Frank Brady - Endgame

Bobby allowed himself to be checked into Landspitali Hospital by Dr. Erikur Jónsson, who supervised the limited amount of treatment and nursing his patient would permit, for seven weeks. It was a difficult time not only for Bobby but for the nursing staff as well. He wouldn’t allow a fixed catheter and insisted that they help him urinate each and every time he had to go. He placed restrictions on what he would eat, created a list of potential visitors who’d be allowed to see him and another list of those who’d be summarily barred from entering his room.

Grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson visited him once a week. Bobby asked him to bring bottles of fresh-squeezed carrot juice from Yggdrasil; if the health food store didn’t have it available, Olafsson was to buy juice imported from Germany. Under no circumstances, Bobby instructed sternly, was Olafsson to buy anything from Israel. Not surprisingly, during some of their visits the two grandmasters discussed chess. Bobby wanted Fridrik to bring a copy of the Kasparov-Karpov game that he’d claimed for years was prearranged, so they could discuss it and play it over on Bobby’s pocket set. But instead of bringing the whole book in which the game was published, Fridrik simply brought a copy of the few relevant pages so that he’d have less to carry. Bobby was deeply disappointed. “Why didn’t you bring the whole book!?”

Bobby asked if a photograph of his mother could be sent to him, and Russell Targ, his brother-in-law, complied. Bobby looked at it from time to time, but contrary to reports that he had it perched on his bedside table, he kept it in the drawer, knowing that it was there, symbolically protective.

Of all of the people who visited him in the hospital, in many ways the man who was the most comforting to Bobby was Dr. Magnus Skulasson, a member of the RJF Committee who’d had a fairly low profile with the group and had hardly been in Bobby’s presence during the three years he’d lived in Iceland. Skulasson was a psychiatrist and the head doctor of Sogn Mental Asylum for the Criminally Insane. He was also a chess player who had a great reverence for the accomplishments of Bobby Fischer and an affection for him as a man.

It should be stressed that Skulasson was not “Bobby’s psychiatrist,” as has been implied in the general press, nor did he offer Bobby any analysis or psychotherapy. He was at Bobby’s bedside as a friend, to try to do anything he could for him. Because of his training, however, he couldn’t fail to take note of Bobby’s mental condition. “He definitely was not schizophrenic,” Skulasson said. “He had problems, possibly certain childhood traumas that had affected him. He was misunderstood. Underneath I think he was a caring and sensitive person.”

Skulasson is a gentle and intense man with a gravitas that is arresting. In his conversations, he appears to be more a philosopher than someone with a medical and psychological background, quoting Hegel as much as Freud, Plato as much as Jung. Bobby asked him to bring foods and juices to the hospital, which he did, and often Skulasson just sat at the bedside, both men not speaking. When Bobby was experiencing severe pain in his legs, Skulasson began to massage them, using the back of his hand. Bobby looked at him and said, “Nothing soothes as much as the human touch.” Once Bobby woke and said: “Why are you so kind to me?” Of course, Skulasson had no answer.

Dr. Jónsson began to get pressure from the hospital to release Bobby because of his refusal of proper treatment. Jónsson realized that releasing him would be a death sentence, so he kept making excuses to keep Bobby in the hospital, trying to keep him comfortable as long as he could. Without Bobby’s knowledge, the nurses applied morphine patches to his body to ease his pain. Eventually, terminally ill, still stubborn about refusing proper treatment, he was discharged and returned to his apartment on Espergerdi in December 2007, where Sverrisson, his wife Kristin, and their two children, who lived two floors below Bobby, became his attendants and guardians. In particular, Kristin used her nursing skills to help care for him.

Being out of the hospital perked up Bobby’s spirits for a while, and he began to feel better, even going to a movie with Sverrisson’s twenty-year-old son, a professional soccer player. At Christmastime, when all of Reykjavik is festooned with lights and takes on the ambience of a Currier and Ives painting and there are days and days of celebrations, Miyoko came and stayed with Bobby at the apartment for two weeks. On January 10, 2008, she flew back to Tokyo, losing a day with the time difference. Soon, she received a call from Sverrisson that Bobby had grown substantially more ill. By the time a new reservation could be arranged and she could make her way back to Iceland, Bobby had been taken to the hospital by Sverrisson in the car. He died there, peacefully, on January 17. Like the number of squares on a chessboard—an irony that nevertheless cannot be pressed too far—he was sixty-four.

Epilogue

BORIS SPASSKY WAS STUNNED. Long concerned about Bobby’s illness, he’d kept in close contact. Then, shockingly, he learned that Bobby had died. Momentarily unable to express his sense of loss, Spassky e-mailed Einar Einarsson: “My brother is dead.”

In those four words he showed how deeply he felt about Bobby, although the world already knew. He’d told people that he “loved” Bobby Fischer … as a brother. At the 1992 match he publicly stated that he was ready to fight “and I want to fight, but on the other hand I would like Bobby to win because I believe that Bobby must come back to chess.” When Bobby was incarcerated in Japan, Spassky had been serious when he announced that he was willing to be imprisoned with him (and a chessboard). Spassky’s respect for his nemesis bordered on adulation and possibly even fear. He once said: “It’s not if you win or lose against Bobby Fischer; it’s if you survive.” But there was true camaraderie between them that went beyond just chess and that Spassky was always quick to express. He felt they sensed each other’s frayed loneliness as past champions, a nostalgia to which few could relate.

Only three weeks before Bobby’s death Spassky had sent his old friend a lighthearted message, telling him to obey his doctors, and that when he “escaped” from the hospital, he should get in touch.

Spassky had been informed that Bobby’s condition was serious, but he wasn’t aware that it was grave. Icelandic tradition discourages a person’s illness from being discussed outside of family or intimate friends, but because of Spassky’s solicitous comments about his longtime opponent, Einarsson considered him a part of Bobby’s “family” and had let him know his friend’s condition was worsening. Spassky wrote: “I have a brother’s feeling toward Bobby. He is a good friend.”

In the last days of Bobby’s life he was becoming more frail and could hardly speak, nor could he keep down any food. His lips were always dry. Either the forty-eight-year-old Gardar Sverrisson—who wasn’t well himself—or his wife Kristin, a nurse, would stay with Bobby at his apartment all through the night, watching out for him when he slept and attending to his needs when he woke.

Bobby had told Sverrisson that he would like to be buried in the small country graveyard close to the town of Selfoss, about an hour’s drive from Reykjavik, in a rural farmland community called Laugardaelir. The cemetery was reported to be at least a thousand years old, established about the time that Eric the Red left for Greenland and the Althingi—Iceland’s parliament (the first in Europe)—was formed; ironically this is the same governmental body that gave Bobby his citizenship in 2005.