Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin Page A

making large decisions based upon what he learned from us. Often he looked at my face for signs of hidden motivations, and sometimes when he smiled sadly I knew that I had failed some test. “The problem with you people,” he said (meaning Americans), “is that you want to be number one in everything. You will be the end of us with this competition. Better houses and better cars, more missiles, more ships.” But though he was often critical of the West for its politics or materialism, he craved its hidden possibilities. It outraged him that he was not allowed to look and judge for himself. “You say that you write on a personal computer?” he asked, and in the rearview mirror I could see that he was wide-eyed. “I’ve never seen one.”
    ‘The way is broken,” Volodja said one morning as Josh and I sat in the back seat jammed against the jack and spare tire, our feet in two inches of muddy water. He meant that this stretch of road on the way to Sokolniki Park was potholed, and that we should brace ourselves. He was checking the rearview mirror frequently to see if we were being followed. It was illegal for him to be driving foreigners, and on this dreary morning the nameless consequences of being caught made us all feel uneasy.
    In Sokolniki Park a chess club nestled within a little forest of birch trees. It was raining steadily, yet two old men in tattered coats sat beneath the trees at a rickety wooden chess table staring at a position. Inside a damp, narrow room we found seventy or eighty Russians playing chess at long tables, while more men lined up behind the players waiting for a turn. They were laborers, dressed in heavy overcoats and caps, with ruddy, fleshy faces and thick, weathered hands. They moved the worn wooden pieces as if they were laying bricks and mortar.
    Josh waited behind a heavyset, bald-headed man. When his opponent lost, Josh took his seat. The bald-headed man lookedirritated but motioned for him to begin. At first Josh moved the pieces quickly, and Bruce worried that he would blunder. As Volodja scrutinized my son’s moves, I wondered whether he was thinking of his own early days at the game, when he had been considered one of the most promising schoolboy players in Moscow. The heavy-set man played slowly, with a disapproving expression; this was not a place where children came to play. But many other players were curious, and as the game went on perhaps a dozen men gathered to watch. Josh began badly against an opening he had never seen before, but once down a pawn he began to play thoughtfully and managed to win it back in the middle game. He concentrated like an adult; on one critical move he thought for twenty minutes, his hands cupping his ears. Sometimes Josh falls deeply into a chess position. Time passes and he doesn’t notice. His face becomes serene and he doesn’t look like a seven-year-old. His mother says that at such times he plays as if there were an old chess player inside him who wakes up for his games.
    After an hour and a half the Russian offered a draw. When Josh agreed, the man’s face spread into an enormous toothless grin, and he got up from his seat and enveloped Josh in a bear hug. “New Fischer,” he said in English to his friends, who were surprised and delighted that a little boy could play so well. They all patted Josh on the shoulder and slapped me on the back for being his father. The love of chess hung in the air like the smell of good food.
    One of the men who had watched Joshua’s game was Valentin Arbakov, who, like Vinnie in Washington Square, managed to eke out an existence giving laborers time odds for kopecks. Volodja said that as a speed player Arbakov was roughly equivalent to Tal, among the best in the world, but that he lacked the discipline for the slower game. Many grandmasters came to Sokolniki Park to test themselves against Arbakov, and though he was rarely sober, he almost never lost. Yet there is no career for a speed player in Russia