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

by Wolf, Christa

  And who is this “We”? Francesco asked, an echo out loud of the question I had already silently asked myself.

  Anyway, said Hanno, the Frenchman eager to compare, that’s not a single country’s problem, or even a single region’s. The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

  And then?

  Back then I was much more sparing with the word BARBARISM. Today it’s on the tip of my tongue. The stitches that held our civilization together, that kept it from falling into the abysses that yawn beneath it, have rent asunder: disasters well up, towers fall, bombs are dropped, people blow themselves up.

  Signals on a multitrack tape running in an endless loop in my head—the words on one of its tracks would be spoken without my willing it. Cut, cut, I couldn’t use and didn’t want this material, thoughts that were off the record or rather that I thought were off the record, while a sound film was showing continuously on one of the other memory tracks—sounds of the city, the terrible sirens of the police cars present day and night, wailing like grievously wounded animals as they pursued their victims. Or the short, shrill bursts of a car alarm when anyone came too close to a sanctified car. Or fire trucks. They raced past, howling, in their whole incredible childlike fire-truck beauty, always directly toward the fire and the cameras that were always there already to bring the bodies of the burned and maimed and the screams and tears of the bereaved to the TV screen in my apartment, they faithfully laid every single one of the daily murder victims in this monstrous city at my doorstep the way a naughty cat brings home every single mouse it catches. At first I let it happen, I took it upon myself as an exercise of duty to watch, what did I care about these unknown dead, until one evening I surprised myself, in the middle of an outburst of despair from a mother whose small son had fallen into a usually harmless creek during the recent downpour and been carried off and drowned, by pressing the red OFF button. This little gesture made me realize that I had arrived, and that the secret hope I had that I might be able to stay aloof from life here had once again proven deceptive.

  Then I sat down at the narrow end of the long dining table in my apartment, where I had recently set up my little machine, and I wrote:

  And what if all my busy activity, meant to look like damn hard work, is nothing more than an attempt to silence the tape running in my head? But I can’t yet know what depths within me are going to be plowed up here or maybe on the other hand paved over.

  The telephone took the trouble to admonish me from across the ocean: You’re completely free to write whatever you want! So just go ahead, what could happen? —Yes, yes. —You shouldn’t defend yourself, you should just say how it was. —Yes, yes. Defend? At first there were only these individual words, treacherous and revealing.

  Then I tried to fall asleep, in the bed that was still too wide but not too soft anymore now that Mr. Enrico had put a board under the mattress, as my spine urgently required. I could not fall asleep, I could not banish the image of Brecht’s defiled gravestone, I could not stop recalling lines of poetry:

  Considering you are

  threatening us with guns and cannons

  we have now decided to fear

  bad life more than death.

  Up on stage actors dressed as the Paris Communards, down in the audience you, the young, enthusiastic faces of your generation, who were not destined to experience the fate of the communards, their failure, you were all utterly sure of that and scornfully laughed at all doubters, I thought, and I could see in my mind’s eye the faces growing old in an instant, old and pinched and used up, worn out, disappointed, betrayed. And timid, calculating, stupid. Cynical. Skeptical and desperate. The usual. We alone were going to be spared that fate. What hubris.

  Cut to another time. Was it not here, half a century ago, in this city, a few miles from this very room where I lay unsleeping, that Brecht, the émigré, gave his Galileo—who would then come face-to-face with us, who were young then, in the shape of the actor Ernst Busch—that he imposed on his Galileo an indomitable pursuit of the truth? Nobody can go on indefinitely watching me drop a pebble and saying it doesn’t fall. Oh, Brecht, we can indeed, almost every last one of us can. And while we despised your Galileo for finally abjuring himself, the pebble was still falling, before our eyes, it fell and fell without end and we did not even see it. If someone had pointed it out to us, we would only have said: What pebble?

  But you saw it, didn’t you, the flower seller who meddled in the fate of a nation. It was in the fall of 1989, she stood on the street and handed out fliers she had made herself, and you knew the expression on her face from the faces of the actors who played the communards: a bright face bursting with hope and resolve, there is that too, you thought, you didn’t want to forget it, even if the historical moment that brought forth such faces was terribly short, and actually already over. To have lived through it, you thought, made everything worth it. And the flower seller said the same thing, with the same words.

  At some point I fell asleep and found myself in one of those gatherings in dreams that are actually high courts, in this case the large lecture hall at the university. Again your name was called, you heard the sharp voice say the word “document,” you were supposed to comment on the loss of your Party document, which had fallen prey to a department-store thief together with your whole briefcase. The sacred trust of every comrade, which he has to carry with him always, but at the same time has to staunchly protect from loss. Did you realize that this loss leads one to draw certain conclusions about your relationship to the Party? You hesitantly admitted it while secretly contesting it. Did you not know what comrades went through during the time of Fascism to safeguard and preserve their Party documents? And the misuse that the Class Enemy could put them to if the documents should happen to fall into their hands? I do! I heard myself scream, as I woke up. I recognized the feeling of hopelessness and suppressed revolt that even back then, forty years ago, had long since haunted me.

  Party reprimand. You shouldn’t take it personally, the comrade who had spoken against you most sharply in the proceeding told you later. How else were you supposed to take it then? It was a matter of principle, you heard, and that was clear to you too, and you would have been the first to deny that your pregnancy played any role at all at the hearing. Every individual has to bow to principle. Severities were unavoidable.

  I take the little red booklet out of its box and page through it, through the many pages with visas and entry and exit stamps. I won’t throw it out, it will go back into its box with the other papers that have become invalid. I wait for my feelings to be stirred, in vain. When did the feelings that were once attached to these papers become invalid too? This whole range of divergent, contradictory, mutually exclusive feelings? That have faded over the course of the years. But what does that mean, I cannot help asking myself. Hasn’t my whole store of feelings faded? Been depleted? Will it be able to supply enough feeling for life to last the rest of my life?

  I dashed to my little machine in my pajamas and wrote:

  There are several strands of memory. Sense memory is the most lasting and reliable. Why is that? Do we need it especially urgently for our survival?

  One part of the urge to tell stories is the destructive urge, of course, which reminds me of the destructive urge in physics that I read about in the newspaper, under the headline “Beaming for Advanced Students.” Quantum physicists have apparently succeeded in making atoms “whisper something to each other” over a large distance: “transferring the original superposition state of Atom A to Atom B,” whatever that means. What interested me most was the statement that, in so doing, the physicist “destroys the original condition.” This information helped to ease my conscience, since storytellers too have to destroy the “original condition” by coldly observing people and transferring whatever seems to go
on between them onto unfeeling paper. But this destructive urge, I tell myself, is counterbalanced by the creative urge that brings new people and new relationships about out of nothing. Whatever was there before has to be wiped out.

  Night after night, I remember, I sat in front of the TV when Star Trek was on, permitting myself the excuse that I had to improve my English even though I secretly knew that it was really my need for fairy tales and happy endings that kept me in my seat. For I could be certain that the Star Trek crew would bring the noble values of Earth dwellers into the farthest galaxies, prevail over every enemy, no matter how dreadful, and not get hurt in the process.

  The telephone. Finally, a voice I had been waiting for for days. How are you, Sally. Then a strange, dark voice came out of the phone, which said: My heart is broken, and that was literally true, as I realized when I saw Sally face-to-face, in her little house far from the center of the city, in a neighborhood that was hard to get to. There was no way to comfort her, no way to help, nothing to say, and I also had to keep to myself my shock at seeing how much she had aged, how gray her hair had gone, and that she had let her short, stylish haircut grow out and run wild. How long would it last, she asked, and she meant her obsession with her loss. It lasts, I said, while I stood next to Sally in her tiny practical kitchen and watched her cut tomatoes and grate cheese, at least two years, and I remembered when a Prague friend had told me that. It was in 1977, a decade and a half before; it was on the way from Hradcˇany to the Old Town, on a cold, gray, windy day in early April; Prague Spring lay far in the past, the Prague friend had experienced the plummet into hopelessness more than ten years earlier, while you knew what it meant to be without hope only since the previous fall, 1976, the worst year. During a horribly cold December you had stood on a street in Berlin in the dark, in front of a lit shop window, stared at the toothpaste tubes and detergents, and understood in a flash: This is what pain is. You did not want to believe your friend when he said you had to endure it for more than another year. Two years! you said at the time, in disbelief, and the argument I had with him made me realize how long I had already spent in that pressure tank. According to this chronology, Sally still had six more months to go. It’s so humiliating, she said, and I said, Yes, I felt that way too. Sometimes, I said, careful to stick close to my own personal experience, the turning point comes suddenly, you know, overnight. You wake up and you’re free.

  But Sally couldn’t hear me, she was still stuck in the pressure tank. She said she had always thought that if it ever happened to her, if her husband ever left her for another woman, she would be able to be magnanimous to him. But she couldn’t do it. No, she couldn’t do it. It’s not just any man, you see. It’s Ron. It’s like a compulsion, she has to take every last advantage of his guilty feelings, do you know what I mean? He has everything he wants—a career he’s happy in, money, a beautiful young woman with tattoos all over, he is free to do or not do whatever he wants, and as for me, Sally said, mixing the salad, I always oriented myself to what other people wanted from me. You, Sally? I said. Now don’t exaggerate. I described the impression I had of her when we first met, years ago, at that college up north: an attractive, very thin young woman, confident, athletic, cheerful, busy, strange in interesting ways, an inspired dancer full of original ideas, a lecturer at the college where I was going to teach creative writing, and a committed feminist.

  Oh, Sally said, if only you knew. And I thought: Yes, if only we knew the truth about each other. If only she knew what kind of tape recording I have running in my head all the time; if only anyone knew that I was thinking: Where does this compulsion come from? The need to cling to people and ideas and things that destroy us? I thought, while Sally said: Did you know I spent ten months in a Buddhist monastery? There was a nun there who really looked out for me and tried to guide me onto the path of loving-kindness and self-acceptance, I think she genuinely liked me even though I was sure I was a worthless piece of garbage that Ron could just throw away. She brought us together for meditation and explained to us, in her friendly, steady voice, that everything we had, however little it was, and all the daily activities she held us to, and our psychological and spiritual condition in that moment were exactly what we needed to help us become humane, awake, and alive. As though we had sought out precisely what would lead us to a fulfilled life. But the nun didn’t help me either. We could choose, she assured us, Sally said, mixing the salad dressing, we could decide to become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation or to become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity by knowing ourselves just as we are. But I didn’t want to know myself. I wanted revenge on Ron. I didn’t want anything else.

  This was the first dinner party she was hosting alone, Sally said, and now she wasn’t sure if the meat was cooked properly. How do you like it, rare or well done. I said medium, she gave it ten more minutes, then the four of us sat down at the small round table in her brightly colored living room and it tasted delicious. We could not avoid—and I didn’t want to avoid—talking about the riots that had spread from the black neighborhoods and shaken the city six months earlier, and that the whites were still talking about, half fearfully and half dismissively. Would they happen again? I asked. Sure, said Al, the sociologist. But next time the police will be prepared and they’ll nip any hint of unrest in the bud. Maggie, who taught school in a poor neighborhood, said that the riots hadn’t changed a thing in South Central L.A. There were simply too many people there with nothing to lose, she said, and the whites for their part just tried to repress as fast as they could the fact that they had stood outside the doors of their houses in their rich neighborhoods, trembling, and had seen the city burning.

  But you know about that, Al said, and at first I didn’t know what he meant.

  Your riots, he said.

  You call them riots? You mean 1989? Some people called it a revolution. Our peaceful revolution.

  Al knew the Leninist definition of revolution: The historical moment when the lower classes do not want to live in the old way anymore and the upper classes cannot. Maybe. But if we’re quoting Marxist theory: Isn’t revolution a step forward toward a more advanced social formation? Well? Can we say that in your case? A step forward from socialism to capitalism?

  They let me take a while before answering. Then I said: For a few weeks, we could feel that history was going our way. The future looked like the one that a lot of people had longed for and none of us had ever seen. And that we had all had a hand in building.

  Maggie said she would like to experience that someday. It might restore her faith in life as a whole, a faith that seemed to be inexorably vanishing at the moment. It was as though the air were leaking out of a container and leaving us, every human being, stuck, airless, and powerless, with a substitute life as the only option left to us.

  I know, Sally said. Don’t I know it! She put in a video. It’s about my job, she said. Her job was working with at-risk youth. We saw and heard on the video how she interacted with them. How she asked cautious questions, how the young people talked about their lives and their grim fates: abandoned by their fathers, neglected by their mothers, growing up in gangs in run-down ghettos, addicted to drugs, stuck there at the edge of criminality and often drifting over that edge. The girl with the afro whom Sally took to the theater, who sat next to her and started crying because she realized that this play was about her too. Sally came right out and told her: You were abused as a child. How the girl, for the first time, could say yes, so that Sally dared to ask more: By a close relative? —Yes. —By your father? —Yes. Yes, yes, yes. —She’s in therapy now, Sally said, and smiled for the first time that night. She’s mad at me now, she has to cut out her mother in herself and she’s practicing on me.

  You don’t realize how strong you are, Sally, I said when we said goodbye. How her smile went out like a candle when I said it. How she said: But I’m about to quit that job. I can’t take it anymore. It’s like scooping up water wi
th a sieve.

  And you? she asked me when we were standing in front of the door of her little half-house with a narrow flight of stairs leading down to the street. What are you here for, really? To get some distance? To forget? What do you want here?

  I’m looking for someone, I said. A woman whose name I don’t even know. Well, good luck, Sally said. And we laughed, near midnight on one of the quiet outlying streets of Los Angeles, in the gentle air of California, under the Big Dipper, now overturned and standing jauntily on its head.

  THE BLIND SPOT

  I wrote on my little machine back home: Maybe it is our task to take the blind spot that is apparently in the center of our consciousness, which we therefore cannot notice, and gradually make it smaller and smaller, in from the edges. So that we gain a little more space that is visible to us. Nameable. But—I wrote—is that what we want? Can we want it? Isn’t it too dangerous. Too painful.