Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  The book changed nothing. Fischer returning was something that the chess world had accepted was never going to happen. The greatest regret of my life was that I had not witnessed Fischer play, until I did, and then that turned into the greatest regret instead.

  Astonishingly, in the early 1990s, a combination of huge amounts of Yugoslavian money, the encouragement of a much younger woman and a slight-of-hand by the chess authorities that allowed Fischer to claim he was still the world champion (even if everybody knew he was not) brought him back.

  I was ecstatic. My hero was going to play again. Sure, there were whispers about his views, but I told myself they would turn out to be wrong, when he re-emerged blinking into the daylight, took his seat at the board, started to make the moves we had all been anticipating for so long. Chess was again going to be as big as it had been in the 1970s. A legend was being re-born.

  He might have been completely crazy by this point, but he was not stupid. He had no interest in playing Gary Kasparov, the real current world champion, who Fischer hated and knew at this stage in his life would have humiliated him. Instead, he played Spassky again, and the legend was destroyed.

  By 1992 he was now a fat, dishevelled bigot who spewed hatred and bile with every utterance. I watched in increasing horror and embarrassment as the man I had idolised since first reading about him proved completely unable to stop ranting about Jews.

  At the opening press conference prior to the match he spat on the letter from the US Government asking him not to break sanctions by playing in Yugoslavia. He talked a lot about Zionists. He insisted he was not anti-Semitic, because Arabs were Semites and they were fine by him. He came over as creepy and unhinged. Then finally, he obliterated what was left of his aura with his actual play.

  Spassky was by this point in semi-retirement and was ranked around number 100 in the world. Fischer took the first game quite well, and though the vagaries of time and his nomadic life simply caught up with him, Fisher eventually ‘won’ the match, despite suspicion in some quarters that Spassky was carrying him. He was still better than most, but routinely got into difficulties that the Fischer of old would have won through with ease. By most standards he was still very good, but compared to his heyday he was nothing, like an ageing boxer who could still punch but was no longer able to move. Which even then might not have mattered had he been capable of keeping his mouth shut.

  Despite the fact that sanctions forbade it, the US Government took no action over him playing in Yugoslavia. For all the talk of other matches, it looked like he was going to disappear back into obscurity. He was not strong enough to realistically take on Kasparov or another of the game’s real elite, and the man who once had every major organisation in the world vying for his signature was now an untouchable to any self-respecting blue-chip entity.

  Then finally, on 9/11, around the time Katharine and I were looking at a single blue line on a pregnancy kit, Fischer took to the radio to continue his descent into madness. He said that the attacks were a time for rejoicing and that, for the US, what goes around comes around. He made still more observations about Jews and their role in running the world.

  Suddenly the US authorities were interested in Fischer again and warrants were issued for his arrest. He spent jail time in Japan awaiting extradition, but finally was offered sanctuary in Iceland, the scene of his world championship triumph all those years ago. He hated the place but knew if he ever left he would be arrested. He spent the final few years there, increasingly paranoid and delusional, dying at sixty-four, the same number of years as there are squares on a chess board.

  Bobby Fischer was the only chess player my father really knew about. He had watched the 1972 world championship on the television and he told me everyone had been rooting for Fischer back then. It was a match that had really taken the imagination, somehow all sorts of things had seemed possible and Fischer’s very different sort of craziness had then been a part of his attraction.

  Yet in the course of twenty years he had deteriorated mentally from a man whose fears centred on the noise of the crowd and the positioning of cameras into something altogether appalling. Apparently that darkness had always been there, if more quietly stated. Spassky’s own possible anti-Semitism was also by now whispered about, and I could but shudder as to where this really left the so-called ‘Match of the Century’, to say nothing of the rematch. Neither man was who we wanted to pretend he was.

  For Fischer, it seems to have stemmed from a hatred of his stepfather. Many in the chess world are Jewish. So was my father, which made me half Jewish, as was Gary Kasparov. It was clear from Kasparov’s writings on Fischer that he had no liking for him. The two were never to meet. The opportunity never arose, I once heard Kasparov say in an interview.

  At one level they were to have competing legacies, although even purely in terms of chess there are few who would place Fischer ahead of Kasparov now. Had he played on, who can say? Kasparov’s view was that you had to enjoy Fischer’s games, that it was Fischer the chess player who should be remembered.

  My dad, who never played through or studied any chess games, so could not share in the things that Kasparov saw, was similarly sanguine. Fischer clearly had issues and needed help that he did not get, he said to me. “It’s obvious to watch him that he’s really very ill. What he is saying speaks only to that, really. You have to feel sorry for him; what is the point of feeling anything else? Maybe the whole situation was too much for him?”

  When you win at anything 6-0 it is hard to know where you go from there. Those whom the gods wish to damn, first they grant them their wishes, and all that. My father had surprised me again; I would have put money on him being more judgemental, more critical. But he wasn’t, even if deep down he knew that I was.

  It wasn’t that he remotely condoned any of it; of course he did not. “The things he says now disgust me,” my father said, “but it is like looking at a shadow, a ghost. There is a different Bobby Fischer for you to remember.”

  He had tried to save my hero for me and I was grateful to him for that, even if it was a futile attempt. This was the only Fischer I had actually got to see live on screen. Unlike my father I did not live in the time of the earlier Fischer, and could only read about him.

  There is a debate in chess as to whether the game drives sane people mad, or whether it keeps those who are at risk of going mad comparatively sane. Fischer certainly descended into madness rapidly when he stopped playing, however odd he was before. Perhaps it might have happened anyway, age and time presenting challenges that a game like chess (or any other game, for that matter) would not be able to overcome. Come to think of it, returning to the game did not exactly seem to help him either.

  For me, Fischer was an idol, no more, but I could still read books about his early matches and play through his games and enjoy them. I was grateful that my father had been thoughtful on the subject and had tried to find a way for me still to reach the former champion, even if in truth I no longer could. Not like before.

  I decided it might be no bad thing if my girls did not turn out to be chess players after all. Morphy and Fischer were far from isolated examples of chess players descending into madness.

  I vowed also, should one of my girls’ heroes come crashing back to earth in the future, to remember my father’s approach with me. If they were to ask me what I thought about their former idol I would try and save for them what once that person had been. It is something a parent should do.

  Other Visits –

  Mountains and Rocking Horses

  Attempting to go the Brecon Beacons and not being able to find them. Hours in the car, Dad increasingly frustrated; our questions as to whether we are nearly there yet not well received. Finally, we park at the foot of a hill that may or may not have been what we were looking for. We eat our picnic in near silence. Soggy sandwiches, flask of tea cold, chocolate biscuits melted into their wrappers. We walk through
wiry mountain grass, past streams and rabbit droppings and the occasional sheep skull, the arguments of the journey still with us, conversation stilted. One of us needs the loo.

  We are already late on a day that has not panned out as planned and cannot be rescued. A trip to Cheddar Gorge on the way home, sausages and chips in the restaurant, passably good but not enough to change anything. Our request to use the fruit machine rejected.

  We are survivors of something, as we eat warm food and wistfully watch bells and fruit flash and spin against a backdrop of canned music and the occasional rattle of falling coins. Later I write an English essay about the trip, which my mother said worried her in terms of whether they were giving us a good childhood. It grew funnier in the re-telling. “Do you remember that time we went to a mountain range and couldn’t find it?” But we didn’t go again, if we had ever been in the first place.

  The mountain venture was unusual for other reasons as Mum and Dad weren’t really walkers. We would occasionally venture onto the bits of the Malvern Hills that you couldn’t see Dad’s work from, or more frequently do the loop around the back of Bosbury.

  Coddington meant bikes. Dad hadn’t learnt to ride as a child and was always a bit wobbly, but did good joke impressions of nearly falling off. Occasionally he did actually fall off, which was somehow less funny.

  There was a vineyard that had been mentioned in the Doomsday Book we would whizz past, and a steep hill to negotiate around the halfway point. I’d make it all the way up on occasion; other times I would have to stop and push. Briefly, while at university, I was fit enough to run the thing and occasionally would, in the heat of a summer day, while listening to Chris Evans on Radio 1, inhaling the yeasty smell of the chicken farm near the main road.

  Fields spanned all the way back to our house without needing to touch the road, if you knew what you were doing and were so inclined, which Matt and I sometimes were, and I would sometimes run through them by myself, invincible, impossible to imagine getting older and not being able to do this.

  At the top of the hill in Coddington was an old schoolhouse opposite the church that a Mr Close, a retired teacher, lived in. We would sometimes go in for tea and cake. I don’t know when the school closed or whether he had actually once taught there.

  He would tell us amiably that he did not believe in the cane, but a cricket bat was alright. In the churchyard rested the tiny daughter of a friend. She had been born with a heart condition which nobody knew about until it was too late. A child I barely knew but still remember.

  The fear that anything might happen to one of my own children is perhaps drawn in part from my knowledge that things can go terribly wrong, and being young is no safeguard against the randomness of nature and all that that entails.

  I hated it when my own children went near the edge of bridges or buildings. Maddie and Francesca in particular would play to this, as if trying to induce a heart attack in me, setting a trap that I would always walk into. My father never had much of a head for heights either, but I lacked Maddie and Francesca’s capacity to exploit that.

  I worried when they were driven by others. I worried when I drove them myself. Maddie developed a peanut allergy that meant a nut could kill her. Gabriella, diabetes, which we were told would not. But we all knew the horror stories about what might happen if she chose not to look after herself properly when she was older and responsible for managing her own care.

  Sometimes she would tell us that she didn’t have diabetes anymore, that she had been cured. We had to tell her that if we could change things we would, but we could not and that the important thing was that we all worked together to look after her.

  People would sometimes say that because she had been diagnosed so young, at three, she would never know anything different. That was not true either. It more seemed that she would have to react to the situation emotionally firstly as a three-year-old, then as a four-year-old, and so on.

  We have to deal with today, Katharine and I would say to each other. Worrying about what hasn’t happened is too much.

  Matt had a bit of asthma but my MS (if that was what it was) did not develop in childhood, so perhaps our parents did not have quite such acute fears about our mortality as I do about my own children’s. Except as I think to it now, they must have done. I do not worry any less about Annabelle simply because she can eat a peanut, or Francesca because she does not have diabetes. Perhaps the worries through the generations are the same. It is just the specific manifestations that differ.

  The fear that we might die of boredom on a visit to a stately home was not one of those that resonated for my parents. We went to lots, and when we were younger it was always excruciating. Looking at old furniture, rooms long since hushed and roped.

  There were probably fewer things to do in those days. But as we got older, I became more interested by the stories, if not the architecture. Those told explicitly in guidebooks, and others only half to be guessed at or imagined.

  I remember a large doll’s house in a nursery, that stood untended. A plaque spoke of the family that had played with it. I thought to those children, now long gone, their time playing with the house finished forever, and all the things it might have been to them: a meeting point, a negotiating arena, a stage for worlds created in their imagination and played out with china figures, watched on by maids. A backdrop to all sorts of discussions and arguments and normal afternoons and extraordinary happenings, dramatic then, now faded away. I thought to the stages through which they would have grown away from the house. Playing with it less as they became older, laying untouched for a while, enveloped in cobwebs perhaps – until their own children arrived and it was dusted down and pressed back into service. Though perhaps it was used less from one generation to the next, grandchildren being told to play gently – it’s fragile now. Then, finally, they were gone too and it became what it is today, a grand but empty museum piece to which I stand witness in a time beyond which they could reach. But it is still theirs, not mine, abandoned or not.

  Once, after our marriage, we had dinner with an older, very successful couple. He mentioned his meetings with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown while we drank champagne in their palatial house. “Tony is much easier to work with,” I remember him saying. Then the conversation moved on and he said that while he did not believe in any of it, something strange had happened to them recently.

  They had bought an old wooden rocking horse to place on the corner of their large stairwell. As soon as it was carried in, the dog went berserk and refused to go anywhere near it. Both their children burst into tears, one running away, the other standing transfixed. The older refused to speak when quizzed. The younger said there had been a child standing by the horse, just looking at him. “The boy could see me,” he said. “He was waiting for something.”

  “So we had somebody take it away again,” the father said. “I don’t know what it was.” He shrugged insouciantly and took another swig of his drink, but it was a subject he had raised. Who knows when we might be being watched unseen, from the corners of other times, by forgotten children who have reached across the void? Perhaps it happens more often than we think.

  We are born, we play, we work, we are first child, then parent, perhaps even grand or great grandparent, and finally it is done. In all families, some objects survive us, even if they are less valuable than those to be found in stately homes and the houses of the rich.

  My father’s chess set is in my study now, all set up and waiting, though no longer for him. His old Totopoly set, a horse racing game with the cardboard cut-out figures, is sometimes used by Annabelle, Maddie and Francesca. His Scrabble box is on the bookcase in the dining room, and Gabriella has created her own word-making game that involves piling the tiles on top of each other in a way that no one else quite understands.

  Over time all of these things will be used less, and one day, after I have gone, they will find their way into more
obscure cupboards, and ultimately into a skip, although I will do all in my power to delay the inevitable for his chess set.

  I do not think that he peers out from behind the things that once he owned. There has been no event like that of the child and the rocking horse, but I can see him in his things and remember moments when we played and bonded over them.

  It was always the games that papered over the cracks in our relationship. If one day, which will come, there is nobody left with these memories, and his old games are simply a collection of ageing plastic, wood and cardboard, with no meaning for those who look on them, then that too is part of the cycle. It will not diminish the power they once had, or what they once meant. Even objects are ultimately destined to die.

  Still the cycle goes on and family life repeats itself, or at least comes close. The thing we call a family. Even now, the fact that my own children too are mortal has become obvious, has explicitly manifested itself for Maddie and Gabriella much earlier than it ever did for me.

  As with chess, the precise pattern of each generation is different from the one before, but they are all recognisable and we are all constrained in some way by the power of the pieces ranged against us, the confines of the board. The difference is that chess is a game that can end in a draw, both kings can survive, whereas none of us are getting out of this one alive. Yet with luck there are many moves for us to make before all that. I will my children to make as many as possible.

  The Mouth of Hell,

  and Some Writers