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

by Wolf, Christa

  And as I am calling that all back to mind and a series of pictures is passing before my mind’s eye, I find the document I was looking for, in the chest with the copies of our Stasi files, of course, which I open only rarely and reluctantly. It is the only document in Russian among those files—an NKVD report to the agency’s German counterpart describing in meticulous detail a young man’s visit to our apartment. He had wormed his way into your trust—this is what I told Peter Gutman that evening, in condensed form—by mentioning Efim’s name on the phone, so of course we invited him over, and he reported to you that he had studied science in Leningrad (he might actually have done so, on the side), had met Efim by chance in a used bookstore—oh, these Russian coincidences!—where Efim was bringing in books to sell because he had been forced to leave the country, he told us: Efim had told him that in confidence, since they had talked to each other for a while. And then he said Efim had asked him to ask you if he could continue to stay in contact with you from the West, or if that would be too dangerous for you, and you, incurably gullible, insisted that you wanted to keep in touch with Efim and offered him your help.

  That is how it stands in the files, in Russian with a German translation affixed with a Russian stamp. You continued to see Efim, on the street in Bloomsbury in London, in a West German city where you both took part in a conference, and on his roof terrace for a Russian meal in Potsdam, the last place he lived. That was after the “Turn.” He was full of Russian and Jewish stories, you laughed a lot, but he always wanted to discuss the most serious questions too—he was tormented with an unease about the future that he tried to chase away by indefatigably traveling around the world, giving lectures, teaching. He had heart problems. He would keel over somewhere or another while he was traveling, you thought. It turned out, in the end, that he died there, where he never in his life would have predicted: in Potsdam.

  I never really understood, I told Peter Gutman, how two secret police forces could see such an ordinary event as worth spending their time on.

  Well, Peter Gutman said, you probably didn’t try hard enough to put yourself into their frame of mind.

  We certainly did, I said. Sometimes we knew everything, then we forgot it again, the thing about some insights is that they surface and then, in an unpredictable rhythm, go under again into the “sea of forgetting,” now that’s a lovely image. Don’t you think it’s strange, I asked, without even noticing that I had started using the informal pronoun, that our brains don’t seem to be built to retain such simple insights? While there are all kinds of stories we can absorb and retain without any problem.

  Objection, Your Honor, Peter Gutman said, and the thought crossed my mind that he was from England and that, in the list of fellows, “essayist” stood after his name as his job title.

  Why? I said. Stories are preserved for centuries in the great river of narrative, once a story is told it’s told. Never again will Achilles be able to be anything other than a hero. Or take Werther. Again and again he will put that bullet into his brain, Goethe himself couldn’t stop it now. So what to do? Or rather, what to write, how to write? The fact that everyone dies at the end may be tragic but it doesn’t result in a story. Or does it? What do you think?

  I don’t know, Peter Gutman said. What you’re saying is not unlike what my philosopher says about narrative, I’ll tell you about it sometime. But first, I have another question: Would you say it results in a story when a theme recurs again and again in someone’s life?

  I don’t know, I said. What theme do you have in mind?

  For example, the theme of a wasted life.

  Listen, as a well-read person you must be familiar with …

  Now now. I know all the books, with all their stories, they’re of no use to me.

  Right, I said. We agree on that.

  And that was where Peter Gutman wanted to leave it for the night. He stood up and left. A few minutes later, he phoned. Thank you for a lovely evening. I’m sure you realized I was talking about myself. I am the one busy wasting my life. No, don’t say anything now. It did me good to talk.

  * * *

  In the layer of my brain responsible for day-to-day routine, I had stored away the bus lines for Santa Monica and Los Angeles and the information about how to use the university library. I rode without any problem down the endless, palm-lined streets, straight as an arrow, in Blue Bus Line Two, always into this unreal light; I looked for the library on the UCLA campus and found it; I entered my reader’s card into a computer and after typing in a keyword watched lists of authors and titles scroll past my eyes on the screen of another computer until I came to one which might prove useful for my researches: Women’s Emigration to the U.S. I pressed the button to order the book and saw that it had been loaned out, only a few days ago in fact. I entered my hold request. Yet another track that led nowhere. The question of why I was actually here seemed to grow more urgent.

  I admitted to myself that I had felt a twinge of jealousy when that bundle of letters came into my hands. In the old hard-cardboard suitcase that held my friend Emma’s papers when she died was a large brown envelope with my name written in the corner, in Emma’s handwriting, and the large letter “L” in the middle, written in thick black marker—the same letter the writer had used to sign all her correspondence. During all those years when I thought I was her closest friend, Emma had corresponded with this L. without saying a word about it to me. Don’t be childish, I had to tell myself, don’t take it as a breach of trust. Was Emma obligated to tell you anything and everything? Her acquaintance with L. went back far into her past, into the nineteen twenties. Emma was already in the Communist Party and presumably friends with “L.” when I was born. The fact that she left me these particular letters was a kind of consolation, and proof of her unqualified trust in me. I also took it as a suggestion to investigate this area of her life she had kept hidden from me. Otherwise, wouldn’t she have destroyed the letters before she died?

  I was unusually tired and went back to the MS. VICTORIA in the bright light of midday, instead of to my office. I lay down and immediately fell asleep, and dreamed of a dream book I had wanted to write once—a plan that, like so many others, I had not carried out. But now, in my dream, I am holding this dream book in my hands, a lined schoolbook of A4-size paper between whose pages I had put old banknotes, money invalid since the state in which they had been valid had ceased to exist. Then, to my surprise, the dream continues on the topic of money. A friend, who is already dead, calls me to say he needs Western money for his mother. So we must have still been back in GDR-times, as they say today, I think in my dream, and I say to my dead friend: Recently I even heard someone talk about “East times.” But where am I supposed to get West-money so quickly, I ask him, and he says all you have to do is go to a certain office and tell them what you want and you’ll get some. So we drive through a desolate city of rubble to a gloomy office building, and at a teller window I am in fact handed slips of paper, but they don’t seem to me to have anything to do with money. I anxiously show them to G. and he shrugs his shoulders: Barter system, he says. Now we have to take this “money” that I am convinced is worthless to our dead friend’s mother. We drive over rough ground and stop in front of a house that is probably the most desolate of all my desolate dream-houses—completely neglected, one of the gables sticks up into the sky like a stage set, there are isolated flagstones in the courtyard with mud and grass between them. We say: The last rain has done a lot of damage here. Our dead friend’s mother comes up to us, totally changed, shattered, with features grown old and indistinct, and wrapped in thick dirty clothes, she who always dressed so properly. Clearly she has been freezing. She leads us into a cold, inhospitable room, we realize that she is terrified by our visit and wondering if we want to spend the night there, we reassure her, hand her the money that doesn’t mean a thing to her. Your son sent us, we say, oh yes, she says lightly, he’s still looking out for me from the grave. I have the impression that the woman
is half-crazy from loneliness, not in her right mind. We are very depressed and we leave her and then see our younger daughter, who tells us that the woman was only pretending to be friendly, she saw through the window how the woman had stuck the “money” in the oven with an evil grin.

  When I woke up I felt that the dream, in the guise of a scary fairy tale about an old witch, symbolized the collapse of the East German state, which had ended in the lines of people standing in front of the banks after the new money was introduced, in celebrations in the streets around midnight—champagne, cars driving around honking their horns—to celebrate its arrival. I was half-asleep and the TV images pushed in front of the dream images I still had in mind, whose meaning I wanted to interpret, and they disappeared. I fell back asleep.

  That morning I needed to look at L.’s letters, whose existence was the reason for my stay in this place. The red folder was right there on the shelf, next to the growing pile of newspapers—today it is sitting in a drawer where I keep other mementoes of Emma too: photographs from various stages of her life, all since the war—Emma as a woman who loved life, with friends, including me, in her garden—the old tattered cookbook whose recipes she cooked for me, her ancient Party handbook going back to the twenties, copies of court records from the fifties when she spent two years in a prison of the German Democratic Republic due to “unjustified accusations,” as it said later in the rehabilitation document. We had talked about that for nights on end.

  I missed her. Just then I missed her very much. No one could straighten things out the way she could. I wanted to hear her voice through the words of her friend L. I sat down at the table and opened the red folder: a little pile of stationery, some of the sheets yellowed, in various sizes, mostly in American paper sizes, almost all of them typed and a few written by hand in a sprawling, almost masculine-seeming woman’s handwriting that turned, over the course of the more than three decades that these letters spanned, into an old person’s handwriting, hard to read. There were no envelopes with a sender’s name and address, not a single one, as though the recipient had painstakingly destroyed them. No photographs and no other clues about the sender other than the date on each letter after the place: “Los Angeles.”

  It was just like Emma: She was never willing to discuss my plan to write her biography but then she left me important material for it, without any explanation or commentary. It must have been a message: Write! What she couldn’t have predicted was that I would fall prey to something like an obsession: I had to track down the woman who had sent her the L. letters and solve their riddle.

  I still had to overcome a certain shyness when I read the letters. I picked up the earliest pages very carefully, afraid that the thin paper, already crumbling at the edges, might fall apart in my hands. Today I absolutely cannot believe how negligent and thoughtless I was to bring the originals on that long journey instead of having copies made, as I have since, copies that lie in front of me now while the originals are secure in a bank safe.

  The first letter: from September 1945. The blue ink on both sides of the paper shows through the page and makes it hard to decipher. I know the first sentences by heart:

  Emma, my dear, I hope I am writing to someone who is still alive. That is the most important question we have to ask our friends in Europe. Please, answer as quickly as you can, even though it must still be hard to send a letter overseas from there. I am giving this letter to a young man traveling through Europe as a reporter for a big American newspaper. If you are still living where I think you are, he will visit you there and ask you to give him a letter for me. I have just looked through my old address book, one of the very few things I took with me in my flight from Europe and kept with me through all the stations of my exile, and I was horrified, and sad too, how few names were left that I could send such letters to. The Führer almost managed to do it: make a tabula rasa of our people. Your name, Emma, was always right at the top of my mental list. Through all these dark years it has been with me like a beacon I could cling to: When peace comes I will find you again, and you will be your old self—I never had a shadow of a doubt about it.

  As for me, just this for now: I am in good health, within the limits that age and the situation allow, and my circumstances have not changed, neither the external ones nor the internal ones. You will understand what I mean, and will shake your head again, like before, with your mocking grin. Yes, my dear, people never change, and you will probably contradict me, and then I’ll tell you the details, and you’ll tell me yours too! I embrace you. L.

  I knew that Emma, in the fall of 1945, before we had met, was still living in Berlin—she never lived anywhere other than Berlin—but no longer in the house where the young American reporter went looking for her, a rear building in Neukölln that had been destroyed in the bombing, which might have been what saved its inhabitant of many years, who was under surveillance by the Gestapo and about to be arrested again. She had managed to work her way out of the ruins on the night of the bombing and go into hiding in the mass of rubble that the city, almost completely destroyed, had become. Emma almost never talked about that. We sat together so many times in her labyrinthine little house on the eastern edge of the city, a house that had grown, with years of adding-on and building-up, from the bower she had fled to at the end of the war. I took the last letter out of its envelope. It was written in May 1979, not by L. but by someone else, and contained the brief news that L. had died of a heart attack. It was signed with a first name: “Ruth.”

  I wondered what Emma would say to me. Be reasonable, girl? The mere thought of it made me feel better.

  * * *

  Doctor Kim, whom you went in to see in your socks and whose waiting room had bamboo chairs to sit in, asked different questions than other doctors. He was interested on a deep and fundamental level in the physical pain that brought me to see him. Hip joint, I see, that didn’t seem to be the main point as far as he was concerned. Then he raised his thin Asiatic head from the sheet of paper I had had to fill out for him: You are a writer. What do you have to do to become a good writer? I felt like I was back taking an exam, I wanted to do well and tried to put myself in the teacher’s place to figure out what he wanted to hear. I said I tried to know myself as accurately as I could and then express that. Doctor Kim seemed satisfied. Then he suggested I meditate regularly, I would get to know myself well that way, and I should not be afraid of what I would find there, and not shy away from expressing it. Then I would be able to become the best writer in the world.

  To which I could truthfully say that that wasn’t my goal, which seemed to amaze him. With a motionless face he stuck his delicate metal needles into my body.

  But it wasn’t my goal, I insisted to myself when I was back in the bus that rode the whole length of Wilshire Boulevard and picked up the poorer people, the carless people, who apparently existed even in this car city. Was I one of them? It was a pointless question, I could buy myself an inexpensive used car whenever I wanted, if I ever lost my inhibition about driving in this city I found so unfathomable. I tried to memorize the changing passengers: the black mother and her black daughter with little bows in her hair; the disheveled homeless man clutching his bottle and furiously muttering at nobody; a group of white, black, and brown schoolchildren gathered by the door in the middle of the bus and acting stupid like schoolchildren everywhere in the world; a woman whose body, a mass of flesh, completely filled both the seats in one of the short rows. I observed them as I had gotten used to doing. At every stop I noticed how many people walked badly, could get on or off the bus only with difficulty, how many used a cane or crutches, how many had an arm in a sling or an eye patch, and when the bus finally stopped at Fourth Street I took care to get off as light-footedly as I could, as though I did not actually need the handrail, even though the results that Doctor Kim apparently expected from only his first five needles didn’t seem to have taken effect. Still, I had heard that a worsening of the symptoms could sometimes indicate that the
therapy was working, and I wondered, as I laboriously climbed the steps to my apartment, if I couldn’t let myself make use of another one of the pills that Doctor Kim didn’t need to know anything about; he had already prohibited other pleasures—no coffee! no wine!—since in his view these damaging drugs blocked the free flow of energy in my body, which is precisely what Doctor Kim was trying to bring about.

  I was unprepared, then, when the news I did not want to hear came at me from the television, before I could flee the room, all I could do was close my eyes and later flip past the page in the newspaper with a picture of the murder device called an “electric chair.” But the man, who had been on death row for ten years since committing murder, was killed by lethal injection. In despair I tried to suppress the picture, but I couldn’t. In despair I tried to greet the news of the kidnapping of a female archaeologist in Iraq with composure, so that it would become more bearable. But I couldn’t, or only sometimes. I still remember how as I child I sometimes used to lie in bed and wonder how I was supposed to endure hearing about the suffering constantly inflicted on other people, and the fear of being hurt myself, for my whole long life long. I didn’t then know, and would not have believed, that sympathy gets weaker when excessive claims are made upon it. That it doesn’t grow back to the same extent after you give it out. That people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy.