THE BISHOP
MOVES DIAGONALLY
STEVE SILKIN
Copyright 2011 Steve Silkin
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WHAT HAPPENED to you, that boy whose sister
Gave him a chess set when he was six
Born in America, during the Holocaust
What a strange game you would play, Bobby Fischer
Your mother was Jewish, her husband Hans, German
He was suspected of Communist sympathies
He could not come here, so you never knew him
Your real father, Paul, was a Hungarian Jew
When you learned the bishop moves diagonally
You said: “All I want to do, ever, is play chess.”
New York in the fifties, what an amazing place
Boom times and beatniks, a world of possibilities
Mom left you alone with your sister in Brooklyn
And moved to England, across the Atlantic
While you were playing your pawns and rooks
Did that make you feel she’d abandoned you, Bobby?
Soon you were named the world’s youngest grand master
The shiniest star in your strange galaxy
To its formulas and strategies you would bring
Your burning talent and something beyond
A Jewish agency arranged my adoption
Just a few miles away from where you were then
Spending your days perfecting your play
And learning to see things that others could not
You were losing a chess game to Robert Byrne
But with a few moves you made a comeback
For a checkmate so stunning that they would say
You were like Rembrandt, or Brahms, or Shakespeare
We moved to L.A. and my dad’s friend Maurice
Came from New York and gave me a chess set
And showed me that the bishop moves diagonally
I taught my dad and we’d play together
You lost to the Soviets, you made some bad moves
Even so, you accused them of cheating
And dropped out of championships for five years
Until the rules were changed to your liking
My dad and mom took me to San Diego
We crossed the border to shop in Tijuana
We bought a cheap steel-stringed guitar
And a big, beautiful wooden chess set
Soviet missiles were aimed at my neighborhood
Targeting Lockheed, Rocketdyne, Hughes
We kept hearing we could die any day
And we believed it because it was true
One morning in ’71 the earthquake hit
Shaking so hard that our pool splashed half empty
For a few seconds I thought bombs had fallen
And it was the end of everyone and everything
Later that year my dad bought me tickets
To see Led Zeppelin at the Forum in Inglewood
So I heard Robert Plant sing “Stairway to Heaven”
The first time the band ever played it in public
The concert opened with “Immigrant Song”
A driving guitar riff and pounding drums
“We come from the land of the ice and snow”
Then “Dazed and Confused” with a violin bow
Soon you would take the role of our champion
Against the Soviets – like David faced Goliath
With no armor, naked, just a slingshot –
You had no missiles against Boris Spassky
An arena of rock fans would cheer Jimmy Page
When he played guitar on “Whole Lotta Love”
While all around the world, not thousands but millions
Were rooting for you, Bobby, millions and millions
So you went to the land of the ice and snow
You complained about noise, you were surly, impatient
But your game was so bold, so new and so strong
Even Spassky applauded one of your checkmates
That was when I stopped seeing my friends
I was tired of them, they didn’t like me much either
I’d stay home Friday nights and set up the pieces
To play two or three quiet games with my dad
Spassky left before the tournament ended
No longer respectful, he phoned in his forfeit
And that’s when you became the world champion
The greatest player in the history of chess
You gave sixty-one thousand to a Pasadena church
Jesus would come back in ’75, they said
Then, when he didn’t, you walked out on them
You should have asked for your money back, Bobby
Three years after your triumph in Iceland
You were living alone in an acquaintance’s basement
She was your only friend in the world, then:
A little old lady from Pasadena
One day the cops thought that you were burglar
You were arrested, then you claimed they abused you
You wrote a 14-page pamphlet and called it
“I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse”
I didn’t know you were there then, so close
Just a few miles from me down the freeway
I wouldn’t have visited you, though, Bobby
I had lost interest in you and your game
… And I don’t think my father ever knew, really,
How much I loved playing those chess games with him
The Friday nights when I was fourteen and fifteen
The warmth of his kindness, his gentle affection
Then you refused a challenge from Karpov
So they took away your title of champion
I was in college, and worked at a porn theater
I’d sit in the stairway to read Mishima and Ibsen
I finished my studies in Paris then got a job there,
Kasparov beat Karpov in a weird tournament
They played the same game over and over!
You were invisible, a penniless hermit
In French, the king is le roi and the queen is la reine
But the bishop is not l’eveque, the bishop is le fou –
The court jester, or literally: the crazy one
Is that because the bishop moves diagonally?
I flew from France for my father’s funeral
It was my worst day, Dad, and not just because
We would never play chess again
I never thanked you for all you had done for me
I moved back to L.A. to take care of my mom
The Soviet Union was signed into oblivion
With the stroke of a pen that Gorbachev borrowed
From an American who was standing next to him
Slobo was doing his ethnic cleansing
I was visiting Paris when I was told that
A Yugoslav friend went to look for his mom there
And to this day I don’t know if he found her.
You didn’t care, Bobby, you played there anyway
You beat Spassky again and won three million dollars
But lost your country, you were stripped of your passport
You placed the blame on a Jewish conspiracy
Then Kasparov faced off with Big Blue
In a match that was designed to determine
If a computer could outplay a human champion …
But machines cannot love and machines cannot hate
You drifted around, from country to country
; They say you spent time in Germany and Hungary
Were you seeking the fathers that you never knew?
Mom’s communist husband, her Jewish lover?
One winter morning I buried mom next to dad
The porn place I’d worked at turned into a theater
They did The Doll’s House on stage there one weekend
The dream was a world or the world was a dream?
Your mother and sister had died, Bobby Fischer
And you could not come home to tell them goodbye
But you wouldn’t sit quietly and play random chess
There was still something more that you needed to say
Arabs crashed planes into the twin towers
Across the river from where you grew up
Just down the street from Washington Square
Where you’d mastered your game when you were young
How could you rejoice over the carnage,
The severed limbs, people burning and falling?
They were not chess pieces, Bobby Fischer,
Not pawns, not knights. How could you think that?
Your words came to us from across the Pacific
On Manila radio you described your approval
As crowds crossed the bridge back to your old Brooklyn
Fleeing the chaos that delighted you so
Later, eight months in a Japanese jail
While the U.S. tried to bring you back to stand trial
Then you were granted refuge in Reykjavik
You went back to the land of the ice and snow
Into the mist you would fade, matching moves
With your wife – she was a chess master, too
Could you enjoy the midnight sun with her?
Or did you think it was another Jewish plot?
I went to New York six months after 9/11
On a spring morning I stood at Ground Zero,
The next day the woman in charge of adoption files
Had just left her office; I still haven’t called her
I was in the Big Apple at the dawn of the century
What an amazing place, a world of the wonderful
The Graduate on Broadway, the ballet at Lincoln Center
And the Darger exhibit at the Folk Art Museum
Five years later, Led Zeppelin played Wembley
A million people were bidding for tickets
To hear what I’d heard back in ’71
You were dying in the land of the ice and snow
At the end, could you see the missing piece?
The bishop moves diagonally
Sometimes you play the bishop
And sometimes the bishop plays you
Dad, even if you were still alive
You might be too old for chess
Still, I wish we could have kept playing
Those Friday night games forever
Comments? stevesilkin at gmail.com
Thanks to Seann McCollum, J.J. Hudson and Richard Herd.
Cover Design: Daniel Loeb
If you liked this poem, please read more by this author:
The Cemetery Vote
Forbidden Stories
Too Lucky and Other Stories
The Telescope Builder