Searching for Bobby Fischer (13 page)

In contrast to her nervousness with us, Anna was composed and eloquent before her class. For the entire two hours she lectured and asked questions about a single king-and-pawn endgame position from an Akiba Rubinstein game. As she discussed every conceivable variation, the children took copious notes as if they were college students. After an hour Josh became impatient; he wanted to play. With Bruce he rarely studied a single position for more than fifteen minutes. At seven years old, he regarded chess only as a game and was patronizing about the necessity for deep study. He wanted to get his hands on Anna’s students, whom he was certain he could beat.

Bruce was impressed with Anna’s class. She was a bright, thorough teacher with a keen sense for the pace at which her students could absorb technical material. We were looking for secrets, but there were no secrets, no techniques that American teachers didn’t routinely use. The advantage for children here was simply their constant exposure to the game. Day after day they were drilled in the fundamentals of chess for more hours than fourth and fifth graders in the United States study math.

Most mornings, before we went touring, Bruce spent an hour working with Josh. Usually they set up their chessboard on the second-floor balcony overlooking the cavernous lobby of the hotel. After Anna’s class we returned to the Cosmos at eleven-thirty, and Bruce decided to work with Josh before lunch. It was a mistake; my son was saturated with chess instruction.

“Now what else did you consider?” Pandolfini asked while Josh gazed down at the hubbub in the lobby. “You didn’t consider e5,
did you? You’re still not considering it. Sit up. Let’s get down to business.”

Josh shaded his forehead with his hands so that his teacher couldn’t see his eyes and struck the pose of a contemplative player.

“You’re not racking them up this month, Tiger,” Pandolfini said. “It’s not easy to get master-class points when you’re gazing off into space.”

“I’m not doing so badly. How many points do I have this month?” Josh asked, trying to engineer the conversation away from the lesson.

“Josh, forget the points,” said Bruce, caught in his own trap. “White to move and win.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Josh asked combatively. “Rook to dl.”

“That’s not the point. You didn’t study the board. You’re moving before even
I
know the answer. I want you to have at least two different plans before you move. Each plan should have at least three or four moves.” Josh was shaking his head in agreement but shutting Bruce out. Pandolfini was impatient. Perhaps watching Anna’s class had made him edgy; maybe he and Josh had spent too much time studying openings and not enough on the endgame; maybe he had allowed Josh to play too much speed chess; maybe he hadn’t been systematic enough in his teaching. The Russians build chess players slowly and methodically, as if they were constructing tall buildings.

Sometimes I’m delighted by Bruce’s ambition for Josh; at other times I find it frightening. He has said that Josh has the talent to become a master before his twelfth birthday, a chance to become the youngest American master ever; that’s his goal. But perhaps Josh isn’t as good as Bruce thinks or won’t be willing to work hard enough. Josh is secretive about his dreams. What if he decides to give up chess? Could Bruce sense it and gracefully let go, or would he keep pretending that his pupil’s growing distance or distaste for the game was only a stage in the learning process?

Josh and Bruce were working on the same Rubinstein endgame position that Anna had taught in her class. Her students had been attentive, but now my son couldn’t bear to look at it.

“So why is black better? Take your time.”

“Black has the advantage,” Josh said, pushing himself, “because white has more islands. If you have more pawn islands, you have weaknesses.”

“That’s right,” said Bruce, but before the words were out, Josh had cleaned the pieces from the board with a sweep of his hand in order to bring the lesson to a quick conclusion.

“Okay, Josh, set the position up again, and if you get it wrong you lose master-class points.”

“Okay, I don’t care.” Josh shrugged. “It’s good for my practice.”

“It took players hundreds of years to come up with the theory of positional chess,” Bruce said sternly. “Rubinstein was one of the greatest endgame players of all time. Did you know that?”

For the past fifteen minutes, while Bruce had been lecturing him on endgame technique, Josh had been furtively fashioning a glider from a paper napkin beneath the table. “This is the best one I ever made,” he announced and lofted it off the balcony.

A middle-aged man who had been sitting beside them watching the lesson had been itching to play and challenged Bruce to a game. Pandolfini graciously declined but suggested he play against Josh, who couldn’t have been happier to put Akiba Rubinstein behind him. He was like a racehorse breaking from the gate, and the man was lost after fifteen moves.

A COUPLE OF
days later a master with whom we had become friendly invited us to attend his class at the Pioneer Palace. This visit confirmed our suspicions that the Pioneer Palace was not closed for repairs and that the secret to Russian chess training at the elementary level was nothing more than devotion to the game and hard work. Here Josh played games with half a dozen talented nine-year-olds and beat each of them. But would he be able to keep pace with them over the next several years, and would he want to? For my son and other American kids, chess is a question of trade-offs. More chess means less time for homework, basketball and friends, who know or care little about the game. Josh thrives on the excitement of tournaments, but he also loves fishing, baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis and video games. He was now studying two hours each week with Pandolfini, doing half an hour of
problem-solving three or four evenings a week and, if there was no tournament, playing once or twice a weekend in the park—a total of six or seven hours of chess a week; there was simply no time in his life for more. But his Russian counterparts were studying ten hours a week in the sports school, another ten hours with a master at the Pioneer Palace in the afternoon, and each night after dinner they were urged by their parents to study positions. At an age when American kids dream of becoming firemen or baseball players, the children in Anna’s classroom already were specialists who knew what they were going to do when they grew up. Such specific and rigorous early training goes against the spirit of liberal arts education and of making mature life choices during or after college, but clearly it is the most efficient, way to manufacture a new generation of grandmasters.

Joel Benjamin describes what it is like to analyze positions with young Russian grandmasters: “It was obvious that in certain endgame positions the Russians knew it was a win or a draw simply by looking at the position, while I had to figure it out. This gives them advantages in tournament play.” These players had spent countless hours studying the grammar of chess while Benjamin had played sports with his friends in Brooklyn.

ONE AFTERNOON WE
arranged for a tour of Moscow through an Intourist representative at the hotel. Our guide, Yuri, a pleasant young man with acne on a fleshy face, was a student of languages at Moscow University. Although he spoke with a slight hesitation, he was fluent in English, and his knowledge of some aspects of American culture was astounding. He had a passion for American sports and pop music and peppered us with questions about Meat Loaf, Madonna and other rock stars. He knew the lifetime statistics of Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Doctor J. and Bernard King and earnestly described the moves of basketball players he had never seen. He took us to a score of monuments that celebrated the Russian Revolution, delivering a mechanical little speech at each of them. When I asked him if there was much premarital sex in Moscow he became so embarrassed that he couldn’t answer.

Two days later we were eating lunch in the cafeteria at the
Cosmos when I realized that I had left my wallet in the room. I took the elevator up, turned into the corridor to our room and bumped into a busboy—Yuri dressed in a white jacket. I greeted him enthusiastically, but he rushed off down the hall. I followed him and called his name. From the second-floor balcony I watched him race down the long staircase and out the front door of the hotel.

Pandolfini was upset when I told him what had happened and went up to the room to see if anything was missing. Our travel vouchers and money were all in place, but Joshua’s journal was open. “I left it open. Were any of my books missing?” Josh asked with alarm, referring to his collection of Snoopy books.

Soon it became clear that we were being watched constantly. One morning in a museum I sat down on a bench to take a few notes in my journal, and a man immediately sat down beside me and peered at my notebook. All morning he followed me from gallery to gallery. When Josh gave his little friend Anton some toy cars in exchange for several Russian chess books at the Hall of Columns the next day, the books were sternly observed, as if the children were passing state secrets.

12

BORIS GULKO

M
ore than ever I wanted to meet Boris Gulko. Still, I was apprehensive when I received a call on our room phone in the hotel saying that a meeting with “our friend” had been arranged. What if the meeting was a setup? If we ended up in jail, what would happen to Josh? By now we’d been away for three weeks and he had become homesick for his mother. He wanted to call her and tell her that he missed her and that the KGB was following us. This was all Bonnie would have to hear.

On a damp gray morning Josh, Pandolfini and I stood outside a boarded-up café wondering if we were being observed. We had been told that Gulko would take the metro to a stop near our hotel, that Volodja would pick him up, and if they weren’t being followed they would stop for us.

In a few minutes Volodja’s small car pulled up, and he gestured for us to crowd into the back seat. Next to him in the front sat Gulko. I suggested it might be safer if we talked in the car, but he wanted us to come to his flat to meet his wife and son.

Volodja nervously checked the rearview mirror. “Boris has just won the semifinals of the Soviet championship,” he said. I was surprised, because there had been no report of his participation in newspapers or chess magazines, and most players and chess journalists I had asked said that they didn’t know what had become of Gulko. “Oh, I am allowed to play a few games a year,” he said, “but they are never reported. If I win a tournament they only write who came in second or third.” Gulko said that he had played
Kasparov twice during the past three years and won both games. Almost no one beats Kasparov, and such news would have been on television and on the front page of
Pravda
were Gulko not a refusenik, one of the living dead.

Boris Gulko is a distinguished-looking white-haired man of medium height with a small pursed mouth and a gentle face. He appeared to be fifty-five or sixty. His speech was serene, almost in the manner of an Eastern mystic, except for a sharp laugh that was filled with irony. At times there was an eerie disparity between his subject and his tone of voice. For example, he would describe a period of intense physical and emotional trauma—a hunger strike or a brutal beating—almost in passing, as if he were beyond feeling pain. I was shocked when Gulko told me that he was thirty-seven. He smiled. “If you don’t eat for forty-two days you too will look sixty,” he said.

I asked if he’d been following the match.

“I would love to go, but Krogius won’t sell me a ticket,” he said, referring to the head of Soviet chess. “Perhaps I would be an embarrassment. Two years ago I got in touch with Karpov about my problems, but he refused to help.”

Even during the early stages of the Karpov-Kasparov match there had been discussion among Russian intellectuals, grandmasters and journalists about whether the event was a legitimate contest. In several of the early games we had attended, Kasparov had advantages and had failed to follow up on them. Later in the match, he aroused the suspicion of grandmasters and chess journalists around the world by offering draws in games in which he seemed to have winning chances. Miguel Najdorf said that Kasparov’s play was inexplicable and a disgrace. “I wouldn’t offer draws in such positions, and I’m seventy-five years old,” he said. In the
Times
of London, chess columnist Harry Golombek wrote: “Perhaps Kasparov has been warned not to play well and has been given to understand that the consequences for him and his family would be disastrous if he did.”

I asked Gulko if he was surprised by Kasparov’s poor play and whether he thought it was possible that the challenger had been ordered to lose the match because the Central Committee didn’t
want a Jew to be world champion. “It is impossible to know this for a fact,” Gulko answered. “Perhaps Kasparov is just playing poorly. He is an emotional young man. But in Russia chess is political and it is difficult to refuse if you are asked to throw a game. If they don’t want a chess player to play, like me or Bronstein, for example, they’ll stop you for years.

“A player’s creative life is ruled by chess management,” Gulko went on in his unsettling calm voice. “In 1953, in the Zurich interzonal, Bronstein was ordered to draw a game against Smyslov. Bronstein had winning chances in the game, and if he had won it, it’s likely that he would have won the tournament and played against Botvinnik for the world championship. But in this instance, more important than Bronstein’s Judaism was the issue of keeping an American out of the championship, because if Bronstein had won that game it also would have given Sammy Reshevsky a chance to win the tournament. The Soviet action was directed against Reshevsky, an American who is also a Jew.

“In 1977, the year I won the Soviet championship, Viktor Baturinsky was the leader of Soviet chess. Because I was a Jew he tried to make certain I’d lose. In two instances players were asked to lose games so that their opponents might finish ahead of me.”