Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Chess was Varga’s passion. The bar ran midweek tournaments that were dangerous, florid affairs. Tuesday and Wednesday was the topsy-turvy weekend for the workers at Coney who were otherwise kept busy Saturday and Sunday with their shows and professional roles when the rest of New York wanted relaxation and fun. On these uneventful days they took their break from the jaunty, vulgar entertainment world, shut down their bodies and their rides, and became just normal folk with leisure time. Some went into the city for their own entertainment, the art of the museums, the excitement and invisibility of walking amid the thronging masses in Manhattan. Brooklyn absorbed many of the workers back into its massive corners where they sat out on stoops and gossiped about the Island, scrubbed costumes clean and hung breeches with tail-sleeves out to dry. Corporeal deformity and mystery were packed away. Ordinary speech was made, and love; sleep was enjoyed, vigs and bills were paid.

It was never clear how the chess tournaments got started, it was simply understood that that’s where they were held. Mary and Valerie themselves did not play the game, and the tournaments had been running before they took over the establishment. Since Cy had first started coming to Varga there had been chess gatherings. The game was not played as he had always imagined it to be played, in the drawing rooms of nice houses between fathers and sons, in the expansive high-ceilinged rooms of European manors and estates, to polite, white-gloved applause. It was played viciously and inconsiderately. With expletives and bets. Legend had it a player had been stabbed in the gaming room of Varga over a debate about the origin of the game itself. One man had said China, his opponent maintained India, tempers frayed, a knife appeared and things got crazy. The fight was barely a fight at all, just one sharp stroke that punctured a lung, and Mr China was carted out feet first only two theoretical moves away from the first check of the game. It seemed that intellect and bohemian temper were not exclusive features in Varga. No watches or sand-timers were employed to keep the proceedings moving along — though if a player was taking too long to make a move the opponent was permitted to use psychological tactics as encouragement. Inciting comments, provocative gestures, cigarette smoke blown casually in a face. Frequently the tournaments went on until the early hours of the morning, or into the next day. Riley would have said that it was a canny contravention, the game of princes and goddesses had been well and truly bastardized by a proletariat rabble. Those who did not play often observed the games, catching their breath when a rook swept away a bishop, clearing an open weft-ward path to the unprotected king, and adding to the already flinty tension. If the noise of the audience increased, or news of a queen’s gambit broke, it passed along the rows of spectators, and new onlookers would be drawn from the other rooms, squeezing in to the smoky gaming arena. It was said more games ended in an argument or a skirmish in Varga than with capitulation or a victory move. That was just the way things went.

There were no two chessboards alike in the bar. They had arrived on the premises from various locations, other incarnations, foreign countries, having seen the world in all its brilliant and bustling and beggarly wonder. They had been sold on markets and in boutiques and in tents and bazaars, or had been made especially for royal children by master carvers. They had been saved from plundering empires and looted from ransacked museums. There were smoked glass boards with polished pieces, others made of varnished wood, pink and cream ivory, jade, woven straw and slate. There was even a bronze board that weighed as much as a human head‚ with a hole in one corner where an emerald had been pried out.

Players were amateur professionals and minor celebrities from Coney, from all over the city and beyond. Local champions attended with regularity, vying over the top spots. Occasionally a flamboyant character would turn up and draw the attention of the locals, an English shire-man who wore a top hat to compete in because he said it brought him luck, and a Russian who had come over for the world tournament in ’39 and had heard bizarre tales of the Coney Island chess-wars and wanted to see them for himself. There was once an ex-congressman, a motion-picture star, a duke, an African chief. There were the old Europeans who played chess in Prospect Park in the day under the shady trees and in Varga at night, who would not allow their photographs to be taken if they won. There were carnival workers and the inventive, sequitor-minded children of the circus. And then there was Grace.

Grace had solemn eyes that were territorial and displaced and dark, like the eyes of the children from eastern Europe that had, for the last two years, been arriving in England in droves on the Kindertransport. She was perhaps twenty years too early for those trains and there might have been eyes like hers all over Brooklyn that had arrived there by some stray, unorganized miracle, by their own dogged mobility. Her eyes said that she also arrived young in a foreign country, or on the cusp of two ages, that time when life can be so easily hindered or so easily accelerated at the bidding of a catalyst, holding the hand of someone who may or may not be her father, a man who disappeared into the crowds of the great city shortly after the boat docked and the official checkpoints were cleared. The eyes spoke somehow of abandonment and resolve, and about a new name, eclipsing and clumsy and Christian, which was designed to cancel out bitter history and give her peace but didn’t. They spoke of adoptive parents, early efforts to learn a language that fitted in her mouth like a wrong shape, triumph, for she was determined in that as in all things, and other languages picked up in waiting rooms and on street comers and with the exchange of money. They said something of failed immigration procedures and a leap to the underside of the city without a second thought because she would not ever go backwards in life. And they described how the taste of her homeland’s traditional foods was not quite the same in America, not quite, there was a subtle mistranslation. But when she heard violin music on Brooklyn’s Yiddish radio and those sad male voices lamenting through apartment windows and inside restaurants the city suddenly seemed like a familiar local graveyard, inhabiting the ghosts of her never revealed nation and she could grieve.

There was an important secret about New York that Grace found out one day, very early on after that brave leap from one civilization to another, lying on the sidewalk with blood coming from her nose and legs. She took a guess at universal human kindness and spoke a very old and very reliant word to a stranger. And a woman she didn’t know spoke the same word back to her and helped her up. The secret was that if the city tipped just so against the light you could see a fine web between corresponding human hearts throughout it, like a spider’s web revealed in the grass on the steppe in the morning dew against the sun. It connected all paths and all peoples with a frail strength that could be traversed if you learned how to move that way. And she learned to tightrope it, like a little spider from home to home, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, delicately between native tongues and histories and cultures. And the beauty was, if you turned and looked behind you, perhaps you would see that you had spun a separate strand along which others could then follow, adding to the web.

Cyril Parks swore that he saw all this in Grace’s eyes when he first met her, in the spring of 1940. Beyond that he could only speculate, for she never spoke of an abandoned town’s name, a river indicating the border of two countries on a map, a family crest or lowly shack, or which cruel twist in Europe’s fabric by which cruel empire, monarch or army general’s hand, had wrung her people out.