And Oslovski was the same.
Before long, young Ferenck gave up the piano and musical notation to devote himself exclusively to the study of combinations and variations. In his first tournaments, he obtained some surprising results. At the Municipal Tournament in Wadowice he came third, but did not lose a single game, claiming 16 victories and 38 draws, which in points put him below two of his rivals, one of whom he had actually beaten. These small tournaments provided the young man with a great incentive to continue. What a chess player longs for above all is to confront a rival of his own, or greater, stature. The desire to follow an ascending curve kept him awake at night, studying variations, reproducing games by grand masters such as Tal, Capablanca, and Larsen, making notes and coming up with new ideas that he would discuss daily with Edenbaum, until something happened that would completely change his life, which was that in the middle of studying a position, as he was writing down his possible moves, Sam Edenbaum’s head tipped forward onto the chessboard, before his whole body collapsed noisily on the floor. An aneurism had burst in his brain, killing him outright, the expression on his face one of concentration rather than pain. As they say of Archimedes, death interrupted him in mid-thought.
So Ferenck found himself without a teacher, because although the tailor, Roth, was still a good companion and pleasant to talk to, he was not at the requisite level to train Oslovski. The young man drifted for nearly a year without a guide, until someone at last appeared to pick up the torch from Edenbaum, a Russian named Vasily Andrescovich, who had heard about the young man and his achievements and was looking for a pupil out of whom to carve his masterpiece. To him, Oslovski was like the block of marble to Da Vinci. The raw material for his great art.
The first thing Andrescovich did, when summer came and the school vacations began, was to apply for permission to go to Moscow, which he managed easily thanks to his contacts and an invitation from the Russian Federation. When he arrived, young Oslovski was stunned. Moscow was not only the capital of the Socialist world, but also a mythical city to chess players. Ever since Alexander Alekhine had snatched the championship from the Cuban, Capablanca, Russian predominance had been unquestioned: Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and even Viktor Korchnoi, who despite his talent never became world champion, as well as young hopefuls such as Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov. Moscow was the cradle of chess, and he, a shy young Pole from one of the most obscure and forgotten corners of the world, was there to devour it.
With his hands in his pockets, sweating with the emotion and the heat, young Ferenck turned on to the tree-lined Boulevard Gogol, passed the huge bronze stature of the author, and a little farther along, on the left hand side, came to the great temple itself, the headquarters of the Russian Chess Federation. When he entered the hall on the second floor, he thought he was going to faint at the sight of the mirrors and the stucco and the meticulously lined-up tables.
Andrescovich told him that a series of games were being played that afternoon between Grand Masters in honor of Botvinnik, the so-called “Dialectic of Iron,” three times world champion and second longest holder of the title after Alekhine. Young Oslovski sat down in the room on the first floor where the games were commented on and waited for the beginning. With trembling lips he saw the white, cold figure of Karpov come in through reception and start up the stairs toward the hall where the tables were. The games began and Oslovski listened to the commentators, old players and Grand Masters, and after what seemed to him only a moment, although nearly two hours had passed, he asked if he might be allowed to make a comment. He left his chair and went to the chessboard where the positions were analyzed and there gave a rapid demonstration of a better play. The old men listened to his explanation, given in fairly correct Russian, thought about it and approved his hypothesis. Later, during a second game, they asked his opinion about another complex position and again the young man gave a brave and highly original analysis. By now, the wise old men were murmuring among themselves.
The next day, Oslovski played for the first time at the Russian Chess Federation. He felt his fingers tremble as they touched the pieces and slid them over the board and the afternoon sun made slanting lines across the floor. A week later, he played in a youth championship and came second. Then he took part in a number of amateur tournaments and won four of them.
From here things began to move fast, as often happens in the lives of chess players. He played in Leningrad, Prague, Kiev, and Odessa, won a tournament in Budapest and another in Athens. He was runner-up in the all-Poland championship and finally, at the age of seventeen, became national champion, which earned him honors and the possibility of traveling around the world.
Now begins a new chapter in the trajectory of Oslovski. By now he was twenty-three and many things had happened in his life. One of them was the death of his father, and another the illness of his mother, for whom, thanks to his position as Grand Master, he was able to secure the best possible care at Warsaw’s Central Hospital, in the ward for patients suffering from terminal illnesses, which in her case was nothing less than leukemia. In spite of these setbacks, Ferenck concentrated on chess, which was now no longer just a passion but a way of rising through the social ranks in Gomulka’s Poland, in pursuit of which he doubled his concentration and efforts.
He continued to work with his Russian teacher, Andrescovich, but something had started to go wrong with the mechanism. The young Polish master stopped winning tournaments. Instead, he would always come second or third. These were anxious years, and the history of Poland, which had always been sad, seemed to be somehow embodied in this young man full of dreams. And what happens to young men like Ferenck, when they gain a certain fame and their personal lives get in a mess? They generally start to develop a weakness for hard liquor, which they justify by stress, or nerves, or those baleful dusks when the sky of Warsaw fills with a purple light, as if tongues of fire were swallowing the city and the souls of its citizens, and then the glasses succeed one another on the bar counters, filled with transparent, highly concentrated liquids intended to counteract that complicated sense of abandonment in which the mind can find no rest, a glass, knocked back in one go, is followed by a second, then a third, and so Oslovski’s hours started to darken and black clouds covered his soul, presaging bad weather.
The storm lost no time in breaking, in the form of a wire from Warsaw announcing the news he had so feared, “Mother died during night, in her sleep. Come asap.” It had been sent by the director of the hospital and Ferenck received it six days later while he was in Odessa, in an elimination heat for a place in the Interzonal, a step on the road to the World Championship.
When he got to Warsaw, he had to go straight from the airport to the morgue, together with his teacher Andrescovich, to identify a body that was indeed his mother’s, although he could no longer recognize her. She was buried in a ceremony attended by only six people: two directors of the Polish Chess Federation, a nurse from the hospital, the doctor, his teacher, and himself.
It was after the funeral that Oslovski ran away for the first time.
He disappeared from the streets of Warsaw for three months, as if swept away by one of those icy winds from the far north that lash the squares of the city, or as so many friends and enemies of the government died, without anyone ever finding their bodies, and both Andrescovich and the directors of the Polish Federation searched everywhere for him, especially in the cities he most liked to visit: Moscow, Kiev, Prague. They checked the hospitals and the police stations, all to no avail, and remember that I am talking about the Communist era in Central Europe, when it was not so easy to disappear, because everything was under such strict control, and yet Oslovski managed it. After three months, in desperation, Andrescovich decided to make the disappearance public, which he had preferred not to do before in order to avoid a scandal.
And what he had hoped for happened. As soon as it was announced in the newspapers and on television that the che
ss master Ferenck Oslovski had disappeared, a call came in from the central police station in the seaside resort of Mie˛dzyzdroje to say that the player was staying in a hotel there. Andrescovich immediately traveled to the town and found Ferenck, looking gaunt, haggard, and sad. “I was taking a cure of silence,” was the only explanation he gave his teacher before setting off for the airfield and getting on a Tupolev to Wadowice, where everyone expected the former young prodigy to regain his spirits and return to the chessboard.
He did in fact manage to do so, although slowly, because the game suffers when it is abandoned for too long and the first moves are like those of a sportsman who has spent a whole season out of action. Timid, erratic steps, exaggerated calculations. That was how it was for Oslovski.
Three months later, he tried again and to everyone’s surprise won an international tournament in Athens, taking a substantial prize of ten thousand dollars, which made it possible for him to replenish his depleted savings, because those were still the days when chess players in Eastern Europe had certain privileges but did not earn very much unless they played in the West. He and Andrescovich returned to Wadowice feeling very pleased, but this vein of good luck was short-lived and soon afterwards Oslovski again reverted to his cruise speed, which meant he would always come third or fourth, or occasionally second. That seemed to be his level, and at least it guaranteed him a salary of three hundred zlotys a month, fairly high in comparison with the two hundred and fifty earned by a university professor or the five hundred earned by a highly placed Party official. From that position, he watched the history of the world and chess pass by. He saw the arrival of Spassky and his rise to the heights, he saw the coming of that young devil, the American Bobby Fischer, performing amazing feats and defeating everyone, including Spassky, and he felt angry at himself for admiring such a mean, self-centered character. From his room, following the championship in Reykjavik, he came to the conclusion that chess did not make people better, which again depressed him, so he closed the curtains and did not come out again for a long time.
There were further crises, and during those years he disappeared four more times, only now neither Andrescovich nor anyone else bothered to look for him. They knew that all they had to do was wait.
By now, fifteen years of work had passed and Andrescovich was starting to grow old. The list of misfortunes that had befallen him during that time, by the side of his disciple, included the following: his parents died, his son defected to the West on a journey to Sydney, he underwent three hernia operations, and his hair started falling out, leaving a smooth ball in the middle and wisps of gray at the sides. After a careful reading of all these signs, he decided to return to Moscow and live on his chess player’s pension, so one fine day he announced to Ferenck that he was leaving, which brought about yet another attack in the younger man.
After this, Oslovski woke up one day and saw that General Jaruzelski had been appointed prime minister of Poland. He also saw, from his window, that the street was covered in dirty snow streaked with weak black prints, and so he decided to close the curtains and carry on sleeping. He woke up again and now Jaruzelski was president, but the snow and the ice continued making the streets dirty, so he again shut himself away. When Lech Walesa was elected, Oslovski thought: they don’t deceive me, and again closed the curtains, until one day he had a brainwave and decided to go outside.
The trees were green and there were flowers everywhere. The sun was shining into every corner. People were singing and whistling, but it was too late for him, so he went and bought an airline ticket and a few days later arrived in Tel Aviv claiming aliyah, which would ensure him a modest but cozy apartment, Israeli citizenship, and help with finding work.
And so it was. He had an apartment on Allenby Street, not far from the beach, and a monthly salary that allowed him to cover the basics. Most afternoons, he went to look at the sea. He loved the outline of the old port of Jaffa to his left, and beyond it the horizon of the Mediterranean, that sea that had given and taken so much from the peoples of the Middle East and was so strange to someone from Central Europe. He would spend the hours making marks in the sand and analyzing positions on a little portable chess set, until he met Gael, a woman of thirty who had lost her husband in the Yom Kippur War. Gael served pizzas and fast food in a restaurant near his apartment called the Nightingale of Odessa, run by a Russian. Oslovski went there every day for dinner, and one night he asked the waitress, what time do you finish work? She looked at him angrily and said, I know what you’re thinking and I’ll only go with you if you’re serious, that’s not too much to ask of a Pole who’s as alone as his sad country.
Ferenck looked at her in surprise and said, I’m alone because I want to be, it’s my way of life, you mustn’t deduce from it that I’m desperate, or that I’m special in any way, to which Gael retorted, nobody likes living alone and if you do then you’re crazy, and Oslovski said, I’m not crazy, I carry my love in my pocket, and he took out the little wooden box with the chess set, but Gael, who was of Lebanese origin, said, if your only company is inside that little box then things are worse than I thought, and went to the counter to serve some beers. Then she approached and said, it was a joke, I know chess is something bigger than the two of us put together and bigger than the Nightingale of Odessa and the whole of Allenby Street and this little strip of land where someday we will all be free. Those words sufficed for Gael and Ferenck to make love that same night in the apartment where, three months later, they decided to set up home together.
Here I shall leave the story of Oslovski.
I leave him with Gael, in the apartment on Allenby Street, to head north, far north, to that mysterious North that is home to so many legends and was home, too, to Gunard Flø, born in Gothenburg into a rich Lutheran family, mine owners and shareholders in a number of shipping companies, who learned to play chess in a very exclusive club in the city, the Barajó, after being enrolled by his father, a lover of the game who had never reached more than a modest amateur level, but who sensed in the chessboard a kind of greatness that neither his money nor his political contacts could give him, nothing to do with fame or success, but with a certain indestructible solitude, a temple that would allow his son to undertake elevated enterprises of the spirit without stooping, daily, to the banality of human affairs.
So Gunard, as a small boy, received as an inheritance his father’s frustrated desire to be a chess player, and received it gratefully. From the age of nine, he devoted himself body and soul to chess, with results that went far beyond what his rich family expected of him. He won youth tournaments in Gothenburg and by thirteen he was the Olympic champion, which would be his greatest prize in chess. He would never again get that far, but that never bothered him. Quite the contrary. Unlike other chess players, defeat or the idea that his talent was a modest one never seemed to bother him. Rather, it gave him a great feeling of harmony, as if knowing that he was not called to great enterprises allowed him to enjoy the game more intensely.
And so it was. In whatever tournament he played, from the age of fifteen, he always achieved decent results, but never genius, never an ovation, never victory. His father was not worried, because with great wisdom he said to himself, I wanted a son who was a chess player and that’s what I have, aspiring in addition to his being a champion would be to tempt fate, may God bless him. In the Lutheran church, people do not long for things, and greed is punished. The only thing his father did for the young man was to give him the best teachers so that he could get as much enjoyment from the game as possible, while playing at a high level. One of them, Theodor Momsen, had even trained the Master Bent Larsen, although we should point out, for the sake of the truth, that the reason Momsen agreed to take care of young Gunard was not that he had seen a huge talent in him, but because Mr. Flø put in front of him a check with many zeros on the right hand side, which is where they count the most, at a time when Momsen’s career was entering what might be described as the final stage of a long, slo
w decline.
So young Gunard studied openings and variations. He fell in love with the more romantic aspects of chess and started using obsolete combinations such as the King’s Gambit, the Vienna Game, or the Bishop’s Opening, common at the time of Morphy and Anderssen, classic players whom Gunard admired and whose games he studied with delight. During his hours of study with Momsen, Gunard enjoyed the beautiful precision of the game and its rhetorical figures, the prosody of those pieces sliding across the board and, of course, he was especially delighted to play blitz chess with his teacher. Every time he achieved a good position, or indeed won, he celebrated it with a few flamenco or tango steps and a burst of wild laughter. He was a cheerful young man, and for his father that was the main thing.
He must have been about eighteen the first time he dressed in women’s clothes. The whole family was vacationing on the island of Capri, where they had a beautiful house, and that was where it happened. One afternoon, without making any particular decision, Gunard put on a green suit, with a degree of cleavage but with the skirt covering the knees. It was a formal outfit that belonged to an aunt who was with them on their vacation and was much loved by Gunard. His mother’s clothes, which were thicker, were excessively baggy on him, not to mention the fact that, although she was his mother, he had no very strong feelings for her. Gunard’s great love was his father.
It was actually his father who found him in the room, and on seeing him asked, what are you doing with that, Guny? The young man replied, I don’t know, daddy, I felt a irresistible urge to put it on, and now, with it on, I look at the horizon and the lights of the distant boats and feel as if my spirit had taken flight, and then his father said, well, I’ll leave you with your spirit, but don’t even think of going down to the living room like that. When you’ve finished put everything back where you found it, is it your aunt Adelaide’s? The young man nodded and turned again toward the sea, and a while later came down in his normal clothes. His father saw him and gave a sigh of relief.
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