by Stefan Zweig
From that moment on our excitement knew no bounds. Up till this moment we had played without any serious hope, but now the idea of breaking through Czentovic’s cold pride sent fire flying through all our veins. And our new friend had already told us the next move, so we were able – my fingers shook as I tapped the glass with the spoon – to call Czentovic back. Now came our first triumph. Czentovic, who until this point had made his moves standing, hesitated – hesitated and finally sat down. He sat slowly and ponderously, but from the purely physical viewpoint the action cancelled out his condescending attitude towards us so far. We had forced him to come down to our level, at least in spatial terms. He thought for a long time, eyes lowered and intent on the board, so that you could hardly see his pupils under his dark lids, and in his meditations his mouth gradually dropped open, giving his round face a rather simple expression. Czentovic thought for several minutes, then made his move and stood up. And our friend was already whispering:
‘Delaying tactics! Good thinking! But don’t fall for it! Force an exchange, you must force an exchange, and then we can get a draw and no god will be able to help him.’
McConnor did as he said. In the next few moves between the two of them – the rest of us had long since sunk to the status of mere extras – a back-and-forth procedure that meant nothing at all to us ensued. After about seven moves Czentovic thought for some time, then looked up and said, ‘Game drawn.’
For a moment there was total silence. We suddenly heard the sound of the waves and the jazz music playing in the saloon, we could hear every step on the promenade deck and the quiet, soft blowing of the wind as it came through the cracks around the portholes. We were hardly breathing; it had happened too suddenly, and all of us were left in shock by the improbable way in which this unknown had forced his will on the world champion, in a game that was half lost already. McConnor leaned back with a sudden movement, the breath he had been holding emerged audibly from his lips in a contented ‘Ah!’ Myself, I was watching Czentovic. It seemed to me that during the last few moves he had turned paler. But he was good at keeping control over himself. He persisted in his apparently unruffled composure, and just asked in the most casual of tones, sweeping the chessmen off the board with a steady hand, ‘Would you gentlemen care for a third game?’
He asked the question purely objectively, purely as a matter of business. But the remarkable thing was that he had not been looking at McConnor, and instead had raised his eyes to gaze keenly straight at our saviour. Just as a horse recognizes a new and better rider by his firmer seat, he must have identified his true, genuine opponent during those last moves. Instinctively, we followed the direction of his eyes, and looked at the stranger in suspense. However, before he could think about it, let alone answer, McConnor in his ambitious excitement was triumphantly calling out to him, ‘Of course! But now you must play against him on your own! You against Czentovic!’
Here, however, something unforeseen happened. The stranger, who curiously enough was still staring hard at the now empty chessboard, started when he felt that all eyes were turned on him and heard us appealing to him so enthusiastically. His expression became confused.
‘Oh, by no means, gentlemen,’ he stammered in visible dismay. ‘Quite out of the question … you mustn’t think of me for a moment … I haven’t sat at a chessboard for twenty, no, twenty-five years … and only now do I see how improperly I behaved, interfering in your game without asking … please excuse my presumption.’ And before we had recovered from our surprise, he had already turned and left the saloon.
‘But that’s impossible!’ thundered the temperamental McConnor, slamming his fist on the table. ‘The man says he hasn’t played chess for twenty-five years? Out of the question! He calculated every move, every counter-attack for five or six moves in advance. No one can do that off the cuff. It’s absolutely impossible – isn’t it?’
With this last question McConnor had instinctively turned to Czentovic. But the world champion remained as cool as ever.
‘I really can’t venture an opinion. Anyway, the gentleman played in a rather strange and interesting way, so I gave him a chance on purpose.’ Rising casually to his feet as he spoke, he added in his matter-of-fact manner, ‘If he, or indeed you gentlemen, would care for another game tomorrow, I’m at your disposal from three in the afternoon.’
We couldn’t suppress a slight smile. All of us knew that Czentovic had definitely not been generous enough to give our unknown helper a chance, and his remark was nothing but a naive excuse to mask his own failure. Our wish to see such unswerving arrogance taken down a peg or two grew all the stronger. Suddenly we peaceable, easy-going passengers were overcome by a wild, overweening lust for battle. The idea that here on this ship, in the middle of the ocean, the palm of victory might be snatched from the chess champion – a record that would be flashed all over the world by telegraph offices – fascinated us in the most provocative way. And then there was the intriguing mystery arising from our saviour’s unexpected intervention just at the critical moment, and the contrast between his almost timorous modesty and the professional’s unshakeable self-confidence. Who was this stranger? Had chance brought a hitherto undiscovered chess genius to light here? Or was a famous master concealing his name from us for some unknown reason? We discussed all these possibilities with great excitement; even the most audacious hypotheses did not seem to us audacious enough to reconcile the stranger’s baffling shyness and surprising protestations with his unmistakable skill. On one point, however, we were all agreed; we weren’t giving up the spectacular prospect of another encounter. We decided to try every possible means of persuading our helper to play a game against Czentovic the next day. McConnor pledged himself to meet the expense. Since inquiries put to the steward had by now produced the information that the unknown man was an Austrian, I was charged, as his fellow countryman, to convey our request to him.
It didn’t take me long to track down the man who had fled in such haste. He was on the promenade deck, reclining in his deckchair and reading. Before going closer, I took the opportunity of observing him. His head with its sharply cut features was resting on the cushion in a slightly weary attitude; once again I was particularly struck by the strange pallor of his relatively young face, framed at the temples by dazzlingly white hair. I don’t know why, but I had a feeling that this man must have aged very suddenly. I had hardly approached him before he rose courteously, and introduced himself by a name that was immediately familiar to me as that of a highly regarded old Austrian family. I remembered that a man of the same name had belonged to the circle of Schubert’s most intimate friends, and one of the old Emperor’s physicians had been a family member too. When I put our request to Dr B., asking him to accept Czentovic’s challenge, he was obviously taken aback. It turned out that he had never guessed he had acquitted himself so well in our game against a grandmaster, indeed the most successful grandmaster of all at the time. For some reason the information seemed to make a particular impression on him, for he kept asking again and again whether I was sure that his opponent had really been the acknowledged world champion. I soon realized that this fact made my errand easier, and I merely thought it advisable, sensing the delicacy of his feelings, not to tell him that the financial risk of possible defeat would be covered by McConnor’s funds. After considerable hesitation, Dr B. said he was prepared to play a game, but he expressly asked me to warn the other gentlemen not on any account to expect too much of his skill.
‘For,’ he added, with the smile of a man lost in thought, ‘I really don’t know if I’m capable of playing a game of chess properly by all the rules. Do please believe me, it wasn’t false modesty when I said that I haven’t touched a chessman since my schooldays, more than twenty years ago. And even then I was considered only a player of no special talent.’
He said this in such a natural way that I could not for a moment doubt his honesty. Yet I couldn’t help expressing my surprise at the precision with which he
could remember every single combination thought up by many different masters; he must at least, I said, have taken a great theoretical interest in the game. Dr B. smiled again in that curiously dreamy way.
‘A great theoretical interest? God knows, I can certainly say I’ve done that. But it was under very special, indeed unprecedented circumstances. It’s a rather complicated story, but it could make some slight contribution to the history of these delightful times of ours. If you have half an hour to spare …’
He had indicated the deckchair next to his, and I was happy to accept his invitation. We had no neighbours. Dr B. took off his reading glasses, put them aside, and began:
‘You were kind enough to say that, as a Viennese yourself, you remembered the name of my family. But I don’t suppose you will have heard of the legal practice that I ran with my father and later on my own, since we didn’t deal with the kinds of cases that attracted newspaper publicity, and we avoided taking new clients on principle. In fact we didn’t really have an ordinary legal practice any more, we confined ourselves entirely to giving legal advice to the great monasteries and in particular administering their property. As a former parliamentary deputy of the Clerical Party, my father was close to them. In addition – and now that the monarchy is past history, I suppose this can be mentioned – management of the funds of several members of the imperial family was entrusted to us. These links with the court and the clergy – my uncle was the Emperor’s physician, another of the family was Abbot of Seitenstetten – went back two generations; all we had to do was maintain them, and this inherited trust involved us in a quiet, I might even say silent form of activity, not really calling for much more than the strictest discretion and reliability, two qualities that my late father possessed to a very high degree. Through his circumspection, he succeeded in preserving considerable assets for his clients both in the inflationary years and at the time of the coup. When Hitler came to the helm in Germany and began raiding the assets of the Church and the monasteries, many negotiations and transactions on the German side of the border also passed through our hands. They were designed to save movable property at least from confiscation, and we both knew more about certain political dealings by the Curia and the imperial house than the public will ever hear about. But the inconspicuous nature of our legal office – we didn’t even have a brass plate outside the door – as well as our caution, for we both carefully avoided all monarchist circles, were in themselves the best protection against investigation from the wrong quarters. In all those years, in fact, none of the authorities in Austria ever suspected that the secret couriers of the imperial house always collected and handed in their most important correspondence at our modest fourth-floor premises.
‘But the National Socialists, long before arming their forces against the world, had begun to muster another equally dangerous and well-trained army in all the countries bordering on their territory: the legion of the underprivileged, of people who had been passed over or who bore a grudge. They had their so-called “cells” in every office and every business company, their spies and listening-posts were everywhere, all the way to the private offices of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. And they had their man, as unfortunately I discovered only too late, even in our own modest legal practice. He was no more than a poor, untalented clerk whom I had offered a job at a priest’s request, simply to give the office the outward appearance of an ordinary firm; in reality we used him only to run innocent errands, let him answer the telephone and do the filing – that’s to say, the filing of entirely harmless, unimportant paperwork. He was never allowed to open the post; I typed all important letters myself, never making copies, I took every important document home, and conducted secret discussions only in the monastery priory or my uncle’s consulting rooms. Thanks to these precautions, the listening-post saw none of our important dealings, but through an unfortunate accident the vain, ambitious fellow must have noticed that we didn’t trust him and that all kinds of interesting things were going on behind his back. Perhaps in my absence one of the couriers had once incautiously mentioned “His Majesty” instead of the agreed pseudonym of “Baron Fern”, or perhaps the wretched man had been opening letters on the sly – at any rate, before I suspected him of anything, Munich or Berlin had instructed him to keep watch on us. Only much later, long after my arrest, did I remember how his original lacklustre approach to his work had turned to sudden eagerness in the last few months, and he had several times almost importunately offered to take my letters to the post. So I can’t absolve myself of a certain incautiousness, but after all, weren’t the best of diplomats and military men taken in by Hitler’s insidious tricks? The close, indeed loving attention the Gestapo had been paying me over a long period was made evident by the fact that on the very evening when Schuschnigg announced his resignation, I had already been arrested by SS men. Luckily I had managed to burn the most important of our papers as soon as I heard Schuschnigg’s resignation speech on the radio, and as for the remaining documents, with the indispensable certificates for the foreign investments of the monasteries and two archdukes, I sent them to my uncle, hidden in a laundry basket and taken away by my trustworthy old housekeeper literally at the last minute, just before my door was broken down.’
Dr B. stopped to light a cigar. In the flickering light I saw a nervous tic at the right-hand corner of his mouth which I had noticed before, and which recurred every few minutes. It was only a fleeting movement, not much more than the ghost of one, but it gave a curious look of unrest to his entire face.
‘You probably think I’m going to tell you about the concentration camps where everyone who kept faith with our old Austria was taken, about the humiliations, torments and tortures that I suffered there. But nothing of that nature happened. I was in a different category. I wasn’t herded together with those poor souls who suffered physical and mental degradation as resentments long nurtured were vented on them, I was put into that other, very small group from which the Nazis hoped to extract either money or important information. In itself, of course my modest person was of no interest to the Gestapo. But they must have discovered that we had been the front men, administrators and intimates of their bitterest enemy, and what they hoped to get out of me was incriminating material: material to be used against the monasteries which they wanted to prove had been sequestrating property, evidence against the imperial family and all in Austria who sacrificed themselves in support of the monarchy. They suspected – and to be honest, not incorrectly – that considerable amounts of the funds which had passed through our hands were still hidden away safe from their rapacity, so they brought me in at the earliest opportunity to force these secrets out of me, using their tried and trusted methods. People in my category, from whom important evidence or money was to be extracted, were not sent to concentration camps but kept for special processing. You may remember that our chancellor and Baron Rothschild, from whose family they hoped to extort millions, were not put behind barbed wire in a prison camp, but had what looked like preferential treatment and were taken to a hotel, the Hotel Metropole, which was also the Gestapo headquarters and where each had a room of his own. Insignificant as I was, I received the same mark of distinction.
‘A room of your own in a hotel – it sounds very humane, doesn’t it? However, you may believe me if I tell you that when we “prominent people” were not crammed into an icy hut twenty at a time, but accommodated in reasonably well-heated private hotel rooms, they had in store for us a method which was not at all more humane, just more sophisticated. For the pressure they intended to exert, to get the “material” they needed out of us, was to operate more subtly than through crude violence and physical torture: the method was the most exquisitely refined isolation. Nothing was done to us – we were simply placed in a complete void, and everyone knows that nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void. Solitary confinement in a complete vacuum, a room hermetically cut off from the outside world, was intended to create pressure not from wi
thout, through violence and the cold, but from within, and to open our lips in the end. At first sight the room I was given didn’t seem at all uncomfortable. It had a door, a bed, an armchair, a washbasin, a barred window. But the door was locked day and night; no book, newspaper, sheet of paper or pencil might lie on the table; the window looked out on a firewall; a complete void had been constructed around my self and even my own body. Everything had been taken from me: my watch, so that I wouldn’t know the time; my pencil, so that I couldn’t write anything; my penknife, to prevent me from opening my veins; even the smallest narcotic such as a cigarette was denied me. Apart from the jailer, who spoke not a word and wouldn’t answer any questions, I never saw a human face and I never heard a human voice. In that place your eyes, ears and all the other senses had not the slightest nourishment from morning to night and from night to morning. You were left irredeemably alone with yourself, your body, and the four or five silent objects, table, bed, window, washbasin; you lived like a diver under a glass dome in the black ocean of this silence, and even worse, like a diver who already guesses that the cable connecting him to the world outside has broken and he will never be pulled up from those soundless depths. There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see, you were surrounded everywhere, all the time, by the void, that entirely spaceless, timeless vacuum. You walked up and down, and your thoughts went up and down with you, up and down, again and again. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they may seem, need something to fix on, or they begin to rotate and circle aimlessly around themselves; they can’t tolerate a vacuum either. You kept waiting for something from morning to evening, and nothing happened. You waited again, and yet again. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, you thought, you thought, you thought until your head was aching. Nothing happened. You were left alone. Alone. Alone.