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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Chess champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires. Dull-witted in all but chess, he entertains himself on board by allowing others to challenge him in the game, before beating each of them and taking their money. But there is another passenger with a passion for chess: Dr B, previously driven to insanity during Nazi imprisonment by the games played in his imagination. In agreeing to take on Czentovic, what price will Dr B ultimately pay?Stark, intense, overpowering, A Chess Story is a grandmaster's examination of madness and the power of a mind willing to sacrifice everything to win.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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STEFAN ZWEIG
A CHESS STORY
Translated from the German by Alexander Starritt
Contents
A CHESS STORY
THE LARGE STEAMSHIP leaving New York for Buenos Aires at midnight was caught up in the usual bustle and commotion of the hour before sailing. Visitors from shore pressed past one another to take leave of their friends, telegraph boys in skew-whiff caps shot names through the lounges, cases and flowers were brought and inquisitive children ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flashbulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us—it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure. My friend looked across and smiled. “You have an odd fish on board with you there, that’s Czentovic.” And since I must have looked fairly baffled in response to this news, he explained by adding, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s worked over the whole USA with his tournaments and now he’s off to conquests new in Argentina.”
As a matter of fact I did now remember this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to expand on them with a whole series of anecdotes. Around a year previously, Czentovic had put himself on a level with the most established old masters of the art of chess—Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, Bogolyubov—at a single stroke; not since the appearance of the seven-year-old wunderkind Reshevsky at the 1922 New York Masters had the irruption of an unknown into the hallowed guild aroused such a general furore. For in no way was such dazzling success indicated by Czentovic’s intellectual capabilities. It soon trickled out that in his private life this chess champion was incapable of writing so much as one sentence correctly in any language and, in the angry taunt of one of his disgruntled colleagues, “his education in every field was uniformly nil.” The son of a dirt-poor boatman on the middle Danube whose tiny coracle was run over one night by a grain freighter, the then twelve-year-old was taken in out of pity after the death of his father by the priest of their remote hamlet, and the good pastor did his best to make up with extra help at home all that the dull, uncommunicative, thick-skulled child was unable to learn in the village school.
But his efforts were in vain. Even after the alphabet had been explained to him a hundred times, in each lesson Mirko would again stare at every letter in renewed ignorance; his lumbering brain lacked the power to retain even so simple a concept. When supposedly doing mental arithmetic, he still at fourteen had to employ his fingers to help, and reading a book or newspaper still amounted to an especial strain for the already adolescent boy. Yet Mirko could not in any way be called recalcitrant or unwilling. He obediently did what he was asked, fetched water, chopped wood, helped in the fields, tidied the kitchen and reliably carried out, albeit with an infuriating slowness, whatever task he was assigned. What, however, dismayed the good priest most about the intractable lad was his utter apathy. He did nothing without being specifically prompted, never asked a question, did not play with other boys and didn’t of himself seek out any occupation that wasn’t expressly decreed; as soon as Mirko had completed his household chores, he sat around stolidly in one room wearing the vacant expression that sheep wear in a meadow, taking not even the slightest interest in what happened around him. In the evenings, when the priest drew on his long-stemmed farmer’s pipe and played his habitual three games of chess with the sergeant of the local gendarmes, the flaxen-haired adolescent slumped mutely beside them and stared, apparently sleepy and indifferent, at the chequered board.
One winter evening, while the two partners were engrossed in their nightly contest, they heard the tinkling bells of a sleigh on the village street approaching fast and ever faster. A farmer, his cap dusted with snow, tramped in hastily, his old mother lay dying, would the pastor please hurry to administer the last rites in time. The priest unhesitatingly followed him out. The gendarme sergeant, who hadn’t yet emptied his glass of beer, lit himself one more pipe for the road and was just preparing to pull on his heavy boots when he noticed that Mirko’s gaze was fixed unswervingly on the chessboard and its unfinished game.
“Well, do you want to take over?” he joshed, quite sure that the somnolent boy wouldn’t understand how to move any of the pieces across the board. The lad stared at him diffidently, then nodded and took the pastor’s seat. After fourteen moves, the gendarme sergeant had been beaten and also forced to admit that no inadvertently careless move of his own could be blamed for the defeat. The second game ended no differently.
