“Bad-da-bum, dum-da-dum.”
Viktor Zuckerkandl’s curly hair was even wilder than usual. One might have imagined he was a young student with big dreams, not the author of Wort und Ton bei Mozart and until very recently one of the most feared arbiters of musical taste in Vienna.
“Bum-bum, da-da-dum.”
He had a habit of humming to himself in a way that got on his colleagues’ nerves. Wordless song elevates the soul to God, he would say to anyone who asked what the point of the humming was. A quote from a rabbi in his family. Occasional words might be interspersed in the humming.
“Dum-da-dum. Schpil a Nigndl mit Harz und mit Gefil.”
Always in Yiddish. The others had to put up with it. The songs were often mournful and slow, but they could be cheerful and catchy.
“Da-da!”
Today he was in a good mood, and so was the rest of the office. Everyone was waiting for the new member of staff who would present himself in the course of the afternoon. The door might open at any moment, and there he would be, the new chap.
Work as an editor at Bermann Fischer’s publishing house had expanded into a full-time occupation, and Zuckerkandl couldn’t deny that contact with the writers brought him pleasure. Essentially the firm had also saved his life, and now he was safe and sound in central Stockholm, but once more with his bags packed. He was to be replaced by the new recruit. This was his last day in the office. He had only a few weeks left in Sweden.
“Intelligent people are never so astute as when they’re wrong,” he said sarcastically. To illustrate his argument he delightedly read out an aphorism about chess.
No one else in the office understood the point, for once again it was a question of some metaphysical subtlety that only Zuckerkandl could appreciate. His bantering tone reflected an irrepressible schadenfreude characteristic of his disposition. The unruly hair reinforced the impression of uncompromising intelligence; at least, that was what Zuckerkandl thought.
Everyone was agreed. He was insufferable.
Dr. Zuckerkandl always knew slightly more than anyone else, and dressed it all in a philosophical language that had once impressed but no longer inspired the slightest admiration. Quite the reverse: by this stage his colleagues were sick to death of him, his humming and his rantings.
“If mathematics be the music of reason . . .”
The front door opened without a knock, and everyone’s eyes turned to the doorway. Even Zuckerkandl fell silent for a moment. Would it be Dr. B. at last, whom many of them had read in Basler Nachrichten?
Miss Stern, Bermann Fischer’s secretary, entered the room, and Zuckerkandl continued his monologue.
“If mathematics be the . . .”
He was interrupted by Miss Stern, who had retrieved her new coat and was inquiring on her way out about her colleagues’ preferences as to cakes for the coffee.
“Swiss roll or biscuits?”
Her main objective may have been to foil Zuckerkandl, because without waiting for an answer she was already halfway down the stairs. It was nearly three o’clock, and it would soon be time for afternoon coffee with cakes, which Miss Stern collected from Café Ogo.
Cakes had become important to them all in their new city. Their considerably more spacious premises on Esteplatz in Vienna had accommodated more people, and sometimes coffee had indeed been consumed in the office, but congregating like this wasn’t a routine event. In those days a number of the editors had taken to having lunch at Café Herrenhof on Herrengasse, where they would bump into people in the press, or one or two of their authors, or colleagues from other publishing houses. It wasn’t unusual for them to remain at a coffee table with their manuscripts for several hours in the afternoon. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to buy a whole strudel for sharing in the office.
In Vienna they had a constant craving for something sweet, and Zuckerkandl was no exception, always at Café Zartl just around the corner, at the crossroads between Rasumofskygasse and Marxergasse. In addition he could be assured of a chat with Robert Musil, who could be found there almost daily, working at his regular table with a long-emptied coffeepot and a glass of water. Musil lived only a few doors away. Both Zuckerkandl and Bermann Fischer would take a seat at his table and exchange everyday observations until they sensed they were disturbing him. Zuckerkandl would generally find the time to order some well-chosen pastry. The publisher was distinctly less interested in Viennese delicacies, and always had been. In Berlin he had developed no such habits, even if coffee and cake were sometimes laid out on one of the desks in the office on Bülowstrasse. But that would only be on Fridays. Actually the publisher preferred tea.
Here in Sweden coffee and cakes had evolved into a ritual that brought the little group together and helped them familiarize themselves with the customs of their new country. They had worked their way through Swiss rolls and vanilla hearts, princess cakes and sponge cakes. Bermann Fischer loved a Swedish sponge cake. He did not subscribe to the criticism some of the other staff directed at this confection, which they judged inferior to the offerings of Vienna cafés. On the contrary, the range of a Swedish bakery suited his rather abstemious character perfectly. One or two pieces of sponge cake was all he really wanted to have with his tea.
Zuckerkandl, on the other hand, was by and large unfailing in his condemnation of the cakes, especially the so-called Danish pastry adapted from Viennese recipes. “Danish pastry? How can anyone have the nerve? A mockery. Nothing less than a mockery.” His prattle filled the office. After Miss Stern had set out on her daily trip to the café around the corner on Kungsgatan, there was no one who had the strength to stop him.
There was an unusually high-spirited atmosphere in the publishing house because today’s coffee break was a farewell party. Zuckerkandl was going to leave the country, and it was a relief. No one could deny that he had a unique way of combining musical and literary knowledge with a sense of what a demanding readership hungered for and for which they were therefore prepared to pay. But there was no doubt his company was trying.
Zuckerkandl turned his attention to the newly arrived books. “If mathematics be the music of reason, what is a game of chess if not a duet in a minor key that ends with the monarch’s death? What drivel! Why a minor key? There are some amusing games, isn’t that what François-André Danican Philidor says in Analyse du jeu des échecs?”
With his hair standing on end, Zuckerkandl was eagerly leafing through a book whose cover appeared to be in imminent danger of coming apart. The door opened with a loud noise, and everyone looked up inquisitively. This time it had to be the new man.
Great disappointment: it was only another delivery from Zuckerkandl’s friend Josephson, the librarian at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, home to Europe’s greatest private collection of mathematical literature, which included books about games, primarily chess. That was how Zuckerkandl had met Josephson, a thoroughly likable Jew in his forties who had the unusual task of running a research library without researchers and without opening hours, because all research had ceased following the founder’s bankruptcy. The library was locked away in a magnificent villa in the city’s most affluent northern suburb, which was easily reached by train from Engelbrektsplan, right by the National Library. They had become very good friends and regularly attended concerts together. Such good friends, in fact, that Zuckerkandl didn’t even need to travel out to the villa, but could instead place his orders by telephone and have them delivered forthwith to the office on Stureplan.
The door had swung wide open with a violent shove, and a small, ungainly figure appeared. It was the librarian’s rather odd son who had brought the books, a taciturn boy of indeterminate age. He was small in stature but wasn’t a child.
Everybody sighed.
“Ho hum,” could be heard from one of the desks.
The boy, if he actually was a boy and not just extremely short, possessed among other talents perfect pitch. He was far from a common lackey. This mysterious gnome was called upon to undertake a wide variety of tasks in the musical life of the city, a fact of which his father was very proud. He tuned grand pianos and upright pianos in the drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie and was a self-taught expert on all kinds of instruments. In a highly original twist, given his family’s religious affiliation, he was responsible for the church bells of St. Gertrude’s, whose tower for many years after the fire had been the highest in the city and whose evangelical congregation had financed its splendid carillon, equipped with twenty-three fine-sounding bells. These involved operating pedals with hands and feet in a manner requiring an excellent level of fitness in the carillonneur up in the clouds. The young Josephson climbed up and down the Lutheran tower every day. No one in the congregation seemed to care that he was a Jew, and equally at home in the synagogue on Wahrendorffsgatan. He was simply referred to as Der Kleine in the parish office, where everyone had become used to him coming and going as he wished. He always reported for bell-ringing with exemplary punctuality.
As Miss Stern was stepping out into the street to fetch the pastries and run a few errands, the sturdy boy had been doggedly trotting up the stairs to the publishing house office, directly above one of the city’s busiest pharmacies. There was always a queue stretching down the street, even on days when a thin layer of snow settled on the customers’ smart woolen coats. It was just a stone’s throw from the Sturehof restaurant, one of the enlightened establishments that provided a setting for the city’s increasingly international social life, no matter the day of the week. Sharply dressed representatives from the embassies of Germany and Great Britain dined there side by side or back-to-back with their highly official if also somewhat clandestine guests. It was not unusual for travelers to find a way of combining business with all that the Nordic metropolis could offer in the way of entertainment. That very afternoon the British military attaché Reginald Sutton-Pratt would assemble a motley crew around him at one of the window tables. In the course of the afternoon this talkative group of Brits, a gathering that included not only guests flown in from London but also Rickman, the cheerful businessman for whom Bermann Fischer had taken a liking, would graduate from drinking tea to sampling the restaurant’s impressive array of white wines. Rickman had provided generous assistance with the innumerable visa applications that would permit Bermann Fischer’s entire family to move to Great Britain. They had in fact been granted, all of them, but now would not be put to use because their travel plans had changed. Thomas Mann had got his own way; America was now the destination.
Bermann Fischer was, however, still indebted to Rickman, and now they exchanged documents of a different kind via Miss Stern. Rickman himself had popped into the office with his fiancée to collect address lists and envelopes. But today it was Miss Stern who would stop briefly at the Sturehof to pick up some of the specially printed material that was to be distributed with the company’s next dispatch. Light snow was falling on the new Swedish coat she had bought for a very favorable price at PUB, courtesy of Rickman’s friend, the one-legged adman. Rickman gave her a nonchalant wave through the window when she left for Kungsgatan.
Stureplan, the square over which the rather cluttered offices of the German publishing house looked, was the heart of the none too large city that in the last few months had been transformed into Europe’s most densely populated and frenzied hub for all manner of information exchange. Here every conceivable bugging method and decoding device was deployed, sometimes before anyone had worked out what they were trying to discover. Soviet and French press attachés dined with close confidants of newly appointed desk clerks from the German embassy and from the office being set up by self-assured gentlemen from the military intelligence service, the Abwehr, on Nybrogatan. It was obvious that the host country’s security services had no means of establishing what actually took place at these tables and who in fact was monitoring whom.
“Dum-da-dum. Schpil-she mir a Lidl wegn Scholem.”
Perhaps Zuckerkandl was never able to keep quiet because he was bored. True, he had enjoyed all the conversations, especially the lively ones with Werfel, whose idea it had been to move the publishing house to Stockholm rather than Amsterdam. And with Zweig, of course. But it was his own theories on the realm of tone, music as a meaningful space without a relationship to worldly things, that claimed his attention. He wanted to get on with writing and escape the demands of friends such as Zweig.
As usual Zuckerkandl had perched himself on a bench behind the book table where Bermann Fischer left stacks of publications of all kinds, until no one in the office could remember why they had been purchased. He was browsing through François-André Danican Philidor’s chess book, occasionally bursting into loud laughter. He certainly had particularly good reason to be in a cheerful mood. Against all probability his visa application had been successful. His wife, Mimi, had all the necessary papers and stamps ready too, and they would soon be crossing the Atlantic by boat. He didn’t know whether it was Klemperer or Furtwängler who had been of most help to him, but he had made use of all his old contacts in the music world. And now he was almost as euphoric as when, twelve years earlier, he had been first entrusted with conducting the philharmonic choir in Vienna, and as relieved as on the joyful day Bermann Fischer let him know that all the necessary travel documents were in order for the journey to Stockholm, and there was absolutely no need for him to give up his editorial work just because the publishing house was forced to leave Vienna.
It had been a good time in the Swedish capital, better than he could have imagined. In the librarian Josephson he had found a kindred spirit, a music fanatic whose powers of association served to demonstrate that he must deepen his own study of mathematics. This was made abundantly clear on his first visit to the villa on Djursholm, when they had an initial conversation about the fugue and music’s total autonomy from the outside world.
Josephson’s son, the curious dwarf, was evidently in good physical shape. He had run up the stairs to the office despite carrying an exceptionally heavy load of mathematical books and papers. Just as Zuckerkandl was starting to declaim another aphorism in sarcastic tones, the stalwart lad staggered in and without any word of greeting dropped the pile onto the already full book table. They landed with a thud in front of Zuckerkandl, who was studying the spate of mathematical logic currently all the rage in Vienna’s progressive circles. He liked to see himself as something more than an amateur mathematician and was by now very well versed in all the fashionable literature about chess, in which one of the publisher’s most distinguished writers had developed such an interest.
Taking no notice of the boy, Zuckerkandl picked up the publication at the top of his heap. The youngster immediately departed without so much as a nod of recognition from Zuckerkandl, who felt slightly uncomfortable in the presence of this strange apparition.
Zuckerkandl waved the book around, addressing both Bermann Fisher and the rest of the room. “Of course you know Savielly Tartakower, the chess genius, don’t you? He wrote The Hypermodern Game of Chess that I want Zweig to read, even though he’ll never understand the technical subtleties. As you’re aware, he’s working hard on his symbolic novel, despite the dark moods. A few examples of the style, perhaps?”
No one said anything, which Zuckerkandl took as an invitation to continue. “Mistakes are there waiting to be made. Victory goes to the one who makes the next-to-last mistake. It’s always better to sacrifice your opponent’s men.”
No one reacted in the slightest. The company’s little band of workers were all absorbed in their tasks.
“These now fashionable Tartakowerisms are not especially clever,” Zuckerkandl said. He memorized several of them nevertheless and wrote them on little cards to send to Zweig. “And the excessive use of emphasis doesn’t improve them stylistically, quite the reverse.”
The look on Bermann Fischer’s face suggested that he had never heard of Tartakower and wasn’t aware that the state of the game’s play had entered a hypermodern period. Zuckerkandl was used to the publisher wearing this rather inert expression and was undaunted by any absence of enthusiasm or lack of encouragement from his unwilling audience.
The outside door opened again.
The same sigh of disappointment echoed around the room. It was Miss Stern, with the cakes. She placed a Café Ogo paper bag containing an unusually large carton in front of Zuckerkandl. “I bought extra, since we have something to celebrate. Biscuits and Danish pastries, and sponge cake for the publisher himself.”
But Zuckerkandl was not one to be silenced by such simple means.
“On purely stylistic grounds,” he said, “Tartakower belongs to the same school as Nimzowitsch and Réti, but he has a weakness for phraseology so paradoxical, not to say reckless, that the thoughts of the attentive reader who is given to conjecture are elevated to a giddy sphere far beyond the prosaic physical reality of the board.”
Bermann Fischer buried his head deeper into his manuscript. He was all too aware that the editor, whose knowledge of diverse philosophical areas could only be described as original, had for months been exchanging ideas with the intermittently depressed and currently exiled Zweig, who had fatally misjudged Hitler and talked of Nazism as a little bump on the road to European unity. The continent’s fundamental aim is to be as great as Switzerland, Zweig had said. This same Zweig had for some time been promising a novella set on an ocean liner, just like a previous story about a physician, the one who ran amok. The new story, which was going to be even more powerful, addressed the German tragedy and was based on an idiosyncratic understanding of chess. Not just idiosyncratic, but also erroneous, according to Zuckerkandl, who wanted to advise Zweig against the whole plan unless the premise were to be reframed. That was why he assailed him with musings and quotations.
The fact that Zuckerkandl and Zweig were no longer able to quarrel over a coffee table but instead had to elaborate their disagreements in increasingly delayed correspondence between Stockholm and Bath, where Zweig had settled with his new wife, meant that time dragged on. The former Miss Altmann, who just a year ago had been his secretary, was the one who had originally contacted Zuckerkandl to inform him that Zweig was deeply impressed by one of his essays, which he had stumbled upon by chance. Over the years the friendship had grown, and now Zuckerkandl was in fact one of the reasons Zweig had decided to cut ties with his previous publishing house and accept Bermann Fischer’s invitation. By this time Lotte Altmann had married Zweig and was living with him in the English city. Zuckerkandl thought it very likely that she was filtering out certain of his communications. At any rate several of his postcards never reached Zweig.
“What is appealing in this game, everyone must agree, is that it is a match between two brains,” Zuckerkandl continued.
Miss Stern heaved an irritated sigh. She pushed the cardboard box so far toward the editor, it nearly fell onto his knee.
“Biscuits or Danish pastry? You can have both, Viktor—it’s your party, after all.”
“As I was saying, two brains.”
Zuckerkandl emphasized this in letter after letter. But now his Austrian friend had taken into his head that the story should be about a man who discovers a previously unknown split in his personality, an inner double life. A double persona knowing everything and at the same time nothing about himself and able to play a game of chess against himself. Zuckerkandl had warned against building a narrative on a paradox that has echoes of the man who tries to jump over his own shadow. He suggested as an alternative a story about particular moments in Alekhine and Lasker’s matches, a kind of political allegory.
In vain. Instead of focusing on the drama building in a truly great match, Zweig dwelt upon his two grand masters: two players occupying the same brain. Time and again Zuckerkandl stressed the absurdity of one and the same person being capable of such a retaliatory attitude with regard to his alter ego, but his stubborn friend remained firmly convinced of the literary effectiveness of his idea.
The cakes were now being laid out on the large book table. It was time for coffee. Bermann Fischer leaned forward to take a piece of sponge cake.
The publisher had grounds for feeling irritated at Zuckerkandl for wasting time. Of course, it was thanks to him that Zweig had finally been persuaded to become one of their authors. It was a splendid achievement, and his first novel, Beware of Pity, had been a best seller. But why pander to Zweig’s never-ending demands with a constant stream of new suggestions instead of working with some of the manuscripts that were actually ready? A particularly embarrassing case was Ernst Cassirer’s book about Queen Christina, which was more than a little late.
It was unfortunate for several reasons. Not least because Ernst Cassirer, for a number of years professor in Gothenburg but now also about to leave the country, was the patriarch of a family that had links with Bermann Fischer’s own. In Berlin he and Tutti had socialized regularly with members of the family as if they were close relatives. It wasn’t just the remarkably carefree Agnes they treated like a family member, but her father too, the earnest publisher of lavish art books. The family had recently managed to move their company from Berlin to Oxford, where they now lived in safety, albeit isolated from the intellectual milieu that had been their lifeblood. They had briefly considered Stockholm as a possibility as well. There had even been some talk of a merger between their publishing houses, which, thank goodness, had never happened.
Bermann Fischer had been concerned that the editor would offend the learned Cassirer. Thomas Mann had warned him: Zuckerkandl often went too far. But on this occasion the editor had barely opened the manuscript.
No, the new editor would have to concentrate on finalizing Cassirer. Every day Tor Bonnier asked if the manuscript would soon be ready for translating. In any case it was pointless sending more material about openings and endgames, because basically Zweig didn’t make use of Zuckerkandl’s copious research. If truth be told, his questions about Tartakower and other grand masters such as Nimzowitsch were just a diversion, and the long article about Réti that Zuckerkandl had had translated from the Polish to cheer him up didn’t seem to have made any impression.
Had Zweig even read it? No, it was increasingly obvious that the whole exchange with the agreeable mathematician at the Mittag-Leffler Institute was frankly leading nowhere. Perhaps it was primarily a kind of party game for Zuckerkandl, who had found an area in which to show off.
Any moment now, and Zuckerkandl’s successor would be coming in. Bermann Fischer knew very little about him, but he had read him many times in the Frankfurter Zeitung. That was quite a few years ago now. He appeared every day in Basler Nachrichten under the byline Dr. B. By all accounts he lived with his wife and two sons with the Weil family, friends of Miss Stern. The work he had done for the publishing house thus far had been faultless. He also made a congenial impression, which was the crucial thing.
The publisher was woken from his ruminations by the sound of the door opening.
It wasn’t Dr. B. at all, but Rickman’s fiancée, who had come for the German stamps Miss Stern had forgotten. She left immediately, but only after a friendly nod to some of the people in the office that she recognized from her time working at Belfrage’s guesthouse on Blasieholmen, where a number of them had stayed on their arrival in the city.
For once Zuckerkandl had broken off his tiresome humming. After some moments of silence came a few lines from a Jewish hymn that sounded familiar. His singing voice wasn’t particularly good. “Sieh’, wie lieblich und wie schön ist’s . . .”
Even this was preferable to the interminable chatter. They all knew the melody, and to his own surprise Bermann Fischer chimed in with the next line. He had a beautiful voice, and his colleagues looked up from their desks in astonishment.
“Wenn Brüder in Eintracht beisammen wohnen.”
Evidently it was the new editor’s father, the cantor in the synagogue in Königsberg, who had written the hymn. Naturally Zuckerkandl knew more about his successor than anyone else in the office and of course took advantage of the situation. No one could prevent him from delivering a lecture about the cantor, with whose unique collection of musical manuscripts Zuckerkandl was clearly well acquainted.
“In a sense he has been pivotal to the understanding of Jewish music. Everything you heard in the temple and sang as a child without understanding, he has collected together in one place and organized. Not just chazzanut, cantorial singing, but street music too.”
This didn’t bode well. Now there would be no way to silence Zuckerkandl for quite some time. The employees at Bermann Fischer’s publishing house were indeed all Jews, but they had no great interest in sacred song. They wanted to eat their Swedish cakes in peace and quiet and wait for their new colleague.
Miss Stern did her best by loudly distributing the profusion of pastries. Patently there would be cakes left over. Outside the office windows the snow was falling heavily now. It settled on the pavements and the square, where people were sheltering from the snowfall under the rounded roof of the mushroom-shaped pavilion.
There were large numbers of people out and about despite the weather. The first Christmas decorations could be seen in shop windows. Their neighbor in the east was at war with the Soviet Union, as all the newspaper placards proclaimed. In Sweden the threat of a government crisis loomed. Yet it was remarkably calm on Stureplan in the heart of the capital. It was as though the snow formed a soothing white blanket over everyday life.
“Sieh’, wie lieblich und wie schön ist’s . . .”
Was it Bermann Fischer himself who struck up in song to quieten their insufferable colleague? Everyone appeared to remember the hymn from their childhood and joined in, “Wenn Brüder in Eintracht beisammen wohnen . . .”
The door had opened again, but no one noticed the new editor standing on the threshold. It was a remarkable sight that faced him: a group of grown-ups around a large table laden with cakes, singing one of his own father’s hymns.