There were further crises, and during those years he disappeared four more times, only now neither Andrescovich nor anyone else bothered to look for him. They knew that all they had to do was wait.
By now, fifteen years of work had passed and Andrescovich was starting to grow old. The list of misfortunes that had befallen him during that time, by the side of his disciple, included the following: his parents died, his son defected to the West on a journey to Sydney, he underwent three hernia operations, and his hair started falling out, leaving a smooth ball in the middle and wisps of gray at the sides. After a careful reading of all these signs, he decided to return to Moscow and live on his chess player’s pension, so one fine day he announced to Ferenck that he was leaving, which brought about yet another attack in the younger man.
After this, Oslovski woke up one day and saw that General Jaruzelski had been appointed prime minister of Poland. He also saw, from his window, that the street was covered in dirty snow streaked with weak black prints, and so he decided to close the curtains and carry on sleeping. He woke up again and now Jaruzelski was president, but the snow and the ice continued making the streets dirty, so he again shut himself away. When Lech Walesa was elected, Oslovski thought: they don’t deceive me, and again closed the curtains, until one day he had a brainwave and decided to go outside.
The trees were green and there were flowers everywhere. The sun was shining into every corner. People were singing and whistling, but it was too late for him, so he went and bought an airline ticket and a few days later arrived in Tel Aviv claiming aliyah, which would ensure him a modest but cozy apartment, Israeli citizenship, and help with finding work.
And so it was. He had an apartment on Allenby Street, not far from the beach, and a monthly salary that allowed him to cover the basics. Most afternoons, he went to look at the sea. He loved the outline of the old port of Jaffa to his left, and beyond it the horizon of the Mediterranean, that sea that had given and taken so much from the peoples of the Middle East and was so strange to someone from Central Europe. He would spend the hours making marks in the sand and analyzing positions on a little portable chess set, until he met Gael, a woman of thirty who had lost her husband in the Yom Kippur War. Gael served pizzas and fast food in a restaurant near his apartment called the Nightingale of Odessa, run by a Russian. Oslovski went there every day for dinner, and one night he asked the waitress, what time do you finish work? She looked at him angrily and said, I know what you’re thinking and I’ll only go with you if you’re serious, that’s not too much to ask of a Pole who’s as alone as his sad country.
Ferenck looked at her in surprise and said, I’m alone because I want to be, it’s my way of life, you mustn’t deduce from it that I’m desperate, or that I’m special in any way, to which Gael retorted, nobody likes living alone and if you do then you’re crazy, and Oslovski said, I’m not crazy, I carry my love in my pocket, and he took out the little wooden box with the chess set, but Gael, who was of Lebanese origin, said, if your only company is inside that little box then things are worse than I thought, and went to the counter to serve some beers. Then she approached and said, it was a joke, I know chess is something bigger than the two of us put together and bigger than the Nightingale of Odessa and the whole of Allenby Street and this little strip of land where someday we will all be free. Those words sufficed for Gael and Ferenck to make love that same night in the apartment where, three months later, they decided to set up home together.
Here I shall leave the story of Oslovski.
I leave him with Gael, in the apartment on Allenby Street, to head north, far north, to that mysterious North that is home to so many legends and was home, too, to Gunard Flø, born in Gothenburg into a rich Lutheran family, mine owners and shareholders in a number of shipping companies, who learned to play chess in a very exclusive club in the city, the Barajó, after being enrolled by his father, a lover of the game who had never reached more than a modest amateur level, but who sensed in the chessboard a kind of greatness that neither his money nor his political contacts could give him, nothing to do with fame or success, but with a certain indestructible solitude, a temple that would allow his son to undertake elevated enterprises of the spirit without stooping, daily, to the banality of human affairs.
So Gunard, as a small boy, received as an inheritance his father’s frustrated desire to be a chess player, and received it gratefully. From the age of nine, he devoted himself body and soul to chess, with results that went far beyond what his rich family expected of him. He won youth tournaments in Gothenburg and by thirteen he was the Olympic champion, which would be his greatest prize in chess. He would never again get that far, but that never bothered him. Quite the contrary. Unlike other chess players, defeat or the idea that his talent was a modest one never seemed to bother him. Rather, it gave him a great feeling of harmony, as if knowing that he was not called to great enterprises allowed him to enjoy the game more intensely.
And so it was. In whatever tournament he played, from the age of fifteen, he always achieved decent results, but never genius, never an ovation, never victory. His father was not worried, because with great wisdom he said to himself, I wanted a son who was a chess player and that’s what I have, aspiring in addition to his being a champion would be to tempt fate, may God bless him. In the Lutheran church, people do not long for things, and greed is punished. The only thing his father did for the young man was to give him the best teachers so that he could get as much enjoyment from the game as possible, while playing at a high level. One of them, Theodor Momsen, had even trained the Master Bent Larsen, although we should point out, for the sake of the truth, that the reason Momsen agreed to take care of young Gunard was not that he had seen a huge talent in him, but because Mr. Flø put in front of him a check with many zeros on the right hand side, which is where they count the most, at a time when Momsen’s career was entering what might be described as the final stage of a long, slow decline.
So young Gunard studied openings and variations. He fell in love with the more romantic aspects of chess and started using obsolete combinations such as the King’s Gambit, the Vienna Game, or the Bishop’s Opening, common at the time of Morphy and Anderssen, classic players whom Gunard admired and whose games he studied with delight. During his hours of study with Momsen, Gunard enjoyed the beautiful precision of the game and its rhetorical figures, the prosody of those pieces sliding across the board and, of course, he was especially delighted to play blitz chess with his teacher. Every time he achieved a good position, or indeed won, he celebrated it with a few flamenco or tango steps and a burst of wild laughter. He was a cheerful young man, and for his father that was the main thing.
He must have been about eighteen the first time he dressed in women’s clothes. The whole family was vacationing on the island of Capri, where they had a beautiful house, and that was where it happened. One afternoon, without making any particular decision, Gunard put on a green suit, with a degree of cleavage but with the skirt covering the knees. It was a formal outfit that belonged to an aunt who was with them on their vacation and was much loved by Gunard. His mother’s clothes, which were thicker, were excessively baggy on him, not to mention the fact that, although she was his mother, he had no very strong feelings for her. Gunard’s great love was his father.