Properly folded, it could finally be arranged to show sixty-four squares. So I first hid the book under my mattress, tearing out only the first page. Then I began modelling the chessmen, king, queen and so on, out of small crumbs saved from my bread, in what was of course a ridiculously imperfect way; after endless effort I was finally able to reconstruct the positions shown in the chess book on my chequered bedspread. But when I tried to play the whole game through I failed entirely at first with my ludicrous breadcrumb chessmen, half of which I had coloured darker with dust. I kept getting confused during those first few days. Five, ten, twenty times I had to begin that single game again from the beginning. But who in the world had as much useless spare time as I did, the slave of the void, and who had such an immense desire to learn and so much patience available? After six days I was already playing the game flawlessly to its end, after eight more days I didn’t even need the crumbs on the bedspread to picture the positions in the chess book, and after another eight days I could do without the check bedspread too; automatically, what had at first been the abstract symbols in the book – a1, a2, c7, c8 – changed inside my head into visual, three-dimensional positions. The switch was a complete success: I had projected the chessboard and chessmen into my mind, where I could now survey the positions of the pieces on the board by means of the formulae alone, just as a mere glance at a score is enough for a trained musician to hear all the separate parts of a piece and the way they sound together. After another fourteen days I was easily able to play any game in the book from memory – or blindfold, as the technical expression has it – and only now did I begin to understand what immeasurable relief my bold theft had brought me. For all at once I had an occupation – a pointless, aimless one if you like, but an occupation that annihilated the void around me. In those one hundred and fifty tournament matches, I had a wonderful weapon against the oppressive monotony of my own space and time. To keep the delight of my new occupation going, I divided every day up exactly: two games in the morning, two games in the afternoon, and then a quick recapitulation in the evening. That filled my day, which used to be as form less as jelly; I was occupied without exhausting myself, for the wonderful advantage of the game of chess is that, by concentrating your intellectual energies into a strictly limited area, it doesn’t tire the brain even with the most strenuous thinking, but instead increases its agility and vigour. Gradually, in what at first had been purely mechanical repetitions of the championship matches, an artistic, pleasurable understanding began to awaken in me. I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet’s verses from only a few lines. What began as mere occupation to fill the time became enjoyment, and the figures of the great strategists of chess such as Alekhine, Lasker, Bogolyubov and Tartakower entered my solitary confinement as beloved comrades. Endless variety enlivened my silent cell every day, and the very regularity of my mental exercises restored to my mind its endangered security; I felt my brain refreshed and newly polished, so to speak, by the constant discipline of thought. It was particularly evident that I was thinking more clearly and concisely in the interrogations; I had unconsciously perfected my defence against false threats and concealed tricks at the chessboard. I no longer exposed my weaknesses under questioning now, and I even felt that the Gestapo men were beginning to regard me with a certain respect. Perhaps, since they saw everyone else collapse, they were silently wondering from what secret sources I alone drew the strength for such steadfast resistance.

‘This happy time, when I was systematically replaying the hundred and fifty games in that book day after day, lasted for about two and a half to three months. Then I unexpectedly came up against a dead end. Suddenly I was facing the void again. For as soon as I had played each individual game from beginning to end twenty or thirty times, it lost the charm of novelty and surprise; its old power to excite and stimulate me was gone. What was the point in replaying games again and again when I knew them all by heart, move after move? As soon as I had played the first opening, the rest of the game jogged automatically along in my mind; there was no surprise any more, no tension, no problems. To keep myself occupied and create the sense of effort and diversion that were now essential to me, I really needed another book with other games in it. But as it was impossible for me to get one, there was only one way my mind could take in its strange, crazed course; I must invent new games instead of playing the old ones. I must try to play with myself, or rather against myself.

‘I don’t know how far you’ve ever thought about the intellectual situation in this king of games. But even the briefest reflection should be enough to show that as chess is a game of pure thought involving no element of chance, it’s a logical absurdity to try playing against yourself. At heart the attraction of chess resides entirely in the development of strategies in two different brains, in the fact that Black doesn’t know what manoeuvres White will perform in this war of the mind, and keeps trying to guess them and thwart them, while White himself is trying to anticipate and counter Black’s secret intentions. If Black and White were one and the same person, you’d have the ridiculous state of affairs where one and the same brain simultaneously knows and doesn’t know something, and when operating as White can forget entirely what it wanted and intended a minute ago when it was Black.