Aleksandar Hemon - The Book of My Lives

In the early nineties, after I’d moved from Ukrainian Village to Edgewater, I played chess at a place in Rogers Park called the Atomic Cafe. It was a few blocks away from the Artists in Residence building, where I was renting a tiny studio. The café was next door to the 400 Movie Theater, where one could watch second-run movies for a couple of bucks and which reeked of stale popcorn and permanently clogged toilet. In the summer, people played chess in a fenced-off outdoor seating area; the rest of the year, the café was full of students from nearby Loyola University, with a corner always occupied by chess enthusiasts. North Side players convened every day to play at the café; on weekends, one could easily play for twelve hours straight. The first time I wandered in, sometime in the early summer of 1993, I kibitzed for a while before going off for a movie. The following day, I returned to the café hoping to play a game. After sheepishly watching, I summoned enough confidence to accept a challenge by an older man who introduced himself as Peter. He looked shabby: gray hair peeking in tufts out of his ears, a flannel shirt on the verge of snapping open at his potbelly, envelopes sticking halfway out of his chest pocket. For some reason, he exuded a strong smell of perfume. But he appeared very wise to me as he narrowed his brows to examine the position on the board. Much like one can tell a good soccer player from the way he or she touches the ball with his or her foot, I could tell Peter was serious about chess from the way he sank deep into himself to contemplate the next move and all the possibilities beyond it.

I don’t remember how the first game against Peter went down, but I’m confident I lost it — it had been a while since I’d played a demanding game. But I kept going back to the café, playing more and more, often with Peter, who never seemed to get bored with beating me. I played with others, too, and even began winning against some respectable regulars. Pretty soon, I was spending weekends at the café, breaking up the long chess hours only to see a movie next door.

It turned out the Atomic Cafe was rife with all kinds of characters obsessed with chess. Between the games I would hang out with the idle players, small-talking, asking them a lot of questions, ever eager to extract bits of other people’s lives. There was a Vietnam vet, for instance, who had been on disability at least since the fall of Saigon. His knee often jerked rapidly and he was proud of having helped stop the advance of communism in Southeast Asia. He played chess, took drugs, and did little else. Once, he described to me putting his face, high on acid, under a stream of water to examine the oncoming water drops — their molecular beauty fucking blew his fucking mind. There was Marvin the Master, the size and shape of a football player, who would occasionally stop by the café to play speed-chess games, disposing of the patzers at such speed and with such brilliance that no one in the admiring crowd could see what was happening. There was a brilliant Indian computer programmer who, in the few years I frequented the place, lost a number of jobs because of his chess obsession. He promised his wife at least once he would quit, but he could not help thinking of chess incessantly. Failing to stay clean of chess, he still came to the café, but declined all invitations to play, wasting just as much time kibitzing. Predictably, he ended up getting divorced. He told me so himself, the last time I saw him. He was driving a cab at the time, which he parked in front of the café to play all day, happily off the wagon and thoroughly uninterested in catching fares. All my chess friends seemed to be lonely men, continuously struggling to reproduce the painfully evanescent beauty of the game, never getting within sight of the bujrum border.

Then there was Peter. Playing against him, I would attack from all sides, and he would patiently defend, waiting for me to make a mistake. Inescapably, I would make one, and he would enter the endgame with an extra pawn, inexorably advancing toward becoming a queen. Soon I would be forced to acknowledge defeat, whereupon he would jokingly demand my resignation in writing. We didn’t talk much while playing, but would chitchat between games, exchanging basic information and finding things in common. He lived in and owned a perfume shop in the neighborhood, which explained his rich, ever-changing flowery scent, heretofore incongruous with his shabby-old-man appearance. We both came from elsewhere: I told him I was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia, to which he said: “I’m sorry.” He, on the other hand, was Assyrian, but born in Belgrade. Walking home after a long day of playing, I asked him how come he’d been born in Belgrade. After a groan of reluctance, in a subdued voice of discomfort, he told me that his parents had escaped from Turkey in 1917 or so, at the time when the Turks had been busy exterminating Armenians, but could still spare, while they were at it, some time and bullets to get rid of a few Assyrians. His parents ended up in Belgrade, so he was born there. A few years later, following a properly unpredictable refugee trajectory, they found themselves in Iraq around the time it became independent, and that was where he’d grown up. But then, in his twenties, he had to leave Iraq because he had a run-in with the prime minister’s son (he offered no details or explanation); his life was at risk, so he fled to Iran. He got married, had a son, and, in 1979, was living in Tehran, employed at the American embassy, arguably the worst imaginable place of employment in the case of a local Islamic revolution. During the chaotic upheaval, his only son, conspicuously clad in denim, was stopped and searched on the street by the revolutionaries. He had some pot and they shot him on the spot.

So here was an Assyrian named Peter, selling knock-off Eternity for Men in Chicago, beating me at chess without any particular pleasure; here was a man whose life contained more suffering than I could begin to imagine. The story of Peter’s life was narrated to me along the few blocks we walked before we parted, in five minutes or less. There is always a story, I learned on that walk, more heartbreaking and compelling than yours. And I understood why I was so drawn to Peter: we belonged to the same displaced tribe. I picked him out of the crowd because I recognized the kinship.

I remembered how, a few weeks before, he had gone off at a couple of Loyola students who were babbling at the next table, copiously abusing the word like , barely slowing down to take a breath. I’d been annoyed by the incessant vacuousness of their exchange, the idiotic frequency of the like s, and I couldn’t stop listening precisely because I’d had no idea what they were talking about. But I just put up with it, always liable to distraction. Peter, however, suddenly exploded: “Why are you talking so much?” he yelled at them. “You’ve been talking for an hour, saying nothing. Shut up! Shut up!” The students shut up, terrified. Peter’s outburst, shocking though it may have been, made perfect sense to me — not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn’t matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory. The students, of course, could not begin to comprehend the painful infinity of Peter’s interior space. Inoculated against speechlessness, they had no access to the unspeakable. They could not see us, even though we were there, as we were nowhere and everywhere. So they shut up and sat in wordless oblivion; then they got up and left. Peter and I arranged the pieces for another game of chess.