Searching for Bobby Fischer (10 page)

AFTER THREE FRUSTRATING
days of arguing and pleading at the Central Chess Club and a call to the American embassy we were given press credentials, but time and again Soviet officials nervously explained that it would be impossible for us to visit chess schools. By an unfortunate coincidence, they were all closed for
repairs. It was as if we were asking to see missile factories. And whenever I brought up Boris Gulko, my conversations with Russian grandmasters and chess officials alike came to an icy end. Gulko, I discovered, was one of the most famous political dissidents in the Soviet Union, and it seemed unlikely that I would ever find him.

*
The American Chess Foundation, a nonprofit organization, funds master-level chess tournaments, school chess programs across the country and private lessons for exceptional young American chess players who demonstrate potential in tournament play. A.C.F. has funded Joshua’s lessons with Bruce Pandolfini since my son was seven.

*
M. M. Botvinnik,
Izbrannye partii
(Leningrad, 1949), pp. 11–12.

*
D. Bronstein and G. Smolyan,
Chess in the Eighties
, trans. Kenneth P. Neat (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1965).

†
D. J. Richards,
Soviet Chess
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 39.

9

VOLODJA

M
ost mornings in Moscow we went with Volodja Pimonov to museums and churches or took Josh to play chess in one of the many parks or chess clubs. Usually we drove in Volodja’s rattling Zaporoszhets, which he had recently hand-painted muddy blue. Each time we set off he said the same thing: “I hope the car won’t fall apart before we get there.” To buy it, he had earned extra money teaching Russian to foreigners a few years earlier, but such good fortune was unlikely to come his way again, he felt, and this would probably be the only car he would ever own. He was proud of the car, but also embarrassed, and fretted constantly about it: “Sounds like something is wrong with my transmission.” Or “Why is it stalling? It must be my carburetor.” Or “There is something wrong with the lock on the driver’s side. Do you think you could help me fix it? Finding parts is impossible.” For him the car was a connection to the Western world of drive-in banks and movies, superhighways and garages with automatic doors, which he read about in magazines or heard described by his wife during their phone conversations—a world he was likely never to see. Whenever the car rattled or coughed, he looked stricken.

Volodja’s curiosity about the West was like an unwelcome lust. He was filled with questions, but the answers agitated or silenced him. During one discussion about journalism I told him that after finishing an article I never showed it to the person I had written about for approval. He was baffled by this. “To write an article
about Karpov and not show it to him first would be slanderous here. A writer would lose his job.”

“But if you showed it to him and he demanded a change, it might compromise the honesty of the article,” I said. It was a new idea to Volodja, and he didn’t know what to make of it.

I had the uneasy feeling that Volodja was making large decisions based upon what he learned from us. Often he looked at my face for signs of hidden motivations, and sometimes when he smiled sadly I knew that I had failed some test. “The problem with you people,” he said (meaning Americans), “is that you want to be number one in everything. You will be the end of us with this competition. Better houses and better cars, more missiles, more ships.” But though he was often critical of the West for its politics or materialism, he craved its hidden possibilities. It outraged him that he was not allowed to look and judge for himself. “You say that you write on a personal computer?” he asked, and in the rearview mirror I could see that he was wide-eyed. “I’ve never seen one.”

‘The way is broken,” Volodja said one morning as Josh and I sat in the back seat jammed against the jack and spare tire, our feet in two inches of muddy water. He meant that this stretch of road on the way to Sokolniki Park was potholed, and that we should brace ourselves. He was checking the rearview mirror frequently to see if we were being followed. It was illegal for him to be driving foreigners, and on this dreary morning the nameless consequences of being caught made us all feel uneasy.

In Sokolniki Park a chess club nestled within a little forest of birch trees. It was raining steadily, yet two old men in tattered coats sat beneath the trees at a rickety wooden chess table staring at a position. Inside a damp, narrow room we found seventy or eighty Russians playing chess at long tables, while more men lined up behind the players waiting for a turn. They were laborers, dressed in heavy overcoats and caps, with ruddy, fleshy faces and thick, weathered hands. They moved the worn wooden pieces as if they were laying bricks and mortar.

Josh waited behind a heavyset, bald-headed man. When his opponent lost, Josh took his seat. The bald-headed man looked
irritated but motioned for him to begin. At first Josh moved the pieces quickly, and Bruce worried that he would blunder. As Volodja scrutinized my son’s moves, I wondered whether he was thinking of his own early days at the game, when he had been considered one of the most promising schoolboy players in Moscow. The heavy-set man played slowly, with a disapproving expression; this was not a place where children came to play. But many other players were curious, and as the game went on perhaps a dozen men gathered to watch. Josh began badly against an opening he had never seen before, but once down a pawn he began to play thoughtfully and managed to win it back in the middle game. He concentrated like an adult; on one critical move he thought for twenty minutes, his hands cupping his ears. Sometimes Josh falls deeply into a chess position. Time passes and he doesn’t notice. His face becomes serene and he doesn’t look like a seven-year-old. His mother says that at such times he plays as if there were an old chess player inside him who wakes up for his games.

After an hour and a half the Russian offered a draw. When Josh agreed, the man’s face spread into an enormous toothless grin, and he got up from his seat and enveloped Josh in a bear hug. “New Fischer,” he said in English to his friends, who were surprised and delighted that a little boy could play so well. They all patted Josh on the shoulder and slapped me on the back for being his father. The love of chess hung in the air like the smell of good food.

One of the men who had watched Joshua’s game was Valentin Arbakov, who, like Vinnie in Washington Square, managed to eke out an existence giving laborers time odds for kopecks. Volodja said that as a speed player Arbakov was roughly equivalent to Tal, among the best in the world, but that he lacked the discipline for the slower game. Many grandmasters came to Sokolniki Park to test themselves against Arbakov, and though he was rarely sober, he almost never lost. Yet there is no career for a speed player in Russia or anyplace else.

Volodja, who had never really focused on Joshua’s play before, was excited and announced with urgency that his talent would come to nothing if he didn’t develop quickly. He spoke half in Russian, half in English as the men stood around listening. “Josh must
develop a willingness to work at the game. He must trust Bruce completely. But speed chess isn’t good for him. It ruined me. I never became a grandmaster,” he said plaintively. It was a great sadness in his life. Arbakov shuffled his feet on the muddy floor and agreed; yes, Josh must study very hard and avoid speed games. His breath reeked of vodka.

THE COSMOS HOTEL
was strictly off-limits for most Russians, perhaps because of its grandeur or the likelihood of meeting wealthy Westerners there. Before our visit, Volodja had never been inside. All guests at Intourist hotels are given identification cards that they must show to a guard at the door. When a writer I knew was leaving Moscow he gave his card to Volodja, who clutched it as if it were a ticket to paradise. Now he would be able to get into the Beryozka shop in the lobby to buy Western tobacco and scores of other commodities not available to Russians. If he could manage to borrow several hundred rubles he could buy a Western camera or stereo, sell it in a secondhand shop for five times what he’d paid for it and be able to send some money to his wife in Denmark.

Volodja and other Russian intellectuals we met chafed at the frivolous curbs imposed on their personal freedom—sanctions against driving in a car with foreigners, traveling out of the country or entering certain stores. Despite the risk, they seemed almost eager to break the rules, explaining that they could not bear to live stunted lives.

Walking through the front door of the Cosmos with Volodja was a nervous moment. I clutched my room key, also an acceptable form of identification to show at the door, and found myself leaning away from him; if he was stopped by the police, maybe my complicity would go unnoticed. It was disgraceful, but each time we walked into the hotel, I felt the impulse to distance myself from him.

The Cosmos is a grand illusion, a rendition of Russia artfully crafted to appeal to the Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Club Med vacation set. It is a glitzy, baldly decadent palace of materialistic and corporal pleasures. The hotel’s brown, curving façade seems to have been patterned after the Fontainbleau Hotel on Miami
Beach, but the Cosmos is bigger and better. Its creators selected a futuristic theme; scores of bars, discos and restaurants have a zippy Star Trek atmosphere, new-wave music and intergalactic names. Looking out the window of our room, cut from the same mold used by Holiday Inn and Hilton for their antiseptic look-alike rooms, the eye travels to a sleek rocket ship on top of the AeroSpace Museum, poised to lift off from the gloomy Moscow morning.

The hotel is located on the outskirts of the city, miles from most things a tourist would want to see, but it provides the tourist—particularly a Westerner—with everything imaginable to entice him to stay inside. There are AMF bowling alleys to keep tourists in shape for Sunday league games, masseurs standing by to knead away tensions and a heated Olympic-sized swimming pool. If you want Russian atmosphere, the hotel provides plenty. The acres of lobbies are sprinkled with big-screen television monitors showing nature documentaries about Siberia, adventure movies with beautiful Russian landscapes and quaint Russian cartoons to entertain restless kids. If you are feeling tired or lazy, you simply throw your feet up on a luxurious Finnish leather sofa, sip a Beck beer and watch Russia on the tube. There are endless books and postcards to take home, demonstrating that you have ventured behind the Iron Curtain, and legions of helpful Intourist guides happy to describe Russian culture and history by the hour. A weary American could not feel more pampered or more at home.

Lengthy menus in Cosmos restaurants feature such old-time Russian favorites as hot borscht and chicken Kiev, but the waiters invariably guide diners to beefsteak and French fries. Night after night they explain that it’s a shame, but akroshka or pyelmeni is not available this evening. The dining halls are like giant spaceships and serve food of the quality you would expect at a Ramada Inn.

For the traveling businessman there are luxury shops filled with glistening furs for the wife and a large selection of gorgeous English-speaking prostitutes lounging around the lobby. If you are needy but shy, such meetings are discreetly arranged by a dour lady stationed on each floor. It is common knowledge that the girls of the Cosmos have an ongoing association with the KGB.

Leaving the Cosmos may seem unnecessary, but if you do decide
to venture out, you are encouraged to make arrangements through your guide. In this way the hotel is your host wherever you travel in Moscow. If you want a tour of Russian war monuments or would like to attend the puppet theater, the circus or the Bolshoi, just pick up the phone. A limousine is standing by to take you and to hurry you back the moment the curtain falls, in time for caviar, champagne and late-night disco at the hotel. If you decide to stay downtown later than expected, the driver waits (at least our driver did) until you are ready to return. It is hard not to wonder if his motivation goes beyond courtesy.

For late-night dining and dancing there is a little Bohemian disco in the basement of the Cosmos, trendy enough to attract crowds of yuppies if it were in New York, with little snacks expensive even by Upper East Side standards. The all-night bars at the Cosmos are captained by heavy-lidded men who speak liquor and money in a dozen languages. Like bartenders around the world, they exchange smiles and tired sympathy for tips. At six in the morning they straggle downstairs to the garage where they park their shiny Mercedes. Word has it that bartenders in the Cosmos are among the wealthiest of Russians, and that the payoffs to get these jobs are tremendous.

From the militarylike security at the front door, one assumes that the authorities have as much invested in keeping Russians out as in seducing Americans to stay inside. It is a stretch for a Marxist idealist to reconcile the reality of daily food lines and scratching out an existence on a hundred and fifty rubles a month with Americans enjoying the jet-set life at the Cosmos for a hundred and fifty rubles a day. How can a Russian like Volodja not be dumbfounded by this epic billion-ruble concoction, Moscow’s homage to capitalism?

ONE EVENING VOLODJA
ate dinner with us in a glittery restaurant on the first floor. His wife-had called him from Denmark two days before to say that during her last visit to Russia she had become pregnant. She was feeling too sick to work and had no money, and he didn’t know what to do. She was afraid to join him in the Soviet Union for fear the baby wouldn’t be permitted to leave. “Do you
realize,” he said, “I may never see my child?” Back in New York, Bonnie was also pregnant, and I wanted to talk with my new friend about fatherhood, but it wasn’t appropriate; my own happiness seemed unfair.