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

by Wolf, Christa

  She invited me to her apartment for barbecued duck that night, where I found Mary, a successful, superthin radio journalist who liked to talk, and Marc, an engineer working on the space telescope that was supposed to pick up signals from other civilizations, whose existence Marc firmly believed in. It was “statistically evident,” he said. But only Mary could supply a personal experience “of the third kind,” which she usually—in other words: with unbelievers—didn’t discuss. Several years ago, when she was driving through Arizona with her family, including a small child and a dog, and was on a mountain with a famous lookout point, a superbright light like nothing she had ever seen appeared in the sky and she couldn’t start her car. They put it in neutral and let it roll down the hill; the child was shaking in fear and started to tremble all over and the dog crawled under the seat, quaking, its paws covering its head in an unnatural position. But she, Mary, had looked out the window, she said, and seen three dark, cigar-shaped objects in close formation coming toward her. She screamed and the other adults saw them too. Then there was a kind of inaudible explosion, a very bright light, and it was all over. The sky was empty, the car was working again, and they drove on in silence. Since then, though, she was absolutely certain that the reports of people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens were based on fact.

  And that’s not all, Mary said. A friend of hers, a scientist with a thing about watches—his wristwatch always had to be precisely correct, down to the second—was driving to London, a trip that normally took two hours, when suddenly, again after a blindingly bright light, he saw an object approach him in the sky: polygonal, green, encased in white light like a shell. It landed next to the street he was driving on, right next to his car, in fact. That was the last thing he remembered. When he came to, he found himself in his car on the outskirts of London, and his reliable wristwatch showed that exactly five minutes had passed. And there was no question of optical illusions. Her friend never told anyone about his experience because he didn’t want people to think he was crazy, but two truck drivers who had been driving through the same area at the same time had seen exactly the same thing and reported it to the police, there was a story about it in the paper that her friend read two days later.

  The barbecued duck was crispy and well-seasoned, the California wine was good, news and rumors about the CENTER and university business occupied the group for a little while but then the evening’s topic came to the fore again. Emily claimed to know about a woman an extraterrestrial had gotten pregnant. She was abducted for the birth so they could take her baby away from her. Later, they showed her the child again to let her see that they had used it to reinvigorate their own genetic material. Emily told us this in all seriousness, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Anyway, she added, who could say that there were only “good” extraterrestrials, why wouldn’t the division into good and evil be in force “there” too, so that “they” would be a kind of mirror image of our own world, technically more advanced and humanly less advanced.

  She turned to Marc: Wasn’t it rather dangerous, what he was doing? Marc said there was no way to know, but personally he would happily join any operation that set out to explore the depths of the universe and if he made it back, and if Emily was still to be found on this earth, he would give her all the information she was apparently so desperate to learn. Emily agreed, she had even tried to talk to astronauts directly and find out what they had dreamed in space. Once she had even managed to talk on the phone to someone who had been to the moon, and had had the courage to ask him. He had curtly dismissed the question: You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. An awful thing to say, in Emily’s opinion, but she had had the impression that he was lying. Or that they had trained them not to have dreams. Maybe it was different with Soviet cosmonauts, she said.

  They were unwilling even to admit the possibility that we were the only rational creatures in the universe, as though they were afraid of the loneliness that would overwhelm them if that were true.

  I still remember that I had one of my strangest dreams that night. We are driving in pairs in a rolling, grassy, partly swampy landscape, I am dragging one of those big tin milk canisters that farmers use in cow stalls, I dream that a dark goat is grazing comfortably in front of us, we go toward it, probably to feed it, it is completely tame, I dream that it lets me pet it, and then suddenly it swallows the enormous canister of milk in one fell swoop, in my dream I panic, the animal will never be able to get the canister out again, I carefully, timidly touch the goat’s body and do in fact feel the sharp metal edges of the canister under its fur, the goat doesn’t seem to feel sick yet, it’s my fault, I say in the dream, I should have been more careful, then I remember that the ancient Greeks had a sacred goat, Amaltheia, maybe this is Amaltheia, I say, unhappily, Amaltheia is ruined and it’s my fault, then the goat moves off away from us across the swampy field and before we can catch up to it and save it, it sinks into the swamp before our eyes, uncomplainingly, sucked down because of the heavy metallic canister inside it, and I woke up with a deep sense of disaster and didn’t have the courage to try to interpret the dream.

  Today, something I saw on TV late last night prevents me from starting in on what I had planned for today’s writing. I saw men’s faces, mostly older, some quite old. The stories they told, or more accurately the statements they gave, had the ring of truth. Most of them were former employees of the legendary U.S. institution whose name, CIA, provokes very different reactions in different regions of the world and different classes of society. I cannot figure out what is making them decide to revisit their heroic deeds of the sixties, seventies, and eighties just now. Is someone pressuring them to do it—they who are, after all, the historical winners? What devil is driving them to say at this point that twenty thousand Vietnamese were murdered on the CIA’s orders, whether they belonged to the Vietcong or not? That there were orders to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro? That the fall of Salvador Allende in Chile proceeded according to their ingenious plan? Anyone America wanted out of its way, the CIA had murdered, and every president either ordered it personally or at least knew about it, one of the old men says. Why is he saying that? Because he is overcome with regret? Because some of it has become known anyway by this point? There is a third possibility: Because they can afford to say it. Because no one can or will hold them accountable. Because they rule the world, so they are automatically in the right. Because everything necessary to secure their mastery over the world was, by definition, good. That’s how it is, and these old men, by no means uncritical in looking back, know perfectly well that none of their revelations will have any consequences. Maybe they produce fear, perhaps even horror, in a few hundred television viewers, so what? That doesn’t do any harm to how they feel about life, the feeling that lets them live without self-doubt on the enchanted isle of the rich, powerful, and right.

  I did not expect to be able to fall asleep, but I did, and near morning a younger woman appeared, a not unpleasant stranger, and she held out to me in both hands half-transparent body parts of some amphibian-type creature formed around a delicate skeleton, and she said: You have to swallow the turtle. When I woke up, I had to laugh. She was right.

  The overcoat of Dr. Freud, I thought, what in the world might be hidden in its inner lining, working its way out only bit by bit? Yes, Bob Rice said, I’ve wondered that too. What does it mean that I lost the magic coat? That it could be stolen from me? Did I really lock the door? And if not—which is actually impossible, but I can’t entirely rule out the possibility, per Freud himself!—what might that mean? Did I somehow want to be free of it, so that it wouldn’t hang on my door anymore and remind me every day of certain things I would rather forget?

  You don’t know who you’re talking to, mister, I said, I have just recently learned a thing or two about memory and forgetting that I wouldn’t have thought possible. Everything in me struggled against it but it couldn’t be put off any longer, I had
to go public with it, I started to write a kind of report, as truthful as possible, and I faxed it to a newspaper in Berlin. I didn’t tell anyone about it until Peter Gutman took an article out of the fax machine in the office one morning, glanced at the headline spread across several columns, and passed it to me. This is for you. I read the headline, saw my name in large type, and understood. My files had been given to the media.

  Hey, listen, I said to Peter Gutman. There’s something I need to tell you.

  You don’t need to, Peter Gutman said, and left me standing there. He didn’t want to hear anything. But he came back again a few minutes later: I hope you haven’t forgotten that it’s my birthday tomorrow. Eight o’clock, my place.

  He was one of the last people I could “tell something” to, but when I could he was the person I told in the most detail, the most often.

  SO WHO COULD I TELL THE STORY TO

  —the story that now needed to be told, even though it wasn’t a story at all? The principle of chance would have to decide for me: Who would sit next to me in the lounge for afternoon tea? It was Francesco. Alone. Not bad, as random choices go. I put the faxed newspaper article on the table in front of him, the one where my name appeared in the headline in the context of two letters of the alphabet that for months now had meant in the German media the highest degree of guilt, and I started talking, I talked the whole afternoon through, no one interrupted us, it got late, the sun set, unnoticed by us, and then I finally got to the end, and Francesco said: Shit.

  Francesco had sat down by himself on that quiet, rainy Sunday, behind his newspaper, planning to complain again about the news from Italy. They’ve destroyed the country, he said. Our political class has destroyed the country, and we just sat and watched. That’s how it always goes, I said, and since he looked up, paid attention, and seemed interested, I could put the faxed article on the table in front of him, and since he folded his newspaper and looked inquisitively at me, I could talk. Some people found Francesco insensitive, he was inclined to angry outbursts, but he listened the right way and I told him about the week, nine months before, that for me existed outside of time.

  About your trip, every morning for ten days, to the part of East Berlin you knew least well. About the street that had just become famous, infamous, because it housed the offices of the agency that, of all the evils the crumbling state had stood for, was the most evil, the most demonic, contaminating everyone it touched. I tried to describe to Francesco the feeling you had when you turned into that courtyard surrounded by a square of monotonous five-story office buildings. He knew buildings like that, he said, and how could he not, as an architectural historian. The fleeting thought that this kind of agency could only be headquartered in buildings like that. Whenever you looked for a spot in the giant parking lot that was always full you were overcome with a feeling of suffocating anxiety, like you were in the wrong place. You already knew which entrance you needed to head toward, and you held your ID ready. The fact that the guard on duty gradually got to recognize you made it paradoxically easier for you to go inside. Obviously he had to write down your ID number again every time, and the different guards who had worked there before must have done the same thing, you thought as you walked upstairs, and you were well aware how much more apprehensive you would have been if you had been summoned to this building in the old days, three or four years ago before the age had “turned.” Not that you even knew if outsiders—suspects?—were ever summoned to this building, or if it was only employees of the organization who set foot here. Now its deepest secrets were spread out before almost everyone’s eyes, a national legacy—before my eyes too, insofar as they concerned me, I told Francesco. Can you understand, I asked him, what it took to force myself to go back there every morning, to sign in with the woman—a nice, modest, and unassuming woman, by the way—who managed the minuscule portion of the enormous mass of material that concerned you and G., which she kept in a big green wooden box you called a “sea chest,” bringing out, every day, the portion of files you were to work on that day and laying them on the table in front of you in the visitors’ room where others were sitting with their own stacks of files at other tables.

  It was very quiet in that room. The woman handling your files told you the rules, including that she had read through every word of the files before you, but, she promised you, she was sworn to never speak about their contents.

  Listen, Francesco said, you don’t have to tell me any more. Yes I do, I have to, I said. There were a lot more files than you had expected. Forty-two volumes, later some additional ones too, including telephone surveillance transcriptions. You had been under observation since very early on. And the files from the eighties were not there, except for a single index card which indicated their contents. Destroyed. Or in any case, unlocatable.

  And? Francesco asked. Would you have lived your lives differently if you had known?

  I’ve thought about that a lot since then, I said. You and many of your friends had reckoned with the possibility that you were being watched. But not from such an early date. Not so uninterruptedly. You had told each other jokes on the phone, had even expressed your opinions pretty fully, just not naming names. You had to take at least that precaution. But you didn’t want to take everything so seriously and make yourself paranoid. It’s hard to describe, this state we lived in of simultaneous knowing and repressing, I told Francesco. Would we have lived our lives differently if we had known everything? I don’t know.

  That afternoon in the lounge I could not know how many evenings, how many hours, I would spend in the coming years on the never-ending conversation we called the “Stasi debate.” The state of our respective files. Whether a suspicion had been confirmed or defused. In the public media, two letters of the alphabet were all-powerful: IM. An “informeller Mitarbeiter”—“informal collaborator”—was the Stasi term for an informer, someone not an employee of this organization who filed a report. Anyone those letters were attached to, or seemed to be attached to, was condemned, irrespective of how much or how little the letters actually said about them.

  The woman helping me, I told Francesco, who of course knew what was in my files, warned me on two different mornings that I was probably going to get an unpleasant surprise that day. And? Francesco asked. Did you get an unpleasant surprise?

  I did indeed: detailed reports by a friend about everything you were doing. Since you knew this friend well, this would be the first time you had the chance to ask for an explanation of how they got him to spy on you. They had had him in their clutches, it wasn’t his fault. But why hadn’t he given you a wink and a nod to warn you? While I was reading that report, I told Francesco, I felt like I was going to throw up, I couldn’t help thinking about all the people who had read these pages before me and how many would read them later. I asked myself if it should be allowed, and I developed an obsessive idea of a giant fire being lit in the courtyard of this desolate square of buildings and me getting all the files out of the sea chest and throwing them into the fire, handful by handful. Unread. What relief I would feel.

  I can imagine, Francesco said.

  Instead, I said, I had to hunt down code names in the files that I wanted to make copies of—a whole trunk of copies. I had to fill out forms requesting the copies, and other forms asking to be told the real names of the people who had spied on me. Then, a couple days later, there they were in front of me, black on white, although what I mostly did was skim them, because it was too embarrassing for me. More often than not the name confirmed a suspicion, but sometimes I was painfully surprised, and then, strangely, I quickly forgot them again.

  At lunch you walked—to get out of that room with all the silent people reading, each one sunk in his or her own problems and apparently unable to talk to anyone else about their problems; a particular variety of shame prevented any of you from exchanging more than a quick greeting with the others—at lunch you walked across the courtyard into one of the other buildings, ate there in a kind o
f canteen that had clearly been set up for the employees of this organization, a meal prepared with no love; you surveyed the other people eating and wondered how many of them had been working there three or four years ago too, and whether they had had to deny what they had earlier thought and done to get their present position. Or whether, on the other hand, they had formerly suppressed their real thoughts and now felt free. They sure didn’t look free, I told Francesco. But what does that prove.

  I described for him how you became more and more depressed every day and longed for the moment when you could finally hand back the files and call it a day. And how, when you drove home down the familiar strange streets, you had the feeling that a process of wilting and fading had set in and made rapid progress on both sides of the street: the facades of the buildings seemed to have aged years, in only a few days; the people on the sidewalks seemed shriveled, even though they were hauling their new purchases home in the plastic bags with brightly colored new logos on them, the new things they had wanted so badly; even the new brands of car that showed up more and more often between the old cars didn’t spread the joy that they had been expected to spread, back when they were objects of longing on television. My own judgment might have been biased, I said to Francesco—maybe I was living through another one of those historical moments which I was unable to celebrate the way other people celebrated them. I had to admit that my desires and most other people’s didn’t point in the same direction. And that that was the cause of many of my mistakes. Sometimes, driving back home, you had to stop, step inside one or another of the new shops, and buy a blouse or some other article of clothing that you then never wore. When you got back home you had to take a shower right away and change all your clothes.