Necropolis (20 page)

Now, in order to continue the story of my characters, it has become necessary to give a brief account of their lives.

I shall begin with Ferenck Oslovski.

His birth and early childhood are fairly irrelevant. Knowing that he was the son of a Jewish notary in Wadowice and a woman who had studied philosophy does not help us to understand very much about his gifts. Hundreds of human beings have had similar childhoods, just as anodyne or interesting, or even brilliant, and none of them, none at all, became champion of Poland.

He himself says that the first time he saw a chessboard was in a local tailor's shop, Roth's, where he had gone to collect a suit for his father. The tailor was playing a game with one of his employees, and let him stay for a moment to watch. Oslovski would always remember how glossy the polished ebony and boxwood of the classic Staunton pieces seemed. He looked at them with such rapt attention that the tailor, a friend of the family, said, would you like to touch them? go on, reach out your hand, move one. The boy chose a knight and slid it across the board.

What he felt in his fingers was so agreeable, so soft, that he was overwhelmed, conquered forever by a pleasure that he would soon learn all about, because the tailor invited him to come whenever he was free to watch him play, and between one game and the next started teaching him. This pawn moves like this, the knight jumps there, the queen can move forwards, backwards, and diagonally.

The boy would watch him in silence, not telling him that he had already watched enough times to know the moves perfectly and absorb all the different openings. One day, after a few months had passed, the tailor said, sit down and start with white, and so that we're evenly matched, I'll play without the queen, and that was what they did. After twenty moves, the tailor performed a classic checkmate, which left young Ferenck on the verge of tears. Then the boy ventured to say: Mr. Roth, can we play another game with all the pieces? The tailor was touched, and said, of course, if you prefer I won't give you any advantage, but it's going to be more difficult.

The game began well, and after thirty-one moves the boy delivered an astonishing checkmate, much to the surprise of the tailor, who had not seen it coming, and when he tried to figure out what had happened, the boy said, Mr. Roth, you were already done for six moves ago, look, and he started manipulating the pieces at great speed, explaining the position. They played four more games and the result was always the same: the tailor, who was not a bad player and had even taken part in tournaments, was checkmated every time. Never again was he able to beat the boy, which convinced him that he was dealing with a case of precociousness that was worth investigating. So he took him, with his father's permission, to the chess club run by Ozer Miller, an experienced player who had been local champion and who gave classes and played with other former players and enthusiasts.

Ferenck's appearance in Miller's club was quite a milestone, because in the eleven months he was there he never lost a game, not even with Ozer Miller himself. Miller decided to take matters in hand and introduce him into other clubs, of greater standing and quality, such as the one run by Sam Edenbaum, where the boy at last found his level.

Sam Edenbaum earned his living selling fabrics, a profession close to that of the tailor Shlomo Roth. They were two links in the same chain, which had created a bond between them that verged on the fraternal. But there was more to the long-standing relationship between these two men, Edenbaum and Roth, than a business connection, and here I hope you will allow me a short digression, because I think it is true to say that they owed their lives to chess.

They were both part of that much-reduced Jewish community in Poland that had survived the Holocaust, and in their case it was thanks to chess that they had survived. Both had been deported to Auschwitz but had been saved by the fact that one of the section commandants in the camp was a lover of chess and organized tournaments. For a prisoner, to lose a game could result in death. That indeed had happened to a number of Jews and one political prisoner, a Communist, whereas when an officer lost the penalty was typical of the military, like having to drink five glasses of brandy or walk between the huts in their underwear, the kind of drunken revel that bore no relation to the tragic outcome with which the others were faced.

Roth and Edenbaum always won, and although that exasperated the officers, it also kept them alive, because they would never send to his death a man they wanted to beat at chess, a consideration that only chess players would understand. The officers did not dare touch them. What they did was make them play against each other, which was somewhat macabre, because they had no idea what would happen to the loser. But to avoid trouble, they played a real game to the death, which Edenbaum won in fifty-six moves, to much acclaim from the officers. In fact, the officers were so pleased that both men were treated to canned chicken and brandy.

As they told it to Oslovski, Roth and Edenbaum never allowed themselves to lose a game. The system they concocted consisted of thinking about chess all the time, closing their eyes, imagining moves and analyzing final positions as they dug holes for fencing in the snow and rain. Thinking about chess and nothing but chess, conceiving the world as a succession of pieces moving across the board according to their own hierarchies, the ignominious reality in which they were immersed being merely the canvas on which they projected moves and planned unexpected advances: that was why, whenever the officers came into their huts and took them away to play, they were always ready, they already knew which openings they would use and how they would develop them, just like the protagonist of Stefan Zweig's novella
The Royal Game
, which I am sure you will remember, whose life is saved by chess but who is later driven mad by it. Well, something like that happened in Auschwitz, although neither Edenbaum nor Roth went mad, only concentrated their energies in the brain and switched off everything else. Their survival depended on that one organ, the brain, and on their skill at playing chess.

This situation continued until the camp was liberated, and caused them a few problems afterwards. Edenbaum and Roth, who were in better physical condition than the others because of the food they had been given by the officers, were now denounced to the authorities, accused of having been collaborators or even spies. These malicious stories went no farther, however, because in those days of horror there were better and more useful things to do than try to pursue two Jewish chess players who had not only survived but even prospered.

But let us return to the education of young Ferenck at a time when Poland was slowly recovering from the war.

Edenbaum took his education in hand and, for a small amount of money, hired a former regional champion to train him in openings, which, according to Edenbaum, were the pillars on which the outcome of a game depended, and so Ferenck started devoting himself increasingly to chess. His father gave him special permission to leave school at noon and spend three hours on chess, a time judged sufficient to deepen his knowledge without taking him away for too long from the world and the things a boy his age needed to do, because, as is well known, most young prodigies develop a distance from reality that sooner or later destroys them, look at Bobby Fischer, a genius but quite awkward and even unpleasant when it came to other human activities, or Gary Kasparov, the prodigy from Baku, who never had a real adolescence and who, as an adult, had the same mental age he had had when his childhood was snatched from him. This did not happen to other grand masters and champions, such as Boris Spassky or Tigran Petrosian, who continued to be human beings as well as great chess brains, so it was important to his new mentor that young Ferenck should be a child like any other, and he made it a condition that his apprenticeship should not take precedence over his life. And he was successful, because Ferenck Oslovski spent his teenage years just like his classmates, going to the river to bathe and trying to win the love of girls—mostly without success, by the way, which contributed to his somewhat melancholy temperament—but by and large leading a healthy life and even developing another great passion: music. He learned musical notation and piano, both major tasks, which helped him to keep his eyes on the horizon and molded his spirit in the clay of the artist.

But the passion for chess is so strong that it may wipe out other vocations. Remember Marcel Duchamp, the man who destroyed the traditional concept of art when he presented an upturned urinal at the Salon des Artistes as his magnum opus. Duchamp gave it all up for the infinite spaces of chess, never again creating anything but combinations of pawns and bishops and kings on a chessboard.

And Oslovski was the same.

Before long, young Ferenck gave up the piano and musical notation to devote himself exclusively to the study of combinations and variations. In his first tournaments, he obtained some surprising results. At the Municipal Tournament in Wadowice he came third, but did not lose a single game, claiming 16 victories and 38 draws, which in points put him below two of his rivals, one of whom he had actually beaten. These small tournaments provided the young man with a great incentive to continue. What a chess player longs for above all is to confront a rival of his own, or greater, stature. The desire to follow an ascending curve kept him awake at night, studying variations, reproducing games by grand masters such as Tal, Capablanca, and Larsen, making notes and coming up with new ideas that he would discuss daily with Edenbaum, until something happened that would completely change his life, which was that in the middle of studying a position, as he was writing down his possible moves, Sam Edenbaum's head tipped forward onto the chessboard, before his whole body collapsed noisily on the floor. An aneurism had burst in his brain, killing him outright, the expression on his face one of concentration rather than pain. As they say of Archimedes, death interrupted him in mid-thought.

So Ferenck found himself without a teacher, because although the tailor, Roth, was still a good companion and pleasant to talk to, he was not at the requisite level to train Oslovski. The young man drifted for nearly a year without a guide, until someone at last appeared to pick up the torch from Edenbaum, a Russian named Vasily Andrescovich, who had heard about the young man and his achievements and was looking for a pupil out of whom to carve his masterpiece. To him, Oslovski was like the block of marble to Da Vinci. The raw material for his great art.

The first thing Andrescovich did, when summer came and the school vacations began, was to apply for permission to go to Moscow, which he managed easily thanks to his contacts and an invitation from the Russian Federation. When he arrived, young Oslovski was stunned. Moscow was not only the capital of the Socialist world, but also a mythical city to chess players. Ever since Alexander Alekhine had snatched the championship from the Cuban, Capablanca, Russian predominance had been unquestioned: Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and even Viktor Korchnoi, who despite his talent never became world champion, as well as young hopefuls such as Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov. Moscow was the cradle of chess, and he, a shy young Pole from one of the most obscure and forgotten corners of the world, was there to devour it.

With his hands in his pockets, sweating with the emotion and the heat, young Ferenck turned on to the tree-lined Boule­vard Gogol, passed the huge bronze stature of the author, and a little farther along, on the left hand side, came to the great temple itself, the headquarters of the Russian Chess Federation. When he entered the hall on the second floor, he thought he was going to faint at the sight of the mirrors and the stucco and the meticulously lined-up tables.

Andrescovich told him that a series of games were being played that afternoon between Grand Masters in honor of Botvinnik, the so-called “Dialectic of Iron,” three times world champion and second longest holder of the title after Alekhine. Young Oslovski sat down in the room on the first floor where the games were commented on and waited for the beginning. With trembling lips he saw the white, cold figure of Karpov come in through reception and start up the stairs toward the hall where the tables were. The games began and Oslovski listened to the commentators, old players and Grand Masters, and after what seemed to him only a moment, although nearly two hours had passed, he asked if he might be allowed to make a comment. He left his chair and went to the chessboard where the positions were analyzed and there gave a rapid demonstration of a better play. The old men listened to his explanation, given in fairly correct Russian, thought about it and approved his hypothesis. Later, during a second game, they asked his opinion about another complex position and again the young man gave a brave and highly original analysis. By now, the wise old men were murmuring among themselves.

The next day, Oslovski played for the first time at the Russian Chess Federation. He felt his fingers tremble as they touched the pieces and slid them over the board and the afternoon sun made slanting lines across the floor. A week later, he played in a youth championship and came second. Then he took part in a number of amateur tournaments and won four of them.

From here things began to move fast, as often happens in the lives of chess players. He played in Leningrad, Prague, Kiev, and Odessa, won a tournament in Budapest and another in Athens. He was runner-up in the all-Poland championship and finally, at the age of seventeen, became national champion, which earned him honors and the possibility of traveling around the world.

Now begins a new chapter in the trajectory of Oslovski. By now he was twenty-three and many things had happened in his life. One of them was the death of his father, and another the illness of his mother, for whom, thanks to his position as Grand Master, he was able to secure the best possible care at Warsaw's Central Hospital, in the ward for patients suffering from terminal illnesses, which in her case was nothing less than leukemia. In spite of these setbacks, Ferenck concentrated on chess, which was now no longer just a passion but a way of rising through the social ranks in Gomulka's Poland, in pursuit of which he doubled his concentration and efforts.