The Bar Fight Gambit

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Another game, my start. I play the safest of openings: king’s pawn, two forward.

 

Ben’s turn next. I pause, like him. The metronome ticks away on the train carriage’s rickety little table. It’s two decades since he first argued that the metronome helped him reach the same focused headspace he achieved laying down basslines in studios. I suspected he hoped to distract me, but never complained, as the much stronger player. Ben said that was because I had a scientist’s brain, while his was artistic. Excuses, excuses.

 

My concentration drifts. I peer out at the relentless frosted forest the train’s sweeping through. I understood Russia’s vastness in theory, but the Trans-Siberian’s taught me more than any atlas could. Five timezones in three days, with three more timezones and two days before reaching Irkutsk—my great-grandmother’s home town.

 

Back to the board. Ben’s next move’s not sensibly symmetrical. His pawn lunges at mine. I once told him this was the Scandinavian Gambit. He called it the Bar Fight Gambit after that—always be first to throw a punch.

 

I hesitate briefly, trying to remember what should happen next (tick-tock, the metronome nags), then take his pawn. He punched first, but I drew first blood.

 

The forest briefly gives way to a spectral vista of tundra, white steppes rippling like a frozen ocean. Ben and I promised we’d do this trip nineteen years ago, right after Jenny’s birth. Having children certainly makes you realise how you squandered your former freedom.

 

Next, Ben’s knight leaps out, challenging my lonely pawn—he always liked fast, scrappy games. The only kind he could win.

 

I’m making my next move when the train shudders so hard the chess pieces jiggle, then howls to a halt.

 

I peer out, expecting some industrial nowhere-town, but there’s only more pine and snow.

 

I’m refocusing on the game when the flustered provodnitsa guard wrestles the carriage door open and speaks to me in Russian simple enough for a five-year-old. She’s got my number.

 

“Please move. Problem track.” She points below. “Please go next carriage. We fix.”

 

She’s turning, when she spies the board.

 

“You play alone?”

 

I nod.

 

“Why?”

 

I could explain that I’m recreating a game I once played on another train in another country with my husband, our four-year-old asleep in his lap. I’ve never understood my memory—I often misplace keys, but remember good chess games near-perfectly. This one particularly, because Ben actually checkmated me with an inspired two-bishop crossfire.

 

But no, the provodnitsa already thinks I’m a madwoman, travelling alone.

 

“It’s fun.” And it is, though a complicated kind. All fun is complicated now. If Ben had lived just two more years, he’d be here to surprise me with a wild new move.

 

The last time I called Jenny, she asked me to stop holding so hard onto memories. She doesn’t understand that I’m getting older and fear losing them forever.

 

The provodnitsa shrugs, then gestures to follow. I do, stilling the metronome’s heartbeat as I leave.

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​​By Jaime Gill​