Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

  “Much involved!—God knows you’d have to say I was much involved with chess. But it happened under quite special, indeed entirely unique circumstances. It’s a fairly complicated story, and one that might possibly be considered a small contribution to the delightful, grand times we live in. If you will bear with me for half an hour …”

  He had motioned toward the deck chair next to him. I gladly accepted his invitation. We had no neighbors. Dr. B. removed his reading glasses, put them aside, and began:

  “You were good enough to mention that you remembered my family name, since you are from Vienna yourself. But I hardly think you will have heard of the legal firm which I directed with my father and later on by myself, for we didn’t take cases you might have read about in the papers and deliberately avoided new clients. The truth is that we didn’t have a proper legal practice, but limited ourselves to legal consulting for the large monasteries with which my father, formerly a representative of the clerical party, was closely associated, and especially to administering their estates. We were also entrusted with managing the finances of certain members of the imperial family (I’m sure it’s all right to talk about this, now that the monarchy has passed into history). These connections with the court and the clergy—an uncle of mine was the Kaiser’s personal physician, another an abbot in Seitenstetten—went back two generations; we had only to keep them up, and it was a quiet, you could even say ‘silent’ employment that was granted us through this inherited commission, requiring little more than the strictest discretion and dependability, two traits which my late father possessed in the highest degree; in fact his prudence enabled him to preserve the considerable fortunes of his clients during the years of the inflation and the economic collapse that followed. Then when Hitler took the helm in Germany and began his raids on the property of the Church and the monasteries, we handled a variety of negotiations and transactions (some of them even originating abroad) to save at least the movable assets from being impounded. The two of us knew more about certain secret political negotiations of the Curia and the imperial family than the public will ever learn of. But the very inconspicuousness of our office (we didn’t even have a sign on the door), as well as the care with which we both pointedly avoided monarchist circles, provided the safest protection from unwanted inquiries. During all those years, in fact, none of the Austrian authorities ever suspected that secret couriers were collecting and depositing the imperial family’s most important mail right at our modest office on the fourth floor.

  “Now the Nazis, long before they built up their armies against the world, had begun to organize an equally dangerous and well-trained army in all neighboring countries—the legion of the disadvantaged, the neglected, the aggrieved. Their ‘cells’ were tucked away in every office, every business; their informers and spies were everywhere, all the way up to the private chambers of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. They had their man even in our obscure office, as I unfortunately failed to discover until it was too late. He was admittedly no more than a miserable, useless clerk, whom I had only hired on the recommendation of a vicar in order to give the office the outward appearance of an ordinary business; in fact we used him for nothing but innocent errands, had him answer the telephone and file papers—completely insignificant and harmless ones, that is. He was never allowed to open the mail, I typed all the important correspondence myself without making copies, I took any essential documents home and shifted all confidential meetings to the priory of the monastery or my uncle’s surgery. Thanks to these precautions, the informer learned nothing vital; but some unfortunate accident must have told the vain and ambitious fellow that he was not trusted and that all sorts of interesting things were going on behind his back. Perhaps in my absence one of the couriers had carelessly spoken of ‘His Majesty’ instead of (as agreed) ‘Baron Fern,’ or the scoundrel disobeyed his instructions and opened some letters—in any event, he got orders from Berlin or Munich to keep an eye on us before I had time to become suspicious. Only much later, when I had been incarcerated for a long time, did I remember that his initial laziness at work had turned into sudden zeal during the last months and that on repeated occasions he had practically insisted on mailing my correspondence. So I cannot absolve myself of a certain carelessness. But, after all, didn’t Hitler and his bunch insidiously outmaneuver even the greatest diplomats and military men? Just how closely and lovingly the Gestapo had been watching over me for all that time became blatantly clear when I was arrested by the SS on the very evening that Schuschnigg announced his abdication, one day before Hitler marched into Vienna. Luckily I had been able to burn the most critical papers as soon as I heard Schuschnigg’s farewell speech on the radio, and (really at the last minute, before those fellows beat my door down) I sent the rest of the documents, including the all-important records of the assets held abroad for the monasteries and two archdukes, over to my uncle, carried hidden in a laundry basket by my trusty old housekeeper.”

  Dr. B. paused to light a cigar. In the flare of light I noticed a nervous twitching at the right corner of his mouth, something that had struck me earlier. I saw now that it was repeated every few minutes. The movement was a fleeting one, hardly more than a flicker, but it gave his entire face a peculiar restlessness.

  “You’re probably thinking that now I’m going to tell you about the concentration camp where all those loyal to our old Austria were taken, about the humiliations, torments, ordeals I suffered there. But nothing of the kind occurred. I was in another category. I was not made to join those unfortunates upon whom the Nazis vented their long-harbored resentments by inflicting physical and spiritual degradations; I was placed in that other, rather small group of people from whom the Nazis hoped to extract either money or important information. An insignificant person like me was of course of no interest to the Gestapo for my own sake. However, they must have learned that we were the front men, the trustees and intimates of their bitterest enemies, and must have hoped to extort some incriminating evidence: evidence against the monasteries proving illicit removal of assets, evidence against the imperial family and all those in Austria who were selflessly fighting for the monarchy. They suspected—in truth, not without good reason—that substantial reserves of the assets which had passed through our hands were still hidden away where they couldn’t steal them; they brought me in on the very first day to force these secrets out of me using their time-tested methods. People in my category, from whom important evidence or money was to be extracted, were therefore not stowed in concentration camps, but saved for special treatment. You will perhaps remember that our chancellor, and in a different sort of case Baron Rothschild, from whose relatives they hoped to wring millions, were not put behind barbed wire in a prison camp. By no means. Instead, as if they were being accorded preferential treatment, they were taken to a hotel, the Hotel Metropole—also the Gestapo’s headquarters—where they were each given separate rooms. Insignificant as I may have been, I was also granted this distinction.

  “My own room in a hotel—that sounds awfully decent, doesn’t it? Believe me, though, if they housed ‘celebrities’ like us in reasonably well-heated hotel rooms of our own, this was not intended to be more decent than cramming us by the score into an ice-cold barracks—it was just a subtler method. For the requisite ‘evidence’ was to be wrested from us by a force more sophisticated than crude beating or physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable. They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing. Locking each of us into a total vacuum, a room hermetically sealed off from the outside world, instead of beating us or exposing us to cold—this was meant to create an internal pressure that would finally force our lips open. At first glance the room assigned to me did not seem at all uncomfortable. It had a door, a bed, a chair, a washbasin, a barred window. But the door stayed locked day and night, no book, no newspaper, no sheet of paper or pencil was permitted to be on the
table, the window faced a firewall; complete nothingness surrounded me both physically and psychologically. They had taken every object away from me—I had no watch, so that I didn’t know the time; no pencil, so that I couldn’t write; no knife, so that I couldn’t slit my wrists; even the tiniest comfort, such as a cigarette, was denied me. Apart from the guard, who was not permitted to say a word or respond to questions, I never saw a human face, never heard a human voice; my eyes, my ears, all my senses received not the slightest stimulation from morning till night, from night till morning, all the time you were hopelessly alone with yourself, with your body, and with these four or five mute objects, table, bed, window, washbasin; you lived like a diver in a diving bell in the black sea of this silence, for that matter like a diver who has guessed that the cable to the outside world has snapped and that he will never be hauled out of the silent deep. There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see, nothingness was everywhere around me all the time, a completely dimensionless and timeless void. You walked up and down, you and your thoughts, up and down, over and over. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they seem, need a footing, or they begin to spin, to run in frenzied circles; they can’t bear nothingness either. You waited for something from morning until night, and nothing happened. You went on waiting and waiting. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, thinking, thinking, thinking, until your temples throbbed. Nothing happened. You were alone. Alone. Alone.

  “This went on for fourteen days, during which I lived outside time, outside the world. If a war had broken out then, I wouldn’t have known it; my world was nothing more than desk, door, bed, washbasin, chair, window, and wall, I stared always at the same wallpaper on the same wall; every line of its jagged pattern became etched as though by a burin into the innermost recesses of my brain, that’s how much I stared at it. Then finally the interrogations began. You were suddenly sent for, not knowing if it was day or night. They summoned you and led you, not knowing where you were going, down a few passageways; then you waited somewhere, not knowing where, and suddenly you were standing in front of a table, around which sat several uniformed men. On the table was a stack of paper, the files whose contents were unknowable, and then the questions started—the real ones and the fake ones, the straightforward ones and the malicious ones, sham questions, trick questions—and while you answered, a stranger’s cruel fingers were shuffling through papers whose contents were unknowable and a stranger’s cruel fingers were writing something unknowable in a report. But for me the most terrible thing about these interrogations was that I could never divine or figure out what the Gestapo actually knew about what went on in my office and what they were just trying to get out of me now. As I mentioned before, at the eleventh hour I had sent the really incriminating papers to my uncle in the care of the housekeeper. But had he received them? Or had he not? And how much had that clerk given away? How many letters had they intercepted, how much had they learned by now in the German monasteries which we represented, perhaps squeezed out of some unfortunate churchman? And the questions kept coming. What securities had I bought for a certain monastery, what banks did I correspond with, did I know a Mr. So-and-So, had I received letters from Switzerland or East Nowhere. And since I could never tell how much they had already ferreted out, every statement became the most terrible responsibility. If I gave away something they didn’t know, I might be delivering someone to the knife unnecessarily. If I denied too much, I was hurting myself.

  “But the interrogation wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was coming back after the interrogation to my nothingness, the same room with the same table, the same bed, the same washbasin, the same wallpaper. For as soon as I was by myself I tried to formulate what I should have said if I had been smarter and what I should say next time to allay any suspicion I might have aroused by a thoughtless remark. I mulled over, pondered, examined, scrutinized every word I had said to the interrogator, I recapitulated every question they asked, every answer I gave, I tried to decide what they might have chosen to write down, though I knew I could never reach a conclusion and could never find out. But these thoughts, once set in motion in the empty room, did not stop revolving in my head, always fresh, in ever new permutations—they even invaded my sleep; after every interrogation by the Gestapo my own thoughts relentlessly continued the torment of questioning and examining and harassing—even more cruelly, perhaps, for the former came to an end after an hour but the latter never did, thanks to the insidious torture of this solitude. And all the time nothing around me but the table, the bureau, the bed, the wallpaper, the window, no distraction, no book, no newspaper, no new face, no pencil to write anything down with, no matches to play with, nothing, nothing, nothing. Now I saw how diabolically practical, how psychologically deadly in its conception this hotel room system was. In a concentration camp you might have had to cart stones around until your hands bled and your feet froze in your shoes, you would have been jammed together with two dozen other men in the cold and stench. But you would have seen faces, you would have been able to look at a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything, whereas here it was always the same thing around you, always the same thing, the terrible sameness. Here there was nothing to distract me from my thoughts, from my delusions, from my morbid rehearsals of past events. And that was exactly what they wanted—that I should go on gagging on my thoughts until I choked on them and had no choice but to spit them out, to inform, to tell everything, to finally hand over the evidence and the people they wanted. Little by little I sensed how my nerves were beginning to give under the dreadful pressure of nothingness, and, aware of the danger, I strained myself to the breaking point to find or invent some diversion. To occupy my mind I tried to reconstruct and recite everything I had ever learned by heart, the anthems and nursery rhymes of childhood, the Homer I’d learned in grade school, the sections of the Civil Code. Then I tried arithmetic—adding and dividing random figures—but nothing stuck in my mind in that emptiness. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. The same flickering thought always broke in: What do they know? What did I say yesterday, what must I say next time?

  “This truly indescribable state of affairs continued for four months. Now four months is easy to write: so many letters, no more, no less! It’s easy to say: four months—two syllables. It takes no time at all to form the words: four months! But there’s no way to describe, to gauge, to delineate, not for someone else, not for yourself, how long time lasts in dimensionlessness, in timelessness, and you can’t explain to anyone how it eats at you and destroys you, this nothing and nothing and nothing around you, always this table and bed and washbasin and wallpaper, and always the silence, always the same guard pushing food in without looking at you, always the same thoughts in that nothingness revolving around a single thought, until you go mad. Little things made me uncomfortably aware that my mind was falling into disorder. At the beginning I had still been lucid during the interrogations, my statements had been calm and considered; that duality of thought by which I knew what to say and what not to say was still functioning. Now I stammered when I tried to get out even the simplest sentences, for while I spoke I stared, hypnotized, at the pen that ran across the paper taking down what I said, as though I wanted to chase after my own words. I sensed that my strength was failing, I sensed that the moment was approaching when, to save myself, I would tell everything I knew, and perhaps more, when I would betray twelve people and their secrets to escape the chokehold of this nothingness, without gaining anything more than a moment’s rest for myself. One evening it had come to this: when the guard happened to bring me my food in this moment of suffocation, I suddenly shouted after him, ‘Take me to the interrogation! I’ll tell everything! I want to make a full statement! I’ll say where the papers are, where the money is! I’ll tell everything, everything!’ Luckily he didn’t hear me. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear me.

  “At this moment of greatest need, something unforeseen happened that promised to save me, at least for a time.
It was the end of July, a dark, overcast, rainy day: I remember this detail clearly because the rain was hammering against the windowpanes in the corridor through which I was led to the interrogation. I had to wait in an anteroom. You always had to wait to be brought before the interrogator: having you wait was another part of the technique. First they shattered your nerves when they summoned you, suddenly pulling you out of your cell in the middle of the night, and then, when you had prepared yourself for the interrogation, when your mind and will were steeled, they made you wait, pointlessly and pointedly, for one hour, two hours, three hours before the interrogation, to exhaust you physically and wear you down mentally. And they made me wait a particularly long time on this Wednesday, the 27th of July, two whole hours on my feet in the ante-room; I remember this fact too for a particular reason: in this anteroom, where I had to stand for two hours until I was ready to drop (I wasn’t permitted to sit down, of course), hung a calendar, and I am not capable of explaining to you how, in my hunger for anything printed, anything written, I stared and stared at that one number, that little bit of writing ‘July 27’ on the wall; my brain devoured it, you could say. Then I went on waiting and waiting and stared at the door, wondering when it would finally open and what the inquisitors might ask this time, though I knew that what they asked would be quite different from anything I was preparing for. Yet in spite of everything the agony of this waiting and standing was at the same time a relief, a pleasure, because this room was at least different from mine, somewhat larger and with two windows instead of one, without the bed and without the washbasin and without that particular crack in the windowsill that I had looked at a million times. The door was painted a different color, there was a different chair against the wall and to the left of it a file cabinet with files and a coatrack with hangers on which three or four damp military coats were hanging, the coats of my tormentors. So I had something fresh, something different to look at with my ravenous eyes, something new at last, and they clutched avidly at every detail. I examined every crease in those coats, I noticed for example a raindrop hanging from one of the wet collars, and, as ridiculous as it may sound to you, I waited with absurd excitement to see whether this drop would eventually run off along the crease, or whether it would defy gravity and keep clinging—yes, I stared and stared at that drop breathlessly for minutes on end as though my life depended on it. Then, when it had finally rolled off, I counted the buttons on the coats over again, eight on one, eight on another, ten on the third, and compared the lapels once more; my voracious eyes touched, caressed, embraced all these ridiculous, trivial details with a hunger I am unable to describe. And suddenly my gaze was riveted on something. I had discovered a slight bulge in the side pocket of one of the coats. I moved closer and thought I knew from the rectangular shape of the bulge what was in this slightly swollen pocket: a book! My knees began to shake: a BOOK! For four months I had not held a book in my hands, and there was something intoxicating and at the same time stupefying in the mere thought of a book, in which you could see words one after another, lines, paragraphs, pages, a book in which you could read, follow, take into your mind the new, different, diverting thoughts of another person. Mesmerized, I stared at the little convexity of the book in the pocket, they blazed at that one inconspicuous spot as though they wanted to burn a hole in the coat. Finally I could not control my craving; without thinking I moved closer. The mere thought that I might so much as feel a book through the material made my fingers tingle down to the tips. Almost without knowing it, I crept closer. Fortunately the guard paid no attention to my behavior, though it was undoubtedly odd; perhaps it seemed only natural to him that someone who had been on his feet for two hours might want to lean against the wall for a moment. Finally I was standing right next to the coat; I had carefully put my hands behind my back so I could touch it without attracting attention. I touched the cloth and sure enough felt something rectilinear through it, something that was flexible and rustled slightly—a book! A book! And the idea flashed through my mind like a bullet: steal this book! Maybe you’ll succeed, you can hide it in your cell and then read, read, read, finally read again! Once this idea had entered my head, it was like a strong poison; my ears began to ring and my heart began to pound, my hands became ice-cold and paralyzed. But after a dazed moment I gently, stealthily pressed still closer to the coat; with my hands hidden behind my back, I nudged the book from the bottom of the pocket, higher and higher, my eye on the guard all the while. And then I grasped it; one gentle, careful tug, and the book, small, not too thick, was in my hand. Now that I had done the deed, I was frightened for the first time. But there was no going back. Yet where could I put it? Behind my back I pushed the volume inside the waistband of my trousers and from there, bit by bit, over to my hip, so that as I walked I could hold on to it with my hand pressed military-style to the seam in my trousers. Now came the first test. I walked away from the coat-rack, one step, two steps, three steps. It worked. If I kept my hand pressed firmly to my belt, it was possible to walk and at the same time hold the book fast.