The Royal Game E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 97

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Beschreibung

A chess game on a translatlantic liner is the starting point for this heartstoppingly intense study of obsession On a Cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, a tantalising encounter takes place between the reigning world chess champion and an unknown passenger. The stranger's diffident manner masks his extraordinary ability to challenge the Grand Master in a game of chess; it also conceals his dark and damaged past, the horror of which emerges as the game unfolds. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

THE ROYAL GAME

Translated from the German by B W Huebsch

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Royal Game

Other Stefan Zweig titles published by Pushkin Press

Copyright

THE ROYAL GAME

The Royal Game

THE BIG LINER, due to sail from New York to Buenos Aires at midnight, was filled with the activity and bustle incident to the last hour. Visitors who had come to see their friends scurried hither and thither, page-boys with caps smartly cocked slithered through the public rooms shouting names snappily, baggage, parcels and flowers were being hauled about, inquisitive children ran up and down companionways, while the deck orchestra provided persistent accompaniment. I stood talking to an acquaintance on the promenade deck, somewhat apart from the hubbub, when two or three flashbulbs sprayed sharply near us, evidently for press photos of some prominent passenger at a last-minute interview. My friend looked in that direction and smiled.

“You have a queer bird on board, that Czentovic.”

And as my face must have revealed that the statement meant nothing to me he added, by way of explanation, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He has just finished off America in a coast-to-coast exhibition tour and is on his way to capture Argentina.”

This served to recall not only the name of the young world champion but also a few details relating to his rocket-like career; my friend, a more observant newspaper reader than I, was able to eke them out with a string of anecdotes. At a single stroke, about a year ago, Czentovic had aligned himself with the most celebrated elder statesmen of the art of chess, such as Alekhin, Capablanca, Tartakover, Lasker, Boguljobov; not since the appearance of the nine-year-old prodigy Reshevsky, in New York in 1922, had a newcomer crashed into that famed guild to the accompaniment of such widespread interest. It seems that Czentovic’s intellectual equipment, at the beginning, gave small promise of so brilliant a career. The secret soon seeped through that in his private capacity this champion wasn’t able to write a single sentence in any language without misspelling a word, and that, as one of his vexed colleagues, wrathfully sarcastic, put it, “He enjoys equal ignorance in every field of culture.” His father, a poverty-stricken Yugoslavian boatman on the Danube, had been run down in his tiny vessel one night by a grain steamer, and the orphaned boy, then twelve, was taken in charge, out of pity, by the pastor of their obscure village. The good man did his level best to instil into the indolent, slow-speaking, low-browed child at home what he seemed unable to grasp in the village school.

But all his efforts proved in vain. Mirko stared blankly at the writing exercise just as if the strokes had not already been explained a hundred times; his lumbering brain lacked the power to grasp even the simplest subjects. At fourteen he still counted with his fingers, and it was only by dint of great strain that he could read a book or newspaper. Yet none could say that Mirko was unwilling or disobedient. Whatever he was told to do he did: fetched water, split wood, worked in the field, washed up the kitchen, and he could be relied upon to execute—even if with exasperating slowness—every service that was demanded. But what grieved the kindly pastor most about the blockhead was his total lack of cooperation. He performed no deed unless specially directed, asked no questions, never played with other lads, and sought no occupation of his own accord; after Mirko had concluded his work about the house, he would sit idly with that empty stare one sees with grazing sheep, without participating in the slightest in what might be going on. Of an evening, while the pastor sucked at his long peasant pipe and played his customary three games of chess with the police sergeant, the fair-haired dull-wit squatted silently alongside them, staring from under his heavy lids, seemingly sleepy and indifferent, at the chequered board.

One winter evening, while the two men were absorbed in their daily game, a rapid crescendo of bells gave notice of a quickly approaching sleigh. A peasant, his cap covered with snow, stamped in hastily to tell the pastor that his mother lay dying and to ask his immediate attendance in the hope that there was still time to administer extreme unction. The priest accompanied him at once. The police sergeant, who had not yet finished his beer, lit a fresh pipe preparatory to leaving, and was about to draw on his heavy sheepskin boots when he noticed how immovably Mirko’s gaze was fastened on the board with its interrupted game.

“Well, do you want to finish it?” he said jocularly, fully convinced that the sleepyhead had no notion of how to move a single piece. The boy looked up shyly, nodded assent, and took the pastor’s place. After fourteen moves the sergeant was beaten and he had to concede that his defeat was in no way attributable to avoidable carelessness. The second game had the same result.

“Balaam’s ass!” cried the astounded pastor upon his return, explaining to the policeman, a lesser expert in the Bible, that two thousand years ago there had been a similar miracle of a dumb person suddenly endowed with the speech of wisdom. The late hour notwithstanding, the good man could not forgo challenging his semiliterate helper to a contest. Mirko beat him too, with ease. He played toughly, slowly, deliberately, never once raising his bowed, broad brow from the chessboard. But he played with irrefutable certainty, and in the days that followed neither the priest nor the policeman was able to win a single game.

The priest, best able to assess his ward’s various shortcomings, now became curious as to the manner in which this one-sided singular gift would resist a severer test. After Mirko had been made somewhat presentable by the efforts of the village barber, the priest drove him in his sleigh to the nearby town where he knew that many chess players—a cut above him in ability, he was aware from experience—were always to be found in the café on the main square. The pastor’s entrance, as he steered the straw-haired, red-cheeked fifteen-year-old before him, created no small stir in the circle; the boy, in his sheepskin jacket (woollen side in) and high boots, eyes shyly downcast, stood aside until summoned to a chess table.

Mirko lost the first encounter because his master had never employed the Sicilian defence. The next game, with the best player of the lot, resulted in a draw. But in the third game and the fourth and all that came after he slew them, one after the other.

It so happens that little provincial towns of Yugoslavia are seldom the theatre of exciting events; consequently, this first appearance of the peasant champion before the assembled worthies became no less than a sensation. It was unanimously decided to keep the boy in town until the next day for a special gathering of the chess club and, in particular, for the benefit of Count Simczic of the castle, a chess fanatic. The priest, who now regarded his ward with quite a new pride, but whose joy of discovery was subordinate to the sense of duty which called him home to his Sunday service, consented to leave him for further tests. The chess group put young Czentovic up at the local hotel, where he saw a water closet for the first time in his life.

The chess-room was crowded to capacity on Sunday afternoon. Mirko faced the board immobile for four hours, spoke not a word, and never looked up; one player after another fell before him. Finally a multiple game was proposed; it took a while before they could make clear to the novice that he had to play against several contestants at one and the same time. No sooner had Mirko grasped the procedure than he adapted himself to it, and trod slowly with heavy, creaking shoes from table to table, eventually winning seven of the eight games.

Grave consultations now took place. True, strictly speaking, the new champion was not of the town, yet the innate national pride had received a lively fillip. Here was a chance, at last, for this town, so small that its existence was hardly suspected, to put itself on the map by sending a great man into the world. A vaudeville agent named Koller, who supplied the local garrison cabaret with talent, offered to obtain professional training for the youth from a Viennese expert whom he knew, and to see him through for a year if the deficit were made good. Count Simczic, who in his sixty years of daily chess had never encountered so remarkable an opponent, signed the guarantee promptly. That day marked the opening of the astonishing career of the Danube boatman’s son.

It took only six months for Mirko to master every secret of chess technique, though with one odd limitation which later became apparent to the experts of the game and caused many a sneer. He was never able to memorise a single game or, to use the professional term, to play blind. He lacked completely the ability to conceive the board in the limitless space of the imagination. He had to have the field of sixty-four black and white squares and the thirty-two pieces tangibly before him; even when he had attained international fame he carried a folding pocket board with him in order to be able to reconstruct a game or work on a problem by visual means. This defect, in itself not important, betrayed a want of imaginative power and provoked animated discussions among chess enthusiasts similar to those in musical circles when it discovers that an outstanding virtuoso or conductor is unable to play or direct without a score. This singularity, however, was no obstacle to Mirko’s stupendous rise. At seventeen he already possessed a dozen prizes, at eighteen he won the Hungarian Masters, and finally, at twenty, the championship of the world. The boldest experts, every one of them immeasurably his superior in brains, imagination, and audacity, fell before his tough, cold logic as did Napoleon before the clumsy Kutusov and Hannibal before Fabius Cunctator, of whom Livy records that his traits of phlegm and imbecility were already conspicuous in his childhood. Thus it occurred that the illustrious gallery of chess masters, which included eminent representatives of widely varied intellectual fields—philosophers, mathematicians, constructive, imaginative, and often creative talents—was invaded by a complete outsider, a heavy, taciturn peasant from whom not even the most cunning journalists were ever able to extract a word that would help to make a story. Yet, however he may have deprived the newspapers of polished phrases, substitutes in the way of anecdotes about his person were numerous, for, inescapably, the moment he arose from the board at which he was the incomparable master, Czentovic became a grotesque, an almost comic figure. In spite of his correct dress, his fashionable cravat with its too ostentatious pearl tiepin, and his carefully manicured nails, he remained in manners and behaviour the narrow-minded lout who was accustomed to sweeping out the priest’s kitchen. He utilised his gift and his fame to squeeze out all the money they would yield, displaying petty and often vulgar greed, always with a shameless clumsiness that aroused his professional colleagues’ ridicule and anger. He travelled from town to town, stopped at the cheapest hotels, played for any club that would pay his fee, sold the advertising rights in his portrait to a soap manufacturer, and, oblivious of his competitors’ scorn—they being aware that he hardly knew how to write—attached his name to a Philosophy of Chess