Free Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin Page B

By now Josh was looking at the board and had got the hang of Anton’s Wilkes-Barre attack; he realized that if he checked with the bishop and retreated it, he was up a pawn with a good position. The two kids were playing in the shadow of Karpov and Kasparov, and from time to time tumultuous cheers filtered from the hall to this children’s game. Perhaps the boys fantasized that the cheering was for them.
    While we watched the children play, Volodja began to describe his life with disarming candor and passion. The fact that I was an American seemed to represent an opportunity for him. “When I married a Danish girl last year, I fell out of favor,” he began. “They feared, I suppose, that I would leave the country. It happens to all people who marry a foreigner. For months my boss at the magazine, Karpov’s friend Aleksandr Roshal, has been contriving reasons to fire me. He looks for any excuse. In one of my articles I misspelled the name of a player, and he used this as evidence of my incompetence. He wants me to leave the magazine because if I did emigrate he would be disgraced and perhaps lose his job. It is a common situation here. For example, a Jew is much less likely to be accepted into a medical school because he might try to emigrate, and this would hurt the teachers who had accepted him. If I lost my job it would be a disaster. I would lose my apartment and would have no money to send my wife. It is unlikely that I would be able to find another job.”
    Ironically, Volodja didn’t want to emigrate; he believed in communism. “I have applied to visit my wife in Denmark, but they won’t let me go,” he said with exasperation. “They are afraid Iwon’t come back. Can you imagine such a situation? I don’t want to give up my citizenship; I just want to be with my wife. It is an outrage that I can’t visit her. She is very poor and needs my help. The irony of it,” he said with disgust, “is that they have turned her from a communist into a right-wing person.”
    During our weeks in Moscow, we spent a great deal of time with Volodja Pimonov, and always when he spoke of his problems there was great intensity but little hope. He seemed reconciled to spending his life banging on closed doors, writing letters, filling out forms, begging bureaucrats to help, telling his story over and over to foreigners in Moscow. The telling itself had become an urgent ritual; he had become trapped in his story. “Thank you, but there’s nothing you can do”; he said this to me dozens of times with his charming smile and sad brown eyes.
    I asked Pimonov if he knew where I might be able to find Soviet champion Boris Gulko, and he shook his head sadly. “I don’t know what has happened to him. People say different things. I’ve heard that he is in jail, but I’m not sure. He is one of the greatest players in the world. If they had left him alone, he might have become world champion. But of course they don’t want a Jew to be world champion, particularly an outspoken Jew like Gulko.”
    When I mentioned the Russian grandmaster whom the defector in New York had urged me to bribe with pornographic magazines in order to meet Gulko, Volodja said that the man was playing in a tournament in Odessa and wouldn’t be able to help.
    Pimonov is a chess player of international master strength. Like devoted players everywhere, he seemed to consider chess as important as love and death. While he talked about his wife, I occasionally stole a glance at Joshua’s game. Volodja responded with a sympathetic smile or a fast glance at the position. My divided attention, an embarrassment to me, did not surprise or offend him. Often during our stay in Moscow he would hold forth on the tragedy of Jews in the Soviet Union, the evils of capitalism, nuclear arms or his own insoluble dilemma, his face showing pain, concern or moral outrage, but when the conversation turned to an intriguing issue of chess, his expression would immediately brighten.