‘You’re not the first. But don’t worry.’

“I knew from the comforting way he whispered this to me and from the reassuring look on his face that I was in good hands.

“Two days later the kind doctor explained to me with some frankness what had happened. The guard had heard me cry out loudly in my cell and had at first thought I was quarreling with someone who had gotten in. But I had flung myself upon him the moment he appeared at the door and shouted wildly at him—things on the order of ‘Will you make your move, you scoundrel, you coward!’—had tried to grab him by the throat, and finally assaulted him so fiercely that he had to call for help. When I was taken to be examined by a physician, in my derangement I had suddenly broken free, thrown myself at the window in the corridor and shattered the glass, cutting my hand—you can still see the deep scar here. I had spent my first few nights in the hospital with a kind of brain fever, but now the doctor said he found my sensorium entirely clear. ‘Frankly,’ he added quietly, ‘I’d rather not tell the authorities, or eventually they’ll take you back there again. Leave it to me, I’ll do my best.’

“I have no idea what this helpful doctor told my tormentors about me. In any case he achieved what he had intended: my release. Possibly he declared me of unsound mind, or perhaps I had in the interval become unimportant to the Gestapo, for Hitler had now occupied Bohemia and the fall of Austria was thus over and done with as far as he was concerned. So I needed only to sign a commitment to leave the country within fourteen days. Those fourteen days were taken up with the hundred and one formalities that those who were once citizens of the world must now go through in order to travel abroad: military papers, police, tax, passport, visa, certificate of health. There was no time to think very much about what had happened. Whenever I did try to think back on my time in the cell, it was as though a light went out in my mind: apparently there are hidden regulatory forces at work within us which automatically shut off anything that might become psychologically troublesome or dangerous. Only after weeks and weeks, really not until I was here aboard this ship, did I regain the courage to reflect on what had happened to me.

“And now you will understand my very impertinent and probably baffling behavior toward your friends. Quite by chance, I was strolling through the smoking lounge when I saw your friends sitting in front of the chessboard; I was rooted to the spot in stunned amazement. For I had completely forgotten that you can play chess at a real chessboard, with real pieces, forgotten that in this game two entirely different people can sit across from each other in the flesh.

It actually took me a few minutes to realize that what these players were engaged in was basically the same game that in desperation I had attempted to play against myself for months. The coded designations with which I had to make do during my grim exercitia were only stand-ins, symbolizing these ivory pieces; my surprise that this movement of pieces on the board was what I had visualized in subjective space could be compared to that of an astronomer who uses the most complex methods to work out on paper the existence of a new heavenly body and then actually sees it in the sky as a distinct, white, physical star. I stared at the board as though held by a magnet, seeing my figments, knight, rook, king, queen, and pawns, as real pieces carved out of wood; I had to transform my abstract computational world back into that of the pieces on the board before I could understand the state of play. Gradually I was overcome by curiosity to see a real game between two players. And then came the embarrassing moment when, forgetting all courtesy, I intruded on your game. But that bad move of your friend’s hit a nerve. When I stopped him I was acting purely instinctively, I stepped in on impulse just as, without thinking, you seize a child who is leaning over a railing. My gross impertinence became clear to me only later.”

I hastened to assure Dr. B. that we were all glad to have had this unforeseen opportunity to make his acquaintance and that for me, after everything he had told me, it would be doubly interesting to be able to watch the improvised tournament the next day. Dr. B. shifted uneasily.

“No, really, don’t expect too much. It will be nothing but a test for me … a test to see whether I … whether I am at all capable of playing an ordinary chess game, a game on a real chessboard with actual pieces and a live opponent … for now I doubt more and more whether those hundreds and perhaps thousands of games I played were actually proper chess games and not just a kind of dream chess, a fever chess, a delirium of play, skipping from one thing to another the way dreams do.