Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

She had disliked Mr. Booth from the moment he met her at Kennedy and introduced himself. Assistant to the Undersecretary. Cultural Affairs. He would show her the ropes in Moscow. She did not want to be shown any ropes—especially not by this gravelly voiced old man with his dark suit, arched eyebrows and frequent theatrical laughter. When he volunteered the information that he had played chess at Yale in the forties, she said nothing; he had spoken of it as though it were a shared perversion. What she wanted was to be traveling with Benny Watts. She hadn’t even been able to get hold of Benny the night before; his line was busy the first two times she dialed and then there was no answer. She had a letter from the director of the USCF wishing her well and that was all.

She leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes and tried to relax, tuning out the voices, Russian, German and French, that surrounded her. In a pocket of her hand luggage was a bottle with thirty green pills; she had not taken one for over six months, but she would have one on this airplane if necessary. It would certainly be better than drinking. She needed to rest. The long wait at the airport had left her nerves jagged. She had tried twice to get Jolene on the phone, but there was no answer.

What she really needed was Benny Watts here with her. If she hadn’t been such a fool, giving back that money, taking a stand on something she hadn’t really cared about. That wasn’t so. It wasn’t being an asshole to refuse to be bullied, to call that woman’s bluff. But she needed Benny. For a moment she let herself imagine traveling with D. L. Townes, the two of them staying together in Moscow. But that was no good. She missed Benny, not Townes. She missed Benny’s quick and sober mind, his judgment and tenacity, his knowledge of chess and his knowledge of her. He would be in the seat beside her, and they could talk chess, and in Moscow after her games they would analyze the play and then plan for the next opponent. They would eat their meals together in the hotel, the way she had done with Mrs. Wheatley. They could see Moscow, and whenever they wanted to they could make love at their hotel. But Benny was in New York, and she was in a dark airplane flying toward Eastern Europe.

By the time they came down through the heavy clouds and she had her first sight of Russia, which looked from above as much like Kentucky as anything else, she had taken three of the pills, slept fitfully for a few hours and was feeling the glassy-eyed numbness that she used to feel after a long trip on a Greyhound bus. She remembered taking the pills in the middle of the night. She had walked down an aisle full of sleeping people to the rest room and got water in a funny-looking little plastic glass.

Mr. Booth did turn out to be a help in customs. His Russian was good, and he got her into the right booth for the inspection. What was surprising was the ease of it all; a pleasant old man in uniform went casually through her luggage, opened her two bags, poked around a bit and closed them. That was it.

When they came through the gate, a limousine from the embassy was waiting. They drove through fields where men and women were working in early-morning sunlight, and at one place along the road she saw three enormous tractors, far bigger than anything she had seen in America, driving slowly across a field that stretched as far as she could see. There was very little other traffic on the road. The car started moving through rows of six-and eight-story buildings with tiny windows, and since it was a warm June morning even under the gray sky, people sitting on the doorsteps. Then the road began to broaden, and they drove past a small green park and another large one and past some enormous, newer buildings that looked as if they had been built to last forever. The traffic had become heavier and there were people on bicycles at one side of the road now and a great many pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Mr. Booth was leaning back in his rumpled suit with his eyes half closed. Beth sat stiffly in the back of the long car, looking out the window on her side. There was nothing threatening about the way Moscow looked; she could have been entering any large city. But she could not loosen up inside. The tournament would start the next morning. She felt totally alone, and frightened.

Her teacher at the University had talked about how Russians drank tea from glasses, straining it through a lump of sugar held between the teeth, but the tea served in this big dark parlor of a room was in thin china cups with a Greek key design in gold. She sat in her highbacked Victorian chair with her knees pressed together, holding the saucer with the cup and a hard little roll on it and tried to listen attentively to the director. He spoke a few sentences first in English and then in French. Then English again: the visitors were welcome in the Soviet Union; games would begin promptly at ten o’clock each morning; a referee would be assigned to each board and should be consulted in the event of any irregularity. There would be no smoking or eating during play. An attendant would accompany players to the rest rooms should the need arise. It would be proper to raise one’s right hand in such an event.

The chairs were in a circle, and the director was on Beth’s right. Across from her sat Dimitri Luchenko, Viktor Laev and Leonid Shapkin, all dressed in well-tailored suits and wearing white shirts and dark ties. Mr. Booth had said Russian men dressed as though their clothes came from a nineteen-thirties Montgomery Ward catalogue, but these men were soberly dapper in expensive gray gabardine and worsted. Those three alone—Luchenko, Laev and Shapkin—were a small pantheon next to which the entire establishment of American chess would stammer in humiliation. And on her left was Vasily Borgov. She could not bring herself to look at him, but she could smell his cologne. Between him and the other three Russians was an only slightly lesser pantheon—Jorge Flento from Brazil, Bernt Hellström from Finland and Jean-Paul Duhamel from Belgium, also wearing conservative suits. She sipped her tea and tried to appear calm. There were heavy maroon draperies at the tall windows, and the chairs were upholstered in maroon velvet trimmed with gold. It was nine-thirty in the morning and the summer day outside was splendid, but the draperies here were tightly closed. The Oriental carpet on the floor looked as if it had come from a museum. The walls were paneled in rosewood.

An escort of two women had brought her here from the hotel; she had shaken hands with the other players, and they had been seated like this for a half hour. In her huge, strange hotel room the night before a water tap was dripping somewhere, and she had barely slept. She had been dressed in her expensive navy-blue tailored dress since seven-thirty, and she could feel herself perspiring; her nylons encased her legs in a warm grip. She could hardly have felt more out of place. Every time she glanced at the men around her, they smiled faintly. She felt like a child at an adult social function. Her head ached. She would have to ask the director for aspirin.

And then quite suddenly the director finished his speech, and the men stood up. Beth jumped to her feet, rattling her cup on its saucer. The waiter in a white cossack blouse who had served the tea came running up to take it from her. Borgov, who had ignored her except for a perfunctory handshake at the beginning, ignored her now as he crossed in front of her and walked out the door the director had opened. The others followed, with Beth behind Shapkin and in front of Hellström. As they filed out the door into a carpeted hallway, Luchenko stopped for a moment and turned to her. “I’m delighted you are here,” he said. “I look forward keenly to playing you.” He had long white hair like an orchestra conductor’s and wore an impeccable silvery necktie, beautifully knotted under a starched white collar. The warmth in his face was unquestionable. “Thank you,” she said. She had read of Luchenko in Junior High; Chess Review wrote of him with the kind of awe that Beth felt now. He had been World Champion then, losing to Borgov in a long match several years ago.