It is flawless except for the black king’s absent finial, lost to a falling section of wall when a tank shell struck the house across the street. He should repair it, find a wood that matches, though he is no artisan, lacking his father’s élan for such matters. For now the piece’s imperfection acts as a harbinger of white’s early advantage, something his daughter is often profligate with.
Yasmeen retreats the bishop, huffs at the realisation her attack was ill-conceived.
You have to anticipate all outcomes, he says. Don’t be impatient.
She pretends it is of little consequence, that another opening will present itself, optimism inherited from her mother. With practice she could be very good, perhaps as strong as her grandfather, who regularly beat the grandmasters of Europe and America in epic correspondence games. At the height of his prowess, there were invitations to tournaments and exhibitions around the world, but even when permission was granted for him to travel, he chose to stay, lauding his beloved city, the sea breeze that billowed in at night, the fresh tuna fishermen barbecued on the beach.
Why would I leave? he’d say.
They called his father the Grandmaster of Gaza, though he achieved no such rank officially, his status more one of quiet legend. It was said that by the age of seven he could beat everyone at his school, and, a few years later, everyone on the Strip. As worthy opponents became harder to find, he was enticed to the West Bank, to play in the cafés and marketplaces of Ramallah and Jenin, where wizened men four times his age would marvel at the bravura of his gambits, the apparent recklessness of his sacrifices. He had no formal instruction, the game learned by watching others play at family gatherings - the house on Sundays a place of great theatre and revelry - and later from books. When a game between uncles ended in a draw, he would often announce how one of them could have triumphed if only they’d persevered, demonstrating the sequence of moves to a mesmerised audience. Aged fourteen he was invited to play a visiting Hungarian master, a series of games witnessed by half of Palestine, the legend went. Two defeats and a draw later, the man returned to Budapest broken and, it was said, never to play again.
Yasmeen is bored now, the days without school long and empty. It is one thing to have an irritable teenager skulk about the house during evenings and weekends, quite another from dawn to dusk. He will send her to buy bird food later. They have been told the classrooms are too badly damaged to open for the new term, and so, in between their games of chess, he gives her lessons at the kitchen table, indulging his daughter’s appetite for knowledge. When the power is on – six hours a day, if they are lucky – he uses the computer given to them by a fan of his father’s, watching British wildlife documentaries, a little of which he understands. Or he encourages her to write an essay on one of the novels she read last term, sometimes a story or poem of her own. Science is her passion, but he knows little of how it’s taught, and in moments of levity Yasmeen laughs at his clumsy attempts to do so. He hopes she will become a doctor, though talk of such is rare these days; it is hard to look too far ahead while death walks so brazenly among them. She will be offered counselling when the school finally reopens, as all children are, to deal with the trauma of the last fifty days, to come to terms with it. She will refuse.
He savours the last of his morning coffee. Warm air brings on it the sound of falafel crackling in the fryer run by the old man at the end of the street. It is a strange time, once the euphoria of a ceasefire recedes, the realisation it will take years, a decade perhaps, just to see the city returned to how it was in June. What has changed for the better, people ask, for surely this cannot have been for nothing. It will be different this time, goes the old lie. Rubbish collections stopped more than a month ago and have yet to resume, scores of feral cats and dogs amassing at the piles of detritus. Redolent of some medieval tableau, donkey carts have been deployed to collect what they can. Two weeks ago the pumping stations, bereft of fuel, stopped working and raw sewage now seeps into the streets, the sludge drawing throngs of flies. They say it will find a way into the water supply soon.
Gazans adapt, though; he sees it everywhere. One of their neighbours runs a car on spent cooking oil, the waft of falafel and fries lingering in its wake. Others cram four at a time in the front seat of a taxi to get to work, the scene faintly comic. During the last war, when a shell killed the zoo’s only zebra, the owner's son bought a white donkey, secured tape down its flanks and painted the gaps with black hair dye, the result a small zebra that brays. You made the best of things.
It was the Russians his father truly admired, though it was unclear whether he saw any of the greats play, his veneration of them likely coming from games he studied. Their influence even contributed to his most enduring affectation when playing, a subtle yet damning flourish that saw him grind a piece into the board after advancing it, unsettling the most stoic of opponents. As a child he would watch his father play out endless positions alone, studying alternative paths a game could have taken, scrutinising the pieces for hours as if they held the code to life. Notation to every game was documented with deliberate strokes of a fountain pen in his leather-bound journal, its pages handmade from the finest Italian paper, the cover held together by a burnished copper clasp. He would listen to coverage of high profile matches unfolding on the other side of the world, playing out the game himself as moves stole through on an old valve radio, the air rich with the odour of hot dust. It was a surprise to everyone when his father stopped playing, the set stowed away instead of adorning the alcove mid-game. Only when Yasmeen returned from school one day and requested he show her how to play, were the pieces retrieved.
He prepares their lunch, leaving Yasmeen eyeing his weakened king-side pawns. Food is more plentiful since the ceasefire – olives, dates and bread abundant again. He salivates at the thought of za’atar spice for breakfast in the coming days, of fresh sardines barely an hour from the ocean. There is a rumour it will be safe to fish again soon. Later he will head out to the lemon grove his own grandfather planted in the fifties, check this modest source of income has not been destroyed. It amazes him how fruitful these citrus trees are, how hardy they have become, despite the parched soil. Much of their best arable land falls inside the buffer zone, where they are forbidden to farm.
Work is harder to come by since the Egyptians flooded the tunnels at Rafah. He is not sorry, his body too beleaguered to be hauling livestock and fuel underground for half a mile in appalling conditions. It is a younger man’s work. They say it is the biggest smuggling operation in the world, employing tens of thousands, a lifeline of their economy but also a death trap. Tunnel walls collapse, cables snap, fires break out. A cousin once tried to smuggle in a lion for the zoo. The animal, insufficiently sedated, awoke mid-tunnel, opening him up from neck to belly.
The day he started work there, the tunnel owner led him to a well shaft secreted inside a tent. Suspended above it was a crossbar with a pulley attached, below which hung a harness for lifting and lowering goods and people. As he sat in the harness, a spool of metal cable turned on a winch, lowering him the sixty feet into the twilit bowels of the earth. Five to ten of them worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, six days a week, communicating with the owner via a two-way radio that had receivers throughout the tunnel. They earned around $50 a shift but could go weeks or months between payments.
And so an economy functions; not as others do, but life finds its way. He knew people who went by tunnel to the Egyptian side of Rafah for medical treatment, and had heard of VIP routes for wealthy travellers, complete with air-conditioning and cell phone reception.
He misses the market at Rafah, the noise and fumes of generators blending with the braying of donkeys, the piquant smoke of shawarma spits, row upon row of stands selling all that had emerged from the tunnels. Were Yasmeen interested in the history of her country, he’d tell her how it has always been fought over. By Pharaohs, Hebrews, Philistines, Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs, Tatars, Ottomans. Later still Napoleon, the British, the Egyptians. Armies marching into the desert relied on the city’s fortress walls and gushing wells, while for merchants Gaza was a bountiful marine spur of the spice routes and agricultural trade. Travellers sought out its inexpensive tobacco; even now Israeli chefs covet Gaza’s strawberries and quail. Invaders to the shores these days would be greeted by bullet-pocked buildings, skeletal seaside cafés and fetid tide pools, while inland abandoned Israeli settlements lie decaying, their fields sanded over, their greenhouses ramshackle, weatherworn. Gaza’s airport, once a source of enormous pride, is now used only by herders grazing sheep, Bedouin feeding their camels.
But Yasmeen is only interested in the history of her grandfather. His father’s particular strength, his party piece, was playing multiple boards simultaneously, once going unbeaten against a circle of sixteen players, drawing only four games. Or he would challenge the local champion blindfolded, the moves communicated to him verbally by an arbiter, his father playing to the crowd, pretending he’d lost track of the position before triumphing. His style, at a time when conservatism had come to dominate, was unswervingly aggressive, even sacrificing his queen in order to secure an outrageous win several moves later. He played quickly whether games were time controlled or not, and became renowned for his ‘announced victories’, remarking to an incredulous opponent, ‘mate in five’.
He watches Yasmeen make a move and then retract it, a habit he needs to relieve her of. She loops a twine of hair round a finger in contemplation, every now and then emitting a sigh of self-admonishment at a strategy’s shortcomings. Her face, he realises, has a new configuration these days, the puppy fat of childhood receding to leave an angular, more exacting beauty.
The Israeli shell that damaged the black king that day also took away her brother, Hasan, and their mother. They had been told it was safe to return, a window of calm in which to gather belongings, to leave the relative safety of the UN facility. Yasmeen was tired so stayed behind, her brother insisting he come to help.
Less than a second after the explosion, rubble from the neighbour’s house surged through the windows and walls, half a home blasted into their own. When the air cleared and the ringing in his ears became something he could bear, he tried to stand but his legs would not obey him. Later, as he sat bleeding by the side of the road, he watched as someone carried his wife’s body from the debris, laying her down beside him as if putting her to bed. The next day a crane removed large segments of the two homes that had become one. They found Hasan shortly before dusk.
One of the last shells to fall this time landed in the cemetery at Jabalia, the dead – though as far as he knows not his dead – forced to partake in the suffering of the living, their bones scattered about broken gravestones, in need of a second burying.
Yasmeen calls to him. She has made her move, a simple pawn push, subtle but one that strengthens her position mid-board. He smiles, placing their food on the table. Once again he vows to mend the black king, to locate the leather-bound journal documenting her grandfather’s games. Chess, according to his father, is both art and science, the smoking out of an opponent’s king rarely achieved with cunning and intuition alone, requiring flair and bravura also. He believed in its poetry, its grace.
After lunch he will check on the birds. Last year, on what would have been his wife’s forty-first birthday, he converted the space where Hasan’s room once stood into an aviary, in which around twenty birds now dwell: pigeons, sparrows, hummingbirds, creatures injured in the fighting, brought to him in boxes or towels once word got out. He has become known as the Birdman, the one who fixes the birds, though most won’t fly again. Some respond well, adapting to their internment; others fight it, fight each other. In time a few can be released, the ones he deems sufficiently recovered to survive, to take their chances.
Yasmeen retreats the bishop, huffs at the realisation her attack was ill-conceived.
You have to anticipate all outcomes, he says. Don’t be impatient.
She pretends it is of little consequence, that another opening will present itself, optimism inherited from her mother. With practice she could be very good, perhaps as strong as her grandfather, who regularly beat the grandmasters of Europe and America in epic correspondence games. At the height of his prowess, there were invitations to tournaments and exhibitions around the world, but even when permission was granted for him to travel, he chose to stay, lauding his beloved city, the sea breeze that billowed in at night, the fresh tuna fishermen barbecued on the beach.
Why would I leave? he’d say.
They called his father the Grandmaster of Gaza, though he achieved no such rank officially, his status more one of quiet legend. It was said that by the age of seven he could beat everyone at his school, and, a few years later, everyone on the Strip. As worthy opponents became harder to find, he was enticed to the West Bank, to play in the cafés and marketplaces of Ramallah and Jenin, where wizened men four times his age would marvel at the bravura of his gambits, the apparent recklessness of his sacrifices. He had no formal instruction, the game learned by watching others play at family gatherings - the house on Sundays a place of great theatre and revelry - and later from books. When a game between uncles ended in a draw, he would often announce how one of them could have triumphed if only they’d persevered, demonstrating the sequence of moves to a mesmerised audience. Aged fourteen he was invited to play a visiting Hungarian master, a series of games witnessed by half of Palestine, the legend went. Two defeats and a draw later, the man returned to Budapest broken and, it was said, never to play again.
Yasmeen is bored now, the days without school long and empty. It is one thing to have an irritable teenager skulk about the house during evenings and weekends, quite another from dawn to dusk. He will send her to buy bird food later. They have been told the classrooms are too badly damaged to open for the new term, and so, in between their games of chess, he gives her lessons at the kitchen table, indulging his daughter’s appetite for knowledge. When the power is on – six hours a day, if they are lucky – he uses the computer given to them by a fan of his father’s, watching British wildlife documentaries, a little of which he understands. Or he encourages her to write an essay on one of the novels she read last term, sometimes a story or poem of her own. Science is her passion, but he knows little of how it’s taught, and in moments of levity Yasmeen laughs at his clumsy attempts to do so. He hopes she will become a doctor, though talk of such is rare these days; it is hard to look too far ahead while death walks so brazenly among them. She will be offered counselling when the school finally reopens, as all children are, to deal with the trauma of the last fifty days, to come to terms with it. She will refuse.
He savours the last of his morning coffee. Warm air brings on it the sound of falafel crackling in the fryer run by the old man at the end of the street. It is a strange time, once the euphoria of a ceasefire recedes, the realisation it will take years, a decade perhaps, just to see the city returned to how it was in June. What has changed for the better, people ask, for surely this cannot have been for nothing. It will be different this time, goes the old lie. Rubbish collections stopped more than a month ago and have yet to resume, scores of feral cats and dogs amassing at the piles of detritus. Redolent of some medieval tableau, donkey carts have been deployed to collect what they can. Two weeks ago the pumping stations, bereft of fuel, stopped working and raw sewage now seeps into the streets, the sludge drawing throngs of flies. They say it will find a way into the water supply soon.
Gazans adapt, though; he sees it everywhere. One of their neighbours runs a car on spent cooking oil, the waft of falafel and fries lingering in its wake. Others cram four at a time in the front seat of a taxi to get to work, the scene faintly comic. During the last war, when a shell killed the zoo’s only zebra, the owner's son bought a white donkey, secured tape down its flanks and painted the gaps with black hair dye, the result a small zebra that brays. You made the best of things.
It was the Russians his father truly admired, though it was unclear whether he saw any of the greats play, his veneration of them likely coming from games he studied. Their influence even contributed to his most enduring affectation when playing, a subtle yet damning flourish that saw him grind a piece into the board after advancing it, unsettling the most stoic of opponents. As a child he would watch his father play out endless positions alone, studying alternative paths a game could have taken, scrutinising the pieces for hours as if they held the code to life. Notation to every game was documented with deliberate strokes of a fountain pen in his leather-bound journal, its pages handmade from the finest Italian paper, the cover held together by a burnished copper clasp. He would listen to coverage of high profile matches unfolding on the other side of the world, playing out the game himself as moves stole through on an old valve radio, the air rich with the odour of hot dust. It was a surprise to everyone when his father stopped playing, the set stowed away instead of adorning the alcove mid-game. Only when Yasmeen returned from school one day and requested he show her how to play, were the pieces retrieved.
He prepares their lunch, leaving Yasmeen eyeing his weakened king-side pawns. Food is more plentiful since the ceasefire – olives, dates and bread abundant again. He salivates at the thought of za’atar spice for breakfast in the coming days, of fresh sardines barely an hour from the ocean. There is a rumour it will be safe to fish again soon. Later he will head out to the lemon grove his own grandfather planted in the fifties, check this modest source of income has not been destroyed. It amazes him how fruitful these citrus trees are, how hardy they have become, despite the parched soil. Much of their best arable land falls inside the buffer zone, where they are forbidden to farm.
Work is harder to come by since the Egyptians flooded the tunnels at Rafah. He is not sorry, his body too beleaguered to be hauling livestock and fuel underground for half a mile in appalling conditions. It is a younger man’s work. They say it is the biggest smuggling operation in the world, employing tens of thousands, a lifeline of their economy but also a death trap. Tunnel walls collapse, cables snap, fires break out. A cousin once tried to smuggle in a lion for the zoo. The animal, insufficiently sedated, awoke mid-tunnel, opening him up from neck to belly.
The day he started work there, the tunnel owner led him to a well shaft secreted inside a tent. Suspended above it was a crossbar with a pulley attached, below which hung a harness for lifting and lowering goods and people. As he sat in the harness, a spool of metal cable turned on a winch, lowering him the sixty feet into the twilit bowels of the earth. Five to ten of them worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, six days a week, communicating with the owner via a two-way radio that had receivers throughout the tunnel. They earned around $50 a shift but could go weeks or months between payments.
And so an economy functions; not as others do, but life finds its way. He knew people who went by tunnel to the Egyptian side of Rafah for medical treatment, and had heard of VIP routes for wealthy travellers, complete with air-conditioning and cell phone reception.
He misses the market at Rafah, the noise and fumes of generators blending with the braying of donkeys, the piquant smoke of shawarma spits, row upon row of stands selling all that had emerged from the tunnels. Were Yasmeen interested in the history of her country, he’d tell her how it has always been fought over. By Pharaohs, Hebrews, Philistines, Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs, Tatars, Ottomans. Later still Napoleon, the British, the Egyptians. Armies marching into the desert relied on the city’s fortress walls and gushing wells, while for merchants Gaza was a bountiful marine spur of the spice routes and agricultural trade. Travellers sought out its inexpensive tobacco; even now Israeli chefs covet Gaza’s strawberries and quail. Invaders to the shores these days would be greeted by bullet-pocked buildings, skeletal seaside cafés and fetid tide pools, while inland abandoned Israeli settlements lie decaying, their fields sanded over, their greenhouses ramshackle, weatherworn. Gaza’s airport, once a source of enormous pride, is now used only by herders grazing sheep, Bedouin feeding their camels.
But Yasmeen is only interested in the history of her grandfather. His father’s particular strength, his party piece, was playing multiple boards simultaneously, once going unbeaten against a circle of sixteen players, drawing only four games. Or he would challenge the local champion blindfolded, the moves communicated to him verbally by an arbiter, his father playing to the crowd, pretending he’d lost track of the position before triumphing. His style, at a time when conservatism had come to dominate, was unswervingly aggressive, even sacrificing his queen in order to secure an outrageous win several moves later. He played quickly whether games were time controlled or not, and became renowned for his ‘announced victories’, remarking to an incredulous opponent, ‘mate in five’.
He watches Yasmeen make a move and then retract it, a habit he needs to relieve her of. She loops a twine of hair round a finger in contemplation, every now and then emitting a sigh of self-admonishment at a strategy’s shortcomings. Her face, he realises, has a new configuration these days, the puppy fat of childhood receding to leave an angular, more exacting beauty.
The Israeli shell that damaged the black king that day also took away her brother, Hasan, and their mother. They had been told it was safe to return, a window of calm in which to gather belongings, to leave the relative safety of the UN facility. Yasmeen was tired so stayed behind, her brother insisting he come to help.
Less than a second after the explosion, rubble from the neighbour’s house surged through the windows and walls, half a home blasted into their own. When the air cleared and the ringing in his ears became something he could bear, he tried to stand but his legs would not obey him. Later, as he sat bleeding by the side of the road, he watched as someone carried his wife’s body from the debris, laying her down beside him as if putting her to bed. The next day a crane removed large segments of the two homes that had become one. They found Hasan shortly before dusk.
One of the last shells to fall this time landed in the cemetery at Jabalia, the dead – though as far as he knows not his dead – forced to partake in the suffering of the living, their bones scattered about broken gravestones, in need of a second burying.
Yasmeen calls to him. She has made her move, a simple pawn push, subtle but one that strengthens her position mid-board. He smiles, placing their food on the table. Once again he vows to mend the black king, to locate the leather-bound journal documenting her grandfather’s games. Chess, according to his father, is both art and science, the smoking out of an opponent’s king rarely achieved with cunning and intuition alone, requiring flair and bravura also. He believed in its poetry, its grace.
After lunch he will check on the birds. Last year, on what would have been his wife’s forty-first birthday, he converted the space where Hasan’s room once stood into an aviary, in which around twenty birds now dwell: pigeons, sparrows, hummingbirds, creatures injured in the fighting, brought to him in boxes or towels once word got out. He has become known as the Birdman, the one who fixes the birds, though most won’t fly again. Some respond well, adapting to their internment; others fight it, fight each other. In time a few can be released, the ones he deems sufficiently recovered to survive, to take their chances.
He asks those who bring them where the birds were found, so he can return them to the same patch of sky. He likes to watch them, their suspicion as he opens the door of the small wicker cage. There is a moment’s hesitancy as the terrain is assessed, as they scan for predators, and then they are gone.
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