Chapter Text
She sticks around Moscow for an extra week. It turns out to be both a great move and kind of a wrench in the funhouse mirrored hallways of her life, shattering glass everywhere.
Beth hopes it doesn’t come off as gloating, lingering in town like this when the plan was to get in, get out, don’t leave the hotel, got it? But the city is aglow with warm lights, rich pastry smells in the crisp cold mornings, and the fresh dustings of snow on the grey cobblestone streets. The delightful bombastic colors of St. Basil’s the only spot of real color in the skyline. It’s a nice change of pace, and a long flight home. Why shouldn’t she enjoy it while she’s already here? Who’s stopping her? Her visa is good for three weeks and she’s on week two. No harm in running out the clock, contrary to her gameplay.
She’d be lying to herself, to say the easy way people love her and show her love here weren’t a factor. Beth is recognized occasionally on the streets and manages to wave and sign proffered receipts or scraps of paper and slip out quickly enough to avoid the fuss of a gathering crowd. Without the help of a bodyguard or getaway car, she needs to be smart about these things. She wanders aimlessly, barely able to read the street signs through sounding out the letters. Those Russian classes have never felt further away now that she has to call on them to earn her right to breakfast. The hotel continues to host her and shelter her from the cold fingers of wind that run through the city. She’s growing rather fond of the room, a longer stay than she’s typically had in a hotel room before, long enough that bottles of travel shampoo and hair styling tools seems to have their own little homes in the bathroom where they belong and will stay.
Without the booze or the pills, she finds bracing winds make her feel even colder and clearer than she’d been during the tournament. The clean edge of her thoughts and decisions is a marvel, but then it’s tiring to make intelligent decisions all the time. It would be easy to get bored, with no company and no games. Tempting, even. It doesn’t happen. On day two after missing her flight back to the states, she goes to a library the travel guide she perused idly on the flight over recommended, allegedly one of the more out-of-the-way historic and architecturally notable spots in the cold, cold city of Moscow.
When she walks into the foyer, all is quiet marble and white pillars seeming to uphold a decorative ceiling that doesn't seem to need the extra support. Then she spies a front desk from around a pillar and invites herself over. “Privyet,” she says. “I would like to see the library.”
“Welcome, madam,” the man behind the desk says. Is she a return visitor? Would she like a tour? What brings an American to Moscow? As best she can parse, the library keeper has a lot of questions and her Russian isn’t strong enough to really answer.
“I am visiting. I would like to see the library, thank you.” That stretches the limit of her practiced phrases relevant to the situation and she’s glad to see him relent and show her through the double doors. This isn’t a city that gets many tourists.
He guides her through to a room of some marvel, books hugging the high walls up to a domed skylight. There are charming wooden ladders that reach up to the top shelves perched to the far left of each bookcase. Blue winter light filters through the windows, ledges plump with old snow. It’s cozy in here. And in the corner, on a weathered tabletop -
A chessboard.
She huffs a laugh to herself, there really is no escape, and the library keeper gives her an odd look, which she is very adept at ignoring. He begins to recount the history of the place with a bearing of great pride in his posture and voice. Beth catches maybe half of it. Old, historied, lots of fancy books, all very evident in the feel of the place. She turns her back to the library keeper to drift a finger against the spines of books she probably can’t read and just enjoys the fact of them without really needing to know what’s in them. Her head tilts up at the sound of the double doors opening. She turns and there is Borgov, with his stiff suit and unsmiling mouth and general air of suffering through great incompetence from the people around him without complaint. One brow lifts and his mouth is just the slightest bit open, an unfamiliar expression on a face that feels familiar from all the time she has spent studying it in magazines and newspaper clippings and across tournament rooms and chess boards. He looks surprised.
“Borgov, hello,” she says, turning fully towards him. She’s surprised, too. “Good afternoon.”
His expression has faded back into absence, which is a more comfortable look on him. “Good afternoon. You know this place?”
The library keeper looks between them like it’s a tennis match, when really it’s more like racquetball and they’re both playing against the wall.
“No. I’m just visiting,” she repeats. “I saw it in a travel guide.” Borgov’s left eyebrow tucks in the right the slightest bit and she wonders if that means he doesn’t know the English word for travel guide. “I read about it.” She pulls the small brick of a book out of her white handbag and taps the cover with her index finger.
“Ah,” Borgov says and then doesn’t seem to know what comes next, which is very unfamiliar to see on the man, indeed. “I come here,” he offers. “I come here to think sometimes.” His English isn’t as strong as she thought it would be, despite knowing intellectually he wouldn’t have a translator if he didn’t need one. It’s possible she explained away the one vulnerability in the man by theorizing he had an interpreter just to present the veneer of a vulnerability. Have more time to weigh his responses to reporters’ questions.
“It’s a good place for that, I guess. What are you thinking about?” She steps towards him, where he’s still poised in the doorway.
“Our game.”
“Naturally. Mister, uh,” she turns back to the library keeper. “Thank you for the history. May I stay with my friend?”
The library keeper looks bewildered, either at the English or the fact that they know each other or some third unknown factor Beth is too American to understand. He says yes, of course, he’ll be right outside in case he is needed, and welcome again.
That leaves Borgov moving out of the doorway, into the room, into a leather armchair in the corner with, why is she fucking surprised, the damn chess board.
“Do they leave this here for you?” Beth invites herself to sit across from him, crossing one knee over the other under her powder blue dress. Moscow’s a hell of a city to not wear pants in. The impressive width of the chair and the gentleman’s smoking room atmosphere of the library reinforces that idea that she’s a girl trying on a man’s role, a child trying to sit at the big kid’s table. Which she imagined she would feel more keenly in this city than she ever did sitting across from Mr. Shaibel. But Borgov is as expressionless as ever. His lack of interest in the incongruity of her place in the championships as a woman, in Moscow as an American, or as Beth Harmon in his library puts her at ease. Nothing to see here. Situation normal.
“I suspect so.” Borgov is contemplating the board with arms on the table in his typical pose, or at least she thinks he is.
“You must come here often.” He glances up, an eyebrow slightly raised. Beth realizes belatedly that he must be aware that sounded a lot like a line. “I meant you must like it here.”
“I do.” Borgov lifts a hand to move a white pawn to opening gameplay. Beth keeps her arms crossed, leans back her comfortable armchair and doesn’t feel like moving. Borgov eyes her while he moves the black knight.
She watches him play himself and is too relaxed from her vacation to recognize the game until six moves in. Their Mexico City game. Beth doesn’t move to engage in the game, opting to watch him recall move for move right up to the last point in the game where it would have been possible to turn things around for seventeen year old Beth.
“I don’t think this is the game you came here to replay.” She doesn’t think it’s too rude to say, not that it’s ever stopped her before. But there’s something about Borgov that demands civility, gentility. She wonders if she makes other people as nervous as he makes her and abruptly decides she hopes she doesn’t, because this is a good kind of nervous and she’d rather be intimidating from a position of fear rather than infatuation. Which is part of why it’s confusing, how much she’s enjoying gallivanting across Moscow in her post-win haze of glory where people seem to love her.
The soft thump of the felted chess piece bottom tapping against the surface of the board brings her back. “It isn’t,” he says at length. “An interesting game,” Borgov adds and tilts his head, seems to want to add on again with a nonetheless or something similar but doesn’t know the word.
Beth snorts. “Not particularly. You creamed me. I did not play well. Didn’t put up much of a fight, so I can’t imagine it could have been all that interesting for you.” Borgov looks up sharply at that.
“You seemed to play the best you knew. That is all to be done. One only plays what they know.”
“Well, from one child prodigy to another, I think we both know there never seems to be a limit until one smacks you in the face. That was a wake-up call for me, so. Thanks. I needed one.” Finding herself scratching the back of her neck, she drops her hand back to her lap and settles in again to watch him play himself, play seventeen year old her.
Borgov seems to settle back in too, trying a different tack to the ill-fated one she’d chosen years ago. She closes her eyes for a minute and lets the muffled movement of pieces on a board to soothe her. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. It feels right and deserved to just relax in the cozy hold of the library for a moment.
She wakes with the scrape of chair legs against the marble floor. Borgov is standing and the board looks totally unrecognizable from the game they’d played back in Mexico. White king left standing. Beth really, really hopes she didn’t snore.
“I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“No, that’s alright. I needed to get up,” she says, even though she has no idea what time it is beyond that there’s still weak sunlight coming through the snowy windows and there’s nothing else on her agenda for the week. Beth subtly rubs her mouth with the back of her hand to check for drool. “Where are you going from here? Will you be getting dinner with your family?”
Borgov shakes his head once. “My family has moved. To the -------- my wife ----.”
“Sorry, what?” Beth is missing key pieces of vocabulary here.
“We are - a split?” She’s never heard The Russian phrase anything as a question before. Maybe nobody has. It’s a day full of firsts around here.
“Oh,” Beth says and then doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
"It is . . .” Borgov shakes his head twice and glances briefly at the ceiling. “One only plays the game they know,” he says again. God, he sounds wise. Maybe he’s just as lost as she is, even when she’s chasing the edge of stardom and being the best of the best of the best. Maybe he’s just as lost and simply has the benefit of a million dollar poker face and a sharp suit.
“Well, do you . . . know where it might be good to have dinner? I’m, uh, new in town.” She huffs a little and invites him in on the joke. He does her one better.
“I know a place. Come."