“In the 1976 interzonals, the elimination matches to determine the challenger for the world championship, I was the only Soviet player without a trainer. In 1977, after I won the championship of the country, I thought my fame would help me, but I was mistaken. Most of my difficulties, I suppose, relate to being a Jew. All Jewish chess players have had problems. At times, even Tal, the great Russian world champion, has not been allowed to travel abroad for tournaments. The same was true for Bronstein, even when he was one of the two best players in the world. Kasparov’s mother changed his name from Weinstein, hoping to avoid the problem. Did you know that there are many Jewish chess players in the Soviet Union strong enough to be grandmasters, but they don’t have the money to enter tournaments? No one ever hears of them.”
While we talked, Anna served tea, sandwiches and a delicious homemade apple pie. It was important to our hosts that we eat a lot and look at their treasured books and photographs.
Listening to the Gulkos and to other Soviet Jews during the trip, I got the impression that as long as they didn’t make waves, Jews were not so much actively harassed or persecuted as actively ignored. Jewish complaints fell on deaf ears and their accomplishments disappeared. It was as if they were asked to live invisibly.
“In 1978 Anna and I applied for emigration to Israel. I wanted to live without chess management, but chess management didn’t want to live without me.” Gulko laughed quietly. “Until then we both were paid for being chess players, but after we applied for emigration all income stopped. They didn’t invite me to any tournaments, even those in this country. For two years I was not allowed to play a single game. For two years I waited. It was destroying me. Anna was in the same situation. We went on a hunger strike in 1980, and after that I was allowed to play in the Moscow Open. I suppose they didn’t consider me a threat to win, because it was a very strong tournament and I was out of practice.”
To the dismay of the authorities, Gulko did win, and during the awards ceremony at the Central Chess Club, he asked to speak. A hush fell over the gathering as he addressed the Soviet Chess Federation and asked that Victor Korchnoi’s wife and son be allowed to leave the Soviet Union to join him in exile. After the speech players and guests paused to shake Gulko’s hand.
Volodja Pimonov witnessed Gulko’s courageous speech at the Central Chess Club. “Afterwards, I drove the judge of the tournament home,” he said. “The man was trembling, because authorities were already saying that it was his fault since he was the judge. After such a debacle they must find a scapegoat.”
In 1982 the Gulkos tried to publicize their situation by demonstrating outside the interzonal tournament. “Anna and I waved posters saying, ‘Let us go to Israel.’ We were arrested and thrown in jail for the night. A few days later I returned to the tournament, which had been moved to the Sport Hotel for increased security. This time I did not intend to demonstrate; I simply wanted to watch the chess. There was a large crowd outside the hall hoping for tickets. A large man with the face of a dog came over and kicked me and smashed me in the face. Then a policeman appeared, the dog man said that I had beaten him, and I was arrested again. The crowd got to see a more interesting show than inside the hall—a former champion of the Soviet Union being kicked on the street.
“A month later we went on another hunger strike. After twenty-two days the doctors told Anna that she must eat or she would die. I had nothing but water for forty-two days. We did it to gain the attention of chess players around the world. But they couldn’t help us.
“My savings are gone now. For a while we received parcels of clothes from Jewish organizations in the West, but they no longer come. I think they are impounded by customs. The clothes were useful because I could sell them in a secondhand shop for money to buy food. Our financial situation is critical, but the biggest pain is not being able to play. When we applied for emigration we were among the strongest players in the world. These years have been a creative death. My life now is mostly waiting. I’ve lost many years. I don’t know how many more I have left.”
Later Boris played a game against Josh, and then demonstrated several of his recent unpublished games. The calmness of his voice gave way to passionate chess talk and even peals of laughter. “You have to be a grandmaster to understand,” said Boris, moving the pieces; at this moment all of us could feel the sublime importance of chess in this deprived little home. “I conceive of chess as an art form,” he said, showing us an original combination with two knights while Anna watched him as if he were reciting poetry. “I will only play in a way that interests me,” Boris said. “For me chess is finding ideas, beautiful, paradoxical ideas.”
Ten minutes after we waved good-bye to Gulko in the parking lot, we were stopped by the police. Volodja whispered that we must not speak English. He was questioned at length about a supposed illegal turn before we were allowed to go on. Volodja said he was certain they knew we had been at the Gulkos’. “You won’t be allowed to leave the country with your tapes and film,” he warned. “If they are confiscated, it will be very bad for me. Maybe you can make some arrangement?”
“What kind of arrangement?” I asked nervously.
GAINING ACCESS TO the American embassy on Tchaikovskovo Street was like trying to enter a fortress before an attack. Guarding the outside perimeter, Soviet soldiers demanded passports in order to intercept Russians seeking asylum, as well as to record the names of everyone who went inside. Word had it that all visitors to the embassy were secretly photographed. Within the gates a Marine in a metal-and-plastic cage skeptically asked our business. When I explained that I was a writer and needed to see the ambassador he became flustered and politely pointed out that it wasn’t easy to see the ambassador.
Inside the embassy there were gaily colored rooms in various states of disorganization and disrepair. Bulletin boards displayed cheerful, homey notices about baby-sitting, Russian lessons, cake sales and square dances. The place had the rambling, upbeat look of a progressive lower school in New York City.
Bruce, Josh and I were led to the third floor, and after a few minutes the acting ambassador hurried into the room to say that he had no time for us today. I said we’d wait. Eventually his assistant appeared and asked what I wanted. Before I’d finished two sentences he said in a booming voice, “I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do to help you.” Then he scribbled on a large notepad: “This room is bugged. All the rooms at the embassy are bugged, even the ambassador’s office. Write what you want on this pad.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done,” he said aloud again, pointing to the ceiling like a character in a Woody Allen movie. I described our situation on the notepad and asked for help getting my notes, tapes and film out of the country. In reply the assistant scribbled that he would discuss our problem with the acting ambassador, and that we could wait in the coffee shop downstairs.
The three of us sat at a table sipping tea. Noticing the banners of NFL teams on the wall, Bruce and Josh began to discuss the Jets. Sitting beside us were two young American diplomats dressed in Brooks Brothers suits. One was briefing the other, who had just arrived in Moscow. Both of them were tense and their rapid-fire whispering was quite audible.
“So what about the ICBMs?”
“Well, they’re using three different types.”
“Are they aimed at Alaska?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the borders?”
“They have the defenses, but the technology is primitive.”
Having just learned that the ambassador’s office was bugged, I thought it was bizarre to be listening to this conversation in the middle of the lunchroom.
Soon the ambassador’s assistant was back. “Do you want to give me your notes?” he wrote on a pad.
“No. I want you to make copies,” I wrote, and then handed him a package containing my tape cassettes and film.
“That’s going to be hard. The copy machines aren’t secure.” What madness, I thought. My chess notes w
ere hardly espionage material.
Next to us the two young diplomats were shaking hands. “So when are we going to get together for a game of table tennis?” one of them asked.
The ambassador’s assistant shook his head. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like living here for two years,” he said aloud.
A FEW DAYS later, Bruce, Josh and I took the midnight express to Leningrad. We were looking forward to seeing the Hermitage and the circus, and to being away from Russian chess politics. When we left the Moscow station, the passengers in our sleeping car were crowded in the corridor, chatting and looking out the windows; then, one by one, they drifted into tiny sleeping compartments.
We were shocked when a large hulking man threw his suitcase on one of our two bottom bunks. Intourist at the hotel had confirmed that our room on the train was to be a private one. I found a woman conductor and tried to explain that the man didn’t belong here; besides, other compartments were half-empty. But when the man said a few words to her, she walked away. He was middle-aged, emotionless, silent. We’d been followed by other men with the same stony countenance.
The KGB man walked back into the nearly empty corridor and stared out the window. After a few minutes we noticed him exchanging remarks with another large man who occupied an adjacent room. Volodja had warned us that after visiting the American embassy we would be regarded as spies. I recalled the fear in his voice on another occasion when he’d said, “In circumstances such as mine, people have disappeared.” Pandolfini and I quickly decided to spend the night in the corridor with the door to the room open. Josh could go to sleep in the top bunk, where we could watch him. If we needed to call for help, maybe someone from one of the other compartments would hear us.
Josh lay on the top bunk reading while Pandolfini, our uninvited guest and I stood in an uneasy vigil in the corridor. We looked at a chess position from the sixth game of the match while the man stared out at the darkness. Long after everyone else was asleep and the doors between cars were locked, the man moved into the compartment, got into his bunk and turned off the light. I went in and turned it back on.
Sometime later Josh signaled to me through the half-open door. He whispered in my ear that the man, thinking he was asleep, had opened our luggage compartment. When Josh sat up, the man returned to his bunk. I told Josh that he should try to sleep. For the next five hours, Bruce and I stared at the same chess position.
Exhausted but safe in Leningrad, we called Volodja in Moscow, who told us that on the day after our interview Gulko had been picked up by the police for questioning. He didn’t know whether or not Boris was still being held.
TWO DAYS LATER at the Moscow airport about two hundred people waited on line to clear customs. In front of us a Russian hockey team leaving for a match abroad was in festive spirits. The line moved quickly until we reached the agent. Pandolfini was taken away to a room and strip-searched; his notebooks, mostly analyses of the chess match, were taken away and photocopied. Three agents pored over each page of my notes, and for an hour several others listened to my little tape recorder. All my tapes of interviews in Russia, as well as the important pages from my notebook and my film, were already en route to New York. The cassettes I was carrying now had been recorded years before while I was doing a story in the Bahamas. The Russians were so intent on hearing fishing captains talk about the techniques of catching blue marlin that I didn’t think they’d let us leave.
For the first time during the trip, Josh looked scared. Where was Bruce? Could he go to the bathroom? They wouldn’t let me take him. At last, seconds before the gate closed, we were allowed to board our Finnair flight to Helsinki.
When the plane took off, Josh yawned and said, ‘The end.” Minutes later he was asleep in my lap, looking, for the first time since he’d waved good-bye to his mommy, like a very little boy.
I felt enormous relief, and then the heady sensation of having gotten away with something. We were all okay, I had my notes, and soon I’d be sharing stories and Russian caviar with my wife and friends.
But then I thought about Gulko and Volodja and others I’d met. I wouldn’t be able to call or write Volodja; it would be dangerous for him. I recalled a conversation with a famous Soviet grandmaster during our first week in Moscow. I had asked if he considered Gary Kasparov’s Jewish background a disadvantage in the match. The man became oddly foreboding. “Write nothing negative,” he’d said, waving his finger back and forth. “Nothing negative. The chess world is small, and your little son is part of that world.”
13
THE CHESS SHOP
The proliferation of subcultures and eccentricities in New York City tends to obscure the madness of a life devoted to solving complicated puzzles. The plight of brilliant jobless and even homeless chess players in Washington Square fits seamlessly into a landscape of unpublished poets hawking photocopies of poems in front of bookstores, painters showing their canvases on sidewalks and musicians playing outside concert halls, waiting to be discovered. Struggling artists live here amidst an illusory swirl of impending success.
Except for a handful, chess players don’t have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn’t make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn’t have it.
While thousands of basketball kids on the city’s playgrounds are convinced of their golden future in the NBA, chess children, except for the very youngest, respond with remarkable frankness and accuracy when asked about their playing strength and potential in comparison to their peers. A twenty-year-old who has been playing and studying chess for seven or eight years and has gained a rating of, say, 2100, which places him in the top 3 or 4 percent of all the tournament players in the country, will have few illusions about becoming world champion, or even about playing a single game that will compare with the masterpieces of Alekhine or Bronstein. Despite his desire, he knows as well as he knows the spelling of his own name that he is simply not in the same league as other twenty-year-olds rated four hundred points higher. Still, more likely than not he will continue to devote a tremendous amount of time to chess, either because he loves the game more than anything else in his life, or because there is nothing else he can do as well, or in some cases because he simply can’t bear to give it up.
In New York City alone, there are hundreds of excellent but not exceptional chess players who spend most of their waking lives in coffee shops, parks, clubs and at tournaments, playing five-minute or five-hour games, studying books on openings and endgames and feeling confused about whether they are artists or reprobates. But in Greenwich Village, even such futility has a certain cachet. In the grim light of a New York winter, the regulars in the clubs, with their dog-eared books, creased clothing and singularity of purpose, seem to share an irreproachable nobility with the down-and-out heroes of Knut Hamsun novels or with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s hopelessly impoverished Warsaw writers. Somehow they are winners for clinging so fiercely to their ways.
Since becoming a chess parent, I tend increasingly to think of New York in terms of chess. Besides Madison Square Garden and a few favorite restaurants, the places I am most drawn to are the chess corner of Washington Square, the Village Chess and Coffee Shop on Thompson Street, Fred Wilson’s chess bookstore on East Eleventh Street, Bryant Park and the corner of Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue, where in the shadow of towering office buildings and X-rated movies, chess masters and even an occasional grandmaster
sit on folding chairs and create gorgeous combinations against passersby for nickels and dimes despite the exhaust fumes and the cold. For me, Carnegie Hall has little to do with music; rather, it is where the Manhattan Chess Club is located, and where Josh plays on Friday nights in the blitz tournaments.
At the end of a jog around Washington Square, I often stop by the chess shop on Thompson Street. Through the window, which is checkered with chess sets of exotic design for sale, I recognize nearly every player. Most of them are here every day that the weather keeps them from playing outdoors in Washington Square. A few play in the shop year round, regardless of the weather, as if this cramped little room, where players must pay seventy-five cents an hour, invests their avocation with more status than does the park. They play with unflinching seriousness, as if life depended upon the flick of a piece or the snap of the clock—and it does. Some of these men have lost jobs and wives playing night after night, usually against the same opponent. The ones who have one or two steady partners have become as tight-knit as a family and think the idea of playing someone new is ridiculous. After years of games against the same opponents, the moves have become more like old habits than chess, and taking on someone new would be risky.
One would think that when players sat with their faces only a few feet apart, their feet occasionally brushing beneath the table day after day, month after month, there would be some intimacy. But this doesn’t seem to be the case; the players know little about the private lives of their partners and aren’t curious to learn more. The game is everything. Partners are usually well matched, so a day’s success is generally based on who concentrates better and is more able to shut out distractions. “You can’t play well if you’re worrying about your wife or your job,” one man explained. But from time to time one of them will whisper conspiratorially to me that he will soon be giving up the game.
Searching for Bobby Fischer Page 11
