The Final Testament (2 page)

“Do you?” Sauerwald thrust his lower lip in a mock-pout. “Well, I believe I have discovered some of your secrets, Dr. Freud.”

Freud took a small sharp breath and cold stinging air passed through a small gap in the roof of his mouth.

“I'm not sure I understand,” he said.

Sauerwald pulled several pieces of paper out of the leather case on his lap.

“These are letters of correspondence to banks in Zurich, Paris, and London. You have been sending money overseas for years. This is entirely illegal.”

The doctor said nothing.

“You could have been detained from leaving Austria and your whole family could have been imprisoned,” Sauerwald said, his voice rising in stentorian admonition. “It was a clear act of disloyalty that could have been punished.”

The doctor tried to use the tip of his tongue to shift the prosthesis to a more comfortable position as the cords of his throat tensed.

“You should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Small white flecks of spittle flew from Sauerwald's lips. “You profited from the neuroses of the bourgeois class when our nation was starving. You violated racial laws restricting Jewish parasitism. You committed acts of treason by diverting this money from the national treasury.”

As he spoke, Sauerwald slapped the top of the attaché case, which continued to bulge as if a heavy item was still inside. His complexion became rough and spongy, and his voice began to crack.

“Your age and fame are no excuses,” he continued. “You should be dangling from the end of a hangman's rope with your family beside you, instead of living out your days in comfort with your beloved statues and pictures around you, and your daughter brewing tea for you in the kitchen. I could have stopped you from leaving at any time and made sure your life ended in agony without adequate medical care. And my superiors in the party would have thanked me by advancing my career.”

“But you did not,” Freud observed quietly.

“No. I did not.”

Sauerwald exhaled and relaxed his hands, allowing the normal color to return to his face.

“I was given back my passport and allowed to board the Orient Express with my family,” the doctor noted, taking care to articulate each word despite the prosthesis. “I am in another country, safe from ‘the hangman's rope,' as you call it. My wife is with me, my children are secure. But you continue to speak as if I had reason to fear you. Why?”

“Dr. Freud, you still have four sisters living in Austria,” Sauerwald replied. “Don't you?”

“Yes.”

“For the moment, they are safe and free. But I promise you, under the Reich, that will not last.”

The doctor looked away, his eyes gliding past all his other rescued antiquities as he thought of his spinster sister Dolfi. An old maid who had devoted her life to caring for their mother. Freud's jaw ached and dampness spotted the corner of his right eye as he sniffed deeply.

“So what is it exactly that you came here to discuss?” he asked.

“I wish to talk to you about books, Dr. Freud.” Sauerwald crossed his ankles, settling in more comfortably.

“
Books?
”

“Yes, the books that you are writing and the books that you will publish. Of course, you are much more experienced than I am in this realm, Dr. Freud. So I believe we can help each other.”

“How can that be?”

“If I may?” The corners of Sauerwald's eyes crinkled as he put down the leather case and stood up. “I've been looking at a pile of papers sitting on your desk as we've been speaking. They appear thick enough to be the body of a manuscript.”

Freud did not turn. He knew exactly what page was on top.

“Would I be right in assuming that this is the doctor's latest book?” Sauerwald asked, starting to cross the room.

“It might be,” Freud grunted.

“Then this would be the long-awaited Moses book, wouldn't it?”

Sauerwald was standing less than a foot from him now, hovering vampirishly over Freud's desk, staring at the pages written in longhand through hours of excruciating pain.

“It might be,” Freud said, refusing to meet Sauerwald's eye or acknowledge that this guest in his house had transgressed by coming into such close physical proximity with his private work area.

“You've been working on this for some time, haven't you?” Sauerwald let his fingertips lightly brush the curled corner of a page. “I read the excerpts in
Imago
.”

Freud looked askance. “I am surprised that high-ranking members of the Nazi party subscribe to obscure journals for psychoanalysts.”

“You're forgetting that I am a doctor and scientist myself, herr Freud.” Sauerwald pursed his lips as if insulted. “And I am not quite a high-ranking member of the party. At least not yet. But as I said, I have taken a keen interest in your work since going through your papers.”

“I should be flattered, then,” Freud said drily, still refusing to look at him, even as the flowery smell of Sauerwald's cologne made him cringe inwardly and caused his eyes to water.

There was a soft ripple of paper as Freud realized that the guest was now turning pages.

“You are a very brave man, Dr. Freud. You've said many things other people were afraid to say in the course of your work.”

“Some of my critics think that they should never have been said.”

“Yes, of course.” Freud turned his head just enough to see the visitor nodding and turning pages more quickly. “The ego and the unconscious. The unhealthy repression of sexual urges. The fixations with anal and oral functions. The death drive. Few people would have dared to think of such things, let alone commit them to paper.”

“Perhaps so.”

A thatch of blond hair fell over Sauerwald's ruddy brow, and he swiped it away in a state of growing excitation.

“But up until now, you have never been afraid to publish any of it. I've read
Totem and Taboo
,
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
Future of an Illusion
, and
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
…”

“I hope you paid for all of them, instead of borrowing library copies,” Freud interrupted.

Sauerwald gave a hoarse barking laugh. “Yes, I've also read
The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.
Amazing. Fantastic stuff. Only you would have been daring enough to write it.”

“Or be foolish enough to write it,” Freud said, aware of a stiffening throughout his body.

“But you have not published this Moses book yet.”

“It's not finished.”

“No?”

He turned and saw his guest pick up the pages, weigh them in his hand, and return to the chair behind the head of the couch. Then Sauerwald donned a pair of glasses, crossed his long legs, and began to read more closely.

“Are you are forgetting that I've been in your office and seen your notes?” Sauerwald asked evenly, pushing the center-piece up his nose. “You see, I know you have been working on this Moses book for years. This is actually much of the same material I saw back in Vienna. The book was finished long ago. But you have not published it. What is the reason?”

“I think the only one who can say when a book is truly done is the author.”

“You are lying and we both know it.” Sauerwald gave him a glacial stare. “You have not published this book because you're afraid to do so in this lifetime.”

“I've heard the Nazis were working on a number of scientific breakthroughs,” Freud broke in. “I didn't realize mind-reading was one of them. Perhaps you'll render psychoanalysis obsolete without having to kill me personally.”

“I don't blame you for being frightened of your own book.” Sauerwald ignored him and held up a page. “Your thesis is a highly disturbing one. If you had simply stated your theory that Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian, that would be enough to cause an uproar.”

“What do you want, Mr. Sauerwald?”

“
Doctor
Sauerwald. I studied medicine and law at the university, so I am due that respect as much as you are. And may I remind you, Dr. Freud, we were speaking of your sisters before.”

Freud cupped a hand over the lower half of his face, his jaw almost exploding with pain as he clenched it. “Yes,” he said, between his teeth. “I have not forgotten.”

Sauerwald took another page from the top of the manuscript and put in on the bottom. “It's a blasphemous notion, but you don't stop there,” he said blandly. “You assert that if Moses existed, then he was almost surely a follower of the pharaoh Akhenaten.”

“Correct.” Freud nodded calmly as the image of Munch's screamer flashed in his head.

“And this pharaoh was the first monotheist, the individual who insisted on destroying images of all the other great Egyptian gods in favor of worshipping just the one sun god.”

“I am not the first to suggest something like that. Greater scholars have put forth similar theories.”

“But you go much further than anyone before you.” Sauerwald reached for the figurine of Neith on a nearby shelf, but then thought better of it. “You say that after Akhenaten died and Egypt went back to its many old gods, this Moses, the gentile,
this fanatic
, sets out into the desert with a ragtag group of Hebrew followers, where he convinces them to join up with the wandering cult of a violent volcano god to form a new heretic religion.”

Freud steepled his fingers, choosing his words as carefully as a sculptor choosing his stone. “Yes, I believe it's possible that is what happened, but I never claimed to be an historian or an archeologist. I'm just an old man speculating.”

“Of course, doctor, that is what you do in analyzing the human mind. You speculate. You conjecture. You make an educated guess. And as your fame and status suggest, you have very often been right.”

“
‘Often' is not the same as
always
,” Freud demurred. “I have been spectacularly wrong more than once.”

“Don't be modest.” Sauerwald took several more pages from the top of the manuscript and placed them on an old mahogany side-table. “We're coming to the best part. The murder mystery.”

Freud tried to shift the pressure from the right side of his jaw to the left, lest the remains of his fragile face collapse from the way he was grinding his teeth.

“Are you under the impression you were reading Sherlock Holmes?”

“Not at all. I know I am reading a book by Sigmund Freud. Because no one else could have written it. In the midst of this scholarly work, you have posited something even more astonishing. You accuse your own people of one of the greatest crimes in all of history. ”

Freud tried to swallow, but his salivary glands would not cooperate. “You misunderstand my work.”

“I don't think I do,
herr professor
.” Sauerwald tapped the pages with a shiny fingernail. “You say the Jews killed their own prophet and then covered up the crime. You state this with absolute clarity and boldness in your writing. You say the strictures of this severe new religion were too much for these wandering Hebrews. And so they rebelled and murdered their leader. And then buried him somewhere in the sands of the Sinai desert, where his bones would never be found. And that generations later, the unexpiated guilt of this sin rose up in their souls and led them to proclaim Moses's one god as their own and conveniently forget the fact that they had murdered Moses for saying the exact same things many years before. It's brilliant and original. Only you could have written it, Dr. Freud. And I can see why you've been so afraid to publish it.”

Freud winced and sniffed. Hating the fact that this swine was half-right. Just the other day, his neighbor, the great Jewish Bible scholar Abraham Shalom Yehuda had stopped by and, just on the basis of the relatively tame
Imago
excerpts, pleaded with Freud not to publish this scandalous Moses book. His voice had joined with the letters the doctor had received from Jews in America, who had heard rumors of the text and begged him to suppress it. Especially now, when the world was on the brink of war, and recent events in Germany suggested that their tribe in Europe would soon be threatened with annihilation.

“
Sauerwald
…”

The name sounded like a curse, a damp and swampy thing laden with foul-smelling funguses.

“I find it hard to believe that you traveled all the way from Vienna to London in order to speak to me about a book that has not yet gone to press.”

“
Yet?
” The visitor's nostrils flared. “Is this deliberate or one of the famous slips you accuse others of making?”

“I
do
intend to publish this book.” Freud jabbed an unsteady finger into the air. “I've spent my life saying things that most people in polite society think should never be said. Why would I stop now?”