by Walter Tevis
After dinner the tournament director handed out printed sheets with the day’s games. In the elevator she started going through them, beginning with Borgov’s. The other two were draws, but Borgov had won his. Decisively.
***
The driver brought her to the hall by a different route the next morning, and this time she could see the huge crowd in the street outside waiting to get in, some of them with dark umbrellas against the morning drizzle. He took her to the same side entrance she had used the day before. There were about twenty people standing there. When she got out and hurried past them into the building they applauded her. Someone shouted, “Lisabeta Harmon!” just before the doorman closed the door behind her.
On the ninth move Duhamel made an error in judgment, and Beth pounced on it, pinning his knight in front of a rook. It would cramp him for a moment while she got out her other bishop. She knew from studying his games that he was cautious and strong at defense; she had decided the night before to wait until she got a chance and then overwhelm him. By the fourteenth move she had both bishops aimed at his king, and on the eighteenth she had their diagonals opened. He hid from it, using his knights cleverly to hold her off, but she brought out her queen, and it became too much for him. His twentieth move was a hopeless try at warding her off. On the twenty-second he resigned. The game had taken barely an hour.
They had played at the far end of the stage; Borgov, playing Flento, was at the near end. As she walked past him to the subdued applause the audience gave while games were in progress, he glanced up at her briefly. It was the first time since Mexico City that he had actually looked directly at her, and the look frightened her.
On an impulse she waited for a moment just out of sight of the playing area and then came back to the edge of the curtain and looked across. Borgov’s seat was empty. Over at the other end he was standing, looking at the display board with the game Beth had just finished. He had one broad hand cupped over his jaw and the other in his coat pocket. He frowned as he studied the position. Beth turned quickly and left.
After lunch, she walked across the boulevard and went down a narrow street to the park. The boulevard turned out to be Sokolniki Street, and there was a good deal of traffic on it when she crossed in a large crowd of pedestrians. Some of the people looked at her and a few smiled, but no one spoke. The rain had ended and it was a pleasant day with the sun high in the sky and the enormous buildings that lined the street looking a little less prisonlike in the sunshine.
The park was partly forested and had along its lanes a great many cast-iron benches with old people sitting on them. She walked along, ignoring the stares as best she could, going through some places that were dark with trees, and abruptly found herself in a large square with flowers growing in little triangles dotted here and there. Under a kind of roofed pavilion in the center, people were seated in rows. They were playing chess. There must have been forty boards going. She had seen old men playing in Central Park and Washington Square in New York, but only a few at any one time. Here it was a large crowd of men filling the barn-sized pavilion and spilling out onto the steps of it.
She hesitated a moment at the worn marble stairs leading up to the pavilion. Two old men were playing on a battered cloth board on the steps. The older, toothless and bald, was playing King’s Gambit. The other was using the Falkbeer Counter Gambit against it. It looked old-fashioned to Beth, but it was clearly a sophisticated game. The men ignored her, and she walked up the steps and into the shade of the pavilion itself.
There were four rows of concrete tables with painted boards on their surfaces, and a pair of chess players, all men, at each. Some kibitzers stood over the boards. There was very little talk. From behind her came the occasional shouts of children, which sounded exactly the same in Russian as in any other language. She walked slowly between two rows of games, smelling the strong tobacco smoke from the players’ pipes. Some of them looked up at her as she passed, and in a few faces she sensed recognition, but no one spoke to her. They were all old—very old. Many of them must have seen the Revolution as boys. Generally their clothes were dark, even the cotton shirts they were wearing in the warm weather were gray; they looked like old men anywhere, like a multitude of incarnations of Mr. Shaibel, playing out games that no one would ever pay attention to. On several tables lay copies of Shakmatni v USSR.
At one table where the position looked interesting, she stopped for a moment. It was the Richter-Rauzer, from the Sicilian. She had written a small piece on it for Chess Review a few years before, when she was sixteen. The men were playing it right, and Black had a slight variation in his pawns that she had never seen before, but it was clearly sound. It was good chess. First-class chess, being played by two old men in cheap working clothes. The man playing White moved his king’s bishop, looked up at her and scowled. For a moment she felt powerfully self-conscious among all these old Russian men with her nylons and pale-blue skirt and gray cashmere sweater, her hair cut and shaped in the proper way for a young American girl, her feet in pumps that probably cost as much money as these men used to earn in a month.
Then the wrinkled face of the man who was staring at her broke into a broad, gap-toothed smile, and said, “Harmon? Elisabeta Harmon?” and, surprised, she said, “Da.” Before she could react further, he stood up and threw his arms around her and hugged her and laughed, repeating, “Harmon! Harmon!” over and over. And then there was a crowd of old men in gray clothes around her smiling and eagerly holding out their hands for her to shake, eight or ten of them talking to her at once, in Russian.
***
Her games with Hellström and Shapkin were rigorous, grim and exhausting, but she was never in any real danger. The work she had done over the past six months gave a solidity to her opening moves that she was able to maintain through the middle game and on to the point at which each of them resigned. Hellström clearly took it hard and did not speak to her afterward, but Shapkin was a very civilized, very decent man, and he resigned gracefully even though her win over him was decisive and merciless.
There would be seven games in all. The players had been given schedules during the long orientation speech on the first day; Beth kept hers in the nightstand by the bed, in the drawer with her bottle of green pills. On the last day she would be playing the whites against Borgov. Today it was Luchenko, with black.
Luchenko was the oldest player there; he had been World Champion before Beth was born, and played and defeated the great Alekhine in an exhibition when he was a boy, had drawn with Botvinnik and crushed Bronstein in Havana. He was no longer the tiger he had once been, but Beth knew him to be a dangerous player when allowed to attack. She had gone through dozens of his games from Chess Informant, some of them during the month with Benny in New York, and the power of his attack had been shocking, even to her. He was a formidable player and a formidable man. She would have to be very careful.
They were at the first table—the one Borgov had played at the day before. Luchenko made a short bow, standing by his chair while she took her seat. His suit today was a silky gray, and when he walked up to the table she had noticed his shoes—shiny black and soft-looking, probably imported from Italy.
Beth was wearing a dark-green cotton dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.
But on the twelfth move he began to attack—very subtly at first, with pawn to queen rook three. A half-hour later he was mounting a pawn storm down the queenside, and she had to delay what she was preparing to deal with it. She studied the board for a long time before bringing a knight over to defend. She wasn’t happy about doing it, but it had to be done. She looked across the board at Luchenko. He gave a little shake of his head—a theatrical shake—and a tiny smile appeared on his lips. Then he reached out and continued the advance of his knight’s pawn as if heedless of where she now had her knight. What was he doing? She studied the position again and then, shocked, she saw it. If she didn’t find a
way out, she would have to take the rook pawn with her knight, and four moves down from that he would be able to bring his innocent-looking bishop from the back rank out to knight five, there on her fractured queenside, and pick off her queen rook in exchange for it. It was seven moves away, and she hadn’t seen it.
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her cheeks against clenched fists. She had to work this out. She put Luchenko and the crowded auditorium and the ticking of her clock and everything else out of her mind and studied, going through dozens of continuations carefully. But there was nothing. The best she could do was give up the exchange and get his rook pawn as consolation. And he would still have his queenside attack going. She hated it, but it had to be done. She should have seen it coming. She pushed up her queen rook pawn as she had to and watched the moves play themselves out. Seven moves later he got the rook for his bishop, and her stomach knotted when she saw him take up the piece in his hand and set it down at the side of the board. When she took the rook pawn two moves later it was no real help. She was behind in the game, and her whole body was tense.
Just stopping the advance of his pawns down the queenside was grim work. She had to return the pawn she had taken from him to manage it, and that done, he was doubling his rooks on the king file. He wouldn’t let up. She made a threat toward his king as a cover and managed to trade off one of his rooks for her remaining one. It did no good to trade when you were down, because it increased his advantage, but she had to do it. Luchenko gave up the traded piece casually, and she looked at his snow-white hair as he took hers in exchange, hating him for it. Hating him for his theatrical hair and hating him for being ahead of her by the exchange. If they went on trading, she would be ground down to nothing. She had to find a way to stop him.
The middle game was Byzantine. They were both entrenched with every piece supported at least once and many of them twice. She fought to avoid trades and to find a wedge that could bring her back to even; he countered everything she attempted, moving his pieces surely with his beautifully manicured hand. The intervals between moves were long. Every now and then she would see a glimmer of a possibility way down the line, eight or ten moves away, but she was never able to make it materialize. He had brought his rook to the third rank and put it above his castled king; its movement was limited there to three squares. If she could only find a way to trap it before he lifted the knight that held it back. She concentrated on it as strongly as she knew how, feeling for a moment as though the intensity of her concentration might burn the rook off the board like a laser beam. She attacked it mentally with knights, pawns, the queen, even with her king. She mentally forced him to raise a pawn so that it cut off two of the rook’s flight squares, but she could find nothing.
Feeling dizzy from the effort, she pulled her elbows off the table, put her arms in her lap, shook her head and looked at her clock. She had less than fifteen minutes. Alarmed, she looked down at her score sheet. She had to make three more moves before her flag fell or she would forfeit. Luchenko had forty minutes left on his clock. There was nothing to do but move. She had already considered knight to knight five and knew it was sound, although of no particular help. She moved it. His reply was what she expected, forcing her to bring the knight back to king four, where she had planned for it to be in the first place. She had seven minutes left. She studied carefully and put her bishop on the diagonal that his rook sat on. He moved the rook, as she knew he would. She signaled the tournament director, wrote her next move on the score sheet, holding her other hand over it to hide it from Luchenko, and folded the sheet to seal it. When the director came over, she said, “Adjournment,” and waited for him to get the envelope. She was exhausted. There was no applause when she got up and walked wearily off the stage.
***
It was a hot night and she had the window open in her room while she sat at the ornate writing desk with her chessboard on it, studying the adjourned position, looking for ways to embarrass Luchenko’s rook, or to use the rook’s vulnerability as a cover for attacking him somewhere else. After two hours of it, the heat in the room had become unbearable. She decided to go down to the lobby and then take a walk around the block—if that was safe and legal. She felt dizzy from too much chess and too little food. It would be nice to have a cheeseburger. She laughed wryly at herself; a cheeseburger was what an American of a type she thought she would never be craved when traveling abroad. God, was she tired! She would take a brief walk and come back to bed. She wouldn’t be playing the adjournment out until tomorrow night; there would be more time for studying it after her game with Flento.
The elevator was at the far end of the hall. Because of the heat, several rooms were open, and as she approached one of them she could hear deep male voices in some kind of discussion. When she was even with the doorway she looked inside. It must have been part of a suite because what she saw was a grand parlor with a crystal chandelier hanging from an elaborately molded ceiling, a pair of green overstuffed sofas and large, dark oil paintings on the far wall, where an open door led to a bedroom. There were three men in shirtsleeves standing around a table that sat between the couches. On the table was a crystal decanter and three shot glasses. In the center of the table was a chessboard; two of the men were watching and commenting while the third moved pieces around speculatively with his fingertips. The two men watching were Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal. The one moving the pieces was Vasily Borgov. They were three of the best chess players in the world, and they were analyzing what must have been Borgov’s adjourned position from his game with Duhamel.
Once as a child she had been on her way down the hall in the Administration Building and had stopped for a moment by the door to Mrs. Deardorff’s office, which was uncharacteristically open. Looking furtively inside, she had seen Mrs. Deardorff standing there in the outer office with an older man and a woman, involved in conversation, their heads together in an intimacy she would never have expected Mrs. Deardorff to be capable of. It had been a shock to peer into this adult world. Mrs. Deardorff held her index finger out and was tapping the lapel of the man with it as she talked, eye to eye, with him. Beth never saw the couple again and had no idea what they had been talking about, but she never forgot the scene. Seeing Borgov in the parlor of his suite, planning his next move with the help of Tal and Petrosian, she felt the same thing she had felt then. She felt inconsequential—a child peering into the adult world. Who was she to presume? She needed help. She hurried past the room and to the elevator, feeling awkward and terribly alone.
***
The crowd waiting by the side door had gotten bigger. When she stepped out of the limousine in the morning they began shouting, “Harmon! Harmon!” in unison and waving and smiling. A few reached out to touch her as she went by, and she pushed past them nervously, trying to smile back. She had slept only fitfully the night before, getting up from time to time to study the position of her adjourned game with Luchenko or to pace around the room barefoot, thinking of Borgov and the other two, neckties loosened and in shirtsleeves, studying the board as though they were Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin with a chart of the final campaign of World War II. No matter how often she told herself she was as good as any of them, she felt with dismay that those men with their heavy black shoes knew something she did not know and never would know. She tried to concentrate on her own career, her quick rise to the top of American chess and beyond it, the way she had become a more powerful player than Benny Watts, the way she had beaten Laev without a moment of doubt in her moves, the way that, even as a child, she had found an error in the play of the great Morphy. But all of it was meaningless and trivial beside her glimpse into the establishment of Russian chess, into the room where the men conferred in deep voices and studied the board with an assurance that seemed wholly beyond her.
The one good thing was that her opponent was Flento, the weakest player in the tournament. He was already out of the running, with a clear loss and two draws. Only Beth, Borgov and Luchenko
had neither lost nor drawn a game. She had a cup of tea before playing began, and it helped her a little. More important, just being in this room with the other players dispelled some of what she had been feeling during the night. Borgov was drinking tea when she came in. He ignored her as usual, and she ignored him, but he was not as frightening with a teacup in his hand and a quietly dull look on his heavy face as he had been in her imagination the night before. When the director came to escort them to the stage, Borgov glanced at her just before he left the room and raised his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Here we go again!” and she found herself smiling faintly at him. She set down her cup and followed.
She knew Flento’s erratic career very well and had memorized a dozen of his games. She had decided even before leaving Lexington that the thing to play against him, if she had the white pieces, would be the English Opening. She started it now, pushing the queen bishop pawn to the fourth rank. It was like the Sicilian in reverse. She felt comfortable with it.
She won, but it took four and a half hours and was far more grueling than she had expected. He put up a fight along the two main diagonals and played the four-knights variation with a sophistication that was, for a while, far beyond her own. But when they got into the middle game, she saw an opportunity to trade her way out of the position and took it. She wound up doing a thing she had seldom done: nursing a pawn across the board until it arrived at the seventh rank. It would cost Flento his only remaining piece to remove it. He resigned. The applause this time was louder than ever before. It was two-thirty. She had missed breakfast and was exhausted. She needed lunch and a nap. She needed to rest before the adjournment tonight.
