The Final Testament Read online

  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?”

  Sauerwald stooped his shoulders and offered his palms. “Because some people think you would be giving support to enemies of your race?”

  Freud cleared his phlegm-ravaged throat and glared. “You are mistaken. The point of my book is not to discredit the religion of my people. It is to consider the distinctive characteristics of the Jewish people and to try to understand how they might have evolved over time.”

  “But you must recognize that some people would use your book as justification for staying out of a war to save Jews,” Sauerwald said, goading him shamelessly.

  “You give me far too much credit for being influential.” Freud shook his head, refusing the bait. “I very much doubt this slender volume you’re holding would change anyone’s mind about anything.”

  “An author is often the worst judge of how a book will be received.” Sauerwald chuckled and rocked back so that his feet left the floor. “I applaud your decision to go ahead, nevertheless. Is there a publication date?”

  “It needs to be translated and copy-edited in several languages. My American publisher expects to have it out by spring next year.”

  “Wunderbar. ” Sauerwald’s smile faded as quickly as a flashbulb dimming. “Excuse me, Dr. Freud. But I would like now to ask an impertinent question.”

  “Now you are worried about manners?”

  “It’s no secret that your health has deteriorated greatly in the last few months, and that you have been suffering greatly.” The visitor thinned his liver-colored lips. “Do you expect to be alive by the time your book comes out?”

  Several seconds of silence passed. Birds began to sing, trying to fill the empty space, and then stopped. A toilet flushed somewhere in the house. A baby cried out on the street.

  His life’s work had been the study of raw emotion. He had made a habit of measuring and analyzing his own responses with as much detachment as possible. But, for an instant, he became a child of the Vienna streets, broiling with scarlet rage as his meek father had a beautiful new fur hat knocked from his head by a Jew-hating brute and failed to retaliate with appropriately unrestrained violence.

  “That is an ugly and inhuman thing to say,” he said quietly. “If not for my sisters, I would demand that you leave my home now”

  “But you know you will not.”

  “What is it you want then? For God’s sake, out with it already.”

  Sauerwald sat back and laced his hands behind his head, tauntingly. “I would like you to help me become an author.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I have never been more serious.” The visitor undid the snaps of his attaché case and took out a slender volume with a brown leather cover and gold lettering on the spine. “I took this manuscript to one of the finest bookbinders in Vienna and paid for the work out of my own pocket.”

  And probably took your money back after you had him arrested, Freud thought grimly.

  Sauerwald smiled, the skin as tight as a sausage casing over his features, then put the attaché case aside and stood up. He crossed the room with a brisk ebullient stride and handed the book to Freud.

  The doctor took it and placed it on his lap, closing his eyes for a moment to collect himself. “This is a book you wrote?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Sauerwald nodded.

  “Are you asking me to read it and offer a critique?”

  “Both more than that and less than that.”

  “I don’t understand.” Freud blinked.

  “Open the cover.”

  With stiff gnarled fingers, Freud did as he was asked and his eye glanced over a title rendered in fourteen point Garamond type: The Theft of the Birthright. But then his eye found the author’s byline and his heart stopped for a good half-second.

  “What do you mean by this?” He looked up, translucent whorls and eddies floating before his eyes.

  “You should be even more flattered.”

  “I should be flattered that my name is on a book that I did not write?”

  “Most writers would be delighted to have someone else produce their work for them.” Sauerwald waggled his eyebrows roguishly. “I would expect you to say thanks.”

  Freud’s hands shook as he began to turn the onion-skin pages quickly, looking for thoughts and words that he might recognize as his own. Like most writers, he was the most fervid admirer and the fiercest critic of his own prose, and was always pleased when he detected his own influence on the work of others. But here was a book that claimed to have him as an author, and its style was appalling. Barbaric phrases and sentiments abounded from every paragraph. “These so-called holier-than-holy chosen people … A pattern of mendacious deceptive audacity repeated audaciously throughout the tortured course of history … The most monstrous of all lies told with the cleverness of ants … the sanctimonious legitimacy of parasitic larceny …”

  “This is work that you’re trying to pass off as mine?” Freud closed the cover and set the book down on the edge of his desk, a wave of dizziness and nausea causing him to pitch forward a little in his creaking chair. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  Sauerwald had returned to the green seat behind the head of the couch. “I’m merely taking up what you suggested in your Moses book and bringing it to its logical conclusion. I’m saying what even you, herr professor, lacked the nerve to say.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That this entire religion, this entire race, this entire culture—as some people insist on calling it—is based on an even greater lie than the murder of a prophet and its concealment. It begins with an astonishing act of fraud and bad faith, and only gets worse from there.”

  Freud’s fingers grappled among themselves, trying to select a single digit to grip as a cigar substitute. “Explain yourself.”

  “It would be far better if you would take the time to read it. I’m quite proud of it.”

  “Spare me the effort. As you say, I’m an old man. And I’m sure you can summarize the contents.”

  Sauerwald sighed, a look of unmistakable disappointment tilting down the corners of his mouth. “Well, if you insist …” He huffed. “I tried to the best of my abilities to emulate your style and mimic your methodology. Like yourself, I take the Bible as my source material, then I put it on the couch like a patient and dissect it without fear or favor.”

  “I do not dissect patients.” Freud moved his tongue around inside his mouth, trying to rid himself of the taste of decay. “I analyze them.”

  “A fine distinction, but not important here.” Sauerwald smirked. “I began with an origin myth that takes place long before this Moses legend. You are familiar, of course, with the story of Abraham in the Book of Genesis?”

  “I suppose this will concern the attempted sacrifice of the son Isaac.” Freud shifted restlessly. “I’ve already written about some of these themes in Civilization and Its Discontents …”

  “Please don’t try to anticipate. I really do wish you would approach this book with an open mind. We begin before that primal scene you describe. When Abram—as he was called then—leaves the land of Ur with his barren and disagreeable wife Sarah and sets out for Canaan. Somehow they wind up in Egypt, where in a burst of shameful cowardice Abram lies to the pharaoh and says that Sarah is his sister because he fears he will be killed otherwise. Instead the pharaoh discovers the truth and treats both of them honorably.”

  “A curious section, but I wouldn’t make too much of it.” Freud shrugged.

  “Except that it sets a pattern that continues and escalates. A few chapters later, after God has promised Abra
m that he will make a great nation of his descendants and award them the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, he has a son. Only it’s not born from Sarah, who is still barren. But from an Egyptian handmaiden named Hagar who gives birth to Ishmael, a strong capable boy and a worthy heir.”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with this narrative.” Freud rolled his hand with barely constrained disgust. “Get to your point.”

  “By all lights, this first-born should be a true descendant in the line of prophets,” Sauerwald said, enjoying—no! luxuriating— in the sound of his voice. “Instead, the authors trump up this preposterous tale about the child’s mother ridiculing Sarah as an excuse to cast mother and child out into the desert. Somehow they survive and become acknowledged as the progenitors of the great Arab tribes. Meanwhile, Sarah finally manages to have a child of her own, this Isaac, who somehow supplants his half-brother in the line of succession—”

  “Everyone knows this, Sauerwald. There’s no need to rub my face in it …”

  “Please, herr professor, you’re interrupting yourself.” Sauerwald sat back and placed his hands on his stomach. “In this next section of your book, which is handled with great élan if I don’t say so myself, you demonstrate that this proclivity for dishonesty and larceny continues down through the bloodlines. Isaac has two sons. Esau, who is strong and hairy, and Jacob, who is weak and shiftless. By law, Esau, the first-born, should inherit all his father’s land. Instead, Jacob conspires to trick his brother out of his birthright. Jacob goes to Esau when he knows his older brother is exhausted and hungry from working the fields and then fools his sibling into trading away his rightful due for a bowl of porridge. He compounds this injustice later, by going to his blind father on his deathbed and disguising himself with furry gloves to simulate Esau’s hairy hands so he can cheat his brother out of a father’s final blessing. Then down through the ages, the tribes of Esau become the people of Edom, who become part of the Arab race and … ”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Freud pounded the arms of his chair, losing patience. “What is your point?”