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

by Wolf, Christa

  Or a little later: How he had a fall when he was about to appear at the Berlin State Opera, and nonetheless had himself carried out onto the stage to give his speech, and then it turned out he had broken his hip. How he lay in bed in the Charité Hospital in East Berlin, impatient, surrounded by newspapers, letters, and manuscripts, always hard at work, always pushing his assistants to make progress on his book about German-Russian relations, with all his antennas aimed at Moscow, where relatives and friends were relying on his help. They all gathered at Raisa and Lev’s kitchen in Cologne, whenever they were “in the West” for a short period or a long one. Raisa and Lev never spoke of their own homesickness.

  My last image of Lev: He is sitting in his émigré room in Cologne, at his desk, with photographs of friends and family all around him on the walls—a room transplanted from another country and another time, like its inhabitant. He had held his ground between the two fronts. His like would never come again. The times have moved on past people like him.

  It moves on past all of us, I thought, all of us sitting here in a typical American house, eating a carefully prepared American meal in a typical American dining room even though, for most of us sitting at the table, very different customs had shaped our ideas of meals and hospitality—Hungarian customs, Scandinavian customs, Russian, Jewish, German—and I wondered if they felt as much like an actor in a foreign play as I did, a play they pretended to know, that they had memorized under penalty of personal destruction if they didn’t, whose words they pronounced as correctly as possible, dialogue that would never be their own language. They knew this about each other, and the fact that they knew it was the bond connecting them—more strongly, perhaps, than any bond between natives of a country ever could, they knew that too, and I learned it that night from their looks, their talk, their silence, their gestures. My role was to listen to them and pretend that I understood more of their English, interspersed with fragments of Russian, Hungarian, Polish, than I did.

  It was one of those nights I wish I had on tape. They talked about mutual acquaintances, made fun of the quirks of Jewish mutual friends, and of themselves, and of American idiosyncrasies, all in a tolerant, relaxed way. I realized that I was almost the only non-Jew in the group. The conversation turned to how anti-Semitic America had been in the thirties and forties, which I hadn’t known: even the richest Jews were not allowed to join country clubs and other associations, Gottfried said, and they couldn’t stay in certain hotels, his father had had that happen to him, his father who was a god in the theater world of Berlin.

  I was happy to be hearing Russian again. Koma had firm opinions about the new politicians in Moscow. Marja thought the developments in Hungary were simply “terrible”: The outlook to the end of this century doesn’t look so optimistic, does it? The Polish couple was happy and proud that their only son, married to an American, now lived in Warsaw as a consultant for a big company and that his child was learning both English and Polish.

  It got more and more lively and fun around the table, we were drinking, we praised the new American wines, it was harmonious and everyone seemed to be having a good time, and still I could feel thick clouds of grief hanging over these people. I was sitting among refugees. All of them had taught themselves not to let their sorrow show—it was buried the most deeply in the features of the old Polish woman—but rather to come to terms with their nostalgia alone, within their own four walls. You have to give America credit: It was the lifeboat for millions of people like these.

  Elizabeth turned to me. Then, at last, it came, the question I was waiting for and dreading: What about Germany? You live in Berlin? West or East? East? Under the regime? You lived there the whole time?

  Yes, madam. Under the regime. Silence around me. I felt that I was the foreigner. That my whole life and all my attempts to explain it converged, for a normal well-meaning American, on the single concept of the Regime, from which there was no escape, the way no beams of light can force their way out of a black hole in outer space.

  The group had not noticed anything. They had changed the subject. Gottfried put forward the argument that what had made it possible for National Socialism to cling to power in Germany was not the rabble but the elites. Why didn’t Max Planck go with his colleague, his brother, Albert Einstein, when Einstein had had to flee Germany? Counterargument: Max Planck helped a lot of Jews. Gottfried refused to allow it and named Gustav Gründgens as another example. The passionate debate continued.

  I felt: Time has stood still for decades for these people. Nothing was in the past for them, nothing had been eased, no pain had lessened, no disappointment had faded, no anger had blown over. The one and only relief they found, if only for a few minutes, was to talk about it sometimes, to tell stories to someone who wanted to know, who listened, who sympathized and agreed that their feelings were right. That night it was I who had to be that Someone, not because of anything specific to me but simply because I was German, and younger. For the first time, I experienced the need refugees have to share, with a German, their never-ending bewilderment. I stopped trying to defend myself against it and accepted my role.

  The coffee was handed around; Willy and the other enormous, pure-bred dog were let in and walked around between the guests. It was time for anecdotes, of which Gottfried had an inexhaustible supply. He had served as a sergeant in a propaganda unit of the army during the war and was chosen to try to convince Albert Einstein to take part in an anti-Nazi film. The great physicist was eager to help but his accent was so dreadful—for example, he couldn’t pronounce the word “such” except as “zootch”—that that was one reason the project never happened in the end. Still, Gottfried had admired the man deeply ever since. He had never met someone like that before and never since. People don’t really know what he’s like, Gottfried said. They always praise his modesty but that’s nonsense: Einstein was never modest. He was just sure of himself. He had said so to Gottfried. All he needed for his work was a pencil and paper, then he performed his calculations and when an equation worked out then he was right and he didn’t need anyone else’s agreement or confirmation, and if not, then not.

  Einstein had explained his theory of relativity to him once. It was while Gottfried was driving him back to Princeton. He should imagine, Einstein had told him, that he was in a closed box, without a window, that suddenly received a push so that he, in the box, was shoved against one side of the box. He might think, out of habit, that it was gravity but it wasn’t gravity, only centrifugal force. Something like that, Gottfried said, full of emotion, and at the time, in the car on the road to Princeton, he had understood it. Or thought he understood it, because Einstein was firmly convinced that everyone would understand it. And we, sitting around the table, all thought for a minute that we understood it too.

  Henry asked Ted, the German professor, who had said the least aside from me, what topic he was working on at the moment. We would laugh if he told us, he said. He was working with a group of students on aspects of literature in East Germany. Very practical, Henry said. A research field with a clearly marked beginning and end. —Yes, and this is precisely the right time to study it, Ted said, despite the overwhelming public hatred of East Germany. The way the West German media were treating GDR culture and its representatives these days really had only one possible explanation: it stemmed from a need to make up for what they had failed to do in settling their own accounts with Nazi cultural figures. In any case, that is what lies behind this campaign to equate Communism with Fascism. But especially in literature, in Ted’s view, there was clear proof of how groundless the equals sign between the two really was. Marja agreed with him and gave examples, named authors and titles. When someone mentioned Brecht, I asked whether, buried in his work, preoccupied with worries about Germany, deep in discussion with colleagues and actors who were putting on his Galileo play—whether Brecht ever really paid attention to his city of refuge, Los Angeles.

  Henry had only to walk over to his bookshelf, pull down
a volume, and open it to a certain page. “Landscape of Exile.”

  The oil derricks and the thirsty gardens of Los Angeles

  And the ravines of California at evening and the fruit market

  Did not leave the messenger of misfortune

  Unmoved.

  Well, still, I thought. “Not unmoved” …

  At that moment we all turned to look at the Polish essayist’s wife, who had just let out a cry of pain. We crowded around her: Was she okay? No, she wasn’t okay, it seemed to be a cramp. She was given some drops and had to be quickly taken home. That was the signal for a precipitous departure for all of us. Henry, who drove me back to the MS. VICTORIA, apologized for the sudden end to our evening. The evening had gone on long enough for me.

  I could not fall asleep. I lay in my too-wide bed and couldn’t stop the four lines of poetry stuck in my head from calling up other lines from my memory. “It’s quite straightforward, anyone can understand it … you’ll understand it. It’s not hard. It’s for your own good, so find out all about it.” —That’s what we did, Brecht, I thought, and it really did look so straightforward, so logical, in fact, yes, inevitable. There was this thing we wanted, a humane society, and all we had to do was dismantle the ruling class’s ownership of the means of production, everyone would surely be happy to be able to live each according to his abilities, understanding, and reason. Was that not the age-old dream of humanity? It occurred to me that it was in fact here, in this utterly foreign place, only a couple of miles from the very room where I was now lying in a foreign bed, that Brecht, in his bare house of exile, put his Galileo into the conflict between loving the truth and being prepared to compromise. Oh, how well we knew that conflict! Was there anything in the world that would have brought us, or forced us, to recant? The Inquisition? We would have laughed at the Inquisition!

  Finally the pills worked and I fell asleep. Then I was in one of my desolate dream houses, this time a hotel in a state of total chaos. I was on a patio surrounded by pieces of broken furniture. I started to straighten up, hauling all kinds of useless things from one corner to the other, but it didn’t get any more organized or habitable. Outside a thick pane of glass was an unkempt, partly scorched bit of lawn where a woman was puttering around. She was pale and expressionless with ash-blond hair, carelessly dressed. She came closer and turned her face toward me, pressed it against the glass, and said, in a tone of giving instructions: Start from the other side! Waking up, I understood the dream: I shouldn’t always start from the side of guilt when I straighten things up. But what gave this rather unattractive dream woman the right to tell me that? I was still laughing about it over breakfast.

  It was Sunday. I sat down at my little machine and wrote:

  What I am writing pushes forward in microscopic steps, against a resistance that pulls away from me when I try to name it.

  Perhaps it is only a coincidence that just now a headline from today’s paper comes to mind: “The Paper-Thin Veil over Barbarism.” That is how a production of Don Giovanni struck one reviewer. Recently, another commentator warned the television audience that current events could develop into a far-reaching disaster for all of us. But that we thought that if the atomic bomb hasn’t been dropped on us yet then none would go off in the future either.

  A scare that keeps repeating itself loses strength, I said to Peter Gutman as we walked down Ocean Park Promenade. Do you remember how we panicked in every bone of our bodies when nuclear missiles were set up on both sides of the German-German border in the early eighties? And here, Peter Gutman said, we started hearing the phrase “Better dead than red.”

  Peter Gutman had convinced me to come to lunch at one of the nice restaurants. The homeless people were lying there again, in the California sun, alone or in groups, on the grassy traffic islands, some of them on padded blankets with the padding spilling out, in a deep, unconscious sleep; we walked past them as though we couldn’t see them and tried to avoid the ragged wreck of a man who was always there, trapped in a loud conversation with himself and sometimes, quite suddenly, aggressive to people walking by. I surreptitiously observed all the different degrees of devastation and desensitization on display.

  We were talking about the possible end of our civilization. But the bombs had not yet fallen on Baghdad then. The twin towers in New York had not yet been brought down. “Nine eleven” was not a date of terror yet.

  God bless you, the half-blind black man in front of the door to the restaurant said when we paid him our toll. I only hope, I said, that there is no God and no Judgment Day, because he wouldn’t bless any of us fat contented heartless white people, unless he really was only our God.

  The restaurant was famous for its oysters. We ordered a dry California white to go with them.

  Peter Gutman reproached me for constantly getting worked up about the old, well-known problem of the “blind spot.” Every single one of our modern societies, based as they are on colonization, repression, and exploitation, has to block out certain parts of its history and deny as much of its present as possible too, in order to keep the self-assurance it needs to live. But one day it will all collapse, if we don’t face reality, I said. Yes, well, Peter Gutman said. Sooner or later.

  * * *

  A word wandered through my head like a ghost, not for the first time: IRRGANG, “labyrinth” or “aberration,” literally a “going astray.” I thought that that would be a good title for a future piece of writing, it would fundamentally lead me in the right direction—no, force me in the right direction—and so then the question arose: Is that in fact where I want to go? Could I want that? The title fit too neatly: it remained a lonely title in search of its text. I knew it was there, that book, written in invisible ink in case it fell into the wrong hands. The writing would appear when held up to a special kind of light, I thought, it had to be not too bright and not too faint, but rather, and still I shied away from the word: Right. Fair. Just. One of those obsolete, discarded words, like boulders from prehistoric times that obstruct the smoothly flowing current of our new language.

  * * *

  Valentina, the Italian who had been at the CENTER for only a short time, got in touch with me and I was glad to hear from her. Her stay was coming to an end and she came to say goodbye. She was sparkling with life. With love of life. She had approached me with a kind of delight that disarmed me. We went to our Thai restaurant. Along the way, little cries escaped her at every new plant she discovered. She thought it was practically a sin to be given so much beauty to look at, she said. She was the type to cry out: C’est génial! —What is, Valentina? —La vita, she said. La vie. Life. Das Leben. And just like that, on humdrum Third Street, we found ourselves in the middle of a whole universe of brilliant, génial life. Valentina was a sorceress, though she didn’t know it. We ate the sour seafood soup that Valentina loved. I considered her one of those people at peace with themselves, taking pleasure not only in others but in themselves, but now she wanted to tell me something different: how hard it was for her to avoid being dependent on other people and their opinions, for example her husband, to whom she had been too submissive for too long, and now she was in the middle of the long and difficult process of separating from him, and she had shied away from doing it for so long that she had almost lost her son over it, and now her husband had had a terrible accident and she had to ask herself if she had a right to leave him now.

  Valentina? Downtrodden? Feeling guilty? I told her I would never have thought it of her and she said I thought other people were like me. Oh, Valentina! But now I couldn’t rob her of this illusion too.

  Then, without explaining the connection, she asked me: What do you think about death? —What do you mean, Valentina, I asked, to gain time. She wanted to know if death was really the end of everything, if that’s what I believed. I do, I said, I remember, more flippantly than I would say it today. I do believe that but it doesn’t bother me. Not yet, I thought at the time, and that “not yet” has since turned into a
“now.”

  Then Valentina made an enigmatic face, but she obviously wanted me to ask her directly so that she could say what she believed. The body dies, she said, that’s true. It disperses into its molecules and atoms and is taken back into the natural circulation of physical matter. The soul, though, the spirit, the energy, are indestructible, she said, and they are preserved in some form or other. Death has no power over them. I said: But we, you and I, as individual people, won’t exist. Valentina admitted that. But maybe that wasn’t so important. In any case, she found consoling, from a higher point of view, that something lasted and that it wasn’t this solid mass, this clumsy opaque body. She much preferred the vivacious, joyful spirit.

  I had no more counterarguments to offer. When we said goodbye, I asked Valentina if I had come across to her as very German. She said, unfortunately, yes: I seemed to her severe, single-minded, and thorough, which are textbook German characteristics, aren’t they. And for that matter, my asking her whether I seemed typically German was itself typically German—could I imagine an Italian worrying about whether he seemed typically Italian? We laughed, gave each other a big hug, and had a hard time parting. We never saw each other again.

  I still remember very well the time when I would have given a lot not to have to be German. But that’s how it is for all of us, said Lutz, the blond Hamburg man from the ’68 generation whom I ran into at the office. He, who was so much younger than me, knew this shame at being German? So that was something East Germans and West Germans had in common, not wanting to be German after the war? Absolutely, Lutz said. That’s the only way to explain the rage of the younger generation at the time against the older generation.

  I wondered, and asked him, if this was common ground that could be expanded and built upon. And, while we’re at it: Build what? “A healthy sense of national pride,” I read in the newspaper I had taken out of my mailbox. I showed it to Lutz, who snorted: Now, how are two parts of a single population, each of which compensated for a weak sense of self in completely different ways, supposed to produce a “healthy sense of national pride” when they’re thrown together? Wouldn’t each side have no choice but to put the blame for its own defects on the other side? So that it can gloat over the obvious weaknesses of the other? And to buoy up its own shattered self-confidence? Which was, in fact, what happened in the so-called Reunification.