A Chess Story

The large steamship leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orches-tra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flash-bulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us-it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure. My friend looked across and smiled.

"You have an odd fish on board with you there, that's Czentovic." And since I must have looked fairly baffled in response to this news, he explained by adding, "Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He's worked over the whole USA with his tournaments and now he's off to conquests new in Argentina."

As a matter of fact I did now remember this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to expand on them with a whole series of anecdotes. Around a year previously, Czentovic had put himself on a level with the most established old masters of the art of chess-Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, Bogolyubov-at a single stroke; not since the appearance of the seven-year-old wunderkind Reshevsky at the 1922 New York Masters had the irruption of an unknown into the hallowed guild aroused such a general furore. For in no way was such dazzling success indicated by Czentovic's intel-lectual capabilities. It soon trickled out that in his private life this chess champion was incapable of writing so much as one sentence correctly in any language and, in the angry taunt of one of his dis-gruntled colleagues, "his education in every field was uniformly nil." The son of a dirt-poor boatman on the middle Danube whose tiny coracle was run over one night by a grain freighter, the then twelve-year-old was taken in out of pity after the death of his father by the priest of their remote hamlet, and the good pastor did his best to make up with extra help at home all that the dull, uncommunica-tive, thick-skulled child was unable to learn in the village school.

But his efforts were in vain. Even after the alpha-bet had been explained to him a hundred times, in each lesson Mirko would again stare at every letter in renewed ignorance; his lumbering brain lacked the power to retain even so simple a concept. When supposedly doing mental arithmetic, he still at fourteen had to employ his fingers to help, and reading a book or newspaper still amounted to an especial strain for the already adolescent boy. Yet Mirko could not in any way be called recalcitrant or unwilling. He obediently did what he was asked, fetched water, chopped wood, helped in the fields, tidied the kitchen and reliably carried out, albeit with an infuriating slowness, whatever task he was assigned. What, however, dismayed the good priest most about the intractable lad was his utter apathy. He did nothing without being specifically prompted, never asked a question, did not play with other boys and didn't of himself seek out any occupation that wasn't expressly decreed; as soon as Mirko had com-pleted his household chores, he sat around stolidly in one room wearing the vacant expression that sheep wear in a meadow, taking not even the slight-est interest in what happened around him. In the evenings, when the priest drew on his long-stemmed farmer's pipe and played his habitual three games of chess with the sergeant of the local gendarmes, the flaxen-haired adolescent slumped mutely beside them and stared, apparently sleepy and indifferent, at the chequered board.

One winter evening, while the two partners were engr