Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  The two sat down to the ancient game from 1858. They gently reassured Igor’s magnificent pieces, stroking them to the center of their squares. Lisa’s face no longer wore the exaggerated pursed expression that Americans commonly make when they imagine themselves concentrating, the face of someone about to get punched. Lisa’s face was open, prepared to attune itself to the choir of the conversation. Her hands passed playfully amongst the pieces as they moved into the game and began to feel the harmony of Morphy’s thought. Her fingers knew to caress the derivative notes, and drive the dominant theme like a screw into Igor’s hand-carved wooden board. Lisa felt the Duke’s sorrow, and heard him crying at the mouth of his kingside cave, begging his pieces to get out of the way. At the beginning of the summer, the formidable material value of those pieces would have walled Lisa’s perspective into a miserly smallness. Now she felt the tingling preciousness of time, and she could feel that the Duke’s lack of it was transforming his kingside into negative space. Morphy didn’t need to control it. The Duke’s own overabundant resources blocked his escape. And she could taste the geometrical justice of the Duke’s death, pressed up against the sweaty thighs of his inert vassals.

  Lisa suddenly saw how this game was a reflection of Igor’s better self. On move eight, Morphy and Igor decide not to grab the b7 pawn. Taking the material would be the safe path, to tax the world and use the proceeds to build armies of suppression. In Morphy’s refusal to finish off his inferior opponent with workmanlike opportunism, Igor saw his own refusal to allow his superior mind and physical body to easily win against an inferior world. And the geometrical mate of a lonely bishop and rook up against the vast remains of an uncoordinated army offered a sublimated hope to Igor’s impoverished lifestyle.

  *

  Igor met her outside the library. Lisa knew that it was his hidden chess board that gave the garbage bag tied to Igor’s back its square shape. But her new classmates would not. Lisa feared their taunts, and imagined them saying, “Yo, Lisa, saw you with the homeless mutant ninja turtle. He showin’ you some moves?”

  “Igor, it’s September, it’s not gonna rain,” she said. “Why do you have a garbage bag around your board?”

  “Yes, is for truth. But board old friend.”

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  “For truth,” Igor said. “Arun give Igor and Lisa room. We now go there every day.”

  They again marched up the hill, toward the UC campus clocktower that loomed over the entire East Bay.

  “Why do we need a room?” Lisa asked.

  “We now look at Lisa’s chess, need private.”

  Fear came to Lisa. She remembered the many times in Fresno and Lubbock that men had approached Igor to ask how they might improve their game. Perhaps they imagined the big man would offer them a minor adjustment, like a yoga instructor pushing a pose into proper alignment; they would walk away straighter, cleansed of all the niggling twistiness that worried their chess. But Igor’s scarred face would always look down on their hopes and say, “You must study own game.” The petitioners would walk away sadly. They would mutter “of course” or “you’re right.” But it was clear to Lisa that they never would. They would never be strong enough to look at their chess. Leave the presence of my master, she would silently command these men. You are neither worthy, nor capable of being taught. Go watch ESPN.

  But now Lisa felt the brutality of Igor’s heartless inspection upon her. Dank orangutan hair spread from his forearms onto his hands. He was capable of killing. Is natural, he might say as he pulled arms from their sockets. He wouldn’t remember his victims; to him they would be forgotten like grasses on the side of yesterday’s road.

  Lisa’s nascent chess infrastructure had just been recognized with such an elevated form of praise that she had to sign for it. Her streets and avenues had dignity! Finally, there was something in her that others thought was good. The prosperous inertia that unfolded her streets should be allowed to create itself.

  Lisa stammered, “But we haven’t finished the Tal-Botvinnik match yet!”

  “You know,” Igor said. “I notice that when man and woman together they always wish for talk about another couple. How do they live? What choices they make? It is a pleasure for consider own self in lives of other. Is mirror without failure, guilt, and accusation.”

  Lisa followed Igor’s worn sneakers into the Morrison Library. She avoided the contrast between the garbage-bagged chess board and the luxury of cork herringbone floors flowing up into fine wood paneling. If she just kept looking down, no human gaze could scald her conscience. Her eyes found the worn cherrywood tables. Easily incorporating generations of flaked skin into their soft durability, they reminded her of Polgar’s chess pieces.

  At the far end they turned left and ascended a tight staircase, which was like a ladder that had been left leaning for so long that it had grown into the building. With room for only one person at a time, each step had two precisely rounded footfalls gently massaged into the supple wood. Lisa imagined an age of wise women who wore wool socks. They left their shoes by the entrance, as she had done at Ruth’s house.

  Above, they found themselves in a narrow gallery, able to look down on the library. From bookshelves built into the dark wood paneling, quaint pages and bindings of an ancient tradition whispered reassurance to the earnest faces lit up behind computer screens. The students sprawled on leather couches in acrobatic gestures to an unconcerned and smug sense of belonging. They loved the upholstered bosom of this church so much they didn’t want to go home to sleep.

  Lisa tried to imagine herself underneath the green Morrison lampshades that softly caressed the natural beauty of their tables’ grains. Her thoughts shouldn’t have to burn underneath the stinging brightness of the Public Library and large tournament halls. She should also be natural, nurtured underneath this maternal light. The light she had known wanted her to hurry; it never encouraged her to stay. And this difference felt to Lisa like one of the irreparable scars on her arm. Those scars announced that she would never be whole, or one of the chosen. And that sense of weakness, of the inability to ever find completion, made her dread of the coming inspection of her chess all the more overwhelming.

  Arun had promised that they would find a trapdoor right after the third bookcase. It was so small! Three feet by three feet, it looked like the opening to a garbage chute. Lisa was eager to get in there, worried that someone was going to come up the stairs and start asking questions. Igor said, “You open. Combination long: 43252003274489856000. Then hit pound.” On her knees, Lisa hurried to set the numbers into the electronic pad and get inside. Igor had to unstrap his board and slip it through the hypotenuse of the entrance. He was too big there, like a rat who has to dislocate his bones to negotiate all the narrow spaces behind your cabinets, vents and heating systems.

  Lisa and Igor felt with their hands along the greasy wall for a light switch. The room was musty, and smelled like a gerbil’s cage. When Igor finally pulled on a string dangling from the ceiling, crinkly edges of candy wrappers caught the light of the solitary bulb as pieces of metal catch the rising sun: Kit Kat, Snickers, Jolly Rancher.

  “What kind of place is this?” Lisa wondered out loud.

  “Arun say only few mathematicians can break code. For normal is honor for come at late night, need also break Morrisson Library code.” Amidst the trash they found snippets of paper with problems written on them like:

  “Say you have a book with at least 100 pages, prove that there will be two pages, like say from pages 5 to 21, between which the total number of words is divisible by 100.”

  Lisa found a problem with an answer whose solution ended with: “Q.E.D. gimme a real problem you little bitch.”

  A chess board was set up in the middle of the room. Countless hours of blitz chess had rubbed the faces off the pieces, leaving them with the pleasing feel of rounded beach stones. Arun, or someone, had left a position for them. “White to play and draw,” it said.

  It
would be easy. She would prove herself more than worthy of this room. She would show the composer of the problem to be a little bitch. But she soon found the march of black’s a and b pawns to be relentless; and that nothing much seemed to change with 1. Rd1 Kh2 2.Rd2 Kg1 3.Rd1 Bf1. Nothing. Lisa began anxiously banging her head against the lack of options to even consider. Nullity.

  A half hour passed; Igor sat still. A full hour passed; tangy chemical salts from rancid potato chips floated like dust about the chessplayers. The problem was a door that wouldn’t open for her. It was the SAT score she would never get. She wasn’t smart enough. Cold and indifferent, the problem wouldn’t even acknowledge the many times she had cruelly cast her delicate young body against its massive smooth marble.

  “The problem’s wrong.” Lisa announced. “Fucking waste of time, these n00bs. And problems to draw are so lame. I want to win.”

  The interrogation light bulb dangled from the concrete ceiling. Igor said: “For me it is a pleasure for sit. No library clock make tick tock. You too young to remember, but we used to play the chess with such clock. They still wake in middle of night. You Americans put these clocks in every room; they look different, but little Chinese battery make same sound. Is anti-intellectual, time not clock. Dance many rhythm have. In this beautiful silence, I think: We come to special room for look at Lisa’s chess. Your book, journal, seem like same thinking, but about Lisa’s life. Each day new position for consider.

  Lisa rolled her eyes. “The journal’s pretty useless, Igor. You just write down your feelings and crap like that. Jan told me to write in it when I was a little kid. But she hasn’t written in hers since forever. She’s too stressed out with her store. And I’m too old for that kind of thing now.”

  “But you show me how, yes?”

  “You mean you’ve known that the problem was wrong, and you were just sitting there, staring at it, wondering about my journal?”

  Igor held his hands out in front of himself as if he were cradling a pregnancy. “Once big Russian belly, many fold, ecosystem of hair and sweat. When I your age not possible know that vodka make belly. Later, when friends all have proud Russian belly, we think is normal. Belly part of man we say; Body Mass Index big Jewish conspiracy to take man.”

  “You think you have the answer to the problem, don’t you?” Lisa whined. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Is horror,” Lisa’s coach said, “for repeat same mistake, over and over. You put unclean finger down throat, on cuticle furry bacteria play mariachi music. They have band. Here, in groove of finger—this how FBI can find Igor—in groove, feather-bacteria fly around like bird in valley. But all this not help. Usually only dry heave have. I repeat. But is same.”

  “What are you saying??” Lisa screamed. “Show me your answer. I bet you don’t have it. How much you wanna bet? This is . . . this is bullshit!” As she had done in front of the liquor store, Lisa shouted at the problems. The word “fuck” was the electric cord; the other fury words supplicated this source like light bulbs and toasters.

  Igor’s posture became martial, and she felt the unfeeling shark eye on her, probing her. But he could not reach the deep sorrow underneath her anger.

  *

  The following afternoon, Igor sat on the table with a green spiral-bound notebook, the kind Lisa knew could be had for $4.37 at Walgreens. The following rune stood at the top of the page: личное вертуально. Это не путь мужчины. Журнал—это для женщин и педиков. It was the entrance into chess wisdom. Lisa’s time of initiation had come, in the special math room at UC Berkeley.

  With her voice full of wonder, Lisa asked, “What does it say?”

  “Personal not truth,” Igor answered. “Not path of man. Journal for woman and faggot.”

  “Why is the journal only for women?” Lisa asked. But it was true, she thought. The journal had come down from her grandmother through Jan, and she had never known a man to keep one.

  Her coach yelled at her, “You think I teach for money? Ha! Money for expensive vodka and crap American food. I not need that shit. I need journal. Need for know how Lisa look inside and make big jump.”

  Igor’s great bald head glared like a polished helmet on an ancient noonday battlefield. His back was so straight, stretching up to the ceiling of the little room. Lisa couldn’t look for long up into the cold shark eyes that wanted something from her. If she could just spit out all the things she didn’t know, so that they could lie like tattered fabrics on the table between them—maybe then Igor would understand that she didn’t have anything to give him.

  Lisa brought her thick stupid legs up on the chair and drooped her head onto them. Igor had given her so much and she couldn’t repay him. He wouldn’t coach her once he figured out that the journal wasn’t good for anything.

  Igor remained silent until Lisa confessed. “Look,” she said, “the journal is about all the small things that come and go, that no one cares about. It’s like . . . it’s like you’re on the shitter in an outhouse, and instead of leaving the pot behind, you feel the need to start poking around in there. But you never find your shit. Yours is mixed up with a whole mess of other people’s. The journal isn’t like chess, or music. There’s no truth in it.”

  Igor looked mournfully about the room, but said nothing.

  “Why do you want to write in the journal?” Lisa didn’t like to look at her master’s face just then. He seemed so old and vulnerable, like one of those broken men she saw around Emeryville. Teardrop tattoos fell from their eyes, telling exactly how many men they had killed.

  “I need for find,” he said. “How I come here.”

  “But you had all the advantages,” she said. “You grew up in Russia.”

  “Pioneer Palace,” Igor remembered. “Was our chess school.” He made a gesture to the table between them with no chess pieces on it. “Here was Soviet victory over bourgeois decadence. Money and gods not help capitalist here.”

  “But that not beginning. I enter into geometry as child, find harmony of pieces. Not remember who opponent was, probably one of my fathers. They few men who walk back from war with German. I construct first world against them, they true kings. First freedom, was road sign to intellectual life. Later, system force me say many obvious untruth, propaganda. You understand? But I always remember first moment. I think you I try for recreate this freedom when I get off plane in Gander. Now need woman secret. Freedom of journal.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lisa said. “You have the Russian tradition. There isn’t even a tradition of the journal.”

  Igor again gestured at the table between them without any pieces on it. “At palace we study game of grandmaster in magazine Shakhmaty v SSSR. Grandmaster game like religious text: Interpretation always favorable. We make big rationalization for mysterious move of our heroes. When GM lose to GM, game like fate, destiny, power of one god to overcome another. Grandmaster know something higher. He not make simple mistake. Was no computer for say: He is wrong. No computer for cut umbilicus. In old time, grandmaster have ladder into elegant world, out of all the shit.”

  “Chess was about strength,” he continued. “I tell you already. Chess about becoming man. Chess one man breaking will of another.

  “I have coach in old times. When not think, he shout at me, he say, ‘Is problem, Princessa?’ He say, ‘If you not control mind, you become slave.’ He say, ‘If you not man, you somebody’s bitch.’ But OK, your swear words not translate. Russian more powerful. I thank this man, my coach. He teach mind run creative and free under pressure. He teach smile when dance kazachok.

  “From him I learn: Strength happen on other side of pain.” Lisa’s coach leaned back in his chair thoughtfully, as if he were gently caressing the virtue of self-torture.

  Lisa asked him, “So the journal is painful and there is something on the other side?”

  “Must be,” he said. “I one time see catfish. 1997 Gulf Coast Classic, tournament organizer take fishing af
ter tournament. Everyone help pull seventy-four-pound creature out of Alabama swamp. White, unseeing eyes. Scales color of Chernobyl. I understand. That was beast living at bottom of soul. He eat my best thoughts, rotting on bottom of dark emptiness. He grow bigger, more confident.

  “Long time I think this fish my big belly. My fat. Unclothed belly hang like tumor, foreign thing, sometime growl, always hungry, complain about sunburn. I see pretty people stare, they can go fuck themselves.

  “Then fat kill Wojo. You understand? For him I kill belly. But catfish still there, for truth. He not go. Because I have no journal for pull out. No way for study own games.”

  “WHAT?!” Lisa screamed. “You don’t analyze your own games?” Instantly, her mind put Igor up onto a scroll of adults who didn’t do what they wanted her to do: Jan couldn’t keep a journal, Frohlich didn’t go to therapy himself, Laynee’s teachers didn’t study the stuff they taught. Like goddamn Mr. Reese. Even Ruth, she didn’t play in tournaments anymore. The conspiracy was now complete.

  “Number of game I play since Gander uncountable,” Igor confessed. “Like thread in Afghan rug, cannot take apart.”

  It hurt Lisa to think of Igor as just another broken man, tumbled from the shrill roughhouse of romper rooms into the unreflected compromises of half-lit adult spaces. She again remembered the tournament in Fresno, where several older men had asked Igor how they could improve their game. They smiled at her coach and graciously shook his hand. They acknowledged that he must surely be right: They must analyze their own games. But they wouldn’t. And without that reflection they would disappear back into the most worn paths of their existence. Why had she believed that Igor was any different?