The knife had seemed well hidden back in the sheep barn, but standing there while the soldier searched me, I could think of nothing but the hard leather sheath digging into the top of my foot. He searched the pockets of my father’s old greatcoat, checked beneath my armpits, under my belt, down my legs. He dug his fingers into my boots and my fear returned, a jolt of pure terror, mocking me for the numbness I had felt five minutes before. I tried to breathe normally, to keep a calm expression on my face. He prodded around my shins, found nothing, and moved on to Kolya.
I wonder how much he missed it by, how many millimeters separated his fingertips from the sheath. He was a boy, a year or two older than I was, his face constellated with small brown moles. His classmates had teased him about those moles, that was certain. He had stared at them in the mirror, sullen and ashamed, wondering if he could shave them off with his father’s razor. If he had gotten another fifteen minutes of sleep the night before, if he had swallowed another spoonful of soup, he might have had the energy to do his job properly and find the knife. But he did not, and his carelessness changed everything for both of us.
When he finished searching Kolya, he stepped over to Vika. His fellow ranger made a joke and chuckled at his own wit. Maybe he wanted to goad the boy into slapping Vika’s ass or pinching a nipple, but she watched him with her cold unblinking eyes and he seemed unnerved, inspecting her far less thoroughly than he had Kolya and me. I realized the boy must be a virgin; he was as nervous around a woman’s body as I was.
After he timidly patted down her legs, he stood, nodded to Abendroth, and backed away. The Sturmbannführer watched the boy for a moment, a slight smile curling his lips.
“I think he is afraid of you,” he told Vika. He waited a few seconds to see if she would respond and when she didn’t, he turned his attention to Kolya. “You are a soldier, I cannot release you or you will rejoin the Red Army, and if you kill a German, his parents would have me to blame.” He looked at me. “And you are a Jew; releasing you goes against my conscience. But if you win, I will let the girl go home. That is the best offer I can make.”
“I have your word you’ll let her go?” I asked him.
Abendroth rubbed the silver stubble on his chin with his knuckles. A gold wedding band on his ring finger caught the light from the bulb overhead.
“You like the girl. Interesting. And you, little redhead, do you like the Jew? Never mind, never mind, no need to be vulgar. So . . . you are in no position to make demands, but yes, you have my word. I have been looking for a good game since Leipzig. This country has the best chess players in the world and I have not seen anyone competent.”
“Maybe you shot them before you could find out,” said Kolya. I held my breath, quite certain this was a step too far, but Abendroth nodded.
“It is possible. Work comes before play. Come,” he said to me, “sit. If you are as good as your friend says, I might keep you around for the competition.”
“Wait,” said Kolya. “If he wins, you let her go and you give us the eggs.”
Abendroth’s patience with the back and forth began to fade. His nostrils flared as he leaned forward, though he did not raise his voice.
“What I have offered is more than generous. You wish to continue with this stupidity?”
“I believe in my friend. If he loses, put bullets in our heads. But if he wins, we’d like to fry up some eggs for supper.”
Abendroth spoke again in German and the older trooper jammed the muzzle of his gun against the base of Kolya’s skull.
“You like to negotiate?” asked Abendroth. “Good, we negotiate. You seem to think you have leverage. You have no leverage. I say two words and you become a corpse. Yes? Two words. Do you understand how fast it happens? You are a corpse, they drag your body outside, I play chess with your friend. Later on, maybe I take the little redhead back to my room, give her a bath, see what she looks like without all the dirt. Or maybe not, maybe no bath, maybe tonight I want to fuck an animal. When in Rome, yes? Now think, boy, think very carefully before you open your mouth. For your own sake, for your mother’s sake if the bitch still lives, think.”
Another man would have decided to leave it alone and shut up for good. Kolya did not hesitate for more than a second.
“Of course, you can kill me whenever you’d like. This is undeniable. But do you think my best friend here will have a decent game left in him after he sees my brains on the table? Do you want to play Leningrad’s best or a scared boy with piss running down his leg? If he can’t win our freedom, very well, I understand, this is war. But at least give him the chance to win the supper we’ve been dreaming about.”
Abendroth stared at Kolya, his fingertip slowly drumming the tabletop, the only sound in the room. Finally, he turned to the trooper with the moles and uttered a clipped command. After the young German saluted and left the room, the Sturmbannführer gestured for me to sit in the chair at the corner of the table beside him. He nodded to Kolya and Vika and pointed to the chairs at the far end of the table.
“Sit,” he ordered them. “You have been walking all day, yes? Sit, sit. Should we flip a coin?” he asked me. Without waiting for a response he pulled one from his pocket and showed me the swastika-clutching eagle on one side and the fifty Reichspfennig marking on the other. He flicked the coin in the air with his thumb, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his other hand, and looked up at me. “Bird or numbers?”
“Numbers.”
“You do not like our bird?” he asked with a slight smile. He removed his hand and showed me the Nazi eagle. “I’ll play white. And do not worry—you can keep your queen.”
He slid his queen’s pawn forward two spaces and nodded when I mirrored the move.
“One day I will choose a different opening.” He moved his c-pawn up two, offering the sacrifice. The Queen’s Gambit. At least half the games I played started with these moves. Weekend players and grand masters alike began with the combination; it was still too early to tell if the German knew what he was doing. I declined the Gambit and moved my king’s pawn forward a space.
Over the years I’ve played thousands of games against hundreds of opponents. I’ve played on a blanket in the Summer Gardens, in tournaments at the Palace of the Pioneers, in the courtyard of the Kirov with my father. When I played for the Spartak club, I kept records of all my games, but I threw them away when I quit competition. I was never going to study my old matches, not after I realized I was only a middling player. But if you gave me a piece of paper and a pen, even today, I could write out the algebraic notation of my entire game with Abendroth.
I sprang my queen from the back row on the sixth move, which seemed to surprise him. He frowned, scratching the stubble along his upper lip with his thumbnail. I chose the move because I thought it was a good one, but also because it might appear to be a bad one—neither of us yet had any sense of our opponent’s skill, and if he believed I was a poor player, I could lure him into committing a critical mistake.
He murmured something in German and moved his kingside knight, a reasonable response but not the one I had feared. If he had taken my pawn, he would have kept the initiative, forcing me to respond to his aggression. Instead he played defensively, and I took advantage by moving my bishop into his territory.
Abendroth leaned back in his chair, studying the board. After a minute’s worth of contemplation, he smiled and looked up at me.
“It has been a long time since I had a good game.”
I said nothing, watching the board, visualizing potential sequences of moves.
“You do not need to worry,” he continued. “Win or lose, you are safe. A good game every night will keep me sane.”
He sat forward again and moved his queen. While I deliberated, the young trooper returned carrying a slatted wood box stuffed with straw. Abendroth asked him a question and the trooper nodded, placing the box on the table.
“You’ve put me in the mood,” Abendroth said to Kolya. “If I win, I might eat a twelve-egg omelet.”
Kolya, sitting at the far end of the table, grinned at the sight of the box of eggs. Both troopers now stood behind him and Vika, their hands never straying from the butts of their submachine guns. Kolya had been trying to follow the game from a distance, but Vika stared at the table. Her face never gave much away, but I could tell she was irritated and I realized, far too late, that I had missed an opportunity. When the trooper had gone to fetch the eggs, we briefly outnumbered the Germans; they had guns and we had only knives, but it might have been our best chance.
Eight moves into the game the Sturmbannführer and I began exchanging pieces. I took a pawn; he took a knight. I took a bishop; he took a pawn. At the end of this flurry our forces were still evenly matched, but the board had opened up and I judged my position stronger.
“Violinists and chess players, eh?”
I had been afraid to look at him before, but now I stole a glance as he analyzed our formations. Sitting so close, I could see the dark, swollen crescents below his hazel eyes. His jaw line was strong and right-angled, in profile a capital
L.
He noticed that I was watching him and he raised his massive skull to stare back at me. I lowered my eyes quickly.
“Your race,” he said. “Despite everything, you make wonderful violinists and chess players.”
I pulled back my queen and for the next twelve moves we gathered our forces, avoiding direct confrontation. Both of us castled, protecting our kings as we prepared for the next battle, massing toward the center, trying to claim the best ground. On the twenty-first move I nearly fell for an elegant little trap he had set for me. I was ready to snatch an exposed pawn when I realized what the German had planned. I returned my bishop and moved my queen to give her a better angle of attack.
“Too bad,” said Abendroth. “That would have been a pretty little maneuver.”
I looked over and saw that Kolya and Vika were staring at me. The plan had never been spelled out, but now it seemed obvious. I wriggled my foot in my boot and felt the dead pilot’s sheath digging into my ankle. How quickly could I pull the blade? It didn’t seem possible that I could get the knife free and slash Abendroth’s throat before the troopers gunned me down. Even without his soldiers protecting him, Abendroth looked far too powerful for me to kill. When I was little, I had seen a strongman in a circus with hands like the Sturmbannführer’s—he had twisted a heavy steel wrench into a knot, and because it was my birthday, I got to keep it. For years I saved the knotted wrench, showed it to my friends in the Kirov, bragged about how the strongman had tousled my hair and winked at my mother. One day I looked for it and could not find it; I suspected Oleg Antokolsky stole it, but I never had any proof.
The idea of pulling a knife on a man that big panicked me, so I stopped thinking about it for a few minutes and concentrated on the game. A few moves later I saw an opportunity to exchange knights. My position seemed a little cramped, so I forced the trade. Abendroth sighed when he took my piece.
“I should not have allowed that.”
“Well played,” cried Kolya from the far end of the table. I turned that way, saw that he and Vika were still watching me, and quickly returned my focus to the board. How had I become the chosen assassin? Didn’t Kolya know me by now? Abendroth should die, I knew that—I had wanted him dead since I heard Zoya’s story. Without doubt he had slaughtered thousands of men, women, and children as he followed the Wehrmacht across Europe. Berlin awarded him shiny medals for executing the Jews, Communists, and partisans of occupied countries. He was my enemy. But facing him now across the chessboard, watching him worry his wedding ring as he contemplated his next move, I didn’t believe I was capable of murdering him.
The sheath dug into my ankle. The Sturmbannführer sat across from me, the collar of his jacket digging into a blue vein on the side of his broad neck. Kolya and Vika sat at the far end of the table, waiting for me to act. Given the weight of these distractions, I managed to play decent chess. As meaningless as the outcome might have been, the game mattered to me.
I sat with my elbow on the table, my head propped on my palm so that my hand blocked my view of Kolya and Vika. On the twenty-eighth move I pushed my c-pawn to the fifth row, an aggressive advance. Abendroth could take the piece with his b- or d-pawns. There is an old rule in chess that players should “capture toward the center.” Abendroth followed classical strategy, using his b-pawn, establishing dominance in the middle of the board. But just as Tarrasch said, “Always put the rook behind the pawns, except when it is incorrect to do so,” capturing toward the center is the right move except when it is wrong. When the sequence was over, we had exchanged two pawns each, our piece count was still even, and like a man who has swallowed poison but continues to chew his meat, not realizing his death is now certain, Abendroth had no idea he had committed a fatal error.
Far from tipping over his king, the German thought he held the superior position. As we neared the endgame, his a-pawn was alone on the edge of the board, racing toward the eighth row, where he could transform into a queen and batter my defenses. Abendroth was so intent on getting a second queen he gladly accepted the various exchanges I proposed. How could he lose with two queens on the attack? Focused on his a-pawn, he didn’t realize until too late that I had my own passed pawn in the center of the board. In the end, my d-pawn earned its promotion one move before his a-pawn. Two queens are tough to beat unless your opponent gets his second queen first.