Jack Plays Chess

An introduction to the novel, "Rosewood Dreaming"

Who can explain the chemistry that attracts person to place? The one-sided love affair between Harry Hope Vance and his run-down farm, "Rosewood", has far-reaching implications for the other members of his family. His son, Jack, daughter-in-law, Jeannie, and granddaughter, Anna, become players in the old man"s drama, their lives in thrall to his impossible dream of creating an Eden in the Queensland tropics.

But Harry Vance"s garden harbours earthly beings, not angels, and as the other characters chafe at its confines, Rosewood becomes the catalyst for revelations and self-knowledge. The attachments and antipathies it elicits are a dynamic force, building in intensity to the point where change is inevitable but unpredictable. Nobody is free to leave, however, until the story has been played out, and those who seek escape find they are haunted by the legacy of an old man"s passionate vision.
 
 
Jack Plays Chess - a chapter from "Rosewood Dreaming"

Jack, who has entered his fifth decade but is physically little changed, has found a friend, a Russian immigrant called Igor. In appearance Igor is quite unlike the sallow, dark-eyed, intellectual-looking Grigory of Jack’s youth. Igor is a great, blond bear of a man, a pale-eyed stranger from the north who seems to belong in a Russian fairytale with snow and ice, samovars and troikas, tundra and wolf-haunted forests. He likes to wear Tolstoyan shirts, cropped at the neck, side-buttoned smocks that seem to suit his flaxen colouring. His hero is in fact Tolstoy, count, landowner, philosopher, novelist.

Visually, Igor and Jack are opposites. Jack, long-limbed and gaunt-featured, rangy as a gum tree, with quietly intense, deep blue eyes, his patient manner camouflaging a reticent and fastidious sensibility, is like the lunar shadow to Igor’s exuberant Arctic sun. It is not clear how they met, but presumably it was in the township, while engaged in business to do with their farms. Igor has taken over the lease of a run-down farm with mangoes and pawpaw trees, an unlikely pursuit for the son of a former Russian landowner.

Anna sees his daughter, Olga, on the school bus, wearing the brown pinafore and black lisle stockings of St. Ursula’s convent school. Olga Vinsky, as she is called, since nobody can pronounce the name ‘Vesnovinskaya’, has an oval face with clear green eyes and thick, fair hair braided on either side of a neat centre parting, then caught behind at the ends to form a V. It is rumoured that Olga has a talent for the piano. Perhaps it is the  language she understands best, apart from Russian, as she never speaks to any of the local state school children on the bus. Anna gazes and gazes at her. She can’t help it. Olga represents another world, and seems to move in its aura.

There is no attempt made to include Jack’s and Igor’s families in the friendship that develops between the two men. In fact, nobody has ever seen Igor’s wife, and it is never established whether or not he actually has one. Only on one occasion does Jack take Anna swimming with him and Igor, at Jeannie’s insistence.

Anna pretends to splash in the shallows while she avidly observes the two men after their swim, leaning back against the sea wall where small waves slap their frilly edges. Although the tide is on the turn, the sand is not yet exposed, but by the wall the water is only a few inches deep. The plashing of the shallows against the breakwater, the cries of gulls, the boom of breakers farther from the shore make eavesdropping impossible, but Anna notes with fascination the mat of blond hair on Igor’s powerful chest and arms, and Jack’s thin, boyish body next to him. Igor, despite his frosty appearance, laughs a lot. His laughter rumbles inside his chest like thunder. Telling a funny anecdote, he claps Jack on the shoulder, then the two men rise and look about for Anna.

                * * *
               
Igor is teaching Jack to play chess. Jack goes off like a schoolboy on Sunday afternoons, clutching the old-fashioned wooden chess set that has become his prize possession. Later, he tries to teach Anna what he has learned, but she is too impatient and fidgety to appreciate the different moves, or understand their subtleties and implications. Anna never quite manages to see the whole picture, and because the only time they can play is at night after tea, her eyelids droop, the moths hurling themselves at the glass of the hissing spirit lamp distract her, and she feels suffocated by the closeness of the dimly-lit room.

At the farm where Igor lives, Jack and Igor play long, leisurely chess games as Jack’s skill improves. Igor smokes a pipe, and his wintry grey-green eyes appraise Jack through the wisps of smoke uncoiling gently from his mouth. Jack is enthralled by the game’s romance. It banishes the grind of daily life. There is a steady supply of tea from Igor’s samovar, and the scrubby tropical plantation expands into a Russian estate, a gracious place, as they sit on the verandah at dusk and Igor, remote from a Russia struggling with Stalin"s legacy, philosophises on Utopian themes.

Most of all he likes to talk about Lev Tolstoy, his idol. Tolstoy, he explains to Jack, had come to believe that the only art that mattered, that had worth, was art that was accessible to everyone. He aspired to a literature that was not the preserve of the privileged few, but could give pleasure to people from all walks of life. In fact, the truest criterion of art for Tolstoy was the reaction of the simple man, the uncorrupted Russian peasant. Tolstoy the visionary had said: ‘I want to tell my tribe who they are, where they come from and what they might yet be.’

The fever of excitement that these words provoke sends Jack rushing to the dun-covered bindings that denote the classics section of the local School of Arts library. There he finds ‘War and Peace,’ and steals half an hour whenever he can to sit surreptitiously on a block of wood in the old, disused milking-shed and hungrily turn the pages on a whole new world. How could he have lived so long, knowing nothing of this? Why hadn’t Grigory told him?
 
Reading Tolstoy reminds him of the feeling he had as a boy at Bilambil, watching the stars and the Byron Bay beacon, reassured that the world contained radiance, for here was the tangible proof, a sign and a portent of numinous things, a harbinger of hope. He had all but lost his way since those times.
   
Igor speaks of the schools Tolstoy set up for serfs on his own estates. ‘He was a humanist, you see, an aristocrat of the spirit, Jack, magnanimous of mind and heart, tormented by his soul, which longed for the simplicity that it would never have... Perhaps it is something you yourself possess, Jack, without realising... simplicity, grace... purity...’
 
Flying foxes wheel in the evening sky as Jack savours his mentor’s words. He doesn’t know what to call such approbation, he knows only that it makes him feel more complete. His is a pure heart, a gentle spirit. What his life might mean is something he has hitherto only dimly perceived; it has never seemed so clear to him before. Dominated by Old Vance, he has never quite defined or connected with his own dream. Igor seems to draw him into the light he emanates.

When Igor and Olga suddenly leave the district, even the gossips are stymied. Nobody really knows where they had come from, or where they have gone, or why. Except perhaps Jack, who keeps his own counsel. Not even Jeannie (least of all Jeannie) can extract any information. Jack is steadfast in his silence, as he has been throughout the acquaintance, refusing to be drawn on details of the house, the food, the wife. When Igor leaves, Jack packs away his chess set with his few other precious private things, his face forlorn, his thin shoulders sagging, his eyes blank slates bereft of gladness.