In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only forbidden word?"Why are the Jews so good at chess? The Arabs will tell you, because they think they're so fucking clever." He smiles, the curse word is theirs, not his. "I think it is because we adore God by dividing him into pieces, then analyzing the pieces. Each situation divides into beautiful ambiguities that can be resolved through more analysis. Your scientists split atoms to get muons, and muons to get quarks. But listen...." He throws his head back and stares at the ceiling. He could be searching his memory for a theorem or a prayer.
-- Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
"When do you say the schemah , "The Lord is God, the Lord is One" and the eighteen blessings that go with it? At fall of night. But how many stars do you have to see before you know it is night? Rabbi Pinekhas says: one star means it is still day. Three stars is night; but two stars leave doubt. So if you work Saturday night after seeing only one star, you must make a sin offering for breaking Shabbas; but if two stars, only an expiation of doubt. Forgive the English, I'm translating. Now suppose two stars are doubtful. Suppose you cut half a fig Friday night with two stars out, and Saturday half a fig after two stars. If two stars were night on Friday, they are night on Saturday, so you have not cut a whole fig on Shabbas. But if you cut another half fig on Saturday day, either that half fig and Friday's half fig are on Shabbas, or that half fig and Saturday's half fig are on Shabbas, aren't they, and you owe a sin offering." He clears his throat. "First part of the first chapter of the first book of the Talmud."
The voice is thin and reedy. It should go with a vague beard and black shoes. The kid is fourteen, in new Reeboks. He wipes a drop of fresh-pressed orange juice off his plaid K-mart shirt. "Or you know that famous argument in the Haggadah, that if God's finger smote the Egyptians with ten plagues in Egypt, then when he used his hand in Sinai they must have suffered fifty? Ya know how many rabbis it takes to screw in a light bulb?" He's got a thick Mott Street Yiddisher accent now: "De antzer is fairly complicaded. Rabbi Hillel says three. But Rabbi Akiba says four. Vich reminds me of a story."
He pours some orange juice into a wax paper cup, slides it over to you. "Moves in chess are like the branchings of argument in the Kabbalah. There are disputes over every conclusion, alternatives, even stylistic considerations. God is as deep in the heart of chess as he is in math, or Mozart."
... Is he believable? Was he coached for the interview? You are talking to Zvi Navon, pale complexion, delicate wrists, a sad smile, glasses too big for his face and a grassy, bowl-shaped haircut like a Roman emperor. His soccer sweatshirt says something in Cyrillic. He studies Russian with a tutor. He says, "If I do not go crazy like Bobby Fischer, my teachers tell me I will be a grandmaster by the time I'm seventeen, and champion maybe by twenty-three." You've seen cocksureness like this before, in high school basketball stars, in tennis prodigies, but it's the carelessness, the easy balance between victory and institutionalization, that hits you. What must it be like to wake up from dreams of chess, you think, and try to concentrate again. He doesn't care about the money, but the Israeli government has put hundreds of thousands of dollars into his training (now that Israel has abandoned its own currency), and he needs secretaries to answer the letters that pour in.
"Navon" means "clever," in Hebrew. To be able to concentrate like that...
No, but imagine instead a long dirt road in Botswana, a country that exists only because it is the right size for one, and none of its neighbors want the other neighbors that close to it, and then there is the Sinatra syndrome: Africans believe more firmly than in Allah or Jehovah or Elegba that once you redraw the t-square borders of one cobbled-together country, all the others will burst apart into the thousands of languages and nations and hues that were doing it their way before colonialism. Much better to keep the shapes the guilty Euros remember from maps in dusty lecture halls; much better to keep the sin offerings coming.
There is on this long dirt road a thirteen-year-old girl walking out of a patch of miserable woods. She sees the sun setting red through the red clay dust of the road, and directs herself to the right of the sun, northwest. She has gray eyes that are sometimes mistaken for blue when they reflect te sky. Her cheekbones are high, but her black hair curls tight and kinky. Her name is Isbella. She is looking for her father, a Portuguese air force mechanic fled from Mozambique, where she was born, when the Communists took over. She is walking to Angola, pursuing this unquenchable logic: Angola was also Portuguese. Maybe he is fighting with Jonas Savimbi? I cannot possibly get to Portugal. So I must find him in Angola.
A jet streaks overhead from the prison south, but she does not hear the noise. She looks at the thin ruffled white jet trace, dividing the sky in two. She remembers the curves and lines she saw in another sky during an air battle between two fighter-bombers flown by southern whites and five interceptors from home. The fighter-bombers fired six missiles. Two interceptors streaked West. The sky was full of curved squares. She likes to imagine how the sky would have to be distorted to make the squares straight. Today the sky is deep clear blue, without a wisp of white except for the thickening jet trail. A strange girl, with her skin the dull color of earth after a hard rain, her big deaf ears, and her unnerving, unblinking gray eyes.
An army patrol drives along the road in a Jeep stolen long ago. Its Red Cross markings peek through the flaking green paint. The soldiers are in a bad mood because it is hot and now it is a question of whether to stop the Jeep before it breaks down completely -- the engine is smoking -- and wait for repairs, or try for the next crossroads, where there will be warm beer to extort. This will finish the Jeep off, if it even makes it that far; but it could be all night before a bus or car comes, and someone would have to be left with the Jeep. It is much too far to walk. No Triple-A. Naturally the parts to fix the radio in the Jeep were sold off the year before.
The third alternative is to stop the Jeep fifty feet in front of the girl walking alone in the road and take their anger out on her. The Jeep stops with a jerky slide in the middle of the muddy road, ignition flipped off with a flourish, and all five of them get out, grinning drunkenly more out of habit than out of three dry days in the brush.
"Mademoiselle?" She does not hear the hear the laughter, naturally. "Our Jeep has broken down. Can you fix a Jeep?" -- called out before they can make her out clearly, her image is a little foggy in a mist that seems to be rising as the sun slips behind a low cloud.
"Or can you fix my didi?" says someone, and another, "Can you give us a ride?" ribbing his comrade, and a fourth, "I need a drink, woman, fetch me some of your nectar," and the fifth, but by now she is really very hard to see in the mist, and the tall gangly fifth is thinking mostly about his girlfriend and whether he will get to see her tomorrow, or is she really going back to her father's village. She is looking at the rare dead whiteness of the sun behind cloud cover, now it is only a pale brilliant bald earless head at the edge of a gathering storm front. The hot air tastes of ozone. She is murmuring a spell or a prayer or the proof to Pythagoras' theorem. Her hand unconsciously clasps a juju tight under the folds of her clothes, a hard flat stick with numbers on it and a middle that slides smoothly in and out. There is a low sudden roar she hears through her feet. It is hard to say whether the Jeep explodes before the delta shape flashes over her head, or if the shape passes before the explosion, but she is thrown to the ground, or seeing it coming throws herself down. It is not even war, just a threat, a reminder of the southern tribe's power, just another Jeep blown up a hundred miles north of the border.
For a while she tries to remember what she was thinking of when the soldiers were grinning at her, but it is hot and she is thirsty and dusk is miles away. There is a logic to the world, steps that come before steps, everyone has told her this, especially her mother before the explosion in which Isbella lost both her and her hearing; but here she is not sure what steps to take.
By a rivulet she lays her down to sleep.
In the morning tiny pieces have been added to the puzzle in her mind.
At the border of another woods there is a white haired bent old man scribbling figures in the dust with a stick; and if the world's genius were only a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors, the soldiers, surviving, or other soldiers, might have killed him like Archimedes; but the girl knows that a pattern displaced one square has profoundly different implications. She stops in front of him and begins slowly, painfully, twisting her big Portuguese feet in the dirt in order to help the remembered syllables come.
He puts a finger to his lips, hands her pieces of chalk. She crushes them over every other square in an eight-by-eight grid he has drawn. The grid is bent, drawn on a saddle surface on the curved ground: a distorted plane on which through any given point may be drawn more than one line parallel to another line. What is stranger is that one of the white edge squares has been jarred loose, westward: the board's rhythm is staggerstep, not Bach.
In the days that follow, she learns the game playing rifle cartridges for pawns, cowries for towers, hazel nuts for fools, bird eggs for king and queen. She learns fast, as if remembering the harmonies of a sonata. Days pass, weeks, months. She has forgotten to search for her father, or maybe now she remembers he was killed years ago in a night auto crash involving the only two cars owned within sixty kilometers of where she lived....
We lose track of her here, as she loses track of time, and several times forgets to eat, her cheekbones standing out even more in the hollow hour after noon than the eastern mountains against the sky. At night, if we can imagine what we cannot be sure of, she sees in the sky a vast eight by eight grid, and within, each square divided into eight by eight: but in each smaller grid a different white or red square misplaced.
We lose her trail, but we have not escaped her ....
If you have not been to Moscow, you cannot imagine Moscow.
-- Pushkin
The defending champ is an aging -- thirty-five -- Yurii Kasov. The black Armenian eyebrows have turned prematurely white; in fact, except for his dark skin, and stare that seems into invite you into pure regions of heat and light, instead of the gray-brown nervous glance, he smacks of Stalin at 50. He has ignored opportunities to defect, though he was never been trusted alone. His looks help him now: a converted Jew by history, now he reminds the Russians of a last avatar of Grandfather, the czar, the man of steel. It is a good decade and a half since the matches with Garin, that gnomelike enigma who vanished after losing. "You need a sane madness in top chess," Yurii Jacobovitch says to the people standing near him, "Madness Mister Garin lacked." They say nothing; he is responding to a question only he heard asked. "He wore his opponents down like an industrial robot would wear out a Novosibirsk overcoat. When I sacrificed queens and rooks to him he could not see my esthetic. He won the first matches, then his ego broke." He clears his throat faintly. "The Party ... you remember the party? ... was kind to let him resign his position as head of the chess federation on full pension."
The irony is gentle, the soire intimate, Garin long gone. "They say he never made an original error." He had been caught with the wife of the English ambassador, though wags said it was the ambassador himself. For a while you said, "Please, I think I just saw Garin" to excuse yourself from more vodka.
But if Garin is a ghost, Kasov is aging. His memory is deeper, but it takes more courage to plunge into it. It is something to watch, a man trying to remain a romantic figure through middle age. He is still a bachelor: there is grief there. The disease that has turned Kasov's hair white and tightened the lines in his face is not really medical. It is a chance to bow out gracefully.
Still, in the open field of the chess board he is a Gurkha in the desert, a shadow in the night, sand flung in his enemy's eyes, hiding in plain view. The computers have by now drowned the openings and endgames in neutral possibilities, each neatly tagged. The midgame -- major forces deployed, the field not yet reduced to the inexorable steps of a deadly ballet -- the midgame is his keyboard, his solo, his improv. He thinks of satellites twirling and tumbling in orbit. The metal sphere that stood out in radar like an oil tower flaming off gas in the night, vanishes. Was it an aberration, a faulty microchip? Or has it jammed you, thrown chaff across your sensors?
There is no chance in chess: he calls it proof of the existence of God. He weighs the heavy tournament bishop in his big hand. The people around him at the party, whatever it is for, keep their distance. They feel his normal fever, the high, sweatless heat he has lived in for years.
Later that night Kasov feels it is already many years later. He has this sensation often now: a feeling of time stretching like a rubber escalator belt under his feet, of hurtling through time faster than he lives it. "Many women under the bridge," he laughs to a stranger.
She laughs back nervously, pours his drink, her back to him in the kitchen. Yurii has started to womanize, she thinks, because he has lost his grip on the game. "The match?"
"Shit, what else? Pour yourself one, will you? I can't stand to see anybody not drinking." The apartment is cold, Kasov is still hot, it's almost a trick to bring a woman into his embrace. "Here, come here."
She is tall, slightly gawky, a girl. Blonde. She has a free abandon that attracts men, but also attracts them to abuse her. She won't last long in Moscow, he thinks. She speaks Russian with a thick German accent. We still hate them, don't we, especially now the border is down. We fear and envy them. If I cannot seduce her, I cannot win the match with Navon.
Her skin tastes faintly of cinnamon. The subdued pounding of the plumbing makes counterpoint to the soft violence they practice on each other throughout the night, as snow falls, sentries wrapped like Kachinka dolls pace, and limousines roar down the centers of broad boulevards under the midnight sun.
But in chess, there's no flank, no line, the military metaphor is garbage. It's a formula with thirty-two times sixty four variables . Because we're too dumb to see really deep into a chess position, you and I try to wipe out each other's pieces. Brute force. Sacrifice anything larger than a pawn, and you're either a genius or an idiot. If we could see deeper, if we could see how to win by annihilating our own forces, ah, that would be a quantum leap. Easier to read Finnegans Wake and gawk at the words.
What kills me about chess, is its precision. I fought a war when I was young, when I needed to risk dying for something. No one declared the war, and no one won, except the gunrunners; but we were alive. We were always waiting for that felt thud in the small of the back, it would always come from behind. Sweat, blood and rain, you couldn't tell what was what, and the ground felt like dead skin on a shaved animal. There's no meaning in chess, no fists raised, no slogans, no tears shed, no jokes. I am rich, but not through playing chess. Life isn't chess. The pawn may be cowed by the king he was sent to slaughter, long enough for the king to pull out his own sword; the knight can seduce the Queen. The real board is endless, with indefinite possibilities. Even in the black and white squares of the City you feel rumbling below the subway tracks, current in the air, the walls humming with live machinery.
I sit up and watch the screens around my bed, sixty-four bright, silent pushbutton images, I can't think about chess. I think colors, rhythms, vague three-dee shapes, but no words, just the sounds words make. I absorb more this way than if I read the papers. A woman with the breathless voice of a girl once told me it's like that being seduced, being pulled under, in the long stretch before ecstasy. Sensation without mediation.
The dark and light squares to the contrary, there are no colors in chess. It's mediation without sensation. A language without referents, if you get my drift. Zvi, his mind strips the fringe off all doilies, the spin off all cue balls. He once told me, "The world is in color, but black and white is more realistic." I mean that meaning is his turn-on, not the sounds of the words. He chops up his world, weighs the pieces and puts them back together, philisophical unit by unit, Lego-style. Now Isbella, she doesn't see elements, she sees the net, the web, she doesn't bother with the essences or contents of things, just their relations. Both attitudes meet at infinity, like two people walking directly away from each other along the Equator.
White, playing chess perfectly, cannot lose, because he has the first move; but he can't beat Black, if Black plays perfectly. The perfect game draws. The catch is the size of the search space: there are more possible chess games than quarks in the universe. The chess masters live under a sky crammed with stars of indefinitely variable brightness. Isbella and Zvi always tie. Often he wins pieces, by meticulous analysis, but in hindsight realizes he has lost position, and he has to sacrifice his gains to recover. Isbella never repeats her fluke wins against Kasov: she's lost the skill of making imperfect moves to trap an imperfect opponent. I forget whom the Chess Federation declared a winner. Her and Zvi's romance is a slow ballet around stasis. His tentatives she checks, his assaults she wears down, his insinuations she tangles out of shape. She loves him, she will not give him up, and yet she will not give herself up to him. She enlaces him in a web of nuances. The touch of her fingertips on his skin becomes a series of flashing sensations, each a separate burst of pleasure through time. He does not see her at all, but he knows every part of her.
Where is home? Mark Twain told an audience with my great-grandfather in it, in Carlsbad in 1878, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Or is it where the random courses of the dice, the slips and falls, speak one's language? In a foreign country the tumble on the waxed steps bring only bruises, no wisdom, you can only laugh. In chess there is no chance, and every seemingly ambiguous move speaks to either victory or defeat. Was Kasov looking for a different world, for which it was only necessary to receive chance onto his tongue like a communion wafer?
I can only tell you, he never played chess again. Nor was he unhappy. Imagine him, if you will, with a broad white hat, jacket and pressed pants on the verandah of one of those large villas hidden in the hills encircling Rio. There is a dark-haired, lissome mulatta girl walking barefoot in a room on the second floor. Her hair and her almost transparent skirt ripple whenever she passes the giant fan. Kasov is happy. We leave the house quietly, nodding to the old woman holding the door open with her sleeping back.
Garin, later, is walking the rainslicked streets of Paris, a city that does not understand him. A parade of teenagers passes by, looking for a bigger street. He watches the red, blue and white on the uniforms, the flashing steet batons (somewhere reflected on each round, polished baton tip there is a tiny image of his frown); he is thinking of the parades at home, the twirling batons, his face twirling alongside the hundreds of curbside faces, thump of the drums and throaty roar of brass cutting through clear air, the neatly cut and pressed uniforms.
He feels the warm tug of homesickness. Tonight Moscow is sleeping, a long, cool white dreamy night, like a glass of soda water. Here it rains in December, and the sky is gray. The inevitable thought: no wonder Napoleon failed to think of thick winter boots for his army.
A man tugs at his cashmere overcoat sleeve. "'Z'avez cent balles pour m'aider, vieux?" Garin does not understand French (he speaks slow English to the Tuilieries ice cream vendors), but the man is poor and unshaven. He can imagine the man's breath puffing off-white in the Moscow cold. His hand feels only a bill, fifty francs in his pocket. He is near his hotel. He gives the man the note without looking at it, a feeling of lightness in the back of his head.
Garin, too, has known mercy.
2. Then there's George Eric Wilsson, an Ohio Swede embarrassed by his homespun background, one of those naturalized New Yorkers who say "schlemiel" when they mean "schlemazl." He means well. He's even smart, but no handle for nuance. No, that's not it. He has no love for the sublimely fallen, and he ought to, living in Sin City and all. The black mirror glass monoliths all plug their subbasements into Hudson basin mud. No, he'll be out of place no matter where he lives, unless he goes back home. I don't feel comfortable around his type. Too healthy, too well-brought up, too kitsch, too Republican. If there is salt pork in the fridge because my au pair is making coq au vin for a special occasion, watch out, I'll eat it, heart condition or no. Like my friends who still smoke on the wrong side of forty, I keep telling myself, before it kills me they'll discover the cure. Anyway, why store up extra years of your life, they'll be in your eighties anyway. That's what I love about this town. Your heart may skip a beat and die flabbergasted on the floor, but who can stand living forever to a clock tick?
George Eric Wilsson, I bet, the son of a bitch.
It is 1999, December 31. Try telling the fifty thousand drunks in Times Square that the new millenium won't come for three hundred sixty five days. Instead of letting ball fall, this year they condemned the whole building, and they're going to blow it down with dynamite at the witching hour. If the college boys did their sums right, the walls will fall inward, the roof will meet the ground floor twelve seconds into January 1. On ten floors, CNN minicams will record the destruction. Tri-Star has already inked a pact for a disaster movie based on the footage, and Universal Studios has bought the rights for the ride.
G. E. Wilsson is in the lounge of the Kyoto Hilton, watching the building implode on closed circuit tv. There is an escort service girl sleeping in a rose silk peignoir in the white cotton pressed sheets of his bedroom. She is dreaming that her feet are wet in a black pool in the center of an empty valley. The morning is chill and misty, the leaves around her are damp. There are lotus flowers sprinkled white on the still water.
She is suddenly huge, she is her sister and very huge, sliding through the silk of space, the stars are snowflakes. In the dream she is suddenly tired, and thirsty. She bends down to accept a glass of cherry liqueur before drifting off again to sleep, swathed in spirals and ellipses and bending lines that meet at infinity.
G. Wilsson is flicking from channel to channel to channel, a tiny box in his right hand, a champagne flute in his left, a bottle of '85 Taittinger and two aspirin and a glass of Fuji Snow Water thoughtfully laid on the table next to the easy chair. It is the middle of the day, possibly it is already noon, Tokyo has been sleeping its own drunk off half a day already.
I have been in hotels like this. They have a strangely insistent rhythm. The displaced want home's comforts, the ordinary miracles of their home country. They get sudden packings and unpackings, canned music and thin smiles. But even in this pulse there is solace, like the rocking pulse of the tractors tilling the Plains where I was born, or cavalry on the steppes of Russia where my family losts its peasants and land. It is the lulling, shaking forward motion of the night train from Paris to London. In the lounge, as you enter, there is the gleam of the television, soundless, different images flickering. You see the sparkle of an empty champagne glass. There is a blond man with a pink face asleep in the easy chair by the champagne bottle in front of the tv. He has an unaccountable smile on his face. He is dreaming he is on a train going very far, westward, through the night. The rhythm of the train is George Eric Wilsson's lullaby. He is not out of place where no one is at home. By some freak chance no one will notice, though it must happen every day, he is snoring in perfect time with the call girl, her damp thighs brushing together as she drifts in and out of dreams, curled up amid white pillows in his darkened suite.
3. Kasov is in the new post-Yeltsin government, the oldest member of a new cabinet. No one has seen him for years. No one understands how he got there, another enigma swaddled like the tundra under snowfalls of misinformation. It is May Day, the coldest in years. The wind battles the loudspeakers. A black bowler hat blows over the roofs into what used to be Red Square, creating a commotion. An officer makes out the Latin letters of the label: Harrod's.
The voice over the loudspeaker is wind too, the long white wind that whirls across the steppes, never gaining or losing speed but whirling, whirling aimlessly across longitudes. Kasov's speech is on a green tv monitor hidden in the podium: no papers to blow away.
Suddenly, the line goes dead. No one can make out his words, just their sounds jumbled in the gale. The nervous men at his side, confused by power, have buttoned their ear flaps down and are worrying about their hats. The crowd does not care. Kasov begins to yell whatever comes into his head: the crowd will applaud in the pauses, they are trained for that, for all they know he is speaking French. The words blow up into the blue sky, that storehouse of orations, promises, lies, cries of anguish. When will they fall to Earth again, like snow?
"... Discrete math has two conceptions of infinity! Countably, and uncountably infinite!" He can see the lost murmurs of approval blow in the wind. "You can rank, you can count the list of whole numbers stretching to the infinity sign. You cannot rank the list of fractions, you cannot even infinitely list the fractions between zero and one!" He waits for the applause, lets it continue a moment, then holds up his hand for silence.
"A Jesuit in New York told me, 'God's justice must be countably infinite, and his mercy uncountably infinite. That would save you, and me, and all the other doubting bastards.'" He catches his breath. They are waiting for a summation. "To this you and I add a third infinity: indefinity, inconceivable largeness. More than the grains of sands on a beach! More than the dust between galaxies! All the minutes before I existed and after I die! Chess is in this finity: a game that like man approaches the Eternal, but not as fast as the Eternal recedes!"
Kasov throws his arms wide, embracing the crowd, which applauds him madly. The wind is so loud his hearing is saturated: he hears only the sound of the sea, as if Red Square were an enormous shell held to his ear. He wonders, what are they thinking, our people? With his eyes closed against the bite of the moving air he sees millions of feet marching through history to the horizon. He sees the turnings in each path, possibilities leading away from, then converging back on, the perfect game. He wonders, What we will do when we reach the perfect game. Will God turn out the lights?
The crowd is still there before him, applauding. A final phrase lost in the wind and the vacant hum of the microphone: "So many possibilities! God bless you all! God bless you all!"