“No good moves,” Bina says.
“They call that Zugzwang,” Landsman says. “’Forced to move.’ It means Black would be better off if he could just pass.”
“But you aren’t allowed to pass, are you? You have to do something, don’t you?”
“Yes, you do,” Landsman says. “Even when you know it’s only going to lead to you getting check mated.”
Landsman can see it starting to mean something to her, not as evidence or proof or a chess problem, but as part of the story of a crime. A crime committed against a man who found himself left with no good moves at all.
“How’d you do that?” she says, unable to suppress completely a mild astonishment at this evidence of mental fitness on his part. “How’d you get the solution?”
“I saw it, actually,” Landsman says. “But at the time I didn’t know I was seeing it. It was an ‘after’ picture — the wrong picture, actually — to the ‘before’ picture in Shpilman’s room. A board where White had three knights. Only chess sets don’t come with three White knights. So sometimes you have to use some thing else to stand in for the piece you don’t have.”
“Like a penny? Or a bullet?”
“Any kind of thing a man might have in his pocket,” Landsman says. “Say a Vicks inhaler.”
46
The reason you never developed at chess, Meyerle, is because you don’t hate to lose badly enough.”
Hertz Shemets, sprung from the hospital with a nasty flesh wound and that Sitka General smell on him of onion broth and wintergreen soap, is lying on the couch in his son’s living room, his thin shanks sticking out of his pajamas like two uncooked noodles. Ester-Malke has a ticket for Berko’s big leather armchair, with Bina and Landsman in the cheap seats, a folding stool and the armchair’s leather ottoman. Ester-Malke looks sleepy and confused, hunkered down in her bathrobe, her left hand fiddling with something in the pocket that Landsman figures for last week’s pregnancy test. Bina’s shirt is untucked, and her hair is a mess; the effect partakes of shrubbery, some kind of ornamental hedge. Landsman’s face in the pier glass on the wall is an impasto of shadows and scurf. Only Berko Shemets could look sharp at this little hour of the morning, perched on the coffee table by the couch, clad in a pair of rhinoceros-gray pajamas, neatly creased and cuffed, his initials worked over the pocket in mousegray crewel. Hair combed, cheeks eternally innocent of whisker or blade.
“I actually prefer losing,” Landsman” says. “To be honest. I start winning, I get suspicious.”
“I hate it. Most of all I hated losing to your father.” Uncle Hertz’s voice is a bitter croak, the voice of his own great-aunt calling out from beyond the grave or the Vistula. He’s thirsty, tired, rueful, and in pain, having refused any medication stronger than aspirin. The inside of his head has got to be ringing like the slammed hood of a car. “But losing to Alter Litvak. That was almost as bad.”
Uncle Hertz’s eyelids nutter, then settle over his eyes. Bina claps her hands, one-two, and the eyes snap open.
“Talk, Hertz,” Bina says. “Before you get tired or go into a coma or something. You knew Shpilman.”
“Yes,” Hertz says. His bruised eyelids have the veined luster of purple quartz or the wing of a butterfly, “I knew him.”
“You met him how? At the Einstein?”
He starts to nod, then tilts his head to one side, changing his mind. “I met him when he was a boy. But I didn’t recognize him. When I saw him again. He had changed too much. He was a fat little boy. Not a fat man. Thin. A junkie. He started coming around the Einstein, hustling chess for drug money. I would see him there. Frank. He wasn’t the usual patzer. From time to time, I don’t know, I would lose five, ten dollars to him.”
“Did you hate that?” Ester-Malke says, and though she knows nothing about Shpilman at all, she seems to have anticipated or guessed at his answer.
“No,” her father-in-law says. “Strangely, I didn’t mind.”
“You liked him.”
“I don’t like anybody, Ester-Malke.”
Hertz licks his lips, looking pained, sticking out his tongue. Berko gets out of the chair and takes a plastic tumbler from the coffee table. He holds it to his father’s lips, and the ice jingles in the tumbler. He helps Hertz to drain half of it without spilling. Hertz doesn’t thank him. He lies there for a long time. You can hear the water sluicing through him.
“Last Thursday,” Bina says. She snaps her fingers. “Come on. You went to his room. At the Zamenhof.”
“I went to his room. He invited me. He asked me to bring Melekh Gaystik’s gun. He wanted to see it. I don’t know how he knew I had it, I never told him. He seemed to know a lot about me that I never told him. And he told me the story. How Litvak was pressing him to play the Tzaddik again, to rope in the black hats. How he’d been hiding from Litvak, but he tired of hiding. He had been hiding his whole life. So he let Litvak find him again, but he regretted it right away. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to keep using. He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t want to be what he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to be what he was. So he asked me if I would help him.”
“Help him how?” Bina says.
Hertz purses his lips, gives a shrug, and his gaze sidles toward a dark corner of the room. He is nearly eighty years old, and before this he has never confessed to anything.
“He showed me that damned problem of his, the mate in two,” Hertz says. “He said he got it off some Russian. He said if I solved it, then I would understand how he felt.”
“Zugzwang,” Bina says.
“What’s that?” Ester-Malke says.
“It’s when you have no good moves,” Bina says. “But you still have to move.”
“Oh,” says Ester-Malke, rolling her eyes. “Chess.”
“It’s been driving me crazy for days,” Hertz says. “I still can’t get a mate in fewer than three moves.”
“Bishop to c2,” Landsman says. “Exclamation point.”
It takes Hertz what feels to Landsman like a long time, with his eyes closed, to work it out, but at last the old man nods.
“Zugzwang,” he says.
“Why, old man? Why would he think you would do that for him?” Berko says. “You barely knew each other.”
“He knew me. He knew me very well, I don’t really know how. He knew how badly I hate losing. That I couldn’t let Litvak bring about this foolishness. I couldn’t. Everything I worked for all my life.” There must be a bitter taste in his mouth; he makes a face. “And now look what happened. They did it.”
“You got in through the tunnel?” Meyer says. “Into the hotel?”
“What tunnel? I walked in the front door. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Meyerle, but it’s not exactly a high-security building you live in.”
Two or three long minutes unwind from their spool. Out on their closed-in balcony, Goldy and Pinky mutter and curse and hammer at their beds like gnomes at their forges deep beneath the earth.