The Royal Game

Stefan Zweig

• Publisher: Re-Image Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783962172770
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Classiques

On a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, an electifying 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 grandmaster in a game of chess; it also conceals his dark and damaged past, the horror of which emerges as the game unfolds.

Chess Story

ON THE great passenger steamer, due to depart New York for Buenos Aires at midnight, there was the usual last-minute bustle and commotion. Visitors from shore shoved confusedly to see their friends off, telegraph boys in cocked caps dashed through the lounges shouting names, trunks and flowers were carried past, and inquisitive children ran up and down the companionways, the orchestra playing imperturbably on deck all the while. As I was standing a bit apart from this hubbub, talking on the promenade deck with an acquaintance of mine, two or three flashbulbs flared near us—apparently the press had been quickly interviewing and photographing some celebrity just before we sailed. My friend glanced over and smiled. “That’s a rare bird you’ve got on board—that’s Czentovic.” I must have received this news with a rather blank look, for he went on to explain, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”

In fact I now recalled this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more assiduous reader of newspapers than I, was able to add a number of anecdotes. About a year previously Czentovic had overnight entered the ranks of the greatest masters of the art of chess, such as Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, and Bogoljubov. Not since the appearance of the seven-year-old prodigy Reshevsky at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the penetration of a complete unknown into that circle of luminaries caused such a wide sensation. For Czentovic’s intellectual traits certainly did not seem to promise a dazzling career. It soon emerged that, chess champion or not, in private Czentovic was unable to write a correctly spelled sentence in any language, and, as one of his irritated peers gibed, “his ignorance was just as absolute in every other area.”

Czentovic’s father, a penniless Yugoslavian Danube bargeman, had been killed in his tiny boat when it was crushed one night by a grain steamer in a remote area; the twelve-year-old boy had then been taken in by the local parson out of pity. The good reverend coached him at home, doing his level best to make up for what the lumpish, taciturn, broad-browed boy was unable to learn at the village school.

But the parson’s efforts were in vain. The letters of the alphabet had been explained to the boy a hundred times, yet still he stared at them as though he had never seen them before; no matter how simple the subject, his brain labored heavily but retained nothing. At the age of fourteen he still counted on his fingers, and, though he was now an adolescent, he could read books and newspapers only with great difficulty. Yet Mirko could not be called reluctant or willful. He obediently did what was asked, carried water, split wood, helped in the fields, cleaned the kitchen, and reliably (though with annoying slowness) finished any task he was given. But what irritated the good parson most about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless specifically told to, never asked a question, did not play with other boys, and undertook no activity that had not been explicitly assigned to him; once Mirko had finished his chores, he sat around listlessly indoors with the vacant look of sheep at pasture, taking not the slightest interest in what went on around him. While the parson, puffing on his long peasant pipe, played his usual three evening games of chess with the local constable, the lank-haired blond boy squatted silently beside them and gazed at the checkered board from beneath his heavy eyelids, seemingly somnolent and indifferent.

One winter evening while the two players were engrossed in their daily game, the jingle of sleigh bells came from the village street, approaching with greater and greater speed. A peasant, his cap dusted with snow, stumped in hurriedly—his old mother was dying, and he wanted the parson to hurry so that he would be in time to administer the last rites. The parson followed without hesitation. As he was leaving, the constable, who was still drinking his beer, lit a fresh pipe and was preparing to pull on his heavy top boots when he noticed that Mirko’s gaze was riveted on the chessboard with the unfinished game.

“So, you want to play it out, do you?” he said jokingly, completely convinced that the sleepy boy did not know how to move a single piece on the board correctly. The boy looked up shyly, then nodded and took the parson’s chair. After fourteen moves the constable had been beaten, and, he had to admit, through no careless error of his own. The second game ended no differently.

“Balaam’s ass!” exclaimed the astounded parson upon his return, explaining to the constable, who was not so well versed in the Bible, that by a similar miracle two thousand years ago a dumb creature had suddenly found the power of intelligent speech. In spite of the late hour, the parson could not refrain from challenging his semiliterate famulus. Mirko beat him too with ease. He played doggedly, slowly, stolidly, without once lifting his bowed broad forehead from the board. But he played with unassailable certainty; during the days to come neither the constable nor the parson was able to win a game against him. The parson, who knew better than anyone how backward his pupil was in other respects, now became curious in earnest as to how far this one strange talent might withstand a more rigorous test. After having Mirko’s unkempt blond hair cut at the village barber’s, to make him somewhat presentable, he took him in his sleigh to the small neighboring city where, in a corner of the café in the main square, there were chess enthusiasts for whom (as he had found) he himself was no match. There was no small stir among them when the parson pushed the tow-headed, rosy-cheeked fifteen-year-old in his fur-lined sheepskin jacket and heavy, high-top boots into the coffeehouse, where, ill at ease, the boy stood in a corner with shyly downcast eyes until someone called him over to one of the chess tables. Mirko lost against his first opponent, because he had never seen the “Sicilian opening” in the good parson’s game. He drew the second game, against the best player. From the third and fourth games on, he beat all his opponents, one after another.

Now it is rare indeed that anything exciting happens in a small provincial city in Yugoslavia, and the first appearance of this rustic champion caused an instant sensation among those in attendance. There was unanimous agreement that the boy wonder must definitely remain in the city until the next day, so that the other members of the chess club could be assembled and especially so that old Count Simczic, a chess fanatic, could be reached at his castle. The parson looked at his ward with a pride that was quite new, but, for all his joy of discovery, he still did not wish to neglect his duty to perform the Sunday services; he declared himself willing to leave Mirko behind for a further test. The young Czentovic was put up in the hotel at the chess club’s expense and saw a water closet that evening for the first time. The next afternoon, the chess room in the café was jammed. Mirko, sitting motionless in front of the board for four hours, defeated one player after another without uttering a word or even looking up; finally a simultaneous game was proposed. It took some time to make the ignorant boy understand that in a simultaneous game he would be the only opponent of a range of players. But once Mirko had grasped this, he quickly warmed to the task. He moved slowly from table to table, his heavy shoes squeaking, and in the end won seven of the eight games.

At this point great deliberations began. Although this new champion was not strictly speaking a resident, regional pride was keenly aroused just the same. Perhaps the small city, whose presence on the map had hardly ever been noticed, could finally boast of an international celebrity. An agent by the name of Koller, who otherwise represented nobody but chanteuses and cabaret singers employed at the garrison, announced that, in return for a year’s subsidy, he would arrange to have the young man given professional training in the art of chess by an excellent minor master of his acquaintance in Vienna. Count Simczic, who in sixty years of daily play had never encountered such a remarkable opponent, immediately underwrote the amount. That day marked the beginning of the astonishing career of the boatman’s son.

After half a year Mirko had mastered all the secrets of chess technique, though with a peculiar limitation that was later to be much noted and ridiculed in professional circles. For Czentovic never managed to play a single game by memory alone—“blind,” as the professionals say. He completely lacked the ability to situate the field of battle in the unlimited realm of the imagination. He always needed to have the board with its sixty-four black and white squares and thirty-two pieces physically in front of him; even when he was world-famous, he carried a folding pocket chess set with him at all times so that, if he wanted to reconstruct a game or solve a problem, he would be able to examine the positions of the pieces by eye. This failing, in itself minor, betrayed a lack of imaginative power and was the subject of lively discussion in elite circles, of the sort that might be heard among musicians if a prominent virtuoso or conductor had proven himself unable to play or conduct without an open score. But this strange idiosyncrasy did nothing whatever to slow Mirko’s stupendous climb. At seventeen he had already won a dozen prizes, at eighteen the Hungarian Championship, and at twenty he was champion of the world. The most audacious grandmasters, every one of them infinitely superior to him in intellectual gifts, imagination, and daring, fell to his cold and inexorable logic as Napoleon to the ponderous Kutuzov or Hannibal to Fabius Cunctator (who, according to Livy’s report, displayed similar conspicuous traits of phlegm and imbecility in childhood). Thus it happened that the illustrious gallery of chess champions, including among their number the most varied types of superior intellect—philosophers, mathematicians, people whose natural talents were computational, imaginative, often creative—was for the first time invaded by a total outsider to the intellectual world, a dull, taciturn peasant lad, from whom even the craftiest newspapermen were never able to coax a single word of any journalistic value. Of course, what Czentovic denied the newspapers in the way of polished sentences was soon amply compensated for in anecdotes about his person. For the instant he stood up from the chessboard, where he was without peer, Czentovic became an irredeemably grotesque, almost comic figure; despite his solemn black suit, his splendid cravat with its somewhat showy pearl stickpin, and his painstakingly manicured fingernails, his behavior and manners remained those of the simple country boy who had once swept out the parson’s room in the village. To the amusement and annoyance of his professional peers, he was artless and almost brazen in extracting, with a miserly, even vulgar greed, what money he could from his talent and fame. He traveled from city to city, always staying in the cheapest hotels, he played in the most pathetic clubs as long as they paid his fee, he permitted himself to appear in soap advertisements, and even—ignoring the mockery of his competitors, who knew quite well that he couldn’t put three sentences together—sold his name for use on the cover of a Philosophy of Chess which had actually been written for the enterprising publisher by an insignificant Galician student. Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had no sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

“But why wouldn’t such a rapid rise to fame send an empty head like that into a ...