For a long time after her husband died, Marina used to scream. She’d feel the scream rushing up from her stomach, choking her from the inside, and she’d run out of the room, stumbling over her kids’ toys, and hide in the hallway, in the narrow space between the coatrack and the mirror stand, biting down on her right forearm to muffle the sound. After the scream had passed, and she unclenched her teeth, there would be little circular marks on her arm that looked like irregular postage stamps. Those scars remained long after Marina had stopped screaming, long after she had ceased grieving for her husband altogether.
Even now, thirty years later, she could feel them tingle at random moments. She felt it when she heard Bobby Fischer’s name on the radio. She was driving down a snowbound Brooklyn street on the way to see a client. The radio was on low, but she thought she heard the announcer repeating that name. She turned up the volume and there it was: Bobby Fischer. Bobby Fischer had died. Bobby Fischer had died in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Marina turned onto a side street and started her crawl up the slippery slope that led to Elijah’s house. His empty driveway was unshovelled, so she had to park on the street between two caked mounds of brown snow. She knocked on the front door, then opened it without waiting for an answer. Inside, there was the usual picture: Elijah in his chair, tiny, wrinkled, wearing his cancer hat, while his night health aide, a chubby young woman, dozed in front of the blaring TV.
Marina called the night aide’s name to rouse her, and she groaned and opened her eyes. Her face was creased. Her mouth had traces of dried saliva. She was embarrassed about being caught sleeping on the job but mostly angry at being woken up. She took her time gathering her things, zipping up her boots, and heading outside, while Elijah sat, staring at the TV.
“Bobby Fischer died today,” Elijah said. “Look.” And he pointed toward the TV. There was a closeup of Fischer in 1972. An enormous, warty face, twitching with anxiety. “Do you know who he was?”
“Oh, yes,” Marina said. “I was following that match in Russia.”
She went to wash her hands, and when she came back into the room Elijah was slumped in his chair, his face twisted in pain. She gave him his pills, then poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down on the sofa. On the TV was footage of the 1972 match. Excited crowds in Reykjavík and Moscow. Excited crowds all over the States. Americans cheering for Fischer. Russians cheering for Spassky.
“See how they’re cheering?” Elijah asked. “I bet you were rooting for Spassky!” His words were becoming slurred.
“As a matter of fact, we supported Fischer,” Marina said, but Elijah was already asleep. His head, too heavy for his withered neck, fell down onto his chest.
In 1972, all Marina’s friends had rooted for Fischer.
All the Russian Jews who considered themselves liberal had wanted Fischer to win. For them, the Soviet Union stood for everything that was vile and deceitful, while the United States held the promise of everything that was good. And Fischer was the face of that good. The enormous, warty face of democracy.
Marina’s husband, Sergey, was an especially passionate supporter of Fischer. “I can’t believe how they’re making him look!” he said, slapping a fresh copy of Pravda down on the rickety kitchen table, making five-year-old Sasha jump. “Like a fucking idiot! The man is a genius!”
“Sh-h-h!” Marina said, as she always did when Sergey expressed his indignation in front of Sasha, even though she agreed with him a hundred per cent.
There were so many things about the Soviet Union that gnawed at them. So many lies, so many humiliations, big and small. The fact that Marina hadn’t been accepted into graduate school because another Jew had just been given a spot. The fact that Sergey hadn’t been allowed to attend a scientific conference abroad because he wasn’t a member of the Party. The fact that they had to stand in line to buy meat or toilet paper or underpants. Plain white cotton underpants—they weren’t even pretty! Color was what impressed Marina the most in the glimpses of foreign life that she saw in movies and magazines. Cars painted yellow and blue and green. Pink houses. Azure swimming pools. Red bras. Crimson lipstick. Straightforward envy over everyday objects grew into a kind of existential restlessness. She felt as if she were boxed up in some bleak, inferior world, while other people were outside enjoying bright and wonderful lives. Sergey took it especially hard. Ever since he was a child he’d experienced the lack of freedom as a physical thing. He liked to keep the frames of his glasses a little loose, to avoid even the slightest pressure on his temples. He never wore gloves, not even in the dead of winter, because they stifled his fingers. Sasha grew up to be just like him. Or even worse. He never wore ties or turtlenecks and always bought shoes a half size too big.
In the fall of 1971, Sergey told her that they needed to think seriously about emigrating. Some of their friends were in the process of leaving. Some had already left. They had nothing to lose. Marina’s parents were dead. Sergey’s parents had two other sons. Sergey was a talented chemist; he was bound to find a good job in the U.S., where the opportunities were unlimited and success required only talent and determination. They could get a visa to Israel, he said, make it to Europe, then try to get into the U.S. from there. It would be difficult, but not impossible. The hardest part was getting the exit visa from the Soviet Union. Many people were denied. Their friends Andrey and Nina Botkin had been denied and now lived in a horrible state of limbo, outlaws in the eyes of the Soviet government, both fired from their jobs, Andrey painting cabins at some remote resort, Nina working as a cleaning lady at a school for the deaf, their son, Kolya, expelled from his kindergarten and left in the care of his psychotic grandmother. Marina was terrified of ending up like that, and she could tell that Sergey was, too.
They spent the entire winter and a good part of the spring discussing whether applying for a visa was worth the risk. In May, when the match between Spassky and Fischer was first touted in the press as a Cold War standoff, Sergey, excited, said that he was willing to let the match decide their fate. If Fischer won, they would apply for exit visas. If he lost, they would stay in the Soviet Union. Marina didn’t take this too seriously. She started looking for a dacha for the summer.
She found a tiny house in a village called Oselki, perched on a hill right by the train station. “We’ll be able to see you coming home from the porch,” she said to Sergey. It was an ugly house. All brown, with chipped pink paint on the shutters. Marina found it touching.
Oselki was thirty-three kilometres from Moscow, thirty-three hundred kilometres from Reykjavík, and four hours ahead. It was Sergey who had calculated the distance and the time difference, so that it would be easier for them to follow the match in real time. “Seven, it’s seven here,” he mumbled when he woke up. “It’s only 3 A.M. in Reykjavík. Fischer and Spassky must be fast asleep.”
Marina groaned and got out of bed. She threw a shawl over her nightgown and ran to the outhouse. A warm morning mist rose up off the flowers and the blades of grass, making her feel mildly elated.
They had breakfast on the porch. Sergey was content to eat a little bread and cheese, and then run to the station, but Sasha always asked for farina. Marina cooked it in an old dented pot, then poured it into shallow bowls, and put a lump of yellow butter and some apple jelly at the center of each. They ate their porridge in slow spirals, saving the treat for last.
After breakfast, Marina took Sasha to the woods to pick berries—strawberries in July, blueberries in August. He had a small plastic pail, and Marina carried a large aluminum jug; she loved how the blueberries rapped against the bottom. When they came home, Sasha played with his modelling clay, and Marina tended to the berries. They were small and wet. Some of them were rotten already; others were unripe. It took a long time to clean them, but Marina didn’t mind.
After lunch, she undressed Sasha for his nap, removing his clothing in layers: his pants smelled like garden soil, his sweater like modelling clay, and his shirt like apple jelly and Sasha—that distinct Sasha smell that Marina couldn’t describe but loved so much.
She used Sasha’s nap time to work on her dissertation. The summer of 1972 was exceptionally hot, and his nap fell at the hottest time of the day, but it wasn’t too bad in the garden. Marina would spread a blanket under a tree and lie down with a book. She had brought to the dacha a typewriter and five crates of books on behavioral psychology. So far the typewriter had sat unused. Sergey scolded Marina for not working. “I’m doing my research,” she’d say. But more often than not she’d drop the book on the blanket, and lie down on her side, staring at the dark, crumbly soil so close to her face. When she was pregnant with Sasha, she’d had a weird craving to eat soil. What she craved now was for Sergey to appear in the garden and fuck her right there, pressing her naked body into the soil. She imagined that it would feel warm at first, but then as she sank deeper it would become colder and colder and smell stronger and stronger until she disappeared into the earth.
Marina never shared these fantasies with Sergey. They never really talked about sex. There was no point in talking.
Every night, Marina would wait for Sergey on the porch. His train arrived at six-fifteen. It was only two-fifteen in Reykjavík, not that she really cared what time it was in Reykjavík. Sergey carried bags (bread and butter, chicken and fruit—the country store had little to offer), but he always kept his back very straight, as if he wanted to pretend that the bags weighed nothing at all. He wore a long bushy beard that summer, which looked ridiculous on his young face. His white shirt was soaked with sweat, stains spreading under his arms and over his back, making him appear even thinner than he was. Marina always marvelled at how brittle he seemed, when she slid into his arms and clasped her hands around his back. She could have counted his vertebrae.
Sasha would jump out from behind a bush and shoot at Sergey with his toy gun, or wave a caterpillar under his nose, or just clutch onto his leg, screaming, “Papa! Papa! Papa!” Then he’d run off to play again, while Marina stayed, as if frozen, in her husband’s arms.
“Masha. Mashen’ka,” he’d say and bend to kiss her neck, while she pressed herself to him tighter and tighter.
Sometimes he called her “my buttermilk cow.” She didn’t know why.
“Mom, that’s horrible,” Marina’s daughter said, when Marina told her this years later. “He meant you were fat!”
No, he meant that he loved her. But Marina didn’t know how to explain that to her daughter. He called Sasha a “maestro of farts” and a “hidalgo of snot,” and loved him more than anything.
For dinner, they had foods appropriate for the heat: green schi, cold potatoes, compote, and berries with sour cream. Sergey ate so fast that bits of food got stuck in his beard, and soup often dribbled down his shirt.
After the soup, it was time for Pravda. Every day brought fresh news from Reykjavík, so every dinner conversation was dominated by the subject of chess.
“Look, look at that!” Sergey said, pointing at the page with his fork. “ ‘It is still unclear whether the match will take place. Today R. Fischer presented the organizers with new outrageous demands.’ They’re trying to paint him as a money-greedy bastard!”
Back in May, when Sergey had said that he would let the outcome of the match decide their fate, Marina had assumed that he was joking. Now, seeing his growing anxiety, she understood that he hadn’t been.
“We lost! Fischer lost. I’m sure they were putting too much pressure on him.”
“We lost again! Fischer refused to play, and Spassky won by default. That is so unfair!”
“I think the Soviets must have done something to him in Reykjavík.”
“They say that Fischer is threatening to cancel the match, because he suspects that his room in Reykjavík is bugged. I’m sure his room is bugged!”
Soon, Sasha had learned to say Reykjavík. He pronounced it as if it were the name of some fairy-tale beast: “Rrryk Yavík.”
Their dinners usually ended with Sergey picking up the scissors, cutting Pravda into squares, and taking them to the outhouse. He marched there with Sasha, singing a military song, making this look like a courageous anti-Soviet act, not simply a necessity caused by the scarcity of real toilet paper.
Marina’s secret pleasure was to read these pieces of Pravda the next day. Their outhouse was exceptionally roomy and clean, with the bare minimum of stench. In the daytime, light came in through a tiny overhead window, just enough to read by. Marina had always read newspapers for entertainment, rather than for information. She hated the urgency with which some people (Sergey included) read newspapers, their belief that the mere knowledge of certain events—belated, incomplete, and often false knowledge—made them active participants in society. She was fine with the outhouse version of the news, soggy with the humidity, sliced into uneven pieces, perfectly random. “A tenth grader, Galya Kolbasina, won the competition for young tractor operators. Her skill and knowledge of the tractor’s technical characteristics impressed the judges.” “Slobodans will celebrate the 450th anniversary of their glorious city, Sloboda.” “The Bolshoi Theatre will show ‘Madama Butterfly’ in the morning, ‘Swan Lake’ at night.” “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”
Reading these scraps of Pravda filled Marina with a strange sense of comfort. Here she was, alone in a cozy little place, calm and untroubled, while other people went about their lives. Children competed in tractor competitions, ballerinas danced, Slobodans celebrated Sloboda, and proletarians united. It was there that Marina realized that she didn’t really mind the Soviet Union so much. She decided that she wouldn’t be too upset if Fischer lost the match.
One night in mid-July, Sergey came home, tapping a folded Pravda against his thigh.
“We won!” he yelled, as soon as he saw Marina. He picked Sasha up and spun him in the air.
She took the copy of Pravda and flipped through it, until she finally found a tiny notice about the match at the bottom of page 6. “It doesn’t say that Fischer won,” she said.
“Of course it doesn’t!” Sergey said, laughing. “I heard it on Radio Liberty.”
“But why are you so sure that Liberty has the right information?” she asked.
“Don’t tell me you trust Pravda more than Liberty!” Sergey said, mocking.
“You know I don’t. It’s just that Fischer’s first win is a big thing. I think they would’ve mentioned it in Pravda. They couldn’t just ignore it.”
“Oh, really?” Sergey asked. He stared at her face as if he were seeing it for the first time, studying her features with cold precision. Marina had a glimpse of what it would be like if Sergey stopped loving her. Despite the heat, her skin broke out in goose bumps.
She took Pravda and ran out of the house, ran to the place that never failed to provide peace.
She sat in the outhouse leafing aimlessly through the newspaper, until Sasha knocked on the door with a stick. “Mama, are you coming out soon?” When she didn’t answer, he knocked again. Then he pressed his face to a crack between the boards and said, “I can see you! You’re not doing anything. You’re reading.”
Marina had to come out.
The fight with Sergey progressed well into the night, until they lay in angry silence on their warm bed. Sergey complained about Marina’s tossing and turning. She kicked him. He rolled over and asked what it was that she wanted. Some brief sex followed. It wasn’t good. Afterward, Sergey fell asleep, but Marina got up and went outside.
She stood on the porch, looking into the dark garden and listening to the cicadas. She didn’t want to emigrate. That was perfectly clear to her now. Another thing that was perfectly clear was that she’d lose Sergey if she didn’t.
The heat wave reached its peak. The peat bogs near Moscow were on fire, and smoke was creeping closer to the dacha. At the village store, the fires were all that people talked about. There were reports of houses burned to the ground, of hospitals crowded with burn victims. Marina asked Sergey if it wouldn’t be smarter for them to return to Moscow. Sergey said no. The entire city was now shrouded in a yellowish smog, and it was so hot that he saw people faint on the subway. “Here we have some fresh air, at least,” he said.
Pravda didn’t say much about the fires. Marina kept looking for coverage of the disaster, but all she found was a piece about ice cream: “A new production line was recently installed at Ice Cream Factory No. 3. This will allow more people to enjoy sweet, cool refreshments.”
Marina studied the photograph of a smiling ice-cream engineer holding a tray filled with ice-cream cones. She imagined Sergey reading the paper over her shoulder and gloating: “Sweet and cool, huh?”
On July 24th, Sasha got sick from the heat. He was crying, complaining that the neighbors were “roasting chickens.” Then he vomited. It was so hot in the house that the walls were warm to the touch. Marina carried Sasha into the garden and gave him some cold tea. Toward the end of the day, he felt better and asked Marina to help him make some clay animals, but by then she was too tired and irritable. She could barely make herself prepare dinner.
Sergey came home from work shaking with happiness. The day before, it turned out, Fischer had won Game 6, taking the lead in the match. “See, see? Even Pravda acknowledges Fischer’s victory,” Sergey told her. There was a large headline on page 6: “SPASSKY’S MISTAKES LEAD TO DEFEAT.”
At dinner that night, Sergey praised Marina’s schi, then raised the bowl to his mouth to drink the last dregs of the soup. He kept talking about the Queen’s Gambit and the Tartakower Defense, and kingside pawn structure, attacks and counterplays, and other chess nonsense—and how gutsy and brilliant Fischer had been to do what he did. They didn’t have a chess set, so he took out the box with Sasha’s clay animals and arranged them on the table to explain what the Queen’s Gambit was; Marina got the feeling that he had only a vague idea himself. The blue catlike monstrosities became knights, a misshapen red dog was the queen, and the green pig (which had actually come out quite well) was the bishop. The animals were clammy in the heat. The cats stained Sergey’s fingers. The pig stained the table. The more Sergey talked about chess and the more he praised Fischer, the angrier Marina became. She didn’t want Fischer to win. She really, really didn’t. She hated Fischer with all her heart. She had an urge to scoop the animals up and knead them together into an ugly mass.
After she had put Sasha to bed, she went and stood on the porch. It had cooled down a little. The smoke was less pungent than it had been, more like the smell of a campfire or of potatoes baking in coals.
Sergey came out to find her. He hugged her and whispered, “Mashen’ka, aren’t you happy?”
She hugged him back and said that she was.
Elijah opened his eyes. “Something to drink?” Marina asked. “Tea?”
He declined the tea, but asked Marina to turn up the volume on the TV. The program was now dealing with Fischer’s later years. There were closeups of him from the nineteen-nineties, bearded and insane. What he liked to talk about was the Jews: Jews were parasites. Jews were evil. Jews needed to be exterminated. All of them.
Elijah chuckled and said, “Yep, that’s Bobby Fischer for you.”
Marina wondered if Sergey would have been disappointed.
He had died of a heart attack a year after they got to the U.S., when Marina was three months pregnant with their daughter. It would still have been possible for her to have an abortion, but she had decided to keep the baby.
She felt a draft on her feet, probably coming from the front door.
“Do you want a blanket, Elijah?”
He shook his head and pointed at the TV. “I was there, you know.”
“Where?”
“In Reykjavík, in 1972.”
“You saw Fischer?”
“Yes, and Spassky. I was working for the New York Times. Iceland is a beautiful country. I didn’t care for Fischer, though.”
“No?”
“He was a crazy fuck, even then. All the reporters hated him. All the chess people hated him. I rooted for Spassky. He was a decent guy. Do you know what he did when he conceded Game 6?”
“What?”
“He stood up and applauded Fischer. Now that’s sportsmanship for you. Not like that crazy bastard.”
Marina was suddenly overcome by an urge to protect Fischer. In those last interviews, he looked like a lost old man, scared and sick. She felt pity and something like perverse affection for him.
“I think you’re too hard on Fischer,” she told Elijah. “I used to hate him, too,” she wanted to add, but Elijah had closed his eyes again. ♦
