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

by Wolf, Christa

  A line came to mind from the old poem I had kept on top in my desk drawer for a long time because I needed it every day, a poem I once knew by heart and had forgotten by then, but these lines came back to me: “Accept your fate, regret nothing.”

  That dreary Sunday morning in my apartment. It was raining. Television. A preacher in a colorful robe in front of the altar of an enormous church hall filled with hundreds of people, and next to him: General Schwarzkopf. The famous preacher read out loud to the general, in a fainting voice, the letter the general had written to his family at the start of the Gulf War. Both men had tears in their eyes. What has changed in the country since then? the preacher asked the general. Lots of people still write to him and thank him for what he did for his country, he said. Maybe we succeeded too well, he went on. Communism had collapsed. President Bush, the “magnificent leader,” made the right decisions in the Gulf War. The general was campaigning for Bush.

  Drums beat, trumpets blared. Everyone in the enormous auditorium stood up and gave the general a standing ovation. Enthusiastic, devoted faces. The preacher prayed in a resounding voice: God, give us men. What we need are leaders. Strong minds, great hearts, true faces who will not lie. —Yeah! cried the hundreds of people in the hall. Their preacher called upon them to pray long and hard before they cast their vote. Yeah!

  The thought came to me that the last intervention you undertook as a public intellectual was before the Gulf War started, an open letter to the UN asking it to do everything in its power to approve the French resolution to postpone the use of force in the Gulf region, you relayed the text by phone and fax to everyone you could, asked people to sign it, received the signatures, and sent the document to the UN—my face blushes in shame when I think about it—and then, a few days later, you sat in front of the TV at 4:00 a.m. and watched the American troops land on the coast of the Persian Gulf, where they were met by the TV cameras they had requested in advance, and tears ran down your face because you couldn’t help but picture the unquenchable enmity on the part of the Arab world that would be stirred up against the West at that moment. All due to false eyewitness reports, as we now know.

  How are you? It was Sally on the phone. She had quit her job with at-risk youth and signed up for a class she was taking to prepare for a degree program. —What field? —Architecture. Interior design.

  What? I said, and I thought: You were born to be a dancer.

  I saw before me, I can still see before me today, how Sally was when I met her in the mid-seventies, in a small college town in Ohio—how young she was, with beautiful posture, in peak physical shape, how happy she was when a performance of her dance troupe was shown on TV, I saw and I still see her birdlike head with her hair short as matchsticks, how relaxed, how artistic she was when she moved, how much in love with her Ron was, everyone turned their heads to look at them when they boisterously ran from the German-Jewish bakery across the big parking lot back to their car, Ron couldn’t stop looking at Sally and touching her. She glowed. She had her whole life ahead of her.

  Sally, Sally, I said, I never would have thought your confidence could be shaken so easily.

  You have no idea, Sally said, my mother saw to that. And now she feels almost glad that I’ve failed, that life with Ron didn’t work out. —I don’t believe that, I said. —So why is she being so generous, paying for this class, when she’s usually so cheap? And aside from that, don’t you think a man can tell when a woman is weak? He quivers like a hunting dog when it picks up the scent of blood, and then follows that scent even more aggressively. Do you know the Frida Kahlo painting, she asked me, a doe pierced with arrows that has a woman’s head, her own head? —I know that one. —And don’t you know that the chase really starts in earnest when you’ve been hit? —Oh yes, Sally. I know.

  Hey, tell me, Sally asked, what’s really on your mind.

  Oh, Sally, that’s a long story.

  So tell me.

  Later. Soon.

  But I didn’t tell Sally the story first. I told Francesco, but only later. I wasn’t ready yet.

  Monday morning in the lounge, almost everyone was there, hidden behind pages from their home countries. Just in time, before the election, the news media had reported that the American GDP had unexpectedly risen 2.7 percent that year, so that President Bush could proclaim to the nation: The recession is over! The local media countered that the recession was still going strong in California: there was high unemployment, and various businesses that had been leading military manufacturers were near collapse. Well, of course, said Lutz, who understood politics just as well as he did art history: no one had any idea what to do after the unforeseen end of the Cold War. He read us an editorial from a German newspaper arguing that the Cold War had been a gift to democratic societies: it had pushed several industries into high gear and at the same time, by brutally reinforcing an ideological image of the enemy, restricted the validity of the democratic rules of the game. The Cold War also made possible the unchecked, cancerous growth of the secret police. Would modern societies be able to cope with the collapse of the enemy, that is, the disappearance of the image of an enemy? Without constructing new images of the enemy, new targets for military aggression and rivals in an arms race?

  Clinton’s electoral prospects were said to have worsened overnight.

  The landscape of memory spreads out far and wide, I think, and the beam of our thoughts scans across it. In my notebooks, I come across these sentences by the nun, from the book Sally gave me:

  I’ve begun to see the value of everybody’s wisdom and the fact that people discover the same truths through many avenues. Open up your life so that you’re not caught in self-concern. Then you will no longer think you’re at the center of the world, because you’re so concerned with your worries, pains, limitations, desires, and fears that you are blind to the beauty of existence. You will see that life is such a miracle, and we spend so much time doing nothing except figuring out the ways life is being unfair to us.

  It doesn’t surprise me to find Doctor Kim singing the same tune as the nun. When I told him the pain was getting pretty bad over the past few weeks, he calmly explained It depends on what you eat, and said not to eat sweets either. What was I supposed to eat, then? Rice and vegetables. Ah. I was sure that he followed his own advice. I didn’t tell him that I was taking pain pills. He advised me to make a mental image of the condition of my hips, as precisely as I could, and to bathe the affected cartilage areas in a beneficent flow of healing thoughts. He pricked me with his needles and assured me: I will rebuild your hip. I could not believe him, I felt guilty, and I knew that his prognosis would not be valid for an unbeliever. He also warned me not to eat so much bread, and had an assistant measure out for me a bag full of strange ingredients, including what seemed to be bones along with the leaves and herbs and tubers, that I was supposed to boil for a very long time every morning to make a broth I was supposed to drink, and I did it too, it made my apartment reek, I held my nose and drank it, but it couldn’t help me, I thought, if I hated it. I knew that Doctor Kim fasted one day a week and ate very moderately the rest of the time, and I thought, when I was back on the bus, about how he must despise us dissolute inhabitants of the Western world given over to our unchecked desires.

  New Year’s was approaching, it was dark already at five, I got off the bus to go into a bicycle shop and buy one of the bike locks considered secure, for the new bike I had acquired at Woolworth’s for a hundred and six dollars. The old one, inherited from Bill, had been stolen from the garage, together with two other bikes parked there, locked, of course. They must have come by with a truck! —Yes, said the young and pretty policewoman who showed up at the office to take a detailed report, that’s likely, they’re organized gangs who switch a few parts and resell the bicycles right away, every day there are at least twenty reports of lost bikes in Santa Monica alone. And what are my chances of getting the bicycle back? She shrugged her shoulders. Basically zero, especially if the vi
ctim doesn’t know the bicycle’s serial number, as in my case.

  I said Thank you to the young policewoman, in spite of the bad news. She answered You’re welcome, and I bought a new bicycle. I rode it down the coastal road to Venice exactly once, more out of a sense of duty than because I wanted to: it was something one had to experience. I realized that it was very difficult for me to climb on or off the bike because the crossbar was too high, so I took it to the garage and conscientiously locked it up with the new lock, which a week later was still hanging trustily on the rail while the bike itself had been cleanly removed and stolen again. I did not want to trouble the police again with such a trifle—they were busy enough. The realization that I was not meant to ride a bicycle in this part of the world cost me one hundred and six dollars, and I left it at that.

  Bob Roberts: A timely film, you might say. The viewers in the small movie theater on Second Street followed with grim pleasure the path of a corrupt, deceitful senatorial candidate, a folksinger, casting a spell over the masses with Bob Dylan–like songs given false lyrics. At the end, when it looks bad for the candidate, he and his team fake a shooting and he wins the election as a candidate in a wheelchair, but then the camera shows the man’s supposedly paralyzed leg happily tapping in time at a concert. Meanwhile, the man who was paid to fake the shooting is killed by Roberts’s fanatical followers.

  Movies don’t get any more pointed than that, I said, while the whole clan walked up lively Second Street as it got dark, to the MS. VICTORIA, to Francesco’s apartment, where he had invited us for risotto. The references to the current electoral campaign were obvious, I said. I might have known that Peter Gutman, who had made an exception to his usual habit and come along with us, would contradict me. All well and good, he said. But movies like that do not make the slightest difference. It wasn’t just me, the others didn’t want to believe him either. Anyone who saw this movie, which was well made too, could not have as naive and gullible a view of the current election as someone who hadn’t seen it, we said. I appreciate the argument, Peter Gutman said. His sarcasm sometimes got on my nerves. Now, do you think that any of the followers of our three candidates today, who go into raptures of enthusiasm when their star comes out on stage, will see this movie? Not a single one will see it, that’s what I say, he said. But the Sunday preacher’s speeches inciting his followers on TV, they see and hear those. And they get the message that it’s normal, it’s God’s will, to turn off the rational mind when it’s time to decide who should lead this country for four years.

  Francesco and Ines’s apartment was homey, furnished with Italian tablecloths, pillows, and wall hangings. Francesco took command in the kitchen and had to concentrate on the risotto, so a few comments he threw in here and there were his only contribution to our discussion. Lutz, though, didn’t want to let Peter Gutman off the hook for his cultural pessimism, as he termed it. At least a movie like that is courageous, he said, and you couldn’t convince him that it would have no effect, even if that effect could not be measured. What do you think, Emily?

  Emily, the film studies professor who had recommended the movie to us, shook her head. Effect? she said. No. Nichts. Nothing. Niente.

  You see, it’s just for the chosen few, Peter Gutman concluded with satisfaction.

  I was furious at him, for whatever reason, and accused him of enjoying it when his dark predictions were proven right.

  Peter Gutman raised his eyebrows.

  A sizzle came from the kitchen as Francesco threw the fish filets into the pan of hot oil. Ines asked what kind of dressing we wanted on our salad, we said Italian dressing of course, and Francesco left the all-important final minutes of the risotto to Ria (still wearing her leather cap): stirring, carefully pouring the hot broth over the risotto, measuring out the butter, folding in the Parmesan she had grated. Francesco arranged the fish filets garnished with lemon slices and dill in layers on a large platter, Ines served the salad in little bowls. We all had the same white dishes in our respective kitchen cupboards. The white wine was chilled, we were hungry, it tasted delicious, we were in a good mood.

  By the way, Pintus asked, hadn’t we noticed that the nation was much less gripped by the election than by the final retirement of their idol, the basketball player Magic Johnson, who was unfortunately HIV positive and, after a short, celebrated return to his team, now had to throw in the towel because the players on other teams did not want to run the risk that he and one of them could be injured at the same time and his infected blood might contaminate their healthy blood. This sequence of events had divided the nation, not the platforms of the presidential candidates, which were, in the end, so similar.

  We said nothing.

  I try to think back to that bygone time, which now lies spread out before us, or actually behind us, like a well-lit field where everything is clearly visible, and I wonder if, for all our skepticism and cynicism, we really foresaw so clearly and with such certainty how things would be today. That we would be at war again. Probably only Peter Gutman thought anything was possible. It was after that risotto dinner at Francesco and Ines’s that he took me up to his apartment, for the first time actually—he said he wasn’t ready to call it a night, and I said me neither, so I had to follow him up another flight of stairs and walk into an apartment laid out exactly the same as mine and yet more different from mine than I could possibly have imagined. It was untouched; nothing suggested that anyone lived there. No books, no pictures, no newspapers on the table, no flowers, even the chairs looked like they hadn’t been touched. So bare and austere, it was stifling. Peter Gutman saw me standing in the doorway, he knew that the sight of his apartment was a shock to me; he said nothing and I said nothing. He offered me the comfortable armchair and went to the kitchen, where I heard the refrigerator door open and close and he came back with a good white wine, he knew his wine. At some point he said that comfort disgusted him because of its hypocrisy. He had a goal in mind that night, I think, he wanted to get to something in me. And he started by going on the offensive: They knocked the fight right out of you all, didn’t they? he said.

  I understood what he meant but played dumb. Who? Out of whom? What fight?

  He didn’t respond to that at all. You’ve lost only when you see yourself as having lost, he said.

  So he didn’t believe in objective criteria?

  It’s about whether you let yourself be defined by the other side, the winning side.

  In short, Peter Gutman had taken it upon himself to defend me from something like a loss of self. He explained to me much later that he thought he had detected in me a kind of depression beneath the surface that he wanted to fight back against. But at the time, he had no way of knowing its real cause.

  It must have been on that same night that I told Peter Gutman about an experience I’d had at the theater a long time before. It must have been back in the fifties, I said. Lyubov Yarovaya, a play by a Soviet author. The title heroine is fighting in the civil war in 1919, as an officer in the Red Army. Her husband, whom she loves, is an officer for the Whites and he plans an attack on the Reds. A furious argument with Lyubov does not dissuade him from his plans, so she shoots him. She has to shoot him, the playwright suggests. And I thought, I told Peter Gutman, that that’s how a revolutionary has to be. Able to do that. And at the same time, I knew I could never be like that.

  And? he said.

  And it took me a long time before I realized that any moral system that puts people into such conflicts takes something away from their humanity. The New Man is a reduced man.

  But people fight to the death for their ideas everywhere, to this day, Peter Gutman said. Even today.

  It must not be easy to write down something like that, he said then.

  No.

  Do it anyway. You can take it out later.

  It strikes me that we never called each other by our first names. “Monsieur” and “Sir” were all I needed for him; he called me “Madame” or used no form of address at all.r />
  Adieu, Monsieur.

  Sleep well, Madame.

  * * *

  Looking back from today, it seems to me that the time before New Year’s 1992/93 felt so long because I had so much new to see, hear, think about in those few months. So many new faces too, crowding around me in that short span of time. Some appeared once, with a piece of information, a question, a message, news, and then disappeared again, while others became “Bekannte,” “acquaintances”—a word that doesn’t really translate into American English because “acquaintances” there turn so quickly into “friends,” in a different sense from the German word for “friends” too. Bob Rice, for example, the architecture historian. It is now finally time for him to appear.

  It was almost Christmas, in stifling heat, the Christmas psychosis was in full swing even though you weren’t allowed to talk about “Christmas,” so as not to insult the non-Christian religions, instead people wished each other “Happy Holidays.” The streets were aglitter with elaborate decorations, there were masses of Christmas trees everywhere, often trimmed to exact pyramid shapes, and in the CENTER’s hall a giant, lavishly decorated Christmas tree greeted us. We rode up in the elevator to the tune of “A Great and Mighty Wonder”; meanwhile, Mrs. Ascott had invited us to a tree-trimming party in the lobby of our beloved MS. VICTORIA, at which Peter Gutman and I agreed that she, Mrs. Ascott, would make a perfect lady for a comic mystery novel.

  Buildings! Neutra buildings! was the motto of our architectural guide, Bob Rice. He knew everything there was to know about the famous architect who had emigrated from Germany to America in the twenties. Francesco and Ines crowded into the back of Bob’s tiny Honda, which, as though alive, picked up the scent and was off to the next destination of its own volition, back and forth across the megacity, on freeways, boulevards, up the canyon on steep rocky roads to the “grandmother’s house” on the top of the topmost peak, a tiny little house that Neutra had built as a guesthouse for the mother of the family who lived far down the hillside—an ambiguous success, since the grandmother liked it so much in the little house that she stayed. The old lady who lived there now knew the story and showed us the stunning view of the city in all directions.