Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (13 page)

After 46 games the score was 5-1 to Karpov, with 40 draws. Karpov had had no victory for 21 games. And he had lost 22 pounds. Then Kasparov won game 47; and game 48. 'It was extraordinary,' said a chess writer, and International Master, who covered the match. 'We began in September with great drama as Karpov took his lead. On November 24 he stopped winning. Then — a winter of draws. The band of analysts was dwindling. The press room was like a bunker. Suddenly there were rumours about Karpov's health, and you could feel the political pressures. There were "technical" time-outs — for instance, eight days to change venues. There were meetings with contacts on street corners. Journalists wondered whether they were being followed. Everybody knew that Karpov was in a de luxe private clinic, suffering from exhaustion.' After Kasparov's second straight victory the President of FIDE flew from Dubai to Moscow and ended the match. A new word entered the language: FIDEgate.

It is illuminating to recast the Moscow Championship as a set of tennis, the final set of an imaginary Supergrandslam. The Champion is serving for the title at 5-0. After a game involving 100 deuces, his serve is broken. The next game goes to 300 deuces. By this time the Champion is limping, wincing, howling with fatigue. The Challenger wins the seventh game, and wins the eighth with ease. The umpire now decides that everyone has had enough. 'I wouldn't like to be 3-5 down to Karpov
on his death bed,'
said Nigel Short, the world No. 9. 'People say he looks weedy, but mentally he's very, very tough,' At this stage, however, Karpov was playing like a man with a nagging brain injury: and it is quite clear that Kasparov sensed victory. The decision still incenses him. For Kasparov it is as if, during an endless rally, with the crowd gasping and shrieking, the Champion's weak baseline lob has gone up, the Challenger ravenously awaits it at the net — and the umpire extends a long hand from his perch, snatching the ball from the air.

The umpire is, of course, Mr Florencio Campomanes, President of FIDE. There is almost something captivating, something blithely Chaucerian, about Campo, with his air of farcical unreliability. If there is no smoke without fire, then Campomanes is a veritable Vesuvius, fizzing and burping with partiality and bad faith. You feel that the world of chess is too small for his talents: he ought to be in arms dealing, or nuclear proliferation.

A Philippine, a one-time Garcia man and now a follower of Marcos (with whom he is said to have many interests in common), Campo was elected to the Presidency in 1982
,
on 'the Third World ticket'. The extent to which he dominates FIDE is made clear by its recent resolution 'thanking him for his initiative' in aborting the Moscow match, a decision so reviled by the world press that even the
Sun
joined the chorus
(RED KING OF CHESS SET TO CRACK UP).
1986 is election year, and Campo has introduced a new 'tax on draws', by which every drawn game diverts 1 per cent of the purse to Campo's chess-development programme in the Third World. Kasparov cleverly preempted the ploy by donating his share of the winnings to the Chernobyl relief fund. Karpov was obliged to follow suit.

Without going too deeply into the intrigues, one can simply say that Campo disports himself like a Third World politician. 'When I ask President Marcos for two million dollars, at worst he wants to know whether he should bring the money straight away or whether I can wait for a cheque.' There are many stories of his intimidation of journalists (threats of denying visas, etc.) and his general admiration for Marcosian strong-arming. Ever since the Moscow row, Campo has cobbled together a defence of this 'unpopular decision' by directing counter-conspiracy charges at 'a small band of journalists' led by Raymond Keene ('skilful', 'cunning', 'forked tongue'). This is the tone of a recent FIDE newsletter, from the disinterested pen of Casto P. Abundo:

It is no surprise that Keene lies in his book ... in an obvious attempt to
wash his hands
of the affair. Now, in shameless
hypocrisy,
he charges 'incorrect decisions by the President'.

Campo's main adversary, however, is not Raymond Keene. Campo's main adversary is far more centrally placed. He is Gary Kasparov.

Why did Campo do it? Possibly he bowed to pressure from the Soviet Chess Federation, whose officials have a stake in Karpov. But then Campo has a stake in him too. All these careers and ascendancies are interlinked. 'You can't expect to please everybody, or even anybody,' said Campo, with astounding serenity, among the hoots and guffaws of the Moscow press conference. Campo didn't please anybody. Karpov looked sick, up on the podium with the glozing Campo, he looked morally queasy. Soon afterwards he claimed that his 'sports and public reputation' had been 'blasted'. 'By his decision,' Spassky has said, 'Karpomanes' had 'actually destroyed Karpov'.

During the rematch in 1985 Karpov's image took a further tousling.
Der Spiegel
accused him of diverting $½ million through a German agent, who had absconded with the money and was now wanted by the police. It was further claimed that Campo was trying to retrieve the money on Karpov's behalf. The crisis was spectacularly unwelcome. But by this Stage, anyway, Kasparov had the whole world behind him. To stamping feet, to cries of 'Gary! Gary!', he surged to victory on a crest of rectitude. Youth, aggression, justice! Only the Chess Federation Karpovites were left muttering in the press room. 'There is nothing we can do,' they said. 'There is nothing we can do.'

So things will stand when White pushes his first pawn tomorrow afternoon. And the question remains: what are they up to? What of the chess itself, the eerie engagement with the 32 pieces and the 64 squares?

'Their styles are so different,' says Tony Miles, 'you can't even compare them. Kasparov is the perfectionist: he analyses to infinity. He likes to establish a tree of complications, say a five-move line with six alternatives per move. He thrives on complexity. You can't out-analyse him. You'll get blasted out of sight. Karpov is more practical and classical, more of an artist in his way. He likes straightforward positions with no forcing continuations. He makes intuitive general assessments and consolidates small advantages. Then he makes them pinch.'

And if you raise your eyes from the board? 'When I played Karpov,' says Nigel Short, 'it took me about half an hour to get over my awe at playing the World Champion. Then it was business as usual, just another game. With Kasparov — it's hard to describe. I found his presence uniquely disturbing. I have never faced such an intense player, never felt such energy and concentration, such will and desire burning across the board at me.'

One can well imagine the exhaustion of playing Kasparov. Watching him do a ten-minute spot on a chat show is exhausting enough. The galvanic giggling, the agitation, the expressiveness: he doesn't sit on his chair - he hovers on it. Recently Kasparov beat ten computers simultaneously, blindfolded. How flattering for the species. There are over 288 billion possibilities through the fourth move (by White
and
Black). Yet the mark of a good chessplayer is not how many moves he considers but how few — as Karpov knows.

Although the betting is on Kasparov, some of the emotional money is tending back towards Karpov, the saddened swat with the Baskerville eyes.

'Chess is like life,' said Spassky. 'Chess
is
life,' said Fischer, who paid the penalty for his obvious mistake. Chess has been called an art, a science and a sport. It can't be an art, because every brilliancy depends on the fuddled collusion of the opponent: even 'the Immortal Game' would have died the death if Black had had his wits about him. It can't be a science, because, simply, it has no content: the singularity of chess is not its readiness but its refusal to serve as a matrix for anything else. And it can't be a sport, not quite, because it is both infinite and precise; every game is recoverable; every game can be re-experienced through the markings on a page. 'It's
definitely
not an art,' said Nigel Short. 'If I have the choice between a beautiful combination and a mundane way of wrapping up the game, then I'll wrap up the game. You must win. It's not an art. It's a fight. It's a fight.'

Observer, 1986

THE ROLLING STONES AT EARLS COURT

Throughout the entire course of my visit to the first of the Rolling Stones concerts at Earls Court Arena last Friday night, I did not get my eyes spooned out, my teeth stomped in, or my head kicked off. Neither was I deafened, trampled, robbed or maimed. For these small highpoints in an otherwise rather disappointing evening, I hereby give laconic thanks.

Invited to appear promptly for the eight o'clock concert (people who arrived as late as 8:15, one gathered, would be 'turned away'), we joined the panting, aromatic multitude at 7:30 on the hotdog-strewn steps of the Earls Court building. The multitude was also, apparently, a queue: it contracted like a dying amoeba as the semi-circular throng oozed through the doors. Once inside, panic and claustrophobia jockeyed routinely for one's attention; for every hundredweight of humanity that surged through the doors, a tardy click could be heard, somewhere in the distance, every twenty seconds or so, as the ticketed trickle inched past the two or three turnstiles. Some people fainted, or were haggardly led to the pockets of air at the front of the queue. In the high tradition of all the best rock concerts, you were treated as if you had come to sate some vile addiction rather than simply to exchange cash for entertainment. Beyond the crush at the turnstiles, fans and policemen could be glimpsed moving about in relative freedom. A mere half an hour later, we joined them.

The ante-hall of the Earls Court Arena was a Brobding-nagian underground carpark of remote and overcrowded bars, sweet shops and dirty hot-drinks machines. Normally a token homogeneity obtains at the average rock concert: David Bowie fans all look and behave like David Bowie, Bryan Ferry fans all look and behave like Bryan Ferry etc. But everyone is a Stones fan. On the concrete safari from the turnstiles to the concert area I was impartially menaced by sick junkies, posh druggies, junior droogs, fat suburbanite tikes (who half-tried to lure away the two girls I diffidently squired), elderly men in suits, platformed teenagers — and, I suppose, people like myself, who had quite liked the Stones a few years ago, who had somehow been given or got hold of tickets, and who were now wondering why they weren't somewhere else.

We entered the auditorium. Imagine a hot, dark, sealed football stadium - with people massed on the pitch as well as in the stands. Our tickets said row 'C' (hence the pack of Malleable Muffler Earplugs I had purchased on the way to the show). A T-shirted attendant appeared, frowned at our tickets, scratched his head, and took out a map. In the distance, about 3,000 fans away, a lone ginger-bearded policeman rocked on his heels. Perfect, perfect, I couldn't feel more secure. Our seats were as far away as they could possibly be from the bay through which we had entered, about 150 yards to the right of the podium. We gained them, and sat.

Meanwhile a bad supporting group called the Meters had started up — bad supporting groups being the conventional rock-concert means of (i) sapping your initial high spirits, and of (ii) paving the way for mass hysteria when the star attraction arrives. A coloured New Orleans group, the Meters gave a good indication of what was to come: their steely clatter made short work of what are laughingly known as the 'acoustics' of the venue, sending a torrential wall of sound boomeranging from one corner of the auditorium to the other. Once you were in your seat, too, the real proportions of the place could be gingerly absorbed. As in the Hells of Blake and Doré, the vaultfuls of shadowy supplicants stretch up high into the middle air; along the cornice level are squares of yellow light, where silhouettes of angular figures lean and hover. The Meters packed up their set. People got ready to be hysterical. As quivering roadies groped and blinked about on the stage, I fondled my earplugs. After the usual courteous delay — barely twenty minutes — we were off.

To a 'Dawn of Man'-type prelude from some undisclosed source, the huge leek-shaped tube behind the original stage started to unpeel in segments — and there, perched high on the tip of one of the descending petals, was the awful Mick himself. The stage flattened bouncily out, Mick began jumping up and down on the end of it, and the whopping chords of
Honky Tonk Woman
cracked out into the darkness. Immediately, as is the way at rock concerts, everyone got to their feet. I assume that the first few people to stand up do so out of genuine excitement; the rest do so because they can't see if they don't. People who prefer not to stand up get angry with people who do, and luckily I had a particularly strident and foul-mouthed lot of people behind me to yell at and threaten the lot of people in front of me, who had stood up but soon sat down again. (I turned to see a clump of hate-contorted faces that kept me safely strapped to my seat throughout.)

I was glad I could see the stage, unimpressive though it was from my vantage — and it must have been a flea-circus to the thousands further back. Glad, because it soon became clear that the evening would offer nothing to gratify even the rudest ear. Mick's voice came over as a strangled, monotone holler; the instruments weren't distinguishable from one another; the two percussion men (Watts plus a grinning bongoist) merely provided a basic fuzz on the general cataract of sound. And this wasn't, as they say, just me: a dozen bars of
Get off my Cloud,
easily identifiable on record, passed without comment from the audience, and only when Mick started up did the crowd click, granting the applause traditionally accorded to an ex-number one. Indicatively, too, the two or three new Jagger-Richards creations left the fans embarrassingly cold; only the songs already embossed on the responses could be recreated by the frenzied approximations from the stage. No, it was all too big; there were too many people; you couldn't respond to the music because it couldn't respond to you.