In an empty market in Sloviansk, near which six bridges were blown up by the Ukrainians, these elderly people play chess. As if for an hour you could forget to be there, to be at war: with that elegant concentration that isolates you from the noise of the world and keeps you glued to the chessboard, to the movements of the pieces, to the plan of war without weapons – if not those intelligence – which is a game of chess. It is not a metaphor for anything; once again it is life. And yet one wonders why what could have been an unarmed game on the so-called international chessboard has become a carnage.
As Ivano Porpora writes in the illuminant ‘A king does not die. Chess Literary Course (Utet), ‘
chess is not just a game of pieces but of territory; it is there that you stop thinking in terms of kings – the defense – and the queen – the attack – and you begin to consider strategy, perhaps the highest point of chess.
Here, in fact: the strategy. Porpora says that the Russian players were among the best at thinking like the opponents by anticipating their moves. But he speaks of an abstract, aerial war; a war of intelligence that no one wanted to play. And they play chess, they do, those old forgotten citizens, while the game of death does not stop.