Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FORTY TWO – OUR COMPANY
Theoretically, a chapter with this title could be a separate book. A company, a society of friends and like-minded people, after all, is not something immutable, but constantly changing its shape and size, like a cloud.
Starting from the first day of school, I’ve got my class, which also changed and transformed. There were twenty-seven of us at graduation, and sixty people passed through the class over ten years of studying. Those, closest to me, were ten or twelve, led by Eli.
From pioneer (Boy Scout) age, we began to add friends from summer camps. Since those years, I’ve become quite close friends with several other guys, but my main find was Sasha. He became my closest friend, with whom we shared our youthful anxieties and secrets. A talented mathematician, he was in many ways an example for me. Everything went well for him – studying modern algebra, getting married and even playing cards.
At the university, our company grew significantly: they were friends from the group, from the faculty, from the university – we had many wonderful students! Seven to ten people are forever included in the list of my best friends. Friends from classes, summer holidays, work and entertainment. Student humor is another field of activity in which I collected a harvest of friends: both local and out-of-city.
I am still friends with many of them, although life, work, relationships, and even humor have changed over the years. But the memory stores…
CARDS
One of our favorite pastimes was the card game Preference. The university guys also played in the army, at training camps. Lenin’s room seemed to be created for this purpose – tables with chairs, good lighting… I learned to play the game after the training camp. Perhaps Sasha taught me. And I joined the company of players who usually gathered at Sasha’s to play Preference. Let’s note that Sasha, the only one from our company, had his own apartment. Can you imagine? Those who lived in that country at that time understand what a value it was for a young man to have his own separate place of living.
It happened so that Sasha’s parents built a large cooperative apartment, and left the old, two-room apartment to the young family. In this apartment, we often celebrated holidays with the whole company and played Preference when Sonya was not on edge. Either the game, or the very fact that her husband better preferred a gambling company seating in clouds of cigarette smoke to her, irritated Sonya, and periodically, she burst into the living room and tore the cards from the table to shreds. It ended in embarrassment; the guests quickly left. I think that the reasons for such rage were friction between the young spouses. We will return to the story about them later, but for now only about Preference – as a part of our company’s recreation.
At first, I couldn’t understand the simple rule, how could it be that your friend, who is “sitting on the draw,” (which means skipping at the moment bids and tricks) catches you at a Misère in a complex situation. It seemed to me very unfair, selling friendship for money, but gradually I learned the principle of “nothing personal.” However, even now, it is not my favorite one. A similar phenomenon was observed in a mixed company – the husband-player protested against the use of the term “pour into” in relation to another player – his wife. The term means playing a game for certain points instead of a lagging behind player, but was perceived by the husband as a hint of sexual activity…
The second point in the cards was that I didn’t try to make money from my friends and didn’t want to lose my labor money to strangers. Most likely I wasn’t adventurous enough. Once I figured out complex card combinations, I didn’t remember them forever and could easily miss opportunities. Denis always got indignant,
“How did you get so freaked out? You yourself showed me how to play in such distribution of cards!”
“I’m a sports theorist,” I objected, “And what does it matter who won?”
I was a fan of the Olympic principle, but this view was not popular. My friends not only enjoyed playing among themselves, but also played games with strangers on vacation. Fortunately, most of the beach players were not card sharps, but sincere seekers of fun. Sometimes, for greater safety, friends played in pairs. They didn’t cheat, playing together against others, but they controlled the enemy.
Once on vacation I had a game like this. Two couples took part in it: on the one hand, me and a programmer friend from Tbilisi, and on the other, two sisters from Chisinau. All four of us played well, but the beauty of the game was that we played not for money, but we bet for desire. Believe me, I have never felt more excitement playing cards in my life! It’s not hard to guess what the guys wanted from girls, but the girls… It’s hard to say, maybe they just took a risk to play, trying to show their class. Typically, most women (not all!) who play difficult card games are not young and not attractive enough. Perhaps they have a masculine type of thinking. I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but cards partially replace them flirting.
In the case of the sisters, this was not the case. The girls were players, but at the same time they were beautiful and desirable partners, I didn’t mean partners in Preference at all.
So, we clashed! Luckily it was a rainy day and there was nothing to do at sea. By lunchtime the men were in the lead and were already anticipating a sweet victory! However, instead of finishing the game, we decided to take a lunch break. This is what ruined us. The heat of passion passed, we made mistakes, and the game ended in a “fighting draw”. And it would be nice to turn time back…
I remember that sometimes the excitement captured the player at the wrong moment. One day, Sasha’s employee, an excellent programmer, Leo Slyuda, who lived nearby, came running to him. In those formative years of Soviet programming, he was one of the best specialists in this field known to me. If his life had not been tragically cut short so early, he could have shone in another country during the period of mass migration. But now we are talking about the comic, which often borders on the tragic.
So, Leo ran to Sasha, and they immediately began to play a simplified version of Preference – “A young hussar”, when there are only two players and the cards of the third player are revealed. Of course, they weren’t playing for money, but were just scrolling through combinations, hoping to stumble upon a tricky option, and at the same time they were also discussing work problems. And then Sonya entered. She usually didn’t attack Leo, as well as me, and didn’t tear the cards, but she asked angrily,
“Are you playing cards again? No more things to do?”
It was useless to reproach Sasha for the fact that he would rather clean up or sweep up than play Preference. This would only cause a backlash. Leo remained a single target for her attack. And to put pressure on Leo’s conscience, Sonya said,
“You’d better help your sick mother!”
The mention of mom caused an unexpected reaction. Leo jumped out of his chair and grabbed the phone receiver. It turns out that he ran in to call an ambulance for his mother, but the cards on the table completely took away his memory. Fortunately, his mother felt better without any doctors and meds. And for calling an ambulance, “false call” or “real call”, they did not charge money.
Sasha, my idol, began to get bored with the usual game, and he found companies where they played for big money. Not a penny for one point, but a ruble (x100). Usually this is how businessmen played. It was the right time for Sasha to play with them: they were not card sharpers, but, on the contrary, well-known people in the city, they knew how to play quite well, but in difficult situations they were inferior to the analytical mind and brilliant memory of a mathematician. Soon Sasha became addicted to going out at night on weekends to play Preference, earning something on the order of a thousand rubles each time.
His son, at three or four years old, already knew chess and cards. One day Denis examined him and was amazed by the boy’s knowledge. Then he decided to joke and asked about the chess bishop made out of mahogany wood,
“What color is he?”
“The color of Diamond suits!” the kid instantly blurted out.
CHESS
Perhaps, when talking about Preference, it is worth mentioning chess. Unfortunately, I played them poorly. In my childhood, my dad showed me the figures and how they moved, but he didn’t have the patience to play with me, and maybe he didn’t know how to play seriously. Usually he played both for himself and for me,
“I move like this, you move like that, I do this, you do that, I sacrifice, you hit, I declare check, you castling… checkmate!”
The game was over before it even started for me. But the loser had to put the pieces back in the chess box.
At school I learned to play checkers well, and won camp tournaments, but only for the time being. Teenagers began to participate in sports sections, and an unprepared mind could no longer defeat them… This was apparently the case with chess – in addition to abilities and memory, a section was needed, or at least a dad who played well. I had neither one nor the other, which I often regretted. One day I was playing chess with my neighbor Misha, a would-be gladiator whom I often went to call on the phone. We played for an hour and ended the game in a draw.
“Anyone who doesn’t beat me in ten minutes doesn’t know how to play seriously,” was my verdict.
Misha laughed and added,
“The same applies to my opponents.”
A whole galaxy of my friends played chess well. Sasha is probably better than all of them, non-professionals, although he did not always win.
“I get bored,” he boasted, “In the tournament the score would be 9:1 or 8:2.”
Neither Zalessky, who initially studied in my class and graduated from school in Sasha’s, nor Denis thought so. Trying to determine Sasha’s level, Denis brought to him a professional, our friend, biophysicist, candidate for Master of sports in chess, Abram Davarashvili. Abrasha won with a tricky move, then played a draw in the return game, and reported to Denis on the street,
“He plays very well for a non-professional. But in the tournament I would beat him 10:0. There is no option!”
We had chess players in our physics department. Another professional was Yakow Gelfand. He also grew to become a candidate for Master of sports, and thanks to his father’s connections in the business world, he received a job as deputy director of the chess house, where the international symposium on artificial intelligence was held. Yakow was a very tall and pretty guy. The position of deputy director was just for him. During the period of gangster de-Sovietization, he eventually became the deputy director of some large company, but ended badly, falling out of a window from a skyscraper on Kalininsky Prospect (Avenue) in Moscow.
The best chess player I knew in person was another of our course mates, Kevork Pepelyan. He was a Master of sports and was one of the 500 best chess players in the USSR. When I asked how he would play with a candidate for Master, he answered in a turn of phrase that was already familiar to me,
“If I had played seriously in the tournament, I would have won 10:0!”
I got to know Kevork better after university. He first studied at our physics department, then switched to philology, then transferred to journalism at Moscow State University. We ran into each other in a bookstore, perhaps a second-hand bookstore. We started talking. He invited me to his home – we lived next door. The apartment in which he lived with his elderly mother was very modest. In Kevork’s room, as if in a warehouse, there were stacks of scarce books that he traded. I listened with interest to his stories about his adventures in Moscow, where he studied among the children of Politburo members and other eminent parents. Perhaps Kevork was partly lying, but I immediately believed one thing. These children made friends easily, invited you to visit them in government apartments and dachas, spent time with you, freely had sex, but in no case allowed marriage. As I understand it, he would not mind immediately rectifying his situation by marrying favorably. But the fathers and mothers of rich brides stood guard over their fortunes.
Kevork told how he earned money by hook or by crook until, as compensation for leaving alone his next bride, he received a position as a chef at a closed restaurant for government delegations. When I asked him, how he cooked, he replied that his task was to create menus for cooks and to sell surplus of delicacies.
I have never been particularly interested in the lives of the rich and famous unless they were bright and meaningful in themselves, regardless of their money. It was much more interesting to hear about Kevork’s adventures in this environment, and even more interesting to hear about tournaments and chess. It turned out that money is always swirling around them, big bets are made, grandmasters play cards at night and hold blitz tournaments for the crazy money of millionaires. Masters of sports had nothing to do there, but in the parks they could earn a little extra money. Kevork found such a park in every city with pensioners, half of whom were chess cheats, but since no one knew him, he cheated everyone. He lost the game for a ruble and demanded to win back. His bet was increased to five rubles – again an artificial loss. Again – noise and indignation. The bet was raised further, to twenty-five rubles, in order to calm down and drive the upstart away from the serious game. Kevork’s argument was silly – the sun was shining in his eyes, or the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. Now, if they switch places, he will win back. They gave up their seat to the “fool” for twenty-five rubles, and then the robbery began. Now the happy owner of the “right” place had never lost. But sometimes he had to run away…
Kevork taught me many games of chance, which are played on a chessboard with pawns or checkers, and if you don’t know the right tactics, you will lose a lot of money before you understand the idea of the game.
It seemed to me that Kevork was a nice and lonely guy, but we didn’t have enough time for real friendship. After a couple of months he returned to Moscow in search of fortune.
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