Poets and Chess Players #1: In Which Dr. Haber Sells His Soul

Well, as he no longer believed in magic, what was left but politics?

This is chapter 1 of Poets and Chess Players, a spy adventure and drama serial set in Austria near the end of 1941; although of course this prologue takes place quite a bit earlier.

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FOUR YEARS AGO: September 30, 1937
Cambridge, UK - Trinity College

Klemens Haber stood over his fireplace with a match in one hand and the box in the other, looking down at the paper stacked at his feet and smiling a slightly-crooked smile. For a long minute, he let the tension wash over him, enjoying the rare feeling of power. Then he struck the match and dropped it into the waiting pile of tinder.

“Soll ich dir, Flammenbildung, weichen?¹” Haber quoted in his soft Austrian accent, as the crumpled edges caught and then began to burn away. Once the handwritten notes in the grate were ablaze, he began to roll up the typed pages and feed them in, one after another. The flames danced before his eyes in time with the heartbeats hammering in his throat, each tongue of fire seeming to jump for joy as it vied with the others for the precious fuel. Soon it would be over. Soon he would never have to face this damnable place again –

A knock at the door behind him broke the spell. Haber briefly considered his options before tossing the rest of the papers into the fire with a shouted “Come in!” Waving the now-billowing smoke out of his face, he turned to see one of the few people he considered a friend standing just inside the doorway, frozen with his hat in his hand and his usually-cheerful eyes wide in horror.

"You've finally gone mad, haven't you?" Klugmann demanded².

Haber realized how he must look – standing in front of an unwisely large fire, sleeplessly unkempt, and stripped to his shirtsleeves – and mentally conceded the impression. He was all too aware that his advancing state of scoliosis didn’t help matters. After faithfully enduring body braces and posture coaching since childhood, he had finally given up and allowed his twisting spine its own way. Already his head had acquired a permanent leftward cant, and though he was tall, in the last three years he’d lost nearly six centimeters to the corresponding curve in his back. He was a dark-haired man and, though naturally dark, very pale these days even at the best of times. No one seeing the tired lines on his face would have thought him as young as twenty-seven. The one sign of life in him glinted wildly from behind thick round lenses in eyes like raw iron. “I was mad,” he said, gesturing to the remnants of his dissertation now burning in the grate. “I have gone sane, and you can’t imagine what a relief it is.” 

The other man was already pushing past him. “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing, then,” he said, reaching for the narrow windows and heaving them open on groaning hinges. The grey outdoors began to trickle in, its damp and cool air creeping over the sill as the smoke reluctantly wafted out. “You’ve been killing yourself writing that thing for five years. It's all I've ever known you to really think about. Nobody who reads it will shut up about how you’re going to be the next Wittgenstein. Now you’re burning it?”

Haber removed his glasses to wipe them clear of soot. “It has served its purpose. I wrote it to get a degree, which I have now, thanks to those four hundred pages of rubbish. I only wish I could do the same for the college’s copy. What is it to you, anyway?”

"What? - well, the principle of the thing, I suppose." The revelation that he hadn’t just destroyed the only trace of his work seemed to reassure Klugmann somewhat, and he began to look more exasperated now than angry. "Besides, it's awfully unsubtle, even for you."

"Touché," he said, shrugging his lower shoulder as he put his glasses back on.

Klugmann shook his head, already slipping past exasperation into thinly-suppressed laughter. "I don't know what I expected you to rather do than attend your own going-away party."

"That thing?" 

“Yes, I came up to tell you that you were missing it.” He waved the last of the haze through the window and dropped heavily into a chair to light a cigarette.

“They would have waited if they were celebrating anything besides being well rid of me,” Haber said, drawing up the other chair beside him. “I didn’t want to go anyway. You know Isobel - she'll have invited everyone she can get her hands on. By the end of the night, half of them will be naked in a back room and the other half will be spilling Party business to some convenient journalist."

His friend smiled through his puff of smoke. Like the Austrian, James Klugmann was an intellectual dévoté of Communism and consumed by the ideology, but he had a good deal more patience with those who were not - such as their libertine comrades in 'sex-pol'. "To each his own, surely?"

"Surely 'to each his neighbour's' would be more apt," Haber said, his tone a characteristic mix of cynical and innocent amusement. Klugmann laughed, but, as always, he wasn't quite sure if he should have. "Here - I’m sorry you are missing it, if nothing else."

He reached into a side-table drawer to produce a forgotten bottle of sherry, courtesy of his pre-doctoral years, and an equally dusty set of cordial glasses. Haber was well aware of his reputation as 'the monk', and perhaps better aware than anyone of how much he deserved it. Ten years ago he had arrived in Cambridge as an ambitious young student of mathematics, eager to trade his already-nominal Catholicism for everything the world had to offer. His conversion to analytical philosophy had led him on a long retreat into something like what he'd left behind, though with a few key substitutions in his creed. Religion had failed him; the world had failed him; the search for knowledge itself had failed him, ending only in the glum agnostic certainty that nothing could be known; well, as he no longer believed in magic, what was left but politics? As Haber poured the drinks and handed one across, Klugmann smiled a little more easily. "Very kind of you," he said. "So it's all set?"

"Oh, yes."

Klugmann nodded thoughtfully, and tucked the cigarette between his glass and thumb so that the other hand could scratch at his short, greying hair. "Do be careful, Haber," he said; "we've lost some good men out there."

"In Spain, you mean? Vienna is hardly a war zone."

"I wasn't necessarily thinking of your being shot. Only that it's awfully close to Germany."

Haber shrugged, as though he considered such a thing too irrelevant to even think about. It was pure feint. He had in fact devoted a great deal of his time and thought to the thin, nearly arbitrary line dividing the lands in which the Nuremberg Laws and Hereditary Health Courts were already in force from those in which they were not, he supposed, yet in force. His mother's letters mentioned an increasing appetite for annexation, to the extent that she had asked him not to risk visiting home. At one point, he had seriously considered settling down in Britain. As was his habit, however, he had decided to handle the situation by creating an even worse one of his own: tomorrow he would return to his native place as a Soviet informant.

To be fair, it had not been entirely his own decision. Most of the ‘friends’ currently celebrating his departure were proud members of Comintern, every bit as loyal to the Soviets as to the British Communist Party; and what Klugmann evidently felt unsafe acknowledging, even in private, was that he himself had recruited the young ex-pat for the job. Their NKVD contact had promised a good salary and the satisfaction of making the right enemies, which was more than the fascists on the Moral Sciences faculty had to offer him. Most importantly, if the federal authorities were ever to require health-passports or proofs of ancestry, then his family - most of whom would be legally considered Jewish - would have somewhere to turn. To OTTO, of course, he had made out that he was most interested in the advancement of Soviet socialism and the defeat of its opponents, which only happened to include the Hitlerists. He needed his new patrons to believe that their cause was his first allegiance. Communist though he was, truthfully, he would have rather joined forces against Germany with anyone else. The trouble was that no one else seemed willing to put up any forces for him to join.

Respecting the unwritten rules of secrecy, Haber had said nothing of these negotiations to Klugmann, nor did he now. Instead, he cleared his throat to cover his pause for thought, and continued unruffled. "What is the use of my having this tired old life, if I don't risk it once in a while?" he said. "If I stay here much longer, I'm afraid I will miss my chance. You may come back twenty years from now and find me walled up in my tower like Hölderlin, a madman writing sad little verses for visitors who aren't there."

"I can't imagine it," said the other agent, who rarely understood Haber's literary references and had learned to work around them.

"Can't you?" He smiled slightly, and tipped the glass back and forth in his hand. "No, I will be careful. The officials there haven't got an idea of what I have been doing abroad, and I intend to keep my profile low. I imagine I can get work somewhere; I'm not the first academic to wash out and go home to shuffle someone else's papers. I'll take care of Mother. Perhaps I'll still write a little, on my own terms. Who knows?"

"Who knows?" Klugmann raised his glass in a toast. "Dr. Haber, I wish you well, and I wish you the best of luck."

"I appreciate that," Haber said, returning the gesture and chuckling to himself as he looked for another moment at the sherry - and drank, then, on his deal with the devil. "I have a feeling that I will need it."

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1. Goethe: Faust, Part One. “Thee, form of flame, shall I then fear? Yes, I am Faust: I am thy peer!”

2. This chapter has an unusually high rate of name-dropping.
British Communist writer James Klugmann, aka MER (bio, here).
Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (bio, here).
Czech-Austrian spy Arnold Deutsch, aka OTTO (bio, here).
German philosopher and poet Friedrich Hölderlin (bio, here).