Chess

  ‘I lived like this for two weeks, outside time, outside the world. If a war had broken out during that time I wouldn’t have heard about it, for my world consisted only of table, door, bed, washbasin, chair, window and wall, and I kept staring at the same wallpaper on the same wall; I stared at it so often that every line of its zigzag pattern has etched itself on the innermost folds of my brain as if with an engraver’s burin. Then, at last, the interrogations began. You were suddenly summoned, without really knowing whether it was day or night. You were fetched and led along a few corridors to you didn’t know where; then you waited somewhere, again you didn’t know where, and suddenly you were standing in front of a table with a few men in uniform sitting round it. A pile of papers lay on the table: files, containing you didn’t know what, and then the questions began, real and false, obvious and deceptive, cover-up questions and trick questions, and while you replied strange, malicious fingers leafed through the papers containing you didn’t know what, and strange, malicious fingers wrote something in the record of the interrogation, and you didn’t know what they were writing. But the most terrible part of these interrogations, for me, was that I could never guess or work out how much the Gestapo really knew about what went on in my legal office, and what they wanted to worm out of me. As I’ve told you, I had sent the really incriminating papers to my uncle at the last minute by way of my housekeeper. But had he received them? Had he failed to receive them? And how much had that clerk given away? How many letters had been intercepted, how many might they have extracted by now from some naive cleric in the German monasteries that we represented? And they asked questions and yet more questions. What securities had I bought for such-and-such a monastery, which banks did I correspond with, did I or did I not know a Herr So-and-so, had I received letters from Switzerland and Steenookerzeel? And as I could never guess how much they had found out already, every answer became the heaviest of responsibilities. If I let slip something they hadn’t known, I might be unnecessarily delivering someone up to the knife. If I denied too much, I was doing myself no good.

  ‘But the interrogation wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was coming back to my void after the questioning, back to the same room with the same table, the same bed, the same washbasin, the same wallpaper. For as soon as I was alone with myself I tried reconstructing what I ought to have said in reply, and what I must say next time to divert any suspicion that some unconsidered remark of mine might have aroused. I thought it all over, I went back over everything, examined my own statements, checked every word of what I had said to the chief interrogator, I recapitulated every question they had asked, every answer I had given, I tried to think what they might have put down in the written record, but I realized I could never work it out, I would never know. However, once these thoughts had started up in the vacuum they wouldn’t stop going round and round in my head, again and again, in ever-changing combinations, and they went on until I fell asleep. After every interrogation by the Gestapo my own thoughts took over the torment of questioning, probing and torturing me just as mercilessly, perhaps even more cruelly, for every interrogation ended after an hour, and thanks to the insidious torture of solitary confinement those thoughts never stopped. And around me, always, I had only the table, the cupboard, the bed, the wallpaper, the window, no means of diversion, no book, no newspaper, no new face, no pencil for making notes, no match to play with, nothing, nothing, nothing. Only now did I realize how diabolically ingenious the hotel-room method was, how fiendishly well devised in psychological terms. In a concentration camp you might have had to cart stones until your hands bled and your frostbitten feet fell off in your shoes, you would have slept packed together with two dozen other people in the stench and the cold. But you would have seen faces, you could have stared at a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything, while here you were always surrounded by the same things, always the same, always the terrible same. There was nothing here to distract me from my thoughts, my delusions, my morbid recapitulations. And that was exactly what they intended – I was to retch and retch on my own thoughts until they choked me, and in the end I had no choice but to spew them out, no choice but to tell them everything, all they were after, handing over the information and the human beings they wanted at last. I gradually felt my nerves begin to give way under the pressure of the void, and aware of the danger I stretched them to breaking point to find or invent something to divert my mind. To keep myself occupied I tried remembering and reciting anything I had ever learnt by heart, the national anthem and the playground rhymes of my childhood, the Homer I had studied at school paragraphs of the Civil Code. Then I tried arithmetic, adding and dividing numbers at random, but my memory was unable to hold the numbers steady in the void. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. The same thought kept flickering through my mind: what do they know? What did I say yesterday? What must I say next time?

  ‘This truly unspeakable state of affairs lasted four months. Four months – it’s easy to write down: just under a dozen characters! It’s easy to say: four months – two syllables. Your lips can articulate such a sound in a quarter of a second: four months! But no one can describe, assess, demonstrate to himself or anyone else how long a given period lasts in a timeless, spaceless void, and you can’t explain to anyone how it gnaws away at you and destroys you, nothing, nothing, nothing around you, only the same table and bed and washbasin and wallpaper, and always that silence, always the same jailer handing in food without looking at you, always the same thoughts circling around the same object in the void until you go mad. With alarm, I realized that my brain was becoming confused. At first I had been inwardly clear during the interrogations, I had answered calmly and carefully; my ability to think what to say and what not to say at the same time was still in working order. Now I stammered in articulating even the simplest sentences, for as I spoke I was staring, hypnotized, at the pen recording my statements on paper, as if I were trying to follow my own words. I felt my strength failing me, I felt the moment coming closer and closer when I would tell them everything to save myself, tell them what I knew and perhaps even more, when I would give away a dozen human beings and their secrets to escape that choking void, without gaining any more than a brief respite for myself. One evening I really did reach that point; when the jailer happened to bring my food at that moment of suffocation, I suddenly shouted, “Take me to be questioned! I want to tell them everything! I want to make a statement! I’ll tell them where the securities are, where the money is! I’ll tell them everything, everything!” Fortunately he didn’t hear me. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear me.

  ‘In my hour of greatest need, something quite unexpected happened, offering me a way of escape, at least for a time. It was the end of July, a dark, overcast, rainy day. I remember that last detail clearly because the rain was drumming against the windowpanes in the corridor down which I was led to be questioned. I had to wait in the chief interrogator’s anteroom. You always had to wait before every interrogation; leaving you to wait was part of the technique too. First they made you nervous with the summons, with being suddenly fetched from your cell in the middle of the night, and then, once you had adjusted to the idea of interrogation, once you had prepared your mind and will to resist, they kept you waiting, a deliberately pointless wait of an hour, two hours, three hours before the interrogation itself, to tire your body and wear your mind down. And I was kept waiting for a particularly long time that Wednesday, the 27th of July; I waited standing in the anteroom for two full hours. I remember the date so precisely for a particular reason, because in the anteroom where I had to wait – of course I wasn’t allowed to sit down – in the anteroom where I had to wait on my feet for two hours there was a calendar, and I can’t tell you how, in my hunger for the printed word, for something written, I stared and stared at that one number, those few words on the wall: July 27th. My brain devoured them, so to speak. And then I went on waiting, waiting, staring at the door, wondering when it would finally open, trying to
think what my inquisitors might ask this time, and knowing it would be nothing like what I was preparing for. In spite of all this, however, the torment of waiting and standing was a pleasure too, and did me good, because at least this room wasn’t the same as mine. It was a little larger, had two windows instead of one, and it was without the bed and without the washbasin and without the crack on the window sill that I had studied a million times. The door was painted a different colour, there was a different armchair by the wall, and on the left a filing cabinet with files and a coat-stand with hangers on which were draped three or four wet army overcoats, the coats of my torturers. So I had something new and different to look at, something different at last for my starved eyes, which clutched greedily at every detail. I observed every fold of those coats, I noticed, for instance, a drop of water dangling from one of the wet collars, and absurd as it may sound, I waited with ridiculous excitement to see if that drop would finally run down the fold of the fabric, or if it would continue to defy gravity and stay there longer – in fact I stared and stared at that drop for minutes on end as if my life depended on it. Then, when at last it had rolled down, I counted the buttons on the coats, eight on one coat, eight on another, ten on the third; then I compared their lapels; my hungry eyes touched, played with, seized upon all those silly little details with an avidity I can hardly describe. And suddenly my gaze fixed on something. I had seen that the side pocket of one of the coats was bulging slightly. I went closer, and thought that the rectangular shape of the bulge told me what was inside that pocket: a BOOK! I hadn’t had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it. Hypnotized, my eyes stared at the small bulge made by that book inside the pocket, they gazed fierily at that one inconspicuous spot as if to burn a hole in the coat. At last I could no longer contain my greed; instinctively I moved closer. The mere prospect of being able at least to feel the book through the fabric made the nerves in my hands glow to the fingertips. Almost without knowing it, I moved closer and closer. Fortunately the jailor didn’t notice what must have been my strange behaviour, or perhaps he thought it only natural that a man who had been standing upright for two hours would want to lean against the wall a little. Finally I was very close to the coat, and I had intentionally put my hands behind my back so that they could touch it unnoticed. I felt the fabric, and there really was something rectangular on the other side, something flexible and rustling slightly – a book! A book! And a thought flashed through me quick as lightning: steal the book! You might succeed, and you can hide it in your cell and then read, read, read, read again at last! No sooner had the thought entered my mind than it worked like strong poison; suddenly there was a roaring in my ears and my heart began to hammer, my hands turned cold as ice and wouldn’t obey me. But after the first stupefaction I moved quietly and warily even closer to the coat, keeping my eyes on my jailer all the time, and with my hands hidden behind my back I moved the book further and further up in the pocket from the outside. And then: one snatch, one slight, careful tug, and suddenly I had the small, not very thick book in my hand. Only now did I take fright at what I had done. But there was no going back at this point. Yet where was I to put it? Behind my back, I pushed the book down under my trousers where the belt held them up, and from there gradually round to my hip, so that as I walked I could hold it in place with my hand down beside the seam of my trousers in a military stance. Now for the first test. I moved away from the coat-stand, one step, two steps, three steps. It worked. It was possible to hold the book in place as I walked if I kept my hand firmly pressed to my belt.

  ‘Then came the interrogation. It required a greater effort from me than ever, for as I answered questions I was really concentrating all my strength not on what I was saying but on holding the book in place unnoticed. Fortunately the interrogation was a short one this time, and I got the book back to my room safe and sound – I won’t bore you with all the details; once, when I was halfway down the corridor, it slipped dangerously low, and I had to simulate a bad coughing fit so that I could bend over and push it back up under my belt again. But what a moment it was when I came back to my hell, alone at last, yet not alone any longer!

  ‘You’ll probably expect me to have taken the book out at once, to have looked at it, read it. By no means! First I wanted to enjoy actually having a book in my possession, artificially drawing out the delightfully intriguing pleasure of anticipation, dreaming what kind of book the one I had stolen might ideally be: first of all, very closely printed, with many, many printed characters in it, many, many thin pages, so that it would take me longer to read it. Then I hoped it would be a work to exercise my mind, nothing shallow or light, but a book that would teach me something, a book I could learn by heart, poetry, and preferably – what a bold dream! – Goethe or Homer. But finally I could no longer contain my avid curiosity. Lying on the bed, so that if my jailer suddenly opened the door he couldn’t see what I was doing, I took the book out from under my belt with shaking hands.

  ‘The first glance was a disappointment, and even made me feel a kind of bitter anger: the book I had carried off at such great peril and was looking forward to with such ardent expectation was nothing but a chess manual, a collection of a hundred and fifty championship matches. If I hadn’t been locked and barred in I’d have flung the book through an open window in my first rage, for what use was this nonsense to me, what could I do with it? As a schoolboy, like most others, I had sat at a chessboard now and then out of boredom. But what good was this theoretical stuff going to be? You can’t play chess without a partner, and certainly not without chessmen and a chessboard. Morosely, I leafed through the pages, hoping I might yet find something there to read, a foreword, an introduction; but I found only the bare, square patterns of the boards for the various games, and under them symbols of which I could make nothing at first: a2–a3, Nfl–g3, and so on. It all seemed to me a kind of algebra to which I had no key. Only gradually did I work out that the letters a, b and c were for the horizontal rows of squares, the ranks, and the numbers 1 to 8 for the vertical rows, the files, and they indicated the present position of each separate chessman; that at least gave a language to the purely graphic patterns. Perhaps, I thought, I could make myself a kind of chessboard in my cell and then try to play these games; like a sign from heaven, it struck me that my bedspread so happened to have a design of large checks. Properly folded, it could finally be arranged to show sixty-four squares. So I first hid the book under my mattress, tearing out only the first page. Then I began modelling the chessmen, king, queen and so on, out of small crumbs saved from my bread, in what was of course a ridiculously imperfect way; after endless effort I was finally able to reconstruct the positions shown in the chess book on my chequered bedspread. But when I tried to play the whole game through I failed entirely at first with my ludicrous breadcrumb chessmen, half of which I had coloured darker with dust. I kept getting confused during those first few days. Five, ten, twenty times I had to begin that single game again from the beginning. But who in the world had as much useless spare time as I did, the slave of the void, and who had such an immense desire to learn and so much patience available? After six days I was already playing the game flawlessly to its end, after eight more days I didn’t even need the crumbs on the bedspread to picture the positions in the chess book, and after another eight days I could do without the check bedspread too; automatically, what had at first been the abstract symbols in the book – a1, a2, c7, c8 – changed inside my head into visual, three-dimensional positions. The switch was a complete success: I had projected the chessboard and chessmen into my mind, where I could now survey the positions of the pieces on the board by means of the formulae alone, just as a mere glance at a score is enough for a trained musician to hear all the separate parts of a piece and
the way they sound together. After another fourteen days I was easily able to play any game in the book from memory – or blindfold, as the technical expression has it – and only now did I begin to understand what immeasurable relief my bold theft had brought me. For all at once I had an occupation – a pointless, aimless one if you like, but an occupation that annihilated the void around me. In those one hundred and fifty tournament matches, I had a wonderful weapon against the oppressive monotony of my own space and time. To keep the delight of my new occupation going, I divided every day up exactly: two games in the morning, two games in the afternoon, and then a quick recapitulation in the evening. That filled my day, which used to be as form less as jelly; I was occupied without exhausting myself, for the wonderful advantage of the game of chess is that, by concentrating your intellectual energies into a strictly limited area, it doesn’t tire the brain even with the most strenuous thinking, but instead increases its agility and vigour. Gradually, in what at first had been purely mechanical repetitions of the championship matches, an artistic, pleasurable understanding began to awaken in me. I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet’s verses from only a few lines. What began as mere occupation to fill the time became enjoyment, and the figures of the great strategists of chess such as Alekhine, Lasker, Bogolyubov and Tartakower entered my solitary confinement as beloved comrades. Endless variety enlivened my silent cell every day, and the very regularity of my mental exercises restored to my mind its endangered security; I felt my brain refreshed and newly polished, so to speak, by the constant discipline of thought. It was particularly evident that I was thinking more clearly and concisely in the interrogations; I had unconsciously perfected my defence against false threats and concealed tricks at the chessboard. I no longer exposed my weaknesses under questioning now, and I even felt that the Gestapo men were beginning to regard me with a certain respect. Perhaps, since they saw everyone else collapse, they were silently wondering from what secret sources I alone drew the strength for such steadfast resistance.