Frank Tallis - Deadly Communion

Rainmayr opened the bag wide and showed the girls what was inside.

‘See. Pretty things.’ He then shook it for good measure.

He picked out a choker and placed it around Franzel’s neck. Then he found a stocking.

‘Stand on one leg.’

Rainmayr knelt down, slipped the stocking on Franzel’s foot and pulled it up to her thigh.

‘Now, the other one.’

The girl reached out to steady herself with the hand that she had been previously using to cover her genitals. Rainmayr glanced up and was pleased with what he saw.

The dying human weakens the partition that separates this world from Her world. In Eastern religions it is said that the soul enters the body when the newborn infant takes its first breath. I believe this to be correct. The first breath creates an opening through which the eternal essence pours, filling the empty vessel of the flesh. A correspondent event occurs with the very last breath. The final exhalation creates the temporary corridor through which the soul must make its exit from the world, the very same corridor through which She enters to effect our liberation. Death is very much like a state of possession. In the moment of death, we are possessed by death.

You grasp, I hope, the significance of this?

Let me be plain.

It occurred to me that expiry during copulation would make communion with Her possible: as the Virgin in Majesty is transformed from Mother to Empress, so the Queen of Darkness is transformed from reaper to lover. She becomes attainable.

I searched for a fitting host but without success. I tried the obvious places — the brothels, the Prater — but none of the women I encountered seemed right. Let us say that they struck a wrong note. In the end, it turned out that my nocturnal jaunts were entirely unnecessary. You see, I didn’t find Adele Zeiler. Adele Zeiler found me.

I was sitting in the Volksgarten, admiring the Theseus Temple, when she emerged from a crowd, caught my eye, and sat next to me.

— Good afternoon.

— Good afternoon.

Pause.

An exchange of smiles.

— It’s very pleasant here, isn’t it?

Thus, with these simple words, she sealed her fate. She was flirtatious, engaging, yet at the same time oddly self-contained. Did you ever see her face? It was interesting. That said, it was perfectly clear what kind of woman Fraulein Zeiler was. We arranged to meet again and when we did I gave her the gift that she had been chasing. A hatpin. One of two hatpins, in fact, that I already possessed, having purchased them at Jaufenthaler’s — a grubby little jewellery shop on the Hoher Markt — in readiness.

Ah yes. I am reminded that this is something that interests you.

You will appreciate that my task was fraught with logistical difficulties: guns are noisy, stab wounds bleed, and the time a poison takes to act impossible to calculate. By contrast, the method I chose was silent, clean, and allowed me to determine precisely the moment of communion. Did I think of it myself? No, I didn’t. I learned about it during a chance conversation with a gentleman by the name of Doctor Buchleitner. He was called upon to embalm the body of a twelve-year-old baron who had been accidentally killed by his older brother — a cretin — while writing a letter to his absent father. The cretin had come up behind him, picked up a freshly sharpened pencil, and had then thrust it into his brother’s neck. Unfortunately, the pencil was not stopped by the floor of the skull but went through the foramen magnum and into the brain. Of course, the boy died instantly.

Fraulein Zeiler.

We met in Honniger s, a little coffee house in Spittelberg. I gave her the hatpin and promised her more baubles in due course. Our conversation was frivolous, but we both knew that a contract had been made and that she would honour her obligation. Therefore I was not surprised when she suggested that we go for an evening stroll in the Volksgarten. By the time we arrived there it was almost dark.

I will assume that you are not interested in our preliminary embraces and kisses. Such things, I dare say, you can imagine. You will be interested in what followed: communion.

Professor Freud took a panatella from the cigar box on his desk. He had already told Liebermann two jokes that he had heard while playing tarock on Saturday night with Professor Konigstein, and was about to tell a third.

‘The villagers went to the cattle market and there were two cows for sale. One from Moscow for two thousand roubles and one from Minsk for a thousand roubles. They bought the cow from Minsk. It produced lots of milk and the people were delighted with their purchase. So much so that they decided to get a bull to mate with the cow. If the calves born of this union were anything like their mother, the shtetl would never be short of milk again. They scraped together just enough money to buy a strong, handsome bull and they put it in the pasture with their prize cow. But things did not go to plan. Whenever the bull approached the cow she did not respond to his bovine ardour. The villagers were very upset and decided to consult their wise rabbi.’ The Professor lit his cigar before continuing. ‘Rabbi, they said. Whenever the bull approaches our cow, she moves away. If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. When he approaches her from the front, she moves backwards. An approach from the side, she edges off in the other direction. The rabbi thought about this for a minute or so and then and asked: Is this cow — by any chance — from Minsk? The villagers were dumbfounded, as they had never mentioned the provenance of their cow. You are truly a wise rabbi, they said. How did you know the cow is from Minsk? The rabbi looked at them all with a sorrowful expression, shrugged his shoulders and answered: My wife is from Minsk.’

Freud allowed himself a sly chuckle, and looked to his guest for approval. Liebermann had anticipated the punchline and was only mildly amused. Undeterred, Freud continued: ‘Jokes frequently contain a fundamental truth concerning human behaviour. Why is libido distributed unequally between the sexes? I have no ready answer. In the subject matter of jokes, we find a very worthy agenda for psychoanalytic inquiry.’

Ever since Erstweiler had told Liebermann about his beanstalk dream the young doctor had been reflecting on a particular passage in The Interpretation of Dreams. The passage, perhaps only four or five pages long, was concerned with the origin of the psychoneuroses and made many references to Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus Rex. Liebermann succeeded in steering the conversation away from jokes and towards theories of aetiology. Freud did not resist the transition. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk about this aspect of his work.

‘I had been thinking about this possibility many years before the publication of my dream book.’ He counted off the fingers of his left hand with the thumb of his right. ‘Since ’eighty-seven, to be precise. I can remember sharing my thoughts with Fliess and recounting an incident from my early years. I was two — or perhaps two and half — and travelling on a train with my mother from Leipzig to Vienna. An opportunity arose to see her,’ he paused, embarrassed, and ended his sentence in Latin, ‘nudam.’ Freud’s eyes glazed over with memories. He puffed on his cigar and the action seemed to pull him back into the present. ‘In the intervening years, since writing to Fliess, I have become increasingly confident that love of the mother and jealousy of the father are a general phenomenon of early childhood.’

‘General?’