Grandmaster (23 page)

She took a cupful of broth from the large black kettle hanging at the fireplace and, when it had cooled somewhat, pressed it to Gilead's mouth. She opened his lips with her fingers and allowed some of the broth to dribble in, but it only rolled out the side of his mouth. He would die, she knew, without food and without medicine. And he was just too beautiful to let die.

Yva reached into an old jug in the corner of the room. Inside was a scrap of cloth tied around some money. There were only a few zlotys; not enough for a doctor, and a doctor was what the man desperately needed. Even if the doctor in the village did not fear Yva as a witch, he was still one of
them.
And she would not ask one of them for a favor. She would have to pay.

"Yva! Yva Pradziad!" a voice called from the bottom of the hill below her house.

Recognizing it, she picked up a rock as she stepped out the door and hurled it at Józek. "Can't you leave me alone, scum?" she screamed.

"Hold it, Yva! I only want to talk. But I don't want to get caught in your traps."

"Then talk from down there, Russian ass-kisser."

Józek spread his arms wide. "Now, is that any way to talk?"

"I'm only saying the truth. Everyone knows you make money from the Russians, only they're all too gutless to say so. They're afraid you won't sell them your precious Russian luxuries. Well, there's nothing I need from you." She spat elaborately.

"I'm not here to sell. I'm here to buy," Józek said pleasantly.

Yva cocked her head. "Buy? Buy what?"

"Your friend inside." He thrust his chin toward the house. "Is he dead yet?"

Her face pinched into a grimace. She picked up another rock and threw it expertly, striking Józek on the shoulder. "Get out of here!"

"Wait, Yva. Wait." He held his shoulder with his hand. "I want to buy the medallion around his neck. Even if he's not dead, he won't miss it." He ventured a step forward. "I'm offering you a lot of money for it, Yva. Three hundred zlotys. More than you'd get anywhere else, even in Krakow."

"It's not mine to sell," Yva said.

"Think about it. Aren't you taking care of him? Maybe he's a Czech, a renegade. Then you're risking your own life to save his skin, aren't you? Ask him. He'd be the first to tell you he owes you something."

"He can't talk," Yva said. "He's still in fever."

"Well," Józek said with satisfaction, "then some money for food will do him more good than a silly necklace, won't it?"

Yva stood in the doorway for a long time, looking from Józek's mocking figure at the foot of the hill to the sick man lying on the straw. Finally she walked over to Justin and unclasped the medallion's chain. It felt hot to her touch. She wrapped it in a scrap of cloth and then picked her way between the familiar animal traps to Józek.

"Where's the money?" she asked sullenly. Józek produced a crisp roll of bills.

"Now, was that so hard?" he asked, smiling.

"Get out of here."

 

J
ustin awoke two days later.
The damp straw beneath him hurt his skin. He was in a strange place, a country shack. Vaguely, he remembered walking here, but he did not recognize the young woman who bent near the fireplace on the other side of the room. Was he supposed to know her?

He strained to see, craning his neck with exhausting effort to see her face. She turned, still squatting, saw him, covered her mouth with her hand in disbelief. She came over to him, speaking words his mind could not yet follow, and held a cup of cool water to his lips. For the first time he noticed a plaster cast on his left wrist.

By nightfall, he could sit up. The evening breeze felt cool. The woman he did not know fed him some soup. It was delicious. He ventured toward the open door, but the woman stopped him, cautioning him with gestures and the peculiar language he did not understand.

Little by little, the words began to make sense, although Justin still did not speak. Several days after he first came to consciousness in the straw bed, he was well enough to walk outdoors. He found the woman in her garden, pulling weeds. He stooped beside her.

"So, my handsome simpleton has come to help me, has he?" she said, rumpling his coal-colored hair. She demonstrated how to pull the weeds from the earth.

The earth. Touching it, he felt again the nightmare sensation of earth weighing down on him, suffocating him. Of clods of earth falling on him as birds sang and a man watched overhead, the Prince of Death with a face Justin could not remember...

"What's the matter, bored already?" the woman said teasingly.

Across the valley, past the distant forest, in the mountains. Over there the Prince of Death waited, faceless and patient,
over there
, and Justin had to reach him or his karma would not be complete, but it was not time ... was not time; the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms burned, and so the time was past, come and gone, and his soul was in damnation, and still the Prince of Death waited for him...

He ran.

"Stop!" Yva called, rushing after him. "The traps! You'll be hurt!"

Justin howled as the trap closed over his ankle. Yva knelt beside him, straining to open it. "Stupid!" she shouted. "Don't you know anything?"

He moved her hand away, grasped the trap by both of its rusty sides, and pulled it apart, sending the spring mechanism flying.

Yva checked the wound on Justin's bare foot, then examined the broken trap. "Dumb as a beetle, but with the strength of an ox," she said. "Even with a broken wrist. Well, that's something, anyway!" Scolding, she led him back to the house and handed him a broom. "Sweep up," she said, showing him how. "As long as you're healthy enough to run, you might as well make yourself useful."

The straw bed was split into two parts, but Justin abandoned it. At night, he slept outdoors, where the sight of the stars brought back distant memories: of high mountain passes above a lake surrounded by flowers; of a gold-domed hall where a tree stood, a tree with a bark of iron that fell at his feet; of an old man who handed him a diamond and a gold snake enclosed in a circle.

The snake obsessed him. At times, it was no more than a feeling, but sometimes he could picture it as clearly as if it were a real thing, gleaming, powerful, with a drop of molten gold at the base.

Two weeks later, the woman who had become a constant in his life was gone all morning. When she returned, she was smiling. Under her arm was a board of some kind, warped with water and time. It was marked with a checkerboard. She set it in front of him.

"You leave this alone, now, understand?" She took his hand, pulled it near the board, then slapped it away. "Don't touch," she said, shaking a finger at him. He nodded in understanding. A few minutes later, she returned with an apronful of wood chips. Some were dark and some were light. She placed them carefully on the three end rows on each side on the black squares. "This is a game even you can play," she said, moving her light piece diagonally onto another black square. "It's called checkers. Go ahead. Do the same thing I've done on your side." She pointed encouragingly toward his hand, then tapped the square he was to move to.

Justin looked at the board, feeling something awaken inside him. He moved the center left piece in the front row two spaces forward.

"No, no, you can't move that way. I showed you where to put it."

Justin looked at her uncomprehendingly.

Her face softened. "Oh, that's all right. I got the board for free, anyway. You can play whatever crazy way you want." She left him with the board and the blocks of wood.

Justin stared at the board for hours. Invisible lines of force seemed to connect the pieces on the checkered background, but there were not enough pieces. He went to the woodpile and returned with thirty-two more scraps of light and dark wood.

"Don't you bring a big mess in here," Yva shouted, but she didn't try to stop him.

He placed the pieces side by side on both sections of the board. Now the lines of force worked. They were aligned now, at rest. He moved white's center right piece forward two squares. Then he opened black's game by moving the queen bishop pawn forward by two. Already the lines of force stretched into possibility.

You are the game.

As he shifted the shapeless pieces of wood over the board, the mush of unrelated information in his mind receded. What was past and unknowable for him no longer mattered. Here was a world of logic and order, and he had found his way to it again. He was home.

He didn't sleep that night. Instead, he took Yva's skinning knife and whittled the pieces into recognizable shapes: a horse's head; a castle tower; the bland, faceless soldiers of the front rank ...
Chess.
The game was called chess, and in it were hidden the secrets of thought and power.

Things came to him like a barrage of bullets. A game long ago with a small boy, ashamed of a radio transmitter under his sleeve, the yellow robes swirling around him in a dark alley, the scent of almonds, the music,
the coiled snake.

Instinctively, his hand slapped against his chest. There was nothing there. Was it imagined, the coiled snake in the circle, the center of his life? What did all those memories mean?

He ran to the fireplace and pulled out a piece of blackened wood. No, it could not be imaginary, because he could see it clearly. Sweeping the chess pieces off the table, he set the charcoal on it and began to draw. First, the eyeless head, with its tongue darting, then the coiled body, only occasionally dotted with scales, then the circle around it, the circle of destiny, of karma, closed, with a molten drop of gold...

"What have you done?" Yva screamed behind him. He looked over his shoulder, startled back into reality. Yva was angry, her features pinched. She was pointing to the drawing. "You've ruined my table!" she shouted. "Look, I can't even get it out. You've dug into the wood." She slapped a wet rag on top of the design. "It'll never come out, you worthless dummy!" She picked up his whittlings and threw them across the room. "You're good for nothing, like your toys."

Justin backed away, feeling whatever thoughts had briefly possessed him recede into blankness again.

He ran to the forest, and spent the rest of the day and night sitting, waiting for the precious thoughts that had left him to come back. They were his past, the elements that made him something besides a stranger locked in the present. He had to find them again.

The days passed without notice. One day he removed the cast from his wrist. His leg no longer hurt. Justin walked and ate from the woods, and found contentment. By sunrise of a day when the breeze blew warm and he could smell the scent of wheat from the nearby farms, he found a small stream. In its center was a rock so large that the water eddied around it. He picked it up. "In a hundred years, the rock will have disappeared," he said out loud. His words were in English, and behind them, he could hear the soft, remembered voice of Tagore. He said the words again in Hindustani, German, Russian. He repeated them in Polish.

Polish is what I've been hearing here, he decided. I'm in Poland.
Poland
. Think. Why Poland? Where did I come from?

Suddenly he thought of the woman who had been looking after him. Since he'd first awakened in the tumbledown shack, he'd taken her for granted as a presence, chattering, scolding, feeding. She was the mother he had needed, and like a child, he had accepted her without question. But she was not his mother. She was young and almost pretty and, except for him, it seemed, entirely alone.

He retraced his steps back to her. He did not remember how long he had been away, and did not know if she would permit him to return. But she was his only link to his own past, and he had to find her.

Yva was seated at the big table still marked by Justin's drawing. Always working, she had a scrap of sewing on her lap as she ate from a bowl. She sat bent over her food like an old woman. Justin knocked on the door frame.

"It's you," she said breathlessly, rising. Her face brightened visibly in front of his eyes. She
was
pretty, like a cut stone, her sharp edges giving her distinction. Hers was the face of one who had suffered and survived.

"I have your toys," she said quickly, bringing over a box filled with Justin's whitled chess pieces. "You see, I wasn't really mad at you. I knew you didn't know better, but see?" She pressed them into Justin's hands. "Oh, how I wish you could understand me, even just a little."

Justin held his hand out to her and touched her cheek. "Thank you," he said slowly, "for all you've done."

"You can talk!" she gasped.

"I couldn't until now. I didn't remember. Something happened, and..."

"But you're speaking Polish," she marveled. "Then you're not a Czech after all."

"I don't know. I speak other languages, too. I don't know which is my own. There are so many things I don't remember." He looked into the box, with its small figurines. "This game is called chess," he said, trying to think. "And there's a wise man named Tagore, and the Prince of Death is somewhere beyond the woods ... It all sounds so crazy."

"No, no, it's wonderful. Come. Eat." She led him to the table. He saw the mark on it and rushed to it.

"And
this,"
he said, tracing the drawing with his fingers. "I see this all the time. It's something terribly important to me, I know, but I can't remember what it is. Have you seen this before?"

She looked down. "It's just a picture," she said.

"No. It's something else. Something powerful, part of me. But what could a coiled snake mean?"

Wordlessly, Yva brought him a bowl of soup.

That night, as Justin lay outside beneath the stars, Yva came to him. Her head was covered with a cloth, as if she were in church. "There is something I must tell you," she said.

He sat up. In the moonlight, her rough features softened.

"The coiled snake was on a gold medallion you wore around your neck," she said. "I sold it to buy food and medicine."

He stared at her.

"I sold it. Do you understand? While you were sick."

"Where did you sell it?"