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

by Wolf, Christa

  SOMETIMES THE PAST REACHES UP AND GRABS AT YOU

  I think, and then the established, well-known course of events kicks in. The public reacts with joy and lightning speed to the word “morality” and, for good reason, flays the skin from the body of the person accused of immorality.

  And the truth they all purport to serve?

  What else? How to keep going? Everything does always have to keep going. In the MS. VICTORIA, everything kept going. I had to keep walking on the same paths. How are you doing today? This time it was the uniformed doorman at the fancy restaurant on Second Street that the guidebook listed as one of the ten best places to eat in Los Angeles. People drove up in the biggest stretch limousines imaginable, which they then entrusted to the doorman with his blinding white gloves. He had no reason to ask me, of all people, how I was doing: he must have seen right away that I was not among his clientele. Oh fine, I said, surprised, and you? —Terrific! he said, convinced and convincingly, a word that I used to confuse with terrifying, which led to some misunderstandings until I finally found the two words next to each other in the dictionary, terrific translated as “great,” “fantastic,” also “cool,” while to terrify meant “to give someone a frightful shock,” a phrase that immediately started to tumble around and around in my head—“to give a cool shock,” “fantastic to be sent into shock,” “a great, frightful shock” … Stop! I ordered myself. Stop. Stop. But it was no longer in my power to make the tape recording stop.

  Now the three raccoons sitting in front of the MS. VICTORIA, or hunting in the bushes for something to eat, were getting bold: apparently the garbage bins in the narrow side street were good hunting grounds. When I came home at night they were squatting in the dark in front of the circular flower bed with the bitter orange tree and staring at me. Hi! I said, in a friendly voice, which didn’t seem to impress them. All right, so let me pass, I said in German, but they didn’t know German. So I walked toward them, step by step, toward their masklike faces with eyes always open wide, and they squatted there without moving, Don’t worry, I said, more to myself than to them since they were obviously in no way worried, and now was I supposed to just squeeze past them or what? Then the door of the MS. VICTORIA was flung open, the tall resident with the Indian face stepped out, clapped his hands, and gave a loud and aggressive yell. The raccoons scurried into the bushes. Come inside! the man called to me, Hurry up, please, they’re dangerous. I ran into the building and when I turned around in the door I was looking into three pairs of wide-open eyes. They’re crazy, the man said, they are not acting normal.

  In the following days I saw the ragged gray cat creeping around the building, but NO PETS! stood on the door in big letters and no one dared bring the animal into the building past Mrs. Ascott, and when we put edible items out in the bushes we didn’t know what we were actually feeding, the shaggy cat or the feral raccoons, but after only a few days its fur had gotten smoother, and then it was wearing a brown leather collar, and then one day I saw the cat on the lap of the man with the Indian face, who was sitting under the sun umbrella on the front lawn, a little dish of milk at his feet, and he was petting the cat. It trusted him and was snuggling with him. He saw the look I gave him and said I adopted it, and from then on the cat lay curled up in the sun, in front of the MS. VICTORIA’s door, completely at peace, and it let the people it trusted pet it. Peter Gutman said that the guy was a little crazy himself. Have you heard him sing? He puts on old, scratchy records and sings along. —Does he sing well? I asked. —Abominably. But it’s okay, I like the ordinary sounds around me, especially the ones I wouldn’t hear on a luxury liner.

  Diversionary tactics, we both knew it. We talked about everything under the sun except the contents of the faxes that arrived for me at the CENTER’s office in ever increasing number, which Kätchen put in my mailbox without comment. There seemed to be no topic more interesting to large swaths of the German media than my actions. I didn’t read every article right away when it came in: there was a limit, a daily quota of accusations that I could bear. Now it turned out that, against my original wishes, I needed a car for even the simplest daily errands, like shopping. It was a difficult undertaking that took days to take care of, distracted me, and let me get to know a sharp, capable salesman. Finally, he was delighted to see me buy a Geo, fire-engine red, which admittedly made a strange grinding noise whenever the car made a sharp left turn, but then again, when would I really need to make a sharp left turn? It was cheap and it fit in the space in the MS. VICTORIA’s garage, number 7.

  I warned Peter Gutman never to drive with me but he insisted on our going in this car, with me behind the wheel, to an area of Los Angeles neither of us had been to, where Malinka wanted to show us the house she was planning to buy.

  It was a hideous house in a hideous neighborhood. We looked at each other, communicated our agreement, and refrained from passing judgment. Malinka said that she knew perfectly well there were better houses out there, but this was one she could afford. And it would be her own. And it was located far enough away from any possible place where new riots might break out. She remembered with perfect clarity her ambivalent feelings during the riots in April: One person inside her had stood up and crowed in triumph: Ha! Finally! while the other one anxiously followed the fires coming closer and said: You may be right, you may have a right to revolt, but dammit, don’t touch my house! That’s how it is, she said. The more you own, the less you can let yourself see the world the way it really is—much less the way it should be.

  That’s Marxism, I said.

  So? Malinka said. Ur-Marxism, if you want to put it that way. Not far at all from primitive Christianity.

  When I hear you two talk, Peter Gutman said, it makes me think that maybe Communism isn’t dead after all.

  Always these words, I said. Can’t we get by for even a little while without these words?

  No, Malinka said, words are so important. For example, “riots,” or at most “unrests”: those are set in stone now. It’s obvious whose interests are being served by saying that these uprisings were “turmoil,” “disturbances,” “riots,” and nothing like “revolt,” “rebellion,” “insurrection,” or “uprising,” much less “revolution.” It was said to be naked, unbridled violence that had terrified South Central Los Angeles in April—no political or social motives were to be attributed to the rioters, certainly no economic motives. They had laid hands on the holiest of holies, this society’s bedrock: private property. Yes, Malinka said, of course I felt sorry for the Korean shopkeepers, they didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of it, but the other person in me, the one from before, understood the rioters. That’s how revolutions have always started: the most disadvantaged take from the rich what they weren’t allowed to have until then.

  And when a revolution has failed to reach its goal and has come to an end, I say, its heirs are the first to reestablish the old property relations.

  I asked Malinka—it was a compulsion, I had to ask everyone I met—if she had ever completely forgotten a crucially important event in her life. Oh yes, she said, I run into that all the time, whenever I go home and see my family. They remember lots of things that happened when I was there but which I don’t have the slightest memory of. These memories are a precious possession for them; for me, they’re a burden I have to throw off.

  That must be a loss too?

  Malinka said she had trained herself with iron resolve not to feel any regret about that kind of loss.

  She didn’t manage it completely, I said to Peter Gutman on the drive back. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten worked up like that about the names given to the April uprising. By the way, that’s a long-standing concern of mine: the intensity and speed with which the political class and its media push a name that suits them onto events that have surprised, maybe even overwhelmed them. Most recent example: the people’s uprising in the fall of 1989, around the end of the GDR. The label “Wende,” the “Turn,” got itself firmly established. And the
n, interestingly, the state’s name had to vanish as quickly as possible, along with the thing itself: all you saw in the papers was “the SED dictatorship,” after the name of the Party, or “illegitimate state,” or “unjust regime.” In personal conversations today, people say “in GDR-times.”

  But I remember, I said to Peter Gutman, who was sitting next to me in my red Geo—mute and, I thought, rather tense, tolerating without comment my sometimes risky driving style—I remember how, many years earlier, back on June 17, 1953, the first time I saw masses demonstrating in the streets, it was a headache for the politicians and newspapers how to name the event then too: in the first few days there was talk of “worker’s protests” and “justified criticisms,” and then we were informed that we had witnessed a “counterrevolution,” which naturally made public discussion of the events much easier. Malinka had talked about the split in herself—I can remember very well, I said, the split in myself back then.

  How scared you were, riding the streetcar back from the national library in Leipzig—a whisper behind you had already alarmed you—when you saw workers unfurling a banner on a construction site as you rode past: We are on strike! How you ran through the center of Leipzig, to the Germanistics Institute in the old, half-destroyed university, but almost no one was there—no one who knew what was going on outside, in any case, since the GDR stations were broadcasting light music and people didn’t listen to West German stations in the institute. How you ran around the corner to Ritterstrasse, to the FDJ district committee, and saw them throwing files and typewriters and office supplies and furniture out the windows and the people standing down below were enthusiastically screaming and applauding. Well, those aren’t workers, you thought, relieved. How you wandered around in the city center among an ever thicker crowd of people, trying to find someone you knew. How you saw “Down with Pointy-Beard!” (meaning Walter Ulbricht, the Party’s first secretary) written in chalk on a streetcar and wiped it off with your handkerchief, and, strangely, I still remember today the face of the older man you thought was some kind of official as he grabbed your sleeve, brought his face right up next to yours, proclaimed the end of this shit government, and told you to take off your party badge. How a ring of people formed in a second around the two of you, demanding the same thing from you, and how you said to the man in an ice-cold voice: Over my dead body!

  That was ridiculous, of course, but at the time it seemed to me the only appropriate thing to answer, I don’t know if you can understand that, I said to Peter Gutman. He listened and said nothing. Then suddenly a comrade was standing next to you, a historian, and he pulled you away, the two of you ran to the Historical Institute where you saw groups of people you had never seen anything like before, wild people, you thought, in the first row of one bunch was a muscular man with a beard and no shirt on with something like a cudgel in his hand. What if they work us over with that! the man with you said, and then you felt queasy too. But they were there at the Historical Institute to organize the defense of the premises, go ahead and laugh but what else should I call it. They had barricaded the entrance door from the inside, with desks, and a guard was placed there to let in only people he knew or who could prove they were all right. Still no orders from the Party, they said. That failure kept repeating itself in crisis situations, I said.

  For the first time a feeling that there was no way out of the situation came over you, but you forgot it again. I have not forgotten how it was light out late that night and you picked up at least ten Party badges on the way home that timid comrades had thrown away. And how you were both horrified and relieved when the tanks rolled past. And how, a few days later, when you sat down in a restaurant with your Party badge on, the other people at the table pointedly stood up. And how it made you uncomfortable when it was only you and one Christian fellow student who insisted, at an assembly of student groups, that the Party should pay attention not only to the actions of its inevitable enemies, but also, and above all, to the workers’ justified demands. But the line was: Don’t give an inch of ground to the class enemy. And I was told that I should be careful about the company I kept.

  I fell silent. Peter Gutman was silent too. Then he said: You must know Brecht’s remark when he gave up his plan to write a play about Rosa Luxemburg. He said, “I’m not going to hack off my own foot just to prove that I’m a good hacker.”

  Yes, I knew that remark. But don’t we really need to ask ourselves why it should lead to self-mutilation simply to speak or write the truth?

  Oho! Peter Gutman cried. Madame! Simply speak the truth! No more and no less!

  We had arrived safe back at the MS. VICTORIA’s garage door. Peter Gutman got out of the car. Then he stuck his head in the car again: So, when are you finally going to ask me?

  Ask you what? What am I supposed to ask you?

  Whether I’ve ever forgotten crucially important things in my life.

  You? I said. You’re the person I’ll ask last.

  He slammed the passenger door shut.

  * * *

  Doctor Kim was on vacation in Korea. A friendly, moon-faced man named Wu Sun would take care of me, but first Doctor Pan had to take my blood pressure. They both shook their heads, they said numbers I couldn’t believe, then they put their heads together and whispered, in English, since Doctor Pan was Chinese and didn’t speak Korean—he wanted to know “whether there are any troubles in your life just now” and I had to laugh, oh yes, I said, there are, they were discreet and didn’t ask anything more, just discussed the points into which Wu Sun should insert the needles, including now a few against my extremely high blood pressure. Relax! they implored me in stereo, relax! but I couldn’t relax, and I didn’t yet know that I would not be coming back there again, because I was in the grip of an anxiety that made it impossible for me to lie down calmly for half an hour.

  Sally called. How are you today. —Oh, Sally, I said, something’s wrong.

  She said she could tell from my voice.

  And what about you, I asked her. How are you?

  Very bad. She came over. We walked along the coast, up on Ocean Park Promenade, back and forth, back and forth, holding nothing back as I talked in a foreign language, in the California winter light, it had been raining for weeks, heavy rain, there were eight years of drought to make up for, on TV you could still see people lugging sandbags through the dark, firefighters pumping out basements, or houses sliding down the unreinforced hillsides. The ocean was brown and it beat in high waves against the empty beach.

  Sally said: It’s hopeless, that’s the first and most fundamental thing you have to remember. There is no hope, you know, there is only the duty to keep going, to try to get through it. That’s all we can do.

  I know that, sometimes, I said, and then I forget it again.

  She said she forgot it every day.

  Sally was my test subject. I tried out on her how I felt, I spoke unspeakable words out loud under the cover of the foreign language and the foreign ocean, I saw myself standing there leaning against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree and explaining to her the various types of files, the bad files and the good files, and she had to laugh: Oh, you Germans!

  No, I said, don’t laugh, it’s nothing to laugh about! Sally is Jewish, she’ll understand me, I thought, illogically. Listen, I said, can’t you imagine how you would feel if suddenly, looking at these files, two letters of the alphabet jumped out at you that were like a judge’s sentence, a moral death sentence. IM: Do you even know what that means?

  No, Sally said quite naturally, I have no idea.

  Oh, happy America! “Stasi”? Yes, she had heard of that. Everyone knew about that.

  “Informeller Mitarbeiter,” how can I say that in English.

  Oh, I see. Some kind of agent? Or spy?

  Oh, Sally, you’re killing me. Why couldn’t she speak a single word of German? Everything was even more direct and raw and sickening in a foreign language, of course, where qualifications and distinctions fell away bec
ause I simply didn’t have them available. But what good were qualifications anyway.

  I’ll tell you what happened, okay?

  But that’s exactly what wasn’t so simple. All right: In my memory, which I had struggled to bring to the surface, there were two young men who dropped by your office one day, at the newspaper where you worked, and they wanted some inconsequential information from you about your job. In the files it says that they intercepted you on the street. I don’t remember that. They told you what they were: personnel of the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi.

  When was this? Sally asked.

  1959.

  My goodness, you were a different person then!

  Never mind that, Sally. It’s not about that. It’s about memories, about how we remember: my topic for decades, you understand? And somehow I could have forgotten that. It came to me that you had met these two men two more times, they called themselves Heinz and Kurt or something like that. One time, I just now recall, I said, was probably near the Thälmannplatz subway station, I don’t remember anymore what you talked about with them, I told Sally, in my memory they were short and insignificant encounters, which I did talk about at home, by the way, and I had told them that right off the bat. You weren’t comfortable with them, I still remember that, but everyone knew that these people came to see almost everyone playing any kind of role, that was their job, it didn’t incriminate you. And then, after the “Turn,” when this hunt for IMs in the files began in Germany, I had not one second of thinking that I might be affected too. I didn’t feel the slightest guilt. Do you understand that, Sally?

  Oh yes, I understand, she said. She had been just as certain that she would never find a letter from Ron’s mistress in his jacket pocket. Not that she wanted to compare the two cases, only our false certainties.