Tactics of Conquest Read online

  “Don’t you talk to me of insanity,” I say. Rage gathers within, a damp ball of purpose lodged in my intestines beginning to move free. “The fact is that you’ve been crazy all your life, Louis, and everyone knows this. But whether it’s just us or whether it’s as I know it to be, for the fate of the universe, I ask you again; What difference is made here? The match must progress.”

  “You really don’t understand, do you? If the Overlords have been lying to us, if we’ve been playing for ourselves, then we’re free to make a private arrangement.”

  “Private arrangement?”

  “Of course,” he says. He flings another handful of lice in, the pig. “It’s one thing if we’re playing for a terrific outcome. If this is apocalypse we’re dealing with it’s impossible to make an arrangement of any sort. But if we’re merely entertaining billions of people, if the Overlords are simply managing a talent show, then it’s a different category of concern altogether.”

  “How?”

  “Why, we have nothing to gain or lose! We can reach some kind of agreement to our mutual satisfaction. But,” he says, greedily chewing away on the lice, gasping as they hit an air pocket of the esophagus and then belching a pure, fine belch, “I must return to the board, David. I think that we’ve used all the time that we’re able without arousing suspicion. We’ll talk about this later. I’m going to let you win this match, however.”

  “Let me win the match. Let me win the match! I can defeat you at will, you fool.”

  He shrugs. I feel that I am about to cry. “But I can,” I say. His eyes are focused toward something at right angles to us.

  “I’m not going to fight with you David,” he says. “I know how hypersensitive you often become these days about your abilities—or about your lack of them, I should say—and I’m not even going to begin to get into that area. The fact is that by letting you win this, by helping you close up the gap between the two of us, it’s possible that we’ll be able to come into the forty-first match in a dead tie and then initiate a series of grandmaster draws. Wouldn’t that be better? We can extend the matches indefinitely.”

  Flabbergasted, I look at him, unable to say anything. He gives me a look which mediates somewhere between revulsion and compassion, the two being the same in this creature who is in most ways devoid of any qualities of humanity. He says, “Well, David, I’m sure that you see the point by now. We’re playing by ourselves. This is an exhibition match whether you like it or not, and in an exhibition you’re able to make your own arrangements. I really think that this would be wise, David. You see, the way we’re going now I’m going to wipe you out.” Saying nothing more, Louis turns and walks quickly out of the backstage area. His figure, even more ponderous from the rear view than from the front, waddles in an undignified fashion as he departs from me and for an instant an image whisks itself across the panels of my mind: Whining in tearful submission, Louis will concede the absolute truth of everything that I have said; my power, my righteousness, the essential dignity of my position.

  So I watch him depart, once again functioning in that high, abstract area, and it is only after he has gone that I realize how deeply shaken I have been by our conversation. Surely my self-control during our dialogue has been absolute; it would have been impossible for Louis to have divined the depths of my disturbance, but after his exit it is a different story indeed; I am sweating and trembling and find that it is necessary to seize a handful of Jovian lice which I fling into the open cavity of my mouth, chewing and chewing away toward forgetfulness, my rising gorge embracing the food hurled into it and then retracting it with a shudder, placing it deep within the barrel of the body.

  Shocking news! The concept that Louis and I have been ill-used by the Overlords, that the Overlords have misrepresented the importance of our match and that what we are engaged in after all is little more than an exhibition. But I remind myself frantically, struggling for some kind of stability and self-control, that Louis has given absolutely no basis at all for his allegation, that he is functioning on the rankest form of hearsay. Since he has a reputation in our circles for lying anyway, there is no reason to pay unusual credence to our situation as he has interpreted it.

  Still, it is with knocking knees that I make my weary way toward the backstage door. If there is the slightest credibility to be given to his information, I will have to re-evaluate the entire situation. This much is clear. I am liberal enough to say this. On the other hand, if he has lied to me (and Louis, like most grandmasters, is a compulsive liar in almost all aspects that cannot be directly verified), I am certain that he will pay severely for having done this to me.

  It is a puzzlement, a puzzlement indeed, and it is as a much older and wearier individual that I return to the playing area, hearing as always the murmurs and spatters of applause which greet me. A grandmaster, even in these perilous circumstances, has certain obligations: I smile, wave and nod tightly to the crowd, and then I return to the board.

  As I sit at the board, awaiting Louis’ next move, I daydream. Louis’ face is impassive; his arms are wrapped around his knees; he is totally devoted to the concept of the next move as it percolates its way moistly through the corridors of his mind. I do not interfere with those processes, it being an ancient fundamental of chess etiquette that one does nothing to distract the opponent. I would enjoy tapping my fingers on the table: whistling, singing, cracking my knuckles or, like the sainted Emmanuel Lasker, removing a huge cigar from a breast pocket to blow huge clouds of smoke into my opponent’s face ... but I do not know whether or not I could get away with this and in any event this, the fifteenth match of our series, would be no time to start. Ground rules for discourtesy should have been set much earlier, if at all.

  So I allow my mind to whisk away from the board. Like a busy mop wielded by a chambermaid, it chases itself around in little wet circles, the circles ever widening and increasing around me, and a distraction so close to peace that it might be the same thing entirely overtakes me. Most of chess is daydreaming after all; every grandmaster knows this. One can maintain that funnel of high concentration only for a limited time; most of the period of the match is devoted to waiting for the opponent to make his moves, and it is amazing what the mind will get itself into during these periods.

  Looking at Louis, his impassive face, his strong hands nestling into one another across the board, I admire his impassivity. It is hard to imagine, looking at him in this fashion, that not two minutes ago he divulged to me the amazing information which I have reported. Quite to the contrary, his face has flattened now into a grandmasterly scowl; he seems to be almost unaware of his surroundings, projecting himself into the board with intensity. It is odd at this early stage of the game that he would devote so much time to a simple response move, but then I have already given him a good deal to think about ... and in the bargain, it is possible that by slowing down the pace of his play he thinks that he is giving me more time to concentrate upon the information he has given. This is a credible possibility.

  I think of the many paths and byways through which I was led into the grandmasterly passion. Certainly, I could have done many other things with my life; I could have been a mathematician, or a physicist perhaps; I could have constructed cryptograms or puzzles for the magazines, any one of those pursuits which combine the beauty of the orderly mind with innovation. But it was chess for me from the outset; from the moment I was given a small board and pieces by my father at the age of eight when I was ill (he lived to regret it), there has been only one consuming interest in my life and that has been chess, that magnificent game which has given me such satisfaction, to say nothing of income, for almost four decades. Last year, the last complete year before this unfortunate instance, I was able to clear five thousand four hundred dollars (above expenses) from tournaments. Since there is little on which to spend my money, and all of my expenses are provided for, this was an exquisite sum, more than I might have ever conceived previously. Almost all of it nestles in my pe
rsonal savings.

  Louis is beginning to sweat now, faint little trickles of moisture pouring from his high forehead, mingling in his beard. I look at him intently, seeking out his gaze, but his eyes become furtive, his gaze slips downward and folding his hands he stares into the board. It is obvious that he already regrets the information he has given me; our ancient enmity has never been more apparent to him than it is now. Staring at him in this way, seeing this creature winking and blinking, trying to construct his next move, it suddenly occurs to me with shocking precision that he has not been lying. He has been telling the truth as far as he knows it. His reaction is far too stressful to be feigned; if he is not telling the truth, he is at least telling the truth as he believes it to be. I find that this sudden insight twists my bowels around into a strange position; they seem to momentarily reside above my stomach rather than in their customary and comfortable position below, and a kind of nausea overtakes me, waves of revulsion spinning through. The board, that tunnel of concentration, spins beneath me. I am unable to bring further attention to it, and momentarily everything seems to dwindle and assume miniscule proportions.

  As if from some great height I look upon a tiny Louis, a miniaturized board, an infinitesimal series of dots upon that board which must be chess-pieces. Is this possible? Am I seeing things, at last, in truest perspective? Have I dedicated my life to an inconsequentiality, narrowed my focus to a series of objects and purposes so slight that they can hardly be said to exist?

  The questions are dazzling, but even more dazzling are the series of burps and groans which I begin to emit; I sound like some dyspeptic animal lost in the woods (or perhaps I am thinking of an animal in a slaughterhouse, turned upon huge racks, ready for skewering). Little burbles and gasps escape me, my intestines take a final lurch, the board zooms toward me with great speed, beginning to assume massive proportions, growing and growing in my distorted consciousness, until by some feat of reversal the board seems not to be miniscule but literally to be overtaking the world. The pieces are huge, gallivanting Knights and Bishops swollen to grotesque proportions. As these pieces swarm before me, the horses seeming to open their mouths filled with rows of giant teeth, their riders with lances to skewer me, it occurs to me that I am very ill.

  I look over at Louis, who is bloated and swollen as well, a series of red lines streaking the white surfaces of the ballooning face leering out over me. “I am very ill,” I say to him. “Pardon me, I am very ill, I need rest, I need recovery, I need aid of some sort.” And I push the chair back from the board. It screeches across the floor.

  I remember a tournament in Paris at which one of the competitors—Nilsson, I believe it was—suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while in the very midst of a two-Knights’ defense and had to be carried out by a crew of seconds, his hands still twitching as if to seize the two Knights. This fills me with even further dread; it is so dreadful to become ill in public. There is something so humiliating about it. Death is bad enough, but to die in public would be in the worst of taste.

  Louis stares at me impassively. Desperately I lurch forward from the chair, tottering like a very old man, and take a few staggering steps back-stage. I try to draw air into my lungs, which seem paper-thin, composed of some wire mesh which will not yield to the act of inhalation. Then at last, as I stand there in panic, I feel tentacles surrounding me, purple surfaces, the smooth, slimy scales of the Overlords winding around me. Half-pulled, half-supported by their weight, I am dragged off to the backstage area. Their alien eyes as they peer at me seem to be filled with concern (but then again I am prone to misinterpretation on many levels), and they are not so much aiding as threatening me. Who is to say? Who is to know? Life, this situation, the true motivations of the Overlords, are often as impenetrable as the game of chess itself. As I am pulled backstage amid the murmurous cries of the audience, it is with the feeling that I may never truly get to the end of this and will descend, brushing against the slippery scales, to the receptacle of final uncertainty.

  INTERREGNUM: King’s Knight

  In Lima, at the time of those Interzonals, there was some kind of local political problem which made us unable to use the facilities of the hotel for some time; revolutionaries were allegedly threatening the democratic reign of the president, and the president had felt it best to cancel public events. FIDE tried rather desperately to convince him that chess was not a public but a private event, and that there would be no more than thirty or forty spectators, participants, referees and judges in the great hotel ballroom at any given time. (These were the days when chess had not yet achieved its stunning international reputation and high level of public interest; fifty dollars above expenses was considered a reasonable sum to take out of a three-day tournament for an honorable mention.) The president, however, could not be convinced. He feared that assassins in the guise of chess followers would somehow use the tournament as a means to penetrate the hotel and from there set up a guerilla cell to topple the democratically appointed government. South American rulers have always been difficult for me to understand. Our own regimes would doubtless look exotic to South Americans; they have always seemed that way to me.

  So there we were, in the Hotel Crillon in Lima, Peru (FIDE had found us the only decent hotel within the area). Fourteen competitors, their seconds and two referees, locked up and rattling around in the dank spaces of this enormous hotel. By the third day of our confinement I was so restless that on my own I decided to take the day trip to the city of Cuzco, the lost city of the Incas, where marvelous ruins are surrounded by booths selling replicas of the artifacts. Skittles had long since reached the point of diminishing returns and I knew more about my thirteen fellow grandmasters than I cared to. Chess at the grandmaster level is a very small field, of course: There are only a finite number of grandmasters at any time, much less touring grandmasters, and our little band had trooped that summer from Switzerland to Salt Lake City to Berlin to Lima without any change in our basic relationships—which were bad.

  The loathing of grandmasters toward one another is excessive. I am one of the few civil and sane members of the group. Louis is in all ways a more typical example.

  Off to Cuzco, then, to see the lost city of the Incas. It was the first time in many years of travel that I had any sense of place; chess matches are conducted in partitions, abscesses of gloom which always look and smell the same. Whether one is in Switzerland or Salt Lake City at a given time can often be determined only by the calendar; everything looks the same from the inside, and the game, of course, is unchanging. As any mathematician will tell you, the range of possible moves within even the opening of a game goes into many, many billions but there is still a constancy to chess which cannot be ignored. One is, after all, playing with the same sixteen pieces and facing the same opponents with the same general ideas over and again. The so-called infinite variation is, then, perhaps somewhat less than publicity for the game might indicate.

  But in those revolutionary times in Peru, I felt a sudden, desperate need to get out, to restore a certain sense of place after too many months in airless rooms pushing around wooden pieces. It was with a sigh that I settled myself into the small plane to make the three-hour flight, noting that many of my fellow passengers already wore somewhat nauseated expressions.

  It was only later that I found out that the flight from Lima to Cuzco has a reputation for being one of the most terrifying. Moving into the mountains, the quality of the air changed. The air was much thinner, and we were advised to use oxygen masks since the cabin was not pressurized. My mask, coming against my cheekbones, cut off half my vision. It was frightening, but it succeeded in blocking off views of the mountains to the left and right, sometimes rearing above us, the plane crazily sucked into the banks of mountains as if it were descent, not ascent, upon which it was bent. It was at that time that many people began to throw up into their oxygen masks. Experienced traveler that I was, I did not. But I landed in Cuzco in an entirely shaken condition, trembling for sev
eral moments in my seat before I was able to arise and make my way through various greenish and slumped forms toward the cabin door. On the ground, leaning against the plane with a tortured expression on his face, a cap dangling from his rigid hand, was a man in military garb who I later learned was the pilot.

  Off to the ruins of Cuzco. It is recommended, I learned subsequently (I did my guidebook reading only in retrospect; a bad policy), that one spend his first day in Cuzco in bed, simply becoming acclimated to the thin air, the reduced oxygen of the mountains. But I did not know this at the time, and had no accommodations anyway; I was merely on an impulse trip and so instead of acclimating myself I immediately arranged for a tour of the ruins thirty minutes after my flight, wondering why my respiration was so uneven and why there seemed to be a small, deadly animal rattling around in my chest.

  “Excuse me,” I said when I joined the tour to the guide, an elegant man in robes, “I don’t feel well; it must be something I had back in the hotel. I’m an international chess competitor, a grandmaster as a matter of fact, competing here in an International down at Lima.” I wondered why I was drawing such strange, distracted looks from the band of tourists; it must be something in the air, I thought, something about the curious, thin, dense heat of this area which seemed quite tropical to me as I stumbled into place amidst the tourists. “As a matter of fact,” I pointed out to the guide, enveloping him in a confidential hand-hold and leading him a short distance away from the others, “I would have been playing in the Inter-zonals at right this moment, probably a Sicilian defense, except that there’s some kind of a revolution in your country and the president has cancelled the matches. Bloody little buggers, your revolutionaries, eh?” I said to the guide, whose expression of dismay did not yield. Although I had intended this to be confidential, the tourists seemed to have overheard me.