What luck, he thought, but it would not last, they would soon think of something, so he retreated farther into the side channel, realizing after a while, to his horror, that it was getting ever narrower. It doesn’t lead anywhere, I’m a dead man. He heard a loud explosion, and the gallery filled with gunpowder and smoke. To protect himself, he got down on his knees and put his head in the water, but was unable to keep it under for long without breathing. He was getting very anxious now. On the other side of the stones, he saw beams of light and heard voices. The echo of voices he could not understand. The air was full of smoke and brick dust, provoking a coughing fit that must have been heard by those above, because a hail of bullets immediately lashed the water.
He retreated, and saw this time that, a few feet farther along, the passage widened again and the water was colder, which might mean something. He washed his face and tried to think. He remembered that before he had fallen he had been walking ahead of a group of men, but had advanced very rapidly and had found himself alone. The enemy were here, but it was possible his own side would arrive soon. He just had to hold out. There was another huge explosion, and he felt the earth tremble. The stones that had fallen with the first explosion, plus those he had piled up, protected him, but then it occurred to him that the enemy were trying to bury him alive. Would they do that? In wondering this, he was not thinking about whether they could bury a human being alive, everybody did that kind of thing in war, but whether they would fill in a well from which they drew water, which was one of the most precious commodities in the region.
Where the hell were his comrades? Even way down here, he could hear the sounds of fighting. According to his calculations, they should not be long now.
With luck, he might be able to survive, so he tried to retreat along the channel, and found that he could, except that as he moved the level of the water kept rising and was already up to his chest. In a strange way, he felt safe, even though he was in the bowels of the earth, and in complete darkness. Another explosion made him think that they were indeed preparing to fill in the well. Too bad for him.
After all, they could always clear it later, if there was a “later.” His legs were numb, but he tried to walk as best he could, because the last explosion had again filled the narrow chamber with dust and smoke.
There won’t be a “later” for me, that’s for sure. He recalled a chess position that had no way out, and concentrated on that. As he did so, he had to touch his eyes to be sure if they were open or closed, such was the state he was in. He did not think he was seriously wounded. All he had was a graze he had received when he had knocked down a wall to enter a house, and the blow to his shoulder when he had fallen in the well. Not much if you took into account the magnitude of this war and all the bullets fired and all the bodies he had seen fall since he had first pressed the trigger.
He heard cries again, and it seemed to him that he could understand a few words. Somebody was saying something in Russian or Hebrew or even Polish. He went back along the passage, groping his way, and when he reached the open part he noticed that the cave-in had raised the level of the ground and the water. He saw the gleam of a torch, and a rope hanging down in the middle, and again heard the voice. He realized they were saying to him, grab the rope, and that was what he did. As they hoisted him up, he could not see what was happening, as not only was he blinded by the light, but his pupils were also filled with dust.
When he got to the top, he had an unpleasant surprise. Instead of his comrades, he found the courtyard filled with the enemy and a man speaking to him in broken Hebrew. They tied his hands, threatening him with rifles pressed to the back of his neck. Then they took him into a room off the courtyard, and he asked himself, why don’t they execute me immediately? and also, where are my men? The fighting seemed to have moved farther east, and he was alone. He was a prisoner. He said to himself: I was better off down there, in the darkness and the cold water and the all-embracing earth. That was the way he was.
They laid him naked on a rusty, rickety table full of holes, and started asking him questions. How many of you are there? What’s your objective? Which rebel chief are you after? What are your plans of deployment? How far are you planning to go?
The man who was asking the questions spoke Hebrew, and the first thing he did was to put out his cigarette on Oslovski’s stomach. Oslovski screamed in pain. Then came something rather more unpleasant with his nails. They removed the nail from his little finger with wooden splinters. Then from his ring finger and index finger. Oslovski writhed and twisted, but did not answer their questions, partly out of pride and partly because most of the things they asked him about he did not know. As long as he did not answer, he would stay alive. If he told them what they wanted, they would shoot him in the back of the head and throw him down a well. Not his nice, cool, maternal well, but a dry one full of dust.
One of the men stared at his testicles, then grabbed them with his hand and seemed for a moment to be weighing them. What was he going to do? The light glinted on a razor, black with dried blood, and Oslovski thought, the end is near, my comrades aren’t coming and it’s all over for me, and he felt a pain in his thigh.
Still holding his testicles, the torturer had made the first cut, a clean deep fissure in the thigh that made Oslovski see stars, although he was so tired, his body forgot it immediately. He was still alive, still had a few seconds left. He did not understand what they were saying around him, only what the man asking him questions said. He wanted to pee, but contained himself. He did not want to call attention to his member. What was coming next? The man with the razor let go of his testicles and a hand pulled his head back. The same man as before was now holding a pair of garden shears and moving them closer to his toes. The man asking the questions said: I’m going to repeat what I want to know and if you don’t tell me you’re going to lose your toes.
A young man who had been watching all this with a certain horror put a plastic bag under his feet. Oslovski made a calculation, if they’re going to cut off my toes one by one, that means they’re in no hurry. Where the hell were his comrades? They must have been repulsed and now he was alone. That was the situation.
At the far end of the room, a pregnant young woman was knitting a sweater. The image seemed completely out of place here, but he looked at the wool and remembered something. What was it? His grandmother had used the same stitch, three knits with one of the needles and six with the other, knitted back to front, and then, with his forehead bathed in sweat and his body anesthetized by the pain, he noticed that the woman was getting the sequence wrong, she wasn’t knitting the complete series and one of the sides would come out too long.
Without thinking, he said in a thin voice: you’re getting it wrong, it should be six with the right needle, otherwise one of the sides will be too long and your son will be uncomfortable. She stopped her knitting. One of the men hit him in the mouth but she made a placatory gesture, came toward him with her huge belly, and said, how do you know it’s a boy? Because of the color blue, he replied. Then she said, you think the knitting is wrong? He told her what he remembered and the woman compared the sides. You’re right, this one’s turning out narrower. I can still undo it and save the wool. Thank you. She turned and walked out.
They let him rest and gave him water, and later, with the sounds of fighting apparently getting closer, a man came into the room, untied him and said, your things are over there, your weapons stay here, now go.
Oslovski went out, feeling very confused. He walked through the shadows, one more shadow himself, lingering in the ruined houses and foul-smelling trenches, and thinking, trying to understand what had happened, afraid of advancing and being seen. He had no weapons. He decided to wait until nightfall, and when it came started retracing his steps. As he passed the well, he considered hiding in it, because they had left the rope, but it was better to take a risk, so he continued walking, treading carefully over the broken glass and the rubble, and was wandering through part
of a field when he saw a tank coming. He fell to his knees, took off his combat jacket and waved it above his head, crying: save me.
The hatch opened and a fair-haired man emerged and said, come on, get in, you must be wounded.
It was Gunard Flø.
Later, in the mobile hospital behind the lines, after they had sewed Oslovski’s wounds and told him he would have to be immobile for a while, Flø said to him, I know what to do when we can’t sleep at night, and took out a chess set. They hit it off, and after a few games realized that they already knew each other. They had taken part in some of the same tournaments, and although they had never played against one another, they remembered each other’s names.
That was how the heroes of my story met.
I will add one more thing, which is that Oslovski had a curious experience some years later, in Berlin,. He was at a crossing, waiting for the lights to turn green, when he saw on the other side of the street the woman from the torture room. She had an absent look on her face, and of course she was a bit older. She was holding a little boy by the hand. When the lights changed, they met in the middle of the street and he said to her, do you remember me? you saved my life in the refugee camp. She looked at him in surprise, uncomprehendingly. He insisted, remember, the knitting stitches that were wrong, it’s me, I owe you my life! The woman looked at him in terror, picked up the little boy, and broke into a run. Both of them disappeared into the crowd.
Now, in order to continue the story of my characters, it has become necessary to give a brief account of their lives.
I shall begin with Ferenck Oslovski.
His birth and early childhood are fairly irrelevant. Knowing that he was the son of a Jewish notary in Wadowice and a woman who had studied philosophy does not help us to understand very much about his gifts. Hundreds of human beings have had similar childhoods, just as anodyne or interesting, or even brilliant, and none of them, none at all, became champion of Poland.
He himself says that the first time he saw a chessboard was in a local tailor’s shop, Roth’s, where he had gone to collect a suit for his father. The tailor was playing a game with one of his employees, and let him stay for a moment to watch. Oslovski would always remember how glossy the polished ebony and boxwood of the classic Staunton pieces seemed. He looked at them with such rapt attention that the tailor, a friend of the family, said, would you like to touch them? go on, reach out your hand, move one. The boy chose a knight and slid it across the board.
What he felt in his fingers was so agreeable, so soft, that he was overwhelmed, conquered forever by a pleasure that he would soon learn all about, because the tailor invited him to come whenever he was free to watch him play, and between one game and the next started teaching him. This pawn moves like this, the knight jumps there, the queen can move forwards, backwards, and diagonally.
The boy would watch him in silence, not telling him that he had already watched enough times to know the moves perfectly and absorb all the different openings. One day, after a few months had passed, the tailor said, sit down and start with white, and so that we’re evenly matched, I’ll play without the queen, and that was what they did. After twenty moves, the tailor performed a classic checkmate, which left young Ferenck on the verge of tears. Then the boy ventured to say: Mr. Roth, can we play another game with all the pieces? The tailor was touched, and said, of course, if you prefer I won’t give you any advantage, but it’s going to be more difficult.
The game began well, and after thirty-one moves the boy delivered an astonishing checkmate, much to the surprise of the tailor, who had not seen it coming, and when he tried to figure out what had happened, the boy said, Mr. Roth, you were already done for six moves ago, look, and he started manipulating the pieces at great speed, explaining the position. They played four more games and the result was always the same: the tailor, who was not a bad player and had even taken part in tournaments, was checkmated every time. Never again was he able to beat the boy, which convinced him that he was dealing with a case of precociousness that was worth investigating. So he took him, with his father’s permission, to the chess club run by Ozer Miller, an experienced player who had been local champion and who gave classes and played with other former players and enthusiasts.
Ferenck’s appearance in Miller’s club was quite a milestone, because in the eleven months he was there he never lost a game, not even with Ozer Miller himself. Miller decided to take matters in hand and introduce him into other clubs, of greater standing and quality, such as the one run by Sam Edenbaum, where the boy at last found his level.
Sam Edenbaum earned his living selling fabrics, a profession close to that of the tailor Shlomo Roth. They were two links in the same chain, which had created a bond between them that verged on the fraternal. But there was more to the long-standing relationship between these two men, Edenbaum and Roth, than a business connection, and here I hope you will allow me a short digression, because I think it is true to say that they owed their lives to chess.
They were both part of that much-reduced Jewish community in Poland that had survived the Holocaust, and in their case it was thanks to chess that they had survived. Both had been deported to Auschwitz but had been saved by the fact that one of the section commandants in the camp was a lover of chess and organized tournaments. For a prisoner, to lose a game could result in death. That indeed had happened to a number of Jews and one political prisoner, a Communist, whereas when an officer lost the penalty was typical of the military, like having to drink five glasses of brandy or walk between the huts in their underwear, the kind of drunken revel that bore no relation to the tragic outcome with which the others were faced.
Roth and Edenbaum always won, and although that exasperated the officers, it also kept them alive, because they would never send to his death a man they wanted to beat at chess, a consideration that only chess players would understand. The officers did not dare touch them. What they did was make them play against each other, which was somewhat macabre, because they had no idea what would happen to the loser. But to avoid trouble, they played a real game to the death, which Edenbaum won in fifty-six moves, to much acclaim from the officers. In fact, the officers were so pleased that both men were treated to canned chicken and brandy.
As they told it to Oslovski, Roth and Edenbaum never allowed themselves to lose a game. The system they concocted consisted of thinking about chess all the time, closing their eyes, imagining moves and analyzing final positions as they dug holes for fencing in the snow and rain. Thinking about chess and nothing but chess, conceiving the world as a succession of pieces moving across the board according to their own hierarchies, the ignominious reality in which they were immersed being merely the canvas on which they projected moves and planned unexpected advances: that was why, whenever the officers came into their huts and took them away to play, they were always ready, they already knew which openings they would use and how they would develop them, just like the protagonist of Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game, which I am sure you will remember, whose life is saved by chess but who is later driven mad by it. Well, something like that happened in Auschwitz, although neither Edenbaum nor Roth went mad, only concentrated their energies in the brain and switched off everything else. Their survival depended on that one organ, the brain, and on their skill at playing chess.
This situation continued until the camp was liberated, and caused them a few problems afterwards. Edenbaum and Roth, who were in better physical condition than the others because of the food they had been given by the officers, were now denounced to the authorities, accused of having been collaborators or even spies. These malicious stories went no farther, however, because in those days of horror there were better and more useful things to do than try to pursue two Jewish chess players who had not only survived but even prospered.
But let us return to the education of young Ferenck at a time when Poland was slowly recovering from the war.
Edenbaum took his education in hand and, for
a small amount of money, hired a former regional champion to train him in openings, which, according to Edenbaum, were the pillars on which the outcome of a game depended, and so Ferenck started devoting himself increasingly to chess. His father gave him special permission to leave school at noon and spend three hours on chess, a time judged sufficient to deepen his knowledge without taking him away for too long from the world and the things a boy his age needed to do, because, as is well known, most young prodigies develop a distance from reality that sooner or later destroys them, look at Bobby Fischer, a genius but quite awkward and even unpleasant when it came to other human activities, or Gary Kasparov, the prodigy from Baku, who never had a real adolescence and who, as an adult, had the same mental age he had had when his childhood was snatched from him. This did not happen to other grand masters and champions, such as Boris Spassky or Tigran Petrosian, who continued to be human beings as well as great chess brains, so it was important to his new mentor that young Ferenck should be a child like any other, and he made it a condition that his apprenticeship should not take precedence over his life. And he was successful, because Ferenck Oslovski spent his teenage years just like his classmates, going to the river to bathe and trying to win the love of girls—mostly without success, by the way, which contributed to his somewhat melancholy temperament—but by and large leading a healthy life and even developing another great passion: music. He learned musical notation and piano, both major tasks, which helped him to keep his eyes on the horizon and molded his spirit in the clay of the artist.
But the passion for chess is so strong that it may wipe out other vocations. Remember Marcel Duchamp, the man who destroyed the traditional concept of art when he presented an upturned urinal at the Salon des Artistes as his magnum opus. Duchamp gave it all up for the infinite spaces of chess, never again creating anything but combinations of pawns and bishops and kings on a chessboard.
Necropolis Page 18
