Glancing at the great tank commander, Andrei saw in his gray, transparent eyes the same terror and oppressive perplexity that he felt himself. The tank commander was blinking rapidly, watching the Brilliant Strategist without understanding a thing. He was accustomed to thinking in terms of the movements through space of immense masses of machines and men; in his naivety and simplemindedness, he was accustomed to believing that everything would always be decided by his armor-plated armadas, rolling on confidently through foreign lands, and by the multi-engined airborne fortresses, stuffed with bombs and parachutists, sailing through the skies above foreign lands; he had done everything possible to make sure that this clear dream could be realized at any moment necessary… Of course, he had sometimes indulged in certain doubts as to whether the Brilliant Strategist was really so very brilliant and would be able to unequivocally determine that moment and the necessary directions of the armor-plated blows, but even so, it was impossible for him to understand how it was possible to sacrifice precisely him, so talented, so assiduous, and so unique, how it was possible to sacrifice everything that had been created by such immense labor and effort…
Andrei quickly removed him from the board, away with him, and set Wang in his place. Men in blue peaked caps squeezed through the ranks, grabbed the great tank commander crudely by the shoulders and arms, took away his weapon, punched the handsome, thoroughbred face with a crunch, and dragged him off to a prison cell, and the Brilliant Strategist leaned bank in his chair, narrowed his eyes in satisfaction, folded his hands together on his stomach, and started twiddling his thumbs. He was content. He had given a bishop for a pawn and was very content. And then Andrei suddenly realized that in the Strategist’s eyes everything looked entirely different; he had deftly and unexpectedly removed the bishop that had been hindering him and received a pawn into the bargain—that was how things looked in reality…
The Great Strategist was more than a strategist. A strategist always circles around within the limits of his strategy. The Great Strategist had abandoned all limits. Strategy was merely an insignificant element of his game; it was as incidental for him as it was for Andrei—a casual kind of move made on a whim. The Great Strategist had become great precisely because he had realized (or perhaps he had known since the day he was born) that it is not the one who knows how to play according to all the rules who wins; the one who wins is the one who is able to abandon all the rules at any moment when it is necessary, to impose his own rules, unknown to his opponent, on the game and, when necessary, abandon them too. Whoever said that one’s own pieces are less dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent? Rubbish, one’s own pieces are far more dangerous than the pieces of one’s opponent! Whoever said that the king has to be protected and moved out of danger of check? Rubbish, there are no kings that cannot be replaced if necessary by some knight or even pawn. Whoever said that a pawn, after breaking through to the final row of squares, is obliged to become another piece? Nonsense, sometimes it can be far more useful to leave it as a pawn—let it stand on the edge of the abyss as an example to the other pawns…
The damned cap kept sliding farther and farther down over Andrei’s eyes, making it harder and harder for him to follow what was going on around him. However, he could hear that the dignified silence no longer existed in the halclass="underline" he heard the clattering of tableware, a babble of many voices, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up. He caught a whiff of kitchen fumes. Someone declared in a loud, squeaky voice that rang through the entire house, “Georges! I’m deviwishwy hungwy. Teww them to bwing me a gwass of cuwaçao and some pine-app-uw, quickwy.”
“I beg your pardon,” someone said with austere politeness, right in Andrei’s ear, squeezing in between Andrei and the board—he caught a glimpse of black coattails and polished lacquer shoes, and a hand raised high in the air, bearing a loaded tray, drifted over his head. And a white hand also placed a glass of champagne by Andrei’s elbow.
The Brilliant Strategist had finally tapped and kneaded his papirosa into a state fit for smoking. He lit up and hazy, bluish smoke drifted out of his hairy nostrils, getting tangled in his magnificent but rather sparse mustache.
And meanwhile the game continued. Andrei defended convulsively, retreated, maneuvered, and so far he had managed to act so that only people who were already dead anyway were lost. There they had carried away Donald with a bullet through his heart, and beside the wineglass on the table they had placed his pistol and suicide note: “Rejoice not in arriving, in departing do not grieve. Give the pistol to Voronin. It will come in handy sometime.” And there his brother and father had already carried the body of his grandmother, Evgenia Romanovna, sewn into old sheets, down the icebound stairway and added it to the stack of corpses… There now they had buried his father in a mass grave somewhere in the Piskariovskoye Cemetery, and the morose driver, sheltering his unshaven face from the biting wind, had driven his steamroller to and fro over the frozen corpses, tamping them down so that more could be fitted into a single grave… But the Great Strategist generously, cheerfully, and sardonically disposed of friends and strangers alike, and all his well-groomed men with little beards and medals shot themselves in the temple, threw themselves out windows, died as a result of hideous tortures, trampled over each other’s dead bodies to become queens and still remained pawns.
And Andrei carried on agonizingly trying to understand what sort of game this was that he was playing, what its purpose was, what the rules were, and why all this was happening, and he was transfixed to the depths of his soul by the question: How had he become the adversary of the Great Strategist—he, a faithful soldier in the Strategist’s army, prepared at any moment to die for him, prepared to kill for him, not knowing any other goals except his goals, not believing in any means except the means indicated by him, not distinguishing the plans of the Great Strategist from the plans of the Universe? He greedily gulped down the champagne, without tasting anything at all, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a blinding flash of insight. But of course, he wasn’t an adversary of the Great Strategist at all. He was his ally, his faithful helper. That was it—the main rule of this game. It was played not by adversaries but by partners, allies; the game had only one set of goalposts, nobody lost, everybody won… apart, of course, from those who would not survive until the victory.
Someone touched his legs and spoke under the table. “Would you be so kind as to move your foot?” Andrei looked down at his feet. There was a dark, glistening puddle down there, and a bald dwarf on his hands and knees was fidgeting beside it, holding a dried-out rag covered in dark blotches. Andrei suddenly felt nauseous and started looking at the board again. He had already sacrificed all the dead; now he only had the living left. The Great Strategist at the other side of the table curiously watched what he was doing and even seemed to be nodding in approval, baring his small, sparse teeth in a polite smile, and at that point Andrei felt that he couldn’t go on. It was a great game, the most noble of all games, a game in the name of the greatest of all goals that humankind had ever set itself, but Andrei couldn’t carry on playing it any longer.
“I’ll step outside…” he said hoarsely. “Just for a moment.”
It came out so quietly that he hardly even heard himself, but everybody immediately looked at him. Silence fell in the hall again, and somehow the visor of his cap didn’t bother him anymore, and now he could see them clearly, eye to eye, all of his own people, all of those who were still alive.