The Old-Book Peddler
by Stefan Zweig

A Viennese Tale for Bibliophiles

I had come back to Vienna and was returning from a visit to the suburbs, when quite unexpectedly I ran into a downpour of rain which, like a wet whip, quickly drove the people into doorways and under cover. I, too, hastily ran for shelter. Fortunately there is now a cafe on every street corner in Vienna. So, with dripping hat and thoroughly drenched shoulders, I ran into the cafe directly opposite. Once inside, I could see that it was a suburban cafe of the conventional, almost standardized sort. It lacked the newfangled contraptions of the German type of music halls which are common in the heart of the city. It was old Viennese, middle-class, and was completely filled with petty tradespeople who devoured newspapers more avidly than pastry. Now towards evening the air, already stifling, was in addition shot through with smoke rings. But still the cafe looked neat with its unmistakably new velvet sofas and its bright aluminum cash register. In my haste I had not taken the trouble to look at the name outside. As I sat there, relaxed and gazing impatiently through the panes overspread with a bluish haze, I wondered when it would please the tiresome rain to pass on a few miles further.

Thus unoccupied I felt myself slipping into that sluggish passivity which imperceptibly exudes from every genuine Viennese cafe like a narcotic. In this state of vacuity I observed the people one by one. The artificial light of the smoking room cast a sickly gray around their eyes. I watched the girl at the cash register as she mechanically dealt out to the waiter sugar and spoons for each cup of coffee. Only half-awake, I read unconsciously the most trivial placards on the walls, and this dulling of the senses brought on a sort of apathy which soothed me. But suddenly I was jerked from my half-slumber in a queer manner. An inner excitement began to stir uncertainly and restlessly in me, just as a slight toothache begins of which one knows nothing at first, not even whether it has its origin on the left side of the face or the right, in the lower teeth or in the upper. I felt only a dull tension, a mental restlessness. For suddenly - I should not have been able to say how - I became conscious of the fact that I must have been here before, years ago, and that through some association I was bound up with these walls, these chairs, these tables, this strange smoky room.

But the more I strove to grasp this association, the more maliciously and shiftily it eluded me - like a jellyfish gleaming uncertainly in the lowest depth of my consciousness, and yet not to be gotten hold of, not to be grasped. In vain I fixed my eyes on every object in the establishment. Of course, some things I did not recognize, as for instance the cash register with its clinking recording keys; or that brown wainscoting of artificial rosewood - all that must have been installed later. And yet - and yet I had been here before, twenty years or more ago! Here, hidden in the unseen, like the nail imbedded in wood, lingered something of my old self, now long since outgrown. Forcibly I reached out and drove all my faculties into space and at the same time into my own self - and yet, confound it! I could not reach it, this elusive recollection drowned in the depths of my own being.

I fretted, as one always frets, when some difficulty makes one aware of the insufficiency and imperfection of one's mental powers; but I did not give up hope of somehow seizing this recollection, for my memory is so strangely constituted that I knew I needed only the slightest clue. This memory of mine is both good and bad, now obstinate and self-willed, but then again inexpressibly faithful. It often completely engulfs in its darkness the essentials of happenings as well as of faces, of reading as well as of experience, and will reveal nothing from this lower world at the mere command of the will, without compulsion. But should I grasp the most fleeting hint - a picture post card, a few lines on an envelope, a musty newspaper - straightway the forgotten thing quivers, like a fish on the hook, from the dark agitated water, corporeal and concrete. Then I know a person's every trait - his mouth, the gap left by a missing tooth on the left side of his face when he laughs - and the broken cadence of his laughter - and how at the same time his moustache begins to tremble and a new, a different face emerges. Then, all at once, I visualize all this in its entirety and remember every word that this man ever said to me years ago. But, in order to see and sense something past, I always need a physical stimulus, a little help from reality. So I closed my eyes in order to reflect with still more intense concentration, to create and grasp that mysterious fishing hook. But nothing! Again nothing! Buried and forgotten! And I was so enraged at the faulty self-willed organ of memory between my temples that I could have pounded my forehead with my fists, as one pounds a damaged automaton which unjustly refuses what is asked of it. This rebuff from within disturbed me so much that I could no longer remain sitting, and from sheer chagrin I rose to get some relief. Strangely enough, no sooner had I taken the first steps through the room than the first phosphorescent glimmer began to shine and gleam within me. To the right of the cash register, I reminded myself, the room should lead into a windowless room, lighted only by artificial light. So it proved to be. There it was, this rectangular, indistinctly outlined back room - the card and billiard room - with a different paper on the wall, but otherwise unchanged. Quivering with joy I instinctively looked around, taking in one object after another. I felt that I should soon know everything. In the room were two unused billiard tables, at first barely visible, resembling stagnant green ponds covered with slime. In the corners were placed card tables, at one of which two councillors or professors were playing chess. A small square table stood in the space close to the iron stove, on the way to the telephone booth. Suddenly it all came back to me and at once I knew in a flash, with a single staggering shock of flaming joy: Mein Gott! Of course, this was Mendel's place - Jacob Mendel, Mendel the old-book peddler - and after twenty years I was once more at his headquarters, the Cafe Gluck on the upper Alserstrasse! How could I have forgotten him, "Buch-Mendel," for so inconceivably long a time, this most strange and legendary man, this secluded world wonder, famed in the university and in a small, reverent circle! How could I forget him, the peddler and wizard of books! Here he had sat regularly every day, from morning until evening, a symbol of knowledge, the celebrity and the renown of the Cafe Gluck!

For only an instant was it necessary to look within, behind closed eyelids, and then his unmistakable and distinct figure rose out of my stimulated imagination. Instantly, I saw him almost bodily, as he always sat there at the small, square table with its grayish dirty marble top at all times overloaded with books and miscellaneous publications. I saw him calm and unperturbed, his bespectacled eyes fixed with a hypnotic stare on his book. I saw him with his badly polished, blotchy bald spot, humming and muttering as he rocked his body backward and forward - a habit which he had brought along with him from heder, the Jewish school for children in the Near East. Here and only here, at this table, he read his catalogues and books as he had been taught to read in the Talmudic school, softly singing, and swinging himself - a black rocking cradle. For as a child falls into sleep and sinks away from the world through this hypnotically rhythmic movement, so too, according to the belief of those pious people, one falls into the grace of concentration, thanks to this rocking and swinging of the inert body. And in fact, this Jacob Mendel saw and heard nothing of what was going on around him. The billiard players nearby were noisy; the attendants ran; the telephones rang; the floor was scrubbed; the fire in the stove was made. He noticed nothing of all that. Once a live coal fell from the stove. The parquetry smelled of scorching wood and was smoldering two steps from Mendel when a guest, who had noticed the danger because of the disagreeable odor, began to put out the fire. But Jacob Mendel himself, only a few inches away and surrounded by the smoke, had noticed nothing. For he read as others pray, as players play, and as drunkards stare stupefied into space. He read with such touching absorption that all reading by other men has ever since appeared to me profane. In this little old-book peddler from Galicia, Jacob Mendel, I as a youth had seen for the first time the great secret of unremitting concentration which marks the artist as well as the scientist, the man who is truly wise as well as the one who is stark mad - this tragic fortune and misfortune of complete demoniacal possession.

An older colleague of mine from the University had taken me to him. At that time I was investigating, with but little success, Mesmer, the Paracelsian physician and magnetizer, who even today is not given full recognition. The general run of books on the subject proved to be inadequate and the librarian whom I (unsuspecting novice that I was) had asked for information, grumbled at me coldly. Proofs and literature were my business, not his. It was then that my colleague mentioned Mendel's name to me for the first time. "I'll go with you to Mendel," he promised. "He knows everything and gets you everything. He'll fetch you the rarest book from the least-remembered German secondhand book shop. He is the most efficient man in Vienna, and, besides that, a unique character, a 'book-saurian' of a passing race of bygone ages."

So the two of us went to the Cafe Gluck, and, behold, there he sat, "Buch-Mendel," the old-book peddler, bespectacled, bearded, clad in black, reading and swaying like a dark bush in the wind! We approached. He did not notice us. He sat there, reading and rocking his body to and fro over the table in the manner of a pagoda tree. On the hook behind him swayed his threadbare black coat, bulging stoutly with periodicals and business notes. My friend coughed loudly to announce us, but Mendel, his thick spectacles obstinately pressed close to the book, had noticed nothing as yet. Finally, my friend knocked on the table top as loudly and forcefully as one knocks on a door. Then, at last, Mendel waked up and with a quick, instinctive movement pushed his clumsy steel-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead while from under bristling ash-gray brows he turned his strange, piercing eyes on us - small, black, watchful eyes - quick, sharp, darting back and forth like the tongue of a serpent. My friend presented me and I explained my errand. First I used a subterfuge which my friend had expressly recommended to me. Seemingly angry, I complained of the librarian who had not wanted to give me any information. Mendel leaned back and spat with elaborate care. Then he gave a short laugh and with an accent reminiscent of the East said: "He did not want to? No - he could not! He is a parch, a beaten jackass with gray hair. For more than twenty years I have known him - God help us - but he has learned nothing so far. Such as he can pocket the salary - that is the only thing he knows how to do! They should rather lay bricks, these doctors, instead of having to do with books!"

With this outpouring of his heart the ice was broken, and a good-natured motion of his hand invited me for the first time to the square table, the marble top of which was scribbled over with notes - to this altar of bibliographical revelations which was as yet unknown to me. I quickly explained what I wanted: the contemporary works on magnetism as well as all later books and polemics for and against Mesmer. As soon as I was through, Mendel closed his left eye for a moment, exactly as a marksman does before shooting. And, in fact, this gesture of concentrated attention lasted only a second. Then, as if reading from an unseen catalogue, he enumerated fluently two or three dozen books, each with its place of publication, date and approximate price. I was dumbfounded. Though prepared, I had not expected this. But my stupefaction seemed to please him, for at once he continued playing on the keyboard of his memory the most amazing bibliographical paraphrases of my subject. Did I want to know anything about the somnambulists, or about the first attempts at hypnotism, or about Gassner, exorcism, Christian Science, and Madame Blavatsky? Again he rattled off names, titles, descriptions. Now I appreciated what a unique memory I had come across in Jacob Mendel - a veritable encyclopaedia, a universal catalogue on two legs! Completely stupefied I stared at this bibliographical phenomenon, swaddled in this mean-looking, even somewhat greasy garment of a common Galician old-book peddler, who, after he had rattled off about eight names with seeming indifference, but inwardly satisfied with his trump card, cleaned his spectacles with a handkerchief which once upon a time might have been white. To hide my amazement somewhat, I timidly asked him which of these books he could possibly get for me. "Well, we'll see what can be done about it," he muttered. "Come back tomorrow. In the meantime Mendel will get you something. And what cannot be found in one place will be found somehow in another place. If a man has sense, he also has luck."

I thanked him politely, and from sheer politeness I blundered into an awkward bit of folly by proposing to write down for him on a piece of paper the titles of the books which I wanted. At that very instant I felt a warning thrust of my friend's elbow. But too late! Mendel had already thrown me a look - what a look! - one which at the same time was triumphant and hurt, scornful and superior, an altogether kingly look, the Shakespearian look of Macbeth as Macduff demands from the invincible hero that he yield without battle. Once more he gave a short laugh, his large Adam's apple moving up and down in his throat. Apparently he had with difficulty swallowed a rude word. And he would have been in the right if he had shown every conceivable rudeness, good honest old Mendel; for only a stranger, an ignoramus (an amhorets, as he said) could have been so insolent as to presume to write down for him, Jacob Mendel - Jacob Mendel himself - the title of a book, as one might do for an apprentice in a bookshop, or a library underling; as if this incomparable, this brilliant book-brain had ever needed such a gross expedient! Only later did I understand how much I must have grieved this secluded genius with my polite offer; for this small, wrinkled, hump-shouldered Galician Jew, whose face was covered by his beard, this Jacob Mendel was a Titan of memory. Back of this chalky, grimy forehead, overgrown with stray hairs, there was imprinted, as if with cast-metal type in the invisible spirit writing of the memory, practically every author and title which had ever been printed on the title-page of a book. Mendel knew the place of publication, the publisher, the price, of every worth while book - of the one that appeared yesterday as well as of one that was two hundred years old. At the first shot, and with unfailing vision, he remembered at the same moment the binding, the illustrations and the facsimiles. He saw every work, whether he himself had handled it or had only sighted it from afar in some window or library, with the same visual clarity as the creative artist sees his inner creation, as yet invisible to the outer world. He recalled at once when a book had perchance been offered in a catalogue of a Regensburg antiquary for six marks, that the same book in a different edition could have been bought in Vienna two years before at an auction sale for six kronen, and in the same breath he also gave the name of the buyer. No, Jacob Mendel never forgot a title, nor an item. He knew every plant, all the infusoria, every star in the ever-revolving and ever-agitated cosmos of the entire book-world. In every branch he knew more than the experts; he had mastered the libraries better than the librarians themselves. He knew by heart the stocks of most firms better than their owners, in spite of their lists and index cards, although there was at his disposal nothing more than the magic of his memory - an incomparable faculty which could be illustrated by a hundred separate examples. To be sure, this memory, so demoniacally unfailing, let itself be schooled and formed by the eternal mystery of every perfection, by means of concentration. Outside of his books this remarkable man knew nothing of the world; for all the phenomena of life began to assume reality for him only when they had recast themselves into letters, when they had collected themselves in a book, and had become as it were sterilized. But he did not even read the books themselves because of their significance, because of their factual contents and spiritual meaning. Only their authors and titles, their prices, their outward forms, their title-pages drew his attention. In the final analysis, though unproductive and uncreative, and only a register of a hundred thousand titles and names stamped into the soft cortex of a mammalian brain, instead of being written in a book catalogue, yet this specialized bookseller's memory of Jacob Mendel was in its unique perfection not inferior as a phenomenon to that of Napoleon's memory for faces, that of Mezzofanti for languages, that of a Lasker for chess openings, that of a Busoni for music. Put into a seminar, in a university, this brain would have instructed and surprised thousands, even hundreds of thousands of students and scholars, and would have been useful to scholarship, an incomparable gain for those public treasures which we call libraries. But this higher world was forever closed to him, to this little uneducated Galician book peddler who had not gone much further than the Talmudic school. So the fantastic faculty could only find expression in a mystic science at the marble-topped table in the Cafe Gluck. Our intellectual world still awaits the coming of that great psychologist who, as Buffon arranged and classified the species and varieties of animals, will in his turn describe and differentiate the various kinds and prototypes of that magic power which we call memory. He will have to remember Jacob Mendel, that genius of prices and titles, that unknown master of bibliographical lore.

Because of his vocation, of course, Jacob Mendel appeared to the uninitiated to be no more than an unimportant book peddler. Every Sunday there appeared in the Neue Freie Presse and in the Neues Wiener Tageblatt the same stereotyped advertisement: "Am buying old books, paying highest prices. Immediate attention. Mendel, Obere Alserstrasse" - and then followed a telephone number which was really that of the Cafe Gluck. He rummaged through stocks and with the help of an old town porter, every week he dragged new spoils into his headquarters and thence away again, for he had no license for a regular bookshop. So he stuck to his petty dealing and his poorly paying business. Students sold him their textbooks, and through his hands these textbooks passed from the older generation to the one that was for the moment younger. Besides that he acted as an agent and secured all desiderata for a small extra charge. His good advice was cheap. However, money had no place in his world; no one had ever seen him in other than the same threadbare coat, morning, afternoon, and evening - taking his milk and two rolls and at noon eating something brought to him from the nearby restaurant. He did not smoke, he did not play; one might say he did not live. But both his eyes lived behind his spectacles and incessantly fed that enigmatic brain tissue with words, book titles and names. And the impressionable fruitful mass sucked this abundance into itself as a meadow sucks in thousands and thousands of rain drops. People did not interest him, and of all the human passions he knew perhaps only this one: vanity - conceded to be the most human of all. When anyone, after having become tired of searching in a hundred other places, came to him for information and he could give it, this alone gave him satisfaction, together with the fact that a few dozen people who lived in Vienna and abroad also needed and prized his knowledge. In every unwieldy conglomerate of millions which we call a city, there are always set in here and there a few small facets which reflect one and the same universe on their tiny surfaces, invisible to most and prized only by the connoisseur who shares the same enthusiasm. And all these connoisseurs of books knew Jacob Mendel. Just as people who wanted to get advice regarding a page of music went to Eusebius Mandyczewski at the Society of Music Lovers - a man who, in his gray cap, sat there in a friendly fashion among his reports and notes and with the first upward look smilingly solved the hardest problems - even as today everybody who needs information concerning old Vienna theatres is sure to apply to the omniscient Father Clossy - so did the few orthodox bibliophiles with an equally confident "matter-of-courseness" drift to Jacob Mendel in the Cafe Gluck as soon as there was some particularly hard nut to crack. It gave me, young and curious as I was, a peculiar delight to watch him during such consultations. Generally, if an inferior book was laid before him he snapped its covers together contemptuously and merely grumbled: "Zwei kronen." But before some unique or rare copy he drew back respectfully and spread a newspaper under it; and one saw that all of a sudden he became ashamed of his dirty, inky fingers and black finger-nails. Then he began to turn over page after page - lovingly, carefully, and with great respect. At such moments no one could disturb him, no more than one could disturb a true believer during his prayers. In fact, every one of these actions - looking at, handling, smelling, and weighing - had something of the ceremonial of a religious ritual. His bent form moved back and forth while he was muttering and growling, scratching his head and uttering strange, primitive sounds - a long, almost startled "ah" or an "oh" of a transport of delight, and then again a terrified "oi" or "oiveh" when some pages appeared to be missing or to have been mutilated by a bookworm. Finally, he weighed the old book, sniffed and smelled the ungainly quarto, with half-closed eyes, as a sentimental girl smells a tuberose, and with just as much emotion. The owner, of course, had to be patient during this somewhat detailed procedure. But, having examined the book, Mendel ungrudgingly - yes, even enthusiastically - gave all the information possible. Unfailingly he added wide-ranging anecdotes and dramatic recitals of prices of similar copies. In such moments Mendel seemed to become brighter, younger, livelier. Only one thing could incense him beyond bounds: that was, if by chance a novice attempted to offer him money for his appraisal. Then he would draw back offended like some trustee of a gallery into whose hand a passing American wants to press a tip for his information - because to be permitted to handle a valuable book meant to Mendel what it means to someone else to be introduced to a handsome woman. These moments were his Platonic love nights. Only a book, never money, had any sway over him. Therefore, great collectors, among them also the founder of a new American University, sought in vain to secure his services as an adviser and purchaser for their libraries. Jacob Mendel refused. He could not be thought of otherwise than as at the Cafe Gluck. Thirty-three years ago - a young man then, of short stature and rather bent - still wearing a soft, black, downy beard and curled forelocks, he had come from the Near East to Vienna, to study Jewish theology. However, he soon foresook the hard monotheistic Jehovah to devote himself to the sparkling and thousand-fold polytheism of books. At that time he discovered the Cafe Gluck, and gradually it had become his studio, his headquarters, his post office, his world! As an astronomer, alone in his observatory, watches every night through the tiny aperture of the telescope the myriads of stars - their secret paths, their wandering pell-mell, their extinction and rekindling - so Jacob Mendel looked through his spectacles from the square table at the Cafe Gluck into that other universe of books - likewise always revolving and always coming into existence - into that world above our world.

Of course he was highly respected at the Cafe Gluck, the fame of which was bound up for us with his invisible professorial chair rather than with the name of the great musician, Christoph Willibald Gluck, the creator of Alceste and of Iphigenie. Mendel belonged in the cafe inventory as fully as did the old cherry-wood cash box, as did the two badly-patched billiard tables, or the copper teakettle. His table was guarded like a sanctuary, for his numerous clientele and inquirers were politely urged by the members of the establishment to order something or other, so that, as a matter of fact, the greater part of the gain from his knowledge poured into the wide leather pouch which the head waiter carried on his hip. Therefore Mendel enjoyed many privileges. He had free use of the telephone; his mail was reserved for him and all his orders were taken care of; the old, honest dressing-room woman brushed his coat, sewed on his buttons and every week carried his small bundle of wash to the laundry. To him alone might dinner be brought from the nearby restaurant. Every morning Herr Standhartner, the owner, came in person to his table and greeted him (of course, usually without it being noticed by Jacob Mendel, immersed in his books). Exactly at half past seven in the morning Mendel came in and only when the lights were put out did he leave. He never spoke to the other guests, he read no newspapers, noticed no changes; and when Herr Standhartner once politely asked him whether he did not read more easily now by the electric light than formerly by the flickering light of the Auer lamp, he stared in surprise at the incandescent bulbs. Though the change had involved noise and hammering for several days he had quite failed to notice it. Only through the two round apertures of his spectacles, through these two glancing and absorbing lenses did the millions of black infusoria of letters filter into his brain. All other happenings streamed past him like a meaningless sound. Properly speaking he had spent more than thirty years, that is, all his waking hours, alone here at this square table reading, comparing, calculating, in an unremitting and lasting dream broken only by sleep.

Therefore a sort of fear seized me when I saw the oracular marble-topped table of Jacob Mendel in this room as solitary as a gravestone. Now, grown older, I appreciated for the first time how much there disappeared with every such man, first because everything unusual becomes more precious from day to day in our world irremediably becoming more and more standardized. Moreover, out of a secret presentiment, the young, inexperienced man in me had liked this Jacob Mendel very much. In him for the first time I had approached the great secret that everything individual and superior in our life is brought about by a rousing of one's inner energy, by a lofty monomania which is divinely akin to madness. That a devotion to the purely spiritual, that a complete immersion in a single idea could still happen today, a withdrawal not less complete than that of an Indian Yogi or of a medieval monk in his cell, and that this could happen in an electrically-lighted cafe next to a telephone booth - this truth I, young man that I was, had learned much more fully from an unknown, unimportant dealer in old books than from our contemporary writers. And yet I had been able to forget him - at any rate during the years of the War and in a devotion to my own work not unlike his own - but now before this empty table I felt a sort of humility and at the same time a renewed curiosity.

Where was Mendel? What had become of him? I called the waiter and asked him. No, he was sorry, he did not know a Herr Mendel, no man by that name frequented the cafe, but the head waiter might know. This individual pushed his bay-window heavily in our direction, hesitated and reflected. No, to him also Herr Mendel was unknown. But perhaps I meant Herr Mandl, the Herr Mandl of the hardware business in the Florianigasse? A bitter taste came to my lips, a taste of transitoriness. What does one live for if a gust of wind blowing behind us carries away the last trace of us? For thirty, perhaps forty years, a man had breathed, read, thought, spoken, in this room a few square meters in size, and it was only necessary for three or four years to pass, for a new Pharaoh to come, and Joseph was forgotten; no one remembered Jacob Mendel, "Buch-Mendel." Almost angrily I asked the head waiter whether I might speak with Herr Standhartner, or whether there were not some of the old help still left in the establishment? Oh, Herr Standhartner - why, good Lord! he had sold the cafe long ago - he had died, and the old head waiter now lived on his small property near Krems. No, no one was there any more - but, wait! Of course - Frau Sporschil, the dressing-room woman, was still there; but she certainly would no longer remember individual guests! Immediately it occurred to me: one does not forget a Jacob Mendel. I had her come to me.

She came from her room in the basement, this Frau Sporschil, white haired, ruffled, with a somewhat dropsical gait. She was still hurriedly rubbing her red hands with a cloth. Apparently she had just swept her dark room or cleaned the windows. By her uncertain manner I noticed immediately that it was disconcerting to her to be so suddenly called out under the large incandescent bulbs in the front part of the cafe. The common people in Vienna immediately scent detectives and police on every side if one wants to question them; so she regarded me distrustfully from under her eyelids, with a carefully assumed look of humility. What good could I want of her? But scarcely had I asked about Jacob Mendel, when she stared at me with brimming and literally flowing eyes, and she spasmodically jerked her shoulders. "Mein Gott, poor Herr Mendel, that one should still think of him! Yes, indeed, poor old Mendel!" She almost wept; she was as touched as old people are when some one reminds them of their youth, or of any forgotten but treasured bond. I asked whether he was still living. "Oh, mein Gott, poor Herr Mendel, he must have been dead five or six - no, seven years! Such a dear good man, and when I think how long I knew him, more than twenty-five years! Why, he was here when I first came to the place! And it was a shame how they let him die!" She became more and more excited - asked me whether I was a relative. Nobody had ever bothered about him, no one ever asked for him. Didn't I know what had happened to him?

No, I assured her, I knew nothing; she should tell me, tell me all. The good woman appeared timid and embarrassed, wiping her wet hands again and again. I perceived that it was painful for her, a dressing-room woman, to stand in the center of the cafe, with her soiled apron and her mussed white hair. Moreover, she kept looking anxiously to the right and left to see whether one of the waiters was not listening. So I suggested to her that we go out into the card room, to Mendel's old place; there she should tell me all. Touched, she gratefully nodded to me that I had understood her. The old and somewhat shaky woman preceded, and I followed. Both waiters watched us in astonishment. They scented a relationship, and several guests also were surprised at such an ill-matched pair. And there, at his table, she told me about the fall of Jacob Mendel, "Buch-Mendel" as everybody called him. Later some more details came to me from another source.

Well, then, he came as usual every day at half past seven in the morning, even after the outbreak of the War, and he sat there and studied all day as of old. In fact, they all felt and had often spoken about it, that it had never penetrated his consciousness that there was a war. And I know that he never looked into a newspaper and never spoke with any other person. But even when newsvenders uttered their murderous cries, calling out their newspaper extras, and all other people came running together, he never rose or listened to them. He did not notice at all that Franz was missing, as well as the billiard-room attendant, who had fallen at Grolitz. He did not know that the son of Herr Standhartner had been captured at Przemysl. He never said a word as the bread became worse and they had to give him a wretched concoction of fig coffee instead of milk. Only once he wondered why so few students were coming. That was all. "Mein Gott, the poor man! Nothing gave him pleasure or concern but his books."

But then, one day, it happened. About eleven o'clock in the morning, in broad daylight, a policeman came with a detective. He pointed to the badge in his buttonhole and asked whether a certain Jacob Mendel did not frequent the cafe. Then they went straight to the table of poor Mendel, who without any misgiving believed that they wanted to sell him some books or ask him something. But they soon asked him to come with them and they led him away. It was a real disgrace for the cafe! All the people gathered around poor Herr Mendel as he stood between the two men, his spectacles pushed up to his hair, looking back and forth from one to the other, not quite knowing what on earth they wanted of him. She, however, had told the policeman, stante pede, that there must have been a mistake - a man like Herr Mendel could not harm a fly! Whereupon the detective immediately shouted at her that she should not mix into official affairs. Then they took him away, and he did not come around for a long time - for two years. To this very day she did not know exactly what they wanted of him at the time. "But I'd take an oath," said the old woman excitedly, "that Herr Mendel could not have done anything wrong. They made a mistake; on that point I am ready to put my hand into the fire. It was a crime against a poor innocent man, a crime!"

And she was right, the good, pathetic Frau Sporschil. Our friend Jacob Mendel had really done nothing wrong. It was only later that I learned the details. He had simply perpetrated a mad, a pathetic piece of folly - one that was even in those insane times improbable - to be explained only on the ground of his complete absorption, of the detachment of his unique existence.

This is what had happened. In the office of the military censor, whose duty it was to watch over all correspondence with foreign countries, a postal card was intercepted one day, written and signed by a certain Jacob Mendel. It was regularly stamped, but - incredible! - it was directed to an enemy country! On the postal card, which was addressed to Jean Labourdaire, Bookseller, Quai de Grenelle, Paris, this Jacob Mendel complained of not having received the last eight numbers of the Bulletin bibliographique de la France, though the yearly subscription had been paid in advance. The under-official in the censor's office, an enlisted man, a Gymnasium professor, who in private life had a taste for Romance languages, but who was now thrust into a blue military coat, was amazed when this card came into his hand. A stupid joke, he thought. Among the two thousand letters which he ransacked every week and held up against the light in his search for dubious information and suspicious phrases, he had never come across such an absurdity. To think that anyone should carelessly send a letter from Austria to France, should so light-heartedly and so simply mail a postal card to an enemy country, as if these boundaries had not been bristling with barbed wire since 1914, and as if on every single day France, Germany, Austria, and Russia were not lessening one another's male population by a few thousand! Therefore he put the postal card in the drawer of his desk as a curiosity, without following up this absurdity with a report. But, a few weeks later, another postal card came from this same Jacob Mendel addressed to John Aldridge, Bookseller, High Holborn, London, asking whether he could not supply the latest numbers of the Antiquarian. Again it was signed by the same strange individual, Jacob Mendel, who with touching naivete added his full address. Buttoned up in his uniform, the Gymnasium professor now began to feel somewhat uncomfortable under his coat. Could there be, after all, some mysterious code hidden behind this idiotic joke? In any case, he stood up, clicked his heels together and laid both cards on the table in front of the Major. The Major drew up both his shoulders: a strange case! Then he advised the police to find out whether a Jacob Mendel actually existed. An hour later Jacob Mendel had been arrested and, still quite giddy with surprise, had been led before the Major. The latter laid the mysterious postal cards before Mendel and asked him whether he admitted having sent them. Excited by the officer's serious tone and especially because he had been disturbed in the reading of an important catalogue, Mendel blurted out almost rudely that, of course, he had written these cards! He should think that one still had the right to claim a periodical for which the subscription had been paid. The Major turned around in his chair to the Lieutenant at the next table. They winked at one another understandingly: "a thorough fool!" Then the Major considered whether he should merely scold the simpleton and turn him out, or take up the case seriously. In such perplexing difficulties one almost always decides to draw up a protocol. A protocol is always good. If it serves no purpose, no harm is done; only one more meaningless sheet of paper among millions is covered with writing. In this case, however, it harmed a poor, unsuspecting man, for at the third question something ominous came to light. First, his name was demanded: "Jacob, recte Jainkeff, Mendel." Occupation: "Peddler" (that is to say, he had no bookseller's license, only a peddler's permit). The third question proved disastrous: his birth place? Jacob Mendel mentioned a small village near Petrikova. The Major raised his brows. Petrikova, was that not in Russian Poland, near the boundary? Suspicious! Very suspicious! He now inquired more sharply, when had Mendel acquired Austrian citizenship? Mendel's spectacles stared darkly and in surprise; he did not quite understand. "The devil," rapped the Major, "where were his papers and his documents?" Mendel answered that he had no other papers than his peddler's permit. The Major wrinkled his forehead more and more. How about his citizenship then? Let him finally explain that. What had his father been, Austrian or Russian? Serenely Mendel replied: "Naturally Russian." And he himself? Oh, well, in order not to have to do military service he had smuggled himself over the Russian border thirty-three years ago and had since been living in Vienna. The Major became more and more agitated. When had he gotten his Austrian citizenship? "What for?" asked Mendel. He had never troubled himself about such things! Then he was still a Russian citizen? And Mendel, long since bored by this dreary questioning, replied indifferently: "Why, yes, I suppose so."

The Major, horrified, threw himself back so violently that his chair creaked. So that was it! In the midst of the War, at the end of 1915, after the great offensive and the battle at Tarnov, a Russian walked the streets of Vienna unmolested, wrote letters to France and England, and the police did not care! And under such circumstances the blockheads in the newspaper offices still wondered why Conrad von Hotzendorf had not reached Warsaw at once! And under such circumstances as these they still were amazed at General Staff headquarters that every movement of the troops was reported to Russia by spies. The Lieutenant too had risen and stood by the table; the conversation quickly turned into a cross-examination. Why had Mendel not at once registered himself as a foreigner? Mendel still unsuspecting, said in his singing Jewish jargon: "Why should I have registered myself all at once?" In this twisted question the Major saw a challenge and he asked threateningly whether Mendel had not seen the proclamations? "No!" Perhaps he didn't read the newspapers either? "No!"

Had Jacob dropped into the office from the moon the two officers could not have stared at him with greater surprise as he stood there, already beginning to perspire profusely because of his precarious position. Then the telephone rang, typewriters rattled, orderlies hurried, and Jacob Mendel was delivered to the military prison, to be removed with the next transport to the concentration camp. He did not understand what they wanted of him, but he was not particularly worried. What mischief, after all, could this man with the golden collar and rude voice plot against him in whose rarefied world of books there were no wars, no misunderstandings, but only knowledge and the eternal desire for still greater knowledge of numbers and words, of book titles and names! So he trotted good-naturedly down the stairs between the two soldiers. Only when at the police station they took all the books from his coat pockets and demanded his wallet, in which he had a hundred important slips and the addresses of his customers, only then did he begin to struggle and rave. They had to overpower him. But unfortunately in the scuffle his spectacles clinked to the floor, and this magic telescope which enabled him to look into the intellectual world broke into a thousand pieces. Two days later, dressed in his thin summer coat, he was transported to a concentration camp of Russian civil prisoners near Komorn.

What anguish of soul Jacob Mendel experienced during those two years in a concentration camp, without books, his beloved books - without money, among indifferent, rude, mostly illiterate companions, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity - what he suffered there, separated from his rarefied world of books - the only one for him - like an eagle with clipped wings cut off from its ethereal element - of that all testimony is lacking. But gradually the world, grown sober after its madness, came to know that of all the cruelties and crimes of this war, none was more thoughtless, more superfluous, and therefore morally less excusable, than this rounding up and herding behind barbed wire of unsuspecting alien civilians, unfit for military service. They had lived in a foreign country as in their native places and because of their trusting faith in the sacredness of the right of asylum, respected even among the Tungusians and the Araucanians, had failed to flee in time. It was a crime against civilization, committed with equal thoughtlessness in France, Germany and England, on every parcel of European earth gone mad. And perhaps Jacob Mendel would have become mad, as did so many others who were innocent, or he might have died of dysentery, of exhaustion, or of some mental disorder, if an incident, a typically Austrian one, had not brought him back once more into his own world in the very nick of time. After his disappearance letters came again and again from distinguished customers to his old address. The former governor of Styria, Count Schonberg, a fanatical collector of works on heraldry; the former Dean of the Theological Faculty, Siegenfeld, who was working on a commentary on Saint Augustine; the eighty-year old retired Admiral of the fleet, Baron von Lisek, who still kept on correcting his Memoirs - they all, his faithful clients, had written repeatedly to Jacob Mendel at the Cafe Gluck. Some of these letters were forwarded to the forgotten man in the concentration camp. There they fell into the hands of the Captain, who happened to be a good-natured fellow and who was greatly astonished at the distinguished acquaintances this half-blind, filthy little Jew had. Since they had broken his spectacles - he had no money with which to buy a new pair - he was always crouched in a corner, gray, sightless and dumb, like a mole. One who had such patrons must in spite of appearances be somebody of importance. So the Captain permitted Mendel to answer these letters and to ask his patrons to intercede for him. They did not fail him. With the passionate solidarity of all collectors, his Excellency as well as the Dean began to pull wires and under their joint guarantee poor old Mendel, after more than two years of confinement, was permitted to return to Vienna in the year 1917 - of course, under the condition that he report to the police every day. Nevertheless, he was permitted to return to the free world, to his old, small, stuffy garret. Once more he could pass the book displays which he loved so well and, above all, he could return to his Cafe Gluck.

The worthy Frau Sporschil was able to tell me, from her own recollection, of Mendel's return from an infernal lower world. "One day - Jesus, Maria, Joseph! - I think I can't believe my own eyes! The door opens - you know how, slantwise, the width of a crack - just as he always comes in, and there he stumbles into the cafe, poor old Mendel! He wore a ragged military coat, full of patches, and something or other on his head, something that was at one time perhaps a hat - one that had been picked from the rubbish heap. He wore no collar and he looked like death; with his gray face and his gray hair, and so thin that it was a pity! But he comes in, just as if nothing had happened. He asks nothing, says nothing, goes over to the table and takes off his coat, but not as quickly nor as easily as he used to do, and he had to breathe heavily while doing it. And he had no book about him as he used to have. He just sits down and says nothing, but keeps on staring in front of him with empty, popping eyes. Only, by and by, when we brought him the whole bundle of letters and papers which had come for him from Germany, he began to read once more. But he was no longer the same."

No, he was not the same, no longer the miraculum mundi, the magic register of all books. All who had seen him then told me sadly the same story. Something in his usually quiet demeanor and look which suggested that he was reading as if in a trance, seemed irremediably destroyed. In its mad course the horrible bloody comet must have crashed into a solitary and peaceful star, the brightest one in his book-world. His eyes, accustomed for decades to the delicate, silent, insect-like letters of print, must have seen something dreadful in that human herd encircled by barbed wire. His eyelids cast a heavy shadow over his pupils which at one time had flashed so quickly and ironically; his eyes, formerly so lively, gleamed faintly, sleepily, red-rimmed behind his repaired spectacles which had been bound together with thin twine. And, even more dreadful, in the fantastic architecture of his memory some column must have fallen in and the whole structure have become confused; for so delicate is this brain of ours, this regulator of our knowledge, so nicely balanced is it that a small vein clogged up, a shattered nerve, a fatigued cell, or a displaced molecule suffices to break the composite harmony of a mind. And in Mendel's memory, this sole keyboard of his knowledge, the keys refused to function on his return. Now and then, when someone did come for information, he stared at him, exhausted; and he no longer quite comprehended, he misunderstood and forgot what was said to him. Mendel was no longer Mendel, as the world was no longer the world. No longer did complete absorption rock him back and forth while reading, but instead he would generally sit staring vacantly, his spectacles turned mechanically toward the book, and no one could have said whether he was reading or merely brooding darkly. Sometimes, so Frau Sporschil said, his head dropped heavily on the book, and he fell asleep in broad daylight. Then at other times he would stare for hours at the strange, foul-smelling acetylene lamp which had been put on his table during the period of the coal shortage. No, Mendel was no longer Mendel, no longer the wonder of the world, but only a wearily breathing, useless bundle of beard and clothes, lumped meaninglessly in the once Pythian chair; no longer the fame of the Cafe Gluck, but a disgrace, a blemish, ill-smelling and unpleasant to look upon, an embarrassing, superfluous schnorrer.

Such he seemed to the new proprietor, Florian Gartner, from Retz. The latter having become rich as a flour and butter profiteer during the hunger year of 1919, had talked the honest Standhartner out of the Cafe Gluck for eighty-thousand rapidly disappearing paper kronen. With his firm peasant hand he quickly fell to, quickly changed the venerable cafe into something stylish; bought at an opportune time new arm-chairs in exchange for worthless bills, put in a marble front and was already negotiating for the annexation of the adjoining store to convert it into a dance-hall. During these rapid improvements he was of course very much inconvenienced by this Galician schnorrer, who all day long, from morning until night, occupied a table all by himself and, moreover, drank only two cups of coffee and consumed only five rolls. Of course, Standhartner had especially committed his old guest to Gartner and had tried to explain what a significant and important man this Jacob Mendel was. He had, so to say, at the transfer of the inventory, listed him as an encumbering charge to the establishment. But, besides the new furniture and the bright aluminum cash register, Florian Gartner had provided himself with the unscrupulous conscience of profiteering days, and only waited for a pretext to turn out this last remnant of suburban shabbiness from the cafe which had now become elegant. Soon a good excuse seemed to present itself, for Jacob Mendel was in a sorry plight. The last banknotes he had hoarded were pulverized in the paper mill of the inflation and his customers had scattered. The weary man had no strength to drag books together and to mount stairways once more as a peddler. From a hundred small indications one could see that he was faring miserably. It was now very seldom that he had anything brought for him from the restaurant and he delayed longer and longer to settle the small account for his coffee and rolls - at one time it ran for three weeks. Even then the head waiter wanted to put him out. But the good Frau Sporschil, the dressing-room woman, took pity and guaranteed his account.

During the next month the catastrophe occurred. In checking the invoices of the baked goods, the new head waiter had noticed several times that they did not tally. More and more of the rolls billed and paid for appeared to be missing. His suspicion, of course, immediately fell on Jacob Mendel; for at various times the tottering old town porter had come to him with the complaint that Mendel had owed him money for the last six months, and that he could not get a farthing out of the book peddler. So now the head waiter watched him especially, and two days later, hidden behind the stove, he succeeded in catching Jacob Mendel as he rose furtively from his table, went to the other room, and, quickly taking two rolls from the bread-basket, greedily stuffed them into his mouth. When settling up, the old man maintained that he had eaten none. Now the mystery of the vanishing rolls was explained. The waiter immediately reported the incident to Herr Gartner, and he, glad of the long-sought-for pretext, roared at him before all the people, accused him of the theft and thought that he was magnanimous in not calling the police immediately. Then he ordered him to clear out at once and for all, and be damned! Jacob Mendel only trembled. He said nothing, but rose heavily from his seat and went out.

"'Twas a pity," said Frau Sporschil as she described his departure. "I'll never forget - how he rose - his spectacles shoved up on his forehead, which was as white as a sheet. He hadn't taken the time to put on his coat, though it was January and you know, of course, what a cold year it was. And in his fear he left his book on the table. I did not notice it until later and wanted to take it to him, but he had already stumbled through the door and I'd not have dared to go out on the street, for Herr Gartner placed himself in the doorway and shouted after him so loudly that the people stopped and came running in a crowd. Yes, 'twas a shame! I was ashamed to the very bottom of my soul. Such a thing could not have happened when old Herr Standhartner was around - that one should be driven out into the cold for taking a few rolls! In Herr Standhartner's time the old man could have eaten all his life for nothing, but the people of today, why, they have no heart! To drive out a man who had sat in the same place day after day, over thirty years - it really was a shame, and I'd not like to have to account for it before the Lord - not I!"

The good woman had become very much excited and with the passionate talkativeness of old age she repeated again and again her remarks about what a shame it was and about Herr Standhartner, who would not have been capable of such a thing. At last I had to remind her to tell me what had become of our Mendel, and whether she had ever seen him again. She pulled herself together, but became even more excited. "Every day when I passed his table, every time, you may well believe me, it gave me a shock. It always made me think where can he be now, poor Herr Mendel, and if I had known where he lived I'd have gone to him with something warm to eat, for where was he to get money for coal and food? And so far as I know, he had no relatives anywhere. But, at last, when I heard nothing and still nothing from him, I began thinking to myself, everything must be over with him, and I should never see him again. And I even wondered whether or not I should have mass said for him, for he was a good man, and we had known each other - more than twenty-five years!

"But one morning, in February, at half past eight, just as I was polishing the brass window-rods, all at once - I thought that I'd drop dead - the door opens suddenly and Mendel comes in. Of course, you know he always used to come sideways and so bewildered, but this time 'twas in a way different. I noticed at once that he walked to and fro, that his eyes were shiny. Mein Gott, how he looked, all bone and beard! Seeing him in such a state made me suspect that he paid no attention to anything around him, that he was going around in broad daylight like a sleep-walker. He had forgotten everything, all that about the rolls and about Herr Gartner and how shamefully they had thrown him out. He does not know what he is doing, thank Heaven! Herr Gartner had not yet come in and the head waiter was just drinking his coffee. Then and there I rushed over to him to explain that he mustn't remain, he would only be thrown out once more by the ruffian." At that point she looked around timidly and corrected herself. "I mean, by Herr Gartner. Well, 'Herr Mendel,' I called to him. He stares at me. And then, in that moment, mein Gott, it was terrible - in that moment he must have remembered everything, for he starts back and begins to tremble. One could see that not only his fingers but also his whole body was shaking, even his shoulders, and he quickly stumbles back to the door. There he collapsed. At once we telephoned for the emergency ambulance, which took him away, in a fever, as he was. In the evening he died of galloping pneumonia, the doctor said, adding that he was not quite conscious at the time when he came to us, but was only driven on like a sleep-walker. Mein Gott, when you sit in the same place for thirty-six years, day in and day out, then indeed such a table is your home."

We continued speaking of him for a long time, we the last two who had known this strange man - I, to whom when still a young man he, in spite of his microscopically unimportant existence, had given the first notion of a life completely immersed in intellect; she, the poor, fagged dressing-room woman, who had never read a book, but was attached to this comrade of her poor, lower world only because she had brushed his coat and sewed on his buttons for twenty-five years. And yet we understood each other amazingly well, sitting at his old, abandoned table in the communion of the shadow which we had conjured up, for remembrance always unites and doubly so every remembrance in love. Suddenly, in the middle of her chatter she recalled something and exclaimed: "Good Lord, how forgetful I am! I still have the book, the one which he left on the table! Where could I have taken it to him? And then, as no one called, I thought afterwards that I might keep it as a remembrance. There is nothing wrong in that, is there?" Quickly she brought it over from her alcove. With difficulty I suppressed a little smile; for fate, always playful and sometimes ironical, maliciously likes to mix the comic with the tragic. It was the second volume of Hayns' Bibliotheca Germanorum erotica et curiosa, the compendium of amorous literature so well known to every book collector. Curiously enough this shabby catalogue had fallen as the last legacy of the deceased wizard into these weary, chapped and unlettered hands, which had never held any book other than a prayer-book. Habent sua fata libelli. It was with difficulty that I could compress my lips against the smile which was involuntarily surging up from within, a momentary hesitation which confused the good woman. Was it after all something valuable, and did I think that she might keep it?

Affectionately I shook hands with her. "You may keep it without fear. Our old friend Mendel would have been glad that at least one of the many thousands who are indebted to him for a book still remembers him."

And then I felt ashamed in the presence of this honest old woman who had remained faithful in a simple and yet most human way to the departed. For she, though unlettered, had preserved at least one book with which to remember him better; while I - I had forgotten "Buch-Mendel" for years - I, of all people, who should have known that one creates books only in order to unite oneself with other human beings after one is gone and so to defend oneself against the inexorable enemies of all life: transitoriness and oblivion.

End of The Old-Book Peddler by Stefan Zweig