by Jerzy Pilch
I remember the flow and the musical naturalness of play. I didn’t have the sense of the infallibility of any move—I had the sense that there simply wasn’t any other move. Probably, in my case, the famous cognitive innocence had to do with chess, and not with drawing. Most children, as is well known, draw in interesting ways at the beginning; once they grow up a little and begin to draw more consciously, that is to say, to lie, to contrive—the gift vanishes. I grew up a little, began to contrive, the gift vanished. Nowadays I rarely play, and for the last five years all the more rarely, since I play exclusively with myself. If I come upon a chess puzzle in some journal, I am usually able to solve it, and usually—without bragging—it doesn’t take me more than a quarter of an hour.
Today’s newspapers rarely publish chess puzzles. I don’t intend in the least to whine about the fact that we have come to live in evil times, in which lamentable computer games have supplanted the game of kings, or anything of that sort. Absolutely not. I don’t have inclinations toward those sorts of banalities, and when, in moments of weakness, they come over me, I summon up the rest of my mental forces, and I fight them in their infancy. Besides all that, I believe that all “games and entertainments of kings” ought to be limited to the elite, and that, in general, only those things that a small, the smallest number of persons cultivates and practices are worthy of note.
I remark upon the sporadic presence of chess problems in today’s journals in order to make excuses for a certain eccentricity. Namely, browsing through the newspapers and magazines at the Empik bookstore—not with the goal of finding a chess puzzle, in any case, not exclusively with that goal—I noticed that a weekly called New State, which is completely unknown to me and always just takes up space on the shelves, publishes not so much chess puzzles as a special chess rubric, even on a decent level, and that, in addition, those half columns (true, they are of a small size) were edited by a rather—judging by the picture—attractive female chess-master with the exotic name of Iweta. I began to buy it rather regularly. I cut out the descriptions of the games and the commentaries by the attractive female chess-master with the exotic name; the rest of New State I throw away without reading—so much for my eccentricity.
I have three chess sets. A large one (“Classic?” “Royal?” “Olympic?”)—clearly I’m not certain of even the basic terminology; in any case—the chess board measures sixteen inches on a side—it is significantly bigger than the one in Wisła, but the shape of the figures is identical to those that perished together with the house, which has turned into ruin and dust. Pawn, rook, horse, runner, lady, king. The ancient pattern and—since they are taken from my world—the ancient names. No completely unfamiliar knight, bishop, queen. Whenever I hear or read that someone makes a move with his knight, bishop, or queen, I’m not certain at first what game we’re talking about. I’m exaggerating—but only slightly and for symbolic effect. Further—I’m ashamed to admit it—I also have magnetic chess pieces. Yes, it’s true. Small, classical, but, nonetheless—magnetic. It is—it goes without saying—a piece of shoddy barbarity.
Just as the genuine art of carpentry should be practiced without a single nail, so in genuine chess there is no place for any metal elements. Far greater principles than these are regularly broken for the mother of all shoddiness: human convenience. Alleged convenience. Supposedly in certain situations—for instance, on a trip—it is extremely convenient to play with magnetic chess pieces. I don’t know. I avoid travel. Supposedly not only in certain, but in absolutely all situations, computerized chess is even more convenient than the magnetic version. Here I know even less. I use a computer exclusively as a typewriter. For me, the first is worse than the second, and the second is worse than the first. Magnetic chess is worse than the computerized version, but also the computerized is worse than the magnetic. As in life: all scales are in sharp decline. All scenarios are black. True, computerized pieces of shit will supplant magnetic pieces of shit, but this is small consolation, because, seemingly annihilated by the new thing, the slightly magnetized freaks won’t disappear at all; rather they will take on a venerable patina and will become rarities sought after by collectors of twentieth-century design, and perhaps even of twentieth-century art. The circle is closing. The loop is tightening. But I give my word of honor: it wasn’t for the patina that I bought the magnetic chess set.
I bought it—in a men’s gift shop on Krucza Street—because it constantly seemed to me that a bizarre instability reigned over my usual chess set, on which I incessantly played the Tolstoyan game. I suppose I don’t have to emphasize, or even point out, that I set up the pieces as soon as I saw the photo. I examined them carefully, I played out successive variants, I returned to the starting point, etc. But with time—this lasted a good couple of months—I began to get the bizarre, though in this case perhaps only too justified, impression that something, someone, some sort of spirit or some other demon was changing the positions of the pawns and other figures, that they were gliding over the chessboard by themselves—the devil only knows.
The solution turned out to be highly disappointing. The Ukrainian woman who cleans for me once a week, and who is—incidentally—amazingly pedantic, wasn’t able to resist, and she dusted the chessboard as well. Once I figured out what was going on, I reprimanded her severely, and I absolutely forbade her to go anywhere near the chessboard. But as is usually the case with threats, I felt a lack of security, and so, with the goal of at least minimally strengthening the stability of the position, I bought the magnetic chess set.
True, as soon as I saw, while still in the store, the shocking English inscription on the box—“Made without child labour”—I hesitated for a moment. After all, as soon as a person of my generation hears that it is not true that we put children to work, there naturally appears a vision of millions of little, emaciated Chinese, hungry and cold, milling or even sculpting the pawns, bishops, and rooks. Such a vision presented itself to me, but it quickly vanished. I’ll say it honestly: it vanished before it appeared.
My third chess set is a present from a woman I would like to forget. Clearly, however, that wish is weaker than the desire of possession. I haven’t gotten rid of this souvenir, which is all the stranger in that it is a trashy curio to boot. Only—to vent ungentlemanly disdain—a calamitous woman, or rather, only a catastrophic woman, only a woman that catastrophic could hope that anyone would believe that the pseudo-Indian imitation of wood, marble, ivory, copper, ceramic—and whatever else have you—was imported from Bombay, when it was most certainly acquired in the underground passageway under Central Station. And that’s in the best case scenario.
As to literature about chess, I have an anthology of all the matches of Bobby Fischer, three volumes of the Biographical Dictionary of Polish Chess Players, an English-language monograph on the “Sicilian defense,” as well as a fundamental and, frankly speaking, totally insane work entitled With Chess Through the Ages and History. I haven’t read any of these titles even superficially, but then, the number of the books I put off for reading during more peaceful times is much more considerable and their topics wider. By more peaceful times, I mean days, nights, weeks, and months, the lion’s share of which will not be consumed by the passionate chasing of girls. When this happens, when I awake at dawn and begin to read some classic, I will read until the afternoon, and perhaps even—if I feel like it—until dusk. Something tells me I won’t live to see this epoch of peace and quiet, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t collect books.
II
Someone might say that, by constantly emphasizing that I supposedly don’t know much about chess, I am being coy and am obscuring things, since it irrefutably follows from the story I am telling that I must be an entirely decent chess player. Well, without a shadow of a doubt and with deadly solemnity, I declare that I am a miserable chess player, not to say no player at all. And one fundamental detail disqualifies me: I don’t know, and I have never completely mastered, the art of chess description. I have
mastered it only to the point where I can decode the notation of the newspaper chess riddle without making embarrassing errors, and this is truly little.***** The chessboard of my childhood was composed of wooden cream- and dark-brown-colored fields, called “white” and “black,” glued onto canvas; and the paradox of the terminology ended here for us. Not I, nor a single one of the house’s grandmasters, had the least inkling that there existed some sort of a7s, c5s, f3s. I wouldn’t bet my life on it that they could answer without consideration just how many fields and how many pieces there were. And if anyone should tell them that it is possible to play on a scrap of paper, they would be laughed at. Sensual pleasures weren’t their strong suit, but there was no point in playing without touching the pieces, without their leisurely or impetuous movement, without permanent staring at the position of the pieces, which slowly dissolves (and yet entrances to the end in its mysterious symmetries). Professional arguments—that if you haven’t mastered description, you will also have trouble with chess memory; that, granted, you will remember the position of the pieces, but a memory like that is not very capacious, because the pieces are spatial, and not very many of them will stick in your head—these professional arguments were not for us, and to this day they make no impression upon me.
Supposedly the mind of the professional chess player is filled with hundreds of thousands of combinations. I have only a couple of them in my head. Although, without a doubt, in the untangling of precisely this history, a few more might come in handy. Just a dozen, just a few tens, just a hundred.
Perhaps I wouldn’t stare for months and years at the position of the pieces on Tolstoy’s chessboard like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps the position of the pieces itself would open up some sort of secret trap-door in my mind. But I stared, and I didn’t have a chance, since even if I had seen such a position at some point, I didn’t recall it. Even if I had heard this melody at some point, with my wretched ear for music, I didn’t have a chance of repeating it. A classic says: if you remember—you need only connect; but I couldn’t connect, because I didn’t remember. I didn’t have a clue what to connect with what.
Today, I see clearly that I was also afflicted with a peculiar blindness. I carefully examined every square millimeter of the photograph, but I didn’t see the stylish little table on which the chessboard was standing. No: it wasn’t that I didn’t notice, or I didn’t attach sufficient importance to it—I simply didn’t see. I had a bizarre, or perhaps not at all bizarre, but rather a well-justified block. I didn’t see what was in front of my nose, and I didn’t remember the first storyline. I pounded my blind head on the photo of Lev Tolstoy playing chess, as if on the Great Wall of China, or on the Berlin Wall. And I stood before that photograph, as if at the Wailing Wall or at the Iron Curtain. And nothing. No move, not a hand, nor a foot. Neither a bishop, nor a rook.
Until once, in one of my common and daily-experienced epiphanies; once, namely, after glimpsing, at the intersection of Krucza and Żurawia Streets, the most perfect suntan in the world; once—to put it more precisely—on a certain November afternoon, when I was just about to chase after the shoulders emerging from a lizard-green dress and opalescing like Nestlé milk chocolate; when I was already—I’ll say it honestly—chasing after them; when at any moment I was about to change my shape and state of concentration and become a drop of sweat on the withdrawing back of the super babe I had glimpsed by chance—it suddenly dawned on me. Suddenly I stood as if rooted in the ground, suddenly I gave up the chase, suddenly I became myself again. Suddenly the torment caused by this ill-fated photograph vanished; suddenly I realized whom the fellow playing chess with Tolstoy resembled.
He had reminded me of someone the entire time, but this was—so to say—a side uncertainty. An ornamental uncertainty. And so, taken as a whole, the picture was troubling from A to Z, and in it—on top of all that—someone reminds me of somebody. But the fact that he reminds me of someone seems unimportant: it is too ostentatious, it is too much on the surface, and it also looks like a mysterious, although trite, addendum. The main hieroglyphs were almost certainly registered on the chessboard; the match, which had barely begun, might go in any direction, and hundreds of possible combinations could be puzzles and their solutions. Thousands of pages and stories recorded by the brilliant writer might contain entries and exits from the labyrinths. In the end, probably it is in them that we will find the beautiful and intricate crux of the matter, and not in the fact that someone here resembles someone else. Someone always resembles someone else; and when you set off from a small town into the great world, you constantly come upon people in this world who are doubles of people who lived in the neighborhood, and—outside of anatomic pranks—there are no secrets here. I could write a whole book about the doubles of old citizens of Wisła I have met in the world, and it would be a superficial work. Even the similarity of old Lazar to Winston Churchill or of Szarzec from Partecznik to Paul VI is of little significance, to say nothing of the lesser cases of similarity.
It appears that I myself am disappointed with my own solution. Yes and no. I am, because it turned out that the key to the mystery is to be found in the addendum to the mystery that was lying on the very surface. And I’m not disappointed, because the principle that a good horror contains answers to fundamental questions—the nature of evil, the devil, and the other world—proved true as gold in my own thriller.
III
The landed gentryman playing chess with Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy reminded me of a certain driver from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy. We saw him a total of one time, and although both Mother and I, and the other members of the household, well remembered his feats, his face and external appearance were completely erased. And here you have it, after staring at the photograph for three years, on its surface appeared that same—the spitting image of that—good-natured, but essentially hypocritical smile; that same high forehead passing over into a bald spot; that same slovenly and disheveled beard. I had found it. The truth lay on the surface. It was darkest under the lantern. I had for the telling one of the basic and, for a short time, frequently recalled family stories. What is more, a thoroughly family chess story. Recalled frequently, but for a short time, for it soon turned out that all of us preferred to forget these not entirely understandable events from—today it will already be—more than forty years ago.
For an engineer at the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, Father disappeared without a trace decidedly too frequently. He always returned, however, and there is no point in hiding it: these were sorry returns. Always sozzled, always the worse for wear, and always with that same old story: namely, that he had been playing ping-pong with his colleagues until the break of dawn.
When he got lost during the move to Krakow, however, the matter looked ominous. For the first time, we were certain that he was no longer alive.
It was a sweltering August in the year 1962. I was ten years old, and I was at the apogee of all possibilities. After some dozen months of incessant soccer playing, I had become a consummate forward. In a thick journal with a green binding, which I had received for my birthday, I was writing a detective/romance novel. In the expectation of God knows what sort of mystery, I traipsed around after a certain oddly dressed female vacationer. Almost every night, I dreamed of great flights over the Earth and breath-taking landings in yellow grass. I was in love with Claudia Cardinale and—as befitted a true man—I didn’t care in the least about reciprocity on her part. Beginning in the fall, we were to be living in Krakow, and each day of that summer had the taste of final things.
Father placed an order with Master Sztwertnia for bookshelves that were to occupy one whole wall in the Krakow apartment, a hanging kitchen cabinet, and a special little table for playing chess.
“What do you mean, a little table for playing chess?” Mother wrung her hands. “A little table for chess? It’s a disgrace to order something like that. Master Sztwertnia is a serious craftsman! He isn’t going to make any absurdities! What’s t
he point of a little chess table!” Mother screamed. “Can’t you play on a normal table?”
“No,” Father responded dully.
“You are Newton!” Mother raised her gaze to the heavens. “You are the great scientist Isaac Newton!”
Probably for the hundredth time, for there was no lack of opportunities, she cited the anecdote about Sir Isaac Newton, who, so they say, weary of constantly opening the door for the cat and her kittens as they sauntered back and forth, ordered two openings to be cut over the threshold—a large one for the cat and a smaller one for the kittens—“as if,” she choked, “as if the small cats couldn’t manage to pass through the large hole! Newton! A genuine Isaac Newton! And besides, when are you going to play that chess? When? Since you are never home.”
“On Sunday,” Father answered arrogantly, and Mother capitulated and glanced in the direction of Grandma Pech, as if seeking comfort and understanding. Every time Grandma heard about the little chess table, she would shudder, as if it were a matter of deviltry in the strict sense; she didn’t cross herself, she didn’t make the sign of the cross, since we don’t do that on a daily basis; but she would wave it off in despair and immediately, from the spot where she happened to be standing at the moment, rush off, as if she were rushing into panicky flight that would take her as far as the eye could see, and after a few steps she would suddenly halt and glance furtively at the old man to see whether he had come to his senses, and seeing that he hadn’t come to his senses, she would lend her features an expression that said: Get thee hence, Satan!
