The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

  She ate a fast lunch of spinach quiche and a kind of Slavic pommes frites in the restaurant. But when she went up to her room at three-thirty and got into bed, she found sleeping out of the question. There was an intermittent hammering going on above her head, as though workmen were installing a new carpet. She could hear the clumping of boots, and every now and then it sounded as if someone had dropped a bowling ball from waist level. She lay in bed for twenty minutes, but it was no good.

  By the time she finished supper and arrived at the playing hall she was more tired than she ever remembered being. Her head ached and her body was sore from being hunched over a chessboard. She wished fervently that she could have been given a shot to knock her out for the afternoon, that she could face Luchenko with a few solid hours of dreamless sleep behind her. She wished she had risked taking a Librium. A little fuzz in her mind would be better than this.

  When Luchenko came into the parlor room where the adjournment was to be played, he looked calm and rested. His suit, a dark worsted this time, was impeccably pressed and fit him beautifully across the shoulders. It occurred to her that he must buy all his clothes abroad. He smiled at her with restrained politeness; she managed to nod and say, “Good evening.”

  There were two tables set up for adjourned games. A classic rookpawn ending was in place on one of them, waiting for Borgov and Duhamel. Her position with Luchenko had been laid out on the other. As she sat down at her end of it, Borgov and Duhamel came in together and walked to the board at the other side of the room in grim silence. There was a referee for each game, and the clocks were already set up. Beth had her ninety minutes of overtime, and Luchenko had the same, along with an extra thirty-five minutes left from yesterday. She had forgotten about his extra time. That put three things against her: his having the white pieces, his still unstopped attack, and his extra allotment of time.

  Their referee brought over the envelope, opened it, showed the score sheet to both players and made Beth’s move himself. He pressed the button that started Luchenko’s clock, and without hesitation Luchenko advanced the pawn that Beth had expected. There was a certain relief in seeing him make the move. She had been forced to consider several other replies; now the lines from them could be dropped from her mind. Across the room she heard Borgov cough loudly and blow his nose. She tried to put Borgov out of her mind. She would be playing him tomorrow, but it was time now to get to work on this game, to put everything she had into it. Borgov would almost certainly beat Duhamel and begin tomorrow undefeated. If she wanted to win this tournament she had to rescue the game in front of her. Luchenko was ahead by the exchange, and that was bad. But he had that ineffective rook to contend with, and after several hours of study she had found three ways of using it against him. If she could bring it off, she could exchange a bishop for it and even the score.

  She forgot about how tired she was and went to work. It was uphill and intricate. And Luchenko had that extra time. She decided on a plan developed in the middle of the night and began retreating her queenside knight, taking it on a virtual knight’s tour to get it up to king five. Clearly he was ready for that—had analyzed it himself sometime since yesterday morning. Probably with assistance. But there was something he might not have analyzed, good as he was, and that he might not see now. She pulled her bishop away from the diagonal his rook was on and hoped he wouldn’t see what she was planning. It would appear that she was attacking his pawn formation, forcing him to make an unstable advance. But she wasn’t concerned with his pawn position. She wanted that rook off the board badly enough to kill for it.

  Luchenko merely pushed up the pawn. He could have thought longer about it—should have thought longer—but he didn’t. He moved the pawn. Beth felt a tiny thrill. She took the knight off the diagonal and put it not on king five, but on queen bishop five, offering it to his queen. If his queen took it, she would take the rook for her bishop. That in itself would be no good for her—paying for the rook with the knight and the bishop—but what Luchenko hadn’t seen was that she would get his knight in return because of the queen move. It was sweet. It was very sweet. She looked up hesitantly at him.

  She had not looked at him in almost an hour, and his appearance was a surprise. He had loosened his tie, and it was twisted to one side of his collar. His hair was mussed. He was biting his thumb and his face was shockingly drawn.

  He gave it a half-hour and found nothing. Finally he took the knight. She took the rook, wanting to shout with joy as it came off the board, and he took her bishop. Then she checked, he interposed, and she pushed the pawn up to the knight. She looked at him again. The game would be even now. The elegant look was gone. He had become a rumpled old man in an expensive suit, and it suddenly occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one exhausted by the games of the past six days. Luchenko was fifty-seven. She was nineteen. And she had worked out with Jolene for five months in Lexington.

  From that point on, the resistance left him. There was no clear positional reason why she should be able to hurry him to a resignation after taking his knight; it was a theoretically even game. His queenside pawns were strongly placed. But now she whittled away at the pawns, throwing subtle threats at them while attacking his remaining bishop and forcing him to protect the key pawn with his queen. When he did that, brought up his queen to hold his pawns together, she knew she had him. She focused her mind on his king, giving full attention to attack.

  There were twenty-five minutes left on her clock and Luchenko still had nearly an hour, but she gave twenty of her minutes to working it out and then struck, bringing her king rook pawn up to the fourth rank. It was a clear announcement of her intentions, and he gave it long, hard thought before moving. She used the time his clock was ticking to work it all out—every variation on each of the moves he might make. She found an answer to anything he might do, and when he finally made his move, bringing his queen, wastefully, over to protect, she ignored the chance to grab one of his attacking pawns and advanced her king rook pawn another square. It was a splendid move, and she knew it. Her heart exulted with it. She looked across the board at him.

  He seemed lost in thought, as though he had been reading philosophy and had just set down the book to contemplate a difficult proposition. His face was gray now, with tiny wrinkles reticulating the dry skin. He bit his thumb again, and she saw, shocked, that his beautiful manicure of yesterday had been chewed ragged. He glanced over at her with a brief, weary glance—a glance with great weight of experience and a whole long career of chess in it—and back one final time at her rook pawn, now on the fifth rank. Then he stood up.

  “Excellent!” he said, in English. “A beautiful recovery!”

  His words were so conciliatory that she was astonished. She was unsure what to say.

  “Excellent!” he said again. He reached down and picked up his king, held it thoughtfully for a moment and set it on its side on the board. He smiled wearily. “I resign with relief.”

  His naturalness and lack of rancor made her suddenly ashamed. She held out her hand to him, and he shook it warmly. “I’ve played games of yours ever since I was a small girl,” she said. “I’ve always admired you.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “You are nineteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have gone over your games at this tournament.” He paused. “You are a marvel, my dear. I may have just played the best chess player of my life.”

  She was unable to speak. She stared at him in disbelief.

  He smiled at her. “You will get used to it,” he said.

  The game between Borgov and Duhamel had finished sometime earlier, and both men were gone. After Luchenko left she went over to the other board and looked at the pieces, which were still in position. The Blacks were huddled around their king in a vain attempt to protect, and the White artillery was coming at its corner from all over the board. The black king lay on its side. Borgov had been playing White.

  Back at the lobby of the hotel a man
jumped up from one of the chairs along the wall and came smiling toward her. It was Mr. Booth. “Congratulations!” he said.

  “What became of you?” she asked.

  He shook his head apologetically. “Washington.”

  She started to say something but let it pass. She was glad he hadn’t been bothering her.

  He had a folded newspaper under his arm. He pulled it out and handed it to her. It was Pravda. She couldn’t penetrate the boldface Cyrillic of the headlines, but when she flipped it over, the bottom of page one had her picture on it, playing Flento. It filled three columns. She studied the caption for a moment and managed to translate it: “Surprising strength from the U.S.”

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Booth said.

  “Wait till this time tomorrow,” she said.

  ***

  Luchenko was fifty-seven, but Borgov was thirty-eight. Borgov was also known as an amateur soccer player and once held a collegiate record for the javelin throw. He was said to exercise with weights during a tournament, using a gym that the government kept open late especially for him. He did not smoke or drink. He had been a master since the age of eleven. The alarming thing about playing over his games from Chess Informant and Shakmatni v USSR was that he lost so few of them.

  But she had the white pieces. She must hang on to that advantage for dear life. She would play the Queen’s Gambit. Benny and she had discussed that for hours, months before, and finally agreed that that was the way to go if she should get White against him. She did not want to play against Borgov’s Sicilian, much as she knew about the Sicilian, and the Queen’s Gambit was the best way to avoid it. She could hold him off if she kept her head. The problem was that he didn’t make mistakes.

  When she came across the stage to an auditorium more crowded than she believed possible, with every inch of the aisles filled and standees packed behind the back row of seats, and a hush fell over the enormous crowd of people and she looked over to see Borgov, already seated, waiting for her, she realized that it wasn’t only his remorseless chess that she had to contend with. She was terrified of the man. She had been terrified of him ever since she saw him at the gorilla cage in Mexico City. He was merely looking down at the untouched black pieces now, but her heart and breath stopped at the sight of him. There was no sign of weakness in that figure, motionless at the board, oblivious of her or of the thousands of other people who must be staring at him. He was like some menacing icon. He could have been painted on the wall of a cave. She walked slowly over and sat at the whites. A soft, hushed applause broke out in the audience.

  The referee pressed the button, and Beth heard her clock begin ticking. She moved pawn to queen four, looking down at the pieces. She was not ready to look at his face. Along the stage the other three games had started. She heard the movements of players behind her settling in for the morning’s work, the click of clock buttons being pushed. Then everything was silent. Watching the board, she saw only the back of his hand, its stubby fingers with their coarse, black hair above the knuckles, as he moved his pawn to queen four. She played pawn to queen bishop four, offering the gambit pawn. The hand declined it, moving pawn to king four. The Albin Counter Gambit. He was resurrecting an old response, but she knew the Albin. She took the pawn, glanced briefly at his face and glanced away. He played pawn to queen five. His face had been impassive and not quite as frightening as she had feared. She played her king’s knight and he played his queen’s. The dance was in progress. She felt small and lightweight. She felt like a little girl. But her mind was clear, and she knew the moves.

  His seventh move came as a surprise, and it was clear immediately that it was something he had saved to spring on her. She gave it twenty minutes, penetrated it as well as she could, and responded with a complete deviation from the Albin. She was glad to get out of it and into the open. They would fight it out from here with their wits.

  Borgov’s wits, it turned out, were formidable. By the fourteenth move he had equality and possibly an edge. She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer. This time she saw the whole board in her mind and caught every change of balance in the power that shifted over its surface. Each particle of it was neutralized by its counter-particle, but each was ready to discharge itself if allowed and break the structure open. If she let his rook out, it would tear her apart. If he allowed her queen to move to the bishop file, his king’s protection would topple. She must not permit his bishop to check. He could not allow her to raise the rook pawn. For hours she did not look at him or the audience or even the referee. In the whole of her mind, in the whole of her attention she saw only those embodiments of danger—knight, bishop, rook, pawn, king and queen.

  It was Borgov who spoke the word “Adjourn.” He said it in English. She looked at her clock uncomprehendingly before she realized that neither flag had fallen and that Borgov’s was closer to it than hers. He had seven minutes left. She had fifteen. She looked at her score sheet. The last move was number forty. Borgov wanted to adjourn the game. She looked behind her; the rest of the stage was empty, the other games were over.

  Then she looked at Borgov. He had not loosened his tie or taken off his coat or rumpled his hair. He did not look tired. She turned away. The moment she saw that blank, quietly hostile face, she was terrified.

  ***

  Booth was in the lobby. This time he was with half a dozen reporters. There was the man from the New York Times and the woman from the Daily Observer and the Reuters man and the UPI. There were two new faces among them as they came up to her in the lobby.

  “I’m tired as hell,” she told Booth.

  “I bet you are,” he said. “But I promised these people…” He introduced the new ones. The first was from Paris-Match and the second from Time. She looked at the latter and said, “Will I be on the cover?” and he replied, “Are you going to beat him?” and she did not know how to answer. She was frightened. Yet she was even on the board and somewhat ahead on time. She had not made any errors. But neither had Borgov.

  There were two photographers and she posed for pictures with them, and when one of them asked if he could shoot her in front of a chess set she took them up to her room, where her board was still set up with the position from the Luchenko game. That already seemed a long time ago. She sat at the board for them, not really minding it—welcoming it, in fact—while they shot rolls of film from all over the room. It was like a party. While the photographers studied her and adjusted their cameras and switched lenses around, the reporters asked her questions. She knew she should be setting up the position of her adjourned game and concentrating on it to find a strategy for tomorrow, but she welcomed this noisy distraction.

  Borgov would be in that suite of his now, probably with Petrosian and Tal—and maybe with Luchenko and Laev and the rest of the Russian establishment. Their expensive coats would be off and their sleeves rolled up and they would be exploring her position, looking for weaknesses already there or ten moves down the line, probing at the arrangement of white pieces as though it were her body and they were surgeons ready to dissect. There was something obscene in the image of them doing it. They would go on with it far into the night, eating supper over the board on that huge table in Borgov’s parlor, preparing him for the next morning. But she liked what she was doing right now. She did not want to think about the position. And she knew, too, that the position wasn’t the problem. She could exhaust its possibilities in a few good hours after dinner. The problem was the way she felt about Borgov. It was good to forget that for a while.

  They asked about Methuen, and as always she was restrained. But one of them pressed it a bit, and she found herself saying, “They stopped me from playing. It was a punishment,” and he picked up on that immediately. It sounded Dickensian, he said. “Why would they punish you like that?” Beth said,
“I think they were cruel on principle. At least the director was. Mrs. Helen Deardorff. Will you print that?” She was talking to the man from Time. He shrugged. “That’s for the legal department. If you win tomorrow, they might.”

  “They weren’t all cruel,” she said. “There was a man named Fergussen, some kind of attendant. He loved us, I think.”

  The man from UPI who had interviewed her on her first day in Moscow spoke up. “Who taught you to play if they didn’t want you doing it?”

  “His name was Shaibel,” she said, thinking of that wall of pictures in the basement. “William Shaibel. He was the janitor.”

  “Tell us about it,” the woman from the Observer said.

  “We played chess in the basement, after he taught me how.”

  Clearly they loved it. The man from Paris-Match shook his head, smiling. “The janitor taught you to play chess?”

  “That’s right,” Beth said, with an involuntary tremor in her voice. “Mr. William Shaibel. He was a damn good player. He spent a lot of time at it, and he was good.”

  After they left she took a warm bath, stretching out in the enormous cast-iron tub. Then she put on her jeans and began setting up the pieces. But the minute she had it on the board and began to examine it, all the tightness came back. In Paris her position at this point had looked stronger than this, and she had lost. She turned from the desk and went to the window, opening the draperies and looking out on Moscow. The sun was still high, and the city below looked far lighter and more cheerful than Moscow was supposed to look. The distant park where the old men played chess was bright with green, but she was frightened. She did not think she had the strength to go on and beat Vasily Borgov. She did not want to think about chess. If there had been a television set in her room, she would have turned it on. If she had had a bottle of anything, she would have drunk it. She thought briefly of calling room service and stopped herself just in time.