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was leaving first.
    It was sod’s law that on the day the men arrived to clear Sigmund’s study – an event that could have been calculated to turn his head and heart as topsy-turvy as the room
itself – ‘would you let a strange man rummage through your trousers?’ – the Nazi Commissar of Vienna, one Dr Sauerwald, should also arrive, just as two apronned removal men
were struggling down the stairs with the patients’ couch. Having no choice but to invite him in – a courtesy they were able to avoid extending to his SA escort – Sigmund asked,
‘To what do I owe the honour?’ and realised at once that the man was taking the terms of the question literally.
    ‘A simple matter of paperwork,’ the Doctor replied.
    Sigmund took the single sheet of paper from its envelope and read.
    ‘Since the Anschluss . . . blah, blah, blah . . . I have been treated . . . blahdey-blah . . . with all the respect due to my reputation . . . blah, blah, blah . . . and could live and
work in full freedom, if I so desired . . . blah, blah, blahdey-blah . . .’
    Sigmund looked at Sauerwald. As the name implied, the man was humourless. Perhaps that was the key to Nazism . . . no sense of humour. It was the funniest thing he’d read in weeks, but he
was the only one laughing, and even then laughing only on the inside.
    ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But you are too modest. Would you mind if I added an endorsement?’
    ‘Endorsement? Er . . . certainly.’
    Sigmund scribbled ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone’, added a spidery ‘S. Freud’ by way of signature and handed it back.
    Sauerwald looked at it. He didn’t get this joke either. It was the sort of thing you found on the side of brown, ribbed bottles of patent medicines, cures for indigestion or piles, general
tonics and spurious pick-me-ups – the sugared water sold by rogues to rubes in Huckleberry Finn.
    ‘Most kind,’ he said. ‘And if I can be of any . . . er . . . assistance to you and your family . . .? I have long been an admirer . . .’
    Sigmund stopped listening. The only place to air stuff like this was on the couch. He would have loved to get this one on the couch, but alas the couch had gone out as he came in.
    After lunch Sigmund took a slow stroll in the summer sun, an old man’s stroll from bench to bench, resting as often as was possible. It would be so hot in the apartment while his daughter
burnt his papers.

 
§ 16
    Saturday, 4 June
Vienna Westbahnhof
    Two days later, late in the evening, the Freuds boarded the sleeper train to Paris.
    Regardless of what he had told Lockett, Sigmund would kick his leg high enough to reach the bed in the wagon-lit. It might kill him, but he’d do it.
    As they emerged from the corridor that connected the palatial white-stone frontage of the station with the glass and iron engine shed at the back, a young man of thirty or so approached the
Freuds, set down his attaché case, doffed his trilby and introduced himself.
    ‘My name is Smith, sir. From the United States Embassy. I’ll be with you as far as Paris.’
    ‘Interesting,’ Sigmund said. ‘Are all spies called Smith in the United States?’
    ‘Most of us are, sir. But I have several colleagues with a preference for Jones and one or two favour Brown.’
    Freud was curious about most things. An occupational hazard. He asked to look at the engine – a squat-bodied, high-domed monster more evocative of the empire than of Hitler’s Vienna
– and he gazed one last time at the great glass roof. He’d made a career in symbols. There was no point in dodging them. But when the train pulled out of the station, past the twin
towers at the end of the engine shed, he did not look back. Instead he quizzed Smith, a dozen quick questions – but Smith was adept at dodging them.

 
§ 17
    Sunday, 5 June 1938
Leopoldstadt
    It was a pleasant summer’s afternoon, a Sunday in early June. Hummel had surrendered to the normality and pushed the oddness