The referee looked at me without comprehension. Something wild and Teutonic passed over his face, then he looked at the floor. “I told you!” I shrieked. “He won’t move! You’ve got to make him move!”
The referee mumbled something, moved away. I stamped my feet in a rage, aware that I was now drawing some attention from a desultory little line of spectators in the hall. “Make him move!” I shouted. “Make him move!”
Stiller himself looked up from the board three yards away, and rubbed his palms. Up and down the line of tables, the frieze of concentration broke. Players were staring. “Please,” I said, appealing to them, “this cannot be permitted.”
“Really, David,” Stiller said, “this is not proper, it’s highly irregular, in fact. Allow me to consider my next move in peace.”
“Liar!” I said. “You have no next move! You’re not going to move, you’ll just sit there.”
“I’m definitely going to move if you’ll give me a chance. In these circumstances,” he said blandly, “how could I move?”
His demeanor was so mild, so apologetic, immersed in such sanctimony as to drive me to utter fury, and with a growl I leapt toward him, shrugging off the referee who made desperate little gestures of retrieval, then, with a sigh, gave the battle up and fell away as I launched myself upon my adversary. I felt the shocking contact of his flesh as I dove.
Chess is a game famed for its intellectual rather than physical contact, and therefore this plunge against Stiller was doubly shocking. Little sighs were torn out as I reached my hands toward his stalwart, Hebraic neck, wrung it. (I am not an anti-Semite but there is a certain characteristic of Jews, a repulsive amalgam of hard personality and soft physique which I find disgusting. I say this even though I am at least partly Jewish myself.) Oh, did I squeeze!
“Don’t do it,” he said, “David, don’t gghh, then,” his voice remitting to a kind of unintelligibility as he reeled from the board, Knights and Bishops falling like little warped pearls.
“You can’t do this to me!” I responded. I was vaguely conscious of forms hustling toward our little confrontation, attempting to separate us, but I could hardly be dissuaded. “I’m entitled to better than this. I’ve won the game fairly, you fool. You can’t just sit there and expect me to go away!” and so on and so forth, mumbles and curses meshing, wringing his little neck until his kike’s head began to flap on his neck like a petal, and only at that moment did the hands of intervention assert themselves.
They came between us, pulling me from Stiller, he from me, and I saw him recede. Then I hit the floor, pinioned by referees, officials and a few involved spectators who had dashed from the benches to assist, becoming involved in the situation although FIDE is very much against this kind of thing. Lights swung above my line of sight like insects. I felt myself to be literally in extremis but this too, I advised myself, would pass, would pass.
An incident of this sort was unheard of in the Internationals but there is always a first time. “I’m sorry,” I said when I was able to recover breath, “truly sorry about this but he was, of course, cheating. He’s a big cheater and not only that, he’s a Jew.”
So I felt myself yanked, propelled through the air as I wavered in the supporting network of hands. “You’ve got to play the game fairly,” I nevertheless observed. “It’s a great game, but unless you honor the rules, what’s the point of it? It’s only a madness then; it is the rules which make it great, the strictures which shape it, the difficulties which lend genius.” Then I must have fainted, or at least I have little recollection of what went on for the next few moments. At one instant I was declaiming, and at the next there was a blank, aseptic pit, no sense of transition between the two and then—
I found myself in a small room at the rear of the hall being talked to earnestly by two officials. “We can’t have this sort of thing, David,” one of them said. I nodded; apparently I had remained conscious through all of this, although without memory, and was trying to give a good account. So I deduced. “It’s a scandal. Stiller is being seen by a doctor right now, he may want to press charges for assault. The Germans are a very authoritarian people, you know.”
The other official, silent but equally involved, nodded vigorously at this. “Do you have any explanation for your conduct, David?” the first official asked. “Anything which can be said in your behalf, which we can take to FIDE?”
I shook my head weakly.
“I was afraid of that, David, but then, attacking opponents during a match is illegal. It goes counter to the spirit of the game which is one of the mind—”
“Go to hell,” I said. Spiritless and drained, there seemed yet to be some core of purpose. I dragged myself to my feet. “Go to hell!”
The official looked at me astonished. Such language is rarely heard at matches; Alekhine has been dead a long time. “David,” he said.
“I’m sick of our talk of intellect,” I said, “I’m sick of our cheap rationalizations. Chess is a game for failures and for physical cowards. Let’s face it. Besides, I had a clear line of attack, the game would have been mine in five moves more.”
“But—”
“But he wouldn’t accept the reality of his defeat The trouble with all chess players except me is that they won’t face reality! Reality for the game is itself. They’ve tried to make it a pure substitute, but it won’t work. Things will never change.”
Admittedly, I was gibbering in what was later considered an attack of deep shock. Anxiety neurosis. “I want to get out of the international circuit,” I said. “I want to get out of competitive chess, get married, live in the world, travel a bit and see the places I stay in. I’m going to leave chess,” I said, the silent official unleashing a briskly mad series of nods then, as if I were addressing his own condition, and I found approbation in his eyes. “Get out,” I said, “meet people, circulate, get away from fools like Stiller.” And I stumbled toward the door of the anteroom, my intention quite clear, my intention to leave the hall and embark upon my life but—
As I went through the door I stumbled into the veritable arms of officials, reporters, honored guests, grandmasters—all of them shouting, “The board has been restored, the board is ready again, you must play, you must!” I tried to break free from their grasp and I could not. I found myself linked within that network of arms and conveyed once again into the hall, toward the board where all of the pieces were set up as before except that my Bishop flanking the Knights en prise had somehow been removed.
“Where is it?” I said. “Where the hell is my Bishop?” Referees, honored guests, grandmasters began to laugh. “Where is my Bishop? I’ve got my life tied up in that.”
“The position is as you left it,” they said, all of them talking in unison. “Nothing has changed, nothing has changed.” From a side door came the abused Stiller wearing a fresh set of clothing, a high-collared shirt concealing marks which I had left on his wretched neck, the neck swathed in white. He seated himself across the board, ostentatiously making no acknowledgment at all ... and without hesitation of any sort, brought his Queen down to Q7 and checked me thunderously. I looked at the board appalled. The mate was in one. Inevitable. “This is illegal!” I screamed. “You’ve altered the pieces, you’ve changed—”
“Move!” the referee and honored guests bellowed, Stiller saying nothing, sitting modestly, his hands folded, looking down sweetly at the board in a distracted fashion. As I looked at him, looked at the board, looked at the referees and then the two FIDE officials (who had reappeared), it became quite apparent that the situation, perhaps, was out of control.
Looking at the clock I saw that I had an hour and a half left. Certainly enough. I would sit him out. I folded my hands and looked at the board, suspended in a haze of concentration from which I would not be diverted. I was not going to be checkmated. They were not going to do this to me.
It is possible that certain aspects of this memoir are fabricated, but not all of them are.
CHAPT
ER SEVEN
Queen Takes Bishop Mate
I look up at Louis as he completes his move and he is weeping. His face, still open, has come to darkness. Little patches of illness, seen as pits in the deep surfaces, his eyes shrouded, his neck thin and palpitating.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “My old, old friend, I am so terribly sorry.”
Looking at the board, seeing what he has done to me (or maybe I am only thinking of what I have done to myself; could such a thing as this truly be possible?), I have a dazzling moment of pure and brilliant insight which at last continues and does not deny me. It goes on and on, instead, trailing hot little flashes of light like dysentery cramping from the bowels ... and I see then what we have been, where we have gone, what we will become, but this insight cannot possibly last. No! It drains from me as those cramps dissolve themselves into the viscous and deadly fluids of elimination, and here I am again, looking at the board in the fluorescence, the lights of the hall harsh and bright. There are murmurs about me. I turn to connect with them but when I look, expectedly, there is no one there, only Louis and I. It has always been this way. Slowly then I subside into my seat and the gelatinous substance I know as the Competition encases me once again. Ten games to five. Twenty-six games left to go.
Next time, I take the wraps off.
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Also by Barry N. Malzberg
Chorale
Conversations
Dwellers of the Deep
Galaxies
Gather in the Hall of the Planets
Guernica Night
Herovit’s World
In the Enclosure
On a Planet Alien
Overlay
Revelations
Scop
Tactics of Conquest
The Cross of Fire
The Day of the Burning
The Destruction of the Temple
The Empty People
The Falling Astronauts
The Gamesman
The Last Transaction
The Men Inside
The Remaking of Sigmund Freud
The Sodom and Gomorrah Business
Universe Day
Dedication
For Harry Harrison and Burt Sands—They’d like each other.
A Glossary of Terms
BISHOP: A minor piece. Moves on the diagonal of its own color and may capture any piece it displaces. Louis reminds me of a Bishop in a certain way because the Bishop is a highly phallic piece, its head looking something like that of an uncircumcised genital. This is the way in which I have always thought of my opponent. Bishops are roughly equivalent to Knights in the point-count system of chess, and become more powerful in the end game when there is a wider area of empty board to potentially control. A Bishop exchanged for a Knight is generally advantageous in the opening, even in middle-game, but unwise in the end. I have often imagined Louis dressed in Bishop’s cloak and costume, inclining at some altar above which I rise to enormous height. “Bless me, bless me,” he says, and I say to him, “Who can bless a Bishop but the Pope?” as he caresses me with burning fingers, a perishing touch, a cold and curiously motionless eye. “Well, of course,” he says.
CHESS: The Royal Game. Supposedly invented in Persia in the twelfth century, but there are antecedents suggesting origin centuries earlier. Actually its origins are unclear. Played on a board of sixty-four squares, alternating red and black, with seven kinds of pieces, comprising a total of sixteen pieces per side. Has struck scholars and literati for many years as a metaphor for war or for life. Metaphors are ignored by grandmasters, who know the truth: that only the game matters, that it can be explained only on its own terms, that it is really about nothing. About everything.
DAVID: Myself, the central figure of this commentary and its transcriber. One of the finest human beings among the contemporary grandmasters. Warm and engaging, always willing to help a newcomer and to cheer an aging colleague in the years of his decline. An international grandmaster, rated twentieth in corrupt ratings. Actually, the best in the world. Fifty years, two months and some days old tomorrow: clean-shaven, honest, dedicated and brilliant, wearing lightly upon himself the obligation to defend against darkness the forces of light. Neither a virgin (like his opponent) nor a pederast (like his opponent) but somewhere in the difficult territory between. A fine chess player equipped to deal with all schools, but particularly distinguished in defense against the Ruy Lopez.
FIANCHETTO: Chess attack. The Bishop is brought to KN2 where it menaces opposing Rooks and can command the longest possible diagonal, thereby tying up the opponent’s development Well-known in Larsen’s attack, a transposition of the Sicilian defense.
FISCHER: Robert James Fischer (b. 4/9/43), reigning world chess champion. A difficult, cantankerous chessmaster who was American Junior Champion at the age of fourteen, and is in sore need of discipline.
FOOL’S MATE: A kind of attack. (See RUY LOPEZ).
FOOL’S MATE IN FOUR: A highly subtle and rarefied kind of attack.
KING: Primary chesspiece, the checkmating (or threatened capture) of which is the object of the Royal Game. Kings may move one square in any direction on any given move but may not move into check, nor within less than one square’s opposition of an opposing King. The most important, and yet by virtue of its limitations the weakest of the pieces, one of those ironies with which chess is replete. Useful in the end game. Largest of the pieces and most satisfying to feel when wedged deep into the moistly sweating palm, the fingers coming densely over it, the King welding itself into that pocket like a precious jewel, the trembling head of it a conductor of knowledge, the King itself leaving a stain of implication over that palm which will always be hidden from view. (See BISHOP.)
KNIGHT: Minor chesspiece, roughly equivalent to the Bishop in matching power and attacking force. More useful than the Bishop in the opening, equal in the middle game, less effective in the end game. In the Staunton chess pattern it is in the figure of a horse’s head; in more elaborate patterns may be seen as a rider upon a horse. Moves two squares laterally and one square diagonally, or vice versa. The only piece which can hop over enemy pieces.
KNIGHT FORK: The simultaneous menacing of two pieces by the Knight, a deadly and devastating move most often seen as simultaneous check-and-attack upon a Rook in the early game. Because of the peculiar properties of the Knight (its relative inaccessibility, its mobility, its grotesque features and tendency to leave droppings all over the board) it is that piece most conducive to simultaneous attack. Queen and Bishop Forks, however, have been heard of.
LOUIS: My opponent. Fifty years, two months and some days old tomorrow. An embodiment of all the forces of evil in the universe: a lecher, a celibate, a, fool, a clown, a poseur, a pervert, a cheat, a thief, a liar, a sadist and a doppelganger. Impotent since adolescence because of a congenital malformation of the penis which makes it impossible for him to attain erection, much less pleasure a female. Has a FIDE rating slightly higher than mine because he bribed certain officials. Now, well into the years of his decline, deeply conversant with his impending senescence and death, most of the felonies and atrocious acts of this individual are necessarily behind him. We shared many childhood experiences and there was a certain similarity of personality (in early years) and career, meaning that we have been occasionally confused with one another. Such relationships or concurrence of traits have not existed for many years, though, and there is no similarity whatsoever. We are entirely different, everyone knows this. Louis, that repulsive individual, represents the forces of evil whereas I represent only the good. In all acts of adolescent homosexuality he was the ag
gressor and I merely the passive receptacle. I did not know what I was doing. I must have been ill.
OVERLORDS: The managers of the contest. An alien race of undetermined origins and motives who have made the arrangements for the chess match to decide the fate of the universe as between the forces of good and evil. Purple, ententacled individuals who speak a good English because of their possession of transliterative devices.
Rumors that they have created the match merely for sport and have lied to the principals in order to heighten the level of tension are completely false. Friendly and humanoid in many ways, their appearance is grotesque and disgusting and I will not discuss them again, ever.
QUEEN: Most powerful chesspiece. May move in any direction, laterally or diagonally, if not interposed by her own men. Symbolizes to many literary people the Mother, the Matriarchal Component, the Unattainable Vulva, the Punishing Earth-Mother and so on, all of this being the purest nonsense. The essential component of almost all opening mating attacks. The same height and dimensions as the King, but in the Staunton pattern not as satisfyingly round—meaning that it is less pleasant to fondle as a phallic substance. (See BISHOP.)
ROOK: Also known as the Castle. (A medieval term.) Second most powerful piece, it can move laterally in any direction although not diagonally. Particularly effective when “doubled,” i.e., one Rook on the same file as the other Rook leads to a powerful, often a mating, attack. Considered to be half as powerful as the King. May “castle,” i.e., under certain obscure conditions it may change positions with the King, usually in the early game. Particularly powerful in the end game when the board is open and the full thrust and power, probing into distances, opening up the flower of possibility, can be seen and felt.
Tactics of Conquest Page 13
