Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

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 forget 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 her 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.

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, suspecting 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!”