City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa

  In any case, I didn’t veer off toward the bank windows but went straight to the elevators and noticed, not without satisfaction, that the doorman (guard?) greeted me for the first time with the gesture reserved for only those of the countless visitors to the building he had admitted into the inner circle of those who belonged there. How are you today, Madam? —Oh, great! —There are degrees of comparatives and superlatives for every level of well-being.

  I took the second from the left of the four elevators, as always, and admiringly observed the young lady on the staff who stood across from me, ultrathin in her tight-fitting suit, with a swan made of gold paper, a gift, on her palm, and wafted up to the higher spheres, the eleventh floor, to which I never once strayed. How are you today? —Fine, I heard myself say: a sign that new reflexes were forming, because a very short time before, even yesterday, I would have had to dig around in my brain for an appropriate quick answer that might well have come out as Pretty bad (and actually, why would that have been my answer? I’d have to think about that more later). But by then I understood that nothing was expected of me except to carry out a ritual, which suddenly no longer seemed dishonest and superficial, but almost humane. Elevator syndrome.

  As always, I got out at the fifth floor, where the black security guard already knew me by name and spoke it while handing me an envelope that had been left for me; where I automatically reached out for the correct hook in the little locker to take my Identity Card, complete with my photograph, and attach it to my lapel—a further important sign of my belonging there, and in the end that’s what it was all about.

  I sometimes walked up the two flights of stairs to the seventh floor, and sometimes, when my joints hurt too much, took the elevator. My feet knew the way between the shelves in which photographs of all the works of art from every century and every continent were archived; it no longer happened that I tried to open a wrong door with a wrong key. So I opened the door to my office space and was already so blasé that I no longer had to go up to the large window first thing every morning, with a feeling of something like reverence, to look at the Pacific Ocean stretched out behind Second Street and a line of houses and a row of palm trees. The phone. It was Berlin, the city had melted down into a single voice that I had to hear every day. That wanted to remind me of the Baltic Sea. The Baltic, well. I am fond of it and always will be, and I know that I cannot endure sublime landscapes over the long run, the Alps and such. But still, the feeling that there’s nothing all the way to Japan but this endless expanse of water! Were my feelings exaggerated?

  I put down the bag in which I was carrying around the bundle of papers that had come to me two years before, after the death of my friend Emma, and that burned away at my soul (I am not overstating it): the letters from a certain L., about whom I knew nothing except that she had lived in the United States and must have been very close friends with my friend Emma, and the same age. I had come here because of these letters, among other reasons, nurturing the illusion that it must be possible here to find out who this “L.” actually was.

  I walked to the middle of the office, waving, as I walked past open doors, into rooms where my colleagues sat at their computers, when they were not off somewhere in the rambling building, in the library or the archives, following some trace, or meeting with other scholars in the city. I sometimes envied them for their clearly delineated projects and disciplinary identities: they could state their field immediately: history of architecture, or philosophy, or art and literature, or film studies, there was even medieval literature, and every one of them could name the topic of study they were here to advance just like that. Whereas I was plunged into embarrassment whenever anyone asked me about my work plans. Was I supposed to admit that I had nothing in hand but a bunch of old letters from a dead woman and I was simply curious about their author, who must have lived in this city years ago when she wrote them to my likewise dead friend Emma? And that that was why the invitation I had received from the CENTER came at such an opportune time? And that I would now take advantage of the privilege of being an author of literary books, someone who couldn’t be questioned too closely about her project? It seemed highly likely to me, though, that my plans were destined to fail. Even now, the coincidences that in the end brought this project at least to a successful and happy conclusion seem unbelievable to me. If I may use those inappropriate words, “successful” and “happy,” just this once, as an exception.

  For me, incidentally, the least embarrassing of my evasive actions (that maybe no one else recognized as such) were those directed toward the two department secretaries, Kätchen and Jasmine. Kätchen was middle-aged, somewhat nondescript in appearance but expert and experienced in all matters pertaining to the CENTER, absolutely reliable and discrete and versed in the technological skills that I often had to avail myself of, especially at the beginning, and finally, as we all appreciated very much, sympathetic about all the hardships and difficulties that a member of our community might encounter. The other secretary, Jasmine, blond and young and slender and supple and a delight to the men’s gazes, was in charge of our bodily well-being, for sending and receiving the mail, and for all affairs outside the building, such as arranging meetings with other people in the city, including invitations to this or that restaurant from this or that scholar, since the department staff felt responsible for making sure that the new arrivals felt at home in this foreign country as quickly as possible.

  I took the mail out of my cubbyhole, Jasmine handed me a few newspapers, and Kätchen said that no one had gotten back to her yet about the information request she had put in to the city and university libraries for me. But it seemed unlikely in any case that there would be a complete index there, or anywhere else, of the German émigrés who had found refuge here in the thirties and forties. Although, said Lutz—my much younger countryman, an art historian, who was working at the copier nearby—although the totally impossible is possible here, where else if not here? He immediately provided an example: how he had found a photograph of a painting by the long-forgotten and recently rediscovered painter he had chosen as his object of study right here in the archive, as simple as that, after all the archives in Europe had reported it as lost. Well, good, I said, a little sheepishly, but I don’t even know the name of the person I’m looking for. I don’t know anything except one initial, probably from her first name, L. Yes, well, Lutz said, in that case it certainly is an especially difficult situation. He would be at something of a loss himself, he said, while we walked to the lounge, where it was time for tea and the others would be gathered as well.

  In the lounge, where a gigantic glass wall let in the California light unfiltered, drawing your gaze to the Pacific Ocean and the course of the sun in its great arc from left to right, a sight that took my breath away every time and that since then I see in my mind’s eye more often than any other sight from that year—there they sat, each one behind the newspaper from his or her country of origin. Benevolent habits began to develop. Hi! I said, and Hi! came back from behind the newspapers. People already had their regular seats, and mine was, accidentally or not, between the two Italians: Francesco, working on architecture, and Valentina, here for a short stay to conclude her work on a classical sculpture in the CENTER’s famous museum. She had laid out my cup, put the thermos of tea within reach, and also the German newspaper they subscribed to here. I thanked her with a glance. She was looking especially beautiful again with her brown curly hair and her patchwork jacket combining every color; as always, whenever we ran into each other, she beamed delightedly at me. So I poured myself some tea, unfolded my newspaper, and read whatever seemed worthy to report on in Germany three or four days ago. I read that a colleague of mine, who had had to abandon our country a few years before its collapse but was nonetheless someone of rather the same convictions, was now revealing himself as a radical critic of everyone who had stayed in the GDR rather than leaving in horror as he had. I read that he had criticized the “Revolution” of the fall
of 1989 for being peaceful. Heads needed to roll, I read, and we had been too timid and cowardly. It’s someone whose head wouldn’t have been in danger anyway who’s writing that, I thought, and I noticed myself starting an inner debate with this colleague of mine.

  I remembered—and I still remember today—your relief when, on the morning of November 4, 1989, around Alexanderplatz, the marshals approached you in high spirits with orange sashes on which was printed: NO VIOLENCE! The previous night, at a meeting you took part in, the rumor had been spread that trains with Stasi people disguised as workers had been sent to the capital to provoke the peaceful demonstrators and give the armed forces an excuse to attack. A kind of panic gripped you, you called your daughter and told her she couldn’t bring the children with her to Alexanderplatz, but they had already drawn their banners—MAKE SCHOOL MORE INTERESTING! and HELP US GORBY!—and they could no longer be kept away. You went over your speech again, word by word. None of you talked about it but you all thought about the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The idea that you all might have fallen into a trap, by being too naive, too carefree, weighed heavily upon you, but the more demonstrators streamed up out of the subway stations onto the square, raising their banners and signs, forming a protest march, without needing instructions, the more sure you became that nothing would happen. You couldn’t know, none of you could know, that companies of the People’s Army were stationed on the roofs of public buildings along Unter den Linden, with live ammunition. In case of emergency. In case the demonstrators left the agreed-upon route and broke through to the Brandenburg Gate, the border with the West. Or, what you learned only later: that one of the sons of one of your colleagues was up there in uniform, lying on the roof, while her other son marched in the demonstration down below.

  But would the soldiers have fired? A few months after that day, when the borders had long since been opened, the euphoria had passed, and reality—which apparently is always necessarily disillusioning—was gaining ground, you were walking home in your neighborhood with heavily loaded shopping bags when a young man ran after you and begged you to have a coffee with him and his two comrades, all officers in the National People’s Army, out of uniform. You sat with them at a sidewalk café, it must have been the first warm days. Until the fall of the Wall, the three of them had kept watch over the border with the West, but now that they were no longer needed there they had been withdrawn, to be transferred to the Polish border, which they absolutely did not want, they had their families and apartments or little houses here in Berlin, and anyway, the number of troops was being cut. What was going to happen to them? When after all they were among those who had made sure that no shots were fired at the Wall on the night of November 9. They said that they, a captain and two lieutenants, had not been able to reach a superior officer to receive instructions when the crowds started streaming toward the border crossing and that they had collected all the ammunition from their unit so that nothing could happen. You asked them why they had done it. They said: A People’s Army can’t shoot at the people. —Good for you, you said. —And now that’s all the thanks they would get in return? —I’m afraid so, you said. —In that case they would be the ones who lost the most in the reunification, they said.

  The lounge. I was elsewhere for a few fractions of a second; memory outraced the light. I would photocopy my colleague’s article and put it on the shelf in my apartment with the other clippings and photocopies, a pile that quickly grew, that I would send back over the ocean, by air freight, to add to the other, similar, but far bigger piles at home, useless things that collected dust but that I might be able to use someday to shore up a memory that I otherwise couldn’t trust. Couldn’t trust anymore. In case of emergency. Even though I was well aware that the power of memory supplied by these newspapers was at best an artificial substitute for my real work.

  Francesco was groaning over his Italian newspaper. The politicians are ruining us, he said, those criminals. My country is drowning in corruption. I showed him my article and he read it shaking his head. Has everyone gone crazy, he said, I hope you don’t take that nonsense to heart. I didn’t tell him what I took to my heart. He said how much he hoped that he would live to see another revolution someday. How he imagined that one’s sense of life, so crushed by our day-to-day existence—and more crushed the longer it goes on—would be permanently changed by such an experience: inspired, he should think.

  I forced myself past my reluctance to talk about those days, a reluctance I didn’t fully understand myself. I said yes, having lived through and taken part in that, one of the few revolutions in German history, removed every doubt I had had about whether staying in that country, which so many people had left with such good reason, was the right thing to do. Now I was even happy I had stayed, in fact. But some defect I seem to be afflicted with, I said, prevents me from feeling the proper mood during so-called historical events. On that November 4, for example, I said, a day for high spirits, in the middle of my speech in front of the hundreds of thousands standing on Alexanderplatz, I felt the cardiac dysrhythmia I was well acquainted with overtake me, which the doctors absolutely refused to connect with psychological experiences, so I had to be taken to the nearest hospital in one of the ambulances standing ready at the edge of the demonstration, where everything was ready for admitting numerous patients. I, however, was the first and only patient to be taken there, and was seen by a team of doctors and nurses who thought I was a vision, since they had just seen me fresh as a daisy onscreen. So I lay there on an ER cot for the rest of the event and waited for an injection to take effect.—So much, my dear Francesco, for one’s sense of life. We laughed. I promised to join the outing that Francesco had arranged for the following day, to an installation of modern art.

  Pat and Mike, the young Americans with their Clinton buttons pinned to their shirts—assistants in our department—were brooding over the weekend’s New York Times, which saw declining prospects for the Democrats in the upcoming election. If Clinton doesn’t win I’ll have to leave the country, Mike said gloomily. —Why? —They both worked at a Democratic election office every night and they explained to me how hard it was for liberals, never mind people on the left!, to find suitable jobs in recent years, how stale and demoralizing, denunciatory too, the environment was in government offices; the same in the universities, how you had to gauge whom you could talk openly with, and young people like them would have had absolutely no prospects if they hadn’t conformed to the point of denying who they really were. You probably don’t hear much about that abroad? —You’re right, we don’t, I said.

  But then we all gathered for the spectacle of the sunset over the Pacific, a ritual that was never planned but was usually observed. The sun turned its decline and fall into something special, a climax we wouldn’t have thought possible, and we mutely watched the performance until it came into someone’s head to say: God exists.

  The light! Yes, the light, that’s the first thing I would say if someone asked me what I miss when I think back to those months. The endless streets, fringed with palm trees, that seemed to run right into the ocean, like Wilshire Boulevard, which I drove up and down so many, many times. And, yes, the MS. VICTORIA would come to mind too, which I gradually fell in love with, once I understood that it was a magical place. It did not come as a complete surprise that the earthquake that struck Los Angeles a few years after we all left damaged the old, somewhat ramshackle Spanish-style building to the point where it was uninhabitable. It wasn’t so easy to figure out “how it worked” but you had to take it with a certain sense of humor, and what other house or apartment could you say that about? I have kept some of the announcements that the invisible hotel manager regularly slipped under our doors, mostly warnings, for example: We should make sure that the front door remained closed at all times. We should never, under any circumstances, open this door for unknown persons, because we were surely all in it together when it came to the common goal of security, especially in these times, th
e nature of which Mrs. Ascott did not further specify. Not one of us had set eyes on the manager yet but a picture of her was already taking shape in our minds: that of a strict, middle-aged woman in a gray suit with her hair tightly pulled back. Obviously, to keep things running smoothly at the MS. VICTORIA we had to follow her instructions, for instance organizing a system in case—as happened rarely, but occasionally—a late visitor arrived at the door (which was supposed to remain inexorably closed to him). Depending on age and gender, the visitor could receive a roof over his or her head for the night from Emily, the American film studies professor who lived upstairs from me, or from Pintus and Ria, the young Swiss couple who lived downstairs, or from me.

  It turned out that it was easier to smuggle in people than animals. One day a large sign, NO PETS! appeared on the hallowed front door and Mrs. Ascott, its author, took the prohibition against house pets fiendishly seriously, as I learned from Emily, who had not been allowed to bring even one of her beloved cats with her.