The Final Testament by Peter Blauner

T he doctor ’ s hands were trembling as he took the clutching end of the clothes-pin and put it in his mouth. On some days, there was no other way to negotiate past the pain that caused his jaws to lock up. Carefully, he pushed the head of the pin past his lips, up to his gums, and then tried to wedge it between his clenched teeth.
    Fighting back tears, he began to bargain. A dull, persistent throb he could accept if he could stay off the morphine and maintain a clear mind. The occasional hot skewer up through the cheekbone could be borne, even as his eyes blurred with tears. What he quietly feared was overwhelming, incapacitating anguish that would render him finally useless and put the work of his life at a permanent end.
    It was autumn of 1938 and the news on the radio was not good. The Germans had crossed the border into Austria in March, meeting no resistance. He had tried to tell himself that this could be lived with. But then had come the introduction of the racial laws and the decrees that all Jewish assets were assumed to be improperly acquired and therefore subject to confiscation without advance notice. When they burned his books in the street, he joked about the progress of civilization. “In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me.”
    But then Nazis had shown up at the offices of the publishing company he owned, aiming a gun at his son and confiscating the financial ledgers. Soon after, the Gestapo had come to his home in Vienna without an appointment, leaving Berggasse 19 with six thousand schillings in cash. After that, he had no choice but to call upon favors from foreign friends in high places so that he could find another country that would accept him and the rest of the family should they manage, by some miracle, to be able to flee Austria with a few remaining assets.
    Now he was in London and Hitler’s troops had overrun Poland. On the radio, the Fuhrer was demanding the Czechs leave the Sudetenland. Back in Austria, brownshirts were swinging clubs and breaking windows of stores owned by Jews. The doctor’s relatives who could not get out were being threatened, robbed and beaten on the street almost every week. Such things could not be controlled or reliably contained anymore. At the same time, the cancer in his own body was spreading. He’d recently lost much of his upper palate and right cheek to radical maxiofacial surgery. To block off the space left open between his mouth and the nasal cavity, he’d been forced to wear a large dental prosthesis he called “the monster,” which caused constant irritation and made it difficult for him to talk. His speech, never euphonious, had become labored, nasal, and unpleasant even to his own ears.
    He refused to take anything stronger than aspirin for the pain. He was eighty-two years old. The manuscript for his last and most dangerous book—the contemplation of which terrified and excited him at times—sat two-thirds finished on his desk. He knew he would not be able to complete it with a fogged mind. Yet some distraction was required to endure the discomfort and continue his writing.
    He took the clothes-pin out of his mouth and turned it around, using the thin slat of a pincer to pry open a larger space between the prosthesis and his lower jaw. Then he jammed a Reina Cubana cigar into the aperture, struck a match, lit it, and lay back on the couch where his patients like Dora and the Rat Man had disclosed their darkest and most troubling secrets.
    It had been years since he smoked regularly—the disease had been ravaging him since the 1920s—and he knew his daughter Anna would be furious to find him with a cigar in hand. But what other pleasures were left to an old man in a strange country?
    True, the Nazis had surprised him by unexpectedly releasing some of the furniture and books from his Vienna study after he paid the exorbitant taxes and duties demanded. He took a measure of solace as he looked around.