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

by Wolf, Christa

  I had still not yet seen her in person, our Mrs. Ascott, and when one day I saw a frail old lady get into the giant white Cadillac that, to our annoyance, constantly blocked half of the entrance to the garage, I would never have dreamed of suspecting that she was Mrs. Ascott, who in the end did bear the title of “Manager” and so, I thought, had to be at least fit enough to be able to carry out her duties, and clearly was, since the cleaning staff, mostly Puerto Rican, who cleaned my apartment and changed the sheets and towels twice a week, one woman and two men, worked on Sundays too, and when I asked the woman, a black woman with short frizzy hair, a stout bosom, and wide hips, if that was really necessary, she rolled her eyes and said in her rough, labored English that Mrs. Ascott was “not good.” As a result, I decided to reply to the monthly questionnaire that the management gave out, in which we were asked about the quality of the cleaning staff, by checking the box next to “excellent” every time without exception. Yes, excellent cleaning of the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen, Mrs. Ascott. If only you knew how little I cared.

  TELLING THE STORY FROM THE END

  can be a disadvantage too—you run the risk of pretending you know less than you really do, for example with respect to Mrs. Ascott, whom of course I inevitably did meet one day, if “meet” is the right term for our first encounter. One morning, a gaunt female creature with disheveled white hair, wrapped in a floral-print dressing gown, darted out of the apartment door across the hall from mine and down the stairs in front of me. I recognized the Cadillac driver and she crossed the somewhat dusty Spanish colonial–style lobby with light, swift footsteps and made a beeline for the short Mexican gentleman sitting at the little table like a bank teller who acted as concierge: “Mr. Enrico,” liked and appreciated by all the residents of the MS. VICTORIA. To my amazement, he stood up as the strange lady approached him and received her instructions, not exactly obsequiously but still with his full attention. This could only be Mrs. Ascott. She gave me, when we finally encountered each other in the hall, a distracted look from her watery blue eyes and I heard for the first time her exaggeratedly friendly “Hi!” uttered in a high, shaky voice, and I got the impression that this hotel manager did not have the slightest idea who this person coming up to her in her hotel was, or what was going on under the roof under which she was responsible for maintaining order.

  I can’t prove it but I don’t think it is altogether impossible that the reason I have refused all invitations over the past few years to return to that city again was not least because I did not want to see the MS. VICTORIA as a half-destroyed ruin or as a new modern building. I imagine that it’s the same for Europeans who had been to New Orleans: they don’t want to visit again after seeing the city flooded on television, its poorest residents wading chest-high through contaminated water. But I’m probably deluding myself about that.

  * * *

  Before I move on to introduce some of the people who were important in giving my stay a certain excitement and suspense, I need to remember how I spent my time when I wasn’t traveling, alone or with colleagues, to explore the city and enjoy what it had to offer. Since I did not want to discuss in any detail my actual insane project—tracking down the L. whose letters to my friend Emma I was carrying around with me—I had to pretend to be working on something else, so I sat in my office for several hours a day, like everyone else, my door stayed open like everyone else’s door, and I proceeded to document my days faithfully and exhaustively on the little word processor there, a BROTHER, which I had unnecessarily brought with me because I considered it a transition to working on a computer and I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to try actual computers, which were, of course, made available to everyone there and used by all the others. The fact that I was the oldest was generously taken as an excuse for my shameful deficiency in technical abilities, which I did eventually overcome later. In any case, I always sat diligently in front of my little machine and quickly realized that the time I had at my disposal was barely enough for these detailed daily reports. They, the reports, are now piled around me on various makeshift tables, but I turn to them as aids to memory less frequently than one would think. Incidentally, I also wrote out aphorisms, reflections that seemed to have nothing to do with the daily chronicle. For example, I just now find, typed in capital letters:

  YOU CAN CHANGE THE CITY BUT NOT THE WELL. THAT IS AN OLD CHINESE PROVERB I HAVE COME TO LOVE, BUT IS IT REALLY TRUE, DOES IT ACTUALLY MEAN ANYTHING? AND DOESN’T IT CONTRADICT THE WATCHWORD THAT SECRETLY ACCOMPANIED ME HERE, WHICH SEEMS TO BE: DISTANCE.

  People are mysterious, the voice on the telephone said, and if we could exchange family sentences like that then it must be going well for me in general. Of course I’m doing well, why wouldn’t I be? And so why “distance,” and distance from what?

  A crisis is supposed to have its advantages too, at least that’s what people who aren’t in crisis at the time tend to say. The main advantage of a crisis, allegedly, is that it throws those afflicted with it into doubt. For example: The age-old fact that things occur and are felt and are thought simultaneously but that all those things cannot be put down simultaneously on paper in linear writing suddenly rattles me so much that doubt in the realism of my writing grows into a total inability to write.

  Why haven’t I mentioned yet the three well-behaved raccoons that I got to know long before I met Mrs. Ascott? They were a bit creepy, the way they crouched on the flagstone path in front of the entrance to the MS. VICTORIA, staring fixedly at me with their round, brightly circled eyes and making no move to retreat at all until I scared them off by clapping my hands.

  You must be thinking about staying here, said Francesco, our Italian. I was sitting next to him in his extravagant, quintessentially American, wood-paneled cabriolet, the fulfillment of a childhood dream of his, and we were driving after a quick early sunset on one of the freeways, a long, long drive east to see an installation by an artist Francesco called “famous.” I hadn’t heard of the artist, had simply joined the other scholars in the underground garage of the MS. VICTORIA where we split up into three cars. I just went along, the way I always went along when the opportunity arose, because the city, the monster, was exerting a pull on me that I didn’t yet want to admit. And now Francesco shocked me with his assumption, or suggestion, that I stay.

  Me? Stay? What gives you that idea?

  Most of us think you’d be stupid not to. If you went back now. To that German witch’s cauldron.

  You think I should emigrate?

  For a while. We’re living in the city of émigrés after all.

  Did they really know me as little as that? Or did they see my situation more realistically than I did myself? I could never have predicted how often people would continue to ask me Francesco’s question. And how rumors of my possible staying would spread.

  The rough poetry of the freeways in the evening light. Francesco merged delightedly into traffic while he tried to explain his purchase of this extravagant car as the result of cravings he had caught like a disease, as a young man, from an overdose of American movies. I looked at Francesco’s profile: jet-black, slightly unruly hair over his forehead, a big straight nose, all very masculine. Ines, sitting behind us, let out a sound that might have meant doubt, or displeasure, but also a certain deliberate willingness to let him have his way. She was the most beautiful of the scholars, in my opinion, with a face cut like a jewel and a mane of gorgeous black hair.

  Rush hour. We had to become one with this thousand-eyed creature of legend in two equal parts, five lanes each, racing toward each other and then past each other, seemingly missing each other by a hair’s breadth; had to attune our spirit to the other parts of this creature driving along in front of us, behind us, to either side—a creature that ruled us all and cruelly punished every individual movement, every mistake, as we saw shown on television night after night. Auto bodies wedged into each other, passengers driven away from a scrap heap in a state of shock or carri
ed away on stretchers, wounded or dead and covered with a white sheet, rejected as useless failures too weak to pass the test of strength that we, I thought, exposed ourselves to artlessly, carelessly, for no good reason.

  The steady motion we were embedded in had a hypnotic effect and put me into a slight trance, in which Francesco’s words reached me only in muffled form: The installation we were driving to see was very, very modern, but this damn college we were driving to, it was so far outside of town, he hadn’t realized that. He had turned on his headlights a long time before; the ogre Traffic hurtled toward us with its countless lights. Only now did downtown appear on our left, a fata morgana, towers of light in bizarre forms. To think, Francesco said, that none of that existed twenty years ago, Los Angeles was flat as a pancake, in terms of buildings I mean. But it was easy to have that impression today too, I thought, when downtown had slowly orbited past us and the flat cityscape stretched out on both sides, reminiscent of allotment gardens sometimes, with only the columns of the palm trunks sticking up with their disheveled fronds of leaves. Look at the space they have for development and construction—Francesco spoke like an architect.

  It had grown completely dark. Ines wondered if Francesco hadn’t perhaps missed the exit after all, Francesco denied it, annoyed, and then Ria and Pintus passed us in the left lane, the youngest scholars in our group, recognizable from their snazzy cherry-red car and Ria’s little leather cap. She made gestures of despair over the endlessness of the drive. Then suddenly the name of the exit we were looking for appeared on the road sign over our heads and Francesco had to quickly get to the right lane, had to hope that the other drivers would let him cross all the other lanes. They did—they almost always did—Americans don’t let out their frustrations while driving, they have guns at home for that, you see, one American woman would explain to me later. EXIT ONLY, we could hardly believe it, we were on the right street, found the right turnoff, and ended up on a dark campus. We drove around looking for the right building until we saw Pintus and Ria get out of their car in front of one with the entrance lit up. The other car was parked there too, with our other four road warriors: Hanno, the passionate Parisian intending to write a seminal work comparing Paris and Los Angeles; Emily, the one American in our group, constantly irritated by her sharp features that we all admired as much as we did her deeply intelligent essays on American film; Lutz, my countryman from Hamburg, who had admitted to me that he was coming along just to be polite, these so-called modern pieces were not his thing, while Maya, his wife, in the loose clothing she always preferred, showed up wherever there was something new to her and in the end knew more about Los Angeles than any of the rest of us. The gang’s all here, someone said.

  We went in. A student was waiting for us, a girl with Japanese features who led us down convoluted passageways, partly constructed out of fencing, to the object of our long drive, the famous installation: a square room made of hastily put up walls of the lightest possible material, with big gray blocks piled up on two opposite sides to create surfaces to sit or lie down on, which the viewers were to do in order to direct their gazes up at the dull red, indirectly lit walls, up to the ceiling, where a twenty-square-foot rectangular hole was cut, for the sky that was the actual event of this installation—you were supposed to crane your head and look at the deep black night sky until you saw something. With this piece, the artist was trying to teach his audience how to see, Francesco explained. Lutz, a specialist in nineteenth-century art, could not suppress a groan. Okay, said Pintus, who spent most of his time with medieval literature, we’ll see. The mockery in most of the people’s faces was clear, restrained only by the presence of the Japanese student, who remained perfectly unaffected by it. Then Ines said: A bit hard, this seat, and Ria complained that we wouldn’t even see the stars. She took off her little leather cap and pushed her way into a corner. Only Emily, whose area of study was fantasy films, stayed quiet and attentive, as though expecting something extraordinary.

  Okay. I lay down on one of the gray blocks and looked up at the opening in the roof. After a time, the blackness began to undulate, it seemed to me. The nothing that nothings, I said. Silence. We all seemed to be calming down, but what does that actually mean, I asked myself. Francesco might for a short period of time stop feeling threatened and guilty about Ines’s dissatisfaction with their life together and be free of the stress that usually forced him to brag and strut around. Ines, during this same short period, would gain so much confidence that she would no longer hold Francesco responsible for failings she saw in herself and that no one else saw in her. Ria would not have to keep throwing her leather cap into the ring and Pintus would not have to keep running off to be the first to fetch it—a pattern that both of them must have been tired of; they separated later, as I heard only recently. At the time my thoughts turned next to Hanno, who might have felt free of the pressure to demonstrate his cosmopolitan superiority with polished phrases and elegant clothes.

  And me? What about me?

  Meanings gradually dissolved. The dark rectangle of sky sucked me in, it reminded me of the square Lion Gate of Mycenae, behind which darkness lay in wait for the vanquished, the final darkness my night-dark rectangle of sky gave me only a weak foretaste of, but it carried me off, the senses vanished, the senses vanish, I thought, they go inside me, why not, deeper, still deeper, the final darkness, wished for, yes, wished for sometimes, to free me of the compulsion to have to say everything. Never to go down into that well again, no one can ask that of me, but then who says I have to go in the direction others ask me to go in—richten, a beautiful word, I love these words with equivocal meanings: sich richten, to go in the direction, or to conform; in the passive, to be condemned or judged; das ist richtig, that’s right. Gerechtigkeit, Righteousness, thou word of thunder. Deeper. Still deeper. Sucked into the vortex, spit out. Silence. The silence is greatest in the eye of the hurricane. Now to let go. Groundlessness, a fathomless fall.

  Hey, wake up!

  I wasn’t asleep!

  It sure looked like it. Did you dream, at least?

  I think so.

  We’re off to get Chinese. You in the mood?

  In the mood for late-night Chinese food? I was always in the mood, I remember. The platter with the various dishes spun around in the middle of the big round table, pushed by our hands. They were right: this was the best Chinese restaurant in the whole enormous city. It was almost midnight, we were the last customers, we sat at the table that would become our regular table. This simple local restaurant’s owner and his diminutive wife served us with absolutely unchanging, impenetrable politeness, the little smile that could be either welcoming or stand-offish, and a finesse we Europeans could never hope to match. That is how it would be every time, that’s how it was, whenever we would decide to undertake the long drive out to this out-of-the-way restaurant, whenever we undertook it. We praised to each other the various dishes we’d ordered, we tasted everything, we drank red wine, we were in a good mood.

  Then Pintus had the unfortunate idea to ask me, in English for some strange reason, probably out of embarrassment: What about Germany?

  I had learned to be afraid of that question. It always meant the same thing: How can you explain, to yourself and to us, the photographs from Germany that the newspapers are full of here—the asylum-seekers’ residences in flames, the anti-Semitic slurs spray-painted on buildings’ walls, the president with eggs thrown at him during a demonstration against racism. Then all the pointedly questioning gazes would be directed at me and would make it impossible for me to say simply: I don’t know either. I can’t understand it myself. It is almost exactly as surprising to me as it is to you.

  But maybe it all turned on precisely that “almost.” Because didn’t you have to be prepared for anything since the day you stood in front of the graves of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel and saw the gravestones defaced with the words “Jewish Pig”? But prepared for what, exactly? That the people from this slightly dreary
small town in Mecklenburg that had always just sat there quietly would, one fine day after the fall of the Wall, the TURN, head out to the secluded barracks compound that was always strictly fenced off, occupied by Soviet troops, and surrounded by rumors—rumors that were confirmed after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops: yes, it’s true, right here in our immediate vicinity there had been nuclear rockets stationed—that all these peaceful people, then, would go out from their little town and occupy the compound for days and nights on end, because it was now supposed to be turned into a makeshift camp for foreign asylum-seekers and not, as they all (meanwhile unemployed) had hoped, a tourist center for the region and its paradisiacal landscape. Could I have imagined that they would live in tents, as they had not done since their childhood and their service in the National People’s Army? And that their wives would bring meals in insulated lunchboxes to the peaceful, fragrant, early-summer forest? Did they sing in the evenings? I wondered. Which songs? I would have loved to know that.

  The residents of this small town insisted they didn’t hate foreigners. They only wanted to draw attention to their own desperate situation and prevent further loss of jobs, the wanton destruction of the economy. When they withdrew from the barracks and returned to their homes, they apparently planted small green birch trees in front of their houses. I had to imagine how pretty the single long street of that small town would have looked, decked out with green birches—it was otherwise so joyless, or primped up recently with a few garish advertising billboards—and how sad this prettiness would have been. And how sad the nights might be in the little rooms where the TV was on all day and the husband did not come home from work but rather from the allotment garden or the bar or the bench in front of the house where he could now sit all day long and read the paper, which only made him more furious and more dispirited, since he read there—and still reads there today, which I couldn’t know when we were sitting at the Chinese restaurant and I was supposed to tell the others what was happening in Germany—he read and still reads today the unemployment figures of around 20 percent, and even those are calculated with a formula that makes them look better than they are, and I wondered, and also said: I wonder how we can stop superimposing one false signal on another. Why, for example, I said, while the round platter with the Chinese dishes spun around in the middle of the table, why didn’t anyone talk to the people in that small town, why didn’t anyone ask them what they actually wanted, why did they let it get to the point where they were pilloried as xenophobic? No, I heard myself say, no, I don’t believe it. The reporting in your media is one-sided, as though asylum-seekers’ residences in flames are all that exists in East Germany anymore. That’s what people here expect from the Germans. But the repetition you’re afraid of won’t happen. We won’t allow it.