Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

Feeling dizzy from the effort, she pulled her elbows off the table, put her arms in her lap, shook her head and looked at her clock. She had less than fifteen minutes. Alarmed, she looked down at her score sheet. She had to make three more moves before her flag fell or she would forfeit. Luchenko had forty minutes left on his clock. There was nothing to do but move. She had already considered knight to knight five and knew it was sound, although of no particular help. She moved it. His reply was what she expected, forcing her to bring the knight back to king four, where she had planned for it to be in the first place. She had seven minutes left. She studied carefully and put her bishop on the diagonal that his rook sat on. He moved the rook, as she knew he would. She signaled the tournament director, wrote her next move on the score sheet, holding her other hand over it to hide it from Luchenko, and folded the sheet to seal it. When the director came over, she said, “Adjournment,” and waited for him to get the envelope. She was exhausted. There was no applause when she got up and walked wearily off the stage.

It was a hot night and she had the window open in her room while she sat at the ornate writing desk with her chessboard on it, studying the adjourned position, looking for ways to embarrass Luchenko’s rook, or to use the rook’s vulnerability as a cover for attacking him somewhere else. After two hours of it, the heat in the room had become unbearable. She decided to go down to the lobby and then take a walk around the block—if that was safe and legal. She felt dizzy from too much chess and too little food. It would be nice to have a cheeseburger. She laughed wryly at herself; a cheeseburger was what an American of a type she thought she would never be craved when traveling abroad. God, was she tired! She would take a brief walk and come back to bed. She wouldn’t be playing the adjournment out until tomorrow night; there would be more time for studying it after her game with Flento.

The elevator was at the far end of the hall. Because of the heat, several rooms were open, and as she approached one of them she could hear deep male voices in some kind of discussion. When she was even with the doorway she looked inside. It must have been part of a suite because what she saw was a grand parlor with a crystal chandelier hanging from an elaborately molded ceiling, a pair of green overstuffed sofas and large, dark oil paintings on the far wall, where an open door led to a bedroom. There were three men in shirtsleeves standing around a table that sat between the couches. On the table was a crystal decanter and three shot glasses. In the center of the table was a chessboard; two of the men were watching and commenting while the third moved pieces around speculatively with his fingertips. The two men watching were Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal. The one moving the pieces was Vasily Borgov. They were three of the best chess players in the world, and they were analyzing what must have been Borgov’s adjourned position from his game with Duhamel.

Once as a child she had been on her way down the hall in the Administration Building and had stopped for a moment by the door to Mrs. Deardorff’s office, which was uncharacteristically open. Looking furtively inside, she had seen Mrs. Deardorff standing there in the outer office with an older man and a woman, involved in conversation, their heads together in an intimacy she would never have expected Mrs. Deardorff to be capable of. It had been a shock to peer into this adult world. Mrs. Deardorff held her index finger out and was tapping the lapel of the man with it as she talked, eye to eye, with him. Beth never saw the couple again and had no idea what they had been talking about, but she never forgot the scene. Seeing Borgov in the parlor of his suite, planning his next move with the help of Tal and Petrosian, she felt the same thing she had felt then. She felt inconsequential—a child peering into the adult world. Who was she to presume? She needed help. She hurried past the room and to the elevator, feeling awkward and terribly alone.

The crowd waiting by the side door had gotten bigger. When she stepped out of the limousine in the morning they began shouting, “Harmon! Harmon!” in unison and waving and smiling. A few reached out to touch her as she went by, and she pushed past them nervously, trying to smile back. She had slept only fitfully the night before, getting up from time to time to study the position of her adjourned game with Luchenko or to pace around the room barefoot, thinking of Borgov and the other two, neckties loosened and in shirtsleeves, studying the board as though they were Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin with a chart of the final campaign of World War II. No matter how often she told herself she was as good as any of them, she felt with dismay that those men with their heavy black shoes knew something she did not know and never would know. She tried to concentrate on her own career, her quick rise to the top of American chess and beyond it, the way she had become a more powerful player than Benny Watts, the way she had beaten Laev without a moment of doubt in her moves, the way that, even as a child, she had found an error in the play of the great Morphy. But all of it was meaningless and trivial beside her glimpse into the establishment of Russian chess, into the room where the men conferred in deep voices and studied the board with an assurance that seemed wholly beyond her.

The one good thing was that her opponent was Flento, the weakest player in the tournament. He was already out of the running, with a clear loss and two draws. Only Beth, Borgov and Luchenko had neither lost nor drawn a game. She had a cup of tea before playing began, and it helped her a little. More important, just being in this room with the other players dispelled some of what she had been feeling during the night. Borgov was drinking tea when she came in. He ignored her as usual, and she ignored him, but he was not as frightening with a teacup in his hand and a quietly dull look on his heavy face as he had been in her imagination the night before. When the director came to escort them to the stage, Borgov glanced at her just before he left the room and raised his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Here we go again!” and she found herself smiling faintly at him. She set down her cup and followed.

She knew Flento’s erratic career very well and had memorized a dozen of his games. She had decided even before leaving Lexington that the thing to play against him, if she had the white pieces, would be the English Opening. She started it now, pushing the queen bishop pawn to the fourth rank. It was like the Sicilian in reverse. She felt comfortable with it.

She won, but it took four and a half hours and was far more grueling than she had expected. He put up a fight along the two main diagonals and played the four-knights variation with a sophistication that was, for a while, far beyond her own. But when they got into the middle game, she saw an opportunity to trade her way out of the position and took it. She wound up doing a thing she had seldom done: nursing a pawn across the board until it arrived at the seventh rank. It would cost Flento his only remaining piece to remove it. He resigned. The applause this time was louder than ever before. It was two-thirty. She had missed breakfast and was exhausted. She needed lunch and a nap. She needed to rest before the adjournment tonight.

She ate a fast lunch of spinach quiche and a kind of Slavic pommes frites in the restaurant. But when she went up to her room at three-thirty and got into bed, she found sleeping out of the question. There was an intermittent hammering going on above her head, as though workmen were installing a new carpet. She could hear the clumping of boots, and every now and then it sounded as if someone had dropped a bowling ball from waist level. She lay in bed for twenty minutes, but it was no good.