By One Stone

“Shake them by your ear,” Valiko said. “Like a watch you think has stopped. And talk to them. Dice that nobody talks to fall any old way.”

The nardi board lives on two crates behind the garages, under the plane tree, which in November has given up all its leaves except one. For thirty years Valiko played there every afternoon with Guram from the fifth floor. Guram died in April. Since then Valiko has been coming down at four, setting out both sides and playing himself. Eter watched it from her balcony for a month, then sent me down. “Go,” she said. “He’s starting to lose to himself.”

So I sat in Guram’s place. The crate was still a little lower on that side.

I shook the dice by my ear. I talked to them. “Come on, my dears,” which is what Valiko says. Twenty-one different throws two dice can give, and I had no favourite among them. That, it turns out, is not how you hold dice.

I won the first game before Valiko had lit his second cigarette.

He looked at the board for a long time. Then he set the stones out again without a word, slapping each one down a little harder than it needed.

That was when Shota arrived. Shota lives in the building across the road and has been waiting forty years for Valiko to lose in public. He pulled up a crate, folded his arms and settled in like a man at the cinema.

I lost the second game.

I lost the third one too, and the fourth, and the fifth. I played carefully. I made small, believable mistakes. Each time, when Valiko bore off his last stone, I had exactly one left on the board.

Valiko was happy. He slapped the board. He told Shota the first game had been a warm-up. Shota didn’t answer. He was counting on his fingers.

“Five games,” he said at last. “Four in a row, and every time one stone.” He looked at me, not unkindly. “Guram played like that.”

Valiko stopped with a stone in his hand.

“Thirty years,” said Shota. “One stone. Every time. You never wondered?”

“I thought I was good,” Valiko said.

“You were good. Just not that good.”

Nobody spoke. The last leaf on the plane tree decided this was not its day either.

Valiko put the stone down. He closed the board slowly, like a book you have finished and are not sure about.

“Tomorrow at four,” he said to me. “And you play properly. I’ve been beaten by a kind man for thirty years. I’d like to know where I stand.”

“And if you lose by a lot?”

“Then I’ll know.” He stood up and tucked the board under his arm. “Guram would have hated you. He spent a whole lifetime on that one stone, and you learned it in an afternoon.”

Shota walked home whistling.

I sat a little longer in Guram’s place, on the low side of the crate.

Tomorrow I’m going to beat him by three. A man should know where he stands, roughly.