The Queen's Gambit (34 page)

By the time they came down through the heavy clouds and she had her first sight of Russia, which looked from above as much like Kentucky as anything else, she had taken three of the pills, slept fitfully for a few hours and was feeling the glassy-eyed numbness that she used to feel after a long trip on a Greyhound bus. She remembered taking the pills in the middle of the night. She had walked down an aisle full of sleeping people to the rest room and got water in a funny-looking little plastic glass.

Mr. Booth did turn out to be a help in customs. His Russian was good, and he got her into the right booth for the inspection. What was surprising was the ease of it all; a pleasant old man in uniform went casually through her luggage, opened her two bags, poked around a bit and closed them. That was it.

When they came through the gate, a limousine from the embassy was waiting. They drove through fields where men and women were working in early-morning sunlight, and at one place along the road she saw three enormous tractors, far bigger than anything she had seen in America, driving slowly across a field that stretched as far as she could see. There was very little other traffic on the road. The car started moving through rows of six-and eight-story buildings with tiny windows, and since it was a warm June morning even under the gray sky, people sitting on the doorsteps. Then the road began to broaden, and they drove past a small green park and another large one and past some enormous, newer buildings that looked as if they had been built to last forever. The traffic had become heavier and there were people on bicycles at one side of the road now and a great many pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Mr. Booth was leaning back in his rumpled suit with his eyes half closed. Beth sat stiffly in the back of the long car, looking out the window on her side. There was nothing threatening about the way Moscow looked; she could have been entering any large city. But she could not loosen up inside. The tournament would start the next morning. She felt totally alone, and frightened.

***

Her teacher at the University had talked about how Russians drank tea from glasses, straining it through a lump of sugar held between the teeth, but the tea served in this big dark parlor of a room was in thin china cups with a Greek key design in gold. She sat in her highbacked Victorian chair with her knees pressed together, holding the saucer with the cup and a hard little roll on it and tried to listen attentively to the director. He spoke a few sentences first in English and then in French. Then English again: the visitors were welcome in the Soviet Union; games would begin promptly at ten o’clock each morning; a referee would be assigned to each board and should be consulted in the event of any irregularity. There would be no smoking or eating during play. An attendant would accompany players to the rest rooms should the need arise. It would be proper to raise one’s right hand in such an event.

The chairs were in a circle, and the director was on Beth’s right. Across from her sat Dimitri Luchenko, Viktor Laev and Leonid Shapkin, all dressed in well-tailored suits and wearing white shirts and dark ties. Mr. Booth had said Russian men dressed as though their clothes came from a nineteen-thirties Montgomery Ward catalogue, but these men were soberly dapper in expensive gray gabardine and worsted. Those three alone—Luchenko, Laev and Shapkin—were a small pantheon next to which the entire establishment of American chess would stammer in humiliation. And on her left was Vasily Borgov. She could not bring herself to look at him, but she could smell his cologne. Between him and the other three Russians was an only slightly lesser pantheon—Jorge Flento from Brazil, Bernt Hellström from Finland and Jean-Paul Duhamel from Belgium, also wearing conservative suits. She sipped her tea and tried to appear calm. There were heavy maroon draperies at the tall windows, and the chairs were upholstered in maroon velvet trimmed with gold. It was nine-thirty in the morning and the summer day outside was splendid, but the draperies here were tightly closed. The Oriental carpet on the floor looked as if it had come from a museum. The walls were paneled in rosewood.

An escort of two women had brought her here from the hotel; she had shaken hands with the other players, and they had been seated like this for a half hour. In her huge, strange hotel room the night before a water tap was dripping somewhere, and she had barely slept. She had been dressed in her expensive navy-blue tailored dress since seven-thirty, and she could feel herself perspiring; her nylons encased her legs in a warm grip. She could hardly have felt more out of place. Every time she glanced at the men around her, they smiled faintly. She felt like a child at an adult social function. Her head ached. She would have to ask the director for aspirin.

And then quite suddenly the director finished his speech, and the men stood up. Beth jumped to her feet, rattling her cup on its saucer. The waiter in a white cossack blouse who had served the tea came running up to take it from her. Borgov, who had ignored her except for a perfunctory handshake at the beginning, ignored her now as he crossed in front of her and walked out the door the director had opened. The others followed, with Beth behind Shapkin and in front of Hellström. As they filed out the door into a carpeted hallway, Luchenko stopped for a moment and turned to her. “I’m delighted you are here,” he said. “I look forward keenly to playing you.” He had long white hair like an orchestra conductor’s and wore an impeccable silvery necktie, beautifully knotted under a starched white collar. The warmth in his face was unquestionable. “Thank you,” she said. She had read of Luchenko in Junior High;
Chess Review
wrote of him with the kind of awe that Beth felt now. He had been World Champion then, losing to Borgov in a long match several years ago.

They walked down the hall a good distance before the director stopped at another door and opened it. Borgov went in first, and the others followed.

They were in some kind of anteroom with a closed door on the far side. Beth could hear a distant wave of sound, and when the director walked over and opened the door the sound became louder. Nothing was visible except a dark curtain, but when she could see around it, she sucked in her breath. She was facing a vast auditorium filled with people. It was like the view from the stage of Radio City Music Hall might be with every seat filled. The crowd stretched back for hundreds of yards, and the aisles had folding chairs set up in them with small groups clustered together talking. As the players came across the wide carpeted stage, the sound died. Everyone stared at them. Up above the main floor was a broad balcony, with a huge red banner draped across it, and above this was row after row of more faces.

On the stage were four large tables, each the size of a desk, each clearly new and inlaid with a large chessboard on which the pieces were already set up. To the right of each position for Black sat an oversized, wooden-cased chess clock, and to White’s right, a large pitcher of water and two glasses. The high-backed swivel chairs were set up so the players would be visible in profile from the audience. Behind each of them stood a male referee in a white shirt and black bow tie, and behind each referee was a display board with the pieces in their opening position. The lighting was bright but indirect, coming from a luminous ceiling above the playing area.

The director smiled at Beth, took her by the hand and led her out to the center of the stage. There was no sound at all in the auditorium. The director spoke into an old-fashioned microphone on a stand at center stage. Although he was speaking in Russian, Beth understood the words “chess” and “the United States” and finally her name: Elizabeth Harmon. The applause was sudden, warm and thunderous; she felt it as a physical thing. The director escorted her to the chair at the far end and seated her at the black pieces. She watched as he brought out each of the other foreign players for a short introduction and applause. Then came the Russians, beginning with Laev. The applause became deafening, and when he got to the last of them, Vasily Borgov, it went on and on.

Her opponent for the first game was Laev. He was seated across from her during the ovation for Borgov, and she glanced at him while it was going on. Laev was in his twenties. There was a tight smile on his lean and youthful face, his brow was heavy with annoyance and with the fingers of one slim hand he was drumming inaudibly on the table.

When the applause died down, the director, flushed with the excitement, went to the table where Borgov was playing the white pieces and smartly punched the clock. Then he walked to the next table and did the same thing, and to the next. At Beth’s he smiled importantly at the two of them and crisply pushed the button on Beth’s side, starting Laev’s clock.

Laev sighed quietly and moved his king pawn to the fourth rank. Beth without hesitation moved her queen bishop pawn, relieved to be just playing chess. The pieces were large and solid; they stood out with a comforting clarity on the board, each of them exactly centered in its home square, each sharply outlined, cleanly turned, finely burnished. The board had a matte finish with a brass inlay around its outer perimeter. Her chair was substantial and soft, yet firm; she adjusted herself in it now, feeling its comfort, and watched Laev play the king’s knight to bishop three. She picked up her queen’s knight, enjoying the heaviness of the piece, and set it on queen bishop three. Laev played pawn to queen four; she took with her pawn, setting his to the right of the clock. The referee, his back to them, repeated each move on the big board. There was still a tightness in her shoulders, but she began to relax. It was Russia and it was strange, but it was still chess.

She knew Laev’s style from the bulletins she had been studying, and she felt certain that if she played pawn to king four on the sixth move, he would follow the Boleslavski Variation with his knight to bishop three and then castle on the kingside. He had done that against both Petrosian and Tal, in 1965. Players sometimes broke into strange new lines at important tournaments, lines that might have been prepared for weeks in advance, but she felt the Russians would not have taken that trouble with her. As far as they knew, her level of play was roughly that of Benny Watts, and men like Laev would not devote much time to preparation for playing Benny. She was not an important player by their standards; the only unusual thing about her was her sex, and even that wasn’t unique in Russia. There was Nona Gaprindashvili, not up to the level of this tournament, but a player who had met all these Russian grandmasters many times before. Laev would be expecting an easy win. He brought the knight out and castled as she had expected. She felt sanguine about the reading she had done over the past six months; it was nice to know what to expect. She castled.

The game gradually began to slow as they moved past the opening without any errors and into a poised middle game with each of them now minus one knight and one bishop, and with the kings well protected and no holes in either position. By the eighteenth move the board had a dangerous equilibrium. This was not the attack chess she had made her American reputation with; it was chamber-music chess, subtle and intricate.

Playing white, Laev still had the advantage. He made moves that contained cunningly deceptive threats, but she parried them without losing tempo or position. On the twenty-fourth, she found an opportunity for a finesse, opening a file for her queen rook while forcing him to retreat a bishop, and when she made it, Laev studied it for a long while and then looked at her in a new way, as though he were seeing her for the first time. A quiver of pleasure went through her. He studied the board again before retreating the bishop. She brought the rook over. Now she had equality.

Five moves later she found a way of adding to it. She pushed a pawn to the fifth rank, offering it in sacrifice. With the move, as quietly pretty as any she had ever made, Laev was on the defensive. He did not take the pawn but was forced to bring the knight it attacked back to the square in front of his queen. She brought her rook to the third rank, and he had to respond to that. She was not pushing him so much as pressing gently. And gradually he began to yield, trying to look unconcerned about it. But he must have been astonished. Russian grandmasters were not supposed to have this done to them by American girls. She kept after him, and finally the point was reached where she could safely post her remaining knight on queen five, where he could not dislodge it. She put it there and, two moves later, brought her rook over to the knight file, directly above his king. He studied it for a long time while his clock ticked loudly and then did what she had fervently hoped he might do; he pushed the king bishop pawn up to attack the rook. When he punched his clock, he did not look at her.

Without hesitation she picked up her bishop and took his pawn with it, offering it as sacrifice. When the referee posted the move she heard an audible response from the spectators and whispering. Laev would have to do something; he could not ignore the bishop. He began running his fingers through his hair with one hand, drumming the tips of the others on the table. Beth leaned back in the chair and stretched. She had him.

He studied the move for twenty minutes on the clock before he suddenly stood up from the table and held out his hand. Beth rose and took it. The audience was silent. The tournament director came over and shook her hand too, and she walked off the stage with him to sudden, shocking applause.

***

She was supposed to have lunch with Mr. Booth and some people who were coming over from the embassy, but when she walked into the vast lobby of the hotel, which felt like a carpeted gymnasium with Victorian armchairs lining its walls, he was not there. The lady at the desk had a message for her on a sheet of paper: “I’m really awfully sorry, but some work has come up over here and we won’t be able to get away. I’ll be in touch.” The note was typed, with Mr. Booth’s name, also typed, at the bottom. Beth found one of the hotel restaurants—another carpeted gymnasium of a room—and managed enough Russian to order
blinchiki
and tea with blackberry jam. Her waiter was a serious-faced boy of about fourteen, and he served the little buckwheat cakes onto her plate and spread the melted butter and caviar and sour cream for her with a little silver spoon. Except for a group of older men in army officers’ uniforms and two authoritative-looking men in three-piece suits, there was no one else in the restaurant. After a moment another young waiter came by with a pitcher of what looked like water on a silver tray, and a little shot glass beside it. He smiled at her pleasantly. “
Vodka?
”