Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

“I don’t think so.”

“He plays bishop to B-5, and you’ve got to break the pin.”

“Wait a minute,” she said.

“I can’t,” Benny said. “I’ve got to play an adjournment. Set it up and think it out. Your problem is his queen knight.”

Suddenly she was angry. “I don’t have to set it up to think it out.”

“Goodness!” he said and left.

When he was gone, she stood by the Coke machine for several minutes going over the game, and then she saw it. There was an empty tournament board on a table near her; she set up the position before castling against Beltik, just to be certain, but she felt a knot in her stomach doing it. Beltik could have made the pin, and then his queen knight became a threat. She had to break the pin and then protect against a fork with that damned knight, and after that he had a rook threat and, bingo, there went her pawn. It could have been crucial. But what was worse, she hadn’t seen it. And Benny Watts, just reading Life magazine, reading about a player he knew nothing about, had picked it up. She was standing at the board; she bit her lip, reached down and toppled the king. She had been so proud of finding an error in a Morphy game when she was in seventh grade. Now she’d had something like that done to her, and she did not like it. Not at all.

She was sitting behind the white pieces at Board One when Watts came in. When he shook her hand, he said in a low voice, “Knight to knight five. Right?”

“Yes,” she said, between her teeth. A flash bulb popped. Beth pushed her queen’s pawn to queen four.

She played the Queen’s Gambit against him and by midgame felt with dismay that it had been a mistake. The Queen’s Gambit could lead to complicated positions, and this one was Byzantine. There were half a dozen threats on each side, and the thing that made her nervous, that made her reach out for a piece several times and then stop her hand before touching it and draw back, was that she didn’t trust herself. She did not trust herself to see everything Benny Watts could see. He played with a calm, pleasant precision, picking up his pieces lightly and setting them down noiselessly, sometimes smiling to himself as he did so. Every move he made looked solid as a rock. Beth’s great strength was in fast attack, and she could find no way to attack. By the sixteenth move she was furious with herself for playing the gambit in the first place.

There must have been forty people clustered around the especially large wooden table. There was a brown velvet curtain behind them with the names HARMON and WATTS pinned to it. The horrible feeling, at the bottom of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s office. For a moment she looked over the crowd around the table, trying to find Mrs. Wheatley, but she was not there. Beth turned back to the board and looked briefly at Benny. He smiled at her serenely, as though he were offering her a drink rather than a head-splitting chess position. Beth set her elbows on the table, leaned her cheeks against her clenched fists and began to concentrate.

After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny Watts; I’m playing chess. She looked at him again. His eyes were studying the board now. He can’t move until I do. He can only move one piece at a time. She looked back to the board and began to consider the effects of trading, to picture where the pawns would be if the pieces that clogged the center were exchanged. If she took his king knight with her bishop and he retook with the queen pawn… No good. She could advance the knight and force a trade. That was better. She blinked and began to relax, forming and reforming the relationships of pawns in her mind, searching for a way of forcing an advantage. There was nothing in front of her now but the sixty-four squares and the shifting architecture of pawns—a jagged skyline of imaginary pawns, black and white, that flowed and shifted as she tried variation after variation, branch after branch of the game tree that grew from each set of moves. One branch began to look better than the others. She followed it for several half-moves to the possibilities that grew from it, holding in her mind the whole set of imaginary positions until she found one that had what she wanted to find.

She sighed and sat upright. When she pulled her face away from her fists, her cheeks were sore and her shoulders stiff. She looked at her clock. Forty minutes had passed. Watts was yawning. She reached out and made the move, advancing a knight in a way that would force the first trade. It looked innocuous enough. Then she punched the clock.

Watts studied the board for half a minute and started the trade. For a moment she felt panic in her stomach: Could he see what she was planning? That quickly? She tried to shake off the idea and took the offered piece. He took another, just as she had planned. She took. Watts reached out to take again, but hesitated. Do it! she commanded silently. But he pulled his hand back. If he saw through what she was planning, there was still time to get out of it. She bit her lip. He was studying the board intently. He would see it. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud. Beth’s heart was beating so strongly that for a moment she feared Watts would hear it and know she was panicked and—

But he didn’t. He took the trade just as she had planned it . She looked at his face almost in disbelief. It was too late for him now. He pressed the button that stopped his clock and started hers.

She pushed the pawn up to rook five. Immediately he stiffened in his chair—almost imperceptibly, but Beth saw it. He began studying the position intently. But he must have seen he was going to be stuck with doubled pawns; after two or three minutes he shrugged and made the necessary move, and Beth did her continuation, and then on the next move the pawn was doubled and the nervousness and anger had left her. She was out to win now. She would hammer at his weakness. She loved it. She loved attack.

Benny looked at her impassively for a moment. Then he reached out his hand, picked up his queen, and did something astonishing. He quietly captured her center pawn. Her protected pawn. The pawn that had been holding the queen to her corner for most of the game. He was sacrificing his queen. She could not believe it.

And then she saw what it meant, and her stomach twisted sharply. How had she missed it? With the pawn gone, she was open to a rook-bishop mate because of the bishop on the opened diagonal. She could protect by retreating her knight and moving one of her rooks over, but the protection wouldn’t last, because—she saw now with horror—his innocent-looking knight would block her king’s escape. It was terrible. It was the kind of thing she did to other people. It was the kind of thing Paul Morphy had done. And she had been thinking about doubled pawns.

She didn’t have to take the queen. What would happen if she didn’t? She would lose the pawn he had just taken. His queen would sit there in the center of the board. Worse, it could come over to her king rook file and press down on her castled king. The more she looked, the worse it became. And it had caught her completely off-guard. She put her elbows on the table and stared at the position. She needed a counterthreat, a move that would stop him in his tracks.

There wasn’t any. She spent a half-hour studying the board and found only that Benny’s move was even sounder than she had thought.

Maybe she could trade her way out of it if he attacked too quickly. She found a rook move and made it. If he would just bring the queen over now, there would be a chance to trade.