The opponent won the flip and chose white. He observed to Zhenya, “No time to clean your fingernails?”
Zhenya’s nails had black moons from his living in railroad cars around Three Stations. He stared at them as his opponent opened with his king pawn. Zhenya went on studying the dirt that lined his hands. The opponent waited. Every second was precious in blitz. Other boards jumped with moves and the slap of time buttons.
The producer told Arkady, “After all that, your boy froze.”
A minute passed. Players at the nearer tables stole glances at Zhenya, who left the white pawn alone and unchallenged in the center of the board. Early moves were the easiest, but Zhenya looked transfixed. Two minutes passed. The time clock was digital, with two LCD faces set in tough plastic for the occasional toss by an unhappy loser. The camera zoomed in. It was difficult to tell in all the motion on other boards who was winning or losing, but Zhenya’s board and clock made it immediately plain who was falling further and further behind. His opponent didn’t know how to set his expression. At first he was pleased to see Zhenya, by all appearances, at a loss. As the seconds passed he felt more and more uneasy, as if forced to dance alone. Someone was being humiliated; he could no longer say who. He said nothing to Zhenya; speaking over the board after play began was against the rules. Zhenya stood and the opponent half stood, expecting the boy to quit. Instead, Zhenya took off his anorak and hung it over the back of the chair to settle in for longer analysis.
With two minutes to go, Zhenya went into action. It wasn’t so much the development of black pieces that was extraordinary as the rapidity with which he met white’s every move. White would advance a piece and hardly hit the time button when black did the same, so that the clicks of the buttons came in pairs and the enormous time advantage white had for his moves came to seem pointless, even ridiculous. He began to play at Zhenya’s pace, conceding doubled pawns for a promising queenside push. He traded pieces at a slight disadvantage, saw the queenside attack fade, was stampeded into a high-speed exchange that cleared the board and, stripped, watched as a black pawn strolled to promotion. Cameras, guests and finished players watched as the white king dropped. The loser sank into his chair, still confused. It was the sort of loss that could kill a game for a man, Arkady thought. Zhenya looked for the next opponent.
Platonov’s verdict in the van was, “Nothing but tricks. If you let Zhenya set the rhythm, of course he’ll overwhelm you. In blitz you don’t play with your head. There’s no time to think. You play with your hands and the little shit has very fast hands. But now everyone knows how strong he is. Vanity will be his downfall.”
Zhenya’s second opponent was the prodigy. Perched on his booster seat the boy leveled an unblinking gaze at Zhenya, who had picked his fingernails during intermission. The producer ate it up.
“Two boys from different planets and neither of them Earth. Get tighter.”
When the prodigy won the coin toss, the camera closed in on a smile trying to hide in a corner of his lips. He had the voice of a choir soprano. “White, please.”
Playing black again, Zhenya answered from the start, simply countering and developing his pieces, castling, leaving no obvious weaknesses and mounting no clear attack. Trench warfare. He was even in material until the prodigy did to Zhenya what Zhenya had done to his first opponent and lumbered him with doubled pawns, the first chink in black’s defense. It had promise. Trying to protect his men Zhenya lost offense, and no offense made for an overburdened defense. Targets started to appear. It was so hard to choose, the prodigy squirmed in his seat. It wasn’t until he was down to fifteen seconds on his clock that he realized Zhenya had almost a full minute left on his. At which point, black unveiled a long diagonal across the board and a pin on white’s queen. Not a serious pin, not one that couldn’t be refuted with no more than two or three minutes of analysis. The prodigy’s hand hovered. It was still in the air when his clock said 0:00.
Platonov sneered. “Some victory. He fooled a baby. He managed time better than an opponent who could barely see over the chessboard.”
“It’s down to four players,” Arkady said.
“I never said he wasn’t talented. I said he was wasting his talent. He only plays for money and this, this, this is the proof. In a casino. Look at him.” Platonov pointed to the television screen. Zhenya had pulled up his hood, as good as hiding his face. “He thinks he’s Bobby Fischer.”
During the intermission, a girl Zhenya’s age dared to break into Zhenya’s solitude to offer him a stick of gum the careful way someone feeds a half-wild animal. When the intermission was over she stayed in the player’s seat opposite him and he chewed more thoughtfully.
Playing black, she immediately challenged Zhenya for control of the center of the board. Her style was as cold-blooded as his, sacrificing a pawn to gain tempo and reach level ground with white. Blitz was a sprint and it was hard to distinguish the beginning from the middle game and the middle game from the end. Forty moves in five minutes. No draws. On the other board still in action-the university champion versus a grizzled veteran-the need for speed encouraged exchanges for simplification’s sake. In contrast, Zhenya and the girl developed an intricate structure of poison pawns, veiled threats and phantom attacks. The slightest push could bring it all down. She studied the board with a penetrating gaze. Zhenya closed his eyes. He liked to play blindfolded; Arkady had seen him do it many times. In his mind, Zhenya once told him, he saw all the variations in three dimensions. Not analyzed. Saw.
Zhenya opened his eyes. He pushed. Starting equal in material, he and the girl machine-gunned the board for the next five moves, ending in positions that were identical with one exception: she attacking his king with a bishop while he attacked hers with a knight. A bishop had more sweep than a knight, but a knight jumped enemy lines and in crowded quarters that was the edge.
She saw it. “Mate in five,” she said and set her king on its side.
“The girl has possibilities,” Platonov said.
“We have our finalists!” the presenter announced. “Moscow University undergraduate champion Tomashevsky and our tournament surprise.”
“What did you think of Zhenya’s game?” Arkady asked.
“What did you think?” Platonov threw the question back. “You’ve wondered for days what he’s been doing. He’s been preparing.”
Lydia pulled Tomashevsky and Zhenya in front of the camera and asked what they would do with a thousand dollars if they won.
“Buy a new road bike,” Tomashevsky said. He looked athletic. “And beer.”
“And you?” Lydia asked Zhenya.
“A tricycle,” suggested Tomashevsky.
Zhenya said nothing. He looked at a cage of gaudy parrots that huddled together and blinked their leathery eyelids.
“It must be a secret,” the presenter let him off the hook.
“This is the truth about chess,” Platonov said. “People don’t win a match, they lose. They find a way to lose. Chess is one choice after another and people get tired of choosing. The body gets tired and the brain gives in. The brain says, what are you doing here pulling your wad when you could be out in the midst of life, with women and song and good champagne?”
“How do you think the university champion will do?” Arkady asked.
“Against Zhenya? He doesn’t stand a chance.”
Platonov was right. The game was an anticlimax. Although they played under the overhead camera, the finalists revealed no original or interesting strategy. Television viewers watched the systematic demolition of a university scholar by a boy who did nothing but rapidly offer him choices, one after another. With each wrong choice the scholar’s position deteriorated a little bit. After twenty moves he was only down a pawn but he had nowhere to go. Every move involved some small loss. He was bound by invisible knots that tightened with resistance because he saw that with every succeeding move his situation would be more obvious. Before his friends and admirers. Professors. On television. He did the only rational thing and moved the same piece twice.
“A double move, disqualified!” said the producer, Platonov, all the players and half the people in the gaming hall.
“What a shame,” said the presenter. “The match is decided by a disqualification, a mistake on the part of Tomashevsky, accidentally handing the match to his opponent, Evgeny Lysenko. What a terrible way to lose the tournament when he was doing so well.”
The student Tomashevsky rose from his chair in disbelief, like a man betrayed by nothing more than eagerness and stunned by the magnitude of his error. He’d gotten ahead of himself was all. It happened to the
