted to return to New York tomorrow, but that we needed to talk tonight about the past few games for our article. “Can’t we speak about this tomorrow, Fred?” he said. Trying to remain calm, I explained that tomorrow was the only direct flight of the week from Lyon to New York and it left at twelve noon. If we didn’t work for twenty minutes tonight, I would have to take the train to Paris to get back to New York.

  “I’m not in a good mood now,” he repeated, while sneaking a look at his burgeoning score.

  “How about tomorrow morning at nine?” I asked, trying to calculate if I could still catch the plane.

  “You know that I don’t like to talk in the mornings. Why don’t you come about twelve and we’ll take a long walk and work afterwards.” Twelve! What was this about? Garry’s self-indulgence was maddening. He banged the keys, smiling like a video junkie. Was he paying me back for Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?

  I walked back to my hotel, kicking the pavement. I wasn’t going home for Christmas. On the phone from New York, my wife Bonnie reminded me that Garry was in the middle of playing for the world championship. Funny, but I had forgotten. I was stuck on the idea that he disliked Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and wouldn’t look up from the video game. Being friends with Kasparov, particularly when he was engaged in combat, was not an association involving two equals. During a world championship match or strong tournament, Garry catered to himself more or less exclusively, brought himself into form for each game with a regimen of chess study, stimulated by politics, literature, video games, friends, in just the dosages that felt correct. But even during more peaceful times, friends of Garry’s came to realize that in almost every interaction, choosing the moment to talk, walk or eat, Garry’s sense of timing prevailed. It was an unspoken covenant in all his relationships, except perhaps with Klara.

  During the past year, I had come to recognize that Garry was different things to different people, and that it stimulated him to try on different personae much as he renewed himself as a player by trying new variations in the opening. Despite Andrew Page’s criticisms of Garry’s fledgling business adventures, he remained hopeful about the potential of Garry as an entrepreneur. Andrew had staked his future on Garry’s success as a business mogul, and sometimes he must have bit his lip when Garry’s eye was elsewhere and he was not in the mood to discuss the latest deal. For Vladimir Bukovsky, the match was background noise while he and Kasparov conspired to overthrow the evil empire.

  For me, Garry revealed himself as the chess world champion who might have been a poet or novelist. Garry knew that I was most intrigued with his vulnerable side, and at times he risked showing me that part of himself. Perhaps it was my limitation, but I never entirely believed the public Kasparov, the haughty, disdainful, implacable warrior. Even while he mounted an attack against Karpov, his face hardened with resolve, I felt his vulnerability, how easily he could slip up and lose. As the father of a player, I have learned that while a fierce fighting face is reassuring to the player and to his father, and perhaps intimidating to his opponent, one false move and the best show of machismo goes to shame. While Garry played, I sometimes recalled him watching cartoons, searching for the little boy inside. I heard him wrestling with self-doubts. “Fred, I feel devastated . . . I feel empty.”

  But, while Garry fought Karpov, the little boy inside was perhaps an enemy. Their nine-hour games were a kind of death march, and to endure them was inconsistent with admitting to friends that he would feel better if they would remain in Lyon to the end, instead of going home for the holidays. I had forgotten too easily that there was hardly an hour during these past three months when the match did not nag and pull at him.

  By the next morning I was on a more even keel. Garry was upstairs when I arrived. I chatted with Mikhail Gurevich for twenty minutes. “The other day, in the twentieth game, Garry saw the final combination early in the middlegame,” he said. “He saw twenty moves ahead calculating deep and complicated variations. It was absolutely incredible.” During the last two weeks, as Garry had come into top form in his practice sessions, Gurevich had yielded ground. Instead of sharply debating the nuances of a position, Gurevich had nodded his head, yes, yes. It also seemed to me that he had argued less with Garry about politics over dinner.

  Gurevich spoke of the match reverentially, as he might describe it in thirty years to his grandchildren, the miracles that he had watched the great Kasparov perform. We talked a little about the Linares invitational in March, which would be the strongest group of grandmasters ever assembled in one tournament. Mikhail had been invited, and he was curious about the prodigy Gata Kamsky, who would also be playing. He wondered to what extent Gata’s incendiary father would be a factor in the games. For Gurevich and the rest of the Kasparov team, this match was already history, although there were three games to go. Like me, they were making their plans to go here and there, a vacation, a tournament. Within this atmosphere of people getting ready to leave, thinking about their own lives, Garry still had to play the last three games.

  Garry came down the stairs. He looked rested, happy. “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Much better than yesterday,” he answered, an acknowledgment that something less than wonderful had taken place the previous evening. A
fter chatting and looking around, sizing up the morning, he mentioned that his mother would be walking with us in the park. Soon they were both wearing new French walking boots trimmed in leather, fashionable here this winter, and Garry put on his brown English racing cap.

  As we clumped through the hard snow, Garry and his mother discussed the building feud between the GMA and FIDE over which of them would organize the candidates matches. They spoke in Russian, with Garry pausing after five or six sentences to translate for me. His manner was subdued and, I thought, hinted at contrition.

  Garry still wasn’t sure what he would do regarding the GMA. He maintained that chess professionals had become dependent on the personal largesse of Bessel Kok, instead of establishing viable working relationships with commercial sponsors. For professional chess to work in the long run, he said, it had to be a business, with the potential of turning profits, rather than the plaything of a rich man. Kasparov disagreed on key elements of international chess management with Kok, but perhaps more to the point, Garry had crossed a line with Bessel. Their own power struggle had eclipsed discrete issues. Garry no longer trusted Kok and didn’t see how they could continue to work together. Each time that Garry penned an article in a chess magazine explaining his position relative to the GMA and Kok, a dozen new articles came out attacking him, a deluge of criticism. For years he had been the popular boy on the block, and now it had become chic for grandmasters to call him a bully. Even Garry’s old friends were speaking out against him, mostly relative to his decision to leave the GMA. His childhood friend grandmaster Lev Psakhis said that Garry’s character had changed for the worst, that he had lost his way trying to live too many lives at once. Boris Gulko wished that Kasparov would devote himself more exclusively to chess.

  This criticism was upsetting but it also cut both ways. Garry’s horizons were different than they had been a few years before. More and more, Garry found that keeping company with other GMs was boring, limiting. But what to do about the GMA? Some of Garry’s advisors were suggesting that he should enter into an arrangement with Ted Field to create a new independent organization for professional chess management, which would effectively take the world championship away from both FIDE and the GMA. Field had apparently indicated a willingness to support his plan, though it would split the chess world into warring factions overnight, and would probably result in each of several organizations claiming its own world champion. For the time being, Garry was inclined to do nothing, to stay on the sidelines and watch. The weariness on his face said that he had no heart for this particular war.

  After forty-five minutes, we came to a lovely little zoo buried in snow. “Do you see the big lion?” Garry asked, his face suddenly spread into a smile. I had to look for a time before I saw the animal sitting on a snowy rock. Klara was ecstatic. She grabbed Garry’s arm, said something in Russian, giggled. They had often come here together, and their happiness was so large and private that it felt odd to be with them. Klara gave pieces of apple to Garry to eat and then some to me, and when I tried to refuse, she said, “No, no, no.” There was no choice. On the walk we must eat apples. Garry called Klara “Ma, Ma,” so lovingly, and she chided him, “Garry, eat, eat.”

  We came to an empty pen, and Garry banged on the bars. He banged and banged. “Don’t worry, he will come.” Garry would have banged for an hour. This was important. After five minutes, a huge beast came lumbering out of a shed, a water buffalo with enormous thick horns. “I come to see him every day,” said Garry, grabbing one of the horns and holding it firmly. Apparently, the beast was used to rough treatment from the world champion. When he let go, the huge animal licked Garry’s hand and wrist with its thick tongue, and Garry fed him banana peels and apple cores. Then Garry wanted me to see the ducks. He knew each of them individually. “You must see this one,” Garry said, pulling me along the lake. “Look at the intricate colors, as though it were made of porcelain. Look at the one over there. It is the creation of an impressionist artist, not a real duck.” Garry laughed and laughed. “Look at its eyes. They’re not real.”

  In half an hour we were back at the house, and Garry was on his way upstairs for his nap. “Will you stay for lunch?” he asked quietly. When I said that I would, he looked pleased. He is a most complicated man, and one must know the rules to be his friend. Garry would sleep, and I would read a magazine and watch CNN. In time, he would come back down the stairs and we would enjoy a big meal. For the past few weeks, he had been promising to tell me a story about his father. Perhaps it would be this afternoon.

  Five days later, Kasparov began game 22 knowing that a draw would secure the world championship. But on move eleven, Karpov presented Kasparov with a choice, a variation leading either to a sure draw or to a murky game in which both sides had winning chances. Kasparov chose the latter. Later, it came out that Karpov’s preparation had taken into account the likelihood that the world champion would almost certainly choose not to embarrass himself by clinching the title with a cheap draw.

  In the ensuing middlegame position, Kasparov was once again forced to play the role of counterpuncher, adopting Karpov’s style, while it was Karpov who tried to demonstrate that less was sometimes better than more: Garry was up a pawn, but he was forced to weight his material advantage against Karpov’s dangerous piece activity. Toward the end, when Kasparov’s position began to deteriorate, he once again relied upon his superb technique, forced a number of trades, simplified the position in textbook style, and finally clinched the draw by perpetual check.

  And he clinched the title as well. Ironically, it was a stellar Karpovian effort by the champ which ensured his reign for at least three more years. The score stood at 12–10. Now even if Karpov managed to win the last two to tie the match at 12–12, Kasparov would still retain the title. The victory was his. But not completely. The last thing Kasparov wanted was to back into the world championship with a tie. Karpov would proclaim to the world that he was as good a player, and that Kasparov had retained his title only because of a technicality. This would be a nightmare for him.

  In game 23, however, Garry collapsed. He had a bad position out of the opening and never played with conviction or a coherent plan. In the middlegame, when he was under attack and needed to make a solid defense, Kasparov threw away material for no reason. He did not seem to want to play on. “Kasparov unconsciously dumped this one,” said Bruce Pandolfini. “He didn’t even play like a good grandmaster. He just didn’t show up. Various commentators have speculated that since Kasparov had already won the world championship, he didn’t have sufficient motivation for this game, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Kasparov lives to make great art in chess, but he needs creative energy to raise the game to another dimension. He manufactures pressure, obstacles, crises, even distractions from chess, whatever it takes to get up for it. By losing game twenty-three, Kasparov put himself in a must-win situation in game twenty-four.”

  As the match approached the end, Manny Topol was understanding the game much better and had developed a hunger for it. Some veteran chess reporters in Lyon were impatient to leave, but Manny wished there were more games. Before falling asleep, he would think about sparkling piece sacrifices and tricky endings. Jonathan Tisdall and other reporters were discussing the category 17* tournament, the strongest round robin of all time, coming up in March in Linares, Spain. In serious tournament play, Kasparov had not finished below first place in the last ten years, an unbelievable record, but there had never been such a formidable field taking aim at him before. In Linares, Karpov would be seeking revenge, and the young stars Gata Kamsky, Viswanathan Anand and Vassily Ivanchuk would try to make their reputations by shooting down the champion. Manny was already figuring how to break it to Newsday that he should spend three working weeks in a village in the foothills of Spain. He needed to convince them that chess was a sleeping tiger in America. He would point out that there were persistent rumors that Bobby Fischer wanted to make a comeback. Fischer would put the game ba
ck on the front page. Linares might be a hard sell to Newsday, but Manny had an appetite for chess and its surrounding intrigues, and it was hard to say no to him when he wanted something.

  While Kasparov and Karpov took time-outs near the end of the match, Manny wandered the streets of Lyon, trying to understand the tragedy that had struck the Jews in World War Two. Since he had been a boy, Manny had read Holocaust literature and questioned survivors. Both of Manny’s parents had lost close members of their families in pogroms and concentration camps. The Jewish community of Lyon had been decimated. More than 4,000 had been murdered here, and twice that many had been deported to die by Klaus Barbie, known as “the Butcher of Lyon.” One night, Manny attended services at a synagogue built during Napoleon’s reign, and discovered that Garry Kasparov was a hero to the elderly congregation, though no one seemed to know the least thing about chess. Among Lyon’s Jews, communism was synonymous with anti-Semitism; Kasparov was a friend of Israel, an enemy of communism.

  One afternoon, Topol visited an elderly Jewish dentist who lived directly across the street from Kasparov’s mansion on Boulevard des Bêlges. The man told him something of what it had been like back then.

  “My father-in-law was killed by Barbie,” said the dentist. “When my wife was a girl, she lived in this same apartment. She was walking in the street when her father was taken. When she came back home, he wasn’t there. She waited for him and he never returned.” The dentist turned towards a window which looked across the street to Kasparov’s residence. Although he, too, knew nothing about chess, he was rooting for his famous neighbor, because he understood that Kasparov was sympathetic to Jewish issues. “Let me tell you something,” he said, pointing to the house alongside Kasparov’s. “Barbie arrested eighty Jews there.” The dentist slapped his leg sharply three times. “They were shot right there.”