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A Tribute To F.K.’s Final Hour

Cocooned like a soon-to-be-butterfly beneath the heavy quilt of his bed, he witnessed through a half-closed eye the large chocolate-armored metallic cockroach making its way across the rough wooden floor to an abysmal dark crack in the side of the wall. A faint smile flickered transiently across the bookkeeper’s pale, emaciated face.

F.K. shut his eyes. All he had ever asked for was anonymity ... the ability to fade away like a gray shadow into the Czech urban environment. A simple ripple embossed in the dark blue Danube surrounding Prague would signify to F.K. all he ever desired to be – alone – with his pen and paper and his numbers and his words and the woman so distant now. And Max? What about Max? He had given Brod his instructions and expected them to be carried out to the T! He listened as the bells from the city’s towers began to toll, chiming the hour, with Death whispering near him, saying, "Soon ... soon F.K. we shall depart. Then you shall have what you always desired, what Life could not give you but what I can."

Though he had never been there in his mind he had countless times made his way through the hurley-burley streets and avenues of that great metropolis in Amerika he had written about to himself. Even Max didn’t know. F.K. was growing tired, he was now so weary that the burden of breathing through his phlegm-filled lungs shook his sliver-like white body with pain. He wanted to go to a better place. A quiet spot in the country.

Max found him like that, in the room, his matchstick arm dangling out from beneath the bedcovers, pointing towards the wall where the cockroach had been swallowed up. There was a saintly look of contentment finally stretched across his friend’s dark brow. Somewhere in the near future Max could hear the echoes of the storm trooper’s jackboots hitting the cobblestone passages of the Jewish Quarter near the garret where F.K now lay in peace with the world.

On the boat towards Palestine, Max huddled in a corner beneath deck, tightly holding a small black suitcase packed with F.K.’s life - converted paper thoughts. Unknowingly, in the battered leather case, beneath a ream of F.K.’s work – a large chocolate-armored metallic cockroach was waiting to enter the promised land.

From Reich To Rex

In the fall of 1937, a young man named Otto Reich, in his early 30s, made his way into the practice of Sigmund Freud in Vienna accompanied by a guard from the Austrian state prison system. The meeting had been arranged by an influential but powerful benefactor, who unfortunately had not been able to commute the sentence of the young man for the crime he had been found guilty of. Outside the sky was overcast and on the brink of snow. The wind was rather cantankerous, tossing bits of brown leaves up into the dismal gray mantle of the Austrian metropolis.

Otto Reich began: "I swear to you Dr. Freud that what I am about to tell you is not some demented illusion created by my overly fertile mind ... but the truth. I hope you will be able to deliver me from the horror I have been living till now because of it. I was raised an orphan, my parents, so I believed, having been tragically killed in a train accident two years after I was born. Obviously I remember very little from that period. I was raised by a couple who were introduced to me by the Viennese social services when I was four years old. For all intent and purposes, Mr. And Mrs. Reich raised me with all the love they had and I lacked for nothing. In fact it was only after I killed the man that the horror of what I had done caused me great anguish and I have come here hoping that you will be able to assist me in alleviating my torturous visions."

Sigmund Freud just sat back and while chewing upon the end of his Meerschaum pipe which was carved in the likeness of a sea captain, nodded, "Go on Mr. Reich please."

"Five years ago I met a woman, a most beautiful creature far younger looking than her age whom I fell in love with. It was almost as though from the very beginning we were meant to be. Her name was Elizabeth Recant and she was a professor specializing in Greek mythology at the University of Vienna. An aspiring writer myself, we discovered that we had many passions in common and immediately were swept up in a whirlwind romance culminating in our marriage quite soon after our initial acquaintance. Little was I to know until after the wedding that Elizabeth had been married previously for a few years to an ogre of a man – also an academic – and that from that marriage a child had been born but given up due to the burden of their professional pursuits and the lack of love in the relationship between them. Also to my dismay, Elizabeth informed me after the fact, that the man she had previously called her husband had been unable to accept her leaving him and constantly through the years been tormenting her, keeping tabs on all of her activities, threatening the people she called her friends. The day came, when the man, a gargantuan-sized brute approached me in broad daylight on the Anschlus Strasse in the middle of Vienna. He slapped me in the face and as a gentleman, I was forced to challenge him to a duel. On a grassy knoll, a week later, I took his life in a duel witnessed by our seconds and an unbiased referee known to us both. For this act I was arrested and sentenced to ten years behind bars. Before my incarceration, while looking through Elizabeth’s desk for a pen of mine which I believed she had borrowed, I inadvertently came across a document describing the date and name of the child that she and her first husband had given away. To my amazement, the child’s first name had been Otto and a small picture was attached to the document ... a small picture of me as a child! So you see Dr. Freud ... for whatever reason she had kept it secret ... I had married my birth mother and killed my own father. Now you see my dilemma. What can I do to obtain some inner peace? I am tormented by devilish visions and nightmares. I tried to stop the visions by doing this ... " With those words, Otto Reich removed a dark pair of glasses which till now had shielded his eyes from Freud. Where the young man’s eyes should have been were but two hollow dark cavities of scarred red flesh. Otto Reich concluded, "Upon hearing of the duel, my wife Elizabeth took her own life and I was apprehended a few days later by the police."

After prescribing a powerful calmative for Reich and promising to come and visit him in the Austrian state prison, Sigmund Freud removed the Meerschaum from his fleshy lips and began to write a skeleton structure for a dissertation on the Oedipal Complex, while looking in a book on Greek mythology he reread about Oedipus Rex.

Otto Reich never recovered from his tragic life and was only to meet Freud one last time upon his death bed in prison, shortly after he had pierced his heart with a long metal spike he had smuggled to him by another inmate from the prison’s metal shop.

The Awful Dream Of Lev Davidovich Bronstein

1928: I never thought I would end up here. It came to me in a dream, the night of the heavy ice storms near Alma Ata. It was bitter cold and in my vision I saw a gleaming, steel pinpoint of light from a miniature rod dripping blood onto a hard-packed, dark brown earthen floor in some hot, dusty slum in a country far from this icy prison. Tomorrow I heard I am being deported. The nightmare I had still sends chills through my body. Where did we go wrong? Did we go wrong? I don’t believe so. Father Joseph apparently does. His hands are soaked in the blood of innocent comrades. Call me lucky.

1929: The Island Of The Princes: Büyükada. How did I end up here? Yet, I have found some peace at last. I can write and think of my next steps. It is not over yet. I’ve been here almost four years now. Somehow I feel my time in exile here is coming to an end. I will miss this island paradise with its golden shores surrounded by the comforting waters of a turquoise Bosphorus ... the smell of the Orient and orange blossoms mixed with the history of Ottoman atrocities. Yet who am I to be the judge?

1939: The dream came again last night. Diego said I would be in his new painting. I told him I don’t want to be immortalized. I just want justice. Everyday since leaving my island haven I breathe the air of a people crying out for liberation and justice ... just as those left behind in the wilds of Siberia and the cities still cry out for freedom. I don’t feel completely safe here but I am no longer afraid. My beautiful Nataliya says I have been working too hard. I say that Quetzalcoatl has other things destined for this little Jew from the Ukraine.

1940: I didn’t see it coming. It was so swift ... just like the dream. When the ice pick pierced my brain I was still reading my young visitor’s article. I only wanted to help him. He said his name was Jacson and that he was Canadian. I immediately took a liking to him, perhaps because he too came from a cold country covered by ice and snow. I saw my blood drip to the floor of the study and knew that Father Joseph was smiling faraway.

Philip Hyams is an Israeli/Canadian novelist, poet, artist, journalist and film producer currently residing in Kfar Sava, Israel. Born in 1954 in Montreal, Que. Canada - Mr. Hyams has also lived in London, Amsterdam, Montreal and Toronto. His first novel Canaan Barred was published in 1995 by Tell Books – New York/Toronto and his poetry has been published in more than 70 print and electronic journals around the world from the U.S and Britain to Sweden and South Africa.

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