Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  But then the young cellist began to lament. His instrument became quieter as the twangy awfulness of the cheap piano surrounded him. It was like he began to accept his fate, as if the old man was right, there was nothing that could be done.

  No. Please don’t.

  The song ended. The teacher nodded curtly and walked off stage, showing no signs of approval or disapproval. The student shined with a broad smile. Alone on stage, he opened his frame with his bow and gathered the wild applause of his friends and family in the audience. Igor said they had to go. She still had a game to play.

  On the way back to the Mechanics Chess Club, Igor told Lisa about the Baroque, Vivaldi and b-flat minor. He told her about the treble, the bass and the pianoforte. He called the cheap piano a harpsichord, and said that it couldn’t raise or lower its voice. He said that the student’s cello was also an old instrument, that it squeaked. It didn’t have the expansiveness of its modern equivalent. Igor laughed at them: “This conservatory believe in genuine connection, like chef who use dull knife to recreate feast of eighteenth century.”

  Igor said no, the student was not talented, not talented enough. Were he a chessplayer he might reach 2100. He would be a reasonable player, but he would never have the chance to play with the greatest talents of his generation.

  “Yes, Lisa,” he said, “is possible for feel music. Is advantage of music over chess: Fan not need any special understanding. We also see big disadvantage: Young man hear applause. He doesn’t know how good he is. He has no measure, no way for see hisself.”

  *

  From framed photographs, serious men guarded the quiet foyer of the Mechanics Chess Club. They wore dark suits and sober expressions. They are the Mechanics, Lisa thought, who built the bridges and played maneuvering chess. Igor pointed Lisa to some of his favorite photos: Jose Raul Capablanca in his visit to the club in 1916; Vassily Smyslov playing a simultaneous exhibition at the club in 1976. Aloud, Lisa realized, “It’s the same room, through all that time, it’s the same room they are all playing in.”

  “Yes, Lisa,” Igor responded. “Open door. Many world champion have played in room you about to play in.”

  Lisa opened the milky glass door and the violent noise whipped her. Pieces slammed the boards and unsuited men yelled stuff like, “Bow down, bitch. Show this wizard respect!”

  Tattered old Russians clapped Igor on the back. They called him Igor Vasilyevich, and pulled her teacher away from her. Their yellow teeth mouthed dirty jokes in Russian, and Igor laughed with them.

  Lisa was shoved to the perimeter of the big hall by the pretournament bustle. No one knew her. Alone, she was left to the photographs of old masters that circled the room. Underneath the picture of a really old guy, Lisa read, “Chess, like music and love, has the power to make men happy.” She saw Bobby. He couldn’t have been insane. He looks so breezy and free. She saw Karpov and Kasparov. She saw an old picture of Igor; he was laughing, with a red Santa face. Ruth wasn’t there.

  How come I’m not on the wall? Lisa wondered. I’m the Girls Champion! I’m Igor’s student! Then Lisa remembered her zero-four loss to Ruth. That defeat had demoted her to the low elevation of 1402. Lisa felt that her chess study had been like one of those rough sponges Jan sold at her store, to scour the skin into perfection. But instead of immaculate exfoliation, her face had slipped off like rice paper.

  There were about forty-five men in the big room, no women; Lisa looked down onto the wooden chess table where she would soon sit down against one of them. There was a built-in rectangular leather pouch for the dead pieces to the board’s side. Lisa touched the soft wood. Small dents and nicks revealed themselves to her fingertips. Lisa listened to the pieces falling onto the soft wood, rolling over the withered wood like thunderstorms, trying to engrave their memory. Those battles had left scars, like the ones on Igor’s face and arms.

  Lisa was paired against Vladislav Andreivich Tyomkin, one of Igor’s friends. In the moments before the game officially began, Vlad was cordial with Lisa, though he did not know she was Igor’s student. He encouraged her chess, and told her how he had attended a lecture by Mikhail Botvinnik when he was her age, at the Pioneer Palace. He’s only 1620, Lisa thought. I’m so much better than that. He’s old and weak. He’s going to miss stuff. I will just wait. Then I will punish him. I will take away his points and add them to my own. Then I will beat somebody else.

  Vlad outplayed Lisa out of the opening and began the squeeze. Lisa had been too cautious, playing as if she were the parent, waiting for the child to fall on its face. There was a vise upon her bicep, being tightened into inevitable explosion. A little rope held her big toe, holding her down. Desperate, Lisa remembered Ruth’s trick. Thinking Vlad would only understand her if she talked to him in Igor’s voice, she said in her deepest, most masculine tone: “I offer draw.”

  Vlad was offended. “Look at position,” he said. “Do you feel equal?”

  Lisa began making gestures of despair, as if she were about to resign: deep sighs with a palm to a downcast face. These motions did reflect how she felt, but they were also calculated exaggerations. Assuming victory, Vlad slipped. He was ready to shake her hand, and congratulate himself, when a variation escaped his net like a loose fish.

  The free toe freed Lisa’s arm, and her pieces knew the anger of liberated repression: All of the squares that Vlad didn’t need to control when his opponent was subjugated were now open wounds into which Lisa’s pieces drove salted blades of sarcasm. She sat on her feet, driving her preadolescent bosom over the board, and cruelly slammed her pieces into the weakened territory of the old Russian’s position.

  “Pizda,” Vlad muttered. Lisa wanted his disappointment. She wanted him to writhe. “Manda,” he breathed. Lisa felt the humid spittle of Vlad’s curses coat her knight that was already deep in his position. An old friend arose from the darkness to hand Lisa a pattern from the mate-in-twos. She grabbed the wet knight with her entire palm, and pushed Vlad’s warm saliva into the soil of ten thousand hands. The knight sounded like a whip when it landed, like it might break the old board.

  A crowd came to look upon the beautiful mate and the disgraced Russian. Some of the younger Americans crowned Vlad with “Ahh SNAP!” and “Ohhh DAMN!” Vlad looked Lisa in the eye, not shaking her hand, and said, “You think we play Nintendo? You will never beat me again, never!”

  THE TALK

  Walgreens was one of Jan’s enemies. Cheap, cheap, cheap; the checkout girl passed Lisa her new black notebook as if it were just another thing. It cost $4.37 with tax. A superfluous flap read “College Ruled” and had a picture of a fifteen-year-old boy playing an electric guitar. Lisa could have used one of the journals from Domestique, but those were all unlined—and Lisa had come to think of their milky blankness as deceitful. She needed lines, to write out the variations.

  Lisa wanted a written record of the special meeting Igor had arranged “to tell ze chess.” His words would give her notebook meaning, like the way Jan used to put colorful postcards on the front covers of her childhood journals. But this book would be free of life’s cloudiness, it would only be for chess.

  Just as Igor had pointed her to the three dimensions, he would now hint at what chess really was. Lisa knew that she wouldn’t understand all the words of her initiation; it would probably be like the secret hand gesture—the one Igor had given the attendant in the black suit at the music school. So she went in as a scribe, prepared to copy everything faithfully and to only think about it later.

  But the talk was a disaster. It began with an unfairness. Igor said that she had disrespected chess in her game with Vlad: the way she had offered a draw; the way she pretended that she was about to resign (Igor saw everything!); the way she hunched over the board; and especially the way she had slammed the pieces, trying to humiliate her opponent.

  “But did I break any rules?” Lisa demanded.

  Igor said that wasn’t the point. He said something about “sacred ceremony of game.
” And that today he would talk about “chess culture,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He was clearly taking Vlad’s side, just like when he took Ruth’s side when he forced her to resign her game. At least she had kicked Vlad’s ass and taken his rating points. She had moved up the hierarchy, one step closer to being on the wall of the Mechanics—that was chess culture.

  *

  On the paisley-covered table, now without a chessboard on it, Ruth put tea in Lisa’s cup of hot water and told her to watch the leaves open. The tea box said 洞庭碧螺春, Ruth called it Green Snail Tea. Alekhine was allowed to sit in Lisa’s lap. And Ruth’s tiny apartment suddenly seemed to Lisa like what Domestique was trying to sell: the orange tint of the tablecloth close to the ground where Alekhine rubbed himself; the slightly lighter path in the dark wood of the entryway where her shoeless feet had also walked; the lacy throw over the back of the sofa where Lisa had once slept. But Ruth said the apartment was not hers, she did not own it.

  This wasn’t how Lisa had imagined meeting Ruth again. She had wanted to return to Ruth’s apartment as the victor, so high above her level that she wouldn’t need to fret during the game, as if she would be dispensing wisdom from an overabundant orb of shining light. But now she needed Ruth’s help, to help her understand what chess was about. And it hurt Lisa to ask. Ringing Ruth’s doorbell felt like one of Igor’s exercises, self-inflicted and full of pain.

  But what exactly did she want to ask Ruth? Lisa realized too late that she didn’t really know. She kinda just wanted to ask, “What is chess?” But that sounded dumb. So Lisa asked Ruth, “What did your mom say when you started taking chess seriously?”

  “Oh, I started too late,” she said. “I was already in college, and I never had to tell her about it.”

  “Well, umm, why is it important to measure yourself in chess?”

  “What does Igor say?”

  It was so dumb. Why couldn’t Ruth just tell her what she thought? To draw her out, Lisa asked her the hot question that got everybody excited: “Why are all the top players men?”

  But Ruth solemnly answered, “What does Igor say?”

  “I dunno!” Lisa shouted. “He’s been in this country so long, and he still talks funny, having a momient with his opponient.”

  “Please listen, Lisa,” Ruth said. “I didn’t have a chess coach. And most everybody you play with here—they didn’t have a coach either. They didn’t have somebody for whom chess was part of their soul. For us, chess is a magical world that we can look into—but not a place we can live in. That’s why you need to follow Igor.”

  To refute Ruth, Lisa quoted Igor directly. She knew Ruth would think what he said was disgusting—even criminal. Then she would be on her side. And when she read his words from her chess notebook she did it in his accent. She was really good at imitating him:

  “Please understand Vlad, Lisa, man you play at Mechanics. We both learn chess at Pioneer Palace. Chess our fadder. He teach to be man. Chess is man’s strength. Chess is one man breaking anozer, fucking hym.”

  But Ruth didn’t condemn Igor. She instead thought for a long time, nodding, with a wise smile on her face. And then said: “I was cruel to you in our match, Lisa. I wanted to scrub you clean, to leave you with the best of my chess, and see my chess reflected in yours.”

  But chess couldn’t be just a cruel boxing match between men! Lisa had felt something so much deeper. Trying to get Ruth on her side, to give her some other way of looking at chess, Lisa said, “OK, OK, what about this: American men like womenz, zey tsink chess pastime. Zhey only know outside, same way girl tsink about clothes, never know own power.”

  Ruth was silent. It seemed to Lisa that they were both among the chessless—along with Jan and Ted, and that they always had been.

  “What else did he say?” Ruth asked.

  “Ugh. He talked to me forever about Fischer. But it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Read it to me, Lisa.”

  “Bobby go alone into game. Boards set up through apartment, he play many games against self. Bobby go out to Walden Pond, is American tradition. But Bobby went much further zan zis Pondboy. Pondboy, I find, only go tsree mile from Cambridge, Massachussets. Googlemap show, big disappointment.”

  Ruth told Lisa about trees, flowers and some guy Lisa had never heard of named Thoreau. But all that seemed pretty pointless. And if Igor thought the guy was a n00b then it’s not like she was going to care about what he said.

  Lisa had told Igor that she wanted to learn the Russian tradition, that she hated Americans. But Igor wouldn’t let her forget that she was, in fact, an American. He said he felt horror when he thought about chess from Lisa’s perspective. There were no predetermined crevices in the rock to use as footholds, just a smooth blank nothingness, as if the skin of someone’s face had grown over their mouth, nose and eyes, leaving a slippery pearl.

  “Igor is teaching me in the Russian tradition, Ruth. So whatever all that means, it’s not my problem.” But Ruth made her keep reading.

  “Already, I see zis Pondboy, zis Bobby Fischer, in you, Lisa. Bobby say Russians cheat hym. Bobby say CIA follow hym, make mind gyame wit hym. Fellow American not believe, zey say he crazy. When he win, zen zey like hym. Single man march against big Soviet. He make same sweet song of isolation Americans feel in career and marriage. Zey heroes wid hym. Until Bobby try to come home, after long time at pond and battlefield. Wounded, no longer able to fight, you understyand? He is loud, he make tsreats, he become homeless. Americans not help. History show Russians cheat (of course we cheat, what u tsink?). History show CIA file so big you need wheelbarrow for carry. Who is crazy? I ask you.”

  “This has nothing to do with me!” Lisa yelled at Ruth.

  Ruth turned her face away and confessed, “It’s true, I also didn’t do anything to help Bobby.” Then Ruth turned back to Lisa, and brought her moist, hazel eyes close to her face. “I think Igor is trying to say that you will be alone,” she said, “that you will have to make your own way.”

  “But Bobby went crazy. What does all this have to do with me?”

  “Listen, Lisa: We tell our kids that they should learn, that they should go to school. We tell them that thinking, reading and art are the highest achievements. And we construct palaces for them to pursue these things—a thought palace with the noblest marble floors, wood paneling and vaulted ceilings. But then we say that the palace is not real, we say that it’s only a training ground for the real world. We tell our children not to pursue music in earnest, or painting, or chess. We say they will not be able to earn a living with it. We tell them that they will not be able to become professionals with these arts.

  “It’s the biggest regret of my life, Lisa, that I believed them. Because if you ask the same people: What is important? What gives your life meaning? What gives you joy? You always get a fumbling toward the beautiful. A song. An insight. A harmony that not only explained their self to the world, but elevated them, for a timeless moment, beyond all the stuff around us that points to death.”

  Lisa began to cry, for this was the truth she was looking for. This was chess.

  *

  Lisa told Ruth about her new training regimen with Igor: No more two times a week; they would study every weekday. Igor said they would need all their energy to play through the games from the 1960 World Championship match between Mikhail Tal and Mikhail Botvinnik, played at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow. Lisa and Igor would give themselves as much time as the combatants. They would try to guess their moves. They would see not only if they were right, but they would compare the amount of time used on each decision to the time that had been noted by the Soviet scorekeepers. The time they spent would be a measure of the urgency and possibility they saw in the position. They would do this in one sitting, usually four to five hours, replicating the intellectual time control of 1960 which gave each player two and a half hours for the first forty moves.

  They would discuss their decisions the following day, meas
uring their justifications and reasoning against the notes Tal gives in his book on the match. They would learn how the contestants felt about their pieces, how they felt about each other. They would learn the situations they sought. As well as those they feared. They would participate in their failings. They would see that the best players make mistakes, a lot of mistakes. And they would learn to analyze those mistakes, to reconstruct their genealogies.

  But Lisa held back a big part of her training from Ruth. Because it made her feel like a cheat, and she didn’t want to be anything less than perfect in Ruth’s eyes. Lisa had struck a deal with Igor, and she was pretty sure she couldn’t fulfill her end of the bargain. In exchange for his teaching her the Russian tradition she would teach him the tradition of the journal. But the journal was private! That was the whole point. Her only hope would be finding grandma Lena’s journals. Maybe Lisa would be able to discover some kind of example in them.

  TAL AND BOTVINNIK

  Ted said that the mountain was too big, and that Lisa would never make it. “I’ve looked it up, it’s seven hundred and fifty feet of elevation gain. I couldn’t even do that.” But Jan’s bike fit Lisa. “And it’s way too dangerous, all those drunks going up to Inspiration Point, cutting corners way too fast. And you have such a steep descent.” But the helmet fit too. “Look, I’ll drive you over there.” No. “Let me at least follow you from behind.” No. I’m going alone.

  It was the same mountain in between Orinda and Berkeley that Igor had climbed over to meet her parents. Lisa still didn’t fully understand how Igor had got Jan to let her study with him. It had been a grandmaster move, the kind of strategic thinking that she would have to practice herself if she were to ever understand it.

  Lisa began on the side of the mountain where she had grown up, in Orinda. The birds sang in the still stickiness of the burning sun, and a humid breeze came off the nearby reservoirs, pushing the smells of the big leaf maple and the sticky monkey flower up her nose. Lisa imagined the dimensions of material, time and quality of position flowing all about her like cords and ropes. She could feel their electricity. And when she really concentrated she could see them, curving around her thoughts and whipping the future infinity she could not yet see. One clever move could arrange their paths and show that they were not separate things. They were one. Lisa’s ascent up the mountain would integrate all her variables into one robust motion: she would overwhelm the servility of the treadmills Jan wanted her to run; she would free her mind for the fourth hour of play; and she would now be able to go wherever she wanted, on her own.