I went closer, and thought that the rectangular shape of the bulge told me what was inside that pocket: a BOOK! I hadn’t had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it. Hypnotized, my eyes stared at the small bulge made by that book inside the pocket, they gazed fierily at that one inconspicuous spot as if to burn a hole in the coat. At last I could no longer contain my greed; instinctively I moved closer. The mere prospect of being able at least to feel the book through the fabric made the nerves in my hands glow to the fingertips. Almost without knowing it, I moved closer and closer. Fortunately the jailor didn’t notice what must have been my strange behaviour, or perhaps he thought it only natural that a man who had been standing upright for two hours would want to lean against the wall a little. Finally I was very close to the coat, and I had intentionally put my hands behind my back so that they could touch it unnoticed. I felt the fabric, and there really was something rectangular on the other side, something flexible and rustling slightly – a book! A book! And a thought flashed through me quick as lightning: steal the book! You might succeed, and you can hide it in your cell and then read, read, read, read again at last! No sooner had the thought entered my mind than it worked like strong poison; suddenly there was a roaring in my ears and my heart began to hammer, my hands turned cold as ice and wouldn’t obey me. But after the first stupefaction I moved quietly and warily even closer to the coat, keeping my eyes on my jailer all the time, and with my hands hidden behind my back I moved the book further and further up in the pocket from the outside. And then: one snatch, one slight, careful tug, and suddenly I had the small, not very thick book in my hand. Only now did I take fright at what I had done. But there was no going back at this point. Yet where was I to put it? Behind my back, I pushed the book down under my trousers where the belt held them up, and from there gradually round to my hip, so that as I walked I could hold it in place with my hand down beside the seam of my trousers in a military stance. Now for the first test. I moved away from the coat-stand, one step, two steps, three steps. It worked. It was possible to hold the book in place as I walked if I kept my hand firmly pressed to my belt.

‘Then came the interrogation. It required a greater effort from me than ever, for as I answered questions I was really concentrating all my strength not on what I was saying but on holding the book in place unnoticed. Fortunately the interrogation was a short one this time, and I got the book back to my room safe and sound – I won’t bore you with all the details; once, when I was halfway down the corridor, it slipped dangerously low, and I had to simulate a bad coughing fit so that I could bend over and push it back up under my belt again. But what a moment it was when I came back to my hell, alone at last, yet not alone any longer!

‘You’ll probably expect me to have taken the book out at once, to have looked at it, read it. By no means! First I wanted to enjoy actually having a book in my possession, artificially drawing out the delightfully intriguing pleasure of anticipation, dreaming what kind of book the one I had stolen might ideally be: first of all, very closely printed, with many, many printed characters in it, many, many thin pages, so that it would take me longer to read it. Then I hoped it would be a work to exercise my mind, nothing shallow or light, but a book that would teach me something, a book I could learn by heart, poetry, and preferably – what a bold dream! – Goethe or Homer. But finally I could no longer contain my avid curiosity. Lying on the bed, so that if my jailer suddenly opened the door he couldn’t see what I was doing, I took the book out from under my belt with shaking hands.

‘The first glance was a disappointment, and even made me feel a kind of bitter anger: the book I had carried off at such great peril and was looking forward to with such ardent expectation was nothing but a chess manual, a collection of a hundred and fifty championship matches. If I hadn’t been locked and barred in I’d have flung the book through an open window in my first rage, for what use was this nonsense to me, what could I do with it? As a schoolboy, like most others, I had sat at a chessboard now and then out of boredom. But what good was this theoretical stuff going to be? You can’t play chess without a partner, and certainly not without chessmen and a chessboard. Morosely, I leafed through the pages, hoping I might yet find something there to read, a foreword, an introduction; but I found only the bare, square patterns of the boards for the various games, and under them symbols of which I could make nothing at first: a2–a3, Nfl–g3, and so on. It all seemed to me a kind of algebra to which I had no key. Only gradually did I work out that the letters a, b and c were for the horizontal rows of squares, the ranks, and the numbers 1 to 8 for the vertical rows, the files, and they indicated the present position of each separate chessman; that at least gave a language to the purely graphic patterns. Perhaps, I thought, I could make myself a kind of chessboard in my cell and then try to play these games; like a sign from heaven, it struck me that my bedspread so happened to have a design of large checks.