Mortal Games by Waitzkin Fred;

Author:Waitzkin, Fred; [Waitzkin, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

The following Saturday afternoon, it was rainy and cold as I hurried through Washington Square Park on my way home from the New York University Bobst Library, where I often worked. In several hours, I was meeting Kasparov for dinner. Each Saturday night during the match, we had dinner together, and I was curious about his mood following these two remarkable games. I wondered if the art of games 3 and 4 would be enough to assuage his disappointment over failing to win either of them. As I approached the chess corner, I noticed a solitary figure seated at one of the marble tables, an old man who was nodding furiously as if he were in a heated argument with someone. He looked up at the trees and spoke to the squirrels, as though attempting to enlist their support. Israel Zilber, the sheriff. All over the world, chess people had heard rumors that he had frozen to death three years before, but here was Zilber, no question. He was wearing a light summer shirt, and behind a mustache and ratty beard his face was deeply creased and weathered like an old seaman’s. He was shaking like a leaf from the cold and speaking to the squirrels in Latvian, but I distinctly heard him say the name “Kasparov.” Soon his tone became more congenial; he mentioned a few chess moves with an elegant turn of his filthy hand, as though he were offering a reasoned commentary on a game.

“Zilber, Zilber, how are you?” I said in a loud voice, because he had always been hard of hearing, or at least it had always been hard to get his attention. He looked at me and nodded curtly. Then he returned to his discussion of the game, pointing at wet squares on the board in front of him. It was wonderful to see the sheriff again, but also unsettling. I felt the impulse to tell people that he was back.

The sheriff was angry about one of the Karpov-Kasparov games. He pointed at a square and raised his voice. The powerful games forty blocks uptown had called him from wherever he had been. In the old days he had often muttered their names, and I used to think that, sometimes, while he toiled in the park for a dollar a game, in his mind he was struggling against Kasparov for the title. Maybe it struck Zilber as unjust that the two Russians were playing for the championship in his backyard. Zilber talked on and on. I wanted to ask him where he had been playing and if he still recorded his games on little scraps of paper and envelopes, as he had when Josh was a little boy. I wanted to tell him that his old nemesis Mikhail Tal had just arrived from the Soviet Union and was analyzing on the seventh floor of the Macklowe. Zilber was one of the few living players to hold a lifetime edge over Tal. But I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

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