Let the Game Conquer

LET THE GAME CONQUER

In a prison cell, waiting for my trial to start, it is not hard to remember how things took their first steps in my life and slowly drove me to this place. In this dark room there are not many things to do other than playing little mental games now and then, and to remember the fading reality of my life as if it might have been different. I was torn apart by what are now illusions, but I did what I needed to do and, out of this cell if I survive my trial, I will keep doing the right things. I have no complaint, no trace of regret, no tears. I just have the simple story of what happened. In fact, it is also the story of what still would happen if I were given another chance. And yet the evidence at my trial could still destroy me. But let me start from beginning…

I studied computer science at one of the best universities of my country and just after the graduation I started to work at a software company. All my life I have had two obsessions: working with computers and playing chess. However I never mixed them up. For me, computers and chess were not compatible with each other because they resembled two different parts of me. Chess made me socially active outside my home and computers, in spite of all those social networking sites, made me an introvert, self-exiled into the land of ego.

This almost schizophrenic split went on for years. Then one evening, everything changed. After coming back from work, while looking through the surface of the mirror in the bathroom I saw that I was getting older. Right then, I decided to free myself from the frozen, isolated life of computers. The idea came suddenly, out of nowhere, like a flash some people experience at the middle of the pedestrian crossing and notice that the world isn’t the world they knew before. I decided to listen to this inner voice hoping that something good could come from it. One by one, without hesitation, I deleted the invisible threads of internet! I just did it suddenly so that I would not have any chance to think about it second time. I deleted my hotmail account first. It was my first e-mail account. I got it probably ten years ago, when I was a student. Then I deleted my yahoo account. This was for the e-groups I wanted to keep my eyes on. All sort of rubbish was flowing into this account because there was no control on it. It was like thoughts without inspirations, filling the surface of the earth so much that the real great ideas cannot have enough oxygen to breathe and grow up to maturity. After yahoo, I deleted my last e-mail account: gmail. The one I have been using for last four years. The one which automatically reads my e-mails and sends me advertisements of the products which I might be interested in! I never understood that why on this earth I might need Viagra –because I am a young single man- or I might win lotteries which I never bought. It was funny and irritating. Once I used the word “bishop” in my e-mails, they sent me advertisements on church charities and missionary programs. Another time I received so many advertisements of adult sites just because I mis-spelled the word “brother”.

I was free of all those silly advertisements, all the lies which make people expect more from each other and all the colorful celebrities most of whom are even shorter than me. After finishing e-mails, I started to clean the social networking pages. Deleting my account from facebook was painful as if I was removing my own face from the skull, leaving all those friends behind like washing off the memories in my brain faculties. I became faceless at the end but I was ready for this. I wanted to be faceless so that I can have a new face, a new beginning, a fresh opportunity for a new life. I kept deleting: my personal blog where I was writing about software developments, book sharing pages for the people who like to read good books on philosophy and science, online dating sites dedicated to make lonely people feel more lonely, confession forums of cheat husbands and desperate but still hopeful wives and many more I cannot remember now. One by one they left my world. The more I deleted, the more I felt free like a colorful balloon which somehow left the sweaty hand of the child, hopping in the room, crashing the things scattered around. At the end of the night, I was tired of cleaning all my traces on the infinite number of links. Now there was no thread which can connect me to anyone in the world. I was free of internet. In the same evening, I destroyed my cell phone, smashed my computer into tiny pieces and I left my apartment for a new one away from city center.

That was not all. I have also deleted the Excel file which has the record of all my passwords. I always believed that the second face of my human nature, the one wilder and more humorous than the real existence of my being was hidden in these passwords. Tell me your passwords I will tell you who you are! I will tell you what you like! What your obsessions are! They come from our unconscious! Things we keep secrets from others. Things will go to grave with us… “BaZaRoV” was a password from the times I was a fan of Turgeniev and Nietzsche. “1729LeilaTwins” was another password when I was obsessed with beauty of 1729 and breasts of Leila. ”FckUbss1458”, “shit3%salaryup”, “CheckMateDie” and “ihtUbtcnntsyt” are the other ones. After deleting all the e-mail accounts, there was no point in keeping the passwords in a place I can easily find. But I also did not want to lose them forever because somehow I felt attached to them. Unlike e-mails and social networks, these passwords were totally mine. At the end, I wrote them on a piece of paper and added a title at the top: “Cemetery of Dead Passwords”. Then put the paper in a history book which I will never read.

Next morning I quit my job at the software company and they happily deleted my company account even without asking me. On the same day I went to a chess school. I told them that I am good at playing chess and I can teach game strategies to young players. They accepted me after I beat the school principal in a few games. Later in the same month I have been asked to give private tutorials in different parts of the city. A few months after starting my new life, I was making half of the money I made at my previous job. But I did not care. I was happy and content. Teaching at all ages of people from all different classes of society, I was feeling like I am a master above all differences. People from all backgrounds were coming to my classes. Nine years old daughter of a barber was playing chess with a retired army general and beating him like destroying his platoon without showing any mercy. A 13-years old boy was winning a match against a university professor and at the end of the game nobody was blaming the professor for being defeated to a child. And the most surprising players I have seen were the blind brothers who were at the same time the most frequent finalists of the tournaments we have arranged in the school.

They were playing against each other by their senses of touch. Their chessboard was different from the ones we use. Black squares were slightly lower than the white ones for tactile differentiation. A hole at the middle of each square accommodated pegged chess pieces so that the pieces will not be scattered with an accidental hand swing. The wooden chess pieces too had tactual markings to distinguish black from white. All these supplementary facilities were arranged to make the game more playable. However, there was still a great amount of work of memorization and mental imagination. I believed that it was extremely hard so I never tried blind-folded chess. But I always enjoyed watching their games, their movements. Once I observed the way they treated each piece with extreme care, the way they held the pieces in their hands and felt their very existence as if they were handling a wounded little bird, the way they kept all the positions in their heads and finished the game in that blue darkness of their mental gardens before those who have healthy eyes could see and act, it appeared to me that blindness is a psychological disease and can be cured by strong ambitions only. I taught them how to develop new strategies and they tried to teach me how to visualize the chess board in my head. Unfortunately it was not an easy task to do for someone who cannot even walk in his room without crashing things and destroying the glassware when there is not enough light available. Admitting my disability, I kept watching and admiring them.

Days in a chess school became like an endless vacation for me: playing chess with students from morning to night, training sharp minds for higher level tournaments, developing new strategies, studying chess master’s legendary games and having problems to solve in the evenings. I was spending six days of the week on teaching chess. On Mondays, away from chess and work, I was with Leila, my absolute escape from one reality to another, my oasis! She was a prostitute in a brothel at the outskirts of the city. Despite all my abilities and my high salary at the software company, I never had a girlfriend. The ones I liked did not like me or demanded things I could not afford. The ones I did not like adhered to my body like a double sided sticky tape. Leila was neither! She was a professional prostitute, discrete and loving, not like the many others who keep their eyes on your pocket even while hooking up with you. I loved Leila because of her strong feminine figure and she seemed to love me! Maybe more like she was my guide in the labyrinth world of love and pleasures. Never demanding more than I could offer, always gentle, always understanding, always helpful… And I was her loyal student, diligent and respectful.

But things did not go as smooth as I thought. A few months after I had my new job and started to enjoy my new offline lifestyle, the young communists in my country took the power. The revolution emerged from nowhere while almost all the citizens in the city were having their siesta. It was like a meteor falling from the sky, not knowing the time on earth! You bourgeoisies! Keep sleeping in the sunlight while workers at the factories don’t even rest for a minute! You lazy bastards! It is time for us to come and take the things you stole from others! We the loyal soldiers of revolutionary army never sleep when the suffering continues in this country. Their march was like a hammer in people’s heads, carrying red flags, singing revolutionary songs once they capture an important building. Slowly and slowly they arrived to the government house. It did not take long to take it either. The president has been killed in his pajamas. His wife’s dead body was later found in the bathroom, half-naked. The newspaper –there was only one newspaper after the revolution- wrote that the president killed himself just after shooting his wife to avoid the embarrassing public appearance in the shadow of revolutionaries.

When the revolution exploded and flooded into the streets of the city like the blood in the vessels, I was in Leila’s arms, watching the slow motion of the curtain and listening to her breath. The room was hot and humidity was high that I was hardly keeping my mind awake. Then I heard the gunshots. I don’t know how many! More than twenty I guess! There were red flags everywhere. Young people were running from all the corners of the city, claiming that the city fell to the communists. I wanted to open the window to have a better look at the things going on outside. But Leila pulled me back to the bed. She said “The lesson is not over yet. Even when the communists take the power; they will need prostitutes to learn how to make love.” We made love one more time, gently and slowly, feeling the pain of future inside us, seeing the darkness of tomorrow in each other’s eyes, with the gunshots and revolutionary songs coming from outside mixing with her moans and my over-excitement. She was right! I learnt how to make love from her; I also learnt how to be an honest person from the thieves I saw in this city and how to be compassionate from my cruel managers at my previous work. Outside there was a bloody revolution but we were in the bubble of love, watching them as if we were watching a TV show. After we were both exhausted with the heat sucking half of our energies and leaving us like puppets dangling over the wooden frame, she asked me if I knew what they really wanted.

I said “who” pretending that I did not understand. At that moment I thought that it was my right not to understand such a bad question. Maybe Leila was the only woman in the country who had no idea about what communists might want from others. She said “the communists! What do they want?” without knowing my speculative thoughts. I laughed, biting my own lips, realizing that an answer became compulsory. “They want to solve the problems of proletarians by killing bourgeoisies. They want to re-educate the people who had been mis-educated by the dynamics of capitalism. They also want to create a society in which everyone is equal.” She smiled as if she was excited with the idea of equality for all. I could not blame her for this optimism but I did not stop talking.

“But soon they will realize that it is only a change of names! They will create their own powerful ones; they will exploit people in another way which they will not call exploitation… Nobody rules guiltlessly, you know? Even they know it now but don’t want to see it” She looked at my face as if she was looking at a mysterious lover behind the curtain. Maybe she did not understand what I meant! I did not care! I kept talking about Communist Manifesto and Labor Theory of Value just to make her admire me more. Once I finished talking, she was half-sleeping like a child who slept over some beautiful fairy tales. I kissed her lips as if I was licking the flesh of a mango as deep as possible to get more taste. Then I left the brothel, walked besides the buildings quietly and slowly without attracting any attention. On the road, I thought about her and the revolution. What will happen to prostitutes and their lovers in a communist country? I did not know the answer and I did not want to know… I just worried that Leila could figure out the answer before it becomes so late. Before the sunset, I was in my apartment, drinking the last cold beer in the refrigerator and thinking about a new chess problem.

Next day internet in the entire country has been cut off. All private TV and radio stations have been put under the government control. Basically three months after I disconnected from the world, my country followed me. But the reasons for our actions were different. I cut off my connections because I wanted to free myself. The new government did the exactly same thing because the new rulers of the country didn’t want their people to see what the rest of the world does while people here were waiting in the rice queues with daily ration cards in their hands. The government’s only purpose was to imprison people in the country and not let them import ideas which can jeopardize the future of the party. They kept banning more things in coming days. Counter-revolutionary books, modern paintings, popular movies, western music instruments and anything reminds capitalist lifestyle were all confiscated from people’s houses and burned at the middle of big squares. Party must have been thinking that people are idiots that they cannot differentiate the good from the bad. Once the regime thinks that the people are not mature enough to make their own decisions, its own officers will do it without people’s consent. There is no end for this. It is like an avalanche! The more it moves, the bigger and faster it becomes.

On the fifth day of the revolution, the new government banned playing chess in the entire country. Their reason was simple: In their ignorance, they said chess is a game which belongs to the era of wild capitalism where people are born in their social classes and there were no chances of equality for all. They were definitely right in saying that chess originated from India where there were strictly-observed social classes. And of course, this is against the fundamental purpose of the revolution: All people are equal. Chess encourages young people to think that for the sake of the powerful ones, pawns can be sacrificed. According to the government’s new declaration, since a pawn needs the stronger pieces’ protection to raise his value by reaching to the last square of the board, chess gives way to the justification of corruption, abusing power and exploiting legal rights. It basically nurtures the idea of you are not what you know but who you know. Tell me who is behind you! Who protects you?

However banning the most popular game was not a solution and even the revolutionaries knew that no matter how they re-educate people, common citizens will still need bread and games. Bread was easy because they already started to distribute equal rice, flour, sugar, salt, beans, fruits etc. to everyone in the country. We were all eating same amount of food so the country will not have obese or hungry people any more. There will be no more imbalances in anything so that bell-curves and skewness of these curves will be history soon. It was good in one sense. But then it was impossible to stop people keep asking “Why do I have to work hard if I will be having same food with someone who hardly works?”

For the main game, instead of chess, the new government offered playing checkers to everyone. The game which is always considered inferior to chess because of lack of complexity and imagination is suggested by the revolutionaries just because all pieces are equal in the game and only those who work very hard can be very powerful regardless of who protects them. I never understood what they meant by ‘working hard” and never had courage to ask anyone. Did they mean being a party member is the only result of hard work?

One day after the declaration, the ex-president of chess association has been asked about his opinions. According to the newspaper, he said that “Russia is also a communist country but they had the best chess players in the world. There is no contradiction between chess and communist ideas. It is the only game you can see 7 years old and 77 years old enjoy being in the same class and discussing the strategies.” But his voice did not last long. After the short interview, he has been taken to re-education camps where he can learn the brutality of his innocent-looking, counter-revolutionary ideas. The answer came from the committee a few hours after the interview: “We are not Russia and we will not be like Russia. There will be no tolerance to any spoiled idea of capitalist lifestyles which later can produce leaks in the people’s revolution. Russia’s adventure did not last long because they tolerated the small holes. Ours will be forever. Long live revolution!”

A few days after the declaration, they collected chess pieces from everywhere and in return they gave people pieces of checkers. They came to my apartment in an afternoon, took three chess sets –one of them was glass, one was marble and one was wooden- and gave me in return three sets of plastic pieces of checkers. What were they expecting to achieve by doing this? What makes a game so threatening for them? Isn’t it a simple game with almost mathematical rules? But they did not stop! They closed the chess schools or converted some of them to checkers schools, canceled the chess programs on TV and Radio, turned all of the chess clubs into party headquarters or sports clubs where they can train new comrades for being good informers and burned all the books teaching how to play chess at the middle of the city center. It was like a nightmare happening in daylight. For a man like me, who earns his life from teaching chess to young population and raising them for big chess tournaments it was big a disaster but still I did not lose all my hope. I needed a way to play chess and I knew that the solution to my problem was somewhere close at hand, somewhere in my apartment or with someone I knew.

The solution I found was quite simple. I went to visit my blind students and asked them how we can teach blindfold chess to all chess lovers so that even without pieces the game can survive. They were both pessimistic about my plan. One of the twins said “I was looking for a lake in the desert but all I could find was a mirage. Once you are used to see things by your eyes, there is no return for sharpening your other senses. It is the process of evolution, the rule of perfectly balanced equation. “I answered him without thinking much on my words, “If you think like this, we will never have the opportunity to fight against the political oppressions. It is our right to play what game we want. If you have learnt it, why not others, why not me?” But he did not listen to me. Maybe they were not the people I should ask help for because they knew the game by necessity. The other brother asked me how we can play the game in a country where revolutionary guards were patrolling the streets days and nights, knocking the doors anytime they want and the informers of the party were hiding themselves like the owls in the darkness of the wood to catch their prey without a warning. They were right. Once party banned something, strict control for the implementation was coming quickly after that. It was like the thunder after the lightening, a `sine qua non` for the power show of the party. If chess was banned, there was no way people could have enough courage to go against the ban openly. But this did not mean that we should sit and do nothing! I told them that it won’t be easy but it was definitely worth to try.

After getting a negative answer from my blind students, I went to the library. Fortunately, revolutionaries did not think that history books should also be burned along with all chess pieces. I guess they did not really realize that people can learn playing chess from the history books. Trying not to attract attention from any librarian, I searched all day for information on blindfold chess. But all I found was a few paragraphs on the history of the game and the opinions of some great minds on blindfold chess. To my surprise, when I searched in the database of the library, the first book I found was “The Discourses of Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Buddha was not really happy with seeing the monks playing chess in the air. He disapproved it as “heedless and idle game” and he described the monks who abstain from this as the ones reaching to “intermediate level of virtue.“

In a different book, I found an Arab chess player, Said bin Jubair, who was the first known person playing blindfold chess against his opponents who were allowed to see the board. He lived in 7th century and unfortunately did not leave much behind about his skills in playing chess in the air. Centuries later the obsession traveled to Europe and America where it found great players like Philidor, Paul Morphy and Louis Paulsen. Philodor taught himself how to play blindfold chess by visualizing the board while in bed at sleepless nights. During the world wars, Germans developed a new variant of the game to train military officers and called it ‘Kriegspiel’ or “War Game”. In this game, you don’t see anything more than your own pieces and a referee tells you if the move you want to make is possible or not. Then Russians and Eastern Europeans took over the flag and dominated the chess world with this unique skill. They had tournaments for blindfold players and they trained them for these special games. But after sudden deaths of two relatively young players, the chess association in USSR banned the official tournaments for a few years because they believed that playing blind chess was dangerous for the player’s mental health and as a result it could cause other serious damages. Although it is well-documented that one of these players died of syphilis at the age of 31 –not because of blindfolded chess-, the association did not change the decision.

All the information I found was fantastic to me but at the end it was useless as well. I needed to learn how to play it but I could not find a single book teaching the methodology. I left the library hopelessly and went home. In the evening, I lay on my bed and tried to visualize the chessboard with the pieces on it. No matter how much time I spent on imagining the colors and the shapes of the board, I got nothing before my eyes. It was all darkness and the blue bubbles whose existence was another question for me. Then I thought of simplifying the visualization process. Maybe we did not need to worry about the colors or the shapes of the pieces. What we needed was something to remind us the current positions of the pieces. That was all we needed and it seemed this could be done without colors or shapes. I remembered the man who could repeat hundreds of words in the same order after hearing once. The way he did was using independent stories to connect the words. Even though the stories did not make any sense at all, he was able to retrace the words without making a mistake. It was of course matter of practice I believed.

I got up bed and ran to my table as if I found something very new, like Archimedes leaving the baths knowing he had the answer to what seemed like an impossible problem. At the end I had three main questions to answer: How can I keep the current position in my head? How will I be able to evaluate this position in my head? And how can I consider possible moves against my opponent’s responses? And at that moment, it seemed to me that the method of using stories could answer all of them.

First I drew an 8x8 grid on a piece of paper and named both files and columns with letters from A to H. Then I gave names to each piece so that they all will be different. For example, the pawns can have names like P, Pu, Pot, Pele, Peter, Prince, Patrick and Prescott. They all begin with ‘p’ and they have different length of letters showing their initial position. Putting ‘Pele’ at the square DB, I needed a story for him to retain his position in my head. So ‘Pele DB’ becomes “Pele Dives for the Ball”. On the right, there is Peter who is Eating Beans and on the left there is Pot who is busy with Catching Birds. If the opening of the game involves Pele to move two squares forward, then he will arrive at DD where he will be Diving Deeply. The most recent story was a sequence representing the most recent move made by a particular piece. If castling happens, than more than one story needed to be restored because two pieces move at the same time. If a pawn becomes queen, then the story of pawn should be connected to the story of queen in a way which emphasizes that this is not the first queen. The stories needn’t to be meaningful as long as they can have a timely sequence and they can somehow be linked. And also I was not blind so I could make stories from the things I observe in the room. This made creating new stories much easier.

To evaluate the positions and to consider opponent’s responses, I just needed to stick with more stories and remember the stories of pieces I might use in the next move. Here of course, the memory plays a big role since all thirty two stories should be recalled at the same time and they have to intermingle with each other to give one result: check mate.

In coming days, I left my apartment in the mornings for my new job at one of the party headquarters. Since they needed me for developing new software to keep the files of food distributions, I was not sent to re-education camps. I was lucky, working from 7 am to 5 pm, having my dinner outside and getting back my apartment by the time sun sinks into the ocean. Since my job was not requiring much skill, I was making my mind busy with my discovery whenever I had spare time. Seeing knights and rooks everywhere I looked, watching a pawn’s inauguration at the last square while looking at the children playing on the street, remembering white and black bishops after seeing two cats walking together without fight. I was so stuck with working with this new idea that I even did not go to see Leila that week. When I went to see her next week, I couldn’t find her. The old mamasan told me that she has been sent to re-education camp to study some professions for the future of the society. I wanted to say that she had a profession but I didn’t. I was afraid of losing my privileges.

In the evenings I was in my quiet world, memorizing letters and words, recalling positions of pieces, using mnemonics to decrease the number of errors after each move, developing new stories, changing the ideas with better ones, failing to find a logical connection between two stories and starting again… When I think about those nights, I feel it was like the short time when the patient waits for the surgeon comes and operates. Sometimes I remembered Leila and ended up in the bathroom satisfying myself. But as soon as I finished it, the burden of guilt, the dark feeling of being late for something was invading my whole mind. Then I was rushing back to work. It took my three months to come to a point that I could play up to 10 moves without any mistake.

Then I spent three more months to increase the number of moves to 30. In the nights, I was laying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and imagining the pieces fighting with each other until one side gets over the other side. Slowly and slowly I realized that the pieces I was visualizing were colorless, shapeless, featureless characters. They did not exist more than a ‘number 7’ existed in my mind. They looked like nothing but somehow I knew that they were mine, they were black or white, they were bishop or queen and they were moving forward to threaten opponent’s territory. It was same as I knew that 7+5=12 even though neither 7 nor 5 are visible. The more I played, the more it became easier to create stories and to connect them to each other. At the end of the sixth month I was able to play from beginning to end by creating so amazing stories that even I was bewildered with my own success. Each game was like a story with 32 characters where they have constant roles to play. Each game was an episode!

Once I became confident enough that the method works well I went to see one of the blind brothers. I told him that I wanted to play chess with him. He said “It is banned and I have not played for long time since the revolutionaries closed the school.” I said “Then this is a good time to start again. I developed a method which helps me to visualize and play the game without the pieces. I can play same as you, in my head”. He did not believe me but still did not reject my challenge. Maybe he wanted to try me himself and showed me that what I could do against him was nothing. We played once and I lost the game in 14th move. Then we played again but this time I stood against his quick responses for 27 moves. He was playing much quicker than I do because I was spending time on connecting stories and trying to make sense out of the new picture. The more we played, the more I got closed to the point that I could actually have won the game. When I went home that night, I know that a big task was waiting for me. I must teach this method to as many people I can. If I could learn this, then everyone else could learn it as well. I started writing my little pamphlet to teach this marvelous method. I wanted to beat the regime and show that people in this country are capable of doing things which are not even dreamed. It was like flying high and not caring about the mountains any more. I was free of others’ eyes and I would free all my country. My motto would be legendary: Let the game conquer!

After one week of hard work, my little pamphlet was ready to go. It was handwritten and there was no name on it. In this twenty pages guide, I tried to give as many examples as I can to make the visualization of stories easier. I also made two ready-to-use story outlines for the beginners, some basic graphs, simple mnemonics and pictures. At the end of the booklet, I warned people not to photocopy the pamphlet in any circumstances. My plan was simple: Whoever receives the pamphlet will make two copies by handwriting and distribute them to trustable chess lovers who do not know each other. By this way, we can minimize the possible deadly effects of the back-tracking on the tree. The faster they write and distribute, the faster our war for freedom can gain momentum. The tree was a full-binary and as long as upper vertices control the lower vertices for doing the job on time, we should not have experienced any broken branches. The number of pamphlets will increase exponentially and soon will reach to thousands, like the number of grains of rice on the chessboard reaches to millions. If one person can write two booklets within a week, the number of people who have the booklet at the end of three months will be more than 4,000. By the end of five months, there will be more than enough pamphlets to satisfy more than 60,000 chess players in this country. Of course I did not expect everyone who got the pamphlet will learn playing blindfold chess in six months. I knew that some will never try; some will give up after a few weeks. But my hope was even if one tenth of the chess players try it hard enough and learn it to a level they can finish the game, then we would be able to have decent number of players who can change the fate of this country.

The plan was perfect but not the people. Or maybe most of the people were perfect but having one defect in a chain was enough to destroy one path of players. After creating my first pamphlet, I made two copies to give to two very trustable chess students who have never seen each other in their lives. They were more than overwhelmed with my gift and both promised me that they will make two copies as soon as possible and will start studying the methods in the booklet on that day so they can play with others soon. But four months after the first pamphlet left my hands, two revolutionary guards appeared at my door. There were seven more people arrested together with me but somehow this news did not make me sad. This basically meant that the tree was moving forward and they did not achieve anything but to cut the leaves at the end. So there were still thousands of more chess lovers outside, writing the pamphlets, distributing them and most importantly studying them in their lonely rooms.

The chain of pamphlet writing and distributing started with me. I confessed it before they tortured me, even before they have asked me. I told them everything except for the system of the distribution. I did it because I was not afraid of them and I was sure that they will not be able to detect the systematic way of distribution. I was also sure that if I tell them everything before they ask, they will forget their questions. Since they cracked only seven people, they might think the chain was a one-dimensional, mono-ary tree. Maybe because I confessed all, they released the other chess lovers without any charge but then sent each of them to a different coal mine where they were to work three years with people who cannot play the mental chess. Their purpose was clear: Forget the game.

After telling me the date of my trial, they took me from the comfortable cell I stayed in for a long time and then put me in this hole. I don’t know how long I have been here but definitely more than a year has passed. It seems to me that I have missed my trial. There must be something wrong in the system. At the beginning, I had the luxury of going in the sun and talking with other political prisoners but in the last few months they don’t even let me to leave my cell. I sit here all day, thinking about my old days, playing chess by myself, dreaming about the unbroken chain of pamphlet writing and distributing. I wonder if they caught the others, the ones after seventh vertex. If number seven did not talk about the brother vertex, the distribution must be continuing with same speed despite losing some gear. I am not hopeless though! If something worth hearing happens, then I would definitely know about it. It does not matter how thick and how tall the prison walls are. Good news arrives at the dark corridors of the prison on the same day it hits the streets of the outside world.

And now I am here, in this small cell, waiting the end of my adventure. I hear the footsteps of a man. The sound is getting louder, getting more frequent, coming towards here. He stops in front of my door and opens it. The mechanic sound of the rusty pivot is filling up the cell. There is a tall prison guard at the door, looking at me without any expression on his face. I know this blank expression, the way they look at the people who will be executed soon. I felt it inside, somewhere close to my heart. He takes a few steps towards me, still looking at my face. The sunlight coming from door ajar hurts my eyes. I try to keep my head standing straight but it is hard. He smiles. “You have a visitor!” he says. “A woman, a very pretty woman is waiting for you!” He says this, I am sure. I hear him but still I feel awkward, as if I have been ridiculed. “She is waiting for you in the visitors’ room.” I want to say “Thank you!” or “I did not know that you can allow my visitors to see me” or “Can you send her here because sunlight hurts my eyes?” The guard smiles again. I cannot read his face. Is Leila here? Did she come to see me? I say my third possibility because I don’t want to leave my cell. I feel good here, in the dark, with my memories… If she comes to my cell, then she can turn here to heaven. Outside is hell, everything is controlled, even the dreams, except the game.

He slowly turns his back to the door, gets closer to me and says “Ok, as you wish!” He puts his heavy hand on my head, presses down. Then I understand what he meant by the visitor. Is this the old trick for the unfortunate inmates, like cheating a little boy who is getting ready for circumcision ceremony? I try to resist but he is much stronger than me. His arms are thick and hard, his legs are strong to hold all my body in between. Then a gunshot echoes in the room, I feel the heat on my neck, like a thin wire cuts through my flesh. The heat is moving down and leaving the coolness of river behind. I fall on the floor without any control of my body, glancing at the door and wait for the end, for my Leila. The blood from my head drops to my hands, flows through my arms and my back. Everything becomes darker, that same blue-black bubbles together with chess pieces invade my vision… Slowly my mind loses its power; images fade. I hear the sound of the water falling from somewhere very high. I hear the sound of the footsteps again, this time they are getting away… I kept my eyes on the door, still hoping for Leila to come.

Soon she appears at the door. She opens it but I shout her to close it immediately. She closes it and sits beside me, touching my hands and my head, gently caressing my hair, saying some nice words which I cannot understand truly. I say “I knew you will be here.” She says nothing. She raises me a little bit and we both lean on the wall, holding each other’s arms. She keeps repeating how much she missed me, how much she needed me in the camp and how the re-education camp made her hate communists more. I look at the dark silhouette of her face, feeling the shame of forgetting to visit her for one week and then losing her as a result. She cries silently. I feel it. I feel her bosom moving in spasms.

Then she says something, something I never expected from her, “Do you want to play chess?” I blink my eyes to see her face in the darkness as if she is not Leila. She keeps talking without waiting my answer, “They are coming soon, very soon. Then we will play outside, with real pieces and real board. There will be no need for mental chess anymore, no need for the struggles. Don’t worry!” I become more disoriented, more confused. “Who?” I ask like I found the shortest question. “Who is coming?” remembering her question on the day of revolution years ago. She looks at the door, the little light beam coming through the edge under the door “Didn’t you hear yet? The entire country is boiling like milk in the pot. It won’t take more time to explode and flood the streets. The chess lovers! Your descendants! Your pamphlet spreads all over the country like an epidemic. People saw it as an initiator. Then underground political parties, youth organizations, women movements shaped around your idea of freedom. They are coming to take over. Soldiers, academics, street vendors, prostitutes, students, workers are all together, asking for their game back, for their country back. “I touch her face, trying to raise my head to the level of her head, trying to feel the freshness of her face with my fingertips as if I am trying to find the hidden truth, the one she wants to keep away from me. But all I feel there was her sincere face, her soft and lively skin. I kiss her left cheek like sniffing a rose and begin to cry… She keeps murmuring, putting her hand on my face, fondling gently, “Very near! The victory of the game is very near. Check and mate! As you said in your pamphlet, let the game conquer…” I turn my face to the wall, knowing that I will lose her hands soon. She whispers to my ear“Let it go!” And I do…

Ali Riza ARICAN
30 Nov 2007



Sources:

For Buddha’s thoughts on playing chess in the air:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/index.html

For Blindfolded Chess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindfold_chess

http://www.nakedscience.com/memory/blindfold%20chess.htm

http://notebook.kulchenko.com/intelligence/blind-chess-and-working-memory