The Deceptive Pleasures of Chess
In my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in the late sixties, a friend invited me to the chess club, which was actually the pensioners’ club and populated by World War II veterans. I was thirteen, my friend a few years older. My history teacher read newspapers on a stick in a corner; an old cop who had been suspended for killing an unarmed man in a bar paced around, kibitzing; some of the men wore partisan caps with red stars. In the back room was an air-rifle shooting gallery for the young (so that the country would have a good crop of sharpshooters for future wars) where I had spent a few evenings. In the front room, in the stinging smoke of stale tobacco, through which you could see the weak round lamp like a moon drifting in clouds, men lined up along the tables and slapped chess clocks.
The ticking of clocks and the slaps gave you a sense of urgency, as though bombs were about to go off. From all that slapping, sometimes a walking stick, leaning precariously against a table, would fall to the freshly oiled floor and startle me. I didn’t smoke, unlike most kids my age, so with all the ticking and the nicotine, I became deliriously anxious. I was terrified of making mistakes. Sometimes I won, and often, just after painstakingly gaining an advantage, I would make an oversight, and a knight would leap and pin my rook. I envied my friend on beating the old men who had spent fifty years playing chess; he had a grand time patting his stomach while checkmating them. I would leave with my cheeks red, nauseated from tobacco. It was a thoroughly miserable experience, yet when people asked me what my favorite hobby was, I answered without hesitation: chess.
I didn’t like to play those who were much stronger than me, and I didn’t like to play those who were weaker because the victories felt empty, so I was getting worse by playing bad players. Of course, finding an equal would be the best, and for a while, there was a chance I would have such a partner.
I didn’t like to play those who were much stronger than me, and I didn’t like to play those who were weaker because the victories felt empty, so I was getting worse by playing bad players.
Boro, another friend, studied openings in books, and when we got together, we played and discussed chess strategies. Rather than opening wildly, bringing out the queen without a supporting cast of other major pieces, we now followed the concept of tempi, each developed piece counting as one tempo point in the first ten moves. Good development is essential for effective attacks in the midgame. Soon, we wanted to apply what we learned, and for several days, we played. If I touched a piece, he insisted that I move it. When excited I sometimes did not control my hand, and it would leap ahead of my thoughts and touch a piece. Sometimes I let Boro take back moves, in exchange for his overlooking that I had touched a piece. So instead of playing chess, we negotiated our way through games, which would have been fine if we had simply analyzed various possibilities from a given position. Gradually, I managed to control my hand, and I began to win most of the games, while Boro huffed and smoked more and more furiously. On one occasion, I waited for him to make a move, but he didn’t. He stared at me hatefully. I waited. He stood up and swept all the pieces off the board.
“Why did you do that? I had you licked,” I said.
“So why didn’t you make a move then?”
“It was your turn.”
“No, it was yours.”
“No wonder you play so badly, if you can’t even remember whose turn it is.”
“I would if you didn’t take half a year to make a move. We have to get a chess clock.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Repeat that.”
I did. He punched me in the chest. After gaining some composure, I returned the favor, and pretty soon we were fighting viciously, rolling on the floor, trying to strangle each other. So that was the end of that partnership of fun.
No matter where I played, I felt an undercurrent of hostility, and chess seemed to serve as a form of safe fistfighting. Your nose would not be broken, but your ego might be.
No matter where I played, I felt an undercurrent of hostility, and chess seemed to serve as a form of safe fistfighting. Your nose would not be broken, but your ego might be. Shah-maat, from the Arabic, means “The king is dead.” It’s an assassin or war game, and as such, it was totally adored in the Soviet bloc and the former Yugoslavia. Tito played chess; newspapers pictured him with a chess board. He said on one occasion that he was such a good player he never lost a game on his yacht, the Galeb. Then he added, “I never played one there.” It was the only humorous thing I remember our dictator saying.
Later, when I got to the States, I asked Wolfgang Leonard, a political scientist at Yale who had spent time in the Soviet and Yugoslav governments as an adviser after World War II, what the level of chess was in the Soviet government. He said: “Amazingly high, all the top politicians played at the master level. They were so afraid of talking to each other that they kept playing chess in silence.”
And in the Yugoslav government?
“Not so good. There, people were afraid of not talking — Tito suspected anybody who was quiet of plotting — so they played chess shoddily.”
The communist bloc countries saw chess as the expression of their superiority in education and collective intelligence over the West. During the match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, I woke up early to get newspaper accounts of the games. I rooted for Fischer. Most Croats in town rooted for Fischer because he symbolized the West for us, and we longed for the West, to be let out of Yugoslavia even then; most Serbs rooted for Spassky, as the brother Slav. In Vinkovci, I got a glimpse of Fischer, who had come to visit the chess club, and for months I felt rapturous at the thought that I had been near him, as though I had obtained a blessing from the pope.
After moving to the States at the age of twenty, I didn’t play chess for five years, and when I couldn’t go back to Yugoslavia because I hadn’t served in the army, I suddenly redeveloped my passion for the game. I suppose for me it was a homecoming. I began to hang out at the chess club on Sullivan Street in the Village and sometimes at the chess corner of Washington Square Park. There was quite an array of characters there. A man from Israel, for example, a former grand master, walked around dressed like an admiral. He had beaten the former world champion Anatoly Karpov in a tournament when basically nobody could beat Karpov, but somewhere along the way, he lost his mind, and he kept strolling all around the park waiting for his warship. I found speed chess too frantic, so I sought to play half-hour games. I did not like to play games officially, but I liked to observe them at the New York Open chess tournament, where I saw Spassky, and the best Yugoslav player, Ljubomir Ljubojevic.
Ljubojevic, who was known for having the most fabulous chess imagination, won major tournaments, but because of his unsteady nerves, he could never qualify into the finals for the world championships. Still, he was one of the top-ranking players in the world. In a leather jacket, with a swagger, he looked like a Belgrade gangster, although he had just married a Spanish countess. He had deep lines on the side of his mouth, and his eyes darted left and right. I talked to him after one match. I asked him when he started playing chess, and if he had always wanted to be a chess player.
… he was one of the top-ranking players in the world. In a leather jacket, with a swagger, he looked like a Belgrade gangster, although he had just married a Spanish countess.
“Well,” he replied, “I was so restless, running out to play soccer all the time, that I was flunking out of school. My father figured that all I needed was to develop a habit of sitting to do my homework, so he taught me chess. True, chess got me to sit, but I loved the game so much that I still flunked out of school because I never did my homework. Soccer was my first love, and I played on the Red Star junior team. One rainy season, we were all stuck indoors and played chess. It turned out I could beat everybody on the team, junior and senior, and that gave me such a thrill that when the sun came out, I didn’t run onto the field, but into the street, to the nearest chess club. That was the end of soccer, too.”
Ljubojevic didn’t win the first prize, which was ten thousand dollars, too little money for so tough a competition. I looked around and saw thousands of intelligent people who were wasting their time. I invited a Serbian chess master to live at my place for a month. I beat him the first game we played, but later, he won a dozen games. He found a job as a night guard at an Italian restaurant and hung out with Roman Dzindzihashvili, a Georgian player who had been the speed chess world champion; together they studied many openings. My friend Sasha played chess and gambled for fifteen years in New York, living in poverty instead of working as an engineer — which he was by training — and practicing a lucrative and stimulating career.
Playing chess requires the ability to see many moves ahead, yet chess itself is a bad move if you want to get anywhere. In the mid-1980s I was beginning to write fiction, but instead of writing, I spent many hours anxiously twitching over potential oversights on the chess board, and so I wasted my best mental energy in this ultimate game, which consumed me for two years of my life in New York. It took me a long time to become honest about chess and to admit that the game was more of a mental torment for me than a source of pleasure. Now when I see a chess board, I wince.
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