One of the men stared at his testicles, then grabbed them with his hand and seemed for a moment to be weighing them. What was he going to do? The light glinted on a razor, black with dried blood, and Oslovski thought, the end is near, my comrades aren’t coming and it’s all over for me, and he felt a pain in his thigh.
Still holding his testicles, the torturer had made the first cut, a clean deep fissure in the thigh that made Oslovski see stars, although he was so tired, his body forgot it immediately. He was still alive, still had a few seconds left. He did not understand what they were saying around him, only what the man asking him questions said. He wanted to pee, but contained himself. He did not want to call attention to his member. What was coming next? The man with the razor let go of his testicles and a hand pulled his head back. The same man as before was now holding a pair of garden shears and moving them closer to his toes. The man asking the questions said: I’m going to repeat what I want to know and if you don’t tell me you’re going to lose your toes.
A young man who had been watching all this with a certain horror put a plastic bag under his feet. Oslovski made a calculation, if they’re going to cut off my toes one by one, that means they’re in no hurry. Where the hell were his comrades? They must have been repulsed and now he was alone. That was the situation.
At the far end of the room, a pregnant young woman was knitting a sweater. The image seemed completely out of place here, but he looked at the wool and remembered something. What was it? His grandmother had used the same stitch, three knits with one of the needles and six with the other, knitted back to front, and then, with his forehead bathed in sweat and his body anesthetized by the pain, he noticed that the woman was getting the sequence wrong, she wasn’t knitting the complete series and one of the sides would come out too long.
Without thinking, he said in a thin voice: you’re getting it wrong, it should be six with the right needle, otherwise one of the sides will be too long and your son will be uncomfortable. She stopped her knitting. One of the men hit him in the mouth but she made a placatory gesture, came toward him with her huge belly, and said, how do you know it’s a boy? Because of the color blue, he replied. Then she said, you think the knitting is wrong? He told her what he remembered and the woman compared the sides. You’re right, this one’s turning out narrower. I can still undo it and save the wool. Thank you. She turned and walked out.
They let him rest and gave him water, and later, with the sounds of fighting apparently getting closer, a man came into the room, untied him and said, your things are over there, your weapons stay here, now go.
Oslovski went out, feeling very confused. He walked through the shadows, one more shadow himself, lingering in the ruined houses and foul-smelling trenches, and thinking, trying to understand what had happened, afraid of advancing and being seen. He had no weapons. He decided to wait until nightfall, and when it came started retracing his steps. As he passed the well, he considered hiding in it, because they had left the rope, but it was better to take a risk, so he continued walking, treading carefully over the broken glass and the rubble, and was wandering through part of a field when he saw a tank coming. He fell to his knees, took off his combat jacket and waved it above his head, crying: save me.
The hatch opened and a fair-haired man emerged and said, come on, get in, you must be wounded.
It was Gunard Flø.
Later, in the mobile hospital behind the lines, after they had sewed Oslovski’s wounds and told him he would have to be immobile for a while, Flø said to him, I know what to do when we can’t sleep at night, and took out a chess set. They hit it off, and after a few games realized that they already knew each other. They had taken part in some of the same tournaments, and although they had never played against one another, they remembered each other’s names.
That was how the heroes of my story met.
I will add one more thing, which is that Oslovski had a curious experience some years later, in Berlin, He was at a crossing, waiting for the lights to turn green, when he saw on the other side of the street the woman from the torture room. She had an absent look on her face, and of course she was a bit older. She was holding a little boy by the hand. When the lights changed, they met in the middle of the street and he said to her, do you remember me? you saved my life in the refugee camp. She looked at him in surprise, uncomprehendingly. He insisted, remember, the knitting stitches that were wrong, it’s me, I owe you my life! The woman looked at him in terror, picked up the little boy, and broke into a run. Both of them disappeared into the crowd.
Now, in order to continue the story of my characters, it has become necessary to give a brief account of their lives.
I shall begin with Ferenck Oslovski.
His birth and early childhood are fairly irrelevant. Knowing that he was the son of a Jewish notary in Wadowice and a woman who had studied philosophy does not help us to understand very much about his gifts. Hundreds of human beings have had similar childhoods, just as anodyne or interesting, or even brilliant, and none of them, none at all, became champion of Poland.
He himself says that the first time he saw a chessboard was in a local tailor’s shop, Roth’s, where he had gone to collect a suit for his father. The tailor was playing a game with one of his employees, and let him stay for a moment to watch. Oslovski would always remember how glossy the polished ebony and boxwood of the classic Staunton pieces seemed. He looked at them with such rapt attention that the tailor, a friend of the family, said, would you like to touch them? go on, reach out your hand, move one. The boy chose a knight and slid it across the board.
What he felt in his fingers was so agreeable, so soft, that he was overwhelmed, conquered forever by a pleasure that he would soon learn all about, because the tailor invited him to come whenever he was free to watch him play, and between one game and the next started teaching him. This pawn moves like this, the knight jumps there, the queen can move forwards, backwards, and diagonally.
The boy would watch him in silence, not telling him that he had already watched enough times to know the moves perfectly and absorb all the different openings. One day, after a few months had passed, the tailor said, sit down and start with white, and so that we’re evenly matched, I’ll play without the queen, and that was what they did. After twenty moves, the tailor performed a classic checkmate, which left young Ferenck on the verge of tears. Then the boy ventured to say: Mr. Roth, can we play another game with all the pieces? The tailor was touched, and said, of course, if you prefer I won’t give you any advantage, but it’s going to be more difficult.
The game began well, and after thirty-one moves the boy delivered an astonishing checkmate, much to the surprise of the tailor, who had not seen it coming, and when he tried to figure out what had happened, the boy said, Mr. Roth, you were already done for six moves ago, look, and he started manipulating the pieces at great speed, explaining the position. They played four more games and the result was always the same: the tailor, who was not a bad player and had even taken part in tournaments, was checkmated every time. Never again was he able to beat the boy, which convinced him that he was dealing with a case of precociousness that was worth investigating. So he took him, with his father’s permission, to the chess club run by Ozer Miller, an experienced player who had been local champion and who gave classes and played with other former players and enthusiasts.
Ferenck’s appearance in Miller’s club was quite a milestone, because in the eleven months he was there he never lost a game, not even with Ozer Miller himself. Miller decided to take matters in hand and introduce him into other clubs, of greater standing and quality, such as the one run by Sam Edenbaum, where the boy at last found his level.