Alina Bronsky - Broken Glass Park

It took some effort to close my hanging jaw. Then I gathered up my things and pushed my way through the circle of panting boys without saying goodbye. And since that day I’ve hated not only Oleg but also the checkered board. That was our last game, and that was almost seven years ago.

He’s still sitting there and now my little sister is frolicking on his lap. For the first time in ages I sit down next to him on the bench. He still has the same chess pieces. The dirty white queen was the same one I used to use, and there was already a piece of the black king’s crown missing back then.

“Watch,” says Alissa happily to me, grabbing Oleg’s thick wrist. “He can’t break my hand!”

“What?” I ask, looking with annoyance at Oleg. He doesn’t look any less sheepish.

“I told him to try to crush my hand until it hurt, but he can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do it,” Alissa orders Oleg. “As hard as you can.”

Oleg’s giant fist closes around her hand and his face goes red with feigned effort. Alissa squeals with delight: “It doesn’t hurt! It doesn’t hurt!”

Oleg smiles at me as if to ask forgiveness and shifts Alissa off his lap.

I’m speechless. I’ve just realized I used to play the same game with him during my first year at the Emerald. Even then he had enormous arms, as if to compensate for the powerlessness of his legs. The idea of testing that strength excited me, too.

And I celebrated the same way when I withstood his grip without pain.

“Let him do it to you,” says Alissa.

I remain gloomily silent.

“Long time,” says Oleg. His voice is more gravelly than it used to be.

“What do you mean?” I say. “I see you every day.”

“But not close up. What happened to your legs?”

I shrug my shoulders. I’ve never forgotten what he was talking about that time during our last game together. I can still see the images he was able to create in my head. And the stupid thing is that I didn’t understand everything back then and ever since it’s bugged me what he meant by this or that term.

“What are you doing with my sister?” I ask, gingerly feeling a scab on my shin as I do.

Oleg sits up straight and fidgets with his crutches.

“Nothing,” he says, taken aback perhaps by my tone or by the look on my face. “What do you think I’m doing? I showed her a few chess moves. She’s so bright. It’s funny.”

“Yes, she is,” I say. “Who else are you playing against?”

“Nobody,” he says, smiling his I’m-so-sorry smile again. “I have a chess computer game now. But other than that, the general interest around here has dropped off. My three favorite retirees are all dead. And there’s no younger generation. I mean, there is one, but they would rather shoot at monsters or grope Lara Croft.”

It suddenly occurs to me that Vadim used to sit and listen to Oleg, too, with a disgustingly sleazy look on his face. And I’m sure Oleg wasn’t reciting the latest Nabokov biography to him. And afterwards Vadim would come home and put his arm around my mother. Of course.

An evil thought enters my mind: I’m not the slightest bit sorry about his broken spine.

But then I remember that my mother often used to sit with Oleg, too. She would laugh. He would recite her favorite passage to her — from Mikhail Bulgakov. In a white cape with blood-red lining, shuffling with a cavalryman’s gait, the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, emerged on a covered colonnade between the two wings of Herod the Great’s palace, with a terrible headache, o gods, ye gods, why do you punish me so?

This was after I had sworn off chess. Once I asked my mother angrily how she could talk to Oleg — didn’t she know what his favorite hobby was?

“What is it?” she asked calmly. I looked at my feet and mumbled something. She understood somehow what I meant.

“Sweetie,” she said, “he’s handicapped.”

“So?” I answered angrily. “Serves him right. You should have seen how worked up all those little wankers were from his stories.”

“You should be more understanding. He’s handicapped,” repeated my mother. I found it maddening back then. But now, looking at his aged face, it occurs to me that he wore sunglasses to my mother’s funeral. He kept them on in the dim funeral home. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him in sunglasses. Right now, for instance, the sun is beating down and he’s not wearing any.

“Shall we?” I ask before I think about it too much and change my mind.

He looks at me and raises his eyebrows questioningly.

“What?” I ask. “I haven’t played for six years. And you? How many grand masters have you beaten in that time?”

“Four,” he says meekly. “Online.”

I take the white queen and move her to E8.

“You’ve forgotten everything,” Oleg says. “Turn the board around. D1. But there are missing pieces. I have a new set at home.”

He touches the keys hanging from a chain around his neck and looks at me hopefully.

“Give them to me,” I say. “I’ll go get them. Where are they?”

“White box on the bookshelf,” he says, putting the keys in my hand. “Can you also bring something to drink?”

“Anything else?” I ask.

He smiles.

“Beer?” I ask.

“Soda,” he says. “Or iced tea. Whatever you can find.”

“Is your mother home?”

“My mother?” he says, shocked. “She died last year.”

“What? That’s impossible.” I sit back down next to him.

“I think the same thing sometimes,” says Oleg. “That it’s impossible. But it’s true. I’m not surprised you didn’t hear about it. What did you say?”

“Welcome to the club.”

“I thought I had misheard you.”

I unlock his apartment and open the door. I almost pass out from the stench. The place is a dumpster. First, I go into a room where a messy bed is surrounded by stacks of papers, books, and newspapers, piles of cassettes, and dumbbells. I find the white box of chess pieces.

I find myself standing in front of three color photos thumb-tacked to the wall. They are newspaper clippings. In one photo a little Japanese girl is sitting on her father’s shoulders. Above her is a blossoming cherry tree. The caption reads, “The earliest cherry blossoms since 1953 in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.” The second photo is of two sumo wrestlers during a match. And the third shows a smiling, red-haired woman.

My mother.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

I can’t manage to go into the kitchen, even with my sleeve covering my nose. Instead I stop off for two glasses and a bottle of apple juice from our apartment.

Oleg doesn’t say anything about it. Neither do I.

“Should I play without my queen?” Oleg asks.

“Why?” I ask, annoyed. “No way.”

“Then at least with two fewer pawns? Or with no pawns?”

“Cut it out. I want to lose on my own. Without any help from you. It’s enough that I’m playing the white pieces. Alissa, give me that.”

I opt for the Sicilian opening despite the fact that I always found it awkward. It’s the only one I can remember off the top of my head. I try to concentrate. But I just end up staring at the board while Oleg chats away nonstop and barely pays attention to the game.

“I’m reading a cool book right now,” he says. “It’s set in Moscow. Bombs are going off all over the place. Like what’s happening there these days, just ramped up a bit. A young married woman with a daughter cheats on her husband with a guy who claims he’s an alien. He wants to free her from her personal hell, take her back to his planet, where everything will be better.”

“Aha,” I say, annoyed that I can’t come up with a strategy, that I’m following stupid rules for beginners, and that Oleg’s chatter is getting in the way of the few thoughts I do have.