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

by Wolf, Christa

  Looking into these files completely undermined and defiled the past, you know, and poisoned the present along with it. Francesco said he didn’t entirely understand that. Facts suddenly bursting in on you can have a destructive effect too, I said, which made Francesco angry. Facts? he barked at me. Did I really think that what I found in those files was the truth about any facts?

  That’s what the public was made to think, I said.

  Exactly, Francesco said. Ask yourself why.

  I have thought about that a lot, I said. I asked myself many times, when I got back from that place where the damage was documented but was also spread and deepened, if that kind of knowledge could lead to the healing of any wounds.

  Yes, of course, we knew we were under observation, I said. The cars parked in front of the house for weeks. The broken mirror in the bathroom. The footprints in the hall. The obviously opened and resealed letters. The many bad connections over the phone, the constant crackling. Of course. That was how the organizations responsible for these things functioned normally.

  Weren’t you afraid? Francesco asked. Of course we were. We had the normal fear you have about any enemy with more effective methods at its disposal than you. And it helped that you could call it “enemy” without qualification: the relationship was clear. That had taken some time. —I know, Francesco said, I know all about that. —As for the categories they had pigeonholed you in, you got that from the files too: “feindlich-negativ,” “hostile-negative.” Well, really, you could have thought that up yourself.

  You are a PUT and a PID, the woman helping with your files told you—Underground Political Activity and Political-Ideological Subversiveness. But what was the insidious poison you breathed in from these files that left you so paralyzed? You couldn’t put it into words at the time, but now I know: It was the brutal way they took your lives and made them trite, over hundreds and hundreds of pages. How comfortably these people fit your lives into their own way of seeing the world. Even if the facts that the observers reported on and a senior official occasionally summarized were true—which was by no means always the case; they had to be tailored to fit the interests and expectations of the people giving the assignments—even then, not one of them matched how I felt. If there’s anything I learned in reading those reports, I said, it’s what language can do to the truth. Those files were in the language of the secret police, completely incapable of capturing real life. An insect collector who wants to pin his find has to kill it first; the tunnel vision of the informer unavoidably manipulates what it finds and he soils it with his miserable language. Yes, I told Francesco, that was what I felt: soiled.

  Francesco again suggested a break. We got ourselves some more tea; it had grown dark and we went over to the big window and saw the last glimmers of light on the ocean. Does that make sense? I asked Francesco. It wasn’t the mass of material, not the huge number of IMs assigned to us, not even their unmasking with their real names—none of that was what plunged me into a depression and gave me the feeling that I could not let myself go any deeper into these files or else I would be pinned to a board by the demon pouring out of them. No, not pinned: infested. I could not allow them to triumph over us after the fact. Which is then what happened in the media after all.

  So, you would have liked it better if you had intelligent, sensitive informers spying on you? Francesco said.

  “Liked” or “preferred” are words that truly do not belong in this context, I said. They never showed up in the reports either, of course. These informers must have laughed up their sleeves when they saw how seriously people were taking these often sloppy and careless documents of theirs, how people were combing through them for incriminating material, giving them evidentiary power again, and using them to decide people’s fates. How people used these reports to deprive others of their livelihoods or keep them out of jobs that they themselves wanted. No one can open Pandora’s Box and go unpunished, I said.

  Francesco said it made him feel sick to imagine what would happen if all the secret files were ever opened to the public in Italy.

  Not all of them, I said. Only from part of the country: only the northern files, for example, or the southern files.

  It’s inconceivable! Francesco said.

  I laughed. Night had fallen, I could see that Francesco had had enough, he wanted to leave, but I had to keep him there. Now I was getting to what I really had to tell him—the whole long story so far had just been the necessary background. The last day in the agency’s building, finally. You had more or less thoroughly read through the forty-two volumes of files, learned the informers’ real names and forgotten them again, you thought it was over, thought it was behind you, and then the woman helping you, with whom you had become almost friendly and who knew your files better than you did yourself, cleared her throat: There was something else. A feeling of looming disaster instantly came over you, without your having any idea of what there still might be in store, but you had to find out, right away. She hesitated. She was not allowed to show you your “Perpetrator File”—for the first time, this term! She had sworn not to. You insisted. Finally, she got you to promise that you would never tell anyone she had broken the rule.

  Then she left the room for a moment, where you and she had been sitting alone since it was after closing time, and came back in with a thin green file folder that she put on the table in front of you. Even then you didn’t understand. She stood behind you and paged through the file for several minutes, during which she constantly looked around to make sure that no one would catch her in this forbidden act. It’s your handwriting, isn’t it, she asked you, quietly, as though worried, and it was my handwriting, I said to Francesco, and that was when I learned that hair standing up on the back of your neck is not just an empty phrase, it really happens. But you didn’t sign anything, no official agreement, nothing, the woman said. It would look very different if you had.

  You didn’t have time, you couldn’t read anything carefully, just skim a couple pages: A clearly harmless report on a colleague, in your handwriting; reports from two contacts about three or four “meets” with you; and the fact that they had managed you under a code name. These were what made this folder a “Perpetrator File” and what hurled you, without warning, into another category of human being.

  The woman helping you, who hastily took the file away again, said: It was all more than thirty years ago, practically nothing happened, and there are meters and meters of “Victim Files,” surely everyone will realize how insignificant this ancient history is, but still, she had not wanted to let me fall completely unprepared into the trap that was about to open up under my feet. She read the newspapers too. Any journalist who asked her would get access to this file—as the law ordered! In her opinion, it was just a matter of time before someone received a tip and was on my tracks.

  As for me, I said to Francesco, I heard myself say for the first time: I had forgotten all about that. And I noticed myself how implausible it sounded. The woman sighed: We hear that here a lot! And she rushed to take the file back out of the room.

  Francesco said: Shit. Then, after a while: What are you going to do?

  I said: I’m going to publish it all.

  Think it over first, Francesco said. I read your German newspapers too. You need to ask yourself if you can stand up to what’s going to happen.

  I have no choice, I said. In any case, I couldn’t speak publicly about this file without causing problems for the woman who broke the rules by showing it to me. But I’ve just heard that she has died, very young, of cancer. So now I can talk about it.

  Kafka, Francesco said. Kafka could have come up with something like that.

  You’re right, I said. No one is innocent in his work either. As in life. I turned in from Second Street, crossed the Spanish front lawn, saw the staring masks of the three raccoons in the bushes, walked into the hall, waved at Mr. Enrico just clearing off his table and finishing work for the day, set foot in my strange, foreign apartment
as though I were getting home, poured myself a glass of water, drank it like I was about to die of thirst, and sat down in front of my machine on the table. I wrote:

  How can I avoid ending up feeling compelled to justify myself? That would be the most idiotic way to act of all. But is there any correct, appropriate way to act in this situation? And am I falling back into the trap of asking what other people want from me?

  I lay down on my wide bed. It was dark outside but not time to go to sleep yet, and I said to Pema the nun, whose book lay on my nightstand: The tigers are here, but where is the strawberry? I fell into a half-sleep with lines of poetry floating past, “accept your fate,” oh my dear Fleming, what could you know of the disasters of fate. I drifted into a fleeting dream where a face appeared before me, the face of my friend Emma who was also dead and whom I needed now, but I thought I knew what she would have told me: Don’t let anything show! That’s what she would have said.

  * * *

  The same way she said it back then, in 1965—my God, more than a quarter century had passed since then!—after the so-called “spectacle” of that Plenum of the Central Committee where culture was once again made the scapegoat for everything going wrong. Where you felt it was necessary to defend those who were under attack, and ran up against a brick wall, of course, came under attack yourself, and finally left the auditorium, thinking: Got my hands chopped off there! Now now, Emma said, don’t take yourself so seriously. It was good that you said something, otherwise you would have felt lousy. And hands grow back. —So, you believe in miracles, you said. —How could I not, Emma said. The fact that I’m sitting here with you is due to a whole string of miracles.

  You knew what she meant: That she had survived the years in prison under the Third Reich; that she had found shelter in this allotment garden when fleeing from bombed-out Berlin, before she was thrown in prison again. That she had shed tears when “our side” threw her back in jail, “under false charges”—and the news reached her of Stalin’s death. Her joints were frail from arthritis, from the damp cold jail cell. She walked with a stick, had aches and pains that she ignored. Had I asked her urgently enough why even being jailed by “our side” wasn’t enough to cure her of her belief in Stalin? I could have used her answer now. Ach, girl, she said once, do you have any idea what people cling to when they’re as deep in the shit as we were then? If we had given up hope in the wise Steersman of Peoples we might as well have given up on ourselves … And you understood that this half-Germany, this state—even if it treated her harshly, even if it had many faults—was her only refuge. That she had to cling to the belief that it would develop into the humane society she so longed for. That she had to defend it.

  Emma, who, unlike others, was not afraid to look facts in the face, became one of my most trusted advisors. But back then, I remembered, after that disastrous Plenum, you needed more than advice. You needed what people call professional help.

  The doctor told you: Every system of power in the world has a vested interest in weakening the individuality of its subjects and tries to weaken or if possible completely extinguish it. The best thing to do is not to confront these powers, which are always stronger than the individual, but rather to retreat and live your life in peace and quiet, psychologically unharmed. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a day might come when people can live openly again: if that day comes, we will see that the repression of their individuality has not caused any genetic mutations, that their DNA has remained untouched, and that a new generation will be capable of living without spiritual chains.

  I remembered that the medicines the doctor prescribed for you didn’t work; I also remembered the weeks in the clinic where the doctor finally sent you because he no longer wanted to take responsibility for your case. (“You don’t send a wounded soldier back into battle either!”) It was a tiny room with a barred window overgrown with vines, but you didn’t need the bars there, you would not have chosen to jump out the window; keeping your body intact was important to you. Much later, a doctor told me how many pills a person needs, and of what kind, he was probably just trying to make himself feel important. The only thing you told the supervising doctor at the clinic was that you had a phobia about newspapers—they were full of speeches to the committee agreeing with everything, speeches in favor of the measures you had fought against. There were names at the bottom of the articles and letters that you had never expected to see under such articles and letters. Whenever you saw a newspaper you broke out in a sweat.

  I felt that the new newspaper campaign already getting under way had brought the old trauma back to life. You took the newspapers that they delivered daily to your room in the clinic (as therapy!) and quickly stuck them under the blankets. Since you couldn’t sleep—again, I couldn’t sleep—you roamed up and down the hospital hallway at night and often ran into another patient, the wife of a border patrol officer whose job was to lead foreign visitors to the Wall built four years earlier and explain to them the GDR’s border control measures. Ever since, his wife received phone calls day and night, with threats and curses, again and again, no matter how often they changed their phone number. Finally she developed a phobia about the telephone and could no longer sleep. Her supervising doctor, also yours, was convinced that false habits or information in the brain could be erased and replaced by learning the correct ones, with a correct training program. He had her sleep on the couch in the examination room and had the nurse on night duty phone her several times a night, which made the woman panic and spend the nights in the hallway. You eventually managed to read the headlines in the newspapers, which was the first sign of improvement; the second sign, according to the highly pleased assistant who was under her professor’s spell, was when she noticed me wearing new shoes I had bought—shoes with a prominent black-and-white grid pattern that I wore for a long time.

  Peter Gutman’s fiftieth birthday. There were four of us at the party, as befitted his ascetic lifestyle and tendency to keep to himself. Aside from me were, to my surprise, Johanna—one of our young fellowship holders, working on the treatment of social themes in recent American literature (but that was just an alibi for the CENTER, Peter Gutman thought)—and Malinka, a slim, dark-haired, attractive, prickly woman in her late thirties. She came from former Yugoslavia and had lived in this city for several years. I don’t remember anymore where Peter Gutman knew her from; she didn’t have any connection with the CENTER, coordinating some kind of research tasks at a scientific institute.

  Peter Gutman insisted on serving us without any help: first came melons and prosciutto with a good wine, then he disappeared into the kitchen area to whip up a quick Chinese dish with chicken and vegetables in a wok while we women continued to weave the threads of the conversation. Namely, that compassion for the “underprivileged” on the part of relatively prosperous people was increasingly disappearing; that people did make sure to go out of their way to express themselves politely toward them and with the correct terminology but increasingly refused any concrete help that might affect their own wallets. We all had seen affluent people hurrying past the homeless as though deaf and blind, their faces twisted into a grimace of disgust, withholding the dollar they could so easily have afforded to give.

  Malinka flew into a rage. She said she understood it completely: she didn’t give charity either. No one who hasn’t experienced it themselves could possibly understand how hard life is in this country for someone who has to start with nothing. It had been so unspeakably horrible when she herself had first arrived that she had killed off any sentimentality she had about those who were on the bottom today. She had gotten into the habit of sitting behind her steering wheel and driving past everything without emotion: car crashes, corpses on the side of the road, the worst poverty, and the worst crimes that so often went along with immense riches. Her mantra, she said, was: I don’t care, I don’t care. And she didn’t pity the homeless people like we did. Didn’t give them any money either. She kept every goddamn cent
she had for herself. In fact, she was furious at them. What she most wanted to do was shake them and shout: Don’t let yourselves go like that! Keep your dignity, at least! They should pull themselves out of the swamp on their own. No one had helped her!

  Peter Gutman stuck his head out of the kitchen door to look at Malinka but none of us said a word. We exchanged glances, a bit at a loss about how to respond.

  Johanna told the story of how she had given money to a man in New York once and he had thanked her by saying God bless you! in the usual pathetic tone. She had shouted at him that he shouldn’t say God bless you, he should curse her! He had stared at her in amazement, then calmly said: That’s my business, ma’am.

  Oh, Brecht! we laughed.

  I could tell that a lot of what Peter Gutman had to say in the conversation that night (we had started discussing the vanishing, or actually vanished, role of reason in Western culture) was directed at me—it was his commentary on the article he had taken out of the fax for me the day before. He knew what was going on, but did not want to talk to me about it yet. He wanted to give me space. When we said good night, he said: Be careful!

  What else? There is a pause, it gets longer. I have the usual suspicion that my writing has ground to a halt because I have not succeeded in breaking through the barrier labeled “Do not touch!” and because writing is pointless unless you do break through it. The overcoat of Dr. Freud can also be abused to protect vulnerable sore spots, I think with a mental sneer.