“Of course I wrote the cards. That’s my handwriting and signature. Surely one has a right to claim the delivery of a periodical to which one has subscribed?”
The major swung half-round in his swivel chair and exchanged a meaning glance with the lieutenant seated at the adjoining desk.
“The man must be a double-distilled idiot”, was what they mutely conveyed to one another.
Then the chief took counsel within himself whether he should discharge the offender with a caution, or whether he should treat the case more seriously. In all offices, when such doubts arise, the usual practice is not to spin a coin, but to send in a report. Thus Pilate washes his hands of responsibility. Even if the report does no good, it can do no harm, and is merely one useless manuscript or typescript added to a million others.
In this instance, however, the decision to send in a report did much harm, alas, to an inoffensive man of genius, for it involved asking a series of questions, and the third of them brought suspicious circumstances to light.
“Your full name?”
“Jacob Mendel.”
“Occupation?”
“Book-pedlar.”(For, as already explained, Mendel had no shop, but only a pedlar’s licence.)
“Place of birth?” Now came the disaster. Mendel’s birthplace was not far from Petrikau. The major raised his eyebrows. Petrikau, or Piotrkov, was across the frontier in Russian Poland.
“You were born a Russian subject. When did you acquire Austrian nationality? Show me your papers.”
Mendel gazed at the officer uncomprehendingly through his spectacles.
“Papers? Identification papers? I have nothing but my pedlar’s licence.”
“What’s your nationality, then? Was your father Austrian or Russian?”
Undismayed, Mendel answered:
“A Russian, of course.”
“What about yourself?”
“Wishing to evade Russian military service, I slipped across the frontier thirty-three years ago, and ever since I have lived in Vienna.”
The matter seemed to the major to be growing worse and worse.
“But didn’t you take steps to become an Austrian subject?”
“Why should I?” countered Mendel. “I never troubled my head about such things.”
“Then you are still a Russian subject?”
Mendel, who was bored by this endless questioning, answered simply:
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
The startled and indignant major threw himself back in his chair with such violence that the wood cracked protestingly. So this was what it had come to! In Vienna, the Austrian capital, at the end of 1915, after Tarnow, when the war was in full blast, after the great offensive, a Russian could walk about unmolested, could write letters to France and England, while the police ignored his machinations. And then the fools who wrote in the newspapers wondered why Conrad von Hötzendorf had not advanced in seven-league boots to Warsaw, and the general staff was puzzled because every movement of the troops was immediately blabbed to the Russians.
The lieutenant had sprung to his feet and crossed the room to his chief’s table. What had been an almost friendly conversation took a new turn, and degenerated into a trial.
“Why didn’t you report as an enemy alien directly the war began?”
Mendel, still failing to realise the gravity of his position, answered in his singing Jewish jargon:
“Why should I report? I don’t understand.”
The major regarded this enquiry as a challenge, and asked threateningly:
“Didn’t you read the notices that were posted up everywhere?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you read the newspapers?”
“No.”
The two officers stared at Jacob Mendel (now sweating with uneasiness) as if the moon had fallen from the sky into their office. Then the telephone buzzed, the typewriters clacked, orderlies ran hither and thither, and Mendel was sent under guard to the nearest barracks, where he was to await transfer to a concentration camp. When he was ordered to follow the two soldiers, he was frankly puzzled, but not seriously perturbed. What could the man with the gold-lace collar and the rough voice have against him? In the upper world of books, where Mendel lived and breathed and had his being, there was no warfare, there were no misunderstandings, only an ever-increasing knowledge of words and figures, of book titles and authors’ names. He walked good-humouredly enough downstairs between the soldiers, whose first charge was to take him to the police station. Not until he was there, when the books were taken out of his overcoat pockets, and the police impounded the portfolio containing a hundred important memoranda and customers’ addresses, did he lose his temper, and begin to resist and strike blows. They had to tie his hands. In the struggle, his spectacles fell off, and these magical telescopes, without which he could not see into the wonder world of books, were smashed into a thousand pieces. Two days later, insufficiently clad (for his only wrap was a light summer cloak) he was sent to the internment camp for Russian civilians at Komorn.
I have no information as to what Jacob Mendel suffered during these two years of internment, cut off from his beloved books, penniless, among roughly nurtured men, few of whom could read or write, in a huge human dunghill. This must be left to the imagination of those who can grasp the torments of a caged eagle. By degrees, however, our world, grown sober after its fit of drunkenness, has become aware that, of all the cruelties and wanton abuses of power during the war, the most needless and therefore the most inexcusable was this herding together behind barbed-wire fences of thousands upon thousands of persons who had outgrown the age of military service, who had made homes for themselves in a foreign land, and who (believing in the good faith of their hosts) had refrained from exercising the sacred right of hospitality granted even by the Tunguses and Araucanians—the right to flee while time permits. This crime against civilisation was committed with the same unthinking harshness in France, Germany and Britain, in every belligerent country of our crazy Europe.
Probably Jacob Mendel would, like thousands as innocent as he, have perished in this cattle-pen, have gone stark mad; have succumbed to dysentery, asthenia, softening of the brain, had it not been that, before the worst happened, a chance (typically Austrian) recalled him to the world in which a spiritual life became again possible. Several times after his disappearance, letters from distinguished customers were delivered for him at the Café Gluck. Count Schonberg, sometime lord-lieutenant of Styria, an enthusiastic collector of works on heraldry; Siegenfeld, the former dean of the theological faculty, who was writing a commentary on the works of St Augustine; Edler von Pisek, an octogenarian admiral on the retired list, engaged in writing his memoirs—these and other persons of note, wanting information from Buchmendel, had repeatedly addressed communications to him at his familiar haunt, and some of these were duly forwarded to the concentration camp at Komorn. There they fell into the hands of the commanding officer, who happened to be a man of humane disposition, and who was astonished to find what notables were among the correspondents of this ‘dirty little Russian Jew’, who, half-blind now that his spectacles were broken and with no money to buy new ones, crouched in a corner like a mole, grey, eyeless, and dumb. A man who had such patrons must be a person of importance, whatever he looked like. The CO therefore read the letters to the shortsighted Mendel, and penned answers for him to sign—answers which were mainly requests that influence should be exercised on his behalf. The spell worked, for these correspondents had the solidarity of collectors. Joining forces and pulling strings they were able (giving guarantees for the ‘enemy alien’s’ good behaviour) to secure leave for Buchmendel’s return to Vienna in 1917, after more than two years at Komorn—on the condition that he should report daily to the police. The proviso mattered little. He was a free man once more, free to take up his quarters in his old attic, free to handle books again, free (above all) to return to his table in the Café Gluck. I can best describe the return from the un
derworld of the camp in the good Frau Sporschil’s own words:
“One day—Jesus, Mary, Joseph; I could hardly believe my eyes—the door opened little wider than a crack, and through this opening he sidled, poor Herr Mendel. He was wearing a tattered and much-darned military cloak, and his head was covered by what had perhaps once been a hat thrown away by the owner as past use. No collar. His face looked like a death’s head, so haggard it was, and his hair was pitifully thin. But he came in as if nothing had happened, went straight to his table and took off his cloak, not briskly as of old, for he panted with the exertion. Nor had he any books with him. He just sat there without a word, staring straight in front of him with hollow, expressionless eyes. Only by degrees, after we had brought him the big bundle of printed matter which had arrived for him from Germany, did he begin to read again. But he was never the same man.”
No, he was never the same man, not now the miraculum mundi, the magical walking book catalogue. All who saw him in those days told me the same pitiful story. Something had gone irrecoverably wrong; he was broken; the blood-red comet of the war had burst into the remote, calm atmosphere of his bookish world. His eyes, accustomed for decades to look at nothing but print, must have seen terrible sights in the wire-fenced human stockyard, for the eyes that had formerly been so alert and full of ironical gleams were now almost completely veiled by the inert lids, and looked sleepy and red-bordered behind the carefully repaired spectacle frames. Worse still, a cog must have broken somewhere in the marvellous machinery of his memory, so that the working of the whole was impaired; for so delicate is the structure of the brain (a sort of switchboard made of the most fragile substances, and as easily jarred as are all instruments of precision) that a blocked arteriole, a congested bundle of nerve fibres, a fatigued group of cells, even a displaced molecule, may put the apparatus out of gear and make harmonious working impossible. In Mendel’s memory, the keyboard of knowledge, the keys were stiff, or—to use psychological terminology—the associations were impaired. When, now and again, someone came to ask for information, Jacob stared blankly at the enquirer, failing to understand the question, and even forgetting it before he had found the answer. Mendel was no longer Buchmendel, just as the world was no longer the world. He could not now become wholly absorbed in his reading, did not rock as of old when he read, but sat bolt upright, his glasses turned mechanically towards the printed page, but perhaps not reading at all, and only sunk in a reverie. Often, said Frau Sporschil, his head would drop on to his book and he would fall asleep in the daytime, or he would gaze hour after hour at the stinking acetylene lamp which (in the days of the coal famine) had replaced the electric lighting. No, Mendel was no longer Buchmendel, no longer the eighth wonder of the world, but a weary, worn-out, though still-breathing, useless bundle of beard and ragged garments, who sat, as futile as a potato, where of old the Pythian oracle had sat; no longer the glory of the Café Gluck, but a shameful scarecrow, evil-smelling, a parasite.
That was the impression he produced upon the new proprietor, Horian Gurtner from Retz, who, a successful profiteer in flour and butter, had cajoled Standhartner into selling him the Café Gluck for eighty thousand rapidly depreciating paper crowns. He took everything into his hard peasant grip, hastily arranged to have the old place redecorated, bought fine-looking satin-covered seats, installed a marble porch, and was in negotiation with his next-door neighbour to buy a place where he could extend the café into a dance hall. Naturally while he was making these embellishments, he was not best pleased by the parasitic encumbrance of Jacob Mendel, a filthy old Galician Jew, who had been in trouble with the authorities during the war, who was still to be regarded as an ‘enemy alien’, and, while occupying a table from morning till night, consumed no more than two cups of coffee and four or five rolls. Standhartner, indeed, had put in a word for this guest of long standing, had explained that Mendel was a person of note, and, in the stock-taking, had handed him over as having a permanent lien upon the establishment, but as an asset rather than a liability. Horian Gurtner, however, had brought into the café not only new furniture and an up-to-date cash register, but also the profit-making and hard temper of the post-war era, and awaited the first pretext for ejecting from his smart coffee house the last troublesome vestige of suburban shabbiness.
A good excuse was not slow to present itself. Jacob Mendel was impoverished to the last degree. Such banknotes as had been left to him had crumbled away to nothing during the inflation period; his regular clientele had been killed, ruined, or dispersed. When he tried to resume his early trade of book-dealer, calling from door to door to buy and to sell, he found that he lacked the strength to carry books up and down stairs. A hundred little signs showed him to be a pauper. Seldom, now, did he have a midday meal sent in from the restaurant, and he began to run up a score at the Café Gluck for his modest breakfast and supper. Once his payments were as much as three weeks overdue. Were it only for this reason, the head waiter wanted Gurtner to “give Mendel the sack”. But Frau Sporschil intervened, and stood surety for the debtor. What was due could be stopped out of her wages! This staved off disaster for a while, but worse was to come. For some time the head waiter had noticed that rolls were disappearing faster than the tally would account for. Naturally suspicion fell upon Mendel, who was known to be six months in debt to the tottering old porter whose services he still needed. The head waiter, hidden behind the stove, was able, two days later to catch Mendel red-handed. The unwelcome guest had stolen from his seat in the card-room, crept behind the counter in the front room, taken two rolls from the bread basket, returned to the card-room, and hungrily devoured them. When settling up at the end of the day, he said he had only had coffee—no rolls. The source of wastage had been traced, and the waiter reported his discovery to the proprietor. Herr Gurtner, delighted to have so good an excuse for getting rid of Mendel, made a scene, openly accused him of theft, and declared that nothing but the goodness of his own heart prevented his sending for the police.
“But after this,” said Florian, “you’ll kindly take yourself off for good and all. We don’t want to see your face again at the Café Gluck.”
Jacob Mendel trembled, but made no reply. Abandoning his poor belongings, he departed without a word.
“It was ghastly,” said Frau Sporschil. “Never shall I forget the sight. He stood up, his spectacles pushed on to his forehead, and his face white as a sheet. He did not even stop to put on his cloak although it was January, and very cold. You’ll remember that severe winter, just after the war. In his fright, he left the book he was reading open upon the table. I did not notice it at first, and then, when I wanted to pick it up and take it after him, he had already stumbled out through the doorway. I was afraid to follow him into the street, for Herr Gurtner was standing at the door and shouting at him, so that a crowd had gathered. Yet I felt ashamed to the depths of my soul. Such a thing would never have happened under the old master. Herr Standhartner would not have driven Herr Mendel away for pinching one or two rolls when he was hungry, but would have let him have as many as he wanted for nothing, to the end of his days. Since the war, people seem to have grown heartless. Drive away a man who had been a guest daily for so many, many years. Shameful! I should not like to have to answer before God for such cruelty!”
The good woman had grown excited and, with the passionate garrulousness of old age, she kept on repeating how shameful it was, and that nothing of the sort would have happened if Herr Standhartner had not sold the business. In the end I tried to stop the flow by asking her what had happened to Mendel, and whether she had ever seen him again. These questions excited her yet more.
“Day after day, when I passed his table, it gave me the creeps, as you will easily understand. Each time I thought to myself: ‘Where can he have got to, poor Herr Mendel?’ Had I known where he lived, I would have called and taken him something nice and hot to eat—for where could he get the money to cook food and warm his room? As far as I knew, he had no family in the
whole world. When, after a long time, I had heard nothing about him, I began to believe that it must be all up with him, and that I should never see him again. I had made up my mind to have a mass said for the peace of his soul, knowing him to be a good man, after twenty-five years’ acquaintance.
“At length one day in February, at half-past seven in the morning, when I was cleaning the windows, the door opened, and in came Herr Mendel. Generally, as you know, he sidled in, looking confused, and not quite all there, but this time, somehow, it was different. I noticed at once the strange look in his eyes; they were sparkling, and he rolled them this way and that, as if to see everything at once; as for his appearance, he seemed nothing but beard and skin and bone. Instantly it crossed my mind: ‘He’s forgotten all that happened last time he was here; it’s his way to go about like a sleepwalker noticing nothing; he doesn’t remember about the rolls, and how shamefully Herr Gurtner ordered him out of the place, half in mind to set the police on him.’ Thank goodness, Herr Gurtner hadn’t come yet, and the head waiter was drinking coffee. I ran up to Herr Mendel, meaning to tell him he’d better make himself scarce, for otherwise that ruffian”—she looked round timidly to see if we were overheard, and hastily amended her phrase—“Herr Gurtner, I mean, would only have him thrown into the street once more. ‘Herr Mendel,’ I began. He started, and looked at me. In that very moment (it was dreadful), he must have remembered the whole thing, for he almost collapsed, and began to tremble, not his fingers only, but to shiver and shake from head to foot. Hastily he stepped back into the street, and fell in a heap on the pavement as soon as he was outside the door. We telephoned for the ambulance and they carried him off to hospital, the nurse who came saying he had a high fever directly she touched him. He died that evening. ‘Double pneumonia,’ the doctor said, and that he never recovered consciousness—could not have been fully conscious when he came to the Café Gluck. As I said, he had entered like a man walking in his sleep. The table where he had sat day after day for thirty-six years drew him back to it like a home.”