Grandmaster of Rembrandtplein
SOMETIMES A CERTAIN skill or craft can serve us in a way, which would have been impossible to foresee, at the time one mastered it. Such service could be a matter of pleasant surprise to the person benefiting from it or even, it could be an occasion for unblemished ecstasy. But then again it could all come back the wrong way and the skill mastered so painstakingly, practiced and perfected over long years, could turn against us, putting us in a kind of rich soup the bite and bitterness of which is beyond ordinary foresight.
So it was impossible for me to have the slightest inkling before that fated night, that the time and study I had devoted to the fantastic game of chess would lead me through a curious chain of circumstances, culminating in an absurd denouement, that chilling and grey night in the picture postcard city of Amsterdam – the Mecca of the free peoples of the world.
I had arrived in Amsterdam on a pleasant summer day with a job from my government, the nitty-gritty of which is irrelevant to the events that followed and hence won't be mentioned even in passing. It should be enough to say that the nature of the job was of a kind, which needed me to take a train to the Hague - the seat of the Dutch government - every morning, spend the day there and return with the office rush to Amsterdam's Centraal station in the evening. From there I would hop onto a tram that would drop me at Rembrandtplein, where my hotel was.
Rembrandtplein was a buzzing square with restaurants and discos and the dim-lit brown cafés where you could laze with your Heineken and watch the city walking by. On a street behind my hotel were entertainment plazas and sex video shops and an assortment of other places with names like Eros or Ginseng that teased you as you walked by to your home or hotel, thinking whether to eat in your room or go down to the street.
The work I did, had a fair amount of risk and so I returned all nerves and exhausted every evening and stared blankly at the boisterous crowds walking down the Regulierstraat or pouring out of the discos, that played Black Uhuru songs or Nirvana riffs and Pet Shop Boys chart toppers and the couples walking arms around waists, with smoky eyes that had a hint of something like love. Many days, on my way back to the hotel, I would buy a herring sandwich and a pint of Heineken and sit out on one of benches by the square which was just across and wait till chill pushed the crowds indoors.
My days were hectic and the nights especially on the weekends were loud and noisy and full of laughter and cheer along the great pleasure streets of the metropolis, in the cafés and eathouses and coffee shops, where the two-guilder reefers were good and the conversation brimful.
The wisp of a summer had vanished quickly and the first hints of spring were upon us before I even noticed the change. The evenings got chilly but it was still fun to eat a sandwich on a park bench and watch A'dam celebrating itself. I would sit facing the hotel and the park with Rembrandt's statue would be behind me, the old painter turning his back to the hotel but still very much there, which was a kind of nice feeling that remained with me even when I dozed off in my bed in the little top floor room of the Atlanta.
It might strike the reader by now that the story is too late in coming. I can't say much to that, except that those early days were lonely and so what I noticed was other people and the parks and the lights and the sleazy ads of Häagen-Dazs ice-cream in the glass covered tram stations on Regulierstraat and elsewhere in the city. I wouldn't have known that already, in those early days of spring, the story had picked me out and sat by my side and it was me who had failed to notice till it had drawn me completely into its fold.
`Are you from Italy?' the man on the park bench asked me one day. I turned to check his face for signs of trouble before answering. This, I must admit being part of my training having something to do with my assignment. He looked somewhere in his forties which made him at least a decade older to me. He had a very good head of hair cut short and going grey, clever eyes and an unfashionable goatee which made him somewhat old school, as far as the fashions of the day went. His gaze was intent but he had the early hints of a smile on his face – like a tasting sample, which seemed to say, if I matched his standards, he would benefit me with the full course on offer.
`No I am from India,' I said and looked him level in the eye. He was well-built except for a slight stoop that we sometimes notice in very tall people.
He shifted closer to me on the bench and said, `I see you every evening, are you putting up at the Atlanta?'
`Ah! Yes!' I said, wondering how someone could be watching my movements without my faintest knowledge. `Do I know you?' I asked.
The full course was at last on offer which revealed good teeth and broke his ruddy cheeks into a number of artistic brush strokes - he was handsome. `I am Frank. I run the café next door. You had once been in for a drink but no we haven't met.' The toothy smile persisted. I could feel his warmth and somehow the buzz of the beer made him more likeable. We shook hands and I told him the usual lie about my work in Holland.
It was the beginning of the week and I had work on my mind, so I took his leave for the evening. I went to my room up the narrow staircase admiring the Piet Mondrian prints on the lobby and the corridor upstairs. The lines and boxes of white, black and red, or white, blue and yellow or white, white and a little bit of some other brightness, glowed as if they were alive and I stood for long admiring the work of the Dutch master. Later I would learn from Frank that the painter had been using the top floor of my hotel as a studio sometime in the early part of the century and thanked the invisible gods for getting a room there. With Rembrandt outside on the park and Mondrian's memory all over the hotel, I was in exalted company. I was getting lucky, a bit too lucky for my moody stars.
Some work next week took me away to Rotterdam where I spent a couple of days meeting shipping agents and freight companies and getting roundly bored in the bargain, so much so that I went into a rough bar on the weekend and almost knocked myself out with a string of genever shots, under harsh lights and among unfriendly people. I was beginning to miss Amsterdam too soon and Frank was waiting for me on the park bench, the day I returned.
It was getting cold and I was hungry, so we went into La Madonnina, the Italian restaurant a few steps from our hotel where I ordered lasagna for myself and a beer each for the two of us.
`I didn't see you this week,' he said bringing on his charming smile, his eyes shining brighter when he did that.
`Yes, I was in the country, for work.'
`Oh! I see, was it good?'
`Yes, it was OK, but I was bored,' I suddenly got this urge to share my boredom with him and perhaps that was how it all begun, `so I hit one of those dives and knocked myself cold,' I said.
`I can see that,' he said looking at me intently while sipping his Heineken, `you look tired. Better get good sleep tonight and maybe this weekend we can do something to take care of our collective boredom,' and he winked.
`Oh! Ah! Not a bad idea at all, I said,' and in fact I hadn't seen some of the sights yet and could do with the company of a local. But before that I had to check this guy out.
He pointed at the table saying, `this is the area where all the action is unless you want the cheap fun which is up north, or maybe you would like to see the museums?'
The lasagna was average but I had finished it fast and thought I could do with a little something more but ordered another beer instead. I pondered on his question. The museums I had visited on my first week and the windows with the girls was on my menu too but not on top of my list. They were too in your face and so I thought it would be better to let Frank find something for us, `I have seen the Van Goghs and Vermeers and am not too keen about the girls in the windows. Though we can do that someday ...'
`Yes yes we will do that, but there is stuff happening right where we are and it beats what they have in Paris or Berlin,' he said with real Dutch pride.
`OK someday,' I said, not ready to get too much into it, not till I knew him better. We split the bill and I walked back to my hotel. It was late and the lobby lights were off and the Mondrian paintings on the lobby walls were in deep shadow which made me sad for I always enjoyed looking at them as I waited for reception to hand over the key.
The night clerk at the desk gave me the room key with a routine smile that reeked more of boredom than anything else. He looked sleepy and he had a cup of coffee on the counter to keep him going. In that little island of the hotel lobby, dim lit with a table lamp at his desk and the glimmer of neon reflecting on the glass doors at the entrance, the lonely night clerk looked like the last man in a world waiting for deliverance. Waiting for someone to come and check him out and take him wherever everyone else had gone, where there was laughter and the warmth of voices. Hundreds and thousands of them.
I smoked a cigarette in the dark lobby without talking to him and trudged up the narrow stairs to my room. Though the room was warm and I was tired, I didn't sleep well.
WINTER HAD BEEN creeping up on Holland and the rest of Europe and I shopped for warm clothes in a department store near the flower market. I got a trench coat cheap, a good leather jacket with old fashioned collars, glares, balaclavas to cover my head and then on a whimsy picked up a stovepipe hat that a souvenir shop was selling at a discount. It could make a gift for someone back home, I thought, walking back through the gay flower market with the grinning tulip sellers standing jauntily beside their flower boxes.
Sunday mornings we would hire bikes and pedal up to the boat restaurants moored on the Singel for a lazy breakfast. It gradually became a ritual; this Sunday brunch with Frank at one of the canal-side places and then riding through unexplored quarters of town, ending up at his brown café for more beer till the sun began to slant behind the gabled roofs.
That Sunday I had stepped out early from my room and was taking in the air inside the park, admiring Rembrandt's statue and the bronze sculptures near his feet which were characters from his famous painting. They were about ten in all, carefully sculpted figures from the Nightwatch with their long-barreled arquebuses and spears and in tall top hats and soldier uniforms.
`This is the work of two Russians,' someone said. It was Frank. He was smoking one of his rolled cigarettes and offered me one. I don't smoke before midday, I said.
`They are gorgeous,' I said, admiring the group of finely sculpted figures which turned Rembrandt's famous painting into 3D, while trying to make out from the painter's kindly face if he had any comment about the work of the Russians.
`These soldiers are arranged just as they are in the painting at the museum but they can be moved around. Like chess pieces. So if we want we can play with them,' Frank said.
`I see, but they must be heavy!' I said.
`Of course they are, and no one has dared play with them, but we can try,' he said.
`Let's' I said, `but wouldn't someone notice the change and put the piece back in their place?'
`Hardly. We are too busy now to notice that one of the soldiers of the Hunting party of Captain Banning Cocq has changed his position,' Frank said using the other name of the painting.
I smiled. We stood a while looking at the sculpture, little knowing how soon, Frank's confidence that no one would know if a soldier has moved would be put to test.
There were other people in the park now and they were listening. We walked up to the street, took our bikes and rode north. Before leaving I glanced back at the painter’s face to see what he felt about our idea to play around with his pieces. It seemed there was a hint of approval in his expression.
FRANK AND I had been sniffing around for fun and we made the usual round of the discos and the dance clubs on weekends. There were many places with good music and dancing and these became our favourite hangouts. We made friends, got into fights and crawled back to our beds after midnight.
There were women, plenty of them, but somehow I hadn't figured out the whole sequence of seduction that applied in this country and so was mostly crawling back into empty beds, in a little room, with the ghost of Piet Mondrian hovering somewhere close by.
Yet the excitement of partying was wearing off too quickly and soon it happened that I was more comfortable drinking my beer at a quiet café or downing a shot or two of vodka in a bar, round the corner from the hotel. Then one day Frank mentioned the Deep Blue. I was having dinner at the Madonnina and he had walked in seeing me go in.
`Hi there! Quiet Saturday is it?' he asked.
I invited him to join me.
`So nothing is happening here tonight?' he said with a twinkle in his eyes.
`Maybe, I have no idea,' I said digging into the lasagna with that lingering aroma of fresh cheese, `I like it here,' I added.
`But I know a better place, where they don't have any lasagna by the way,' he said.
`What kind of place?"
`A club. Chic and discreet, we can go next week, it's just around the corner.'
I had a sense of what he was getting at and was really not that keen. Yet when the week was gone and the young couples with their arms around each other, still went bearing their ancient dreams – what colors did those dreams have, did they glow like Mondrian paintings in the dead night or were they bursting with the energy of a Matisse – down Regulierstraat to wherever they had build their little nests, leaving a whiff of Elisabeth Arden perfume behind; I felt I could hand myself over to Frank's care. That was how I discovered the Deep Blue.
DEEP BLUE WAS naughty even by Amsterdam's liberal standards. It was not kinky or anything and so not an immediate put-off but it was naughty nonetheless. Just a minute away from my hotel, the club was in an old three storey building on a canal-side street.
After being checked in by Secret Service style bouncers with glares and impeccably cut jackets we entered a large sitting area with leather couches, cube tables and cushioned chairs. To the left was a dance floor and on the opposite wall from the entrance a well stocked bar counter with two women bartenders waiting on the guests.
When we walked in on the first night there were about ten girls there and as many, if not a few more men. Most of the men were in intent conversations with the girls except a group drinking at the bar and three girls hanging out near the dance floor like ghosts contemplating the world of the living.
I looked sideways at Frank but by then he had engaged one of those phantom women in conversation and in little time I found the two shaking a leg to one of those Foreigner numbers on the dance floor. What was the song they were playing? I think it was The Girl on Moon and in the slippery dance floor lights and the strobe bursts, not only the girl but Frank too looked like someone unfamiliar, someone from a far away planet. Perhaps it was the mood of the place or it was just me.
I got myself a Heineken and plopped into one of the couches near the bar. The dance floor was on the far side and the entrance was near from where I sat. Lights were low. The Deep Blue played soft music.
I studied the faces of the women. They were harshly made up with loud eye shadows, stiff eyelashes and a lot of colour and highlights in their hair. They wore blood red or black lipstick which made them desirable in the afterworld and so when I am dead, I would slip out of my grave and look for them, with their black fingernails and smudged kohl eyes hovering over the empty graveyard for they too, like me, would be looking for something that wasn't given us when we were around.
By and by a woman came up to me and asked for a cigarette. She wore black corduroy minis and a clingy lycra top that worked splendidly well with her body, giving her a provocative air that was hard to ignore. I offered her one of my Camels and she lit up with a tiny gold lighter and took the seat beside me. She had done something to her eyes that made them glow in the half-darkness of the club and made me feel I was sitting with a cat.
`Can I get you a drink?' I said.
She blew the smoke out ferociously and said `Amstel.'
I got her the beer and she studied me and asked questions about my home and what I do in Holland and if I would like to have a drink in private. Which was the signal of course (I had noticed by then, that Frank had vanished with the girl he had been dancing with).
`I am here with my friend,' I said, `today is not my day,' and tried to smile at her. Her expression did not change much but she kept looking at me curiously and asked more questions till I got more beers for us and the night limped along like a man hit by a bullet.
Men got girls they liked and disappeared with them up the staircase behind the bar. Others came. The group at the bar kept getting drunk with determination. A girl passed out and someone from the club carried her away. My girl smoked more of my Camels and watched the dance floor with glazed eyes. She tapped her feet to the music, like an automaton, programmed to react to the beats. Suddenly she looked sideways at me and asked, `OK, would you like a little private dance?'
`Not today,' I said.
She plodded away grabbing her Amstel, bobbing her head slowly to the music and found a lounge chair on the other side of the sitting area. Putting her feet up, she perhaps went to sleep. That was when I saw him. Because of the low light I hadn't noticed him before.
He was sitting in the darkest corner of the club, between the dance floor and where the cat-woman had gone to sleep. There was some sort of passage there and he was sitting in a straight back chair turned away from the dance hall and he was looking down. There was another man sitting across from him. He too was staring intently at something that was between the two of them, which I could not see from where I was.
What was it about that man that drew my gaze? It was obvious he was not interested in dancing, or watching other people dance. From where he sat he could hardly see anybody except for the man sitting opposite him, engaged as he was. He had some sort of cover on his head which I couldn't make out in the darkness. What were the two up to? I rose to get a beer and turning back took a good look. Of course they were playing chess! Should have guessed!
Frank was back now, an imbecile like grin on his face and grabbing a beer he came up to my couch.
`So, you kept sitting here through the performance?'
`I thought I would join that man there,' I said pointing to the chess players.
`Ah! The chess player? You should not even think of that.'
`Why? What's the harm in a little game?'
`I will tell you later, not here,' Frank said.
A little afterwards we left the place and strolled back to the hotel. The night trams swished by, along the Rembrandtplein, with their dozing passengers. Music still blared from the discos but the streets were empty. Yet those sounds seem to fade in the foggy desolation of the streets that had been full a few hours ago. When a great city goes to sleep, she beats the silence of the graveyard.
THE WEATHER GOT worse in December. There were snowstorms at night and the snow painted the city a funereal white. In the mornings, the street side snow was powdery and black and there would be fresh footmarks of a drunk who had gone home alone without a friend the night before. Empty beer cans and crushed cigarette packs lay scattered and wanton, sad memories of time fleeting by – conspiring endlessly against the imagination of man.
My work was pulling me in all directions. I had to go to Rotterdam often and other small towns of Holland with names difficult to spell and even more difficult to pronounce and so I will keep you out of that bother.
Then one day Frank sold his café and disappeared. I knew he had been seeing a girl who lived up in the Damrak area but it was pretty unusual for him to just slip away like that without a word or information. But that is how it was.
The heating in my room broke twice and had to be repaired. I stopped going out on Sunday mornings and instead lazed the whole day in the little room, sometimes reading or falling asleep or just writing a letter to someone I would never meet. Through the window I would see the steam curling from the chimneys and the giant cranes looming in the skyline like Martians and nobody was in sight. It was as if a virus had wiped out the population and only the grotesque creations of a doomed race stood in testimony to a capacious folly.
When the room became unbearable I would step out to the park or catch a beer in Frank's bar which now had a new owner, a blind Dutchman by the name of Julius.
On the streets still, the weekend crowds were loud. Lovers locked their arms and walked in step, whispering to each other, teasing and sharing private jokes, making way for a group of Hare Krishna monks in saffron: walking down Rembrandtplein, cymbals jangling, bare heads reflecting the neon squiggles from the entertainment plazas that lined the street.
The couples let them pass, watching their wake with something in their eyes that was meditative or brooding and it happened to them suddenly, for they locked their lips holding each other tight, their hearts briefly beating together, the street transfixed – for time, in those brief moments, dared not pass them by.
That night I went to the Deep Blue after a long time. There were fewer people that day maybe because it was too cold to step out. The few men that were there, were chatting up the girls and the girls were trying their best to get over with the stupid introductions and run upstairs to the private rooms with the Electrolux mini-bars, porn video racks and spring beds that wept quietly when their duty was over.
I got myself a drink and sat on the couch nearest the door so that I could study his game better. Sure he was there like the other day but playing with another man. He wore a navy and white striped sailor's shirt with a scarf around his neck and a tattered pair of jeans but his shoes - Doc Martens - were shiny new. He wore a bandanna with skull and crossbones right at the centre of his forehead and his shiny blond hair came down to his shoulders. He had a hint of moustache and a stubble. I put him somewhere in his fifties.
As I watched the game I noticed something funny. Whenever he was in somewhat of an advantage, say after taking black's queen, he banged the little wooden table and all the pieces flew up and fell to the floor. Then he would carefully pick them up and lay out the board, not allowing his opponent to touch the pieces till the board was arranged as before. He remembered every position.
`Do you want a private dance Sir?' It was the cat girl again.
`No, I prefer to watch the game.' She made a strange face, looked for a second at the players and then back at me and a light flashed in her eyes. Was it a warning?
She got herself a beer on my account and joined me where I sat, made small talk and tried a few more times to get me to the upstairs rooms. But that was not what I was there for. I wanted to watch the game. I wanted to play with the blond man. The night grew old but the game went on.
I walked down the empty streets thinking of the cat girl and the music at the Deep Blue and the chess player who would fling away the pieces whenever he came close to winning the game and carry on nonchalantly. Then something struck my mind like a whiplash. Deep Blue. I had never thought of it before. Deep Blue - the chess playing super computer that had beaten Kasparov and other masters of the game. Why was this club called the Deep Blue? Was it just a fancy of the owner?
I was at the entrance to my hotel. It had snowed early in the evening and the eaves were groaning with snow and the cars had their bonnets thickly laid over. The streets were deserted and in the blind Dutchman's café a light still shone but there seemed to be no one around. I stepped into the slit of a lobby of the Atlanta. The night clerk was there reading a newspaper and I felt this sudden urge to talk to him.
`I was wondering if I can get a coffee.'
He looked up, his face was colourless as if the night had drawn the blood from it, said, `sit right there, I will check if there is someone at the restaurant.'
He switched on the lobby lights bringing both of us into a world thousands of miles away from where we were just a moment before. Even under electric lights, it all looked sane and manageable while darkness and the dead of the night were the realm of black holes of our consciousness, the way from the visible to the invisible.
The night clerk got busy on the phone as I waited for my coffee. On the opposite wall was a Mondrian composition in red, blue and yellow. The blue square was at a corner of the canvas to the left while the big red one was up on the right and a little yellow box was down at the right. I fixed my gaze and the colours shifted places. The red became blue and the blue turned slowly to yellow and the yellow box was getting red now. Then blue turned yellow and what was yellow a moment ago changed to red. It went on for a while.
The largest square was blue now and it began to glow with soft light. I noticed it was not an even glow but the centre glowed more than the edges. Then it was the other way round and that was when I realized that the blue square was alive, it was breathing! Was it trying to tell me something? I listened, but the only sound was of the night clerk whispering into the receiver.
He got my coffee and a cup for himself. We drank in silence and I collected my key and began riding up the steps. There was this story, I had read about the chess playing computer: Grandmaster Kasparov had alleged the computer, the people in charge of it, had cheated. That's why he lost. I had been intrigued by the story when it appeared. At that time I had read up a lot about the strategies computers used to play humans.
I reached my room. Something was troubling me. I couldn't put a finger on it. What was it that, Mondrian’s painting wanted to convey when I was staring at it a few minutes ago? Was it a signal? Who were those girls at the Deep Blue club and who was the man turned out like a pirate, always playing chess with his back to the dance floor?
The cat girl appeared in my thoughts. Was she for real? Was anything human in that old house on that sleepy medieval street of Amsterdam? She had that bluish glow in her eyes, a rim of light round her pupils. I hadn't seen anything like it ever.
MY CURIOSITY ABOUT the chess player got the better of me. Not that I was not longing for a good game of chess, I most surely was, but what I wanted even more than that, was to play the game with that stranger who flung the pieces off the board when he made a good move, who never smiled and who wore the skull and crossbones of a buccaneer.
Within the next week I visited the club again. The Secret Service guys checked me carefully this time and eyed me with suspicion as they let me in. I walked up straight to the bar and got my drink and headed for the couch. The chess player was there playing with a different man. There was a man sitting cosy with a girl on the couch. I couldn't decide whether to sit at the other end and if they would mind.
Without asking for their permission I sat down at the unoccupied end and turned round to watch the game.
`Would you mind taking another seat?' The man with the girl said.
`I want to watch the game,' I said.
`Ha ha! He wants to watch the game!' the man told the girl and they laughed. Then I noticed that this girl too had that blue fire going in her eyes. The blonde man with the bandanna now looked up. His eyes were gray and his skin smooth as glass.
`Come another night he said,' his voice came from deep inside his belly. Then he was back, to his game.
The man with the girl had found something funny in the exchange. Smiles were floating around on their faces. Then the man asked, `do you really want to play with him?'
`Yes, why not?'
The two again exchanged glances and broke into hushed laughter. `But remember, he owns the place. So you play by his rules only,' the man said. That was news to me though I had guessed he was someone from the club.
I had studied his game and found his moves fascinating. His opponent never got a chance and they never drew a game. It would be great to test my skills against this man. What added to the excitement was that this grandmaster of Rembrandtplein also owned the Deep Blue club where the girls had lights in their eyes and the patrons seemed to be in on secrets that I hadn’t figured out.
`I will play by his rules, as long as those are the rules of chess,' I said and sipped my drink. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the girl chewing her man's ear. Then they scampered up the stairs to the private rooms.
YET I HAD to wait two more weeks for a chance. I went there twice in between but both of these times he had already got an opponent and so I had a few drinks and watched his game. The girls had stopped bothering me by then but would come and sit beside me for a little chat if they had nothing better to do. It suited me too. I was not really, not anymore at least, dying for a screw and what I was really missing was perhaps a good game of chess.
It was January Saturday, the first weekend of the new year. Half of town was still nursing the hangovers of year end parties and the relentless bad weather kept people inside. The snow was thick on the bonnets of parked cars and branches of trees in and around Rembrandtplein and your breath froze if you tried to speak with a stranger on the street.
On my previous visit to the club he had promised to play with me on this day and so I was quite excited throughout, even planning my outfit and wondering if I should add a quirky twist to this great day and thinking ahead how to celebrate if I should win. Though he looked invincible, I had watched his game closely and had in mind a strategy that might be useful in getting the better of him.
I wore black denims and a warm high-neck sweater also in the same color and put on the brown leather trenchcoat to keep me warm. Just as I was leaving my room a certain fancy drove me to pick up the stovepipe hat and shoving my gloves inside, used it like a bag. Then I walked down the old cobblestone street to the canal house which was as always, dark on the outside, with no lights at the gate and not a sliver showing through its shuttered windows.
It was still early evening and the Deep Blue was sleepy quiet. There were three girls and a couple of men at the bar and as soon as I stepped inside one of the girls came up to me and whispered, `Are you serious about playing him tonight?' The cat girl. She had become pretty friendly over time and I liked her.
`Yes, what's the catch there?'
`No nothing, do you know you may get thrown out of the club, if you lose?'
`Eh? Is that the rule someone was hinting at the other night?'
She kept quiet but went on staring at me with those artificial eyes. Her look had a hint of alarm but it was the crawling sadness of that look that disturbed me. But by then he had arrived and so I went over and joined him at the table.
`You know the rules?' he asked in his deep growl as we sat down on the straight-back chairs.
`Kind of. Mind repeating them?'
He studied me closely and I could see his eyebrows twitch and the skull and crossbones on his forehead do a little dance. A girl came up to me with a Heineken and a glass but I refused the beer. Nor did the pirate drink. `If you lose you are barred from my club for a thousand years,' he said with a twinkle in his eyes. I watched his face without expression. `If you win you get the shiznit.'
`The shiznit?' I wondered aloud. I couldn’t figure what he meant – was he offering me an acid trip on the house?
`The real thing Sir, the woman,’ one of the girls who were standing by answered for him.
`The woman?’ I noticed now that both of them had used the definitive which meant whoever she was, was special in some way. `I am not interested in the woman,' I said, `I have come for the game.'
`Those are the rules,' he said gruffly and without waiting made the first move. I should have stopped him then but the pieces were set and I was dying to play. He began his game with the very unusual Paris Opening moving his knight to h3 and I responded with d5, pushing my queen's pawn up two squares. I was astonished to find him playing the risky Paris gambit and soon I could take control of the centre and the first game was over in less than an hour. When the game was all but over, the pirate disrupted the board flinging all the pieces on the floor which he carefully then picked up and arranged one by one while bravely facing white's imminent defeat.
`Two more to go,' he said without any expression. I looked around and found we had got an audience. The ear chewing girl was there with the same man watching the game from the safety of the couch. The cat girl stood behind the pirate and I looked up at her and there was still that blue blaze in her eyes. There were other girls hanging close to the table and one of the Secret Service bouncers had also appeared. I thought I should get a beer but then put away that thought. Someone turned up the music as a couple hit the floor. They were playing The Man Machine, that seventies Kraftwerk album. It was a distracting, lovely old memory –
She's a model and she's looking good I'd like to take her home that's understood She plays hard to get, she smiles from time to time It only takes a camera to change her mind
I began the next game with the Mieses opening, a strategy which could be useful against a computer. This kind of opening can fox a machine taking it out of its opening book but is hardly an advantage with humans. But still I played on the lark. The pirate advanced his king's pawn and I moved my kingside knight and the game went on for two hours. He won.
The last game was upon us and I could feel cold sweat trickling down my spine. The audience had grown. The music was still retro electronica, now a different band, as he opened with the King's Pawn game. Whisky fumes were in my nose now as people gathered round the table with their drinks, the cat woman watched gravely and both the bouncers pushed up close behind my chair. I habitually played the Sicilian Defense advancing my c-pawn by two squares. The game developed fast. He made some wrong moves in the middle game and I mated him in less than an hour. The match was over.
I knew all eyes were on me as he conceded defeat and rose. We shook hands and I waited for the crowd to move back; a mixed feeling of elation and foreboding muddling up my senses. Someone passed on a Heineken. I took a swig, returned the bottle and picked up my coat. Then the bouncers came around my chair and led me towards the passage which was behind the pirate’s chair. He led the way.
The passage was completely dark but at the other end there was a light on a door. I stepped faster with the faint hope of dissuading him from his promise of the prize. But he reached the door ahead of me and I prepared my mind for a steamy session with whoever it was waiting for me on the other side. What the heck!
It was heavy metal door with a white bishop carved on a panel. A light set in the panel made the doorway glow. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I noticed that the whole passage was lined by knights, rooks, bishops and pawns carved into the wall. Quite a taste this man had!
He pushed the door open. The pirate and the two bouncers sent me in. Then the heavy metal door swung back on its hinges and clicked shut.
It was an average room, like one in a studio apartment with a bed on one side and a reading table against a wall. The wall had grad school group photos, a John Lennon poster and a set of matrushka dolls lined on an alcove. The other walls had photos of people, a pendulum clock, a beret cap and a collage of picture postcards stuck on art paper. There was another closed door at the back, which could be a bathroom.
She was sitting on the bed watching me. Her lovely brown eyes slightly turned up at an angle gave her face a questioning look. As if she had just asked something and was waiting for an answer. Her honey blonde hair had deep waves and it went down to her waist, falling loosely over a flounced white dress. Her lips were thin and cherry red and I knew she had come out of a fairy tale. She was in her early teens and hardly an adult.
I was going to put my stovepipe hat on the table and contemplate my situation but then it struck me, how young she looked. `Would you like a beer?' she said rising to take my hat. It was such a charming little voice. I felt like giving her a little peck on her cheeks.
`No thank you,' I said, `what's your name?'
`Yvonne,' she said timidly and then she stood on the floor and began to unzip her beautiful white dress.
`Stop!' I screamed and pushed her to the bed. She sat without protest.
`Who are you, what are you doing in this crazy place?' I asked.
`But the king said you will take me. So I have to go with you,' she said without answering my question.
`Which king, what king? What the hell are you talking about?'
`The King who brought you here. The Master of Deep Blue,' she said as if reciting prepared lines.
I told her to remain where she was. I would have to think fast. How to get this kid out of the clutches of this demon? I sprang for the other door and turned the latch. It swung open revealing a passage, dark as the one through which I had come. As I was about to step in to investigate, a voice from the heavens filled the room. `Don't be foolish. Take the girl. She is your prize for the match.'
The pirate's voice! I looked up and saw the speaker on the ceiling. Surely there were hidden cameras round here somewhere. I thought fast. It would be almost impossible to try to rescue Yvonne just now. But if I somehow managed to get out, I could yet get help.
I kicked the other door open. It gave into a passage about a metre wide. I began to run.
The passage twisted and turned like a snake but I could feel it gently sloping down. It could be the service entrance to the building, flashed across my mind. Then I heard the rap of steel-lined boots coming after me. I went faster, my hands stretched out ahead, rushing through the dark and endless tunnel.
There was a light ahead – a heavy metallic door with a glass panel. Someone was there on the other side. One of those bouncers! I was trapped. The rap of metal on concrete grew sharper, he was approaching fast. There was only one bit of filthy luck left on my side. I sneaked up to the door and swung it open, banging it hard against the dark-suited man. It hit him on the head. He reeled and fell, knocked cold.
I had reached the landing of a metal stairway, like a fire escape. The ground was about ten feet below. There was really no time to lose. I crossed over the banister and jumped, landing on soft snow. I jerked myself erect and continued to run.
The street opened to a wider road and running along it I got to the tram stop near my hotel. It must have been well past midnight. Everything was shut and fresh snow had buried the city. I sprinted along the tracks. He was close behind me, the rap of metal echoing in the deserted street, giving him away.
I dodged into the corner near Frank's café and my hotel but he was right behind and saw me. It was too late to dive into my hotel. What if he had a gun?
I ducked behind a car and crept slowly towards the park. The Madonnina had closed for the night and a supply van parked at its gate was buried under snow. I took the cover of van and skirted round it. He was somewhere near but had lost me in the darkness. I ran into the park.
The old painter loomed over the snow covered desolation. There was not much place here to hide. The blue lights that lit his statue and the bronze figures of the Nightwatch were not working tonight. I still had a chance and with a little bit more of my filthy luck, I might yet survive. Frank had said – nobody would know if a piece in the Nightwatch set was shifted. Putting on the stovepipe hat, I slipped in and stood still among the soldiers of the Nightwatch.
Most of them wore helmets but the Captain and a few others had hats not very different from mine. I flung out my hand in a dramatic pose, pulled out an expression of controlled joy and stood rock steady among the bronze soldiers.
The pirate came running in seconds. He looked here and there, kicked the empty cardboard boxes piled near the falafel stall, looked suspiciously at the soldiers and then turned his attention to the surrounding shrubbery.
I heard a thrashing sound and saw the long curved cutlass with which he was attacking the shrubs, sending powdery snow flying like white smoke. My brown trenchcoat and the stovepipe hat blended with the uniform of the men around me but my hands were getting stiff and the pirate would not give up. He came up close once more and seemed to be admiring the bronze soldiers. I kept staring blankly with the eyes of a dead man.
I don’t know for how long I stood among the soldiers holding my pose while the pirate, cutlass drawn, thrashed and fumed and stared, ready to cut my head off. The snow began to fall again, small flakes at first but then a wind rose and it got heavy, and then I knew I would die there and they would think I was a madman. I could feel my fingers getting numb, my flesh was falling off and my eyes had gone blind.
THE FIRST MORNING light on Rembrandtplein lights up the face of the Dutch master for his statue looms above that park. When his face is lit up, then only the affairs of life - the buzz of espresso machines, the call of unknown birds, the sputter of automobiles - can follow. It cannot happen any other way than that, for that is the rule of the game.
When the light flows down his kind face, slipping down his arms and then onto the bronze soldiers of the Nightwatch, delicately melting the snow on the cars, licking thin the icicles on the eaves, reflecting off the polished glass of the café of the blind Dutchman, sweeping slowly the tree-lined promenades and the grand canals of Amsterdam, warming the bones of the drunk who having not found his home had gone to sleep under the shelter of the ABN-AMRO bank, then only the spirits of the night scurry back to their holes in the ground. That ground is covered with snow today. But if you look hard you can see the holes are there. They are there everywhere, the little hatches from where fearsome beasts pop out whenever the sun is gone. Whenever lovers, arms around waists, forget to hug each other and lock their lips under the mellow Dutch sunlight.
I dragged myself to the Atlanta when it was light. I could hear human voices now. I must have been looking like a ghost because the night clerk shuddered as he handed me the room key. I took a warm bath, slept for two days and waking up, walked that little distance to the canal, up the cobbled medieval looking street, to that old house and the Deep Blue was gone, as if it had never been there at all, but there was a sign over the entrance in large Courier font and it said:
RAJAT CHAUDHURI has published one novel Amber Dusk (2007) which was described by critics as `a new kind of writing emerging within Indian English writing.’ His short stories, book reviews, novel excerpts and other writing have appeared in Indian and international venues like The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Times of India, Eclectica (US), Underground Voices (US), Notes from the Underground (UK), Bhashabandhan (in Bengali), The Legendary (US), Arambha (in Bengali) and elsewhere. He reviews fiction for Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature journal and the Asian Review of Books (Hong Kong, China). Sahitya Akademi is India's national academy of letters. Chaudhuri was a 2010 fellow of Sangam House’s International Writer’s Residency Programme. He lives in Calcutta in eastern India. More information: www.rajatchaudhuri.net and blog.rajatchaudhuri.net
SOMETIMES A CERTAIN skill or craft can serve us in a way, which would have been impossible to foresee, at the time one mastered it. Such service could be a matter of pleasant surprise to the person benefiting from it or even, it could be an occasion for unblemished ecstasy. But then again it could all come back the wrong way and the skill mastered so painstakingly, practiced and perfected over long years, could turn against us, putting us in a kind of rich soup the bite and bitterness of which is beyond ordinary foresight.
So it was impossible for me to have the slightest inkling before that fated night, that the time and study I had devoted to the fantastic game of chess would lead me through a curious chain of circumstances, culminating in an absurd denouement, that chilling and grey night in the picture postcard city of Amsterdam – the Mecca of the free peoples of the world.
I had arrived in Amsterdam on a pleasant summer day with a job from my government, the nitty-gritty of which is irrelevant to the events that followed and hence won't be mentioned even in passing. It should be enough to say that the nature of the job was of a kind, which needed me to take a train to the Hague - the seat of the Dutch government - every morning, spend the day there and return with the office rush to Amsterdam's Centraal station in the evening. From there I would hop onto a tram that would drop me at Rembrandtplein, where my hotel was.
Rembrandtplein was a buzzing square with restaurants and discos and the dim-lit brown cafés where you could laze with your Heineken and watch the city walking by. On a street behind my hotel were entertainment plazas and sex video shops and an assortment of other places with names like Eros or Ginseng that teased you as you walked by to your home or hotel, thinking whether to eat in your room or go down to the street.
The work I did, had a fair amount of risk and so I returned all nerves and exhausted every evening and stared blankly at the boisterous crowds walking down the Regulierstraat or pouring out of the discos, that played Black Uhuru songs or Nirvana riffs and Pet Shop Boys chart toppers and the couples walking arms around waists, with smoky eyes that had a hint of something like love. Many days, on my way back to the hotel, I would buy a herring sandwich and a pint of Heineken and sit out on one of benches by the square which was just across and wait till chill pushed the crowds indoors.
My days were hectic and the nights especially on the weekends were loud and noisy and full of laughter and cheer along the great pleasure streets of the metropolis, in the cafés and eathouses and coffee shops, where the two-guilder reefers were good and the conversation brimful.
The wisp of a summer had vanished quickly and the first hints of spring were upon us before I even noticed the change. The evenings got chilly but it was still fun to eat a sandwich on a park bench and watch A'dam celebrating itself. I would sit facing the hotel and the park with Rembrandt's statue would be behind me, the old painter turning his back to the hotel but still very much there, which was a kind of nice feeling that remained with me even when I dozed off in my bed in the little top floor room of the Atlanta.
It might strike the reader by now that the story is too late in coming. I can't say much to that, except that those early days were lonely and so what I noticed was other people and the parks and the lights and the sleazy ads of Häagen-Dazs ice-cream in the glass covered tram stations on Regulierstraat and elsewhere in the city. I wouldn't have known that already, in those early days of spring, the story had picked me out and sat by my side and it was me who had failed to notice till it had drawn me completely into its fold.
`Are you from Italy?' the man on the park bench asked me one day. I turned to check his face for signs of trouble before answering. This, I must admit being part of my training having something to do with my assignment. He looked somewhere in his forties which made him at least a decade older to me. He had a very good head of hair cut short and going grey, clever eyes and an unfashionable goatee which made him somewhat old school, as far as the fashions of the day went. His gaze was intent but he had the early hints of a smile on his face – like a tasting sample, which seemed to say, if I matched his standards, he would benefit me with the full course on offer.
`No I am from India,' I said and looked him level in the eye. He was well-built except for a slight stoop that we sometimes notice in very tall people.
He shifted closer to me on the bench and said, `I see you every evening, are you putting up at the Atlanta?'
`Ah! Yes!' I said, wondering how someone could be watching my movements without my faintest knowledge. `Do I know you?' I asked.
The full course was at last on offer which revealed good teeth and broke his ruddy cheeks into a number of artistic brush strokes - he was handsome. `I am Frank. I run the café next door. You had once been in for a drink but no we haven't met.' The toothy smile persisted. I could feel his warmth and somehow the buzz of the beer made him more likeable. We shook hands and I told him the usual lie about my work in Holland.
It was the beginning of the week and I had work on my mind, so I took his leave for the evening. I went to my room up the narrow staircase admiring the Piet Mondrian prints on the lobby and the corridor upstairs. The lines and boxes of white, black and red, or white, blue and yellow or white, white and a little bit of some other brightness, glowed as if they were alive and I stood for long admiring the work of the Dutch master. Later I would learn from Frank that the painter had been using the top floor of my hotel as a studio sometime in the early part of the century and thanked the invisible gods for getting a room there. With Rembrandt outside on the park and Mondrian's memory all over the hotel, I was in exalted company. I was getting lucky, a bit too lucky for my moody stars.
Some work next week took me away to Rotterdam where I spent a couple of days meeting shipping agents and freight companies and getting roundly bored in the bargain, so much so that I went into a rough bar on the weekend and almost knocked myself out with a string of genever shots, under harsh lights and among unfriendly people. I was beginning to miss Amsterdam too soon and Frank was waiting for me on the park bench, the day I returned.
It was getting cold and I was hungry, so we went into La Madonnina, the Italian restaurant a few steps from our hotel where I ordered lasagna for myself and a beer each for the two of us.
`I didn't see you this week,' he said bringing on his charming smile, his eyes shining brighter when he did that.
`Yes, I was in the country, for work.'
`Oh! I see, was it good?'
`Yes, it was OK, but I was bored,' I suddenly got this urge to share my boredom with him and perhaps that was how it all begun, `so I hit one of those dives and knocked myself cold,' I said.
`I can see that,' he said looking at me intently while sipping his Heineken, `you look tired. Better get good sleep tonight and maybe this weekend we can do something to take care of our collective boredom,' and he winked.
`Oh! Ah! Not a bad idea at all, I said,' and in fact I hadn't seen some of the sights yet and could do with the company of a local. But before that I had to check this guy out.
He pointed at the table saying, `this is the area where all the action is unless you want the cheap fun which is up north, or maybe you would like to see the museums?'
The lasagna was average but I had finished it fast and thought I could do with a little something more but ordered another beer instead. I pondered on his question. The museums I had visited on my first week and the windows with the girls was on my menu too but not on top of my list. They were too in your face and so I thought it would be better to let Frank find something for us, `I have seen the Van Goghs and Vermeers and am not too keen about the girls in the windows. Though we can do that someday ...'
`Yes yes we will do that, but there is stuff happening right where we are and it beats what they have in Paris or Berlin,' he said with real Dutch pride.
`OK someday,' I said, not ready to get too much into it, not till I knew him better. We split the bill and I walked back to my hotel. It was late and the lobby lights were off and the Mondrian paintings on the lobby walls were in deep shadow which made me sad for I always enjoyed looking at them as I waited for reception to hand over the key.
The night clerk at the desk gave me the room key with a routine smile that reeked more of boredom than anything else. He looked sleepy and he had a cup of coffee on the counter to keep him going. In that little island of the hotel lobby, dim lit with a table lamp at his desk and the glimmer of neon reflecting on the glass doors at the entrance, the lonely night clerk looked like the last man in a world waiting for deliverance. Waiting for someone to come and check him out and take him wherever everyone else had gone, where there was laughter and the warmth of voices. Hundreds and thousands of them.
I smoked a cigarette in the dark lobby without talking to him and trudged up the narrow stairs to my room. Though the room was warm and I was tired, I didn't sleep well.
WINTER HAD BEEN creeping up on Holland and the rest of Europe and I shopped for warm clothes in a department store near the flower market. I got a trench coat cheap, a good leather jacket with old fashioned collars, glares, balaclavas to cover my head and then on a whimsy picked up a stovepipe hat that a souvenir shop was selling at a discount. It could make a gift for someone back home, I thought, walking back through the gay flower market with the grinning tulip sellers standing jauntily beside their flower boxes.
Sunday mornings we would hire bikes and pedal up to the boat restaurants moored on the Singel for a lazy breakfast. It gradually became a ritual; this Sunday brunch with Frank at one of the canal-side places and then riding through unexplored quarters of town, ending up at his brown café for more beer till the sun began to slant behind the gabled roofs.
That Sunday I had stepped out early from my room and was taking in the air inside the park, admiring Rembrandt's statue and the bronze sculptures near his feet which were characters from his famous painting. They were about ten in all, carefully sculpted figures from the Nightwatch with their long-barreled arquebuses and spears and in tall top hats and soldier uniforms.
`This is the work of two Russians,' someone said. It was Frank. He was smoking one of his rolled cigarettes and offered me one. I don't smoke before midday, I said.
`They are gorgeous,' I said, admiring the group of finely sculpted figures which turned Rembrandt's famous painting into 3D, while trying to make out from the painter's kindly face if he had any comment about the work of the Russians.
`These soldiers are arranged just as they are in the painting at the museum but they can be moved around. Like chess pieces. So if we want we can play with them,' Frank said.
`I see, but they must be heavy!' I said.
`Of course they are, and no one has dared play with them, but we can try,' he said.
`Let's' I said, `but wouldn't someone notice the change and put the piece back in their place?'
`Hardly. We are too busy now to notice that one of the soldiers of the Hunting party of Captain Banning Cocq has changed his position,' Frank said using the other name of the painting.
I smiled. We stood a while looking at the sculpture, little knowing how soon, Frank's confidence that no one would know if a soldier has moved would be put to test.
There were other people in the park now and they were listening. We walked up to the street, took our bikes and rode north. Before leaving I glanced back at the painter’s face to see what he felt about our idea to play around with his pieces. It seemed there was a hint of approval in his expression.
FRANK AND I had been sniffing around for fun and we made the usual round of the discos and the dance clubs on weekends. There were many places with good music and dancing and these became our favourite hangouts. We made friends, got into fights and crawled back to our beds after midnight.
There were women, plenty of them, but somehow I hadn't figured out the whole sequence of seduction that applied in this country and so was mostly crawling back into empty beds, in a little room, with the ghost of Piet Mondrian hovering somewhere close by.
Yet the excitement of partying was wearing off too quickly and soon it happened that I was more comfortable drinking my beer at a quiet café or downing a shot or two of vodka in a bar, round the corner from the hotel. Then one day Frank mentioned the Deep Blue. I was having dinner at the Madonnina and he had walked in seeing me go in.
`Hi there! Quiet Saturday is it?' he asked.
I invited him to join me.
`So nothing is happening here tonight?' he said with a twinkle in his eyes.
`Maybe, I have no idea,' I said digging into the lasagna with that lingering aroma of fresh cheese, `I like it here,' I added.
`But I know a better place, where they don't have any lasagna by the way,' he said.
`What kind of place?"
`A club. Chic and discreet, we can go next week, it's just around the corner.'
I had a sense of what he was getting at and was really not that keen. Yet when the week was gone and the young couples with their arms around each other, still went bearing their ancient dreams – what colors did those dreams have, did they glow like Mondrian paintings in the dead night or were they bursting with the energy of a Matisse – down Regulierstraat to wherever they had build their little nests, leaving a whiff of Elisabeth Arden perfume behind; I felt I could hand myself over to Frank's care. That was how I discovered the Deep Blue.
DEEP BLUE WAS naughty even by Amsterdam's liberal standards. It was not kinky or anything and so not an immediate put-off but it was naughty nonetheless. Just a minute away from my hotel, the club was in an old three storey building on a canal-side street.
After being checked in by Secret Service style bouncers with glares and impeccably cut jackets we entered a large sitting area with leather couches, cube tables and cushioned chairs. To the left was a dance floor and on the opposite wall from the entrance a well stocked bar counter with two women bartenders waiting on the guests.
When we walked in on the first night there were about ten girls there and as many, if not a few more men. Most of the men were in intent conversations with the girls except a group drinking at the bar and three girls hanging out near the dance floor like ghosts contemplating the world of the living.
I looked sideways at Frank but by then he had engaged one of those phantom women in conversation and in little time I found the two shaking a leg to one of those Foreigner numbers on the dance floor. What was the song they were playing? I think it was The Girl on Moon and in the slippery dance floor lights and the strobe bursts, not only the girl but Frank too looked like someone unfamiliar, someone from a far away planet. Perhaps it was the mood of the place or it was just me.
I got myself a Heineken and plopped into one of the couches near the bar. The dance floor was on the far side and the entrance was near from where I sat. Lights were low. The Deep Blue played soft music.
I studied the faces of the women. They were harshly made up with loud eye shadows, stiff eyelashes and a lot of colour and highlights in their hair. They wore blood red or black lipstick which made them desirable in the afterworld and so when I am dead, I would slip out of my grave and look for them, with their black fingernails and smudged kohl eyes hovering over the empty graveyard for they too, like me, would be looking for something that wasn't given us when we were around.
By and by a woman came up to me and asked for a cigarette. She wore black corduroy minis and a clingy lycra top that worked splendidly well with her body, giving her a provocative air that was hard to ignore. I offered her one of my Camels and she lit up with a tiny gold lighter and took the seat beside me. She had done something to her eyes that made them glow in the half-darkness of the club and made me feel I was sitting with a cat.
`Can I get you a drink?' I said.
She blew the smoke out ferociously and said `Amstel.'
I got her the beer and she studied me and asked questions about my home and what I do in Holland and if I would like to have a drink in private. Which was the signal of course (I had noticed by then, that Frank had vanished with the girl he had been dancing with).
`I am here with my friend,' I said, `today is not my day,' and tried to smile at her. Her expression did not change much but she kept looking at me curiously and asked more questions till I got more beers for us and the night limped along like a man hit by a bullet.
Men got girls they liked and disappeared with them up the staircase behind the bar. Others came. The group at the bar kept getting drunk with determination. A girl passed out and someone from the club carried her away. My girl smoked more of my Camels and watched the dance floor with glazed eyes. She tapped her feet to the music, like an automaton, programmed to react to the beats. Suddenly she looked sideways at me and asked, `OK, would you like a little private dance?'
`Not today,' I said.
She plodded away grabbing her Amstel, bobbing her head slowly to the music and found a lounge chair on the other side of the sitting area. Putting her feet up, she perhaps went to sleep. That was when I saw him. Because of the low light I hadn't noticed him before.
He was sitting in the darkest corner of the club, between the dance floor and where the cat-woman had gone to sleep. There was some sort of passage there and he was sitting in a straight back chair turned away from the dance hall and he was looking down. There was another man sitting across from him. He too was staring intently at something that was between the two of them, which I could not see from where I was.
What was it about that man that drew my gaze? It was obvious he was not interested in dancing, or watching other people dance. From where he sat he could hardly see anybody except for the man sitting opposite him, engaged as he was. He had some sort of cover on his head which I couldn't make out in the darkness. What were the two up to? I rose to get a beer and turning back took a good look. Of course they were playing chess! Should have guessed!
Frank was back now, an imbecile like grin on his face and grabbing a beer he came up to my couch.
`So, you kept sitting here through the performance?'
`I thought I would join that man there,' I said pointing to the chess players.
`Ah! The chess player? You should not even think of that.'
`Why? What's the harm in a little game?'
`I will tell you later, not here,' Frank said.
A little afterwards we left the place and strolled back to the hotel. The night trams swished by, along the Rembrandtplein, with their dozing passengers. Music still blared from the discos but the streets were empty. Yet those sounds seem to fade in the foggy desolation of the streets that had been full a few hours ago. When a great city goes to sleep, she beats the silence of the graveyard.
THE WEATHER GOT worse in December. There were snowstorms at night and the snow painted the city a funereal white. In the mornings, the street side snow was powdery and black and there would be fresh footmarks of a drunk who had gone home alone without a friend the night before. Empty beer cans and crushed cigarette packs lay scattered and wanton, sad memories of time fleeting by – conspiring endlessly against the imagination of man.
My work was pulling me in all directions. I had to go to Rotterdam often and other small towns of Holland with names difficult to spell and even more difficult to pronounce and so I will keep you out of that bother.
Then one day Frank sold his café and disappeared. I knew he had been seeing a girl who lived up in the Damrak area but it was pretty unusual for him to just slip away like that without a word or information. But that is how it was.
The heating in my room broke twice and had to be repaired. I stopped going out on Sunday mornings and instead lazed the whole day in the little room, sometimes reading or falling asleep or just writing a letter to someone I would never meet. Through the window I would see the steam curling from the chimneys and the giant cranes looming in the skyline like Martians and nobody was in sight. It was as if a virus had wiped out the population and only the grotesque creations of a doomed race stood in testimony to a capacious folly.
When the room became unbearable I would step out to the park or catch a beer in Frank's bar which now had a new owner, a blind Dutchman by the name of Julius.
On the streets still, the weekend crowds were loud. Lovers locked their arms and walked in step, whispering to each other, teasing and sharing private jokes, making way for a group of Hare Krishna monks in saffron: walking down Rembrandtplein, cymbals jangling, bare heads reflecting the neon squiggles from the entertainment plazas that lined the street.
The couples let them pass, watching their wake with something in their eyes that was meditative or brooding and it happened to them suddenly, for they locked their lips holding each other tight, their hearts briefly beating together, the street transfixed – for time, in those brief moments, dared not pass them by.
That night I went to the Deep Blue after a long time. There were fewer people that day maybe because it was too cold to step out. The few men that were there, were chatting up the girls and the girls were trying their best to get over with the stupid introductions and run upstairs to the private rooms with the Electrolux mini-bars, porn video racks and spring beds that wept quietly when their duty was over.
I got myself a drink and sat on the couch nearest the door so that I could study his game better. Sure he was there like the other day but playing with another man. He wore a navy and white striped sailor's shirt with a scarf around his neck and a tattered pair of jeans but his shoes - Doc Martens - were shiny new. He wore a bandanna with skull and crossbones right at the centre of his forehead and his shiny blond hair came down to his shoulders. He had a hint of moustache and a stubble. I put him somewhere in his fifties.
As I watched the game I noticed something funny. Whenever he was in somewhat of an advantage, say after taking black's queen, he banged the little wooden table and all the pieces flew up and fell to the floor. Then he would carefully pick them up and lay out the board, not allowing his opponent to touch the pieces till the board was arranged as before. He remembered every position.
`Do you want a private dance Sir?' It was the cat girl again.
`No, I prefer to watch the game.' She made a strange face, looked for a second at the players and then back at me and a light flashed in her eyes. Was it a warning?
She got herself a beer on my account and joined me where I sat, made small talk and tried a few more times to get me to the upstairs rooms. But that was not what I was there for. I wanted to watch the game. I wanted to play with the blond man. The night grew old but the game went on.
I walked down the empty streets thinking of the cat girl and the music at the Deep Blue and the chess player who would fling away the pieces whenever he came close to winning the game and carry on nonchalantly. Then something struck my mind like a whiplash. Deep Blue. I had never thought of it before. Deep Blue - the chess playing super computer that had beaten Kasparov and other masters of the game. Why was this club called the Deep Blue? Was it just a fancy of the owner?
I was at the entrance to my hotel. It had snowed early in the evening and the eaves were groaning with snow and the cars had their bonnets thickly laid over. The streets were deserted and in the blind Dutchman's café a light still shone but there seemed to be no one around. I stepped into the slit of a lobby of the Atlanta. The night clerk was there reading a newspaper and I felt this sudden urge to talk to him.
`I was wondering if I can get a coffee.'
He looked up, his face was colourless as if the night had drawn the blood from it, said, `sit right there, I will check if there is someone at the restaurant.'
He switched on the lobby lights bringing both of us into a world thousands of miles away from where we were just a moment before. Even under electric lights, it all looked sane and manageable while darkness and the dead of the night were the realm of black holes of our consciousness, the way from the visible to the invisible.
The night clerk got busy on the phone as I waited for my coffee. On the opposite wall was a Mondrian composition in red, blue and yellow. The blue square was at a corner of the canvas to the left while the big red one was up on the right and a little yellow box was down at the right. I fixed my gaze and the colours shifted places. The red became blue and the blue turned slowly to yellow and the yellow box was getting red now. Then blue turned yellow and what was yellow a moment ago changed to red. It went on for a while.
The largest square was blue now and it began to glow with soft light. I noticed it was not an even glow but the centre glowed more than the edges. Then it was the other way round and that was when I realized that the blue square was alive, it was breathing! Was it trying to tell me something? I listened, but the only sound was of the night clerk whispering into the receiver.
He got my coffee and a cup for himself. We drank in silence and I collected my key and began riding up the steps. There was this story, I had read about the chess playing computer: Grandmaster Kasparov had alleged the computer, the people in charge of it, had cheated. That's why he lost. I had been intrigued by the story when it appeared. At that time I had read up a lot about the strategies computers used to play humans.
I reached my room. Something was troubling me. I couldn't put a finger on it. What was it that, Mondrian’s painting wanted to convey when I was staring at it a few minutes ago? Was it a signal? Who were those girls at the Deep Blue club and who was the man turned out like a pirate, always playing chess with his back to the dance floor?
The cat girl appeared in my thoughts. Was she for real? Was anything human in that old house on that sleepy medieval street of Amsterdam? She had that bluish glow in her eyes, a rim of light round her pupils. I hadn't seen anything like it ever.
MY CURIOSITY ABOUT the chess player got the better of me. Not that I was not longing for a good game of chess, I most surely was, but what I wanted even more than that, was to play the game with that stranger who flung the pieces off the board when he made a good move, who never smiled and who wore the skull and crossbones of a buccaneer.
Within the next week I visited the club again. The Secret Service guys checked me carefully this time and eyed me with suspicion as they let me in. I walked up straight to the bar and got my drink and headed for the couch. The chess player was there playing with a different man. There was a man sitting cosy with a girl on the couch. I couldn't decide whether to sit at the other end and if they would mind.
Without asking for their permission I sat down at the unoccupied end and turned round to watch the game.
`Would you mind taking another seat?' The man with the girl said.
`I want to watch the game,' I said.
`Ha ha! He wants to watch the game!' the man told the girl and they laughed. Then I noticed that this girl too had that blue fire going in her eyes. The blonde man with the bandanna now looked up. His eyes were gray and his skin smooth as glass.
`Come another night he said,' his voice came from deep inside his belly. Then he was back, to his game.
The man with the girl had found something funny in the exchange. Smiles were floating around on their faces. Then the man asked, `do you really want to play with him?'
`Yes, why not?'
The two again exchanged glances and broke into hushed laughter. `But remember, he owns the place. So you play by his rules only,' the man said. That was news to me though I had guessed he was someone from the club.
I had studied his game and found his moves fascinating. His opponent never got a chance and they never drew a game. It would be great to test my skills against this man. What added to the excitement was that this grandmaster of Rembrandtplein also owned the Deep Blue club where the girls had lights in their eyes and the patrons seemed to be in on secrets that I hadn’t figured out.
`I will play by his rules, as long as those are the rules of chess,' I said and sipped my drink. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the girl chewing her man's ear. Then they scampered up the stairs to the private rooms.
YET I HAD to wait two more weeks for a chance. I went there twice in between but both of these times he had already got an opponent and so I had a few drinks and watched his game. The girls had stopped bothering me by then but would come and sit beside me for a little chat if they had nothing better to do. It suited me too. I was not really, not anymore at least, dying for a screw and what I was really missing was perhaps a good game of chess.
It was January Saturday, the first weekend of the new year. Half of town was still nursing the hangovers of year end parties and the relentless bad weather kept people inside. The snow was thick on the bonnets of parked cars and branches of trees in and around Rembrandtplein and your breath froze if you tried to speak with a stranger on the street.
On my previous visit to the club he had promised to play with me on this day and so I was quite excited throughout, even planning my outfit and wondering if I should add a quirky twist to this great day and thinking ahead how to celebrate if I should win. Though he looked invincible, I had watched his game closely and had in mind a strategy that might be useful in getting the better of him.
I wore black denims and a warm high-neck sweater also in the same color and put on the brown leather trenchcoat to keep me warm. Just as I was leaving my room a certain fancy drove me to pick up the stovepipe hat and shoving my gloves inside, used it like a bag. Then I walked down the old cobblestone street to the canal house which was as always, dark on the outside, with no lights at the gate and not a sliver showing through its shuttered windows.
It was still early evening and the Deep Blue was sleepy quiet. There were three girls and a couple of men at the bar and as soon as I stepped inside one of the girls came up to me and whispered, `Are you serious about playing him tonight?' The cat girl. She had become pretty friendly over time and I liked her.
`Yes, what's the catch there?'
`No nothing, do you know you may get thrown out of the club, if you lose?'
`Eh? Is that the rule someone was hinting at the other night?'
She kept quiet but went on staring at me with those artificial eyes. Her look had a hint of alarm but it was the crawling sadness of that look that disturbed me. But by then he had arrived and so I went over and joined him at the table.
`You know the rules?' he asked in his deep growl as we sat down on the straight-back chairs.
`Kind of. Mind repeating them?'
He studied me closely and I could see his eyebrows twitch and the skull and crossbones on his forehead do a little dance. A girl came up to me with a Heineken and a glass but I refused the beer. Nor did the pirate drink. `If you lose you are barred from my club for a thousand years,' he said with a twinkle in his eyes. I watched his face without expression. `If you win you get the shiznit.'
`The shiznit?' I wondered aloud. I couldn’t figure what he meant – was he offering me an acid trip on the house?
`The real thing Sir, the woman,’ one of the girls who were standing by answered for him.
`The woman?’ I noticed now that both of them had used the definitive which meant whoever she was, was special in some way. `I am not interested in the woman,' I said, `I have come for the game.'
`Those are the rules,' he said gruffly and without waiting made the first move. I should have stopped him then but the pieces were set and I was dying to play. He began his game with the very unusual Paris Opening moving his knight to h3 and I responded with d5, pushing my queen's pawn up two squares. I was astonished to find him playing the risky Paris gambit and soon I could take control of the centre and the first game was over in less than an hour. When the game was all but over, the pirate disrupted the board flinging all the pieces on the floor which he carefully then picked up and arranged one by one while bravely facing white's imminent defeat.
`Two more to go,' he said without any expression. I looked around and found we had got an audience. The ear chewing girl was there with the same man watching the game from the safety of the couch. The cat girl stood behind the pirate and I looked up at her and there was still that blue blaze in her eyes. There were other girls hanging close to the table and one of the Secret Service bouncers had also appeared. I thought I should get a beer but then put away that thought. Someone turned up the music as a couple hit the floor. They were playing The Man Machine, that seventies Kraftwerk album. It was a distracting, lovely old memory –
She's a model and she's looking good I'd like to take her home that's understood She plays hard to get, she smiles from time to time It only takes a camera to change her mind
I began the next game with the Mieses opening, a strategy which could be useful against a computer. This kind of opening can fox a machine taking it out of its opening book but is hardly an advantage with humans. But still I played on the lark. The pirate advanced his king's pawn and I moved my kingside knight and the game went on for two hours. He won.
The last game was upon us and I could feel cold sweat trickling down my spine. The audience had grown. The music was still retro electronica, now a different band, as he opened with the King's Pawn game. Whisky fumes were in my nose now as people gathered round the table with their drinks, the cat woman watched gravely and both the bouncers pushed up close behind my chair. I habitually played the Sicilian Defense advancing my c-pawn by two squares. The game developed fast. He made some wrong moves in the middle game and I mated him in less than an hour. The match was over.
I knew all eyes were on me as he conceded defeat and rose. We shook hands and I waited for the crowd to move back; a mixed feeling of elation and foreboding muddling up my senses. Someone passed on a Heineken. I took a swig, returned the bottle and picked up my coat. Then the bouncers came around my chair and led me towards the passage which was behind the pirate’s chair. He led the way.
The passage was completely dark but at the other end there was a light on a door. I stepped faster with the faint hope of dissuading him from his promise of the prize. But he reached the door ahead of me and I prepared my mind for a steamy session with whoever it was waiting for me on the other side. What the heck!
It was heavy metal door with a white bishop carved on a panel. A light set in the panel made the doorway glow. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I noticed that the whole passage was lined by knights, rooks, bishops and pawns carved into the wall. Quite a taste this man had!
He pushed the door open. The pirate and the two bouncers sent me in. Then the heavy metal door swung back on its hinges and clicked shut.
It was an average room, like one in a studio apartment with a bed on one side and a reading table against a wall. The wall had grad school group photos, a John Lennon poster and a set of matrushka dolls lined on an alcove. The other walls had photos of people, a pendulum clock, a beret cap and a collage of picture postcards stuck on art paper. There was another closed door at the back, which could be a bathroom.
She was sitting on the bed watching me. Her lovely brown eyes slightly turned up at an angle gave her face a questioning look. As if she had just asked something and was waiting for an answer. Her honey blonde hair had deep waves and it went down to her waist, falling loosely over a flounced white dress. Her lips were thin and cherry red and I knew she had come out of a fairy tale. She was in her early teens and hardly an adult.
I was going to put my stovepipe hat on the table and contemplate my situation but then it struck me, how young she looked. `Would you like a beer?' she said rising to take my hat. It was such a charming little voice. I felt like giving her a little peck on her cheeks.
`No thank you,' I said, `what's your name?'
`Yvonne,' she said timidly and then she stood on the floor and began to unzip her beautiful white dress.
`Stop!' I screamed and pushed her to the bed. She sat without protest.
`Who are you, what are you doing in this crazy place?' I asked.
`But the king said you will take me. So I have to go with you,' she said without answering my question.
`Which king, what king? What the hell are you talking about?'
`The King who brought you here. The Master of Deep Blue,' she said as if reciting prepared lines.
I told her to remain where she was. I would have to think fast. How to get this kid out of the clutches of this demon? I sprang for the other door and turned the latch. It swung open revealing a passage, dark as the one through which I had come. As I was about to step in to investigate, a voice from the heavens filled the room. `Don't be foolish. Take the girl. She is your prize for the match.'
The pirate's voice! I looked up and saw the speaker on the ceiling. Surely there were hidden cameras round here somewhere. I thought fast. It would be almost impossible to try to rescue Yvonne just now. But if I somehow managed to get out, I could yet get help.
I kicked the other door open. It gave into a passage about a metre wide. I began to run.
The passage twisted and turned like a snake but I could feel it gently sloping down. It could be the service entrance to the building, flashed across my mind. Then I heard the rap of steel-lined boots coming after me. I went faster, my hands stretched out ahead, rushing through the dark and endless tunnel.
There was a light ahead – a heavy metallic door with a glass panel. Someone was there on the other side. One of those bouncers! I was trapped. The rap of metal on concrete grew sharper, he was approaching fast. There was only one bit of filthy luck left on my side. I sneaked up to the door and swung it open, banging it hard against the dark-suited man. It hit him on the head. He reeled and fell, knocked cold.
I had reached the landing of a metal stairway, like a fire escape. The ground was about ten feet below. There was really no time to lose. I crossed over the banister and jumped, landing on soft snow. I jerked myself erect and continued to run.
The street opened to a wider road and running along it I got to the tram stop near my hotel. It must have been well past midnight. Everything was shut and fresh snow had buried the city. I sprinted along the tracks. He was close behind me, the rap of metal echoing in the deserted street, giving him away.
I dodged into the corner near Frank's café and my hotel but he was right behind and saw me. It was too late to dive into my hotel. What if he had a gun?
I ducked behind a car and crept slowly towards the park. The Madonnina had closed for the night and a supply van parked at its gate was buried under snow. I took the cover of van and skirted round it. He was somewhere near but had lost me in the darkness. I ran into the park.
The old painter loomed over the snow covered desolation. There was not much place here to hide. The blue lights that lit his statue and the bronze figures of the Nightwatch were not working tonight. I still had a chance and with a little bit more of my filthy luck, I might yet survive. Frank had said – nobody would know if a piece in the Nightwatch set was shifted. Putting on the stovepipe hat, I slipped in and stood still among the soldiers of the Nightwatch.
Most of them wore helmets but the Captain and a few others had hats not very different from mine. I flung out my hand in a dramatic pose, pulled out an expression of controlled joy and stood rock steady among the bronze soldiers.
The pirate came running in seconds. He looked here and there, kicked the empty cardboard boxes piled near the falafel stall, looked suspiciously at the soldiers and then turned his attention to the surrounding shrubbery.
I heard a thrashing sound and saw the long curved cutlass with which he was attacking the shrubs, sending powdery snow flying like white smoke. My brown trenchcoat and the stovepipe hat blended with the uniform of the men around me but my hands were getting stiff and the pirate would not give up. He came up close once more and seemed to be admiring the bronze soldiers. I kept staring blankly with the eyes of a dead man.
I don’t know for how long I stood among the soldiers holding my pose while the pirate, cutlass drawn, thrashed and fumed and stared, ready to cut my head off. The snow began to fall again, small flakes at first but then a wind rose and it got heavy, and then I knew I would die there and they would think I was a madman. I could feel my fingers getting numb, my flesh was falling off and my eyes had gone blind.
THE FIRST MORNING light on Rembrandtplein lights up the face of the Dutch master for his statue looms above that park. When his face is lit up, then only the affairs of life - the buzz of espresso machines, the call of unknown birds, the sputter of automobiles - can follow. It cannot happen any other way than that, for that is the rule of the game.
When the light flows down his kind face, slipping down his arms and then onto the bronze soldiers of the Nightwatch, delicately melting the snow on the cars, licking thin the icicles on the eaves, reflecting off the polished glass of the café of the blind Dutchman, sweeping slowly the tree-lined promenades and the grand canals of Amsterdam, warming the bones of the drunk who having not found his home had gone to sleep under the shelter of the ABN-AMRO bank, then only the spirits of the night scurry back to their holes in the ground. That ground is covered with snow today. But if you look hard you can see the holes are there. They are there everywhere, the little hatches from where fearsome beasts pop out whenever the sun is gone. Whenever lovers, arms around waists, forget to hug each other and lock their lips under the mellow Dutch sunlight.
I dragged myself to the Atlanta when it was light. I could hear human voices now. I must have been looking like a ghost because the night clerk shuddered as he handed me the room key. I took a warm bath, slept for two days and waking up, walked that little distance to the canal, up the cobbled medieval looking street, to that old house and the Deep Blue was gone, as if it had never been there at all, but there was a sign over the entrance in large Courier font and it said:
Hooge's Old Computers and Accessories
Rent or Buy
Easy Installation Anywhere
Rent or Buy
Easy Installation Anywhere
RAJAT CHAUDHURI has published one novel Amber Dusk (2007) which was described by critics as `a new kind of writing emerging within Indian English writing.’ His short stories, book reviews, novel excerpts and other writing have appeared in Indian and international venues like The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Times of India, Eclectica (US), Underground Voices (US), Notes from the Underground (UK), Bhashabandhan (in Bengali), The Legendary (US), Arambha (in Bengali) and elsewhere. He reviews fiction for Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature journal and the Asian Review of Books (Hong Kong, China). Sahitya Akademi is India's national academy of letters. Chaudhuri was a 2010 fellow of Sangam House’s International Writer’s Residency Programme. He lives in Calcutta in eastern India. More information: www.rajatchaudhuri.net and blog.rajatchaudhuri.net
