The Enemies

The play at the heart of Borges’s The Secret Miracle. Condemned to death in Prague in March 1939, Jaromír Hladík is granted by God a secret, motionless year, suspended between the order to fire and the volley, to finish in his mind the drama he never wrote. Here it is. In a Hradčany library, through an evening that cannot end, Baron Roemerstadt, a banker of converted Jewish lineage, searches the chessboard for “a move that does not lose,” while a priest, a banker, a colonel and a journalist tighten around him a game already rigged. Three acts, a clock stopped at seven, a loop. What the Defence of Eternity proves by the concept, The Enemies puts to the test upon the stage. This edition gives the English text, followed by the critical postface “The Compromised Chessboard” and the complete German Fragmentum, the Hradčany notebook. The keystone of the Bibliotheca Hladikiana.