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Winning a World Championship is a funny thing. You win one, one-tenth by sheer luck, four-tenths by stubbornness, and half by skill, and suddenly every misstep becomes something to report on. It is as if you have no power to make your own legacy, but all the power in the world to break it.
46…Rg6!! Brilliant move. Played with one and a half minutes on the clock. Liren will never equal that brilliancy for the rest of his career. It leaves him wondering—furtively, as if it shines the light upon some shortcoming or moral failing of his, for being bitter, or brilliant and still without ambition—whether there is really even anything left to fight for.
Of course there is always something to fight against, the inevitable decline. Which, if he were to believe melodramatic media reporting and armchair analysts, has already begun. At first, somewhat humorously, he thinks that fortunately it is their job to write the headlines and his to play the chess.
But he all but collapses at the tournament Fabiano Caruana wins in Bucharest, losing more rating points than he cares to calculate or check. The only consolation is that he and Ian seem to have crashed and burned in the same smoking vehicle. But Ian is ‘tilted,’ and Liren is ‘inconsistent.’ Despite being foreign, the fine difference in the words has meaning.
Then he withdraws from a series of lesser tournaments, virtually vanishes from active play, and still feels more scrutinized than ever before.
It is unsettling. And ironic, how one only begins to feel like a failure after attaining the ultimate success.
He decides he needs to talk to Magnus Carlsen.
Much like his World Championship campaign, he simply goes ahead and does it without sketching out too much of a plan.
It happens eventually. Owing to Magnus’ aversion to phone calls combined with his absent-mindedness when it comes to answering his text messages, it takes longer to wrangle than Liren had hoped, but still less than he expected. He learns not to suggest a date too close, lest Magnus forget to answer, or too far out, lest he forget it exists.
Magnus needs a calendar for his calendar, thinks Liren. And an alarm for each of his alarms. Well, at least he now has an explanation for why Magnus is late all the time.
He presses the video call button. The phone rings for a good twenty seconds, but right when Liren’s about to hang up, Magnus answers.
‘Hei,’ he mumbles, camouflaged in a pixelated blur of shadows, sounding like he’s just woken up from a nap.
The corner of Liren’s mouth twitches into a smile.
He gives Magnus a minute to find the light switch, and another to fail to smooth down the bird’s nest of his hair.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Magnus says, and Liren believes he means it; Westerners are direct with one another, and Norwegians remarkably so, and Magnus perhaps even more remarkably so. But his mother raised him to be polite, so he waits, and when he starts, he starts with the safer question.
‘Do you regret giving up the title?’
‘Everyone asks me that,’ says Magnus. He sounds bored, but not irritated. ‘Sure. Sometimes. If I’d decided to defend, I probably would’ve won.’
Liren envies his confidence. On the one hand, it makes it a little awkward, having to confront so baldly the fact that he is no Magnus Carlsen and he never will come close; Liren has made a career and a world title out of this game, and he too has his pride. But on the other, Magnus is only being honest. And he is most likely right. Of course Liren is more than capable of challenging him, but the prospect of challenging his legacy resides somewhere just beyond the distant border between possibility and impossibility. Liren is not sure whether that adds a sting or a salve to the burn.
Both, he decides. It is entirely possible. Here he is, a new-minted world champion, calling his predecessor, whom many would rather be in Liren’s place, and asking him about his title after he has relinquished it. They have played each other since childhood and rarely spoken; it is less so Liren’s English and more so that things have always been this way. Introversion and competition rarely make good grounds for a friendship. They have made their living on rivalries when in the end there is little about Magnus that can be rivalled. It is the reality of chess.
There are contradictions enough between them; one more will not hurt. The tricks that abound in their games have no place here. Magnus is too blunt in conversation to be deceptive; Liren’s English has never been good enough for him to lie convincingly, and it has certainly not improved over the last three years. (Remembering the way he ‘freestyled’ his way through the press conferences in Astana, as Dubov said, he almost laughs.)
So he goes ahead with the second, more interesting question.
‘Did you ever regret winning?’
On the screen, Magnus blinks. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. Or maybe the transmission is lagging. Whatever the case, he tries again. ‘What?’
He is very direct, Liren notes dryly.
‘I always play to win. Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ says Liren. But as far as he is concerned, this does not form even half the question asked. ‘But it’s tiring.’ Into the silence, he adds, ‘Every win is only average, every draw is a sign of slipping nerves, every defeat is the beginning of decline.’
Thinking of the Magnus who crossed 2800 at eighteen (when a hundred of his colleagues have fought their entire lives to break into the 2700s), who stormed off a podium once because second place in a blitz championship was inexcusable, who dominated the title match by a staggering four-point margin just two years ago against the same man Liren barely defeated by the skin of his teeth this year, Liren realizes that he might never understand. In years past he might have thought Magnus a man who could live on victory alone.
But in recent years he has made the occasional draw where it secures him the win; with less dazzle and awe, sure, but with less variance too. It was a draw that won him the World Cup this year. Who knows, a final-round draw may win him a sixteenth world title in December. So maybe he will understand.
Magnus struggles to find words too. For him, it is not the language, but the feeling he is trying to describe. Liren gives him time. It is not like he is pressed for it anyway; he left that behind with the memory of the disastrous Game 7.
At length, Magnus settles on, ‘I was tired too. I guess.’ His brow furrows. Watching his games, especially the classical ones, Liren gets the feeling sometimes that he is still tired. But whether he knows that or wants to admit it is none of Liren’s business.
‘Double the glory, double the loss,’ he remembers Magnus muttering drunkenly in some overcrowded bar seven, maybe eight years ago. It had turned out to be true that Scandinavians need to drink to talk about their feelings, and even then, not explicitly.
Now Liren doesn’t even remember why he was at that Tata Steel after-party. He was never one for alcohol or chaos anyway. But he does remember tapping Magnus awkwardly on the shoulder and saying, ‘Come, it’s too early to regret being champion.’
Prophetic words. What happened after he doesn’t remember; they were probably drunk. Certainly Magnus was. But this is an understanding—tragedy seems an insensitive word—of world champions, reflects Liren, a clarity of standing on top of the world and seeing how far you have to fall. Twice the triumph, twice the pain.
Magnus is looking off to the side somewhere. The time for him is three-ten in the afternoon, but the sun is already setting in Oslo. It is past ten at night for Liren. Suddenly the day feels very tired too.
‘Maybe we’re just getting old,’ murmurs Liren, trying for a joke. The lighting of Magnus’ room is just poor enough that he can’t be sure if it works.
‘Probably,’ agrees Magnus, and the twilight stretches on.
‘Do you remember being a child?’ asks Liren.
‘Of course.’ Magnus’ brow is knit, the rising inflection of his voice articulating a bemusement that his words do not. He is very literal, Liren remembers.
‘No, I mean…’ Liren trails off, rubs his forehead as he searches for the right words, for the right way to say it. It’s always been like this, in conversation as in chess; some days the ideas flow right from mind to movement like electricity through a silver wire; other days they struggle from inception, the conduit twists and resists, the execution or explanation is shaky at best.
They all had to grow up quickly to carve out a rung in the ranks of elite chess, is what he wants to say. There are things they missed, things of childhood and teenagehood and young adulthood Liren has never even bothered to find out about. It never seemed more important than knowing Catalan lines by heart, in his sleep, in triumph and in agony, now and at the end of the world.
He is exaggerating, of course. He is being dramatic. The feeling is there nonetheless. It is how the playwright imagines his work in silence, and the actor reinvents it in sound.
Maybe these are, if not the right words, then better ones. ‘Do you remember the last time you felt like a child? Playing chess?’
Magnus is quiet. He’s quiet for so long that Liren wonders if his Internet has gone out again, and says, ‘Hello?’
Magnus’ jerky nod is the only indication that he heard. Suddenly Liren is not sure this is a path he wants to go down.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe the question is meaningless. I think I want to say that I miss being less stressed.’ He thinks of his last tournament in Bucharest, six months ago.
‘It gets to you fast, doesn’t it?’ This is the closest Magnus has come to admitting the sores the crown leaves in its wearer’s head.
‘I saw what it did to others,’ says Liren. Out of politeness, he does not say, I saw what it did to you. ‘The stress, the sleepless nights, the fear of losing, the knowledge that your defeats are always measured taller than your victories. I see what it does to me.’
‘You can say it,’ says Magnus, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. The video lags for a moment, freezing him like that; knowing, ironic, resigned. It is a side of him the world may never see, at least not in full daylight.
Liren tries to take it with care. ‘Say what?’
The connection returns. Liren can watch as Magnus stretches, the wobble of his phone as he shrugs. ‘You saw what the championship did to me too.’
The silence echoes. It drowns out the static.
Ten years is a long time, thinks Liren.
It’s Magnus who speaks first. ‘Will you defend?’
Liren sighs. ‘I said before the match that I wanted to quit.’ He is rehashing this to give himself a starting point to explain it to Magnus, who lets him. ‘I don’t know. I think I am content to play chess. It is a game I always loved. More than law, anyway.’ This last he says with a grain of bitterness, though it is a tired one too.
‘But…’
‘But I won the World Championship and I saw Ian’s face and the trophy, and I thought, That will be me another day. I had not even celebrated. And then I put my head in hands and thought that if this is the price of greatness, then I want no part in it.’
That earns him an even longer silence. No wonder, wonders Liren. It is the inverse of Magnus’ very nature. He cannot even conceive of it. Remember what he said: whatever challenger we gave him, he would have won.
‘Then… then what will you do now?’ Magnus’ voice is hushed, or maybe the static is louder. He seems confused, completely and utterly bewildered at how someone can win his first world championship and somehow have less ambition after; but at least outwardly, he reserves judgment. Perhaps he is glad to have one fewer competitor chasing the coattails of his legacy. But he should never have had that worry anyway. And if he simply doesn’t care what Liren feels or thinks or plans, at least he is curious enough to ask.
‘I don’t know,’ says Liren. He looks out the window, down the countless others just like this one lit in yellow after nightfall, to the thronged streets of a city that never sleeps. ‘I suppose, for now, we just play chess.’