“Okay, so what are you up to now?” Mr. Wiesveld asked him. “How far have you gotten?” He clicked open both locks of his case and pulled out a little pile of books. “Which book are you using?”
“We’re not,” said Jan Boot, slouching in his chair. “We just get exercises. And at the end we’re allowed to play.”
“Exercises. Yes…what sort of exercises?”
Jan Boot stood up and strode over to the demonstration board. He removed a number of pieces, repositioned a few others, turned round, and smirked: “White mates in four.”
We sniggered. We’d been given that problem last week and Jan Boot had been the only one to solve it within the ten minutes allowed.
“Yes…” said Mr. Wiesveld, not really paying attention to the board. “Yes, I’ll have to have a little think about that. I’ll need to find out what you’re all capable of. I tell you what we’ll do: we’ll arrange the tables in a circle—or better still in a horseshoe. Yes…today we’re going to play a game of simultaneous chess, and you’re going to take notes on all the moves. Okay?”
Hesitantly, we did what we were told. But when we sat down, notation books at the ready, and he began to play against us, we could hardly keep our eyes on the game, intrigued as we were by our new chess teacher. We exchanged knowing looks, clearly all thinking the same things: what a funny little man with his jumpy little movements and those ridiculous clothes! A black blazer worn over a light-blue lozenge-patterned jumper with a V-neck revealing a pink, thin-collared shirt! Spindly legs squeezed into a pair of skinny jeans, and those clean, smooth nails we got a good look at every time he stretched out his hand to make a move. We lost piece after piece, but barely even noticed, since we kept on discovering new details about Mr. Wiesveld that we immediately divulged to the rest of the group with nods and other such signs. Mr. Wiesveld affected a cough and muffled it with his fist. He had black hair—so black and shiny it made you wonder whether he had dyed it. He smelled of something—wasn’t it eaude-cologne? He was as skinny as a rake; his jacket fell from his shoulders as though from a hanger. His muted eyes lay sunken in their dark sockets. And he was so dreadfully pale, especially in comparison to Mr. Vink’s boundlessly healthy, ruddy complexion.
After beating us all effortlessly, Mr. Wiesveld stared into the distance, three fingers on his chin. Suddenly, his face broke into a cheery smile as he asked us to go over our notes at home and come in next week prepared to tell him at what point we might have tried a different move.
“Yes…I think that’s enough for today. Would you like to play against yourselves now?”
We stood up, rearranged the tables and chairs, picked up the clocks, reset them to five minutes—all the while casting silent looks at the man and then at one another. He coughed into his hand again, rasping, yelping, like a dog. With thumb and forefinger, he flicked a piece of fluff off his pants. He was clearly uneasy. But as soon as one of us accidentally made eye contact with him, he smiled encouragingly. After Lina had come in with soft drinks for us and another coffee for him, he clinked his teaspoon again curtly on the rim of his cup. He hadn’t meant anything by this, however; he just sat there, not saying a word until the Old Church bell struck twelve heavy strokes, telling us the lesson had drawn to a close.
He helped us put the chess sets back into the cupboard, then locked it. He replaced his books in his bag, returned the cupboard key to the bar, and accompanied us outside.
I can still picture how, while we were unlocking our bikes, he cycled off, coat flapping in the wind, and then looked back to wave good-bye.
“See you next week! And yes…remember to think about those games we played.”
No one reacted—until he had turned a distant corner. It was then that we heard Jan Boot snort. Normally he was the first to leave with a cheerful “Bye-bye babies!” or some such taunt. But this time he stayed where he was. Standing astride his bike, clutching the handlebars, he stared straight ahead.
“A fag,” he said, disconcerted. “We’re being taught by a fag.”
In the weeks that followed, none of us could think of anything other than the new chess teacher. We kept a beady eye on him, and as soon as one of us spotted something new, the rest of the group was informed. There was the time Mr. Wiesveld smoked a cigarette, which he held like a TV actress between the tips of his fingers, wrist cocked back. The time he swept his hair into place—a gesture we imitated enthusiastically after each class. “He’s got thick lips,” whispered Jan Boot one day when Mr. Wiesveld had left to use the facilities. “Have you seen them? Queers always have thick lips.” Later on we all took a discreet but very close look at those lips.
We laughed our secret, disdainful laugh, but at the same time we were almost grateful to Mr. Wiesveld for his peculiarities, which lent themselves so well to detailed examination. He was like an extremely rare species of animal we figured was worth our closest scrutiny—given that we were going to be stuck with him regardless.
The members of our group were culled from numerous different grades at our secondary school on the outskirts of Brevendal. The fact that we all belonged to the same club hadn’t, until then, meant we ever spoke at school. A casual “hi” if you happened to bump into a chess-class member was about as far as our friendship went. Playing chess did not endear you to your classmates, and certainly not to girls. But now, whenever you stood in the lunch line, you might be surprised from behind by Mr. Wiesveld’s little cough (mimicked to perfection by another member of the club) or by the word “yes” pronounced in that silky voice of his. Or else you might be greeted in the corridor by an effeminate flick of the wrist that you would respond to in kind with a deadpan expression on your face. It wasn’t long before our other schoolmates took an interest, and we satisfied their curiosity, exaggerating a little when we imitated his walk, for instance, with our frantic little steps. The other pupils laughed too, so we felt less embarrassed and sometimes even challenged each other to a game or two on miniature sets during recess.
What Mr. Wiesveld thought of us, however, wasn’t something I ever considered. What I do know, though, is that from his second Saturday with us, he threw himself into our lessons, making his approach completely different from Mr. Vink’s good old method of assigning clear exercises (matein-N was like a math equation—either you could solve it or you couldn’t), posing less definite questions, such as: “How is White developing his queenside?” or “How is Black going to foil the threat to his bishop’s diagonal?” or “Is White really right to castle here?” Often we were unable to come up with an answer, but what confused us the most was that, after having let us puzzle over a problem for a good half hour, Mr. Wiesveld was often unable to come up with a good answer himself. Or, if he did, he might suddenly cross his legs tightly (hooking a foot around the opposite ankle), place his fingers on his smooth chin, and then announce in falsetto: “But, on second thought…”
The boys began to grumble—especially Jan Boot. Although he had once been the best student in the class, now he was more and more at a loss. He stopped paying attention and dedicated even more of his time to poking fun at Mr. Wiesveld. Whereas he used to slam the chess-timer during matches with the flat of his hand, now he pressed it preciously with a forefinger saying “Dearie me!” in mock surprise. Outside on the gravel next to the bike racks he would mince around between us, hand on hip. He made a game out of using every derisory word for that type of man he could think of: not just calling Mr. Wiesveld a “fag,” but also “queer,” “queen,” “pansy,” “fairy,” “poof,” and “nancy”—not to forget his favorite: “hairdresser.” Occasionally he tried something new, like on the fourth or fifth Saturday, after we’d been served our drinks and could see Lina’s form fading behind the glass ripples, he blurted out: “What a beautiful sight, eh?” with a big wink at Mr. Wiesveld, who reacted, as always, with a half-timid, half-encouraging smile.
In the beginning, the others took little notice of Jan Boot’s jokes. I don’t think anyone much cared for hi
m, and we were pleased that he was no longer the best in the class. But once we saw that our lessons would never get any less confusing, when we were given complex problems and convoluted game analyses to take home (something unheard of under Mr. Vink), we too began to rebel: we started to affect that little cough and begin all our sentences with a contemplative “Yes…” Once, we even concocted a plan to turn up at Centraal en masse with neatly parted, gelled hair. But it never came to that.
It was February, about eight weeks after our first class with Mr. Wiesveld. During a sports day at school, when all the teams were supposed to do demonstrations, we all sat around four or five boards in the assembly room playing chess with our geography teacher and some older boys: a group from the upper as well as the lower sixth. There had been a similar event about three months earlier—“The Chess-heads” versus Everybody Else—and that time it had been a close call. But not now. We won every single game inside of ten minutes. And when our opponents demanded a rematch, we did it again. We exchanged looks: they hadn’t stood a chance! And then we discovered that this was not an isolated incident: suddenly, there were all sorts of stories floating around about our beating our fathers, grandfathers, next-door neighbors, anyone who, up until then, had been a challenging opponent—slaughtered where they stood.
With Mr. Vink, chess had always been exciting, but never more than an exciting game—a game like any other. The best player was the first to complete his calculations. With Mr. Wiesveld, however, calculation had largely been replaced by something more akin to instinct, and this became obvious during speed chess, those five-minute matches that before had always been a matter of gambling and bluffing: you’d make an opening move, learned by heart, select the pieces for your attack, pause for a second’s thought, and off you went. It was like a stag fight, really: whoever managed to smash their pieces against their opponent’s the hardest would, nine times out of ten, emerge triumphant. But all this changed. Just like it’s impossible to stare up innocently at the night sky having learned about its various constellations, so we were no longer able to look at a chess board without being struck by key configurations, pinnings, center control, and vulnerable pawns. Where once we had seen a tangle of possibilities with tens of potential moves, now we saw only two or three, into which we funneled all of our attention.
We must have realized somewhere deep down how brilliantly Mr. Wiesveld was teaching us, how profound his explanations were about tempo, opposition, and potentially passed pawns, along with twenty other subjects, which up until then, even if we’d heard of them, would have seemed like gobbledygook. We must have realized how admirably patient he was with us, pubescent and adolescent as we were, sitting there gawking, failing to do our homework and never letting him know what we were actually thinking. Perhaps we sensed, albeit vaguely, the opportunities he was giving us when he said: what’s true of chess (it being interesting only when difficult—only when one encounters resistance) is also true of life in general. His lessons contained all the ingredients to help move us forward, perhaps even to give us a little character.
Things didn’t turn out that way, however. Speaking for myself, I see now how the shell in which I had felt so cared for, so protected from the outside world, had been transformed by Mr. Wiesveld’s presence into a suit of armor against which all his kindness rebounded impotently. And yet he remained inspired, class after class. Each week he had prepared something new, along with subtle illustrations of his point. Whenever a boy was unable to attend, Mr. Wiesveld was more upset about it than the absentee himself. Whenever a boy had been sick, Mr. Wiesveld found extra time to get him back on track.
Once we realized that we owed our progress to Mr. Wiesveld, we stopped impersonating him. But we still kept him at a distance. After all, what choice did we have? He was a man who wore raised heels, and whom—in order to amuse your brothers, cousins, and friends—you would mimic by slapping your left wrist a couple of times with the limp fingers of your right hand.
March arrived and Mr. Vink was due to return two weeks later. At the end of the morning (it had been snowing and we were dying to get out and throw snowballs at each other), Mr. Wiesveld asked us to stay behind for a moment. Coats on, we sat back down.
“Would you mind,” he began, more timidly than ever, “coming an hour earlier next week? I’ve put your names down for a tournament. Yes…I do believe that none of you have ever participated in a tournament before.”
A few of us shook our heads. Jan Boot asked suspiciously: “What sort of tournament? Where?”
Mr. Wiesveld smiled. It was to be a speed tournament, in other words, one where each player would play for twenty minutes at a time. It would be held in Schoonhoven, somewhere in the province of South Holland, but there was no need to worry about transport. He did advise us, though, to bring some sandwiches, seeing as the event might go on all day. And yes, of course we’d need to get permission from our parents.
“I don’t know,” said Jan Boot, standing up. “I’ve got other things to do.” He looked round provocatively, but failed to win our support. Even if we’d also had other things to do, we would have cancelled them for the adventure of a real tournament—something we’d only read about in newspapers and chess books.
The next Saturday, an hour earlier than usual, Mr. Wiesveld was standing waiting for us next to a light-blue Volkswagen minivan parked outside Café Centraal. Just when we’d all found a seat and Mr. Wiesveld had pulled the sliding door shut with a slam, Jan Boot showed up. Utterly shocked by the idea that we might actually leave without him, he fell to the gravel from his bike as he was trying to dismount it. He climbed into the van quickly, bludgeoning and elbowing himself into a seat, us laughing at him all the time.
I remember very little about the trip or about Schoonhoven itself. By contrast, I vividly remember the moment I entered the hall with the others. It was a gigantic sports auditorium, the size of a football field, smelling of pencil shavings; it had a varnished wood ceiling with lightning-white neon tubes, and a green floor on which squeaky shoe-soles would occasionally resound. Chessboards, chess pieces, chess clocks were laid out on row after row of tables. And in between all those tables, teeming like ants, were hundreds of boys and a few girls, all aged twelve to sixteen. But the scene was chaotic only in appearance: each participant had been assigned to a pool of six players, each of whom were tied to a well-regulated schedule.
I am there in the midst of all those other children and the electric murmur of ticking clocks, holding on to a corn-colored card with a grid filled in with my name and the names of five unknown opponents. All of a sudden, I’m terribly nervous; maybe that’s why it seems so warm and stuffy in here. When I get to my table, my opponent is ready and waiting. He’s wearing glasses with some tape over the left lens, which makes me feel even more insecure. I hang my jacket over the back of my chair and we shake clammy hands; he looks at his card and asks whether I’ve also played in Rotterdam; I’m so nervous, I can manage no more than a silly shake of my head.
I’m Black. I touch the pieces just to make sure they’re right in the middle of their squares. I blow a hair off the edge of the board, look up to assess my opponent (although I can barely take him in), then press the button on the clock. After a couple of moves, my concentration improves. Mr. Wiesveld walks by; when I look up he raises his thumb. A little later I notice that he’s left, and I’m grateful to him for his tact; we had been worried that he would prance around like he was our leader, afraid of being instantly branded “those kids with the queer teacher.” But that isn’t happening: even when Mr. Wiesveld does have a word with us between matches, he does so quickly—nothing more than a little remark or piece of encouragement as he wanders from table to table…that’s all.
After a couple of rounds, I realized that I was not only a formidable opponent at school; this was my first tournament, my very first opportunity to test my skills against children from other clubs, and I had beaten them one by one! My nervousness returned, but in a differen
t way now: I was becoming fanatical. After each game, I could barely sit still, waiting for the next to begin. I felt a tingling pleasure with every piece I robbed, with every combination that cleaved my enemy’s defense in two. And with each victory I realized more and more that without Mr. Wiesveld, I would have cut a far less impressive figure.
At the end of the afternoon I found that I hadn’t been the only boy in the club to have had a successful day. We’d all won more matches than we had lost. But I was the only boy to have won a prize: a thick bronze coin with an image of a rook on the front, and on the back an inscription that read “11th Schoonhoven Junior Tournament: Eighth Place.” While we were walking to the Volkswagen, with me clasping my medal, Mr. Wiesveld said that it had been a long day and that we must be tired and hungry and could probably do with some French fries. He’d treat us.
“Yum yum…paid for out of his own back pocket, I’ll bet,” I heard Jan Boot mutter under his breath, after the others had cheered. But he wolfed the food down the same as the rest of us.
Through the fries and on the way back I kept on thinking about my accomplishment, and how I owed it to Mr. Wiesveld. If I’d had to rely on what I’d learned from Mr. Vink, I would have become a laughing stock—so shouldn’t I thank Mr. Wiesweld? Thank him today, this being his last Saturday. But how? Perhaps I could say something—speak on behalf of us all. Because I was the oldest, not counting Jan Boot, and hadn’t I done the best?
Sitting in the rear of the van, I stared at the back of Mr. Wiesveld’s head. Any negative thoughts I might previously have had about him had been replaced by a feeling of gratitude. So as we drove back to Brevendal through the dark country roads, I tried to think of what I was going to do.
After a while I could make out the familiar houses and street corners illuminated by the orange glow from the lampposts. Our van drew up in front of the café we slid open the door and jumped out. I stood there looking at the others, then took a deep breath.
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