Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Manny was determined to interview Klaus Barbie, who, old and sick, was being held prisoner in a jail in the center of the city. One day, Manny walked three miles from his hotel to the imposing stone prison, which resembled a medieval fortress. After walking around its entire circumference, Manny pounded on the tall, thick wooden doors. The guard who opened the peephole saw no one at first, because Topol is very short. Manny demanded an interview with Barbie, but they didn’t allow him inside. Klaus Barbie died of cancer some weeks later.

  A few days before the end of the match, Manny Topol, grandmaster Max Dlugy and his wife Marina visited a medieval village thirty kilometers north of Lyon. Dlugy, twenty-four, had been world junior champion at nineteen, and was now one of the strongest grandmasters in America. All afternoon, Manny struggled with his shyness. Odd, Manny thought, when he was with mob bosses or all-pro linebackers, he was perfectly at ease, but with great chess players he was nervous and a little bumbling. Nevertheless, he loved to hear about their intricate winning plans, their psych jobs, and their dreams of glory. Max Dlugy had spent the previous evening with Kasparov, and confided to Manny that he had beaten the champion in blitz, three games in a row. Manny reflected on this as the rented car sped through the Rhône countryside. Three games in a row against the world champion! He wondered if Kasparov had dropped three in a row before, but was too shy to ask Max. Maybe Max could be world champion someday, Manny thought.

  Then on the drive back to Lyon, Dlugy surprised Manny with the news that he was retiring from professional chess. After graduating from high school, Max had given himself six years to become one of the top twenty in the world, and he had fallen a little short of that. Now, at twenty-four, with a wife and baby girl, he was resolved to try another career. There was no money to be made playing chess tournaments in America, and commuting from Englewood, New Jersey, to tournaments in Seville, Hastings or Haifa was not very sensible for a married man. Manny, who called his wife in Long Island each evening, could see the point. Max would begin a job as a foreign exchange trader as soon as he returned to New York. Lyon was his farewell to professional chess.

  Manny took this in: a currency trader. Max sensed his disappointment and explained further. He had chosen chess over Yale and it just hadn’t worked out. A young player couldn’t get a first-class chess education in America. If he managed to become a grandmaster, he still couldn’t support himself. Chess and America didn’t make a good fit. America’s most talented young players were making the same decision. Grandmasters Michael Wilder, Nick DeFirmian and Michael Rohde had also determined to give up professional chess so that they could earn a reliable living. It was the sensible thing to do, Max said, and Manny nodded.

  Back in Lyon, Manny took his usual evening walk beneath the grimy elevated subway on Stalingrad Avenue. He scratched his head. All very reasonable and also a little tragic. A currency trader. Giving up childhood dreams went against Manny’s nature. In that moment, Linares in March seemed farfetched. Just when I’m easing my way into chess, all the great young American players are dropping out, he thought.

  On New Year’s Eve, Karpov and Kasparov played the highest-stakes chess game of all time. If Kasparov won or even drew game 24, he would get the Korloff trophy, worth about one million dollars, as well as $1.8 million of the prize fund. If he lost, they would divide the Korloff trophy and each player would get $1.5 million of the prize fund. One chess game for eight hundred thousand dollars. But Kasparov had further raised the ante for himself. Before the game, he had decided that, if he won the bejeweled trophy, he would sell it and create a fund for Armenians who were destitute and homeless after the slaughter in Baku. It was a classic Kasparov gambit, spilling chess off the board, matching his best moves against Gorbachev’s genocide, revving himself up this way to destroy Karpov with his best chess. For Garry, 1990 had begun tragically in Baku, and if he thrashed Karpov in the last game, he would end the year as neatly as a sonnet.

  With the white pieces, Kasparov played the English opening for the first time in the match. After relatively few moves, the players deviated from known theoretical lines, and for a time the battle was tense and unpredictable, with both players falling into time trouble. After a couple of positional mistakes, Karpov’s queenside attack began to fall apart, and Kasparov rapidly achieved an overwhelming position. And then he offered Karpov a draw.

  Many people were surprised. Garry seemed to be developing a habit of offering a draw when Tolya was losing. A few in the audience thought that Kasparov was being excessively cautious, that he didn’t want to risk losing with so much at stake. But most commentators regarded the draw offer as an act of noblesse oblige. Wearing his best Boy Scout face, Garry later told me that he had decided in advance to offer Karpov a draw from a winning position. “It showed strength and fair play. I didn’t need the win.”

  However, Bruce Pandolfini suggested that Garry’s motivation had been more knotty. “Garry has never blown away Karpov,” commented Pandolfini. “At the beginning of each match, he has said that he wants to crush Karpov, run up a big score, kill him off once and for all. But I wonder if it’s true. In game twenty-four, he had a chance to put some distance between himself and Karpov, but he chose not to. I think that, on some level, it worries Garry to get too far ahead. Professionally, Karpov and Kasparov are almost a single entity. It was the same with Bobby and Boris. After their match, each was incomplete without the other, and although Bobby cut himself off from most of the world, he stayed in touch with Boris. It is risky for Kasparov to annihilate Karpov. What would be left? Who else could motivate him to study and play his best? Most likely, his next opponent will be little more than a weak sparring partner and there will be little worldwide interest in the match. Kasparov will be out there by himself.”

  It was true that when Garry assessed his art, he frequently spoke of Karpov as an aesthetic counterpoint, or even more intimately, as a function of his own chess identity, much as God assumes clarity and holiness relative to the devil. “I play creative chess. Karpov normally plays destroying chess,” Garry said to me, a couple of weeks after the match. “You need his chess to appreciate mine, and of course sometimes he plays brilliant moves, too. It’s as if the two of us are racing in a velodrome. You have the leader who splits the wind, and someone who follows.”

  “But don’t you think that he has made an art form out of following?” I asked. “Preying upon you with finesse? Remember, you said Karpov sucked the energy out of you like a spider.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But the good thing about this match was that he couldn’t take this energy from me. There was nothing to take.”

  *The regional tournaments to choose the qualifiers to compete in the candidates matches. The winner of the candidates matches is the challenger for the world championship.

  *FIDE categorizes international round robins according to the average rating of players. The average rating of the fourteen players in Linares, 1991, was 2658, at the time the highest tournament average in the history of chess.

  9

  THE TRAVELING CHESS SALESMAN

  Following the championship, there was no skiing vacation, as Masha had hoped. Kasparov flew to Moscow to address business problems and to meet with political allies, and then left for a lengthy business trip.

  Before the riots in Baku, when Garry had visited Moscow, he and Masha had lived with her parents in a small flat south of the center of the city, on Donskya Street. Now this flat was their only “home.” The building was virtually indistinguishable from scores of other dreary walkups in the neighborhood. Downstairs was a club that had been closed and boarded up for some time. Broken pipes dangled above the street entrance, which was effaced by ripped-off advertisements, scratched paint and the dents and pry marks of multiple break-ins. Inside, the dark hall was damp and foul-smelling. Apparently no one ever cleaned here.

  The apartment was cramped for four adults. It consisted of a sunny kitchen just big enough for a little table, a bedroom down the hall and
a small living room with walls of flimsy wood paneling, knickknacks in every cranny, classical records and books jamming the shelves, and, on the floor, boxes filled with clothing and the sundry stowage of two families. There was no place to put anything away. To get a big fancy flat like Karpov’s, Garry would have to make a deal with the Soviet Sports Committee, and he wouldn’t do that. But there was a nice feeling to this tight place. Perhaps it was the spirit of Masha, optimistic and sunny, the refrigerator brimming with tasty morsels purchased with hard currency, comfortable corners to sit, an inviting home to visit and have good talks.

  In the morning, the sleepy world champion sat at the kitchen table in a sleeveless undershirt, eating toast with butter. Then he moved slowly to the bathroom to shave. He lathered his face in a small mirror which reflected laundry hanging about. He nicked himself repeatedly as he scraped his heavy beard again and again, going for the executive close shave.

  While he dressed, I noticed a handgun tangled in the straps of Masha’s purse on the bedtable. “You must have it during these times in Moscow,” he said quietly. Downstairs, a half-dozen burly men stood beneath a cluster of barren trees, looking like a gang of toughs. They kept an eye on the door, chatted and kicked at the dusty ground. When Kasparov, dressed in jeans and a sports shirt, trotted down the steps and slid into his navy blue Mercedes, he was flanked by two of them, while four more followed in another car to intercept attacks. “He is like John Lennon here,” explained Arkady Murashov, a People’s Deputy who would become Moscow’s Commissioner of Police a year later. “When he walks on the streets, everyone wants to touch him. It only takes one crazy. It’s smart for him to have bodyguards.”

  “Maybe I would be safe without them,” Kasparov mused. “But who knows? In the West this would not be good for my image but here it is fine.”

  By the time Kasparov arrived at his sprawling offices in the center of town, he was in high gear. Above the beeping and printing of the fax machine, he called out instructions to a leggy secretary who wore a practiced, condescending smile. In his office, he sat at the head of a long conference table and immediately began making phone calls, fine-tuning his itinerary for a whirlwind trip to Europe and the States the following week. Kasparov had managed to get a special line, which permitted overseas calls without the innumerable false starts and disconnections that plagued Moscow’s phone system.

  Several times on the phone, I heard him use the term “joint venture.” That year, all of Moscow’s pioneer businessmen were doing joint ventures, and the term itself seemed to connote adventure, to go along with big profit. Throughout the morning, business associates came in and out of the office to see him; they spoke of a negotiation with Alitalia about the airline’s renting Kasparov’s leased rooms in the Cosmos Hotel for their crews, and about a pending telecommunications deal. There was a tense, closed-door meeting with several partners, to discuss another partner who was perhaps skimming profits. Even while communism was still making its last furious fight, Kasparov was getting an education in the dirty tactics of the new game.

  One day, when Andrew Page was in Moscow, he peered into Garry’s office and then shook his head. How fast this young bumpkin from Baku had picked up the capitalist affect and lingo, if not, alas, the deep fiscal moves and savvy of Kasparov’s billionaire friend, Warren Buffett. But the possibility that Kasparov’s chess brilliance would translate to business acumen kept Page hoping. After an hour, the historian and activist Yuri Afanasyev came to talk with Garry about politics, and then they discussed a business idea. In his office, the businessmen were all freedom fighters. According to Page, this explained in part why many of the deals conceived here were losers; priorities were invariably mixed up. Afterwards, Kasparov raced off in the Mercedes to discuss a deal with a man who had just opened Moscow’s largest computer distributorship. Then it was lunchtime.

  Garry normally ate lunch at his mother’s, which was a short drive from the office, and the lunch break often took much of the afternoon. While Garry was inside, the bodyguards settled across from one another at a chessboard in the lobby. They were trying to blend quietly into the landscape of a chess champion’s life, but their cover was belied by muscles bulging out of short-sleeved shirts, and hands too big and awkward for the elegant wooden chess pieces they had borrowed from the champ. They could have been tag team wrestlers.

  In the early months of 1991, Garry still did not regard Moscow as home, and perhaps in part this explained the appeal of Klara’s roomy flat, which was decorated with photographs and memorabilia of Baku. Klara’s apartment was the heart of Garry’s Moscow life. He arranged key political meetings here. He often met with Western journalists at his mother’s, and once a week he tried to get in a two-hour session of chess at the dining room table with grandmaster Sergey Makarichev, his new trainer. In some ineffable way, ideas seemed to come together in the nurturing environment of her home. He watched CNN, pondered which variation in the King’s Indian to play against Karpov in Linares, or gathered his thoughts for an upcoming meeting with Boris Yeltsin, while he ate his mother’s aromatic chicken and his aunt Nellia’s cakes. Many afternoons he took a short nap here.

  He often wrote his political columns for the Wall Street Journal at his mother’s desk, or at the dining room table. One afternoon while we waited for Klara’s meal, he asked me to read his most recent article before he faxed it off. I had not read anything of his for some months. One year before, when he had started writing articles for English-language publications, his bold ideas had been awkwardly stated and amateurishly strung together. There had been little or no focus or momentum. While I read, Garry was impatient, glimpsing my way for a reaction. I was impressed. The piece was convincing and well-wrought. “I wrote it in five hours,” he said, proud as a schoolboy. In a year, the improvement in his writing had been remarkable. Sometimes Garry composed in English, but more typically he wrote in Russian, had someone translate for him, and then closely edited the English copy. He had been studying articles in various Western publications for style and language. He particularly valued Abe Rosenthal’s column in The New York Times, which he described as both informed and passionate. Garry worked at becoming more playful with his English. He would ask my opinion about a metaphor he had used in a speech or article, and if I didn’t think it worked, he pushed me for a close explanation. Once, I found Garry analyzing a magazine article of mine. He read the beginning over a few times, with his lips moving. I was pleased and also nonplussed; he was scanning the paragraph for style. “Just take these two phrases out,” he said. “Read it to yourself that way.” He was right; the paragraph was leaner, tougher, with his deletions.

  Klara spent much of her day administering the relief program for Armenian refugees which had been funded with the money Garry had received for the Korloff trophy. Every day Armenian refugees visited the apartment with stories of lost loved ones and of the impossibility of finding a meaningful life in Moscow. “We are nothing here. Nobody takes us seriously,” said a young woman. Sons and daughters would report the death of a father or mother only weeks or months after the parents arrived in Moscow. “Died of a broken heart,” was usually the given cause of a parent’s death. But some refugees, such as Garry’s aunt and grandmother, would not say a word about Baku. It was painful to recall, to be sure, but they seemed frightened to recount the tragedy, as though the telling would summon the monster to raise itself again.

  Garry’s driver, Kolia, was tormented with survivor’s guilt. “My best friend at home was a dentist,” he said. “I lived with him in his house. Last year, when I came to work for Garry, I left him alone, and my friend was murdered by the Azerbaijani hooligans. If only I had stayed with him.” Like Nellia and Suzanna, Kolia believed that it was dangerous for Armenian refugees to think about home. “The pain is too great. You have to go through it to understand. My father died after Baku. He could not bear the loss.”

  Daily contact with refugees fanned Garry’s hatred for Gorbachev. I also think that the abjec
t misery of his countrymen had a paralyzing effect on the champion and in the first months after the Karpov match spurred his incessant travel from Moscow. In the office, Garry was always on a roll, but at his mother’s his schedule was less tight, and sometimes this got him into trouble. It was at Klara’s that Garry pined for Baku. He complained to his mother of feeling displaced, a stranger in a country where he was a national hero. One afternoon, when there were no appointments scheduled for the next several hours, Garry read the paper, counted the days until his next trip to Europe and the States, and then he paced. After a time, he talked with his mother in Russian, and his tone grew petulant. His restlessness built like bad weather. At this point in his life, Garry needed constant doses of action, travel, public attention, or else the walls caved in around him. The champion’s face grew dark and he mumbled to himself. After a difficult stretch of silence, the phone rang. It was a journalist from USA Today, requesting an interview about the present political climate in Moscow and his views on Boris Yeltsin, whom Garry would actively support as Yeltsin made his bid to become Russia’s first freely-elected president. Garry smiled broadly into the phone, and those of us in the apartment felt as if we had been reprieved from bad times. “My chess game is suffering,” he told the journalist. “I cannot concentrate on chess. How can I? My country does not know the real meaning of democracy after seventy-eight years of dictatorship. But they know what they don’t want. They don’t want communism.”