had arrived. Old Busic, the lazy school janitor and gardener, could be heard whistling out in the entrance, threatening to do his shoddy mopping tasks once the battle was through.
The whistling broke Johan’s now iron concentration, and he looked up to notice that the gathering of parents off to one side had dwindled.
Yet the crowd had added one to its number. She now stood next to Toothless Mico.
It was his mother, Elena Thoms.
Tears almost came to Johan’s eyes as Fleabag once again came to his table, the number of combatants down to just one, Johan himself. Another boy slunk off into the dusk.
Her sparkling blue eyes were damp with tears—“wetter than an otter’s pocket,” she later admitted—which made them twinkle even more. Lazy old Busic, standing by her now, put down his mop and urged on the little lad with a slowly pumping fist.
She had made it after all, Johan thought. She’d had enough confidence in him to know that he would still be alive on the board.
Johan quickly regained his composure, but it was too late. Old Fleabag’s eyes were focused. He had to produce something remarkable. This he did.
Black (Fleabag) played an inspired and sacrificial rook to h3, in a move that would have initially appeared like suicide even to seasoned professionals. Johan, left with no choice if he was to avoid a checkmate at h6, took Fleabag’s rook at h3, aligning his pawns on the outer flank. It was a price worth paying for Fleabag, who advanced his pawn to h6 for a check. Johan was forced to pitch his king back to h4, whereupon the ruthless old genius slid his now proud, erect bishop to f2 for an inspired victory.
The unbeaten grand master never came to any of the schools again. He shuffled off to the hills to be fed on by fleas until his death, hastened by a malicious Kaposi’s sarcoma, whereby the fleas passed on the baton to their counterparts the worms.
Elena had been there long enough to see the grand master crumple in turmoil as the game slid away from him. Her own flesh and blood had sat opposite, shoelaces dangling inches from the dusty boards. Johan had ratcheted up the old man’s misery with remarkable nonchalance. As the minutes had passed by, the old guy had stooped lower and their respective caricatured outlines had become more pronounced against the yellow light at the far end of the hall. Elena witnessed a swift exchange, a change of posture, and, ultimately, a handshake.
Johan did not want to let his mother know how close he had come to winning. She must not think her presence there had put him off. (It may also have been a hint at an almost frantic desire to please his parents, which some might have seen as unhealthy and perhaps even pathological. The frenetic nature of this adorable trait led Johan to miss breaths when he saw his parents’ smiles.) And anyway, if Pestic could pull off a victory from that position, Johan realized, perhaps nothing would have prevented his own brave defeat. He had, however, lasted longer than any other boy; and he suspected that she loved him as much as he loved her.
At checkmate, Johan jumped down from his chair, and discovered that he had left the wrong shoe untied. He landed, leaving the old guy scratching various parts of his fading cadaver. The lad tied his lace and staggered toward his mother and Toothless Mico. An overexcited Busic tried to meet him halfway. Johan sidestepped him almost with grace, and stumbled on toward Elena, who picked him up and squeezed him.
Toothless Mico took them back to Argona. The boy later remembered being happy as he fell asleep in the cart on the dirt track. He woke from time to time with images of a chessboard on the lids of his eyes. When he opened them, the image was transposed onto the stars in the clear night sky.
Mars was his rook, the moon his queen.
He saw an army of a thousand pawns in the celestials, which made him wonder why he was allowed only eight.
It’s too soon to tell.
—Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked by Henry Kissinger if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been of benefit to humanity
It was serendipity’s day off,” insisted my grandfather Ernest. “By all rights, Johan Thoms should have been blinded, if not killed, as a seven-year-old.”
June 1901. Near Sarajevo.
Johan’s boyhood nightly routine had been an odd one.
First, he would close his eyes and mentally check off each of the continents on his father’s huge ancient globe, which Drago had requisitioned from the school where he worked. The spherical atlas held center stage in the living room, its pink, yellow, and red landmasses enveloped by the blue oceans. The globe also held special status for the boy, as it was larger (however marginally) than his own head. He would spend hours in bed remembering its countries, its capitals, and its seas. As time went by, he increased the difficulty of his nocturnal examinations, testing himself with the capital of Ceylon, the neighboring bodies of water to the Yellow Sea, or the longitudes of Costa Rica’s coastlines. His spongelike brain soaked up everything.
After this initial task, he would transport himself mentally to the side of a deserted rural road. In his reveries, a leaden sky threatened a premature dusk. In a lay-by sat an empty mustard-yellow carriage. The horses had been released. This abandoned cart marked the part of the forest where he would meet his friend. Young Johan then had to stand absolutely motionless next to the wood, and stare in until his pal arrived. This would complete his nightly duties.
His chum was a stag deer, and possessor of the land’s largest antlers—fourteen blades, to be exact. Some nights Johan would lie there for hours, staring at the vivid canvas on the inside of his neuronized eye, awaiting the appearance of the friendly, beckoning deer thirty yards or so into the thick forest. Other nights the deer appeared within minutes, even seconds. Johan had no control. He could only get there and stare into the dense green and brown. But after a glint in the eye and a nod from his imaginary buddy, he would be allowed to enter a restful, deep sleep. If he did not obey these rules, he believed, the world would be nudged off its axis.
* * *
Johan had been visiting the same spot in his mind every night for a couple of years when his parents sent him on a holiday to the countryside. Rudimentary tents; appalling food with grit and burned grass, cremated on campfires; mildly disgusting ditties sung around the campfire every night by the older boys.
On the final afternoon, the group was taken to a local landed estate, where various wild species roamed. It had been a tinderbox of a summer, the hottest in living memory. Ten minutes after arriving, the group was led off to a crumbling canteen at the edge of a lake to hydrate themselves before the afternoon’s exertions. That is, everyone apart from one melon-headed, blue-eyed, stick-legged youth who had spotted one of the most common species in the park, a deer. Johan was in a trance. It was his friend!
At last, he could meet him and talk to him, as he had wished for every night since he could remember.
No one saw the boy stagger off in the opposite direction to the rest of his group. He stumbled in the field’s divots and potholes, like the town drunk leaving the tavern at midnight, toward his buddy. Mothers the world over would have picked him up, wrapped him in cotton wool, and stolen away to the hills with him.
His target was minding his own business, eating grass in the clearing with several other deer. Johan had never been so excited. How come they had not told him he was going to see his friend today? He reached the beast with unusual confidence and speed, and greeted his pal.
“Hello you. I have come to see you. They never told me I was coming; I don’t know if they told you.”
The deer stopped munching