Most people go through life accumulating possessions. I seemed to have gone through mine losing them or having them taken away from me. The only thing I still had from before the war was a broken chess piece made of bone—the head of a black knight from a Selenus chess set. During the last days of the Weimar Republic this black knight had been consistently in use at the Romanisches Café, where, once or twice, I’d played the great Emanuel Lasker. He’d been a regular at the café until the Nazis obliged him and his brother to leave Germany forever in 1933. I could still picture him crouched over a board with his cigarettes and cigars and his Wild West mustache. Generous to a fault, he would give out tips or play exhibitions for anyone who was interested; and on his last day in the Romanisches Café—he went to Moscow and then to New York—Lasker presented everyone who was there to wish him good-bye with a chess piece from the café’s best set. I got the black knight. The way I’d been played over the years, I sometimes think a black pawn would have been more appropriate. Then again, a knight, even a broken one, seems intrinsically more valuable than a pawn, which was probably why I tried so hard to keep it through one adversity after another. The little bone base had become detached during the Battle of Königsberg and was lost soon afterward, but somehow the horse’s head had remained in my possession. I might have called it my lucky charm but for the salient fact that one way or another I’d not always had the best of luck. On the other hand, I was still in the game, and sometimes that’s all the luck you need. Anything—absolutely anything—can happen so long as you stay in the game. And lately, as if to remind myself of this fact, the little black knight’s head was often held tight in my fist the way a Mohammedan might have used a set of beads to utter the ninety-nine names of God and bring him closer during prayer. Only, it wasn’t being closer to God I wanted but something more earthly. Freedom. Independence. Self-respect. No longer to be the pawn of others in a game I wasn’t interested in. Surely that wasn’t so much to ask.