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Nights when she can't sleep (which are often), Anatoly sings her songs in Russian. Lullabies and folk songs about little gray wolves and rustling pines, songs from tv shows about birthdays and puddles and blue wagons, bizarre advertizing jingles that make Florence giggle until she hiccups, and he has to hold her close under the covers and stroke her back until she settles, his chin propped on her head.
"That's all of it," he whispers into her hair. "I don't know any other songs. Why don't you sing me to sleep now, hm?"
"I... can't sing."
Breath puffs against her scalp, almost a chuckle. "And I can?"
She shuts her eyes. "I don't remember any."
"No songs at all?" His voice is gentle, bewildered.
No, she almost says, but instead she kisses him. Base of the throat, Adam's apple, mouth. Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss, but between them, as often as not, it's a change of subject.
When she remembers Hungary, she remembers a room with a bare white bulb hanging from the ceiling so bright as to make the rest of the room shadowy and indistinct, and her father's face as well. But not the board. (Ferenc bácsi's chessboard, given to his youngest sister as a farewell gift when he left the country. Ferenc, Florence's uncle. Florence's dead mother's chessboard.)
On nights she was feeling little and couldn't sleep, her father would take out the board and its chessmen and tell his daughter stories with them. The knight traveling the whole world, trip-trap, clip-clop, one step at a time. The rival queens, Night and Day, and their six sisters, Evening and Morning, Midnight and Noon, Dusk and Dawn, who stood still and staring as statues until the fighting stopped. Fragments of stories, shadows of a room, eyes like her own, pieces out of another childhood, displaced.
Freddie played one of his tricks on her in an airport, once. She'd asked him to find something for her to read on a long flight, and instead of the usual assortment of newspapers he'd brought her an armful of paperback romances, spy thrillers, novelizations of blockbusters, then proceeded to cherrypick the worst bits and read them aloud en route from New York until he put himself to sleep and out of Florence's misery. (While he napped, she'd slipped them into the bags that airline seat pockets handily provide for such occasions and handed them off to a stewardess.)
It's hard to look back and still see how much she'd needed him, there at the beginning. Almost as much as he needed her, maybe. None of his other seconds had lasted nearly as long. And to be honest with herself, she hadn't picked him only because he was the best candidate for beating the Soviets at their own game, or for his political gestures (mostly rude), or even because he was in a similarly long-term and dysfunctional relationship with his own past.
"You're pretty good for somebody who's only played against other girls before," he'd told her after their first match.
One of her first conditions for hiring on with him was that he wouldn't under any circumstances call an over-21 woman grandmaster a girl ever again. And, when all was said and done, he never did.
Freddie had learned chess out of a manual, the only one in his local library. Half the pages were missing, so he claimed, and the paper was water-warped and yellow and smelled like it had been dropped in a toilet.
Anatoly's first teacher had been his Grandfather Tolya. Also Dasha, his sister. And Mrs. Melnikova at school, whose father had played once against Alekhine. A pause after each name when he spoke them, like a memorial.
Florence herself had been taught chess by an elderly man who had been a friend of Ferenc bácsi when he was alive (never Uncle Frank, not even to the English-speakers in the family). Mister Király had no family, but instead of staying home alone he would spend most of his days playing game after game in the park under the big shade trees, or the pavilion when it rained, sitting across the board from other old men who were far from their own countries. After school and on weekends, Florence would meet him there to learn, watching as he showed her with every turn all the moves she could have made, and listening as he explained in great detail what she was doing wrong, though she would only catch a few words here and there because her rusty Hungarian wasn't that much better than his English.
Sometimes his explanations sounded more like digressions, rambling one-sided conversations peppered with words like "horses" and "home" and "airport" and "after the castle" and "Russian sons of bitches" and "no, forget it, forget it." At those times he tended to call her Fruzsina by mistake, or Zsuzsa or Ilona or Erzsébet. Sometimes she called him Mister bácsi, and he didn't seem to mind it.
She doesn't remember leaving Budapest, losing her parents (which must have happened slightly before), or the long, awkward process of settling into a new homeland with distant relatives, a family of strangers. She does remember her first day of school, and how terrifying it felt not to understand a single word the other children were saying. She remembers the first day of her second year, when the teacher asked for her name and she answered, "Florence," because it wouldn't sound as odd to them, because there was a pretty woman named Florence on one of the soap operas her Aunt Barb (not Borbála néni, which would also sound strange) used to watch while folding laundry in the afternoons.
This one is the story she tells Anatoly in bed, in place of songs she can't recall.
"So Florence isn't your real name?" He doesn't sound as surprised as Freddie had, years before.
"No." She tilts her head down, turns her face closer to his shoulder, breath reflected warm off his skin. She knows what comes next.
"What is it, then?"
Fruzsina, she says, or Erzsébet or Ilona or Judit. It doesn't really matter, any more than it did when Freddie asked the same question on another continent. They don't need to know this secret thing, the one piece of herself that goes back further than any other except her family name, her father's name. They have their secrets, whole childhoods full of them. Let her keep just this one, hers alone.
The morning after the final game in Bangkok, she wakes up alone in her hotel room, disoriented. It should be England, drizzly, miserable winter in England. Anatoly should be... He would have been up already, in the next room, bent over the board with a hot drink and messy hair and a notepad full of his looping, uneven notations. She wonders if that's how he's sitting right now in another room far away. It helps a little, thinking he is. (Please, don't let him disappear. Not him, too.)
In the bathroom she looks at her face under the white light, shadows gathering in the corners of her mouth, and her father's eyes staring back at her with something like a question behind them, something like a challenge. There's a suitcase still in the hall to pack, and a house on the other side of the world to sell, and plenty of more immediate things to think about. Solid, practical things.
In a game of chess, you're discouraged from speaking unless it's needful. "Check" if you're a move away from victory, "draw" if all moves are leading nowhere, and if the previous moves have left you slightly off-balance...
"J'adoube," she says softly, finally -- I adjust -- and bends over the sink, turns on the tap and splashes her face to take the sting out of the tears.
Fifteen years, and change. She switches jobs; the Iron Curtain crumbles to pieces; Walter never turns up with her father. The world continues to play itself out like a grand-scale soap opera in the news, and sometimes (rarely) the stories don't seem to be going so badly.
There's a castle again in Budapest, Mister Király's castle -- she's seen it. On Global Television, she saw the Berlin Wall being chipped to bits, and thought for some reason of Freddie overturning the board in Merano, all those years ago. All those clattering pieces.
Political prisoners are walking free because she spoke for them; lost people were found because she wouldn't let their names be buried alive. Having been a chess second really helps in her new line of work -- the red tape, the bureaucrats, the uncooperative silences and oblique threats are all old hat by now. If she can handle journalists, government agents, and snooty consulate office staff, she can handle anybody.
Florence remembers Anatoly outside their hotel in Bangkok, saying goodbye, leaning in close to whisper, "I never leave anything."
She thinks, once she has the time, that she might like to go see Moscow in the spring.