Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Lisa gave herself four hours for the eleven miles to Berkeley and seven hundred and fifty feet of elevation gain. A gentler way for her to get to her first Russian chess lesson after Jan said she wouldn’t even take her to the train would have been to ride Jan’s bike three miles to the Orinda station along some flat roads. But Igor had said that her moves needed to be “for économique.” He said that the moves of average players have only one idea behind them. Like a dog chasing after a ball, their chess is full of just one greedy intention.

  Lisa had to get off the bike and walk up the steep parts. But she didn’t give up. After her experience with Igor’s stupid arm exercise, Lisa expected a higher perspective on the other side of pain.

  At last, Lisa came to the top. The noon sun was high and her vision vast: the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyscrapers of San Francisco, the Berkeley Pier, the Berkeley Public Library. Igor’s garden was down there somewhere. The cold wind and fog of the other side of the mountain, of the vast Pacific Ocean in front of her, penetrated her sweat-soaked clothes

  Lisa was drawn to a metallic dome that sunned itself like a heavy breast on a concrete podium. She pressed one of the oversized buttons, and water splashed against her forehead. Lisa drank deeply from the bosom-like fountain and began to feel her weak legs refreshed, her mind cleansed from all the torment that followed her. Surely, Igor had also drank from this same source.

  In her spongy wet, Lisa briefly experienced the claim that we are in fact watery beings. She had pushed it all out, to begin again. The cold wind felt like an open refrigerator door and began to blow Lisa’s fluid state dry. Pressed into the straps of her unicorn backpack Lisa could see the salty outline of her thick shoulders emerging.

  Jan’s damn pool story kept coming back to Lisa. She had heard it so many times already. When Jan was Lisa’s age, she would spend every summer day at her rich friend’s house. Boys were drawn to the clear blue water of Jennifer’s pool. There were brightly colored rings to be fetched, beach balls and poolside games, way down there in the smoggy warmth of the South Bay. Jennifer’s mom, Patsy, brought them iced tea. Jan had always wanted a pool then, and she thought it was just such a waste that Lisa never invited anyone over to their backyard pool.

  Climbing over the mountain was a way to completely overwhelm Jan’s weight loss agenda. Until now, Lisa had shared Jan’s view of cyclists. From the high windshield of their SUV, she and Jan looked down on the fragile and naked bodies whose flesh Jan could rip open with a momentary lapse of concentration. Ted had bought Jan the bike as part of a long series of cruel fitness experiments: Bikram yoga, Boot Camp, Insanity. But Jan had never ridden her beautiful Colnago road bike. And now Lisa would ride out into Jan’s view of danger.

  *

  Ruth had prepared the games of the Tal-Botvinnik 1960 match as a series of flash cards for Lisa and Igor. They would only be able to see the move played and how much time each player used, but not the entire sequence of the game. Igor and Lisa both kept a separate scoresheet on which they would record their guess as to how Tal and Botvinnik would play each position and how much time they spent thinking about it.

  Igor chose the first moves of game one quickly, as if he already knew what they were.[3] Lisa chastened his haste; with a grave look of professional disapproval she said, “C’mon Igor, this is serious!” Ruth’s light blue and pink flash cards seemed to blush in Igor’s big and callused hands, her feminine cursive right up against his scars and hair—but Igor said nothing, and the white knight and black bishop that had already been removed from the game clicked around in his big hands like a carousel.

  Lisa predicted almost all of game one incorrectly and suffered from muttering dissatisfaction. On move seven, Lisa wanted to play Nf3. Tal played Qg4, disregarding the most parochial rule dramatized in her new favorite movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. Lisa got angry during the following day’s reflective session, and she shouted a line from that movie at Igor: “Did you bring your queen out early, Josh, even though Bruce warned you time and again about that?”

  Igor said, “Knight f3 bourgeois move.”

  But Lisa didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean.

  Igor read from Tal’s notes: “After Knight f3, the game is sufficiently complicated, but insufficiently sharp.”

  “Lisa,” Igor explained, “this man Tal for truth Soviet, but not Russian. Was Latvian, small country, much proud anger. Russia call him Dionysus.”

  Then they came to the injustice of 11.Kd1. Tal’s pieces were still trying to get out of bed, the position’s dykes were beginning to break, and he moves his king—not even to the side of the board—but to where his queen had just stood.

  Lisa said, “They played so badly fifty years ago, I would’ve beaten Tal in that game.” And, “At least he was a strong enough player to put a question mark after 11. King d1.”

  Igor read from Tal’s notes: “11.Kd1? Twenty years ago, a chess commentator would cringe in horror at such a move. At the very beginning of the game, the white king starts out on a journey! . . . White prefers to mask his development plans for the white knight for the moment, keeping the possibility of either going to e2 or f3, and leaving the f1–a6 diagonal open. Losing the right to castle essentially had no meaning since, first of all, his opponent has not developed his pieces sufficiently and, second of all, black’s own king was uncomfortable on e8.”

  “Whaat!?” Lisa cried. She wanted to throw the board, to hurt the pieces.

  “Maybe Dionysus big joke make with question mark,” Igor said.

  “But it’s Such a BAD move!”

  “OK,” Igor said. “We make for refute.”

  Lisa and Igor then conducted war with Tal. Lisa was so committed to punishing him that she allowed Igor to sacrifice a whole piece for only very distant-looking compensation.[4] They didn’t even get a pawn for the knight who gave himself to explode white’s central pawns. They only got Tal’s king scrambling around in a permanent purgatory.

  The analysis session was supposed to last only one day. But game one had too many questions, and Lisa needed to whip the river of Tal’s criminality. She wanted proof, a clear variation that ended with Tal hung from a tree limb. Igor let her use his big hands to punish Tal, and to follow the rivulets to the capillaries of Tal’s unjust thought.

  Finally, when they had exhausted themselves upon game one, after four days, Igor walked Lisa down the stairs of Berkeley Public, to the midsummer light of her long ride home, and said, “I think you interesting that Tal make question mark after King d1. I think you he try for something difficult say. Maybe only possible in joke.”

  Lisa shouted back, “So he’s contradicting himself?! Why would he say a move is bad by giving it a question mark and then defend it? And, if it’s a joke, what’s so funny about it?”

  Igor smiled. “For truth, never given big thought about it. But I think you Dionysus wish for laugh at tradition of question mark. He wish for laugh at truth.”

  Chess was the only place Lisa had ever known truth, when she solved a problem or felt the harmony of her pieces. She certainly hadn’t found truth in her journal or in life. Laughing at the truth of chess was bullshit, as wrong as Tal’s moves were unjust. It was a goddamn heresy.

  Igor continued: “Game for big Dionysus aesthetic ideal. He break rule in opponent mind. First bring queen out, then king go to square queen was on. Next developing move is for put knight on e2—precise commitment Dionysus try for avoid when he play king d1. King then return to home square. What next? Amateur development of rooks from wing. For final, after black try for whole game evict white queen from king side, Tal volunteer for queen move back to starting position. Big laugh that undeveloped light-square bishop finish game.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” Lisa said. “Frohlich would give him Equinox.”

  *

  It upset Lisa that Tal took the bishop with the pawn in game three. His position would have been so whole and normal if he would have just taken the bishop with his queen
.

  Lisa’s mind wandered, and she imagined what Igor’s life as a drunk must have been. There were Greyhound stations, loud semitrucks and it was always dusk. He would hurt himself. The next morning he would have to tape his glasses back together. And she could hear him ask, “Uh, excuse, what city is?”

  Lisa thought about the many times she had cut her arms with a razor. She also hurt herself. The dark blood would pulse out of her. And she would feel better afterward, relieved, as if her grief had found a way out.

  Lisa sat some time in silence with Igor, pondering the public pain of Tal’s decision. Then she said, “Please kill me, I don’t care anymore. That’s what Tal is saying when he takes the bishop with the pawn. Botvinnik gets angry. The rules get angry. And the shark comes. That’s how the bloody mess starts. Pretty soon no one knows who they are anymore.”[5]

  *

  A decision came in game twelve that Igor made very quickly. With a laughing smile he hid his sloppy Cyrillic handwriting behind his hairy hand. Lisa wanted to scream at him, “You can’t know! There are too many plans that Tal can choose from!”

  But the silence of their practice forced her inward. Lisa tried to imagine how she would play the position. But she had no idea. Then she tried to see the board as Tal might. She saw his bishops, how they were pointing at the white king’s future home. Then she felt what she later read in Tal’s notes: “The bishops smile at the white king.”

  Lisa saw that all of black’s pieces could attack the king—except the rook on a8. She could not share in the bishops’ gaze. In a flash, Lisa saw the kind of madness that happens when we are frank about our intentions. She saw what Tal and Igor had seen. The knight would decentralize and take the pawn, 13...Nxa5. The knight knew full well that the side of the board was not her proper place. She was getting out of the way of the queenside rook—she wanted to go to a6 and then swing all the way over to the other side of the board, to h6 or g6, to stare at the white king. The f6 knight would also have to get out of the way.

  Thing was, even if the queenside rook did complete her journey to the kingside, she wouldn’t really threaten anything concretely. The bully rook would simply look at the white king. She would share in the purpose of her friends. The path of murder is honest, Lisa thought. But you won’t be able to live as your mom and school want you to. They will hurt you, for breaking their rules. And Botvinnik made Tal pay.[6] The discoordination of Tal’s rooks was when the boys shouted and wouldn’t let her speak; the weakness of Tal’s back rank was her fear of getting depantsed in public; the busted shell of pawns around his king was when school had stopped making sense.

  Igor called Botvinnik the headmaster of the Soviet School. To Lisa, he was like the kids who always did what they were supposed to. They didn’t think for themselves. They were phonies, because they grabbed at what other people wanted them to be. And they called their earnest never-give-up bullshit “character.” Strive, be all somebody else wants you to be. Lisa knew that they would always have the advantage, closed and protected in the warm garments of success. To them, Lisa and the few other people who weren’t phonies would always be the wounded, raving about something that the people with character would soon declare illegal.

  *

  Lisa found the hustlers at Turk and Market. Every Tuesday night, after her game at the Mechanics, she would go to them. She would stay there as long as she could. Then she would lie to Jan, telling her when she arrived home on the last train that her game at the Mechanics had gone the distance. Lisa played blitz chess with the hustlers. Each player got three minutes for the whole game.

  Lanh owned the equipment. From his heavily laden shopping cart the slender Vietnamese man would first unpack and set up his foldout tables, then he would wait for the hustlers to rent his chipped plastic pieces, along with his thin placemat boards and his ancient analog clocks. Igor’s friend, Vlad, sometimes made a couple dollars there.

  “You want me little Lisa, you want me?” The hustlers called to her. “Well, you gonna have to get me, ooh, now you let me in, gave me the penetration. NO! I’m not going anywhere, sugar, now, oh, I’m feeling it. Take That, You Little BITCH!” Lisa liked being called “bitch.” She liked saying it too: “bitch, bitch, bitch.” The queen was a fucking bitch. She’d fuck your shit up.

  Like young boys who disappear into video games, clean-shaven men in suits would enter Lanh’s world. The n00bs in suits rightly saw—as spectators—that many atrocities of logic were committed in Lanh’s encampment. And they wanted to punish these mistakes. But when the red blood began to flow they were never able to escape the hustle. The demons of street life surrounded the peaceful equanimity of these successful men: The pieces inhaled the diseases of Market street, scratched their balls and banged out four-letter words on hungry metal pots. Bad mojo flowed into these men who took the elevators up into the tall buildings of the financial district, and a couple dollars trickled back down.

  With much practice, Lisa learned to only hear the percussion of the clock being slapped and the scraping sound that the unfelted bottoms of Lanh’s pieces made against his thin paper boards. And she made some money, lots of money.

  Lanh built his fortress every night. Up against a massive wind-blocking building, he leaned two of his plastic tables. The third wall would be formed by his shopping cart. Because he was a careful man (who had enemies—many of the hustlers didn’t like the way he did business, thought he charged too much), he would always tie himself to his shopping cart with a rope so it wouldn’t get stolen.

  Leo, who said he had a rating of 2200, was the man at the top. His pewter face was like one of Lanh’s knights, broken by several falls to the pavement and then smoothed over by many eager fingers. The few times Lisa beat Leo she felt his waning life force flow into her. She took the chess from the veteran soldier’s legless body, packed into his small wheelchair like an old finger into a wedding ring. Lisa cherished the grimace Leo made as he passed her his worn dollar over Lanh’s table.

  Lisa was the only person the hustlers didn’t mind giving their money to. Lanh even let Lisa play for free. The men said that times were slow when she wasn’t there. The foot traffic needed to be drawn in. They liked it when Lisa talked smack and won. The crowd that gathered would always bring more people, especially the suckers who needed to escape from whatever world they were coming from.

  All of the experienced chessplayers, especially Ruth, disapproved of Lisa playing with the hustlers. They called the play of Lanh’s clients cheap, and artificial, without any kind of depth. They said their minds would coarsen Lisa’s. They worried over her, and threatened to call Jan. But Lisa had seen Josh play against the Washington Square Park hustlers in her favorite movie; that’s where Bobby had also played. And Ruth had lent Lisa her autographed copy of Chess Bitch; that book was all about women who played chess with dirty men.

  *

  But Tuesday was just one day in the week. Lisa wanted to raise her rating, she wanted to rise in the hierarchy. To prove herself, Lisa played in all the weekend tournaments. For a tournament in Palo Alto Lisa took the train to Fremont and then biked across the Dumbarton Bridge. For a tournament at a McDonalds in Vallejo she followed an industrial road past a refinery to cross the Carquinez Bridge. In late July, when the only tournament happened to be way up north in Sebastopol, Lisa took a bus to Santa Rosa and then biked the seven and a half miles to the tournament site.

  Lisa found the Ethiopian men who played rated games at Colonial Donut in Oakland. She would follow their example, and slowly sip on a small cup of coffee for hours. After she kicked their asses, she would listen to tales of the old country and learn about the food their wives cooked for them. Sometimes she would buy a maple syrup donut from the Chinese lady who was always there; it dripped a little, but it sounded healthy.

  Lisa was not alone. Ruth always knew where she was. And the men she played against wanted to help her. With broad smiles of American benevolence, the weekend warriors told Lisa that they wanted to suppor
t women’s chess. They gave her free rides and meals. They shared their stories with her: the fish that got away, the time I played Seirawan at the Last Exit when we were both thirteen in Seattle, Bobby Fischer’s whores in Budapest. There were rarely any women at the tournaments. The ones that did show up weren’t any good. Ruth had stopped playing competitively, and Lisa never saw any of the girls from the Northern California Championship at the tournaments.

  People sometimes made nasty comments, about her and Igor, as if they were lovers or something. But only dumb Americans said that kind of stuff. They didn’t know anything about the Russian tradition or pure thought.

  By the end of July, Lisa had over two hundred Facebook friends; nearly all of them were chessplayers—Lisa counted. Later in the summer, when Lisa was trying to find a ride and accommodation for the Central California Open in Fresno, she simply posted “Fresno?” as her Facebook status and more than twenty people posted to her wall with encouragement and offers of help.

  FRESNO

  Jan said that men were going to come to the house and take everything away. Jan would lose Domestique and the house. Ted would lose his TV and his collection of old Mercedes cars. Lisa would lose Jan’s bicycle. They were going to have to move, and Lisa would have to go to a public school. Jan was sorry. The economy was bad and the big-box stores were taking over.