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‘He is an artist,’ Liren tells the Xinhua interviewer, who smiles and nods as if she really knows what that means in chess or how they even arrived at this conclusion. ‘I am more of a philosopher, I think.’
‘Did you find it a good match?’
Liren pauses, glancing off to the side to think.
‘I think so,’ he says at length. The lights are bright in the recording studio, and Richie will probably not see this interview. Even if he does, he probably won’t understand. But if he does see it and he understands, he’ll probably laugh; and that is sufficiently precise calculation. ‘I learned a lot from him. When not to play h3, for example.’
He follows this with an awkward smile. It doesn’t feel nearly so natural to laugh without Richárd Rapport next to him.
It starts small.
1. h3.
You can’t do that. This is the World Championship, not Titled Tuesday blitz. We have to do better.
F ine, Rapport says. There’s a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Liren has never seen him without a glint of mischief in his eyes. How about this?
4. h3.
Why?
Rapport shrugs. It’s interesting, he says.
Liren knows why he and Dubov are friends now. They have something of what he calls artistry and others might call recklessness that he himself lacks. By nature or by upbringing, he’s not sure. He thinks many of his old classmates must feel the same way. It is like that, in China. Probably elsewhere, too. Always have to do this, should do this, rarely ever want to do this.
He shakes himself mentally, returns to a different sort of thinking. Facing him, behind the message warning Liren of his unstable network, Richárd Rapport grins.
So. Will you play it?
Maybe.
That is how it starts: simple, strange. That is, after all, what they are. Simple and strange. Here there is nothing of the colossal nationalistic collaboration, the post-Soviet quantum supercomputers, the illusively-bottomless funds of a cynical federation thirsty for glory.
It is just them—an artist and a philosopher, two laptops and a wavering VPN connection, and a few dozen games on Lichess. This is how it starts.
This is how it continues.
An artist and a philosopher walk into a bar, Richárd says. It is the beginning of an age-old joke.
Liren cracks a small smile. He searches for the words and comes up with a few.
But you would drink me under the table, he says. He hopes that is the correct English idiom.
We’ll see, Richárd says. The ghost of mischief is back again, in the curve of his mouth, in the narrowing of his eyes as he smiles. We’ll test that out when you win.
I think you mean if.
Neither of them speak English as a native language. It has been slow, rough going at times.
Richárd blinks, almost catlike. Chaos certainly follows in his footsteps.
Do I? he asks, almost like a dare, and Liren doesn’t answer.
Each end is only a new beginning. That sounds pretentious.
Do you want to win? Richie asks. For what must be the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth time, they’re sitting at the little table that doubles as a dresser for Liren’s hotel room in Astana. The mirror looms tall and bright before them. Depending on the superstitions one follows, this may either forecast good fortune or invite disaster.
This match has had enough of both. It makes Liren think that perhaps all the old legends are each a little bit true.
The door is open. Liren can’t remember if he left it open when he let Richie in, or if Richie didn’t bother to close it when he let himself in. Liren thinks he has a keycard anyway. He’s lost track of these things after three weeks and fourteen classical games, including the now-infamous 4. h3.
Of course I want to win, he says. Who doesn’t?
No, Richie insists. Do you want to win?
Why else am I here?
Richie shrugs. That’s why I asked.
Is it not more fun to win?
A smile. Now you’re thinking like me.
Richie deals with people the same way as he plays. Creative, provocative. Uninterested in foregone conclusions. Or perhaps he simply forgets they exist to begin with. That would be the artist in him.
Tomorrow is the rapid, Liren thinks as he turns this over in his mind. Of course he wants to win. He thinks so, anyway.
An artist and a philosopher walk into the playing venue. It doesn’t have the same rhythm to it as Richie’s joke, but all the same it rings behind Liren’s sternum with a familiar note of truth.
‘How do you feel?’ Richie asks.
As is habit by now, Liren searches for a few words. He comes up with just one.
‘Fine,’ he says.
Richie grins and claps him on the shoulder in an abridged version of his post-game hugs. ‘You know you want to win?’
‘That is the easy part,’ Liren reproaches him. ‘The hard part is how.’
But he has done this before, and it is not nearly so intimidating now. The elevator dings to announce the next floor, and before the doors open, Richie catches him in a surprise hug.
‘For good luck,’ Richie says by way of justification.
Liren thinks he’s making that up, even though he’s looking him right in the eye.
But artists have no need for justification, only belief. It is something, perhaps, that Liren could stand to learn, if he is to choose one thing to learn before the four most important games of his life. And if there is no time to learn it, at least Richie’s new superstition is a comfort.
All superstitions have some grains of truth to them, after all.