58
PARTISAN REVIEW
crimson crown painted upon them, recalling the round mark on a
happy Hindu's forehead.
A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chess–
board, my watch showed half past three. The season was May–
around the tenth of May, 1940. The day before, after months of
soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered
to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a
visa de
sortie
which, in its turn, conditioned the permission to cross the
Atlantic. All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess
problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close.
Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by
the quality of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were my wife and
child. The lamp on my table was bonneted with blue sugarloaf paper
(an amusing military precaution) and the resulting light lent a lunar
tinge to the voluted air heavy with tobacco smoke. Opaque curtains
separated me from blacked-out Paris. The headline of a newspaper
drooping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler's striking at the Low
Countries.
I have before me the sheet of paper upon which, that night in
Paris, I drew the diagram of the problem's position. White: King
on a7 (meaning first file, seventh rank), Queen on b6, Rooks on H
and h5, Bishops on e4 and h8, Knights on d8 and e6, Pawns on b7 and
g3; Black: King on e5, Rook on g7, Bishop on h6, Knights on e2 and
g5, Pawns on c3, c6 and d7 . White begins and mates in two moves.
The false scent, the irresistible "try" is: Pawn to b8, becoming a
Knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed
checks, by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by
not
checking White and making instead a modest, dilatory move else–
where on the board. In one corner of the sheet with the diagram,
I notice a certain stamped mark that also adorns other papers and
books I took out of France to America in May, 1940. It is a circular
imprint, in the ultimate tint of the
spectrum- violet de bureau.
In its
center there are two capital letters of pica size,
((R .F.,"
meaning of
course
((R i publique Franfaise."
Other letters in lesser type, running
peripherally, spell
((CONTROLE DES INFORMATIONS."
However, it is
only now, a whole decade later, that the information concealed in
my chess symbols, which that control permitted to pass, may be, and
in fact is, divulged.
