Finally Josh returned to the playing room and looked at the position again. It was still a loss; in fact there was hardly a move left for black by which he wouldn’t lose another pawn immediately. He tried to control himself; he didn’t want Jeff to see him crying. He moved his king one square. It was just a move. Jeff answered by pushing a pawn to the fifth rank, which looked reasonable. He had a three-to-two advantage on the queenside; the object was to make a queen and win. But in that instant Joshua’s body stiffened, and he began to calculate with his hands shielding his eyes.
“That was a mistake,” Pandolfini said. For the past half hour, since he had entered the lobby, he hadn’t said a word about the game. He had watched with a strange little smile and explained to everyone who asked him about the position that he couldn’t distinguish the pieces on the monitor. This wasn’t true; it was simply that he didn’t want to talk about it. He would have much preferred to be back in New York, writing in his little studio and looking forward to my phone call in the evening giving Joshua’s results. Bruce was a chess player who hated playing chess, and this was much worse than playing.
“Jeff should have moved his bishop. That would have increased the pressure,” Pandolfini went on.
“The position is still lost. There’s no saving it,” answered Litvinchuk, who was rated higher than Bruce and was one of the strongest teenage masters in the United States.
“There is a chance for a draw,” Bruce said, speaking evenly and still looking directly at the screen, “if Josh moves his knight to the opposite side of the board to h1, apparently out of play, and allows Jeff to pick off his remaining pawns with his king. It might work.”
Bruce seemed to be straining to make something out of nothing. According to his unlikely scenario Josh could save the game by taking his one remaining knight out of action, temporarily sacrificing another pawn, which would put him in precisely the necessary position to win all his material back. Even if it were theoretically possible, Josh wouldn’t think of it. Perhaps a strong master would think of it, and maybe he wouldn’t. Litvinchuk began to analyze. The entire maneuver would take fifteen or sixteen moves. Litvinchuk said he wasn’t sure; it was very complicated.
Josh sat rigidly for ten minutes, began to make a move and then drew back his hand and thought again. Then he moved his knight to h1. Downstairs in the lobby parents and children gasped.
“Now when Jeff takes the rook pawn with his king, Josh pushes his g-pawn, using it as a decoy to lure the bishop away from a defense of the queenside,” Bruce explained.
Jeff took the rook pawn. “Push the g-pawn, Josh,” said Pandolfini.
“Push the g-pawn, push the g-pawn,” the kids and parents watching the game urged. They had no sense of the value of the move; they had simply fallen in step behind Pandolfini. When Josh pushed the g-pawn, people cheered.
Jeff thought that his opponent had given up and was surrendering his material without a fight. But Bruce and Josh were sharing the same vision as surely as if they were talking to each other through the monitor. As Pandolfini calmly laid out his fanciful idea, Josh made the moves. He didn’t even seem excited; it was like one more afternoon in the living room analyzing an endgame position with his teacher.
“If Jeff doesn’t take the second pawn, bring your knight back to the queenside and start winning them back,” said Pandolfini. By now John Litvinchuk was beginning to be convinced, and as Bruce called out the moves, he nodded while, like a chorus, parents and kids urged Josh on.
Now all Josh had to do was to play knight takes bishop. Then Jeff would take Josh’s last pawn with his king, but Josh would be able to pick off Jeff’s last two pawns before he could bring his king back to defend. A hundred voices were screaming, “Take the bishop, take the bishop,” including mine, even though I was too overwrought to understand the position. Bruce was still calmly talking to Josh as if he could hear, while all around us people were shouting Bruce’s instructions.
But instead of taking the bishop, Josh stood up and offered Jeff his hand. For one awful moment no one could figure out why; was Josh confused and resigning because he was down two pawns?
“It’s a draw,” Josh later told me he had said to Jeff.
“I don’t agree,” Jeff had answered in his formal manner.
My son sat down again. “Take the bishop,” people pleaded in the lobby, but Josh paused and wrote down the move he was about to make on his score sheet the way he had been taught. “No need to hurry, Tiger,” Bruce had always said. “Take your time. Play like a big boy. Be sure.” My son put down his pencil and looked at the position again for another few seconds, relishing the ending as if it were a favorite dessert he couldn’t quite bear to finish, then took the bishop. Soon the last two pawns came off the board, exactly the way Pandolfini had predicted sixteen moves earlier, and there were just two kings left on the board separated by one square.
IN THE LOBBY, kids and parents were cheering, men slapped me on the back, a man Bonnie didn’t know hugged her. A woman placed my baby daughter in my arms; while we had been yelling and staring at the television, Katya had toddled out the front door. A group of people checking into the hotel for a business convention walked over to the monitor filled with a nearly bare chessboard and looked at one another in bewilderment.
When Josh came out of the tournament room his face was flushed white and red. “Could you believe I pulled that out?” he said absently, as if he were still in a distant world.
John Litvinchuk grabbed him by the shoulder. “How did you do that? How did you do that?” he screamed. Then he wanted to discuss a mistake that Josh had made on the twentieth move. My son blinked and said he couldn’t remember.
Later Josh would recall winning the national championship as the greatest experience of his life, but at this moment he seemed to be in a trance, not so much excited by winning as relieved not to have lost, and still caught up in the game. I gave him a hug and suggested that he ought to see his mother, Bruce and his friends, who were waiting for him downstairs, but just then Morgan came out of the door to the tournament room in tears. He had lost his game. If he had won, his score would have been six wins and a draw, tying Josh’s and Jeff’s. Kalev approached his son but Morgan put up his little hand and his father stopped in his tracks. At this moment Morgan couldn’t accept his father’s consolation and regret.
Josh put his arm around Morgan’s shoulder and whispered something; then the two of them walked through the crowded hall, past all the little players and their parents, to a large parking lot outside. Josh was only eighteen months older than Morgan but he looked much bigger and older; he was growing up. In a few more years people wouldn’t make such a big deal of it when he beat grownups in Washington Square. Maybe by then he would be embarrassed to have his father hovering over his games like a protective hen. What would I do with my Saturday afternoons?
A few people called out congratulations to Josh as he walked by, but he paid no attention. He knew what Morgan was feeling; it had happened to him last year. For a few minutes, the two of them embraced while Morgan cried on his friend’s shoulder. Then they walked around the parking lot for half an hour. At one point seven-year-old Morgan confided to Josh his fear that for the rest of his life he would be remembered as someone who couldn’t win the big game. As if his own prodigy days were decades in the past, Josh replied, “Morgan, I’m going to tell you a secret: you’re a much stronger player than I was at your age.”
EPILOGUE
The final scene in this book took place in May 1986. It is now two years later, and during the intervening months I have often wondered if the book should have ended where it did. Characters I’ve written about have experienced triumphs and suffered personal tragedies. Josh and I have wandered into so many intriguing stories that I find myself yearning to write these contemporary tales into my chapters. But finally I resolved that despite the attraction this game has for me, particularly when my son is moving the pieces, I had better get on with something else in my
professional life before more years passed, and that perhaps I also needed to move on for Josh’s sake. Still, the reader might be interested in a few recent histories and observations.
In December 1985, following another hunger strike and several public protests, Boris Gulko and his family received visas to emigrate to Israel. He believes that they were allowed to leave the Soviet Union because of articles written by Western journalists about his plight and demonstrations for him in the West. After a month in Israel, the Gulkos decided to settle permanently in the United States, and at present they live in Boston. Gulko is now one of our top players and was recently appointed grandmaster in residence at Harvard, a newly created chair. His wife, Anna Akhsharumova, won the 1987 United States women’s championship, achieving a perfect score of 9–0. Their greatest concern is whether they will be able to support themselves adequately as chess players in America.
***
AFTER WE LEFT Moscow in 1984 Volodja Pimonov became increasingly involved in the fight for human rights. He met regularly with political activists and participated in demonstrations for refuseniks. In one demonstration he was beaten and seriously injured by KGB agents. At the hospital he was asked to sign documents denouncing his political views; when he refused, the KGB would not allow the hospital staff to treat his injuries. At great personal risk a Jewish doctor cared for Pimonov until he recovered.
Since 1985 Pimonov had repeatedly applied for emigration to join his wife and baby daughter in Denmark and was repeatedly turned down. At one point he was informed that his application would not be considered until the year 2002. He suffered periods of profound depression but continued to write free-lance articles for Western publications describing what he called the charade of glasnost. In interviews with Western journalists he spoke passionately about the lives of thousands who have been denied permission to emigrate, and of hundreds detained in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals because of the expression of their religious and political beliefs. In January 1988 he was convinced that his own incarceration in a labor camp was imminent; instead, for reasons that he still does not understand, he received a visa to leave the Soviet Union. On February 5, 1988, Pimonov joined his wife and two-year-old daughter in Copenhagen.
IT IS STILL nearly impossible for even a top grandmaster to support himself by participating solely in United States tournaments, and most of our best players spend considerable time in Europe, where they can count on making a living. Chess parents continue to worry about the wisdom of cultivating wonderful little players who will almost inevitably turn to more respected and lucrative professions just when they are arriving at the peak of their creative powers. The economics of chess will remain bleak in this country until a larger general public begins to appreciate the beauty and excitement of the game, and until major corporations begin to sponsor events as they do in other parts of the world. Perhaps for chess to capture the national imagination again we will need a new Bobby Fischer—though, it is to be hoped, without the bizarre trappings of the old one. By now most chess players have given up dreaming that Bobby will ever challenge for the world championship again, although Fischer’s friends claim that he is currently planning his latest comeback, this time in South Africa.
Nevertheless, the general health of chess in the United States is on the upswing. Each year since 1983, when I first began exploring the chess world with Josh, there has been a modest increase in the prize funds of major tournaments, and more tournaments are being played in attractive hotels, rather than dingy rooms like the Bar Point, which no longer exists. Each year the scholastic chess world has grown in size and enthusiasm, and in 1988 the National Elementary Championship in Detroit will have nearly one thousand children competing, almost twice the turnout of five years ago. This July the United States Chess Federation will send a team of eight boys and girls between the ages of nine and sixteen to Timisoara, Rumania, to compete in the world youth championship, and our team, at least on paper, is as strong as any in the world, including the Soviet Union’s.
JOSH IS NOW eleven. Currently his rating is 2101, the highest for his age in the United States, and this summer he will be the U.S. representative in the under-twelve division of the world youth championship. Ever since he received his invitation to compete in Rumania I have been distracted by daydreams of his crushing the best kids from Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Rumania and Russia. Whenever I bring up the possibility of his winning the world championship, Josh dutifully says, “Awesome,” but I can tell that he dreams of other things.
Each week Josh studies chess openings with International Master Victor Frias and endings with Bruce Pandolfini. A few days ago Bruce told me that our son had grown too strong for him to teach further, and that next fall it would be best for him to begin studying the endgame with a grandmaster. When I mentioned this to Josh, he cried, insisting that Bruce was wrong.
Several weeks ago Josh played in a simultaneous exhibition in the Bronx against world champion Gary Kasparov, along with fifty-eight other children. For the past few weeks he had been playing without passion or concentration, but against Kasparov it was as if his honor were at stake. For two hours he was oblivious to television crews and flashing cameras; with pink-flushed cheeks and hands shielding his eyes, he stared relentlessly at the game. The world champion raced from board to board, hardly pausing to consider his moves, but time and again he would stop at my son’s game for two or three minutes, scratch his short black hair, grimace, calculate, rock back on his heels and then smile at Josh, shake his head and think some more. Josh was so focused on the game that he didn’t seem to notice Kasparov’s special attention until after the twenty-eighth move, when the world champion offered his hand and said, “Draw.” Then Josh pumped the air once with his fist, just as he does on the playground in pickup games with his buddies after scoring the winning basket.
Josh was one of two who achieved a draw against Kasparov, the other being fourteen-year-old K. K. Karanja. Afterward chess masters speculated whether an eleven-year-old had ever drawn with a world champion in a simultaneous exhibition. Someone said that when Botvinnik was twelve, he beat Capablanca. Ten minutes later I was still trembling with excitement and Josh was being interviewed by one of the TV networks. When the reporter asked my son about his career aspirations, I overheard Josh answer that he hoped someday to play second base for the New York Mets.
Searching for Bobby Fischer Page 25
