White Death. Daniel Blake

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      In game eight, he finally, triumphantly, magnificently got it right, playing a game of such breathtaking brilliance that when Tartu resigned, he – Tartu – led the audience in a standing ovation. Kwasi peered through his dreads in shy appreciation.

      Now it was Tartu’s turn to look shell-shocked. He lost game nine inside twenty moves, almost unheard of at this level. Four and a half points each, but the momentum was all with Kwasi. The reporters were getting their front pages again. Game ten, Kwasi missed a difficult winning chance and had to settle for a draw.

      Then came game eleven. In a routine opening, Kwasi made a knight move that brought gasps from the spectators in the hall. Even a casual player could see it was a blunder. Tartu, blinking in astonishment, looked at the position, then at Kwasi, then at the arbiter, then back at Kwasi, then back at the position. There was no trap, no swindle. A genuine, twenty-four-carat mistake, or so it seemed. Five moves later, Kwasi resigned.

      In the press conference afterwards, Kwasi explained what had happened. He’d reached out to move the knight, and as he’d done so, he’d realized it would be a mistake: but before he’d been able to withdraw his hand, he’d felt the tips of his fingers brush the head of the knight. Chess rules state that if you touch a piece, you have to move it. He’d touched the knight, so he’d had to move it.

      Sitting next to Kwasi, in front of the world’s press, Tartu shook his head in astonishment. I didn’t see you touch it, he said. The arbiter concurred: Me neither. Kwasi could have chosen a different move, a better move, and no one would have been any the wiser. How did he feel about that?

      He shrugged. At the chessboard, he said, rules are rules. Nobody’s fault but mine.

      And now he needed to win the last game just to take the match into a tie-break. Tartu could try to close things down, go for the easy draw. Kwasi would have to shake things up: go for the victory even at the risk of losing.

      Mikhail Tal, a former world champion and the most dashing player the modern game has seen, once said: ‘You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where two plus two equals five, and where the path leading out is only wide enough for one.’

      In game twelve, that’s exactly what Kwasi did. He piled complication on complication, trying to scramble Tartu’s powers of concentration and calculation. Feint left and go right: feint right and go left. Knights jumping around at close quarters, rooks battering down open lines. In between moves, Kwasi got up and walked around, pawing at the ground like a bull.

      A well-aimed, well-timed counterpunch from Tartu would probably have taken the game back to Kwasi, but Tartu was – as Kwasi had hoped – too conservative, too wedded to the idea that he could ride out the storm if he battened down the hatches. Kwasi sacrificed two pieces and then a third to rip open Tartu’s defenses; and when Tartu finally extended a hand in resignation, he looked almost relieved that the agony was over.

      Tie-break: first ever in a world championship.

      The twelve games so far had been played with classical time controls: each player given two hours to make forty moves. Now there would be four games at 25/10: twenty-five minutes for all moves, with ten seconds added to each player’s clock every time he made a move. Kwasi won the first game and Tartu the second. The third and fourth were both draws. Still level.

      The ratchet got even tighter, and up went the excitement. Two games at 5/3: five minutes for all moves, three seconds added per move. If the scores were still level after these two games, another set of two would be played, and another, up to five: ten possible games in all. NBC cleared its schedule and started beaming the matches live. Viewing figures later released would show that, on average, quarter of a million more people started watching every minute as news of the showdown spread across America.

      Kwasi won the first game. He was five minutes from the world title, all he needed was a draw – and he blew it, letting Tartu’s pieces strangle the life out of his position. Third and fourth games, both draws. Fifth game, Tartu won, and now he had the advantage. That meant shit or bust for Kwasi: win or go home.

      He crouched low on his seat like a panther, wild and beautiful. When he reached across the board, it seemed that he was not so much shuffling wooden figures from one square to another as unleashing some long-hidden primal force. The cameras zoomed in on his face. He winced in agony, gasped in delight. He put his head in his hands. When he bared his teeth, a couple of the spectators in the front row recoiled instinctively.

      This wasn’t just chess anymore, the commentators panted breathlessly: this was heavyweight boxing, this was a five-set Wimbledon final, this was Ali and Frazier, Borg and McEnroe, where the momentum swings first one way and then the other, and both men can practically smell the prize they want so much.

      Frantic scramble with seconds left for both men in game six, but it was the flag on Tartu’s clock that dropped first. He’d lost on time. They were even again. The crowd stamped and cheered, not because they were against Tartu but because they recognized that what they were seeing was a once-in-a-lifetime drama.

      Seventh game to Kwasi. Eighth to Tartu, at last beginning to sweat under the tension. Punch-drunk, perhaps trying to save themselves for what they knew really would be the final decider, they played out the final two games as draws.

      Now came sudden death, Armageddon chess: and for once the sobriquet didn’t seem inappropriate. The colors had so far alternated game on game, but since this was a one-off, they tossed again. Kwasi won, and chose Black. In Armageddon chess, White has five minutes to make all his moves and Black only four: but White has to win, because a draw is counted as a Black victory.

      By now, thirty-two million people were watching in the United States alone, and three or four times that worldwide.

      Tartu and Kwasi shook hands, gave brittle smiles for the cameras. The arbiter checked their clocks, and off they went.

      Most all the chess teachers Kwasi had ever had – and every one of them had been obliged to provide their services for free, as Regina had never been able to afford lessons – had tried to stop him playing speed chess in Washington Square Park. It’s not real chess, they’d tell him; it’s cheap stuff, trickery, simple two- or three-move patterns. Real chess takes time and contemplation, real chess requires vision and strategy. Real chess is the Four Seasons: speed chess is Mickey D’s.

      But they’d all been wrong, because it was exactly those thousands of two- and three-minute games in the park that won Kwasi the world title now. All the things that were gradually leaching Tartu’s energy from him – the ever-tightening vice of quicker time controls, the barely controlled pandemonium in the hall, the insane pressure of playing a blitz game for the greatest prize in his sport – these were the very things that energized Kwasi, that arced through him like electricity. Four minutes on his clock, spectators who couldn’t keep still or shut up, all eyes on him. This wasn’t a hall in Kazan, this was the park, rain and shine and summer and winter, this was where he felt at home.

      Now, with no time in which to think and even less in which to move, Kwasi played with deathless precision, mind and eyes and fingers everywhere on the board at once. He made moves like a tennis player plays shots, all instinct and muscle memory, pieces finding their way to the perfect square time after time as though by homing instinct. Some called it the zone, some called it a trance. It was both, and neither. Kwasi was no longer playing chess. He was chess.

      And when he came back to the States as world champion, the youngest in history and America’s first since Fischer, he remained chess in a different but equally all-consuming way. Suddenly, the game was no longer a refuge for weirdos and sad sacks, for guys with pocket СКАЧАТЬ