Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

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 shadow 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 retrieving 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 the 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 he 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.