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

by Wolf, Christa

  All of it true but none of it provable, I thought, while the morning joggers ran past me and the sun on the left had already crept up high in the sky, and memory wouldn’t stop: that strange night did receive a kind of explanation later, from something an actor friend told you. That same night, after an opening-night party, he had happened to walk past the print shop where newspapers, hot off the presses and bundled together on pallets, were loaded onto trucks. One of the bundles had gotten untied and a newspaper had fallen out, and he had been able to read the headline in large print on the front page, which said that all of you, the conspirators who were first to sign that protest letter, had recognized your action as damaging and had recanted. Someone else claimed to know that they had planned to arrest you that night and put pressure on you for so long that you would sign the recantation, but that another faction in the leadership had put a stop to the plan. A crazy story, impossible to prove.

  You were afraid then. I have learned since then that emotional memory doesn’t get calloused over but rather stays sensitive in the place where the emotion cut deep. Have I become more fearful? I refuse to answer. Meanwhile, I remember, I have since found in my files a copy of a plan that the agency actually did carry out: to discredit you with the other protesters, they spread the rumor that you had secretly recanted your signature after all in one of their “conversations” with you, and admitted your action was a mistake. They did not spread around that the only answer you ever gave them in these “conversations” was no—an answer which, as you knew with bedrock certainty, was inviolable and would never change. From motives of self-preservation.

  That was one of the turning points in my life, I thought.

  Ocean Park. It was getting hot out, solitary runners and walkers moved past my bench with single-minded determination, soaked in sweat. Then a man with Indian features came and leaned against the railing opposite me, said Merry Christmas, and asked if he could sit next to me on the bench. Sure.

  I am an Indian, he said, from Oklahoma. He was here for only two days, he said, to visit a girlfriend, but when he showed up she had moved to Kentucky. He had been walking a long way, from Venice. He was wearing a bright-colored T-shirt and had a white sweater knotted around his neck. What’s your name? he said. I said my first name. His was Richard. Not an Indian name, I said. His last name was Indian, he said, and he said it, something very complicated. He shook my hand; his was crippled. I asked him what he did for a living. He couldn’t work anymore, he said, pointing to his hand and to a long scar on his forearm: car accident. Very bad. Then came what I was apprehensively waiting for: Could you spare some change? Unfortunately I had run out of the house without a wallet, without money. I said so, regretfully. He nodded. Was I married? When I said yes, he stood up: Nice talking with you, and he left. And that, I thought, was my first encounter with one of the original inhabitants of America.

  Then the two young men in bright white shirts and slick hair with perfectly straight parts came by to push their Mormon Bible on me. I pretended I hardly spoke a word of English, barely understood it, and anyway was not a believer and would never be one, at which point one of the two gave me a piercing look and asked me how I knew. At any rate, they contented themselves with handing me a leaflet and informing me that God had offered up his son for me, for the forgiveness of my sins too. The truth was, I should have asked those two bright white young men (who had managed to unload their Bible on a woman a little ways farther on) how a father could be so cruel as to give over his son to a hideous sacrificial death, and why the only way for a Christian to be set free of his sins was the cross, a torture device that dislocates his arms. Whereas the circle, the symbol of Buddhism, puts humanity as a whole in the center of the universe—the circle that surrounds you, according to Pema the nun, shows you that you are always standing in the sacred space, and you can open your senses to perceive the meaning and beauty of every single detail in every moment of your life. If you want to attain enlightenment you have to do it now.

  Back to the MS. VICTORIA, where there was no one around at that hour of the morning except Mr. Enrico and the cleaning staff. Hello, Mr. Enrico, nice to see you, yes, I’m fine, yes, my apartment is okay, thank you, and there was Angelina in my apartment, the only black woman among the cleaning personnel in the MS. VICTORIA, along with Alfonso, a Puerto Rican, who had just changed my sheets—for my bed and also the second bed I never used, but I couldn’t say anything about that to them—and were now cleaning the kitchen. This heat, I said. Were they thirsty? They hesitantly admitted they were, but they didn’t want me to offer them anything to drink. I mixed us three Campari sodas, they hesitantly took them, but only Alfonso sat down with me at the little round kitchen table and quickly drank his. Angelina didn’t want to sit down, she said she was so tired that she wouldn’t be able to stand back up again, but I still suspected she just didn’t want to sit down in my presence. Angelina was not dark brown, like most of the people we whites call “black”: Angelina was actually black. She had curves wherever a woman could have them, without being fat—her forehead, cheeks, and lips were curved too, even her chin was round, and her nostrils; the bridge of her nose was set deep between the hemispherical bulges of her flashing white eyes, and her elbows were round, and the knee that peeked out from under her wide colorful dress when she stretched for something, and her hair with its little round curls on her spherical head. How long had she been here, I asked. Six years. She was from Uganda. She had six children there, who had lived with her mother until her mother died and now lived with her sister, she was working for them. I have to work very hard, she said, smiling, and I learned that she sometimes worked two shifts a day, in different hotels, and barely slept. I didn’t ask Angelina about the father of her children, I asked how old she was, thirty-six, she said, and her children were between six and eighteen, she hadn’t seen them since 1989, three years, flights were so expensive. She shook my hand when she left and thanked me for the drink with a little curtsey.

  That morning I was glad that they left my apartment soon, Angelina and Alfonso, so I could reach for the red folder on the shelf in the big room. I wasn’t mistaken, one of L.’s letters was written in the winter of 1977: an answer to a letter of Emma’s in which she had apparently hinted at something about recent events in our country. I was sure that large parts of this correspondence had not been sent through the official postal system, but I had little hope of discovering after the fact who had acted as courier for Emma and L. without attracting suspicion.

  So, L. had written to her (and my!) friend Emma in February 1977, in that dark winter:

  My dear,

  No, I don’t believe history repeats itself. It’s true that my dear gentleman is of the opinion that we human beings, especially we on the left, are unable to learn from our mistakes. But look: You and I can say without any false modesty that we’ve learned something! You were no longer able to agree with the dogma that a class enemy lurks in anyone who thinks differently, and you paid the price, not a small one. And I, who used to make fun of you for your loyalty to the Party, I can understand now why you never left it. Today we wouldn’t have any more arguments about such questions, fights where we quivered in rage, standing across from each other in your kitchen. Isn’t that some kind of progress?

  I can see it now, by the way—that kitchen of yours. I could describe every single thing in it. Yes, I’m sometimes sad that I will never see that kitchen again, where you are sitting now with your friends. And this girl you seem so worried about. She walks straight into every trap? Why? What is she trying to prove? That she’s brave? That she can accomplish something? Or just that what she wants to believe in is worth any sacrifice?

  Did my friend Emma actually ask me those exact questions? Sometimes I was moved that they had discussed me behind my back, sometimes hurt. If it’s true that I walked straight into every trap, I thought, then surely it was only because I didn’t think it was a trap. That changed. Why did it take so long? And so much effo
rt?

  L. wrote:

  Well, let the young people do what they have to do. They won’t do it any worse than you and I did, if they’re worth anything. And what else are they supposed to do? Give up?

  Pema, the Buddhist nun, tells the story of a woman running away from some tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines far below her, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Then she looks down and sees that there are tigers below her as well. Then she notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little strawberry bush close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up, looks down, looks at the mouse, then just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it with all of her senses … This struck me as inhuman, something impossible to do and impossible to want to do either.

  Computer crash. After the first shock, after the attempts of various savvier friends to fix it, which even included them getting advice over the phone from even-savvier friends in the middle of the night—apparently a computer problem is self-evidently a major catastrophe that any computer person is prepared to help resolve by whatever means necessary at any hour of the day or night—after we got a general idea of how much text I had actually lost, since I was too lazy to back up the file to disk every night; after I realized, in other words, that I could refill the empty space with the material saved in my head, I feel something like a bizarre schadenfreude. Take that, computer! So what does this crash actually mean? A cry not to be ignored, from the depths of technology, telling me “Stop!”? A sudden, highly welcome release from a constant source of stress? Permission to use the heat of this unusually hot Mecklenburg summer as an excuse for my laziness? Or am I to understand this ordinary occurrence some other way, obsessed as I am with the search for meaning? Is this “crash”—what a concrete image!—trying to warn me that I am approaching the point in my writing that I was more or less consciously, more or less artificially, trying to avoid?

  * * *

  It’s always a sign when I start losing my hair. Back then, in the New Year’s heat in California, my hair started falling out again, by the handful. I passed the information along to Berlin: I’m losing hair by the handful. You can spare it, it’ll grow back, came the voice from across the ocean. Not this time, I thought, and I went and found pills for hair and nail growth and tried to remember when else my hair had fallen out. After the typhus, in 1945, you were almost bald. After the births of your children, dozens of hairs lay on your pillow every morning, the same as now on the firmly stuffed pillows in my wide American bed. After that plenary meeting of the Party in 1965. After the Warsaw Pact troops marched into Prague in 1968. In that hopeless, dark winter of 1976–77, when the cars with surveillance teams took shifts outside your window and you stood behind the curtain and asked each other the question: LEAVE OR STAY? After the five operations in 1988. After the people’s uprising failed in the fall of 1989—it had no platform, it had to fail, but the hormone responsible for hair growth did not seem to care about these facts, nothing we can understand seems to have any effect on it, it reacts only to the gusts of emotion that reach down to the roots of our lives.

  Thomas Mann’s diaries. “Pacific Palisades, Saturday, 10/15/49:… Letter to a German man who sent me a note declaring his love for Serenus Zeitblom … It does me good to see that there are still people in Germany who find something to love in the work of my old age, in my work at all—not just something to carp about. When it comes right down to it, it’s a stupid German trait always to have to tear down and belittle the best they have, anything that represents them nobly and well to the world. No other nations do that.”

  Television. I watched Mr. Clinton, who would be inaugurated president of the United States the next day, with his wife, Hillary, who had had to tone down her clothes and her all-too-confident appearance during the election, and their daughter, Chelsea. They were walking across the famous bridge in Washington to the replica of the Liberty Bell, at the head of a huge stream of Americans of every age and skin color, holding hands with black children. The bell tolled. Chelsea was not going to be sent to a public school, even though the Clintons were obviously in favor of public schools, but Americans seemed to forgive her parents for that, and I wondered if I would be embarrassed in three or four months that my eyes had teared up at the sight of this relaxed, joyful crowd of people striding ahead.

  Dream. I am going somewhere on the autobahn with lots of people in different cars. No one I know in “real life” is there. A bare, deserted landscape. Short stop. Sudden departure. Now I’m driving all alone in a tiny car, I stop, and I see the hood of a giant green truck looming large in the rearview mirror. I have to keep driving, but for some reason I desperately want to go back, so I boldly turn the wheel and steer my car onto the center divider. A few pale figures are standing on the other side and one says to the other: It’s the anniversary of the founding of the GDR today. The other casually answers: We’re skipping that. Then they anxiously shout at me: Careful! On the side of the autobahn I’m trying to drive onto, an ambulance comes racing up with a Red Cross flag flying, it turns onto the lane I’m coming from, right in front of me and my little car, and stops after a few hundred feet. Only now do I see that there are dead bodies inside, covered with blankets, some coffins too. All gray. We had stopped just a few feet before a disaster and hadn’t noticed a thing! The pale light over the landscape. A surreal picture.

  On the radio over breakfast, I heard a man talking about his parents, who had been put to death forty years earlier. They were honorable people, I heard him say, who were trying to make the world a better place. I realized that the man on the radio was one of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s sons. My brother and I, he said, were ten and six years old when my parents were executed. Entirely apart from what it means to lose your parents like that, you can hardly imagine what it was like to grow up in the United States as the child of such parents. —What was it like? the woman hosting the show asked. Then Robert told the story of a nightmare childhood: the need to lie about his own name, the orphanage he called a “prison,” being kicked out of school under the pretext that the parents of the other students had found out who they were. It was quite an experience, he said, and there are other children in America whose parents died for a better world too, but had been forgotten. He and his brother had set up a foundation to support these children.

  I can still remember the day perfectly. It must have been in 1953, you were studying at the university in Leipzig, your first child had been born, you were sitting on the couch in the heated room with the baby in your arms. It was morning. You heard on the radio that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been put to death in the electric chair that night in the USA. You cried. You stroked your small daughter’s little head. I can still feel today, in my fingertips, how soft and fragile it was. I still remember that you thought: I will never forget this day. And I never did forget it.

  Time for afternoon tea at the CENTER. Everyone there knew the Rosenbergs’ names, they had all thought long and hard about the moral tangle that the atomic physicists had found themselves in: Did their work on the atomic bomb help defeat the Nazis? Didn’t a scientist have a fundamental obligation to refuse to work on a weapon that could, in the end, destroy the human race? Or didn’t he have to do everything in his power to stop those who wanted to destroy the human race and use their own weapons against them? Guilty either way. The old tragic conflict. But why did the conflict of Orestes, of Iphigenia, seem human to me while that of our atomic scientists seemed inhuman? I asked Peter Gutman, who was walking back to the MS. VICTORIA with me. He said: When normal, well-intentioned people find themselves driven into a dilemma where they cannot do anything right, by their own standards, then the society they live in is sick.

  I said nothing.

  * * *

  Doctor Kim suddenly asked me my impression of him. So, vanity after all, I thought with am
usement, then I considered the question quickly and said that he seemed to have a strong will, was kind, knew what he wanted, had a sense of humor, could laugh at things, most of all he seemed to know the hierarchy of things and could tell the difference between essential and inessential. Doctor Kim smiled as inscrutably as ever, put six needles in, turned off the light, said Relax!, and I, half-asleep, thought: maybe it’s not vanity, maybe he knows that everyone would ascribe to him the qualities he would like to have, and I thought about what I had not told him: That he probably liked having influence over other people, being superior to them whenever possible; but that the respect he enjoyed stemmed from a genuine authority, a superiority that wasn’t an act and that he also didn’t seem to take advantage of. When he came back: Did you relax? I looked surreptitiously at him so that I could describe him later: his long head with Asian features and dark skin, his slender, sensitive hands, his blue tracksuit with its clean white collar. Sigrid, who took my payment of sixty dollars in the waiting room, said she had been very sick with cancer and he had saved her life with a strict diet, meditation, and acupuncture. Her last exam showed no more metastases. Sigrid was German but spontaneously spoke English most of the time, even with me.

  The full movie theater on Third Street one afternoon. Emily, my upstairs neighbor, our film expert, had convinced me to come with her for something everyone has to have seen: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was not prepared to see the aliens intrude right into our midst, terrifying us with glaring lights in the sky, making dolls move in a well-ordered American suburban home before the housewife’s eyes, making all the appliances run, from the iron to the refrigerator, literally dragging the child away from its horrified mother out through the cat door—all her secret fears and unacknowledged wishes. And then that they would be made to land by technology and music, in a field meaningfully laid out by a François Truffaut who believed in flying saucers, giving back the humans they had borrowed, including of course the abducted child, and taking on new space travelers. Most of all, the touching image of extraterrestrials who are technologically advanced but in other ways unredeemed and who needed us—something Emily, who otherwise said little on the way home, did not want to entirely rule out. By which she indirectly revealed that the movie extraterrestrials’ appeal to our sympathy had worked on her.