Searching for Bobby Fischer (32 page)

For a minute or two I couldn’t quite believe it; Josh was losing. Instead of speculation about who was going to win, the talk around me had suddenly switched to my son’s possibilities of drawing the game.

Now Josh forced an exchange of queens. A big mistake. As a rule, when you are down material without a compensating attack,
you should never exchange pieces. Next he exchanged rooks. It was as if in this stressful moment he was seeking the endgame like an old friend. Litvinchuk and the other masters were shaking their heads; the game was lost.

I had been dreading this moment for a year. I felt disconcerted, naked. It was awful that so many people in the room were watching. “It’s okay,” Bonnie said quietly, and I shuddered. Finished with their games by now, Joshua’s neighborhood friends and their fathers were studying the screen quietly. They seemed to be embarrassed, but perhaps it was only I who was embarrassed.

Jeff’s father and sister were smiling and exchanging casual remarks. I noticed Pandolfini standing at the back of the crowd looking at the screen with a serious expression. Too late. I was angry at him, which was ridiculous; it wasn’t Bruce who had lost. I wished I could take the defeat coolly, and that Josh didn’t have to endure the end of it. I couldn’t bear to look at the screen anymore. The game had reached the stage that frequently occurs when the position is lost and the players go through the obvious forced exchanges until the inevitable resignation.

Some of the kids began chatting with their fathers about the flight home, school and other matters. It was a relief to hear about a world beyond this game. I began to think about how much I loved my son. If he never played another chess game it would be okay. After it was over, I would meet him at the door and give him an enormous hug.

JOSH GOT UP
from the board to go to the bathroom and began to cry there. For two years in a row he had lost the championship in the seventh round. He washed his face with cold water but couldn’t stop crying. He tried to envision the endgame position in his head. He loved the endgame, when most of the pieces are gone and the position seems as clear as a few big trees in a field, the answer apparently obvious. But there are tricks everywhere, transformations one wouldn’t think possible: knights more powerful than queens and rooks, knights able to fend off two bishops. Sometimes when it looks easy, the answer comes only when you calculate so deeply that your mind feels it will burst. Often Bruce had forced
Josh to calculate fifteen or twenty moves ahead. Josh had discovered that on a good day he could see as deeply as his teacher, even occasionally finding wins that Pandolfini had overlooked. Sometimes when there were only a few pieces left, it was easier to find the answer in your head than by looking at the board. But as he stood there in the bathroom, no matter how he envisioned his knight and five pawns against Jeff’s bishop and six pawns, he was lost.

Finally Josh returned to the playing room and looked at the position again. It was still a loss; in fact there was hardly a move left for black by which he wouldn’t lose another pawn immediately. He tried to control himself; he didn’t want Jeff to see him crying. He moved his king one square. It was just a move. Jeff answered by pushing a pawn to the fifth rank, which looked reasonable. He had a three-to-two advantage on the queenside; the object was to make a queen and win. But in that instant Joshua’s body stiffened, and he began to calculate with his hands shielding his eyes.

“That was a mistake,” Pandolfini said. For the past half hour, since he had entered the lobby, he hadn’t said a word about the game. He had watched with a strange little smile and explained to everyone who asked him about the position that he couldn’t distinguish the pieces on the monitor. This wasn’t true; it was simply that he didn’t want to talk about it. He would have much preferred to be back in New York, writing in his little studio and looking forward to my phone call in the evening giving Joshua’s results. Bruce was a chess player who hated playing chess, and this was much worse than playing.

“Jeff should have moved his bishop. That would have increased the pressure,” Pandolfini went on.

“The position is still lost. There’s no saving it,” answered Litvinchuk, who was rated higher than Bruce and was one of the strongest teenage masters in the United States.

“There is a chance for a draw,” Bruce said, speaking evenly and still looking directly at the screen, “if Josh moves his knight to the opposite side of the board to h1, apparently out of play, and allows Jeff to pick off his remaining pawns with his king. It might work.”

Bruce seemed to be straining to make something out of nothing.
According to his unlikely scenario Josh could save the game by taking his one remaining knight out of action, temporarily sacrificing another pawn, which would put him in precisely the necessary position to win all his material back. Even if it were theoretically possible, Josh wouldn’t think of it. Perhaps a strong master would think of it, and maybe he wouldn’t. Litvinchuk began to analyze. The entire maneuver would take fifteen or sixteen moves. Litvinchuk said he wasn’t sure; it was very complicated.

Josh sat rigidly for ten minutes, began to make a move and then drew back his hand and thought again. Then he moved his knight to h1. Downstairs in the lobby parents and children gasped.

“Now when Jeff takes the rook pawn with his king, Josh pushes his g-pawn, using it as a decoy to lure the bishop away from a defense of the queenside,” Bruce explained.

Jeff took the rook pawn. “Push the g-pawn, Josh,” said Pandolfini.

“Push the g-pawn, push the g-pawn,” the kids and parents watching the game urged. They had no sense of the value of the move; they had simply fallen in step behind Pandolfini. When Josh pushed the g-pawn, people cheered.

Jeff thought that his opponent had given up and was surrendering his material without a fight. But Bruce and Josh were sharing the same vision as surely as if they were talking to each other through the monitor. As Pandolfini calmly laid out his fanciful idea, Josh made the moves. He didn’t even seem excited; it was like one more afternoon in the living room analyzing an endgame position with his teacher.

“If Jeff doesn’t take the second pawn, bring your knight back to the queenside and start winning them back,” said Pandolfini. By now John Litvinchuk was beginning to be convinced, and as Bruce called out the moves, he nodded while, like a chorus, parents and kids urged Josh on.

Now all Josh had to do was to play knight takes bishop. Then Jeff would take Josh’s last pawn with his king, but Josh would be able to pick off Jeff’s last two pawns before he could bring his king back to defend. A hundred voices were screaming, “Take the bishop, take the bishop,” including mine, even though I was too
overwrought to understand the position. Bruce was still calmly talking to Josh as if he could hear, while all around us people were shouting Bruce’s instructions.

But instead of taking the bishop, Josh stood up and offered Jeff his hand. For one awful moment no one could figure out why; was Josh confused and resigning because he was down two pawns?

“It’s a draw,” Josh later told me he had said to Jeff.

“I don’t agree,” Jeff had answered in his formal manner.

My son sat down again. “Take the bishop,” people pleaded in the lobby, but Josh paused and wrote down the move he was about to make on his score sheet the way he had been taught. “No need to hurry, Tiger,” Bruce had always said. “Take your time. Play like a big boy. Be sure.” My son put down his pencil and looked at the position again for another few seconds, relishing the ending as if it were a favorite dessert he couldn’t quite bear to finish, then took the bishop. Soon the last two pawns came off the board, exactly the way Pandolfini had predicted sixteen moves earlier, and there were just two kings left on the board separated by one square.

IN THE LOBBY
, kids and parents were cheering, men slapped me on the back, a man Bonnie didn’t know hugged her. A woman placed my baby daughter in my arms; while we had been yelling and staring at the television, Katya had toddled out the front door. A group of people checking into the hotel for a business convention walked over to the monitor filled with a nearly bare chessboard and looked at one another in bewilderment.

When Josh came out of the tournament room his face was flushed white and red. “Could you believe I pulled that out?” he said absently, as if he were still in a distant world.

John Litvinchuk grabbed him by the shoulder. “How did you
do
that? How did you
do
that?” he screamed. Then he wanted to discuss a mistake that Josh had made on the twentieth move. My son blinked and said he couldn’t remember.

Later Josh would recall winning the national championship as the greatest experience of his life, but at this moment he seemed to be in a trance, not so much excited by winning as relieved not to have lost, and still caught up in the game. I gave him a hug and
suggested that he ought to see his mother, Bruce and his friends, who were waiting for him downstairs, but just then Morgan came out of the door to the tournament room in tears. He had lost his game. If he had won, his score would have been six wins and a draw, tying Josh’s and Jeff’s. Kalev approached his son but Morgan put up his little hand and his father stopped in his tracks. At this moment Morgan couldn’t accept his father’s consolation and regret.

Josh put his arm around Morgan’s shoulder and whispered something; then the two of them walked through the crowded hall, past all the little players and their parents, to a large parking lot outside. Josh was only eighteen months older than Morgan but he looked much bigger and older; he was growing up. In a few more years people wouldn’t make such a big deal of it when he beat grownups in Washington Square. Maybe by then he would be embarrassed to have his father hovering over his games like a protective hen. What would I do with my Saturday afternoons?

A few people called out congratulations to Josh as he walked by, but he paid no attention. He knew what Morgan was feeling; it had happened to him last year. For a few minutes, the two of them embraced while Morgan cried on his friend’s shoulder. Then they walked around the parking lot for half an hour. At one point seven-year-old Morgan confided to Josh his fear that for the rest of his life he would be remembered as someone who couldn’t win the big game. As if his own prodigy days were decades in the past, Josh replied, “Morgan, I’m going to tell you a secret: you’re a much stronger player than I was at your age.”

EPILOGUE

The final scene in this book took place in May 1986. It is now two years later, and during the intervening months I have often wondered if the book should have ended where it did. Characters I’ve written about have experienced triumphs and suffered personal tragedies. Josh and I have wandered into so many intriguing stories that I find myself yearning to write these contemporary tales into my chapters. But finally I resolved that despite the attraction this game has for me, particularly when my son is moving the pieces, I had better get on with something else in my professional life before more years passed, and that perhaps I also needed to move on for Josh’s sake. Still, the reader might be interested in a few recent histories and observations.

In December 1985, following another hunger strike and several public protests, Boris Gulko and his family received visas to emigrate to Israel. He believes that they were allowed to leave the Soviet Union because of articles written by Western journalists about his plight and demonstrations for him in the West. After a month in Israel, the Gulkos decided to settle permanently in the United States, and at present they live in Boston. Gulko is now one of our top players and was recently appointed grandmaster in residence at Harvard, a newly created chair. His wife, Anna Akhsharumova, won the 1987 United States women’s championship, achieving a perfect score of 9–0. Their greatest concern is whether they will be able to support themselves adequately as chess players in America.

*    *    *

AFTER WE LEFT
Moscow in 1984 Volodja Pimonov became increasingly involved in the fight for human rights. He met regularly with political activists and participated in demonstrations for refuseniks. In one demonstration he was beaten and seriously injured by KGB agents. At the hospital he was asked to sign documents denouncing his political views; when he refused, the KGB would not allow the hospital staff to treat his injuries. At great personal risk a Jewish doctor cared for Pimonov until he recovered.

Since 1985 Pimonov had repeatedly applied for emigration to join his wife and baby daughter in Denmark and was repeatedly turned down. At one point he was informed that his application would not be considered until the year 2002. He suffered periods of profound depression but continued to write free-lance articles for Western publications describing what he called the charade of glasnost. In interviews with Western journalists he spoke passionately about the lives of thousands who have been denied permission to emigrate, and of hundreds detained in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals because of the expression of their religious and political beliefs. In January 1988 he was convinced that his own incarceration in a labor camp was imminent; instead, for reasons that he still does not understand, he received a visa to leave the Soviet Union. On February 5, 1988, Pimonov joined his wife and two-year-old daughter in Copenhagen.

IT IS STILL
nearly impossible for even a top grandmaster to support himself by participating solely in United States tournaments, and most of our best players spend considerable time in Europe, where they can count on making a living. Chess parents continue to worry about the wisdom of cultivating wonderful little players who will almost inevitably turn to more respected and lucrative professions just when they are arriving at the peak of their creative powers. The economics of chess will remain bleak in this country until a larger general public begins to appreciate the beauty and excitement of the game, and until major corporations begin to sponsor events as they do in other parts of the world. Perhaps for chess to capture the national imagination again we will need a new Bobby
Fischer—though, it is to be hoped, without the bizarre trappings of the old one. By now most chess players have given up dreaming that Bobby will ever challenge for the world championship again, although Fischer’s friends claim that he is currently planning his latest comeback, this time in South Africa.