Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  When they were done, and Elshan returned to the Senate, Dorsa told Lisa that she had not shaken her hand because Americans were Jewish. “Ha!” Lisa laughed. “I wish I was Jewish. I’d be so strong! Imagine, being a Russian Jew!”

  But Dorsa told Lisa not to talk so loud. “It’s not funny,” she said.

  Dorsa told Lisa of the ninety lashes a strong Iranian player received before the fatwa against chess was lifted in 1988. There were still fatwas against the game, even now, but they were not enforced by the theocracy. Many clerics called women who played chess in public whores. The coaches of the Iranian team wanted them to go further, to go abroad and play men. But leaving was difficult, and they were certainly not allowed to shake the hands of men.

  To Lisa, Dorsa and her chess seemed imprisoned by plywood walls that hundreds of years of rain had soaked into fragile rot. Lisa expected the geometry of chess to push through that mush, as if the game were a higher language, an Esperanto of the true soul. Lisa said, “People who don’t play chess don’t get it. They never will. That’s why we can never let them tell us how to live!”

  Dorsa smiled at this. And it seemed true for several days. Nothing stopped Lisa from making friends. She could plop down next to strange boys playing blitz in the hotel hallways, she could visit with Igor and the men of the Senate, and she could bound up to her room to be with Zarra.

  Lisa adored the older Zarra, and loved to hear how her tournament was going. Chess seemed so natural to her, as if it were simply there in her life. As if she didn’t have to fight the world to have it. Lying in bed, Lisa would often think that maybe Zarra was the older friend she had always dreamed of, who would help show her who she was. But the weird thing was that Zarra didn’t really show her anything new. She made chess seem ordinary. Zarra talked about chess the way Igor talked of his daily breakfast of raw oats, moistened with water and speckled with seasonal fruit.

  Lisa’s chess flourished alongside her new friendships. She looked forward to each day’s 10:00 A.M. meditation, no longer overwhelmed by the flags and rules of the adult world. It no longer filled Lisa with emptiness when she thought she saw her opponent snarl, her lip pulled up just a little bit to reveal a tiny white dagger. Lisa knew that she would see the same teeth in just a few hours, flashing in laughter and joyful friendship. She would meet that girl’s teammates, and learn something about the place their chess came from.

  The blood of the girls Lisa slew no longer reminded her of her own death. Everybody was friendly, and that insouciance washed over her like a lukewarm Orinda wind. Of her next opponent, Gabriela Mecking from Brazil, Igor said, “True prodigy, arise from slum, to autodidact freedom.” Melik said, “Is talent.” Lisa came to the board as if she were come to propitiate the summer solstice, asking for true life.

  Right as the game began, Lisa felt herself breaking free of the linoleum corridors that Jan and her school forced her to walk. Her pure self, high above it all, looked down on those old walls as if they were the flimsy partitions of a rat’s maze. She would never be stuck there, ever again. Lisa didn’t fear the warning signs she began to find near the mountaintop of her rational world—Park Boundary, Avalanche Danger. She followed them.

  For each piece, Lisa unrolled its possible future and allowed them to stop the reel wherever they wanted. Her b-pawn talked at length about prediabetic conditions, her fear of lassos, and her dreams of backpacking though valleys and over mountains to reach the other side of the world. Her black-square bishop discussed her color blindness and the horrible sound her cane made when it tapped in the emptiness. She dreaded the rook; if the precious walls of the board ever fell the whole diagonal peek-a-boo thing would quickly lose its charm and get tanked by the rook’s files and ranks. Like a witch, Lisa integrated these personal struggles through the great electric waves of time, the center and space that ran through the board. She channeled Igor and Tal.

  An old woman appeared in the distance, underneath a redwood tree that stretched up into the cloudy sky above. She waved to Lisa. Come up the hill to meet me. She had a headscarf, like Dorsa, but her face looked like Ruth’s. It was a long march. When Lisa arrived the woman was almost dead. She had waited. The lines on her face had grown deep, like a finger in an hour-long bath. These deep ruts in her face merged into the lines of the tree’s bark. She pointed Lisa down to a narrow opening underneath the tree. Lisa gazed longingly at the wet tree roots poking the dark passageway. Maybe the old lady kicked her in, but the only thing Lisa could remember thinking as she lost control was it sometimes happen.

  The pieces breathed with her. And she felt that whole, her whole, bending and wiggling through many textures. Her limbs inflated, like the sweaty tumescence of her legs’ first climb up the hill, arriving at a vision. She squeezed Gabriela with all that love, and peacefully watched the contingencies of their thick embrace pulse through thick cloth, bristly towels and airy veils.

  Lisa walked around like a Buddhist monk after the game, gently smiling at all the fallacies of the world. Poor children, I can’t help you in your state; all of my energy is contained within my spiritual quest, robed and mute. But follow me, follow me. Lisa had not simply proved herself, she had gotten out of herself.

  That night with Zarra, Lisa wouldn’t let the delicate fabric of her spiritual experience escape out of her mouth, into words. Out there what was precious and true could never be held. It would rip and lose its color within the crude arrogance of boys and the falsity of adult compromises. Lisa simply gazed at her wonderful friend in the silence of their hotel room. Between them, with nothing being said, the ceremony Lisa had longed for was finally taking place: A chair was placed for her at the long table of intellectual nobility. She sensed the other girls around her and greeted them through a wick that drew the deep wisdom of Lisa’s soul up to her eyes. They were pure.

  *

  Then round eight came. She was playing Ulviyya Eyyubzada from Azerbaijan. Right away, Lisa couldn’t see anything. Her face was pushed into a gravely sand, unmollified by water or life. Her legs were quickly bound. Something heavy landed on her right shoulder. And it broke. Why couldn’t she see anything? A large ball was shoved into her left arm’s socket and her face began to move. The bluntness of chalky stone passed from her lips to her mouth, feeling so large against her teeth. Red the color of Lubbock steak fell into the interstices of dirt and edge, to the forgetful place beneath the moving surface of things. Her life dripping, Lisa was driven in a circle, her body carving a path into the shifting rock.

  Lisa was powerless. Again in Mr. Reese’s class, she watched the clock move as his voice droned on and on. Soon she would be sent to Project Darkness. But she wouldn’t accept her fate there. Feeling guilty before Jan and Saheli she would try to get out. She would apologize to the school that oppressed her, and she would try to be somebody else.

  Lisa heard her opponent giggle, the heavy ball that had broken her shoulder was her opponent’s head, driving her around like a bull. Lisa was about to be flipped. She would soon see Ulviyya’s face, on top of her.

  *

  Half-wake, Lisa felt ten gentle points gently massaging her scalp, underneath her ugly hair. Lisa’s head rested against a small and gentle arm, a child’s arm. Slowly, Lisa opened her eyes. “Thank you, Dorsa,” Lisa told her new friend. Dorsa smiled back at her, and Lisa fell into a deep and nourishing sleep.

  “How did you get in?” Lisa suddenly wondered.

  “I saw you leave the tournament,” Dorsa said. “You were so sad. After I finished my game, I found Zarra, and she let me in.”

  Lisa laughed. “I thought Zarra was the enemy!”

  Dorsa smiled wisely and said, “Well, no one seems to care here.”

  This was something Lisa had wanted to hear so much, just a couple hours before. But now she said, “No, Dorsa; you were right. There are forces on us. They are real and strong. I felt them in my last game. The structures penetrate us. They tell us who we are. It doesn’t help to pretend they aren’t there. It w
as dumb of me to laugh, and expect you to easily overcome all your troubles. I can’t even overcome my mom. She’s like an iron wall separating me from my chess and everything I want to be.” Both players contemplated. Then Lisa continued. “We only have a little bit of time to talk to each other. It won’t last forever.”

  Dorsa nodded sadly and said, “It’s only the tournament that brings us together?” Lisa nodded, and Dorsa then added, “Your name is Jewish, I could never bring you home to visit.”

  Lisa sat up and spoke in such quiet disbelief that it sounded like she was yelling: “MY NAME IS JEWISH? SCHMIED?”

  Dorsa answered, “No, ‘Lisa’ is Jewish. I looked it up.” The two young women were soon on the computer, discovering Lisa → Elizabeth → Elisheva → אֱלִישֶׁבַע → meaning: My God is abundance → some woman who was married to a guy named Aaron in the Hebrew bible. Lisa was stunned. They even discovered that Yelishka was the Russian way to say her name. Then they read that her middle name, Lena, came from Mary of Magdalena (a place that means “palm tree” in Arabic), who was Jesus’s disciple, but maybe also a whore.

  Dorsa began a sentence with: “See, you are a Christian, and so you were baptized, but in Islam we . . .” Lisa was confused. Was she a Christian? What’s baptism? Jan thought of herself as Christian. Or maybe not. She did do the cross thing at a funeral once. But they never went to church. And Lisa really knew nothing about it. Dorsa knew so much about Islam. She seemed to know even more about Christianity than Christians did. Dorsa said that the Muslims worshipped Jesus as a prophet, so Lisa guessed Dorsa was kind of a Christian. Grandma Lena had once sang at a church. But which church was it?

  Dorsa was mystified that Lisa could live without religion. Where did her strength come from? A man must have the Koran engraved in his heart, so that he can speak truthfully and offer direction. And a woman must know how all customs flow from the great book. If she did not know how the text incarnated itself in daily life it would be as if she didn’t know how the pieces moved.

  Dorsa said she didn’t wear a headscarf at home; inside, she laughed and played with her mother. Together they made Ash-e anar, a soup covered in bright red pomegranate seeds. They watched foreign movies they found online. They wrestled. Indoors they could do whatever they wanted.

  Lisa talked to Dorsa about Jan and Project Darkness as if she were a Russian: anti-intellectual conspiracies displaced Yelishka. Those inevitable forces were her and Dorsa’s common enemy. It was only the tactics of the two worlds that were different. Yelishka’s school and Jan used passive-aggressive thwarting maneuvers. They were harder to see, because the oppressors didn’t have the guts to admit what they were doing. “At least the people in Iran are honest about it,” Yelishka said.

  And the two young women shared another question that no one around them seemed to ask: Why was there a separate tournament for girls?

  *

  Lisa took second place in the girls U/14 group, behind Mo Guo of China. All of her new friends applauded wildly as Lisa went up to stand on the pedestal and receive her medal. And the American coaches whispered rumors about Lisa getting an invitation to the US Women’s Championship.

  Dorsa came over to the American clan for the first time at the closing ceremonies, but she only made eye contact with Lisa and some of the younger girls. She came to give Lisa a gift, a beautifully bound Koran with an embossed cloth that resembled jewels. It was in English, and must have been very difficult to find in Greece. Dorsa also gave Lisa the honor of a formal Persian goodbye. “La hawla wala quwata illa billah,” she said. Lisa didn’t have anything to say or give in return, and spent a long time simply looking down on her new book, holding it.

  The end of the tournament was coming. Like chunks breaking off a thawing glacier, groups of children began to float away, back to their flags. And Lisa became desperate, thinking of how she would never see her friend again, and how she didn’t have a gift for her.

  “Give Dorsa your book,” Igor said.

  “My book?”

  “Yes, your book.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Ha, you only have one book, Lisa.”

  Lisa sprung up. “But it’s all full of my notes!”

  “Is better,” Igor said.

  Lisa quickly ran up to her room to get it. But Dorsa was already gone when Lisa got back. Her only hope was to hand the book off to Elshan at the final meeting of the Senate. But Igor said she couldn’t go. “We no longer coaches, you understand? We men, is momient. But I bring book to Elshan.”

  Bullshit! There was no way she was going to miss the momient. But instead of complaining Lisa grabbed a white sheet from her bed, put the medal around her neck as if it were some kind of amulet, and passed by all the parties and get-togethers that were being held on that final night. She threw her sheet over a plastic table about twenty feet from where she knew the men would gather. And she waited.

  She heard Russian first. Then came a crinkly sound, followed by a small glass clink. In her soul, Lisa saw the brown paper bag and the elegant bottle of vodka. It wouldn’t be the cheap kind, with the unkempt feathers of a nasty black eagle pasted onto it; it would be pure and translucent. “First big drink, zen big fuck!” Lisa yelled to herself.

  More voices, speaking many languages arrived. Lisa heard Elshan accept her gift. “A divine book,” he said. Lisa heard the soft rustle of her book as it passed through the coarse hands of the men. She felt their eyes on her notes.

  Someone asked Igor what his favorite game of the match was. “Game twelve,” he said. That was the game where the bishops smiled! Lisa remembered. “Psalm twelve, psalm twelve,” someone cheered. Then Lisa remembered the screaming madness of that game. She had pushed it away. Igor had also been lost. He had no resolution to offer, no metaphor to at least put some stuff in shelves. Thickets of infinite variations tumbled over each other. That game had felt too much like life, too much like the hyper-aggressive evolutionary war that occurs in every warm puddle.

  The pieces began hitting the board in a quick Russian rhythm; tak, tak, tak, they said. “I think you this momient not like, a lil’ bit for coconut touch!” someone yelled. Shoving the pieces, the men quickly discovered many of the variations she had discovered with Igor over the course of many days. They found new paths too. Someone yelled, “I make penetratio!” Lisa knew that Botvinnik should have lost that game. Now she knew that he should have been fucked.

  This was Igor’s cohort. He had marched up Mount Vodka with them, where they had found obesity instead of Dionysus. Now they were old; the new prodigies of the game—who became younger every day—had no understanding for the cult of the grandmaster which had guided their early study. Karpov was losing games to just about everyone now, and the stern militarization of the Cold War had become a flowery memory of picnics and brunches.

  *

  Lisa jumped from her window seat into the Arctic clouds. The enveloping oneness caught her fall, and held her so tightly that the clock no longer marched her around and around with everybody else, so tightly that her tiny body did not cast a shadow upon their sublime vastness. Lisa gripped the loose vapor as hard as she could, loving with everything she had.

  Then she imagined stepping back, back into the tick-tock of the clocks that drove Igor mad, back into her window seat. From there, on the outside, she could imagine men like Arun forcing equations upon the shapes and slopes she was flying through. The less clever would see great white towers and hulls of overlarge ships.

  On the falling curve into SFO, the clouds opened to reveal the steep glaciers of the Canadian icefields. There were no roads; the jagged land was barren of direction as far as she could see, like life would be when she got back home, without her friends. Teachers like Reese would want her to cage everything with their names, so she could graduate and not be homeless. No! Lisa thought. I will never forget my game against Gabriela Mecking or the experience of the clouds.

  From his aisle seat, Igor stretched his ov
ersized feet into the walkway, tripping up everyone as they followed their bladders to the bathroom. The man between them woke, and said, “Do your books get along?” Lisa looked down onto her Koran and Torah and said, “I don’t understand anything. They’re supposed to be everything, but I don’t see what they have to do with me. My friend Dorsa gave me this Koran; isn’t it beautiful?” The man nodded his appreciation.

  “But when I brought it back to my room,” Lisa continued, “my roommate Zarra hated it, even though she has never read it. I told her that Dorsa says that the Jewish Bible is also sacred to Muslims. And she said ‘Well, you should take my English copy then. The Israelis say I have to study the Torah in Hebrew anyway.’ That’s how I got these two tomes.”

  The man introduced himself as Dan. Such a normal sounding name, Dan, like her own. So Lisa told Dan what her name meant and then asked about his. Dan answered, “It means ‘God is my judge.’ The first Dan was a slave who wouldn’t do as his master said. Then he went crazy.”

  “Geez,” Lisa said. “Religion is everywhere. Listen to what my friend Dorsa told me when we said goodbye. I’ve memorized it: ‘La hawla wala quwata illa billah.’ It means: ‘There can be neither transformation nor power except through Allah.’ Sounds nice, right? ‘La hawla wala quwata illa billah.’”

  Dan said, “That’s very beautiful, Lisa. Even if the books don’t make sense to us anymore. Take the word ‘Goodbye.’ So simple and clear, like our names. But the ‘bye’ is not ‘good.’ Goodbye is a contraction of ‘God be with ye.’ ”

  WATER

  Jan had begun to use more makeup. And she looked especially cheap at the end of a work day. Her mascara ran a little into her crow’s feet and a smudge of lipstick sometimes appeared on her cheek. Jan made Lisa think of what Igor had said of American chessplayers: “They like women, never know own power, put fancy clothes on outside—to hide from themselves. Make superficial play.”