Fantastic Night & Other Stories (18 page)

“Good Lord, no. Poor Herr Mendel must have died five or six years ago. Indeed, I think it’s fully seven since he passed away. Dear, good man that he was; and how long I knew him, more than twenty-five years; he was already sitting every day at his table when I began to work here. It was a shame, it was, the way they let him die.”

Growing more and more excited, she asked if I was a relative. No one had ever enquired about him before. Didn’t I know what had happened to him?

“No,” I replied, “and I want you to be good enough to tell me all about it.”

She looked at me timidly, and continued to wipe her damp hands. It was plain to me that she found it embarrassing, with her dirty apron and her tousled white hair, to be standing in the full glare of the cafe. She kept looking round anxiously, to see if one of the waiters might be listening.

“Let’s go into the card-room,” I said, “Mendel’s old room. You shall tell me your story there.”

She nodded appreciatively, thankful that I understood, and led the way to the inner room, a little shambling in her gait. As I followed, I noticed that the waiters and the guests were staring at us as a strangely assorted pair. We sat down opposite one another at the marble-topped table, and there she told me the story of Jacob Mendel’s ruin and death. I will give the tale as nearly as possible in her own words, supplemented here and there by what I learnt afterwards from other sources.

“Down to the outbreak of war, and after the war had begun, he continued to come here every morning at half-past seven, to sit at this table and study all day just as before. We had the feeling that the fact of a war going on had never entered his mind. Certainly he didn’t read the newspapers, and didn’t talk to anyone except about books. He paid no attention when (in the early days of the war, before the authorities put a stop to such things) the newspaper-vendors ran through the streets shouting, “
Great Battle
on the Eastern Fron
t,” (or wherever it might be), “
Horrible Slaughter,
” and so on; when people gathered in knots to talk things over, he kept himself to himself; he did not know that Fritz, the
billiard-marker
, who fell in one of the first battles, had vanished from this place; he did not know that Herr Standhartner’s son had been taken prisoner by the Russians at Przemysl; never said a word when the bread grew more and more uneatable and when he was given bean-coffee to drink at breakfast and supper instead of hot milk. Once only did he express surprise at the changes, wondering why so few students came to the café. There was nothing in the world that mattered to him except his books.

“Then disaster befell him. At eleven one morning, two
policemen
came, one in uniform, and the other a plain-clothes man.
The latter showed the red rosette under the lapel of his coat and asked whether there was a man named Jacob Mendel in the house. They went straight to Herr Mendel’s table. The poor man, in his innocence, supposed they had books to sell, or wanted some information; but they told him he was under arrest, and took him away at once. It was a scandal for the cafe. All the guests flocked round Herr Mendel, as he stood between the two police officers, his spectacles pushed up under his hair, staring from each to the other, bewildered. Some ventured a protest, saying there must be a mistake—that Herr Mendel was a man who would not hurt a fly; but the detective was furious, and told them to mind their own business. They took him away, and none of us at the Café Gluck saw him again for two years. I never found out what they had against him, but I would take my dying oath that they must have made a mistake. Herr Mendel could never have done anything wrong. It was a crime to treat an innocent man so harshly.”

The excellent Frau Sporschil was right. Our friend Jacob Mendel had done nothing wrong. He had merely (as I
subsequently
learnt) done something incredibly stupid, only explicable to those who knew the man’s peculiarities. The military censorship board, whose function it was to supervise correspondence passing into and out of neutral lands, one day got its hands upon a
postcard
written and signed by a certain Jacob Mendel, properly stamped for transmission abroad.

This postcard was addressed to Monsieur Jean Labourdaire, Libraire, Quai de Grenelle, Paris—to an enemy country,
therefore
. The writer complained that the last eight issues of the monthly
Bulletin bibliographique de la France
had failed to reach him, although his annual subscription had been duly paid in advance. The pedantic official who read this missive (a high-school teacher with a bent for the study of the Romance languages, called up for war-service and sent to employ his talents at the censorship board instead of wasting them in the trenches) was astonished by its tenor. “Must be a joke,” he thought. He had to examine some two thousand letters and postcards every week, always on the alert to detect any thing that might savour of espionage, but never yet had he chanced upon anything so absurd as that an Austrian subject should unconcernedly drop into one of the imperial and
royal letter-boxes a postcard addressed to someone in an enemy land, regardless of the trifling detail that since August 1914 the Central Powers had been cut off from Russia on one side and from France on the other by barbed-wire entanglements and a network of ditches in which men armed with rifles and bayonets, machine-guns and artillery, were doing their utmost to exterminate one another like rats. Our schoolmaster enrolled in the
Landsturm
did not treat this first postcard seriously, but pigeon-holed it as a curiosity not worth talking about to his chief. But a few weeks later there turned up another card, again from Jacob Mendel, this time to John Aldridge, Bookseller, Golden Square, London, asking whether the addressee could send the last few numbers of the
Antiquarian
to an address in Vienna which was clearly stated on the card.

The censor in the blue uniform began to feel uneasy. Was his correspondent trying to trick the schoolmaster? Were the cards written in cipher? Possible, anyhow; so the subordinate went over to the major’s desk, clicked his heels together, saluted, and laid the suspicious documents before the ‘properly constituted authority’. A strange business, certainly. The police were instructed by telephone to see if there actually was a Jacob Mendel at the specified address, and, if so, to bring the fellow along. Within the hour, Mendel had been arrested, and (still stupefied by the shock) brought before the major, who showed him the postcards, and asked him with drill-sergeant roughness whether he acknowledged their authorship. Angered at being spoken to so sharply, and still more annoyed because his perusal of an important catalogue had been interrupted, Mendel answered tardy:

“Of course I wrote the cards. That’s my hand-writing 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-leagued 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 realize the gravity of his position, answered in his singing Jewish jargon:

“Why should I report? I don’t understand.”

The major regarded this inquiry 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, were the books 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 civilization 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, some-time 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 C O 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 underworld of the camp in the good Frau Sporschil’s own words: