5: The Second Day: the Game
Daniel rapidly demolished the last of his meal and beat a hasty retreat to the privacy of the ascenseur, batting away reporters who wanted to know what was said.
Daniel is not stupid. Sometimes he may be a little slow, having to make conscious deductions which more normal people process easily and intuitively, but lying on his bed, finding his balance, he has time to reflect.
Chess is a hard old game. You don’t get to be a champion without playing thousands of matches against opponents - overwhelmingly male - who are trying to browbeat and bully when they can’t out-think you. Petra’s little episode, he now sees, conforms to a wearily familiar template. Yet he can control his emotions, can put this behind him. Once at the tournament table he will blank out the past and be in the moment. All that will exist will be the board - and the contest to shape its evolution to victory.
Daniel is right as far as he goes, but he never considered that Petra’s little cameo might have been aimed at a broader audience than just himself.
Two o’clock in the cathedral. The chairs - which replaced pews a long time ago - are entirely occupied; more are being delivered. Suddenly this competition has come alive, has caught the world’s attention. The lunchtime contretemps is on Youtube, getting millions of views.
The large screen facing the audience shows the board, pieces lined up ready to go. The camera is directly above the players and clever software replaces the images of the pieces with easy-to-see icons.
This is being live-streamed to a popular chess site and commentator Angelo Márquez is setting the scene. He has a few words to describe Daniel Brown, sitting to the right (‘calm, almost bored’) and misses the extent to which Daniel, mindful of the wisdom behind Petra’s intervention, has taken some pains to spruce himself up.
He spares few superlatives in describing the eighteen year old, thoroughly dolled-up Petra. A sideways view shows what a poor job that skimpy black fashion item is doing in covering her alluring flesh. The website coordinator whispers on the backchannel: “Keep it up: viewing figures are going through the roof!”
Hans and Anne-Marie are sitting together in the front row: Petra’s father observes the screen; her mother the players. Despite the heat outside, it’s cool in the basilica. No-one comments on Hans’s light coat with its many pockets or on the thin gloves he’s wearing - against allergies if anyone were to ask (they won’t).
Daniel gets to play white and at first everything is conventional: the first ten moves or so a standard book-opening. Daniel begins to get the feel of the development, lets his subconscious find the shape of the play, the wave of advance he must surf, the momentum which will force his opponent into passive reactivity sucking all initiative from her game. Petra in her personhood and individuality has been erased: the game is now abstracted to dynamics in space and time.
There is a small gasp from the audience. Daniel is jerked from comfortable flow. What did she do there? Why was that pawn moved to form an echelon? That part of the board is sterilized, inert, dead. He briefly raises his head, fixes a deadpan stare at Petra. Is she shocked by this careless mistake, does she wish she could take back that move?
She looks at him serenely, giving nothing away. There had been that subliminal buzz again, so faint he could barely hear it. Where did it come from? Some piece of equipment, no doubt. He dismisses the thought.
Eleven moves later there is a similar glitch in Petra’s play. Her bishop retreats from a promising stance to a defensive posture near that pawn echelon. Again a murmur from the audience: comments on the Internet are going crazy. Daniel is suspicious - could there be method in her madness? He takes a glance but her expression gives him nothing.
He decides not to rush things. His clock ticks. He settles into a deep Zen state, absorbing the board holistically, immersing himself in the shifting swells of possibilities, monitoring his psyche for gut feelings of anxiety or concern. There are none.
Fifteen moves on and Daniel is done. Her rising arc of firepower should have been easy to stop, once it had arisen from nowhere. Yet all his key pieces had been pinioned. Her errors, he now sees, had been crucial, yet had taken so long to pay off. How, where had she learned that?
He tips over his King. Most of his being does not believe it, the act of surrender is almost that of an automaton. He wants nothing more than to get back to his room and feverishly replay the whole thing, to understand what has happened here.
Petra is not so retiring. She lingers for the reporters, for photographs. She is an engaging interviewee. She claims to have little insight into her unorthodox moves: “I play by instinct, by intuition,” she breathes into the thrusting microphones, “They just felt right at the time.”
Petra makes primetime TV in France and Germany, a Eurostar seeing-off a perfidious Brit. Other countries pick up on the thoroughly photogenic challenger; mainstream presenters and camera crews are dispatched at pace to Carcassonne.
Tomorrow will be the decider.
The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.