Chess

  ‘This happy time, when I was systematically replaying the hundred and fifty games in that book day after day, lasted for about two and a half to three months. Then I unexpectedly came up against a dead end. Suddenly I was facing the void again. For as soon as I had played each individual game from beginning to end twenty or thirty times, it lost the charm of novelty and surprise; its old power to excite and stimulate me was gone. What was the point in replaying games again and again when I knew them all by heart, move after move? As soon as I had played the first opening, the rest of the game jogged automatically along in my mind; there was no surprise any more, no tension, no problems. To keep myself occupied and create the sense of effort and diversion that were now essential to me, I really needed another book with other games in it. But as it was impossible for me to get one, there was only one way my mind could take in its strange, crazed course; I must invent new games instead of playing the old ones. I must try to play with myself, or rather against myself.

  ‘I don’t know how far you’ve ever thought about the intellectual situation in this king of games. But even the briefest reflection should be enough to show that as chess is a game of pure thought involving no element of chance, it’s a logical absurdity to try playing against yourself. At heart the attraction of chess resides entirely in the development of strategies in two different brains, in the fact that Black doesn’t know what manoeuvres White will perform in this war of the mind, and keeps trying to guess them and thwart them, while White himself is trying to anticipate and counter Black’s secret intentions. If Black and White were one and the same person, you’d have the ridiculous state of affairs where one and the same brain simultaneously knows and doesn’t know something, and when operating as White can forget entirely what it wanted and intended a minute ago when it was Black. Such dual thinking really presupposes a complete split of consciousness, an arbitrary ability to switch the function of the brain on and off again as if it were a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against yourself is a paradox, like jumping over your own shadow. Well, to be brief, in my desperation I spent months trying to achieve this absurd impossibility. However, I had no option but to pursue it, if I were not to fall victim to pure madness or see my mind waste away entirely. My dreadful situation forced me at least to try splitting myself into a Black self and a White self, to keep from being crushed by the terrible void around me.’

  Dr B. leaned back in his deckchair and closed his eyes for a minute. It was as if he were trying to suppress a disturbing memory by force. Once again the strange little tic that he couldn’t control appeared, this time at the left-hand corner of his mouth. Then he sat up a little straighter in his deckchair.

  ‘Well – up to this point I hope I’ve explained it all reasonably intelligibly to you. But I’m afraid I’m not at all sure that I can give you as clear an idea of what happened next. For this new occupation put such extraordinary pressure on the brain that it made any kind of self-control at the same time impossible. I’ve already told you that in my opinion playing chess against yourself is essentially absurd, but even that absurdity might stand a minimal chance with a real chessboard in front of you, since the reality of the board does allow you to distance yourself to some extent, occupy a different material territory. In front of a real chessboard with real chessmen, you can insert pauses for thought, change from one side of the table to the other in purely physical terms, seeing the situation now through Black’s eyes and now through the eyes of White. But forced as I was to project these battles against myself – or with myself, if you like – into imaginary space, I had to keep the situation on all sixty-four squares clearly in my mind, and in addition calculate not just the present state of the game but the possible subsequent moves of both partners, while also – and I know how ludicrous all this sounds – imagining four or five moves in advance for each of my selves, working them out twice or three times, no, six, eight, twelve times. In this game in the abstract space of the mind I was obliged – forgive me for my presumption in asking you to think along these deranged lines – to work out four or five moves ahead as player White, and the same as player Black, combining in advance all the situations that might arise as the game developed, and I had to do it, so to speak, with two brains, White’s brain and Black’s brain. But even this splitting of myself wasn’t the most dangerous part of my abstruse experiment; that was the fact that in devising the games independently I suddenly lost the ground under my feet and fell into an abyss. Just playing through the tournament matches as I had in the earlier weeks, after all, was nothing but reproduction, purely the re-enactment of material provided to me, and as such it was no more of a strain than learning poems by heart or memorizing legal paragraphs. It was a limited, disciplined activity, and excellent mental exercise. My two games played in the morning and two games in the afternoon were a quota that I could achieve without becoming excited; they acted as a substitute for a normal occupation, and anyway, if I went wrong in the course of a game or wasn’t sure what to do next, I could always resort to the book. That was the only reason why this activity had been such a healthy, rather soothing one for my shattered nerves, because playing out games between other people didn’t involve me personally; it made no difference to me whether Black or White won, since it was really Alekhine or Bogolyubov trying to win the championship, and I myself, my mind and soul enjoyed the games only as a spectator, appreciating their changes of fortune and felicitous aspects. But as soon as I tried playing against myself I began unconsciously issuing myself with a challenge. Each of my two selves, my Black self and my White self, had to compete with the other, and each separ-ately felt an impatient ambition to triumph, to win; as my Black self I felt feverish anxiety after every move to see what my White self would do next. Each of my two selves felt triumphant when the other made a mistake, and at the same time was angry with itself for its own carelessness.

  ‘All this seems pointless, and in fact such an artificial schizophrenia, such a split of the consciousness, with its admixture of dangerous excitement, would be unthinkable in a normal human being in normal circumstances. But don’t forget that I had been forcibly torn from all normality, I was a captive, innocent but imprisoned, I had been subtly tormented with solitary confinement for months, I was a man who had long wished to vent his pent-up fury on something. And as I had nothing but this pointless game against myself, my fury and desire for revenge were injected, with fanatical enthusiasm, into the game itself. Something in me wanted to be proved right, and I had only that other self within me to oppose, so during the game I worked myself up into almost manic agitation. At first I had thought calmly, soberly, I had paused between one game and the next so that I could recover from the strain, but gradually my inflamed nerves wouldn’t let me wait. As soon as my White self had made a move, my Black self was feverishly advancing; as soon as a game was over I was challenging myself to the next, because each time one of my chess selves was defeated by the other it wanted its revenge. I shall never be able to say even approximately how many games I played against myself during those last months in my cell, as a result of this insatiable derangement – perhaps a thousand, perhaps more. It was an obsession against which I had no defence; from morning to night I thought of nothing but bishops and pawns, rooks and kings, a and b and c, checkmate and castling. All my being and feeling drove me to the chequered square. My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves and chess problems; sometimes I woke with my forehead perspiring and realized that I must still have been unconsciously playing even as I slept, and when I dreamed of people I did so exclusively in terms of the movements of the bishop, the rook, the knight’s leaps forward and back. Even when I was summoned for interrogation I couldn’t think concisely about my responsibility any more; I have an idea that during the last interrogations I mu
st have expressed myself with some confusion, because now and then my inquisitors looked at me strangely. But all the time they asked questions and consulted each other, I was just waiting, in my disastrous passion, to be taken back to my cell to go on with my playing, my mad playing of another game and then another and another. Every interruption disturbed me; even the quarter of an hour when the jailer was cleaning my prison cell, even the two minutes when he brought me food tormented my feverish impatience. Sometimes the bowl containing my meal still stood there untouched in the evening; I had forgotten to eat as I played chess. My only physical feeling was a terrible thirst; it must have been the fever of my constant thinking and playing. I emptied my bottle of water in two draughts, and plagued the jailer for more, yet next moment my tongue felt dry in my mouth again. At last my excitement as I played – and I did nothing else from morning to night – rose to such a degree that I couldn’t sit still for a moment; I kept pacing up and down as I thought about the games, faster and faster and faster I paced, becoming more and more heated the closer the end of the game came; my desire to win, to triumph, to defeat myself gradually became a kind of rage, and I was trembling with impatience, for one of my chess selves was always too slow for the other. One urged the other on; ridiculous as it may seem to you, when one of my selves didn’t counter the other self’s move quickly enough I began telling myself angrily, “Faster, faster!” or “Go on, go on!” Of course I now realize that this condition of mine was a pathological form of intellectual over-stimulation, for which I can find no name but one hitherto unknown to medicine: chess poisoning. Finally this monomaniac obsession began to attack not just my brain but my body too. I lost weight, my sleep was restless and broken, when I woke up it always cost me a great effort to force my leaden eyelids open; sometimes I felt so weak that when I picked up a glass to drink I had difficulty lifting it to my lips because my hands shook so much. But as soon as the game began a wild strength came over me; I walked up and down with my fists clenched, and sometimes, as if through a red mist, I heard my own voice crying hoarsely and venomously, “Check!” or “Mate!” to itself.

  ‘I myself can’t tell you how this terrible, unspeakable condition came to a crisis. All I know is that I woke up one morning, and it was a different waking from usual. My body felt as if it were separate from me; I was resting softly and comfortably. A heavy, beneficial weariness such as I hadn’t known for months weighed on my lids, so warm and kindly that at first I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. I lay awake for a few minutes enjoying this heavy apathy, lying there lethargically with my senses pleasantly dulled. Suddenly I thought I heard voices behind me, live human voices speaking words, and you can’t imagine my delight, because for months, for almost a year, I had heard no words but the harsh, sharp, malicious remarks made by my bench of interrogators. You’re dreaming, I told myself, you’re dreaming. Don’t open your eyes whatever you do! Let the dream go on, or you’ll see your accursed cell around you again, the chair and the washstand and the table and the wallpaper with its pattern forever the same. You’re dreaming – go on with the dream!

  ‘But curiosity got the upper hand. Slowly and cautiously, I opened my eyelids. And wonder of wonders: I was in another room, a larger, more spacious room than my hotel cell. An unbarred window let daylight in, and there was a view of trees, green trees swaying in the wind instead of my rigid firewall, the walls here gleamed smooth and white, the ceiling was white and rose high above me – it was true, I was lying in another bed, one I didn’t know, and human voices were whispering quietly behind me, it really wasn’t a dream. I must instinctively have given a violent start of surprise, because I heard steps approaching. A woman came up to me, moving gracefully, a woman with a white cap on her hair: a nurse. A shiver of delight ran through me; it was a year since I had set eyes on a woman. I stared at this lovely apparition, and there must have been a wild, ecstatic expression in my eyes, for as she came closer the woman said soothingly but firmly, “Calm! Keep calm!” But I merely listened to her voice – wasn’t that a human being speaking? And in addition – an unimaginable miracle – speaking in a soft, warm, almost tender woman’s voice. I stared avidly at her mouth, for in that year of hell I had come to think it improbable that one human being could speak kindly to another. She smiled at me – yes, she smiled, so there were still people capable of a kind smile – then put an admonishing finger to her lips and walked quietly on. But I couldn’t obey her. I hadn’t seen enough of the miracle yet. I tried to force myself upright in the bed to watch her go, to look at the miracle of a kindly human being as she walked away. As I tried to haul myself up by the edge of the bed, however, I found I couldn’t do it. Where my right hand usually was, and my fingers and wrist, I felt something strange instead: a large, thick, white wad of fabric, obviously an extensive bandage. At first I stared uncomprehendingly at this white, thick, strange thing on my hand, and then I slowly began to grasp where I was, and wondered what had happened to me. I must have been injured, or else I’d hurt my own hand. I was in a hospital.

  ‘At midday the doctor came, a friendly, elderly man. He knew my family name, and mentioned my uncle the imperial physician so respectfully that I immediately felt he was well-disposed to me. As we talked, he asked me all kinds of questions, particularly one that surprised me – was I a mathematician or a chemist? I said no.

  ‘ “Strange,” he murmured. “In your delirium you kept crying out such strange formulae – c3, c4. We could none of us make anything of them.”

  ‘I asked what had happened to me. He gave a rather odd smile.

  ‘ “Nothing serious. An acute irritation of the nerves.” And he added quietly, after looking cautiously around, “Not surprising, after all. You’ve been here since March the 13th, haven’t you?”

  ‘I nodded.

  ‘ “No wonder, then, with their methods,” he murmured. “You’re not the first. But don’t worry.”

  ‘From the way in which he soothingly whispered this, and thanks to his kind expression, I knew I was in good hands here.

  ‘Two days later, the kindly doctor told me frankly what had happened. The jailer had heard me shouting out loud in my cell, and at first thought someone had come in and I was quarrelling with him. But no sooner did he appear in the doorway than I had rushed at him, uttering wild cries which sounded like, “Will you make your move, you rascal, you coward?” I had tried to seize him by the throat, and finally I hit out so frantically that he had to call for help. As I was being dragged off in my rabid state, I had suddenly torn myself free, rushed to the window in the corridor and smashed the pane, cutting my hand – you can still see the deep scar here. I had spent my first few nights in hospital in a kind of brain fever, but the doctor thought my senses were perfectly clear now. “To be sure,” he added quietly, “I won’t say that to those gentlemen, or they’ll have you back in there. Trust me, and I’ll do my best.”

  ‘I have no idea what that helpful doctor told my tormentors, but at least he got what he hoped to achieve: my release. He may have said I wasn’t responsible for my own actions, or perhaps by now I was of no importance to the Gestapo, for Hitler had occupied Bohemia, so as far as he was concerned that was Austria dealt with. I had only to sign an undertaking to leave our native land for ever within two weeks, and those two weeks were so full of the thousands of formalities that former cosmopolitans need in order to travel these days – military papers, police papers, tax certificates, a passport, a visa, a health certificate – that I had no time to think about the past much. It seems that mysterious powers work to regulate our brains, automatically switching off what might burden and endanger the mind, for whenever I tried to think back to my time in that cell the light in my head went out, so to speak; only many weeks later, in fact only here on this ship, have I found the courage to remember what happened to me again.

  ‘And now you’ll understand why I acted to your friends in such an unseemly and probably bewildering manner. I was walking through the smoking-room entire
ly by chance when I saw them sitting at the chessboard, and I was instinctively rooted to the spot by surprise and horror. For I had entirely forgotten that chess can be played with a real chessboard and real chessmen; I had forgotten that two completely different people sit opposite each other in person during the game. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that the players were basically involved in the same game that, in my desperate situation, I had tried playing against myself for months. The numbers I had used to help me in my grim mental exercises had been only a substitute for those carved chessmen, a symbol of them; my surprise when I saw that the movement of the chessmen on the board was the same as the imaginary moves I had made in my mind was, perhaps, like the surprise of an astronomer who has used complicated methods to calculate the existence of a new planet on paper, and then actually sees it as a white, bright, heavenly body in the sky. As if magnetically drawn to the board, I stared at it and saw my patterns – knight, rook, king, queen and pawns – as real figures carved from wood. To get an idea of the state of the game I first had to change them automatically back from my abstract world of figures into moving chessmen. Gradually I was overcome by curiosity to see a real game between two players. Then came the embarrassing moment when, forgetting common courtesy, I intervened in your game. But your friend’s wrong move was like a pang going through my heart. It was purely instinctive when I restrained him, something done impulsively, just as you’d catch hold of a child leaning over the banisters without thinking about it. Only later did I realize how very improperly my impulse had made me behave.’