Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Having said this, Garry turned back to the chessboard and, after a few minutes, Josh joined him. They were soon immersed in a variation that Garry was preparing for tomorrow. While Garry and Bobby had been squabbling across time, Josh had been listening closely. Now he looked very serene analyzing with Kasparov. The position was more engaging to both of them than the talk on the television. Bobby spoke on and on, and neither of them listened. But maybe Garry listened. Around midnight, Bjelica was interviewing Miguel Najdorf, the world’s oldest grandmaster. Garry was staring at the ceiling, trying to evaluate a position many moves ahead. “Garry Kasparov,” said Najdorf. “He’s another Bobby Fischer.” Kasparov shook his head, no, no, no.

  Against Ehlvest, Garry played with the same dark resolve he had brought to the Fischer documentary. Ehlvest played tentatively and Kasparov overwhelmed him with the black pieces. Kasparov’s intimidating physical presence at the board set him apart from the other grandmasters here. Confronted by his glowering look, an opponent lost confidence in his own ideas and was more apt to play wimpy moves. In contrast, Speelman and Anand, who were creating unexpected magic in Linares, looked like butterflies at the board, lithe and uneasy. Yusopov was big and soft, oozing gentleness, between moves smiling sweetly at his young pretty wife, Nadia, who sat in the audience. Ivanchuk, a genius to be sure, was a nervous wreck. Gelfand exuded kindness and goodwill. Salov was burdened with sadness and self-doubt. In the tenth round, Beliavsky, a decorous man, had forgotten to shave and brush his hair. He sensed that he was being left behind. Karpov was only half himself. He spoke in whispers and avoided eye contact. Maybe he would never fully recover from Lyon. It was hard to imagine any of the other players here overcoming the sheer strength and resolve of Kasparov. After the tenth round, Kasparov, Beliavsky and Ivanchuk were tied for first, and most people expected Garry to win.

  Garry was in terrific spirits. After the game, he had called Moscow and learned that a million people had lined the streets around Red Square, calling for the ouster of Gorbachev. “Communism will die softly, without bloodshed,” he said at dinner.

  We walked from the hotel to the pool hall. In the evening, Garry usually shot for a half-hour before going on his walk. After he beat several of the players at eight ball, I challenged him to a game. I won easily and then Garry didn’t want to play another. I think he sensed that I had his number at this game and he wanted to retain his good spirits. That night, our walk along the main avenue through Linares was fast and furious, with Garry singing Russian folk songs in full voice.

  Each morning after breakfast, and each night before settling into his room, Kasparov walked this same route, which took about twenty-five minutes. There were more interesting choices, through narrow streets winding past the bullring and little restaurants and food shops, but Kasparov always walked this same broad, central avenue. Going another way was unimaginable. A car ride in the morning to Baeza was out of the question. Part of this was a kind of puritanism; there was little time for fooling around between rounds. But more, Garry pushed against the habits of his day, he revved himself, built his energy and emotion for the games by bouncing against small, familiar constraints. Garry sat at the same table for breakfast, and across the room, the same one each night for dinner. He always walked into the playing hall through the same door. He wore the same green jacket. During the games, he first drank his coffee, then his fruit juice, always the same routine.

  Actually, most players, except Kamsky, took their walks along the same central avenue that led through a shopping area and then into the countryside. The morning walk was a ritual of the tournament, players deep in thought waving like sailors as they approached one another going and coming. But Gata and his father went their own way. Gata was the only one here who did not analyze with his opponents after games. Rustam did not want him to reveal the key to his genius. “It is a shame about that father,” said Gurevich. “If the father weren’t spreading so much hate, one of us would talk to the boy, tell him things so he wouldn’t lose so much.” But it was Rustam’s larger strategy to cultivate in his son the belief that it was the two of them against the rest of the world. Apparently, Rustam also demanded a daunting stoicism from Gata. Winning or losing, Gata sat at the board like a robot. After games, there was never joy or grief. On his face one saw mostly sallow detachment, and occasionally a fissure of discomfort or impatience. Emotional displays by the player were not allowed. But on some nights, those who lived near their room would hear Rustam shouting and the boy crying.

  The morning before the eleventh round, I walked the narrow streets of Linares in the warm sun, past the cafés, bodegas and little homes sunny today with their shutters thrown open. In a few hours, Kasparov would play the brilliant twenty-one-year-old Viswanathan Anand, perhaps the biggest talent to emerge in the chess world since Kasparov, and the morning was bright and thrilling with the promise of their battle. Maybe today Kasparov would take the lead. Garry had said in interviews that despite Anand’s soaring rating and fast vision of the board, the Indian player had deep holes in his game and would never make a serious challenge for the world championship. Such outspokenness, provocative and typical for Kasparov, raised the stakes of his games. But there were many little blood wars in Linares. In the round after this one, Ivanchuk and Gelfand, the best young players in the Soviet Union, would square off, with the winner of this game sure to be touted as a world championship contender, and the loser returning to the Soviet Union feeling miserable and questioning his talent.

  On Calle Parez Galdo Ventanas, I came across the bar called Lagartijo, a cathedral of bullfighting. The men of Linares came here to drink cerveza, snack on tapas and dream about the great corridas of the past and those coming up this spring and summer. On the walls were fighting photographs of lean, sad men, their bodies bent gracefully as bleeding bulls rushed past. These men had suffered terrible life-threatening wounds and had won victories that would be praised for decades. Linares was a town steeped in two blood sports, and I found myself recalling great chess tournaments of the past, even while I looked at photographs of famous corridas on the walls of the Lagartijo: San Sebastian 1911 with Capablanca and Rubinstein, Seville 1921 with Juan Belmonte, Linares 1947 with Manolete, Marbella 1965 with El Cordobes and Paco Camino, Palma de Majorca 1970 with Fischer, Seville 1987 with Karpov and Kasparov, Linares 1991 with Kasparov and Ivanchuk.

  When I returned to the hotel, Josh was playing speed chess against all challengers in the pressroom and winning game after game. Mr. Rentero came by and said something like, young man, you’ll be playing in Linares in a few years. We both felt unbearably terrific. We were finishing our late lunch in the dining room with Mikhail Gurevich when Kasparov walked through on his way to the playing hall. He stopped at our table for a moment, flashing his best smile, and the room brightened two shades. When he was gone, Gurevich commented, “Garry will come into the playing room like a big fighting bull. With a look around the room, he’ll take all the space. Players will feel like jumping out of his way. I feel badly for Anand.”

  Even among the great players in Linares, Viswanathan Anand was considered one of a kind. Anand was a chess player who did not need time to think. Against Anand, grandmasters used their entire two and a half hours, while he required only ten or fifteen minutes to engineer his deadly assaults. While his opponents thought and thought, Vishy’s biggest problem seemed to be boredom. He fidgeted, looked around, forced a show of interest. In blitz chess, against grandmasters, Vishy usually won using less than a minute on his clock. Indeed, Anand’s talent for the game was so huge that some in the chess world felt that it might ultimately prove to be his undoing. With his gift for playing very good moves by instinct, it was argued that Anand was less inclined to struggle to find great moves.

  Anand-Kasparov in the eleventh round looked to be a physical mismatch. Although twenty-one, Anand was much more boy than man. He was willowy, with soft brown eyes and a lighthearted manner. There was no anger, angst or threat in Vishy. Most da
ys in Linares, he hung out with Josh, taking walks, playing table soccer and Ping-Pong in the arcade room, talking about school, sports, chess, joking around, being kids together.

  For the first twenty minutes of their game, both Kasparov and Anand moved very rapidly through a long and much-studied opening line. To go with his astonishingly fast vision of the board, Vishy was also a theory hound. He had a great memory and knew everything there was to know about the opening lines that he favored. The first twenty-two moves of the game were all theory. But on the twenty-third move, Kasparov ran out of book knowledge and made a small mistake, giving Anand good chances to draw the game. Anand began to construct a fortress for his king. Garry hunkered down at the board, held his head between his two hands. He was wrenching deep into himself for a winning idea. For most grandmasters, winning or playing brilliantly involves an element of suffering. After fifteen minutes, Garry moved. Immediately, Anand’s hand shot out, but he brought it back, looking embarrassed. The other players were always saying to him, Vishy, you must learn to think a little before you move.

  But while he paused, he didn’t think. He looked around at the other players and then out at the audience. He gave Josh a silly grin. While Kasparov tried futilely to create complications in an arid position, Anand paced the stage, and each time he sat following Kasparov’s move, it was almost unbearable for him not to volley back his reply instantly. He would stall for a minute or two, glancing at the players sitting nearby. Beliavsky was making faces of mental anguish. He was being mated by Salov. Gurevich was being slowly squeezed to death by Ivanchuk. When the waiter came by with Garry’s coffee, the champion waved the cup away. He was thinking like a turbine, but could not come up with a winning plan. Vishy held his head, imitating Garry, trying to think longer and harder, but his eyes flipped around the stage. He looked up at Kasparov, trying to figure him out. He liked Garry, but found his seriousness and petulance annoying. This game was so easy for Vishy. He seemed like a man straining for something to do with himself while he waited for Kasparov to make up his mind. When they agreed to a draw after twenty-seven moves, Kasparov had used a full hour more on his clock than Vishy. Afterwards, the champion was disgusted and muttered that Anand had been lucky. “Why do you say that?” asked Anand, with a smile and twinkling eyes.

  “What would you have done here?” Garry said, showing the correct continuation on the twenty-third move.

  “I would have thought for a minute and come up with something,” Anand answered playfully.

  After the eleventh round, it was Ivanchuk who had forged into the lead. Anand, with an eye and ear for the absurd, referred to the Ukrainian as “Chucky,” and noted that he was not your average neighborhood fella. At the board, Ivanchuk rarely looked at the pieces, staring instead at the ceiling, envisioning the game in his head. At least in Linares, the gifted grandmaster was all chess. Pale and mumbling, with eyes upturned, Ivanchuk calculated variations while walking in the halls, or distractedly bouncing on one leg in the lobby or while eating with Karpov and Kamsky.

  In the dining room, players’ moods changed dramatically from one evening meal to the next. Following the Anand game, Kasparov picked at his food and wouldn’t answer when I spoke to him. He felt the tournament slipping away from him. And also Anand’s lightness of being had been infuriating. “You’re twenty-seven years old and world champion. It’s not so bad,” I tried at one point, but he didn’t respond. Garry pushed away his plate, and with a toothpick in his mouth, he turned sideways to the table, so that he would not have to look at us. It was blistering to sit across from him like this. Josh felt trapped and angry, trying to eat his meal.

  At a nearby table, Beliavsky sat, holding his head between his hands. He had started this event winning game after game, but now he had lost two of the last three, mated like a patzer by Salov this afternoon. Beliavsky had been jilted by the chess muse and all the earlier winning meant nothing to him. He was smashed, finished. Salov, a sad man by disposition, was brightened greatly by his bishop sacrifice and clever win against Beliavsky. “Mas queso,” more cheese for my spaghetti, he said jauntily to the waiter. Salov was looking forward to an evening of billiards with Vishy, who was also pleased after having held off Gazza, which was what he called the world champion. Nearby, after a hard-fought draw against Yusupov, Gelfand was pleasantly engrossed in his book of Isaac Singer short stories. In the following round, he would play one of the biggest games of his career against his arch-rival, Ivanchuk.

  In a far corner of the room, Mikhail Gurevich sat by himself, smoking a cigarette. He had sealed in a losing position against Ivanchuk. He had been so hopeful this afternoon, going into the round. A win against Ivanchuk would have redeemed a poor performance in Linares. Following dessert, which Kasparov didn’t touch, Garry walked to Gurevich’s table and lectured to his friend about how he could have drawn the game—which would have improved Kasparov’s chances to win the tournament. Kasparov’s bitter critique was yet another blow. When I had first met Gurevich in New York at the beginning of the Karpov match, he had been a bold, confident man. The timbre of his voice was deep and compelling. He believed that he was as good as any player on the earth, besides Kasparov, and in New York he had held his own in analysis sessions and practice games with the World champion. Now, with a poor performance in Linares following his mediocre play in Reggio Emilia, he was utterly depleted, sadness manifest in each glance and in his drooping posture.

  The dinner following the twelfth round was memorable because of Gelfand. Boris Gelfand was an optimistic twenty-two-year-old with a wonderful, wry sense of humor. He was wise beyond his years, and though he was the number three in the world, for the most part he maintained a sensible perspective about his chosen career. “It is a day for life, not chess,” he would say, when the sunny blue sky was an entreaty for tennis or hiking in the country. But the game this afternoon had crippled him. Ivanchuk had played a novelty in the opening and Gelfand had answered with terrible mistakes. When Kasparov had gotten up from his own board to take a first look, he had scowled and shook his head, no, no, no, no, no. His censure was something that a young player was likely to remember. All of Gelfand’s pieces were on the wrong squares and his queen appeared to be trapped. Meanwhile, Ivanchuk was rocking back and forth in his seat and mumbling as though he were reciting a prayer. Kasparov had paced two lengths of the stage, hoping that first appearances were deceiving, then stopped again in front of Gelfand and pulled his fingers through his hair. He then made this bitter, incredulous expression, how could you do this to me, Gelfand? All of Garry’s friends were losing to Ivanchuk, giving the tournament to Ivanchuk. This game had been billed as a contest between two possible world champions, and Gelfand had resigned after only eighteen moves. It was a nightmare. In chess circles throughout the Soviet Union, people would conjecture that this game could be a turning point in two careers.

  Gelfand was a gangly fellow, and in the dining room following this humiliation, his angles were all wrong. He hid behind a local newspaper, with one shoulder slung six inches below the other, his neck bent uncomfortably. Gelfand’s kind face had broken out with pimples. When he tried to thank the waiter for his tea, he slurred his words. And then his hands wouldn’t work properly and he poured the scalding tea all over himself. “It was terrible,” he said quietly, when we met later. Watching him in this condition made me afraid for my son. What if he decided to do this with his life? Gelfand was ranked third in the world. One day he was a hero, a god. The next he was a fool, humiliated, distraught, vanquished for the loss of a tempo or a piece on a wrong square.

  Winning was the only medicine. Each night the victors came to the dining room with appetites braced by the sweet illusion of endless winning. The walk the following morning was propelled by winning, and the preparation for the next round seemed majestic and irrefutable. Even for Kasparov, it was like this. It was the life of a salesman. There was no tenure. As a chess professional, you were only as good as your last good sale, your last victo
ry. But when you were winning, you could not recall the feeling of losing. Such highs and lows. Josh says that, after a tournament, trying to pull himself back into the prosaic school life is a torture. “Living this life is a drug,” Kasparov says.

  As a chess father it has been this way for me, as well. I feel like a child again, giggling, soaring high above the worrisome world while Josh is moving in for the kill with his pieces. When our boys are winning, it is redemptive for me and Klara. When Josh was nine or ten, I said to myself maybe we’ll back off on chess a little when he is fifteen or sixteen. Now that he is a teenager, I say, what is the harm in giving it five or six more years? The beauty and rush of his chess success not only masks the dark ironies of the life, but it impedes time, helps me forget that he is no longer a child. I forget that as a teenager Josh watches the deep maneuvers of the world’s best with the game already beneath his skin, that he will do the choosing, not me.

  Kasparov’s response to winning against Ljubojevic in the twelfth round was manic, and jangled like the game itself. “I don’t know how I feel,” said Garry while he ate. “The winning, losing, and winning happened so fast. You need time to understand it, to know how you feel.” For most of the game, Garry had played beautifully, but then on the verge of putting it away, he had overlooked a little combination and blundered his rook. Ljubojevic, a powerful and creative player, was stunned to find himself suddenly defeating the world champion, and in time pressure, Ljubojevic fumbled and lost like a beginner. Garry had won this game with big help from good luck. In game after game here, he was getting hit with big blows. Going into the last round, although he remained within a half point of Ivanchuk, Kasparov was vexed and uneasy.