The bench by Feneketlen Lake looked exactly like every other bench: green-painted metal, slightly sunken in the middle, a brass plaque at its foot bearing some donor’s name from 1987. But the old man always sat on that one bench, always in the same posture: both palms flat on his thighs, the chessboard hovering between the bench and a folding camp table as if gravity itself knew better than to touch it.
Near the park’s entrance, by Kosztolányi Dezső Square, two vending machines stood side by side — one for coffee, one for soft drinks — and between them you could always find someone patting their pockets for change, or freeing a stuck paper cup from the machine with one practiced punch. From there the path split: one way led to the duck pond, the other circled the lake past fourteen benches in all, of which only one was the bench everyone who knew the place simply called “the chess bench.”
On the September afternoon I first sat down across from him, I hadn’t slept properly in three days. My work laptop was in my bag, still on, because the client in Hamburg wanted the updated quote by nine that evening, and I’d decided I would rather sit by the lake for half an hour than go home to an apartment where the dishes had been waiting since the previous Tuesday.
I worked at a risk-assessment firm called Rékai & Partners, on the sixth floor, in an open-plan office where twelve people stared at twelve monitors, and where the steady hum of the air conditioning was the one sound that genuinely connected all of us. On my desk sat three coffee mugs in a row, all from the same week, because there was never time to wash them, only to refill them. My team lead, Katalin, had sent a message first thing that morning saying “just a quick question” — which turned into four rounds of email and a half-hour phone call about why our model was underestimating flood damage in a county that hadn’t seen serious flooding in a decade, though management insisted that “with climate change, anything could happen now.”
By the time I finally got out of the building, my feet didn’t hurt anymore so much as feel borrowed, as if I’d lent them to someone who’d treated them worse than they deserved. I headed for Feneketlen Lake because it was the closest strip of green between the office and my apartment, and because something about the water’s surface not reacting to anything I did always calmed me — not to the laugh I’d given a deadline through gritted teeth, not to the way I stood quietly watching the ducks like a completely different person.
The old man looked up when I stopped in front of his bench.
“Seat’s free,” I said, because I didn’t have a better opening line.
“Free,” he repeated, and tilted his head toward the seat as if we were in a restaurant and he were the headwaiter.
I sat down. The board was already set up, not mid-game but in a position which, much later, once I knew all his openings by heart, I recognized: the Italian opening, eight moves in, the exact moment where Black always makes the same mistake.
“You play?” he asked.
“Learned in college. Badly.”
“No disadvantage here,” he said, and nudged his white pawn forward.
That was how it started. I didn’t know his name; he didn’t ask mine. We just played, in silence, with the gray herons circling above the lake and the footsteps of some jogger rounding the gravel path. I resigned after seventeen moves, because by the twentieth it was clear my rook was trapped, and I had no interest in watching the slow execution.
“Early,” the old man said, when I tipped over my own king.
“I’d have lost.”
“Maybe. Not certain.”
That was the whole first day. I stood up, said thank you, he nodded, and I went home to finish the Hamburg quote, which I ended up sending at half past ten, two hours past deadline, and nobody said a word, because at Rékai & Partners that kind of slippage had long since become the norm.
*
I learned his name two weeks later, when a woman with three dachshunds on three different-colored leashes stopped by the bench and called out:
“Afternoon, László! Winning again?”
“Not yet decided,” the old man answered, tipping his head toward me. “She’s still learning.”
The woman was Rozi, and her three dachshunds — as it turned out — were named Bobby, Garry, and Vlad, because her late husband had loved chess history and she hadn’t wanted the names to vanish along with him. That was the first sign that this park was full of people who each had their own small ceremony, and that the benches weren’t simply benches but outposts.
László was seventy-four, a retired structural engineer, and — this I only learned months later, when he started talking about a renovation of the Rákóczi Bridge and couldn’t stop — he knew exactly how many tons of load a forty-year-old reinforced concrete beam could bear. His wife had been named Ilonka. He said nothing about her in the first few months, only that he always bought two coffees at the machine by the entrance, and that one of them was always cold by the time he reached the bench.
I was Zsófia, twenty-nine, and I’d believed working at an insurance risk-assessment firm meant staring at spreadsheets eight hours a day. In my first year there I learned it actually meant eleven or twelve hours a day, and that a person becomes grateful for every half hour not spent in front of a monitor.
The third time, László asked why I always came around four on Friday afternoons.
“Because they let you leave early if you say you have a doctor’s appointment.”
“And they believe you?”
“So far.”
That made him laugh, which was rare for him, because by then I already knew that his smile was really just one corner of his mouth pulling sideways, not a true laugh.
It was on that third occasion that Feri first appeared, watching us from the neighboring bench in a buttoned cardigan, and after our tenth move he got up, came over, and stood behind me, leaning over the board to see what I was planning.
“Not that,” he said. “Should’ve been the knight.”
“Didn’t ask,” I answered, because I didn’t yet know how to talk to him.
“Nobody asked Pestalozzi either, when he was explaining things to the kids in the back row,” he shot back, and that was the first sentence that told me Feri had once been a teacher, and that he would never stop teaching, no matter who sat across from or beside him.
László only said, “Leave her be, Feri, she learns from her own mistakes,” at which Feri retreated huffily to his own bench — only to return at the very next move, because he was incapable of holding back an opinion.
Feri’s story unfolded slowly, in small pieces, the way old men tell their lives: never all at once, only when something in the present reminded them of something old. He’d taught mathematics for thirty-two years at a primary school in Kőbánya, and claimed that in all that time exactly one inspector had praised him — in 1991, after a lesson in which he’d improvised half of it on the Fibonacci sequence. His son lived in Toronto and called once a year, always on the same day, the day after Christmas, because “the international rates are cheaper then,” as Feri put it, though nobody believed that was really the reason they only spoke that once. His wife hadn’t died; she’d simply left, years before, with a librarian who loved Bach cantatas, which Feri had never forgiven — neither the librarian nor Bach.
“I’m not as philosophical as László,” he told me once, while László had gone to the kiosk for tea. “He accepts things. I just get used to them, which isn’t the same.”
*
Over the next year, our Friday four o’clock slowly slid into Saturday ten in the morning, because weekend mornings were calmer, and László preferred playing in sunlight to the cooling afternoon. He always opened with e4, the king’s pawn two squares forward, and when I once asked why always the same move, he said:
“Because a man’s life is uncertain enough that he should at least know his first move.”
That was the first sentence of his I memorized word for word, one I would quote back to him years later, under entirely different circumstances, just to see if he still remembered it.
The park’s other regulars gradually became part of the backdrop, the way a play’s supporting cast makes the main story feel hollow without them. Feri, who never played but watched every game from the next bench and, every seventh move or so, remarked that he’d have done it differently. Timea, who brought two-year-old Bence to feed the ducks every single day, and who once stopped behind us to say her son already knew the knight’s name, because László had once taught him how it jumps in an L-shape. An elderly couple who never sat down, only walked laps around the lake, nodding at us at the end of every circuit as if we too were part of their walk.
By the time Bence turned three, he had his own private names for the pieces, nothing like what the books called them: the knight was “horsie,” the bishop was “slanty-man,” and once, when László accidentally knocked over his own queen with a bad move, Bence shouted, “Uncle Laci, the queen fell down!” — at which the whole bench, Feri included, burst out laughing, and that line stuck with us for years, trotted out whenever one of us blundered.
The walk around the lake wore a different face each season. In spring the willows along the bank turned entirely green, and the herons returned to the little island in the middle, which everyone just called Heron Island, though some old map surely gave it another name. In autumn the plane trees dropped their leaves onto the board so thickly that a chestnut would occasionally land exactly where the rook stood, and László always brushed it aside before it could influence his move. In winter, if it was too cold to sit, we’d retreat to the little kiosk at the edge of the park, where they served mulled wine and tea, and where the woman behind the counter, Margit, always kept a table by the window for us, “for the chess players,” as she put it, as if that were our profession.
Margit once admitted that she too had learned chess at some point, for her son’s sake, who’d played competitively for a while in a district club before switching to motocross, “because at least that’s faster, and you don’t have to sit in a chair for hours.” From that day on, whenever the kiosk was empty, she’d step out for a few minutes and watch the game standing in her apron before heading back behind the counter, because “the mulled wine can’t wait.”
Rozi stopped by every time, and every time gave us a full report on which dachshund had eaten something it shouldn’t have. László rarely answered her much, but he always listened, and once, after she’d walked on, he told me: “A man only really starts talking to his dogs after he’s lost someone who used to listen.” He didn’t say who he meant, but he didn’t need to.
Timea’s life, as it slowly emerged, wasn’t quite as peaceful as the duck-feeding afternoons suggested. Her husband, Bence’s father, worked night security shifts, and their only shared time was weekend mornings — which Timea nonetheless spent alone with the boy in the park, because her husband preferred to sleep whenever he could. Once, when Bence was home sick with a fever and Timea came down alone, just “to get ten minutes of air while the neighbor looks in on him,” László asked if everything was all right with her.
“I’m tired,” Timea said, and it was the first time she’d spoken of anything other than ducks or Bence’s latest word.
“Motherhood isn’t a job you get paid for, but it’s still a job,” László said, and that was the closest I ever heard him come to giving advice to someone who hadn’t asked for it.
From that day on, Timea sometimes sat with us for a few minutes before moving on to the ducks, and though she never learned to play, she always brought a thermos of coffee, which she and we drank from together, as if that were the toll for sitting on our bench.
One June Saturday, the park’s management announced a “Summer Chess Afternoon” by the lake, where anyone could bring their own board, and a prize was raffled off at the end — a bottle of champagne and a fruit basket, presented by a district council member who had clearly come only for the photo opportunity. László took part reluctantly, grumbling that “this is a circus, not chess,” but ended up reaching the final against a man much younger than him in a denim jacket, who turned out to compete officially at a local chess club. The final game lasted forty-five minutes, with Feri loudly counting out each move, Timea bouncing with Bence on her hip, and when László finally forced a draw with an elegant perpetual check, the whole small crowd — maybe fifteen people — rose to their feet and cheered as though they’d just watched a national team match.
“Didn’t win,” he told me afterward, the champagne bottle tucked under his arm, unopened, because he was saving it “for an evening that deserves wine.”
“Didn’t lose, either.”
“Exactly. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you for years.”
Seeing the event’s success, the district council decided to hold the Summer Chess Afternoon every year after that, and though László complained every single time that it was “an unnecessary circus,” every June he showed up with the same reluctant expression and made it to the final every time but one, when a twelve-year-old girl, brought by her father from the county competition, beat him cleanly inside three openings — after which László spent two weeks repeating that “the future is already here, and it doesn’t ask permission.”
He never opened the champagne alone. Every winter, when the first snow fell, he’d bring it out from the kitchen cupboard and share it with us at the kiosk table, saying that “a bottle drunk alone is just punishment, not a celebration.”
My bad habit — resigning too early — never went away. László let it slide sometimes; other times he didn’t.
“Not lost yet,” he said one October Saturday, after I’d lost my queen’s bishop and already started resetting the board to the starting position.
“But my rook’s trapped, and in two moves it’ll take my pawn too.”
“Even so. Keep playing, and see what happens.”
I didn’t win that game. But it lasted eleven moves longer than I would have given him otherwise, and at the end, when my king was checkmated, I told him it was the first defeat I didn’t mind so much.
“See,” he said. “It’s not the win that matters. It’s the length.”
Years later I still wasn’t sure whether he’d meant that about chess, or about something else entirely.
Once I asked where my habit came from, and I, surprised at my own honesty, told him that my father had taught me chess as a child, and that he’d always pointed out my mistakes too fast, too sharply, so that by the time I was ten I’d learned it was better to resign early than watch someone else prove how badly I’d blundered.
“Your father was a bad teacher,” László said simply, neither accusing nor forgiving, just stating it as fact.
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Certain. A good teacher lets the mistake reveal itself, and only points it out once it’s already happened. Until then he just watches. And waits.”
I didn’t answer, but I thought my next move through longer than usual, and I didn’t resign when my rook came under threat.
There was another time, a rainy April afternoon, when we took shelter in the kiosk, and I told him I was thinking of quitting my job, because the work meant nothing — just spreadsheets everyone would forget in three months. László was quiet for a while, stirring his tea, then said:
“When I calculated the beams for the Rákóczi Bridge, ninety-nine percent of the people who ever crossed it never knew those numbers existed. They just walked across, and it didn’t collapse under them. That was the entire result of my work: that nothing happened.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No. But similar. You work so that something doesn’t happen either — so an insurer doesn’t go bankrupt when the flood comes, so the people whose life savings sit under that roof don’t lose everything at once. It’s not meant to be seen. It’s meant so that no one ever has to see what would have happened if you hadn’t done it properly.”
I didn’t quit that day, or in the months after, but whenever I felt my spreadsheets meant nothing, I thought back to that bridge, which I must have crossed a thousand times without once asking myself why it hadn’t fallen down under me.
This was also the period when he learned to play chess. At his army service in Kalocsa, where during the duller hours of training a sergeant — oddly also named László — had handed out a hand-carved, incomplete wooden set to the men, and anyone who couldn’t play got assigned to latrine duty. “I learned the rules in a week, because I had no other choice,” he said, adding that his own father had never once sat down at a board with him, believing chess to be “a gentleman’s waste of time,” and expecting instead that his son help him mix cement on Sundays. László became a structural engineer anyway, not a bricklayer, and said chess had helped with that too: “You learn to see ahead, to know what happens if you set the stone down wrong right now.”
The story of the Rákóczi Bridge renovation also unfolded properly around this time, piece by piece, week by week, like a novel published in installments. He told me that in 1986 he’d been responsible for the calculation showing that one of the bridge’s support beams didn’t need full replacement, only reinforcement, saving the firm several million forints — though he never received recognition or extra pay for it, only his boss telling him, “Good work, Laci.” Thirty years on he still remembered exactly which meter, which column, a subordinate of his had measured wrong, and how he’d caught it in time.
*
In our second winter, he started talking about Ilonka, quite by accident, when snow falling on the bench forced us to retreat to the nearby tea house, and there, over a steaming cup of mulled wine — which he’d ordered himself, saying his doctor allowed him one glass — he told me his wife had died four years earlier, and that the two of them had started right here, on this very bench, only in reverse: he had been the beginner, and Ilonka had always known what to play.
“She was better than me,” he said. “Never told her, but she was better.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Because then she’d have known it too.”
That was the first sad thing he ever told me, and the first time I didn’t try to fix the sentence with some kind reply. I just let it sit there on the table between the two cups, and he let it too, then pulled his board from his pocket — a folding magnetic travel set he carried with him always, rain or no rain — and set it on the table.
“Come on, show me something with that brain of yours, not just your stomach,” he said, and it was the closest thing to a joke he’d ever offered me.
I asked how he’d met Ilonka, and he, keeping his eyes on the board, told me they’d met at a youth-league dance in 1969, and that he’d walked into the hall limping, having twisted his ankle on a hike the week before, and Ilonka had been the one to ask him for the very first dance, “out of pity,” as he always told it, though his wife had never once confirmed that version in her lifetime.
“Did she teach you to play?” I asked.
“She taught me everything I’m good at. Chess, patience, not shouting when something doesn’t go as planned. Only cooking she couldn’t teach me, because she hated it too.”
“So who cooks for you now?”
“The frozen food industry,” he said, and on that first real shared laugh of ours I felt something had shifted between us: we weren’t just partners across a board anymore, but two people who’d started trusting each other with what they chose to say.
*
In my third year, I got promoted at work, which should have made things easier but instead doubled my responsibilities, barely changed my salary, and replaced the Hamburg client with three new ones, each convinced their project mattered most. There was an evening — a Wednesday, I remember exactly, because the next morning there was an auditors’ meeting — when I sat in the office bathroom behind a closed door, not crying, just sitting, trying to remember the last time I’d eaten something that hadn’t come from a vending machine. My assistant, Petra, knocked to ask if I was okay, and I said “sure,” which was the first lie I told that day, though not the last.
For three months I didn’t make it to the park. There was a moment, in the tenth week, when I’d already composed my resignation letter in my head, sentence by sentence, the way you rewrite tomorrow’s speech before falling asleep. I never submitted it. Instead I bought a small, pocket-sized magnetic chess set and kept it in my desk drawer at work, and on the worst days, when I didn’t know what else to do with the tension, I’d pull it out, set up the first eight moves of the Italian opening, and just look at it, without ever continuing. Petra once asked what it was, and I said, “a friend taught me this,” to which she only nodded, as if that were answer enough — and really, it was.
When I finally went back, on a gray February Saturday, László sat in the same spot, wearing the same coat, and he didn’t look at me like someone who’d been hurt but like someone who’d been counting.
“Thirteen weeks,” he said, before I could say anything.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not saying it to keep score. Saying it because Feri made a bet that you weren’t coming back, and now he’s lost a bottle of pálinka.”
That made me laugh, and behind the laugh, I think, for the first time, I felt a kind of gratitude we don’t often get in life: that someone had waited, and hadn’t asked for an explanation.
From that day on, the pálinka bet became a permanent fixture of our bench’s life. Feri renewed it after every long absence of mine, always for a bottle of good plum brandy, always on the condition that “if she’s gone more than three weeks, I win” — and over the years he lost so many that László once told him he ought to open a little shop among the benches just for the bottles he’d amassed.
“One day I’ll win,” Feri grumbled.
“I’m afraid that’ll be the day I don’t come back,” I said, half joking.
“Then I’d rather keep losing,” he answered, and in that sentence there was enough quiet vulnerability wrapped inside an old teacher’s manner that I didn’t dare push the subject any further.
It was around this time that I began ending things with Dávid — after four years, quietly, by mutual agreement, which didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt — though I told László little about it, only that “there’s a change happening in my life,” to which he replied only that “change is the one constant,” and advanced his queen’s pawn.
A month later, once I’d cleared out my half of our shared apartment and was staying temporarily with a friend, László asked why I hadn’t brought “that young man” I used to mention now and then.
“Because there’s nothing left to mention.”
“You broke up.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you haven’t said his name in four months, and now you suddenly have the look of someone who’s finally set down a heavy suitcase but doesn’t yet know what to do with her hands.”
He didn’t ask anything further. He simply let me make my move, and when I made a bad one — sending my queen somewhere indefensible, just to do something with the tension — he didn’t punish it right away. He gave me two more moves before cutting it down, and that was his way of saying there was no rush.
*
In the spring of my fourth year, my company offered me a secondment to Vienna — fourteen months, double the salary, and a project that would have been professionally foolish to turn down. On the Saturday I told László I was leaving, he was mid-move with his rook, and his hand paused in the air for a moment.
“Vienna’s far,” he said.
“Three hours by train.”
“Then it’s not that far.”
I asked how he’d manage without a partner, and he said Feri had always known how to play, just been too lazy to bother, and now he’d finally be forced to. Then, as I stood to leave, he said something I wasn’t prepared for:
“Ilonka used to say the best chess games are the ones you never finish, because those are the ones that stay longest in memory.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just hugged him, which I’d never done before, and he let me, patting my back with both hands like someone trying to calm a piece of delicate porcelain.
*
My Vienna apartment was in a fifth-district building, in the Margareten neighborhood, in a room furnished with temporary company furniture, where nothing belonged to me except a few books unpacked from my suitcase and the small magnetic chess set I placed on the nightstand every night, as if that somehow brought the park closer. At work I collaborated most with an Austrian colleague, Lukas, who was kind but never understood why I’d laugh when he said, “chess is a pointless pastime anyway, since the computer always plays better.”
In those first months I tried to find Vienna’s equivalent of our bench. The Stadtpark had a few fixed stone tables where older men gathered on Saturday mornings, and once I sat down among them, hoping to find something like what I’d left behind in Budapest. But when I offered to play one of the men, he just said, in German, “this is our spot here,” and though he wasn’t rude about it, and though I knew it wasn’t personal, I went home and wrote my first letter to László that same evening, because I realized it wasn’t chess I missed — it was having someone who knew exactly which move I usually gave up on.
For the first three months I wrote him letters — on paper, because he said he had no email address and didn’t want one. His replies were short, handwritten, in small letters, and always contained one chess move I had to continue on an imagined board. “Qd4–e5,” he wrote once, and I had no idea which game he was continuing, but I answered, “Nc6–d4,” and this went on for months — two people playing chess with each other on an invisible board, one of them sitting in a Vienna office tower running risk models, the other on a Budapest park bench in a winter coat.
On New Year’s Eve I was alone in the Vienna apartment, because my colleagues had all gone home to their families, and I told everyone I “loved being alone,” which I half believed myself. At midnight I went out onto the balcony, watched the fireworks over the Prater, and dialed Rozi’s number, which I’d somehow gotten from a mutual acquaintance before leaving, just to ask how László was doing. Rozi picked up amid dog barking and firecracker noise and said she was actually with him right then, playing chess, and that “he’s fine, just misses you, though he’d never say it out loud.” I could hear László’s voice in the background asking who’d called, and Rozi answering, “nobody important,” which we both laughed about weeks later when she described the same scene from her own side in a letter.
Once I sent him a photograph too, of an old ivory chess set I’d found in a Vienna antique shop and nearly bought, then put back on the shelf because it was too expensive, and because somehow it felt unfair to play with such a beautiful set when a worn, incomplete plastic one was waiting on our bench. Three weeks passed with no reply to the photo. When he finally wrote, he said only: “Nice. But our queen’s missing her head, and somehow that suits us better.” I didn’t entirely understand what he meant at the time, but it comforted me all the same.
By the ninth month, the letters grew sparser. I assumed he’d simply gotten busier — maybe playing more with Feri, maybe finding some new acquaintance on the bench. When I came home for two weeks at Christmas, I went down to the park, but on the bench sat a strange couple, a young man and woman eating sandwiches, with no connection whatsoever to chess.
I found Feri instead, sitting on the neighboring bench, in his coat, alone, his chessboard folded shut in his hands, like a book with no one left to read it to.
“Where’s László?”
Feri turned toward me slowly, and I told myself at the time that there was something in his eyes I didn’t want to see.
“He fell, love. In October. His hip.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Tell you how? You were in Vienna. I don’t have an email address to reach you with, and he didn’t want us to ‘make a big thing of it.’ Said he’d write himself once he felt better.”
“And is he better?”
Feri lowered his head and pulled a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket — a hospital visitor’s card, with the hospital’s name and a room number scrawled on it in ballpoint pen.
“Go see for yourself.”
*
I found him at Szent János Hospital, on an orthopedic ward, where the corridors smelled at once of disinfectant and something penetrating and sweet, which I later learned was the afternoon pudding. At reception a tired nurse told me he was in room 214, and that “regular visiting hours” ended at five, but if I hurried there’d be no problem. The elevator wasn’t working, so I took the stairs two at a time, wondering the whole way up what I would say if he didn’t remember me, or if something worse awaited me than I’d prepared for.
László sat on the edge of the bed, not lying down, as if resisting the entire hospital protocol with one small act of rebellion. His left hip had a prosthesis in it; his hand trembled slightly when he reached for me, and his face was paler than I remembered.
“You see,” he said, and there was something in his voice that wasn’t his usual dry humor, more a kind of embarrassment. “A man at seventy-four still thinks his legs will last forever.”
“Why didn’t you write?”
“Write what? That I fell on a patch of ice like a beginner? That I lay alone in my apartment for three weeks before the neighbor noticed I wasn’t taking out the trash?”
That last sentence landed hard. Another patient lay in the room, a middle-aged man, asleep, the television on the wall silently running a cooking show, and under the window a vase held wilted carnations that clearly no one visited often enough to replace. When the doctor, a young woman with an exhausted face, came in that afternoon, she told me in the corridor only that the hip replacement was “holding well,” but that “given his age and general condition” recovery would take longer than usual, and that it would help if someone visited regularly, “because these patients heal faster when they have a reason to get out of bed.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out of my bag the thing I’d been carrying around ever since Vienna, without quite knowing why: a small magnetic travel board I’d bought at a Viennese antique shop because it somehow resembled his old ones.
“Thought you might be bored.”
László looked the board over, then looked at me, and his eyes went briefly wet in a way I’d never seen from him before.
“I’ll open with e4,” he said, and his voice was back to its old, dry self.
*
The rehabilitation took eight weeks, and during that time I went up to see him whenever I could — sometimes after work, sometimes stealing half an hour during a Vienna project call, locked in a bathroom so no one would see how different my face looked when it wasn’t about work.
In the first two weeks he could barely focus on the board for more than ten minutes at a time. The painkillers clouded his gaze, and once, when he put his bishop on a square that simply didn’t exist under the rules, I quietly corrected it and said nothing, letting him continue as if nothing had happened. Another afternoon I arrived just as a nurse was trying to get him to take a few steps with his walker, and he snapped at her more angrily than I’d ever heard him speak, “leave me alone, I’m not an idiot,” at which the nurse left the room, and László, catching sight of me in the doorway, looked ashamed and said only, “Don’t be angry at her. She’s just doing her job.”
There was a day, toward the end of the second week, when he greeted me in such a foul mood I nearly turned back at the door. He said he was “tired of being visited,” that he “had no interest in moving pieces when he couldn’t even move his own leg properly,” and that I should “go home and do something useful instead.” I was stung, and had already put my coat back on when I called back from the doorway:
“I’m coming next week too. Whether you like it or not.”
He didn’t answer, but when I showed up the following time, the board was already set up on the bedside table, and instead of an apology he simply said, “I’ll open with e4,” as if that were the only language he’d ever known for saying he was sorry.
In the third week he had a better day, sitting up on the edge of the bed under his own strength, and when I walked in, the board was already set on the rolling hospital table.
“Winning today,” he announced, like a declaration.
“Big words from a hospital bed.”
“Exactly why. A man needs something he can be certain of.”
He didn’t win that day, but came very close, and when the game ended there was a satisfaction on his face I’d only ever seen before in the park, when the sun hit the lake at just the right angle on its way down.
By the sixth week he could walk the corridor, and that was when he started telling me what those three weeks alone in his apartment had been like before the neighbor noticed. He told me he’d fallen on the kitchen tiles and couldn’t get up, so he’d spent the night there on a folded towel, and in the morning, once he saw no one was coming, he’d started replaying in his head the most famous games he knew, just to keep from thinking about the pain.
“Whose games did you replay?”
“Capablanca’s. And ours too. By the tenth one I couldn’t remember exactly how it went, so I made up the ending.”
“How did it end?”
“I beat you. Finally.”
In the seventh week came the day a nurse walked in to take his blood pressure just as László asked when I’d be coming back from Vienna for good.
“Two months.”
“Until then I’ll be here, or at home. Not at the park.”
“I know.”
“I’m afraid,” he said, and that was the only time I ever heard him say that word.
I didn’t answer right away. Then, slowly, I said something that surprised even me:
“Then I’ll bring the bench here.”
I didn’t mean it seriously. But the next day I called the district council and asked whether you could borrow a park bench for a hospital courtyard, to which they naturally said no — but the hospital’s porter, an older man named Jenő, who’d overheard part of my phone call, suggested that the hospital courtyard had a garden-furniture storeroom, and that we could bring out a small table and two chairs if I just asked the caretaker.
Jenő, once we’d brought out the table and the two chairs, fetched a third one for himself too, “so there’s somewhere to sit if I get a free moment,” and though the first time he just stood there awkwardly, by the second week he was sitting down too, and like Feri, he started commenting on our moves — though he was more interested in László’s bridge stories than in chess analysis.
“Did you build something yourself?” László asked him once.
“Been a porter thirty years. I think I hold things together more than I build them.”
“That’s no small thing either,” László said, and it was one of those sentences he tossed off so casually that you only realized, hours later, how true it was.
That was how, in the inner garden beneath room 214, under a plane tree, a temporary “bench” of ours came to be, where we played for the six weeks the rehabilitation lasted.
In the eighth and final week, a physical therapist, a brisk but friendly man named Norbert, started coming out to the courtyard every day to check on the walking exercises, and once, spotting our board on the little table, he stopped and asked if he might watch.
“Depends whether you comment the way Feri does,” László said.
“Who’s Feri?”
“A friend who always knows better than me.”
Norbert laughed and sat down in the third chair Jenő had brought out, and from then on, every afternoon he had time, he sat with us for ten or fifteen minutes before continuing his rounds to the other patients. On the last day, when László was finally discharged, Norbert came over and told us that he “rarely sees someone regain their balance this fast,” and that in his opinion “a patient’s motivation matters just as much as the physical therapy.” László only replied that “my motivation is sixty-four squares, and plays with me on Fridays,” which made all of us laugh, including his roommate, who up to that point had never said a single word to us, only listened to the television.
*
I got a message from Dávid in those weeks, once he’d somehow heard — probably through mutual friends — that I’d come home from Vienna because of László’s accident. All he wrote was: “Hope the old man pulls through. You were always good at sticking by someone — just not always in your own affairs.” I didn’t reply right away, and when I finally wrote a few lines, I said only “thank you,” feeling no need to explain further, because I realized it was no longer his business what happened to me by that lake.
My Vienna posting ended two months earlier than planned, because when I told my project lead I wanted to go home while László recovered, I got surprising flexibility: the remaining work went to a junior colleague, Mira, who was glad for the chance to run a project on her own. Back home, I didn’t return to Rékai & Partners but started at a smaller firm, where the hours were shorter, the pay nearly the same, and where my new team lead’s first interview question was, “what do you do when you’re not working,” to which I answered that I play chess with an older gentleman by Feneketlen Lake — an answer she apparently found, oddly, to be a good one.
When László finally got to go home, in March, the park still looked wintry, ice floating on the lake, and Rozi was by now walking four dachshunds, having adopted a rescue dog in the meantime whom — to my surprise — she’d named Kasparov. Our bench stood exactly where it always had, only the paint more worn, and someone had stuck a small sticker to it: “Old men play chess here.” László sat down more slowly, holding the armrest with his right hand like a handrail, but he sat.
“Shall we?” he asked.
“Let’s.”
He opened with e4, as always. I defended, as always, and nothing remarkable happened in the first twenty moves. But on the twenty-first, when my rook was trapped — exactly as it had been six years earlier, in our very first week — I didn’t tip over my king.
“Playing on,” I said.
László looked up, and for a moment it seemed he recognized exactly what was happening.
“Not resigning?”
“No.”
The game lasted another twenty moves. I tried to build a counterattack on the kingside, sacrificed a bishop to open the file for my rook, and for a moment, around move thirty, it seemed I might actually force a draw. László’s brow furrowed, his hand froze above his queen, and he thought longer than at any other point that day. But he found the continuation anyway: his queen’s pawn, which I’d ignored for hours because I’d been focused on the bigger pieces, slowly crossed the board and promoted to a queen before I could do anything to stop it. I lost, in the end, in a precisely calculated endgame. But the defeat was different from my earlier quick resignations: it was long, hard-fought, and every move I made had intention behind it, not just impatience.
When my king was finally checkmated, László didn’t smile right away. He just looked at the board for a while, as if trying to understand his own victory.
“Well,” he finally said. “Now you know how to lose properly.”
“Was that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Best one I’ve got.”
We stood up, and he took my arm, not because he needed it to walk but because, as he put it, “hip insurance never hurts.” We set off around the lake, slowly, toward Feri, who on the neighboring bench had already set up his own board, knowing it was his turn now.
Rozi stopped with us for a moment too, with her four dachshunds, and when she saw László walking on his own two feet, cane-free, only holding my arm, she burst into tears, which embarrassed him, and he quickly changed the subject, asking why Kasparov had chewed up one of the rooks, which lay abandoned under the camp table.
“Because he’s a smart dog,” Rozi said through her tears. “Knows what matters.”
In the months that followed, the old rhythm returned, only slower: every one of László’s movements grew more deliberate, the walk to the bench took longer, and after the hospital he no longer let me go home after dark, so we agreed we’d always stop at five, no matter how many moves were left in the game. There was something new in that: a boundary we both respected, because we both knew the price of not respecting it.
Timea, the day László first sat back down on the bench, announced that her husband had finally been switched to the day shift, and that from now on he’d come down to the park with them sometimes too, “so he finally sees who I talk to for so long every weekend.” Her husband, a quiet, mustached man named Attila, just stood by the bench awkwardly the first time, but by the third visit he was sitting beside Feri, and from then on the two of them formed their own little faction in the park, talking football between every move while László and I worked at the board.
A year later, on a June Saturday — the same weekend the district council put up posters on a lamppost announcing the third Summer Chess Afternoon — a young boy sat down beside us on the neighboring bench, his own chessboard in hand, maybe sixteen, headphones around his neck, and watched us carefully for a while before asking if he could join the next round. László looked at me, a glance in which I recognized something of my own self from nine years earlier, then nodded toward the boy.
“Seat’s free,” he said, exactly the way he’d once said it to me.
The boy sat down, and László opened with e4.
I moved over to Feri’s bench, who was already sighing loudly, because he could see the boy was about to make the exact same mistake on move eight that I’d once made myself, and he’d already opened his mouth to shout his advice across.
“Let him,” I said, taking his board from him to set up our own game. “He’ll learn from his own mistakes.”
Feri grumbled something into his mustache, but sat down and took the white pieces, which he always got, because he was never willing to start with black, and when he opened with e4 — because of course he’d picked that up too over the years, though he’d never admit it — all he said was, “Right, girl, let’s see how much you learned from us old fools.” A heron rose from the lake, skimmed the water, and on the next bench László laughed at something the boy had said, a laugh that was, this time, more real than that old sideways pull of his mouth.
Leave a Reply