Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin

Before playing, he would become an enthusiastic young man, a biggerversion of Josh, excited and concerned only about the coming game.
    I introduced Volodja to Pandolfini, who was also watching Joshua’s game with more than passing interest. “Pandolfini, I’ve read your column in Chess Life for years,” Volodja began. “You are a national master, yes? I can’t wait until we have a chance to play some chess. I’m a good speed player.” Then he added shyly, “One year I nearly won the Moscow speed championship ahead of Tal. In the deciding game I was killing him. I had mate in three, but then my flag fell.”
    “Oh, great,” Bruce said to me under his breath. “Plays blitz as well as Tal and he wants Pandolfini.”
    By now Josh was winning game after game from Anton. He was in a rhythm, moving quickly, but concentrating for the first time in months. He was setting up attacks with diversionary feints. His pieces flowed to the right squares, and everyplace Anton moved there seemed to be a trap. Everything was working for Josh. He was like a basketball player who couldn’t hit anything but net. But the kids were still giggling, and Pimonov and Pandolfini and even Anton’s father were enjoying the games.
    When Joshua is playing poorly, I watch every move like a hawk and feel pricked by each mistake; later I can re-create the critical parts of the game—not that he wants to rehash it. But when he’s playing like this, I don’t follow the moves. I ride on top of the game, relishing the emphatic way he snaps a pawn ahead, the flash of his eyes, the assurance on his young face, the bright neatness of his plan. I realized that while we had been “training” for Moscow, I had become so consumed with motivating him to play well that I had forgotten how much he loves the game.
    * Fédération Internationale des Echecs, the international governing body for chess, headed by Florencio Campomanes of the Philippines. A FIDE master has gained his master’s rating in FIDE tournaments and is, generally speaking, somewhat stronger than a U.S.C.F. national master.

9
    VOLODJA
    M ost mornings in Moscow we went with Volodja Pimonov to museums and churches or took Josh to play chess in one of the many parks or chess clubs. Usually we drove in Volodja’s rattling Zaporoszhets, which he had recently hand-painted muddy blue. Each time we set off he said the same thing: “I hope the car won’t fall apart before we get there.” To buy it, he had earned extra money teaching Russian to foreigners a few years earlier, but such good fortune was unlikely to come his way again, he felt, and this would probably be the only car he would ever own. He was proud of the car, but also embarrassed, and fretted constantly about it: “Sounds like something is wrong with my transmission.” Or “Why is it stalling? It must be my carburetor.” Or “There is something wrong with the lock on the driver’s side. Do you think you could help me fix it? Finding parts is impossible.” For him the car was a connection to the Western world of drive-in banks and movies, superhighways and garages with automatic doors, which he read about in magazines or heard described by his wife during their phone conversations—a world he was likely never to see. Whenever the car rattled or coughed, he looked stricken.
    Volodja’s curiosity about the West was like an unwelcome lust. He was filled with questions, but the answers agitated or silenced him. During one discussion about journalism I told him that after finishing an article I never showed it to the person I had written about for approval. He was baffled by this. “To write an articleabout Karpov and not show it to him first would be slanderous here. A writer would lose his job.”
    “But if you showed it to him and he demanded a change, it might compromise the honesty of the article,” I said. It was a new idea to Volodja, and he didn’t know what to make of it.
    I had the uneasy feeling that Volodja was