Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  All of her stuff was gone, all of Jan’s stuff too. It seemed right that her domestic fantasies ended up looking like an empty warehouse. Lisa laid herself out on the bare wooden floor where her bed had been, and thought about her K-12 Northern California Girls Championship trophy. Four levels of marble elevated a golden queen all the way up to the height of her chin. That queen had hovered by Lisa’s bed. Her rising brass spires replaced the slouching plush bear Jan had given Lisa as a child; and she had hummed the same prayer when Lisa closed her eyes as when she awoke to its loyal shine in the morning sun: I am proof, Lisa, that you have a gift. When you study chess, and suffer, you are making sacrifices to me. I see your work, Lisa. And I will reward you. Together we will make a path. That trophy had qualified Lisa to play in the Polgar Girls tournament, and had bestowed her summer study with an unambiguous vector. Lisa was now a pilgrim, and she would soon consult an oracle in Lubbock, Texas. That oracle would tell her if she belonged to the chess elite.

  Jan said that there was no space for the trophy at their new apartment, and that the golden queen would have to go into storage. She had shoved her into a black plastic bag with a bunch of random stuff. Lisa saw the screws coming loose. Jan scratched the queen in her thoughtless haste, and Lisa saw the plastic underneath. Lisa imagined her golden queen suffering with other trophies in a shed. She would be pushed up against a tin sheet. Spiders would build their nests in her nooks and hollows.

  But no. Jan had probably lied. She hadn’t put the trophy into storage. She had thrown her trophy away, along with the rest of her lonely Orinda childhood.

  LUBBOCK

  Coming off the plane, Lisa thought she saw the word “chess” far down the terminal. She ran to it. All summer she had been like a metal detector, trying to find the game underneath what the Bay Area had thrown away. Now she read a glossy poster on a tripod: HERE AT TEXAS TECH WE PLAY CHESS! Behind the sign was a chess set whose pieces were the size of small children. Lisa jumped onto the oversized board where some non-chessplayers had assembled a nonsense position. She moved a bishop forcefully and shouted like Leo did at Turk and Market: “Check to the miserable king!” Lisa laughed heartily and began to right the pieces. “C’mon Igor,” she called, “let’s play a game.” But Igor hadn’t caught up to her.

  Suddenly alone, Lisa remembered her night in Orinda. The life-sized queen was as big as the trophy Jan had put in the black plastic bag. Up close and large, the bishop really was unhappy; the knight’s snarl was vicious. The pieces reproached Lisa: What are you doing on our board? You are like a little boy playing with ants when you move us. You think you are bigger, that you are in control. You interfere with our supply lines. You bring ants from a different nest to battle us.

  “Wanna play?” A thin Indian girl with glasses timidly stepped onto a corner of the board. Lisa turned to her, surprised to find this quiet creature in her world. The young woman leaned her weight upon the bald head of a white pawn and introduced herself as Saheli. Her dress had a modest elegance, with simple lines and cloth that looked handmade. “OK,” Lisa said.

  Saheli’s father came up to the edge of the board and began to hover over his daughter’s moves. He woggled his head as if he were speaking a language, conveying the muttering dissatisfaction he felt in his daughter’s play. Then he scolded her, “तुम अपना घोडा बोर्ड के किनारे पर क्यों लेके जाते हो ? तुम्हे पता है ना की विशी कभी ऐसे नहीं खेलता.”

  More girls came up; they must have all been on the same connecting flight. They must also be playing in the Polgar tournament, each the best player from their state. Lisa found herself tumbling along with them, first through baggage claim and then onto the curb where they were loaded up into silvery vans. Lisa’s vehicle soon became small in the darkness of many-laned highways circling the city. Distant neon signs flirted precut meat, of various slabs and sauciness. But Lisa didn’t notice. She and Saheli exchanged ratings and specialized opening knowledge. They talked about specific positions, without a set. Saheli talked about the flaws in her game, and whom she feared the most. Lisa bragged, “Right now I’m ranked seventy-ninth of all the women in the country. But if you take away the Asian and Jewish last names I’m already number nine!”

  Lisa discovered that Saheli was driven by pursuits that weren’t chess. The fifteen-year-old from Georgia made sure to get an A in every class. Her father trained her for something called the Math Olympiad. And he was already taking her around the country to visit the top colleges and universities.

  Lisa felt many emotions next to this striver. Her own deep remorse at having failed to achieve at school condemned Saheli: Why do you do what they tell you? Why wouldn’t you give everything to chess? That’s why your rating isn’t as high as mine. But Lisa felt flattered that this accomplished young woman was a friend and peer. And she looked out to the other girls, seated across several tables at a restaurant called Ribs! They are the best, Lisa thought. And I am sitting with them.

  Lisa didn’t understand Saheli’s math thing. But she got the impression from Saheli and her father that they thought math and chess were somehow bound together. Lisa wished Jan could see her chess as if it were math. If she did, maybe she would also bring her a special dish in a tiffin, like Saheli’s father had for his daughter.

  *

  Lisa’s round-one opponent sat uncomfortably in the parched branches of a scraggly piñon tree’s crown. She had scuttled her covered wagon with the intent of scrambling up this last sad bastion. The representative from South Carolina, rated 890, didn’t know how to control her horses, how to use her reins. Far away from her lush homeland, Lisa stood in front of Ashley Rosedale’s tree, not with a rusty ax, but with flamethrowers and missiles.

  I hate you, Ashley, with your flouncy blond hair and fancy clothes. You haven’t made the sacrifices. You don’t even have enough chess culture to resign this position. You are an insult to chess. I’m going to push my pawns all the way into you and then turn them into knights. With five knights, I’m going to give you the Rodeo Mate.

  *

  At the lunch buffet, Lisa saw two Asian girls giggle at the wiggliness of their food. Lisa quickly flensed a rectangular section of mac ’n’ cheese and shouted, “Hey! Look at this.” Lisa thudded her food down onto her plate. As she had hoped, the structure of her casserole wobbled like a tall building in an earthquake. Everyone saw Lisa’s trick, and everyone laughed. Triumphant, Lisa repeated her marvel with a square of green jello whose fruit pieces floated like little bricks without enough comrades. Holding the two artistic achievements high, Lisa danced them back to her table of new friends.

  The sugar and white carbs shot through the young throng, and the girls convulsed into silliness. They gave each other names; Lisa became The Wrangler, Saheli Deep Blue. They soiled and spilled upon the tablecloth. Dr. Pepper was snorted through nostrils. Eyelids were turned back to reveal the animal they all shared.

  *

  The representative from Maryland, rated 1050, struggled with the strong waves of the Pacific Ocean. Lisa had a K-9 unit that wouldn’t let her come ashore and the Alaskan current gripped her. But Tracy Zuo wouldn’t resign, and Lisa patiently waited for her to die of hypothermia. Lisa was friendly to Tracy after the game, and her advice was startlingly simple: “Don’t gimme your toys!” Lisa knew this phase of chess from her own experience. And she muted her own three-dimensional view of the game for Tracy. She knew that Tracy had to first appreciate the value of material objects, to know how to effectively manipulate them, before she could reevaluate the clinginess she felt toward them.

  That evening, a pizza party was held at a place called the Main Event. Jan had brought Lisa to many playhouses like this one, to parties with other kids. Lisa remembered bearing the heavy bowling ball to the dumb black line and shrugging it off, like an unwanted child into life. “Gutterball!” the boys would always shout. Fine, Lisa would s
cowl to herself. That’s who I am then. I don’t care about your stupid pins anyway.

  But that evening, at the Main Event, the girls loaded the air hockey puck with a wad of gum at the rim, hoping for an ecstatic spin. They gave stories to the pool balls, finding secret alliances among the anonymous spheres. They enchanted the bowling ball with a spell before pushing it down the lane with their socked feet. And they made fun of the boys who took their video games so seriously.

  Cheese and bread burned into one another, and the black smell bit into the hairless nostrils of the young girls like nicotine. They shot high above themselves, eating more and more of the divine pizza. Too powerful to imagine sleep when they returned to the hotel lobby, they sent Igor and the other adults up to their rooms. Go to your drowsy books and TV screens. Once free, Lisa said, “Hey guys, let’s get some Cokes!” Lisa wanted to subvert Igor, that domineering bastard. And she wanted a Coke.

  The Asian girls for whom a Coke would have been a rebellion did not get one. Instead, they ate Sang Lee’s dark chocolate. They said it was the good stuff.

  “Hey Saheli, Let me buy you a Coke, c’mon.” Lisa wanted her friends to share in the terrible guilt and accusation Igor had put upon her. She could agree to exercise. She felt that in her body. She could feel her body being molded, and punished into a better form. But it was obvious that Igor was being a jerk about the Cokes and food. I mean, it’s just a Coke, right? And she wanted to get lit with her friends, sharing this truth.

  Saheli politely said no. But Lisa kept pressing. “It’s not pure,” Saheli finally said. Lisa and the four North Asian girls found this both fascinating and silly, while the two other Indian girls, Eesha and Bodda, woggled their heads. “What’s that thing you guys do with your head?” the North Asian girls and Lisa asked. The Indian girls told their new friends about the head woggle. Lisa asked many questions about their Brahmin ways. She wanted to be pure, and belong to an intellectual people who distanced themselves from the muddle of the everyday world.

  Lisa said, “It’s like you guys have a tradition. I don’t have one. That’s why Igor is giving me the Russian tradition.” The girls became silent.

  Bodda asked, “Is he like a master of something? All the coaches ask him questions, as if he has some kind of power.”

  Lisa said that Igor was the strongest player ever. And that he was teaching her his secrets. The girls all wanted to know more about her teacher, and gathered around her. But Lisa was shy, and said that she couldn’t tell them the whole truth at one time; she wasn’t strong enough yet. She had to tell them in pieces.

  Trying to impress, Lisa told them how Igor could play blindfold, without a set, and that he was helping her carve her own inner board. She told them about Tal and the mysticism of Dionysus. Lisa felt like somebody, with the undivided attention of her gifted friends.

  But Lisa wanted more. She wanted to be their equal. She said, “Igor taught me how the central squares are heavier, and how the wavelengths of chess bend around them, the way light from a distant galaxy bends around the sun. It’s mathematical.”

  “Wow,” Sang Lee said. “Like the field equations? Mass tells space/time how to curve and curved space/time tells mass how to move?”

  “Precisely so,” Lisa answered. Desperately hoping her shameful ignorance would not be discovered, Lisa began telling her new friends about her deepest and most vulnerable experience. She said that she felt the pieces as parts of her soul. And that she talked to them.

  Saheli, usually quiet, became excited: “Chaturanga!” she shouted. Everyone stared at her in disbelief as she got down on the floor and did something like a pushup. “It means the four supports in Sanskrit, you know, Old-Indian.”

  But the girls, led by Lisa, said, “Umm, no, that’s a pushup.”

  Saheli responded, “No, no, it’s not a pushup. It’s a position of the yoga where you feel your four limbs and their stretch through the body. You feel and strengthen yourself.” Her audience didn’t understand what she was trying to say. “Chaturanga is the original name for chess,” she continued, “named after the four supports of the army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots.”

  The group shouted, “But there are no elephants in chess!”

  “But there are,” Saheli said. “The infantry became the pawns, the cavalry the knights, the elephants the bishops, and the chariots the rooks.”

  “What about the queen, she’s the most powerful piece!” the group shouted.

  “But the queen was not the queen, she was the raja’s adviser. And the adviser could only move one square.” After a silence, Saheli continued quietly, “Your teacher is very wise, Lisa, he knows the secrets of the ancient Indian tradition; he knows that chaturanga is yoga for the soul. Yoga isn’t just about improving your body, and chess is not just an exercise for your brain.”

  “That’s so Hogwarts!” Michelle Quan said. “And so long ago, maybe like two hundred years.”

  “More like two thousand!” Saheli answered. “And now chaturanga has come back to India, and Anand is World Champion.”

  “Hogwarts is a school,” Lisa said. “And school sucks. Chess is much deeper and more beautiful than school.”

  Lisa felt she had said too much, and blushed. Now she was the outsider, sitting next to the strivers.

  Saheli looked into Lisa’s eyes and quietly said: “School can be pretty dumb. Right? I mean it doesn’t really seem like the teachers are interested in what they’re teaching. It’s always about some test. Most of the other kids are hopeless. And the boys are always so dumb.”

  After a pause, Lisa asked: “So why do you do it then?”

  “It’s only for a little while,” Saheli said. The other girls nodded. “Then we’ll go to the best colleges in the world. ’Til then we’ll prove ourselves at the Math Olympiad, on the violin, in the spelling bee and at chess.”

  Lisa was overwhelmed, and she shouted, “You play the violin too?!”

  “Not so well, but Christine wins all the competitions.”

  Lisa looked over to Christine Chen—she had been sitting right beside her the entire time, peering quietly. “That’s Hogwarts!” Lisa sighed. She had wanted to pull up her long sleeves, so sticky and wet in the warm Texas night, and show her new friends the scars on her arms. But she kept them covered, kind of like how Jeffrey hid his war tattoos. She wanted to tell them that she sucked at school. But she admired them so much that she couldn’t. And she resolved to try again, at her new school, starting next week.

  *

  The alarm clock between her bed and Igor’s said 2:25 A.M. It was the middle of the night, and there was no way she could get enough rest for the critical games the next day.

  He was still awake. Lisa could tell; when he slept the thick hairs that dangled from his nose like ropes made his breath sound like an air purification system. “Igor,” Lisa whispered. “I fucked up again. I never do the right thing. It’s so late . . .”

  Igor cut her off and said, “I hope you make nice time with new friends, Lisa.” Lisa needed that. To her, if felt like she had yet to rise far enough in the theocratic hierarchy to have a papal line of communication with chess. Igor had to absolve her, because somewhere in a black garbage bag, a queen on top of a trophy was accusing Lisa of sinning against her. That austere bitch was saying that Lisa had failed, by not getting enough sleep, by not properly respecting her.

  *

  Lisa faced Christine Chen in round three the next morning. At 1600, she was stronger than Lisa’s first two opponents. Chen employed a turtle-like defensive structure which Lisa had to carefully turn over by hopping around the vulnerable spots like a fox, forcing Christine to switch her center of gravity, all the while taking care that a vicious counterbite didn’t grab a paw. And Lisa eventually did turn Christine. She showed patience.

  Winning, Lisa felt her chess as a thousand cords of threaded rebar, binding upper decks of freely flowing tactical fancy and speculation to an unshakable deep earth of positional understanding. L
isa had ripped out her inner muddle of hatred and estrangement; in its place she now beheld a transparent orb of vision and power. She had overcome herself and realized the fantasy that her journal had failed: she could understand the interrelationships around her, and guide them into an ideal vision of herself. The other girls could be clever. But they had never suffered enough to excavate their own view. They followed the expectations of others.

  *

  By winning three games in a row, the pairing for round four was unavoidable. Lisa would have to play the number one seed, Zarra Mikhalevskaya. Igor said that the chess world is small, and that he was good friends with Zarra’s grandfather, Big Mikh. He said that Lisa would one day have a chance to stay with a Brooklyn family like Zarra’s—to taste the dark Russian bread that doesn’t know it is poor, to sleep on Zarra’s rollaway bed in the makeshift living room; to witness a family for whom chess and literature are not foreign pursuits which require tournaments and schools to give them direction and a measure of success.

  Lisa’s chess felt transparent to Zarra’s thought from the very first moves. Because the intentions of her pieces were so trivial, so small, Zarra could see through her. Lisa could predict none of Zarra’s moves. After each one, staring at it, Lisa had the sensation of an otherworldly grasping that crowded her pieces. But she could never see or understand how Zarra moved through her. But I’ve done nothing wrong! Lisa complained, as if to Igor. She recalled Zarra’s lineage: Her grandfather, Big Mikh, had learned the Soviet tradition in Belarus before moving to Israel. And she heard Igor say, “Zarra know this tournament not real chess. She study with father and grandfather.”