Chapter 7 seven

"At this critical juncture of extreme gravity, an unexpected event saved me, at least for a time. It was a dark, dreary rainy day at the end of July: the reason why I remember it so clearly This detail is because when I was taken to the trial, the rain was hitting the window glass in the corridor passing by. I had to wait for a long time in the front hall of the interrogation room, and I had to wait for every interrogation. This is also their method You are called to stand trial suddenly, and you are taken away from the cell in the middle of the night, and you are nervous first, and when you are ready for the trial, your reason and will are all cheered up and ready to resist. Keeping you waiting, waiting and waiting, one hour, two hours, two hours. Makes you physically exhausted and heartbroken. This day is Thursday, July 27th, the time they made me wait It was very long. I stood and waited for two full hours in the vestibule; there is a special reason why I remember the date so well, because I stood in this vestibule for two hours— It goes without saying that I was not allowed to sit down--stand so stiff-legged, and there just so happens to be a calendar hanging up here, I can't explain to you how I was dying to see something in print, see I saw some writing, so I read and read the short line of "July 27th" on the wall; I almost swallowed them and engraved them in my brain. Then I And I waited and waited, my eyes fixed on the door, to see when it would finally open, and I thought twice. What questions are these judges going to ask me this time, and I know that they are asking me The question will be completely different from the one I am going to answer. But even so, this torment of waiting and standing is at the same time a blessing, a joy. For this room is not the same as the one I live in. , it is relatively spacious, with two windows, unlike my room which has only one window, and has no bed, no washbasin. There is also no special crack on the window sill, which I have watched carefully a million times. The door was painted a different color, and there was another small sofa against the wall, a filing cabinet to the left, and a hanger with hooks on which hung three or four wet army coats from the torturers. My guys' coats. Now I have something fresh, something else to look at, something else to see at last for my hungry eyes, which greedily grab every little spot. I Carefully observe every wrinkle on these coats, for example, I noticed a drop of water hanging on the wet collar of a coat. This may sound ridiculous to you, but I say it in a very Waiting with absurd excitement to see if the bead will finally trickle down the creases, or defy gravity, and hang on to the collar a little longer—yes, I hold my breath for minutes without taking my eyes off it I stared intently at the drop, as if my life depended on it. When the drop finally rolled down, I went to count the buttons on my coat. The first one had eight buttons on it, and the second one also had eight buttons. grain;Three are ten grains; then I compared the lapels of several coats with each other: my hungry eyes caressed, played with, and grasped all these ridiculous, extremely unimportant details with an indescribable greed. .Suddenly my eyes stopped on something.I found the side pockets of one coat a bit bulging.I moved closer, and from the boxy shape of the bulging thing, I could see what was hidden in this slightly distended pocket: a book!My knees began to shake: a book!For more than four months, I have not held a book in my hand. In a book, I can see words lined up in rows, and I can see many lines, pages, and sheets. In it I can read fresh and distracting thoughts unknown to me, I can follow their development, I can keep them in my mind, and the mere contemplation of such a book is already intoxicating, At the same time, it makes people feel numb all over.My eyes were obsessively fixed on the little bulge, the shape the book made in the pocket.My eyes, fixed on this very inconspicuous spot, were on fire, as if they were trying to burn a hole in the coat.At last I could no longer restrain my desire; I couldn't help but draw myself closer.Even if I could touch the book with my hands through the cloth, the mere thought of it set my nerves on my fingertips all the way to my nails.Little did I know it, my body was getting closer and closer to the wall.Fortunately, the guard didn't pay attention to me. This must be a very strange behavior; perhaps he also felt that it is very natural for a person to want to lean against the wall after standing upright by himself for two hours.Finally, I was so close to the coat that I purposely placed my hands behind my back so that they could touch it unobtrusively.I touched the woolen material, and through the woolen material, I really felt a square thing, which could bend and move slightly, and made a slight rustling sound—it was a book!a book!A thought flashed through my mind like lightning: steal this book!Maybe you can steal it, then you can hide it in the cell, read and read slowly, and finally you can read the book again!As soon as this thought entered my mind, it took effect immediately like a strong poison: all of a sudden, my ears were ringing, my heart was pounding, and my hands were cold and I couldn't control them.But after the initial giddiness passed, I quietly and subtly moved closer to the coat.While watching the guard with both eyes, I used my hands hidden behind my back to lift the book from bottom to top, higher and higher.Then, I stretched out my hand to grab it, and pulled it out gently and cautiously, and suddenly the small book that was not very large was in my hand.It was then that I was taken aback by what I had done.However, I have no way out.But where to put this book?I tucked the book behind my back into the waistband of my trousers, and from there gradually moved it to my waist, so that I could hold the book while I was walking with my hands in the seam of my trousers in a soldierly manner. .Now we have to see if we can pass the first test.I moved away from the hanger, one step, two steps, three steps.OK, it went well.When I'm walking, I can clip the book, as long as I clamp my hands to my belt.

"Then came the interrogation. This interrogation required more energy from me than ever before, because when I was answering the questions, all my strength was not actually focused on my confession, but on how to clamp on the matter of keeping the book without drawing attention to it. Thanks to the relatively short interrogation, I took the book to my room without incident—I won't go into all the details so as not to delay you too long, because One time it was so dangerous that the book slipped off the waistband of my trousers just as we were in the middle of the corridor, and I had to feign a cough so I bent down and tucked the book back under the belt safely. What a moment of bliss when I returned to my hell with this book, alone at last, but not alone again!

"As you probably guess by now, I must have grabbed the book right away, looked at it carefully, and read it. Not at all! I first had to fully savor the joy of having a book by my side. The joy of getting excited, I thought to myself, what kind of book should this stolen book be: the most important thing is that it is printed densely, crowded, with many, many words, and many, many thin Thin pages, so that I can read more time. Then I hope, this is a book that can make me mentally tense, not a shallow, light-hearted work, but something that can be learned and recited, such as poetry, Preferably—what a daring dream!—Goethe or Homer. But at last I could no longer control my desire, my curiosity, and I lay flat on my bed, and so, If the guard had opened the door suddenly, he wouldn't have seen it--and tremblingly drew the book from under my belt.

"My first glance at the book was such a disappointment that it even irritated me. The book I stole at such great risk, the book I left open with such eager anticipation until now. It's nothing else, it's a chess book, a collection of one hundred and fifty famous chess games. If my windows were not closed tightly and iron bars were added, I would definitely put this book in my anger. The book was thrown out of the open window, because what do you tell me to do with this nonsense? What use would I use it? When I was a boy in high school, like most other students, I sometimes fell down because of boredom. Chess. But what should I do with this book about chess theory? You can’t play chess without an opponent, let alone chess pieces and a board. I could find something to read, a preface, a reading guide; but I found nothing but square diagrams of famous chess games. Below the diagrams are some that baffled me at first. Symbols. All this seemed to me like an algebra problem for which I could not find a solution. It was only later that I figured out that the letters a, b, and c represent vertical rows, and the numbers from 1 to 8 represent They are horizontal lines, which together determine the position of each chess piece at that time. In this way, this purely diagrammatic sketch has become a language instead. I thought to myself, maybe I can I designed a chessboard here, and then tried to play the games according to the game record. It seems to be a gift from God, my bed sheets happen to be large squares. If I stack them properly, I can finally make sixty-four Square. So I hid the book under the mattress first, tore off the first page of the book. Then I started to use the bread crumbs I saved to make the king, queen and other chess pieces, without saying a word However, the appearance is very ridiculous and extremely imperfect. It took a lot of effort, and finally I was able to rearrange the chess pieces on the checkered sheet according to the position marked on the chess record. I used dust to put half of the chess pieces Make the color darker to show the difference from the other half. However, when I first tried to play the whole game according to the game record, I failed completely. In the first few days, I kept playing and messing up Yes. Five, ten, twenty times I had to start over from the beginning of the same game. But who in the world has so much unused and useless time as I, the slave of nothingness? Who has so much incalculable greed and patience? After six days, I have finished this game of chess without missing a single step. In another eight days, I will be able to put chess pieces on the board without even placing chess pieces on the bed sheet. I imagined the positions of the pieces in the chess game I marked. In eight days, I won’t even need the bed sheets; the original abstract symbols in the book were automatically transformed into the specific positions of the images in my mind. This process of transformation is completely It worked: I reflected the chessboard and pieces into my brain, and the symbols alone could reproduce the changes of the entire chess game in front of my eyes, just like a well-trained musician, just looking at the score is enough to make him hear the voicesVoices and their harmonies.After another two weeks, I could recite every game in the book without any trouble—or, as chess players say: kill blindfold.I now begin to understand what an inestimable happiness my daring act of theft brought me.For all at once I had work to do—a senseless, purposeless kind of work, if you will, but it was a kind of work that wiped out the nothingness around me.With the game records of these one hundred and fifty games, it is like having a magical weapon to resist the invariance of the overwhelming space and time.In order to keep this fresh activity unfailingly its charm, I have carefully divided my daily time from then on: two sets in the morning, two sets in the afternoon, and a quick review in the evening.Before that, my daily life was as messy and sticky as rubber jelly, and I was fooling around all day long.As a result, my time every day is full.I'm busy all day, but I don't feel tired.Because playing chess has such a wonderful advantage: it concentrates all the brain power in a very narrow range of activities, even if you use your brain to think hard, it will not shrink your brain. On the contrary, it will only make your brain more flexible and more energetic.At first, it was just a mechanical imitation of famous chess games. Gradually, I began to develop an artistic and pleasant understanding of chess.I learned the subtleties of offense and defense, the tricks and tricks in them.I learned the art of anticipating the development of the game a few moves ahead, making arrangements early, and launching a counterattack suddenly.Before long, I was able to recognize the individual characteristics of each chess master's play with unmistakable accuracy, just as when reading a poet's poem, I can tell who the author is by just reading a few lines.At the beginning, playing chess was just to pass the time, but now it has become a kind of enjoyment. Aleshin, Lasker, Bogorubov, Tarta Kowell, these great chess strategists, are like dear Like a good friend, walk into my lonely little world.With these endless adjustments, my silent cell became alive every day.Just because I practiced playing chess very regularly, my thinking ability, which had been severely shaken, returned to normal again.I feel like my mind has been refreshed again, even more flexible and alert than before through regular and continuous mental training.Especially during the interrogation, it proved that my thinking became clearer and more concentrated; I unintentionally practiced on the chessboard the ability to resist false threats and crush hidden tricks; Without showing any flaws, I even felt that these Gestapo gradually began to observe me with a certain respect.Perhaps they secretly wondered: from what secret source did I draw my strength for such an indomitable resistance, so many people collapsed before them?

"Day after day, I systematically played the 150 games of chess in the book according to the game records. This happy time lasted for about two and a half to three months. Then I came out. Unexpectedly, I reached a dead point again. I was suddenly faced with nothingness again. Because after I played each game twenty or thirty times, the games lost their fresh charm and no longer surprised people. They were drained of their formerly so exciting, so exciting power. I have already recited these games every move, and what's the point of playing them endlessly? I just took the first step of the game Chess, the future progress seems to unfold in my mind automatically, and there is no surprise, tension, or thinking. In order to make myself something to do, to find me that has already become indispensable I really need another book with other games printed. But since this is completely impossible, there is only one way out of this strange maze; I have to invent some new games myself. The old chess game. I had to try to play chess with myself, or, to be more precise, with myself as an opponent.

"I don't know if you have ever imagined the mental state of playing this 'game within a game'. But a cursory thought is enough to see that chess is a purely mental game, without chance. Therefore, it is absolutely absurd to play chess with yourself as an opponent. The attraction of chess is not that the strategy of the game is played by two different minds in accordance with different ideas. Did it develop? During this battle of wits, Black did not know what military moves White would make, but kept trying to guess and destroy White's combat intentions. At the same time, White Fang also tries to be one step ahead of Black's secret intentions. If Black and White are now the same person, then there is a very abnormal situation, that is, the same brain wants both To know this matter, or not to know this matter. When this brain is functioning as White, it must be able to completely forget what it wanted to achieve and what it wanted to do as Black a minute ago. In this way A kind of double thinking actually presupposes the complete split of human consciousness, which requires the human brain to be like a mechanical instrument, which can be opened or closed at will. Therefore, if you want to use yourself as an opponent to download Chess is as unreasonable as wanting to jump over one's own shadow."

①Refers to playing chess with oneself as mentioned above.