The Last Miracle: Jewish Stories E-Book

Zweig Stefan

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

Seitenzahl: 456

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Five tales of family breakdown, political struggle, and monomaniacal obsession from one of the defining voices of the European Jewish diaspora.Moving back through time from the First World War to Ancient Rome, these stories play on the tension between religion, society and individual with masterful irony. We encounter heroes and bookworms, visionaries and gadabouts, patriarchs and rebels - united across the centuries by faith, and by the intensity with which they live and die, their individual passions blazing out against the forces of history.

Leseprobe

1‘The fates of men are nothing to the universe, Zweig tells us―but he makes us care’

SUNDAY TIMES

‘He was capable of making the reader live other people’s deepest experience—which is a moral education in itself. My advice is that you should go out at once and buy his books’

TELEGRAPH

‘Stefan Zweig’s time of oblivion is over for good… it’s good to have him back’

SALMAN RUSHDIE, NEW YORK TIMES 2

34

THE LAST MIRACLE

JEWISH STORIES

STEFAN ZWEIG

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY ANTHEA BELL AND EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

5

Contents

Title PageBuchmendel Downfall of the HeartThe Miracles of LifeIn the Snow The Buried CandelabrumAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsAbout the AuthorsCopyright6

78

Buchmendel

9

Back in vienna again, on my way home from a visit to the outer districts of the city, I was unexpectedly caught in a heavy shower of rain that sent people running from its wet whiplash to take refuge in such shelter as the entrances of buildings, and I myself quickly looked round for a place where I could keep dry. Luckily Vienna has a coffee house on every street corner, so with my hat dripping and my shoulders drenched, I hurried into one that stood directly opposite. Inside, it proved to be a suburban café of the traditional kind, almost a stereotype of a Viennese café, with none of the newfangled features that imitate the inner-city music halls of Germany. It was in the old Viennese bourgeois style, full of ordinary people partaking more lavishly of the free newspapers than the pastries on sale. At this evening hour the air in the café, which would always be stuffy anyway, was thick with ornate blue smoke rings, yet the place looked clean, with velour sofas that were obviously new and a shiny aluminium till. In my haste I hadn’t even taken the trouble to read its name outside, and indeed, what would have been the point? Now I was sitting in the warm, looking impatiently through window panes veiled by blue smoke, and wondering when it would suit the vexatious shower to move a few kilometres further on.

So there I sat, with nothing to do, and began to fall under the spell of the passive lethargy that invisibly emanates, with narcotic effect, from every true Viennese coffee house. In that empty, idle mood I looked individually at the customers, to whom the artificial light of the smoke-filled room lent an unhealthy touch of grey 10shadow round the eyes, and studied the young woman at the till mechanically setting out sugar and a spoon for every cup of coffee served by the waiter; drowsily and without really noticing them I read the posters on the walls, to which I was wholly indifferent, and found myself almost enjoying this kind of apathy. But suddenly, and in a curious way, I was brought out of my drowsy state as a vague impulse began to stir within me. It was like the beginning of a slight toothache, when you don’t know yet if it is on the right or the left, if it is starting in the upper or the lower jaw; there was just a certain tension, a mental uneasiness. For all at once—I couldn’t have said how—I was aware that I must have been here once before, years ago, and that a memory of some kind was connected with these walls, these chairs, these tables, this smoky room, apparently strange to me.

But the more I tried to pin down that memory, the more refractory and slippery it was as it eluded me—like a luminous jellyfish unconsciously glowing on the lowest level of my mind, yet not to be seized and scrutinized at close quarters. In vain I stared at every item of furnishing; certainly much of it was new to me, for instance the till with the clinking of its automatic calculations, and the brown wallpaper imitating Brazilian rosewood. All that must have been imported later. Nonetheless, I knew I had been here once before, twenty years or more ago, and something of my own old self, long since overgrown, lingered here invisibly, like a nail hidden in wood. I reached out into the room, straining all my senses, and at the same time I searched myself—yet damn it all, I couldn’t place that lost memory, drowned in the recesses of my mind.

I was annoyed with myself, as you always are when a failure of some kind makes you aware of the inadequacy and imperfection of your intellectual powers. But I did not give up hope of 11retrieving the memory after all. I knew I just had to lay hands on some tiny hook, for my memory is an odd one, good and bad at the same time: on the one hand defiant and stubborn, on the other incredibly faithful. It often swallows up what is most important, both incidents and faces, what I read and what I experience, engulfing it entirely in darkness, and will not give anything back from that underworld merely at the call of my will, only under duress. However, I need just some small thing to jog my memory, a picture postcard, a few lines of handwriting on an envelope, a sheet of newsprint faded by smoke, and at once what is forgotten will rise again like a fish on the line from the darkly streaming surface, as large as life. Then I remember every detail about someone, his mouth and the gap between the teeth in it on the left that shows when he laughs, the brittle sound of that laughter, how it makes his moustache twitch, and how another and new face emerges from that laughter—I see all that at once in detail, and I remember over the years every word the man ever said to me. But to see and feel the past so graphically I need some stimulus provided by my senses, a tiny aid from the world of reality. So I closed my eyes to allow me to think harder, to visualize and seize that mysterious hook at the end of the fishing line. Nothing, however, still nothing! All lost and forgotten. And I felt so embittered by the stubborn apparatus of memory between my temples that I could have struck myself on the forehead with my fists, as you might shake a malfunctioning automatic device that is unjustly refusing to do as you ask. No, I couldn’t sit calmly here any longer, I was so upset by the failure of my memory, and in my annoyance I stood up to get some air.

But here was a strange thing: I had hardly taken a couple of steps across the room before the first phosphorescent glimmers of light began to dawn in my mind, swirling and sparkling. To 12the right of the cash desk, I remembered, there would be a way into a windowless room illuminated only by artificial light. And sure enough, I was right. There it was, not with the wallpaper I had known before, but the proportions of that rectangular back room, its contours still indistinct in my memory, were exactly the same. This was the card room. I instinctively looked for individual details, my nerves already joyfully vibrating (soon, I felt, I would remember it all). Two billiard tables stood idle, like silent ponds of green mud; in the corners of the room there were card tables, with two men who looked like civil servants or professors playing chess at one of them. And in the corner, close to the iron stove, where you went to use the telephone, stood a small, square table. Suddenly the realization flashed right through my entire mind. I knew at once, instantly, with a single, warm impulse jogging my memory: my God, that was where Mendel used to sit, Jakob Mendel, Mendel the bibliophile, and after twenty years here I was again in the Café Gluck at the upper end of Alserstrasse, to which he habitually resorted. Jakob Mendel—how could I have forgotten him for such an incredibly long time? That strangest of characters, a legendary man, that esoteric wonder of the world, famous at the university and in a small, eminent circle—how could I have lost my memory of him, the magician who traded in books and sat here from morning to evening every day, a symbol of the knowledge, fame and honour of the Café Gluck?

I had only to turn my vision inwards for that one second, and already his unmistakable figure, in three dimensions, was conjured up by my creatively enlightened blood. I saw him at once as he had been, always sitting at that rectangular table, its dingy grey marble top heaped high at all times with books and other writings. I saw the way he persistently sat there, imperturbable, his eyes behind his glasses hypnotically fixed on a book, humming and muttering as 13he read, rocking his body and his inadequately polished, freckled bald patch back and forth, a habit acquired in the cheder, his Jewish primary school in eastern Europe. He pored over his catalogues and books here, at that table, never sitting anywhere else, singing and swaying quietly, a dark, rocking cradle. For just as a child falls into sleep and is lost to the world by that rhythmically hypnotic rocking movement, in the opinion of pious Jews the spirit passes more easily into the grace of contemplation if one’s own idle body rocks and sways at the same time. And indeed, Jakob Mendel saw and heard none of what went on around him. Beside him, the billiards players talked in loud voices, making a great deal of noise; the markers scurried about, the telephone rang, people came to scour the floor and heat the stove—he noticed none of it. Once a hot coal had fallen out of the stove, and was already burning and smoking on the wooden floor two paces away from him; only then did the infernal smell alert another of the guests in the café to the danger, and he made haste to extinguish the smoke. Jakob Mendel himself, however, only a couple of inches away and already affected by the fumes, had noticed nothing. For he read as other people pray, as gamblers gamble, as drunks stare into space, their senses numbed; he read with such touching absorption that the reading of all other persons had always seemed to me profane by comparison. As a young man, I had seen the great mystery of total concentration for the first time in this little Galician book dealer, Jakob Mendel, a kind of concentration in which the artist resembles the scholar, the truly wise resembles the totally deranged. It is the tragic happiness and unhappiness of total obsession.

An older colleague of mine from the university had taken me to see him. At the time I was engaged on research into Mesmer, the Paracelsian doctor and practitioner of magnetism, still too 14little known today, but I was not having much luck. The standard works on Mesmer proved to be unobtainable, and the librarian to whom I, as a guileless newcomer to the place, applied for information, replied in a surly tone that literary references were my business, not his. That was the occasion when my colleague first mentioned the man’s name to me. “I’ll go and see Mendel with you,” he promised. “He knows everything, he can get hold of anything. He’ll find you the most obscure book from the most forgotten of German second-hand bookshops. The ablest man in Vienna, and an original into the bargain, a bibliophilic dinosaur, the last survivor of a dying race from the prehistoric world.”

So the two of us went to the Café Gluck, and lo and behold there sat Mendel the bibliophile, bespectacled, sporting a beard that needed trimming, clad in black, and rocking back and forth as he read like a dark bush blown in the wind. We went up to him, and he didn’t even notice. He just sat there reading, his torso swaying over the table like a mandarin, and hanging on a hook behind him was his decrepit black overcoat, its pockets stuffed with notes and journals. My friend coughed loudly by way of announcing us. But Mendel, his thick glasses close to his book, still didn’t notice us. Finally my friend knocked on the tabletop as loudly and energetically as you might knock at a door—and at last Mendel looked up, automatically pushed his clumsy steel-rimmed glasses up on his forehead, and from under his bushy, ashen grey brows two remarkable eyes gazed keenly at us. They were small, black, watchful eyes, as nimble and sharp as the darting tongue of a snake. My friend introduced me, and I explained my business, first—a trick expressly recommended by my friend—complaining with pretended anger of the librarian who, I said, wouldn’t give me any information. Mendel leant back and spat carefully. Then he just laughed, and said with a strong eastern European accent, 15“Wouldn’t, eh? Not him—couldn’t is more like it! He’s an ignoramus, a poor old grey-haired ass. I’ve known him, heaven help me, these twenty years, and in all that time he still hasn’t learnt anything. He can pocket his salary, yes, that’s all he and his like can do! Those learned doctors—they’d do better to carry bricks than sit over their books.”

This forceful venting of his grievances broke the ice, and with a good-natured wave of his hand he invited me, for the first time, to sit at the square marble-topped table covered with notes, that altar of bibliophilic revelations as yet unknown to me. I quickly explained what I wanted: works contemporary with Mesmer himself on magnetism, as well as all later books and polemics for and against his theories. As soon as I had finished, Mendel closed his left eye for a second, just like a marksman before he fires his gun. It was truly for no more than a second that this moment of concentrated attention lasted, and then, as if reading from an invisible catalogue, he fluently enumerated two or three dozen books, each with its place and date of publication and an estimate of its price. I was astonished. Although prepared for it in advance, this was more than I had expected. But my bafflement seemed to please him, for on the keyboard of his memory he immediately played the most wonderful variations on my theme that any librarian could imagine. Did I also want to know about the somnambulists and the first experiments with hypnosis? And about Gassner’s exorcisms, and Christian Science, and Madame Blavatsky? Once again names came tumbling out of him, titles and descriptions; only now did I realize what a unique marvel of memory I had found in Jakob Mendel, in truth an encyclopaedia, a universal catalogue on two legs. Absolutely dazed, I stared at this bibliographical phenomenon, washed up here in the shape of an unprepossessing, even slightly grubby little Galician second-hand 16book dealer who, after reciting some eighty names to me full pelt, apparently without taking much thought, but inwardly pleased to have played his trump card, polished his glasses on what might once have been a white handkerchief. To hide my astonishment a little, I hesitantly asked which of those books he could, if need be, get hold of for me.

“Well, we’ll see what can be done,” he growled. “You come back here tomorrow, by then old Mendel will have found you a little something, and what can’t be found here will turn up elsewhere. A man who knows his way around will have luck.”

I thanked him courteously, and in all this civility I stumbled into a great act of folly by suggesting that I could write down the titles of books I wanted on a piece of paper. At the same moment I felt a warning nudge in the ribs from my friend’s elbow. But too late! Mendel had already cast me a glance—what a glance!—that was both triumphant and injured, a scornful and superior, a positively regal glance, the Shakespearian glance of Macbeth when Macduff suggests to that invincible hero that he yield without a fight. Then he laughed again, briefly, the big Adam’s apple in his throat rolling back and forth in an odd way. Apparently he had bitten back a sharp rejoinder with some difficulty. And good Mendel the bibliophile would have been right to make every imaginable sharp remark, for only a stranger, an ignoramus (amhorezis the Yiddish word he used for it) could offer such an insult as to write down the title of a book for him, Jakob Mendel, as if he were a bookseller’s apprentice or a servant in a library, as if that incomparable, diamantine bibliophilic brain would ever have needed such a crude aid to his memory. Only later did I realize how much my civil offer must have injured the feelings of such an esoteric genius, for this small, squat Galician Jew, entirely enveloped in his own beard and hunchbacked into the bargain, 17was a Titan of memory. Behind that chalky, grubby brow, which looked as if it were overgrown by grey moss, there stood in an invisible company, as if stamped in steel, every name and title that had ever been printed on the title page of a book. Whether a work had first been published yesterday or two hundred years ago, he knew at once its exact place of publication, its publisher and the price, both new and second-hand, and at the same time he unfailingly recollected the binding, illustrations and facsimile editions of every book. He saw every work, whether he had held it in his own hands or had only seen it once from a distance, in a window display or a library, with the same optical precision as the creative artist sees the still-invisible forms of his inner world and those of other people. If, say, a book was offered for six marks in the catalogue of a second-hand bookseller in Regensburg, he immediately remembered that another copy of the same book could have been bought for four crowns in an auction in Vienna two years ago, and he also knew who had bought it; indeed, Jakob Mendel never forgot a title or a number, he knew every plant, every micro-organism, every star in the eternally oscillating, constantly changing cosmos of the universe of books. He knew more in every field than the experts in that field, he was more knowledgeable about libraries than the librarians themselves, he knew the stocks of most firms by heart better than their owners, for all their lists and their card indexes, although he had nothing at his command but the magic of memory, nothing but his incomparable faculty of recollection, which could only be truly explained and analysed by citing a hundred separate examples. It was clear that his memory could have been trained and formed to show such demonic infallibility only by the eternal mystery of all perfection: by concentration. This remarkable man knew nothing about the world outside books, for to his mind all the 18phenomena of existence began to seem truly real to him only when they were cast as letters and assembled as print in a book, a process that, so to speak, had sterilized them. But he read even the books themselves not for their meaning, for their intellectual and narrative content: his sole passion was for their names, prices, forms of publication and original title pages. Unproductive and uncreative in that last point, nothing but a list of hundreds of thousands of titles and names, stamped on the soft cortex of a mammalian brain as if written in a catalogue of books, Jakob Mendel’s specifically bibliophilic memory was still, in its unique perfection, no less a phenomenon than Napoleon’s memory for faces, Mezzofanti’s for languages, the memory of a chess champion like Lasker for opening gambits or of a composer like Busoni for music. In a public place in the context of a seminar, that brain would have instructed and amazed thousands, hundreds of thousands of students and scholars, with results fertile for the sciences, an incomparable gain for those public treasuries that we call libraries. But that higher world was for ever closed to this small, uneducated Galician dealer in books, who had mastered little more than what he was taught in his studies of the Talmud, and consequently his fantastic abilities could take effect only as the secret knowledge shown when he sat at that marble-topped table in the Café Gluck. But some day, when there is a great psychologist who, with patience and persistence equal to Buffon’s in arranging and classifying the entire animal kingdom, can do the same for all varieties, species and original forms of the magical power that we call memory, describing them separately and presenting their variants (a work as yet absent from our intellectual world)—then he would be bound to think of Jakob Mendel, that genius of prices and titles, that nameless master of the science of antiquarian books. 19

By trade, to be sure, Jakob Mendel was known to the ignorant only as a little dealer in second-hand books. Every Sunday the same standard advertisement appeared in the NeueFreiePresseand the NeuesWienerTagblatt: “Old books bought, best prices paid, apply to Mendel, Obere Alserstrasse”, and then a telephone number which in fact was the number of the Café Gluck. He would search through stockrooms, and every week, with an old servant bearded like the Emperor Joseph, brought back new booty to his headquarters and conveyed it on from there, since he had no licence for a proper bookshop. So he remained a dealer in a small way, not a very lucrative occupation. Students sold him their textbooks, and his hands passed them on from one academic year to the next, while in addition he sought out and acquired any particular work that was wanted, asking a small extra charge. He was free with good advice. But money had no place within his world, for he had never been seen in anything but the same shabby coat, consuming milk and two rolls in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, and at mid-day eating some small dish that they fetched him from the restaurant. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t gamble, you might even say he didn’t live, but the two lively eyes behind his glasses were constantly feeding words, titles and names to this strange being’s brain. And the soft, fertile substance of that brain absorbed this wealth of words greedily, like a meadow soaking up thousands upon thousands of raindrops. Human beings did not interest him, and of all the human passions perhaps he knew only one, although that, for sure, is the most human of them all: vanity. If someone came to him for information, after laboriously searching for it elsewhere to no avail, and he could provide it at once, that alone made him feel satisfaction, pleasure; and so too perhaps did the fact that a few dozen people who respected and needed his knowledge lived in and outside Vienna. Every one of 20those massive conglomerations of millions of people, a place that we would call a metropolis, is sprinkled here and there with several small facets reflecting one and the same universe in miniature, invisible to most and valuable only to the expert, who is related to another expert by virtue of the same passion. And these bibliophiles all knew Jakob Mendel. Just as if you wanted advice on sheet music you turned to Eusebius Mandyczewski at the Viennese Music Association, a friendly presence sitting there in his grey cap among his files and his scores, and he would solve the most difficult problem with a smile as he first looked up at you; just as today everyone wanting to know about the Altwiener Theater and its culture would still turn infallibly to Karl Glossy, who knows all about the subject—so a few devout Viennese bibliophiles, when they had a tough nut to crack, made their pilgrimage to the Café Gluck and Jakob Mendel.

Watching Mendel during one of these conversations gave me, as a young man full of curiosity, a particular kind of pleasure. If you put an inferior book in front of him he would close it scornfully, muttering only, “Two crowns”; but faced with some rarity, or a unique specimen, he would lean respectfully back, place a sheet of paper under it, and you could see that he was suddenly ashamed of his grubby, inky fingers with their black-rimmed nails. Then he would begin leafing tenderly, cautiously and with immense reverence through the rare volume, page by page. No one could disturb him at a moment like that, as little as you can disturb a devout believer at prayer; and indeed that looking, touching, smelling and assessing, each of those single acts, had about it something of the succession of rituals in a religious ceremony. His hunched back shifted to and fro, meanwhile he muttered and growled, scratched his head, uttered curious vowel sounds, a long-drawn-out, almost awe-stricken, “Ah” or “Oh” of 21captivated admiration, or then again a swift and alarmed, “Oy!” or “Oy vey!” if a page turned out to be missing, or had been nibbled by a woodworm. Finally he would weigh up the thick tome respectfully in his hands, sniff at the large rectangle and absorb its smell with half-closed eyes, as delighted as a sentimental girl enjoying the scent of tuberose. During this rather elaborate procedure, the owner of the book of course had to possess his soul in patience. Having ended his examination, however, Mendel was very happy, indeed positively delighted to give any information, which infallibly came with wide-ranging anecdotes and dramatic accounts of the prices of similar copies. At these moments he seemed to become brighter, younger, livelier, and only one thing could embitter him beyond all measure: that was if a novice tried to offer him money for his opinion. Then he would draw back with an air of injury, for all the world like the distinguished curator of a gallery when an American tourist passing through the city tries to press a tip into his hand.

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, 22his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

Of course he was highly esteemed in the Café Gluck, the fame of which was linked, so far as we were concerned, with Mendel at his invisible teacher’s lectern rather than with the nominal patronage of that great magician Christoph Willibald Gluck, the composer of Alcesteand Iphigénie.Mendel was as much a part of the fixtures and fittings as the old cherrywood cash desk, the two badly mended cues and the copper coffee pot, and his table was protected like a shrine—for his many customers and seekers after information were always urged by the staff, in a friendly manner, to place an order of some kind, thus ensuring that most of the profits of his knowledge disappeared into the broad leather bag worn at his hip by Deubler the head waiter. In return, Mendel the bibliophile enjoyed many privileges. He was free to use the telephone, his letters were fetched and anything he ordered from the restaurant brought in, the good old lady who looked after the toilets brushed his coat and sewed on buttons, and every week she took a little bundle of washing to the laundry for him. Lunch could be brought over from the nearby restaurant for him alone, and every day Herr Standhartner, the owner of the café, came to his table in person and said good morning (although usually Jakob Mendel, deep in his books, failed to notice the greeting). He arrived promptly at seven-thirty in the morning, and he left the café only when the lights were switched off. He never spoke to the other customers, and when Herr Standhartner once asked him 23courteously if he didn’t find reading better by electric light than in the pallid, fitful illumination from the old Auer gas lamps, he gazed in surprise at the electric light bulbs; in spite of the noise and hammering of an installation lasting several days, this change had entirely passed him by. Only through the twin circles of his glasses, only through those two sparkling lenses that sucked everything in, did the billions of tiny organisms formed by the letters filter into his brain; everything else streamed over him as meaningless noise. In fact he had spent over thirty years, the entire waking part of his life, here at his rectangular table reading, comparing and calculating, in a continual daydream interrupted only by sleep.

So I was overcome by a kind of horror when I saw that the marble-topped table where Jakob Mendel made his oracular utterances now stood in this room as empty as a gravestone. Only now that I was older did I understand how much dies with such a man, first because anything unique is more and more valuable in a world now becoming hopelessly uniform. And then because, out of a deep sense of premonition, the young, inexperienced man I once was had been very fond of Jakob Mendel. In him, I had come close for the first time to the great mystery of the way what is special and overwhelming in our existence is achieved only by an inner concentration of powers, a sublime monomania akin to madness. And I had seen that a pure life of the mind, total abstraction in a single idea, can still be found even today, an immersion no less than that of an Indian yogi or a medieval monk in his cell, and indeed can be found in a café illuminated by electric light and next to a telephone—as a young man, I had sensed it far more in that entirely anonymous little book dealer than in any of our contemporary writers. Yet I had been able to 24forget him—admittedly in the war years, and in an absorption in my own work not unlike his. Now, however, looking at that empty table, I felt a kind of shame, and at the same time a renewed curiosity.

For where had he gone, what had happened to him? I called the waiter over and asked. No, he was sorry, he didn’t know a Herr Mendel, no gentleman of that name frequented the café. But perhaps the head waiter would know. The head waiter ponderously steered his pot belly towards me, hesitated, thought it over. No, he didn’t know any Herr Mendel either. But maybe I meant Mandl, Herr Mandl from the haberdashery shop in Florianigasse? A bitter taste rose to my mouth, the taste of transience: what do we live for, if the wind carries away the last trace of us from beneath our feet? For thirty years, perhaps forty, a man had breathed, read, thought and talked in this room of a few square metres, and only three or four years had to pass before there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. No one in the Café Gluck knew anything now about Jakob Mendel, Mendel the bibliophile! Almost angrily I asked the head waiter if I could speak to Herr Standhartner, or was there anyone else from the old staff left in the house? Oh, Herr Standhartner, oh, dear God, he had sold the café long ago, he had died, and the old head waiter was living on his little property in the town of Krems. No, there was no one from the old staff here now… or yes! Yes, there was—Frau Sporschil was still here, the toilet lady (known in vulgar parlance as the chocolate lady). But he was sure she wouldn’t be able to remember individual customers now. I thought at once, you don’t forget a man like Jakob Mendel, and I asked her to come and see me.

She came, Frau Sporschil with her untidy white hair, her dropsical feet taking the few steps from her area of responsibility in the background to the front of the café and still hastily rubbing 25her red hands on a cloth; obviously she had just been sweeping or cleaning the windows of her dismal domain. From her uncertain manner I noticed at once that she felt uneasy to be summoned so suddenly into the smarter part of the café, under the large electric lights—in Vienna ordinary people suspect detectives and the police everywhere, as soon as anyone wants to ask them questions. So she looked at me suspiciously at first, glancing at me from under her brows, a very cautious, surreptitious glance. What good could I want of her? But as soon as I asked about Jakob Mendel she stared at me with full, positively streaming eyes, and her shoulders began to shake.

“Oh, my God, poor Herr Mendel—to think of anyone remembering him now! Yes, poor Herr Mendel”—she was almost weeping, she was so moved in the way of old people when they are reminded of their youth, of some good, forgotten acquaintanceship. I asked if he was still alive.

“Oh, my God, poor Herr Mendel, it must be five or six years he’s been dead, no, seven years. Such a kind, good man, and when I think how long I knew him, more than twenty-five years, he was already coming here when I joined the staff. And it was a shame, a real shame, the way they let him die.” She was growing more and more agitated, and asked if I was a relation. Because no one had ever troubled about him, she said, no one had ever asked after him—didn’t I know what had happened to him?

No, I assured her, I knew nothing, and please would she tell me all about it? The good woman looked shy and embarrassed, and kept wiping her damp hands again and again. I realized that as the toilet lady she felt awkward standing here in the middle of the café, with her untidy white hair and stained apron. In addition, she kept looking anxiously to left and right in case one of the waiters was listening. 26

So I suggested that we might go into the card room, to Mendel’s old table, and she could tell me all about it there. Moved, she nodded to me, grateful for my understanding, and the old lady, already a little unsteady on her feet, went ahead while I followed her. The two waiters stared after us in surprise, sensing some connection, and some of the customers also seemed to be wondering about the unlikely couple we made.

Over at Mendel’s table, she told me (another account, at a later date, filled in some of the details for me) about the downfall of Jakob Mendel, Mendel the bibliophile.

Well then, she said, he had gone on coming here even after the beginning of the war, day after day, arriving at seven-thirty in the morning, and he sat there just the same and studied all day, as usual; the fact was they’d all felt, and often said so, that he wasn’t even aware there was a war going on. I’d remember, she said, that he never looked at a newspaper and never talked to anyone else, but even when the newsboys were making their murderous racket, announcing special editions, and all the others ran to buy, he never got to his feet or even listened. He didn’t so much as notice that Franz the waiter was missing (Franz had fallen at Gorlice), and he didn’t know that Herr Standhartner’s son had been taken prisoner at Przemyśl, he never said a word when the bread got worse and worse, and they had to serve him fig coffee instead of his usual milk, nasty stuff it was. Just once he did seem surprised because so few students came in now, that was all. “My God, the poor man, nothing gave him pleasure or grief except those books of his.”

But then, one day, the worst happened. At eleven in the morning, in broad daylight, a policeman had come in with an officer of the secret police, who had shown the rosette badge in his buttonhole and asked if a man called Jakob Mendel came in here. Then they went straight over to Mendel’s table, and he thought, 27suspecting nothing, they wanted to sell him books or ask for information. But they told him to his face to go with them, and they took him away. It had brought shame on the café; everyone gathered round poor Herr Mendel as he stood there between the two police officers, his glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking back and forth from one to the other of them, not knowing what they really wanted.

Frau Sporschil, however, said that she had instantly told the uniformed policeman this must be a mistake. A man like Herr Mendel wouldn’t hurt a fly, but then the secret police officer shouted at her not to interfere in official business. And then, she added, they had taken him away, and it was a long time before he came back, two years. To this day she didn’t really know what they’d wanted from him back then. “But I give you my oath,” said the old woman, much upset, “Herr Mendel can’t have done anything wrong. They made a mistake, I’d swear to it. It was a crime against that poor, innocent man, a real crime!”

And good, kind-hearted Frau Sporschil was right. Our friend Jakob Mendel really had not done anything wrong, only something stupid (and as I said, not until later did I learn all the details)—he had committed a headlong, touching and even in those crazy times entirely improbable act of stupidity, to be explained only by his total self-absorption, the oddity of his unique nature.

This was what had happened. One day the military censorship office, where it was the duty of the officials to supervise all correspondence sent abroad, had intercepted a postcard written and signed by one Jakob Mendel, properly stamped with sufficient postage for a country outside Austria, but—incredible to relate—sent to an enemy nation. The postcard was addressed to Jean Labourdaire, Bookseller, Paris, Quai de Grenelle, and on it the sender, Jakob Mendel, complained that he had not received 28the last eight numbers of the monthly BulletinbibliographiquedelaFrance, in spite of having paid a year’s subscription in advance. The junior censorship official who found it, in civil life a high-school teacher by profession and a scholar of Romance languages and literature by private inclination, who now wore the blue uniform of the territorial reserves, was astonished to have such a document in his hands. He thought it must be a silly joke. Among the 2,000 letters that he scanned every week, searching them for dubious comments and turns of phrase that might indicate espionage, he had never come across anything so absurd as someone in Austria addressing a letter to France without another thought, simply posting a card to the enemy country as if the borders had not been fortified by barbed wire since 1914, and as if, on every new day created by God, France, Germany, Austria and Russia were not killing a few thousand of each other’s male populations. So at first he put the postcard in his desk drawer as a curio, and did not mention the absurdity to anyone else.

However, a few weeks later another card from the same Jakob Mendel was sent to a bookseller called John Aldridge, at Holborn Square in London, asking if he could procure the latest numbers of TheAntiquarianfor him; and once again it was signed by the same strange individual, Jakob Mendel, who with touching naiveté gave his full address. Now the high-school teacher felt a little uncomfortable in the uniform coat that he was obliged to wear. Was there, after all, some mysteriously coded meaning behind this idiotic joke? Anyway, he stood up, clicked his heels and put the two cards on the major’s desk. The major shrugged his shoulders: what an odd case! First he asked the police to find out whether this Jakob Mendel actually existed, and an hour later Jakob Mendel was under arrest and, still stunned with surprise, was brought before the major. The major placed the mysterious postcards in 29front of him and asked whether he admitted to sending them. Agitated by the major’s stern tone, and particularly upset because the police had tracked him down just when he was reading an important catalogue, Mendel said, almost impatiently, that of course he had written those postcards. He supposed a man still had a right to claim value for money paid as an advance subscription. The major turned in his chair and leant over to the lieutenant at the next desk. The two of them exchanged meaningful glances: what an utter idiot! Then the major wondered whether he should just tell this simpleton off in no uncertain terms and send him packing, or whether he ought to take the case seriously. In such difficult circumstances, almost any office will decide that the first thing to do is to write a record of the incident. A record is always a good idea. If it does no great good, it will do no harm either, and one more meaningless sheet of paper among millions will be covered with words.

This time, however, it unfortunately did do harm to a poor, unsuspecting man, for something very fateful emerged in answer to the major’s third question. First the man was asked his name: Jakob, originally Jainkeff Mendel. Profession: pedlar (for he had no bookseller’s licence, only a certificate allowing him to trade from door to door). The third question was the catastrophe: his place of birth. Jakob Mendel named a small village in Petrikau. The major raised his eyebrows. Petrikau, wasn’t that in the Russian part of Poland, near the border? Suspicious! Very suspicious! So he asked more sternly when Mendel had acquired Austrian citizenship. Mendel’s glasses stared at him darkly and in surprise: he didn’t understand the question. For heaven’s sake, asked the major, did he have his papers, his documents, and if so where were they? The only document he had was his permit to trade from door to door. The major’s eyebrows rose ever higher. Then 30would he kindly explain how he came to be an Austrian citizen? What had his father been, Austrian or Russian? Jakob Mendel calmly replied: Russian, of course. And he himself? Oh, to avoid having to serve in the army, he had smuggled himself over the Russian border thirty-three years ago, and he had been living in Vienna ever since. The major was getting increasingly impatient. When, he repeated, had he acquired Austrian citizenship? Why would he bother with that, asked Mendel, he’d never troubled about such things. So he was still a Russian citizen? And Mendel, who was finding all this pointless questioning tedious, replied with indifference, “Yes, I suppose so.”

Shocked, the major sat back so brusquely that his chair creaked. To think of such a thing! In Vienna, the capital of Austria, right in the middle of the war at the end of 1915, after Tarnów and the great offensive, here was a Russian walking around with impunity, writing letters to France and England, and the police did nothing about it! And then those fools in the newspapers are surprised that Conrad von Hötzendorf didn’t advance directly to Warsaw, and on the general staff they are amazed that all troop movements are reported to Russia by spies. The lieutenant too had risen to his feet and was standing at his desk: the conversation abruptly became an interrogation. Why hadn’t he immediately reported to the authorities as a foreigner? Mendel, still unsuspecting, replied in his sing-song Jewish tones, “Why would I want to go and report all of a sudden?” The major saw this reversal of his question as a challenge and asked, menacingly, whether he hadn’t read the announcements? No! And didn’t he read the newspapers either? Again, no.

The two of them stared at Mendel, who was sweating slightly in his uncertainty, as if the moon had fallen to earth in their office. Then the telephone rang, typewriters tapped busily, orderlies ran 31back and forth and Jakob Mendel was consigned to the garrison cells, to be moved on to a concentration camp. When he was told to follow two soldiers he stared uncertainly. He didn’t understand what they wanted from him, but really he had no great anxiety. What ill, after all, could the man with the gold braid on his collar and the rough voice have in store for him? In his elevated world of books there was no war, no misunderstanding, only eternal knowledge and the desire to know more about numbers and words, titles and names. So he good-naturedly went down the steps with the two soldiers. Only when all the books in his coat pockets were confiscated at the police station, and he had to hand over his briefcase, where he had put a hundred important notes and customers’ addresses, did he begin to strike out angrily around him. They had to overcome him, but in the process unfortunately his glasses fell to the floor, and that magic spyglass of his that looked into the intellectual world broke into a thousand pieces. Two days later he was sent, in his thin summer coat, to a concentration camp for civilian Russian prisoners at Komorn.

As for Jakob Mendel’s experience of mental horror in those two years in a concentration camp, living without books—his beloved books—without money, with indifferent, coarse and mostly illiterate companions in the midst of this gigantic human dunghill, as for all he suffered there, cut off from his sublime and unique world of books as an eagle with its wings clipped is separated from its ethereal element—there is no testimony to any of it. But the world, waking soberly from its folly, has gradually come to know that of all the cruelties and criminal encroachments of that war, none was more senseless, unnecessary and therefore more morally inexcusable than capturing and imprisoning behind barbed wire unsuspecting civilians long past the age for military service, who had become used to living in a foreign land as if it were their own, 32and in their belief in the laws of hospitality, which are sacred even to Tungus and Araucanian tribesmen, had neglected to flee in time. It was a crime committed equally unthinkingly in France, Germany and England, in every part of a Europe run mad. And perhaps Jakob Mendel, like hundreds of other innocents penned up in a camp, would have succumbed miserably to madness or dysentery, debility or a mental breakdown, had not a coincidence of a truly Austrian nature brought him back to his own world just in time.

After his disappearance, several letters from distinguished customers had been delivered to his address. Those customers included Count Schönberg, the former governor of Styria and a fanatical collector of heraldic works; the former dean of the theological faculty at the university, Siegenfeld, who was working on a commentary on St Augustine; and the eighty-year-old retired Admiral the Honourable von Pisek, who was still tinkering with his memoirs—all of them, his faithful customers, had repeatedly written to Jakob Mendel at the Café Gluck, and a few of these letters were forwarded to the missing man in the concentration camp. There they fell into the hands of a captain who happened to have his heart in the right place, and who was surprised to discover the names of the distinguished acquaintances of this little half-blind, dirty Jew, who had huddled in a corner like a mole, grey, eyeless and silent, ever since his glasses had been broken (he had no money to buy a new pair). There must, after all, be something special about a man with friends like that. So he allowed Mendel to answer the letters and ask his patrons to put in a good word for him, which they did. With the fervent solidarity of all collectors, His Excellency and the Dean powerfully cranked up their connections, and their united support brought Mendel the bibliophile back to Vienna in the year 1917, after more than two 33years of confinement, although on condition that he reported daily to the police. However, he could return to the free world, to his old, cramped little attic room, he could walk past the window displays of books again, and above all he could go back to the Café Gluck.

Good Frau Sporschil was able to give me a first-hand account of Mendel’s return to the café from an infernal underworld. “One day—Jesus, Mary and Joseph, thinks I, I can’t believe my eyes!—one day the door’s pushed open, you know what it’s like, just a little way, he always came in like that, and there he is stumbling into the café, poor Herr Mendel. He was wearing a much-mended military coat, and something on his head that might once have been a hat someone had thrown away. He didn’t have a collar, and he looked like death, grey in the face, grey-haired and pitifully thin. But in he comes, like nothing had happened, he doesn’t ask no questions, he doesn’t say nothing, he goes to the table over there and takes off his coat, but not so quickly and easily as before, it takes him an effort. And no books with him now, like he always brought—he just sits down there and don’t say nothing, he just stares ahead of him with empty, worn-out eyes. It was only little by little, when we’d brought him all the written stuff that had come from Germany for him, he went back to reading. But he was never the same again.”

No, he was not the same, he was no longer that miraculummundi, a magical catalogue of all the books in the world. Everyone who saw him at that time sadly told me the same. Something in his otherwise still eyes, eyes that read only as if in his sleep, seemed to be destroyed beyond redemption. Something in him was broken; the terrible red comet of blood must, in its headlong career, have smashed destructively into the remote, peaceful, halcyon star that was his world of books. His eyes, used for decades to the tender, 34soundless, insect-like letters making up print, must have seen terrible things in that barbed-wire pen into which human beings were herded, for his eyelids cast heavy shadows over his once-swift and ironically sparkling pupils; sleepy and red-rimmed, they shed twilight on his formerly lively eyes as they peered through his glasses, now repaired by being laboriously tied together with thin string. And even more terrible: in the fantastic and elaborate structure of his memory, some prop must have given way, bringing the rest of it down in confusion, for the human brain, that control centre made of the most delicate of substances, a precision instrument in the mechanics of our knowledge, is so finely adjusted that a blocked blood vessel, even a small one, a shattered nerve, an exhausted cell or the shift of a molecule is enough to silence the heavenly harmony of the most magnificently comprehensive mind. And in Mendel’s memory, that unique keyboard of knowledge, the keys themselves jammed now that he was back. If someone came in search of information now and then, Mendel would look wearily at him, no longer fully understanding; he heard things wrongly, and forgot what was said to him. Mendel was not Mendel any more, just as the world was no longer the world. Total immersion in reading no longer rocked him back and forth, but he usually sat there perfectly still, his glasses turned only automatically on a book, and you could not tell whether he was reading or only day-dreaming. Several times, Frau Sporschil told me, his head dropped heavily on the book and he fell asleep in broad daylight; or he sometimes stared for hours on end at the strange and smelly light of the acetylene lamp they had put on his desk at this time when coal was in short supply. No, Mendel was not the old Mendel, no longer a wonder of the world but a useless collection of beard and clothes, breathing wearily, pointlessly sitting in his once-oracular chair, he was no longer the glory of the Café Gluck but a disgrace, 35a dirty mark, ill-smelling, a revolting sight, an uncomfortable and unnecessary parasite.

That was how the new owner of the café saw him. This man, Florian Gurtner by name, came from Retz, had made a fortune from shady deals in flour and butter during the starvation year of 1919, and had talked the unsuspecting Herr Standhartner into selling him the Café Gluck for 80,000 crowns in paper money, which swiftly depreciated in value. He set about the place with his firm rustic hands, renovating the old-established café to smarten it up, buying new armchairs for bad money at the right time, installing a marble porch, and he was already negotiating to buy the bar next door and turn it into a dance hall. Naturally enough, the odd little Galician parasite who kept a table occupied all day, and in that time consumed nothing but two cups of coffee and five rolls, was very much in the way of his hastily undertaken project to smarten up the café. Standhartner had, to be sure, specially commended his old customer to the new owner, and had tried to explain what an important man Jakob Mendel was; indeed he had, so to speak, transferred him along with the café’s fixtures and fittings as someone with a claim on his goodwill. But along with the new furniture and the shiny aluminium cash register, Florian Gurtner had introduced the approach of a man out to earn all he could, and he was only waiting for an excuse to banish this last, annoying remnant of suburban shabbiness from his now-elegant café.

And a good reason to do so quite soon arose, for Jakob Mendel was in a bad way. The last banknotes he had saved had been pulverized in the paper mill of inflation, and his customers had disappeared. These days he was so exhausted that he lacked the strength to start climbing steps and going from door to door selling books again. There were a hundred little signs of his poverty. 36He seldom had something for lunch brought in from the restaurant now, and he was behind with paying the small sums he owed for coffee and rolls, once as much as three weeks behind. At that point the head waiter wanted to turn him out into the street. But good Frau Sporschil, the toilet lady, was sorry for Mendel and said she would pay his debt.