They talked about this over a beer in the café attached to the funeral parlor, minutes before the cortege set off for the cemetery. Outside, it was raining. Gunard was surprised that Renate could use the death of their child for artistic purposes, however noble the idea; he found it hard to believe that her grief was not as strong as his and that she could only think about herself. But he said nothing, only listened to her and then stood up, paid for the beer, and went back to the room where the coffin lay.
His father had come from Gothenburg for the occasion. They embarked, which gave Gunard back his strength. Then they went for a walk and his father said, the death of a child is the worst pain a human being can suffer, but you mustn’t look for reasons and you mustn’t try to assign blame, any more than you can deny that it’s a terrible injustice and demonstrates that this world is not ruled by a superior being but by a murderous, drunk little tyrant who gloats over his creatures. Above all, don’t try to understand, be strong and wait, the pain will pass, remember the Chinese proverb, we have to be like the bamboo, which bends when there’s a storm and then rises again, let the storm pass, the noise of it will thunder in your head, but don’t do anything. It’s like the rain. You can’t stop it falling, you can only wait until it’s over.
He spent all night with his father and Cécile. The next day they buried Ebenezer in the Friedhof Fluntern in Zurich, in a grave on which Renate had had the following phrase carved: The rest of my life is written on the stones that lie at the bottom of the Limmat. Gunard made no objection, even though Renate’s need to transform the child’s death into something distinctive struck him as vain and ridiculous. The symbolism and metaphors concealed her imperious desire to play a leading role in the tragedy, to appropriate it for herself, thus demonstrating her extraordinary crassness and egotism. Gunard said nothing, and looked absent during the ceremony. Some of those present claimed they felt a great sense of cold when they gave him their condolences, as if something of that frozen North from which he came was in his eyes.
Ebenezer’s death marked the final break with Renate, and that gave him a feeling of calm. On the flight back to Tel Aviv, he looked out the window at the glistening blue expanse of the sea and remembered the night with Renate in Capri. My God, he said to himself, what begins so romantically, between two human beings, has a tendency to become corrupted and end tragically, in contempt and insults and humiliation, is it always like that? The proof of the contrary was Cécile, but he also said to himself, it’s too soon to draw conclusions. We’ll have to wait a few more years.
Some time later, when Gunard was on the point of abandoning chess, he was called into the army. His new country was getting ready to launch a military action outside its borders and needed all its reserves. Gunard joined a tank company whose mission was to transport the wounded as well as supplies. Cécile enlisted in a mobile hospital unit.
The combat began and Gunard became accustomed to advancing amid dust and rubble, lifting bloodstained and mutilated bodies full of holes. He became accustomed to shrieks of pain and the sharp crack of ampoules of morphine opened with the teeth, and other things too: the smell of charred flesh and the smell of gangrene and the bulging eyes of young men who were dying and knew it and having to stop bleeding by plunging his hand into hot wounds, yes, Gunard’s fingers, accustomed to moving delicate pieces of wood or ivory, were now exploring the insides of shattered bodies, suturing broken veins, and occasionally, only occasionally, finding bodies that emerged from the rubble and started to run, propelled by the force of life, an image that made him cry and forced him to hide his face, because the simplest actions had turned into something precious.
So it was that one afternoon, after a thunderous combat in a village, he saw a body emerge out of nowhere, and a man lifting his hands and saying, save me. Ferenck Oslovski.
They met at the moment of salvation.
Later, in the mobile hospital behind the lines, where they sewed Ferenck’s wounds and announced a slow recovery, Gunard said: I know how to spend the sleepless nights, and he took out a chess set. After a few games, they realized that they knew each other. They had both taken part in a tournament in Austria two decades earlier and although they had never played against each other, they remembered each other’s names.
When the war ended, they continued to meet.
Gunard would come to Tel Aviv and they would play on the beach until the orange sphere of the sun descended below the surface of the sea, seeming to sink in the water. The two men would talk and move the pieces rapidly. The lives of both men had drifted to that coast like a school of fish moving to warmer waters. Oslovski would say to Gunard: look at the sand, it’s made of tiny stones and crystals. When one of these particles sinks it’s covered by another, by ten more, a hundred or a thousand, and the same thing happens to us, don’t you think? When we sink others will come, hundreds of thousands, and the Earth will always be populated by people who will feel alone, but a hundred years may pass before two men again play chess on this beach, do you think chess will still exist? Yes, said Gunard, chess is deeper and more mysterious than all of us put together; it’ll exist until somebody manages to master it completely, and that’ll never happen, Ferenck, it’s impossible for that to happen. Oslovski looked at him in surprise, and said, at the end of the day it’s a question of statistics: we’ll keep getting better, more intelligent, more gifted, we’ll keep going farther. Soon the great men of the 21st century will be born, or rather, they’ll turn into adults, because many may already have been born, and then we’ll know about them. The Freuds and Marxes and Einsteins and Nietzsches of the 21st century must be going to school right now, or still playing with toy cars, or watching the fall of a leaf in a park, who knows? And apart from them, there’ll also be a young Kafka suffering then turning to literature as therapy, and there’ll be an aristocratic Proust, who’ll portray the decadent bourgeoisie of the early 21st century from within, and of course the new Rimbaud must already be walking the streets, a young man with his fists clenched with hate, struggling against the social forms, and the Bukowski of the 21st century receiving a thrashing from his father and discovering that alcohol dulls the pain, and of course some boy of seven or eight must be on the verge of checkmating an adult on a chessboard, because in humanity’s infinite pack, the cards are equal only on one side; when we turn them over we find that there are many twos and threes and sixes of spades, but far fewer aces of diamonds, do you see what I mean?
Gunard listened to him, looked again at the chessboard, and said, you’re right, not all of them are aces, but being an ace doesn’t always ensure a happy life; the six of spades may end up much happier. Ah, great lives! Usually they’re people who suffer, maladjusted creatures; some because their vocation was so overwhelming that it put an end to anything that didn’t serve its purposes, others because their longings were never satisfied; others because they pursued the vanity of fame and success fruitlessly; others because sometimes talent is associated with terrible defects and vices, serious shortcomings. .
Then the two men would fall silent and finish their game, and then spend a while analyzing the positions. When they could barely see their pieces, they would gather everything up and go off to a bar on the beach, near the walls of the port of Jaffa, and drink a few beers and continue talking about life and its curious variations, until at dinner hour they would walk to the Nightingale of Odessa where Gael would serve them pizzas with vodka and herrings in vinegar.