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

by Wolf, Christa

You had to get undressed for a strip search. Here? you said. With no curtain on the windows? No way!

  The policewoman opened a closet door and told you to get undressed behind it. She found the election-worker ID you’d hidden in your sock, you grabbed it out of her hands, she tried to get it back and scratched your hand in the process. So this is how you treat people here! you snapped at her, and you started tearing the paper up into little pieces before her eyes. That’s what people did in that situation, you knew it from books and movies and hadn’t forgotten what they’d told you over and over in the union headquarters. You destroyed the very document you could have used to legitimate yourself. The policewoman, furious by now, screamed at you: Are you all like this? and you, calmly but shaking inside, answered: Not all of us, but a lot.

  Such great dialogue, already perfect for a book. I cannot count how many times that purple map of the Soviet Union later appeared before my mind’s eye but first you ended up in a squad car, separated from Lorchen, who was legally a juvenile, and you had to spend the night in a four-person cell at the Moabit detention center—even today when I drive past its long wall, guarded with barbed wire, I give it my regards with my eyes. Naturally the three women who were already in the cell gathered around you: Why are you here? —Fliers, you said. They turned away, almost disgusted. Oh, just political! They had more serious problems.

  One of them paced back and forth in the cell and burst out with the same sentence every minute: Over a toothbrush! When asked, she expanded this one phrase into a long flowery story that started with an evening stroll with her “spouse,” continued with a trip to a drugstore to buy some soap, where the underhanded pharmacist had thoughtlessly left a whole glass of toothbrushes unobserved in reach of the customers, which led to the taking of one single toothbrush, but then the pharmacist had an excuse to send a cop car after them. It’s incitement to theft!—

  Fair enough. But even a class-based justice system would not be able to turn the theft of one single toothbrush into a serious offense, you tried to reassure the woman. Then she planted herself in front of you and asked you a question fraught with danger: Do you know men? You didn’t have a quick answer ready, strictly speaking you had not known many men but it wasn’t about that kind of knowing, it was about whether you could count on a man if “they” gave him the once-over. —“They” who? —You know, they. If they were really grilling him to see if he’d sing. —No idea. But what was he supposed to…? —Huh! Contemptuous hand gesture. If they show up with a search warrant. If they really push him into a corner, the way they like to do. If he loses his nerve and lifts up the plank in our kitchen … —Then what? The woman was stunned at how naive I was. Then they’d find something, wouldn’t they. Maybe find a whole lot of something. Then they’d have just what they wanted: Theft in conjunction with dealing in stolen goods, that’s what they’d call it. They love to overdo it when they can play a dirty trick on the likes of us. And then they’ll look in our files, of course. And then …

  Even you understood what she was getting at. Men could keep quiet too, you promised the woman, even though you didn’t actually have a single piece of evidence in mind. Or at least that’s what you hoped for her, with all your heart, the same way you hoped that the other pretty young woman would get through the interrogation scheduled for tomorrow without “them” being able to get a confession out of her. Even to you, the fresh-faced novice, it was clear that she, a chambermaid in a famous fancy hotel, had stolen a rich guest’s jewelry, which was what she was being charged with. They always pick on the little guy! she cried, in a Berlin accent, and you could only agree with her wholeheartedly. They had been questioning her for weeks already and she was starting to get her story mixed up. No one would ever find the hiding place, she said suddenly, not even her boyfriend. She wanted to finally have a good life, at least when she got out of jail. She deserved that much. You completely agreed. She should just keep an iron-clad silence from now on, you suggested, no one could prove anything. —You’re damn right! she cried, and you said she should always keep in mind the good life that she deserved just as much as the rich. Damn right! But you could see that the woman was worn out, her hands shook; tomorrow they’ll get her, you anxiously thought, tomorrow she’ll blab everything. —You’ve got nothing to worry about with your fliers, she added, almost envious. Nothing can happen to you.

  That was true. Or was it? You were put in a solitary cell in the Moabit detention center and interrogated for a week yourself, every day. Nowadays everyone knows what a jail cell looks like: a cot that folds up during the day, a wooden locker, a narrow table, a cupboard on the wall with the requisite prison utensils, soap, comb, toothbrush cup. A sink. A toilet behind a low partition.

  A punctilious social service worker visited you and got not one word out of you besides the most necessary information. Religion? she asked. None, you said. At which she wrote a single word, DISSIDENT, on the thin card she then slipped into the wooden slot prepared for it on the wall cupboard. That was how I first encountered that word, the one which would, much later, reappear in my life with an entirely different meaning, and which meanwhile made the pastor who also came to see you very upset. He left before long. Since you didn’t get the books you wanted—a Russian grammar and Marx’s Capital—you browsed around, bored, in a thick book of uninspired prose, stories from Shakespeare’s plays, and you thought out the deceptions and false trails you were using to try to lead your interrogator astray about your family relationships. He was an unambitious man, middle-aged, who shook his head often. He only wanted to know which institution had “in truth” sent you, which was hardly a secret, but of course he didn’t hear anything about it from you. He tried to ascertain if you had been given other assignments, besides this unfortunate electoral agitation, and what relationship you had to the West Berlin members of the Communist Party—all questions you stubbornly refused to answer, even though it would have been easy enough to answer them in the negative.

  He couldn’t get anywhere with you, but since you had told him, totally unnecessarily, that your father was dead, while in fact he was visiting your family in Karlshorst with your mother and was in the best of health, you had to think up the most cloak-and-dagger secret codes imaginable to communicate this claim to your oblivious family and prevent them from contradicting it in the presence of the interrogator, for example at one of the visits that they were allowed. So you had to watch while your mother, faced with secret messages you were trying to convey to her in short, curt sentences that of course she couldn’t decipher, started to doubt your sanity, grew more and more confused, and finally, to your fury and dismay, tried to explain your behavior to your interrogator as youthful folly.

  Meanwhile you couldn’t deny that jail was not agreeing with you, that you were by no means as calm and cool as you were acting, that your stomach was in knots and you could hardly swallow a bite of the prison food. You grew terribly anxious and nervous and could hardly sleep. You studiously avoided the word “afraid.” Outraged colleagues and comrades sent care packages of candy and vegetables to your cell, solidarity actions were conducted “on the outside,” a condemnatory article appeared in the newspaper.

  You knew from books that prisoners were supposed to make conspiratorial contact with the other prisoners, so you slid your stool across the floor and stood on it under the half-open barred window, pulled yourself up with the bars, and loudly whispered to either side, asking if anyone could hear you. There was an answer from the left: a despondent woman’s voice. Whispering or talking in a half-loud voice, constantly interrupted by the sounds of prison life, you eventually found out the relevant information about the woman in the neighboring cell: She was from the GDR, accused of espionage activities in West Berlin for the Stasi. You couldn’t pretend not to hear it: This woman was truly afraid. So here was a mission for you: You had to encourage her, firm up her resolve, which was about to give out completely. You didn’t ask her if the charges were true, obviously, you just urged h
er not to admit a thing. Surely there was no way they could prove anything. She didn’t seem to be so sure. Once, when a policewoman took you for questioning, showing obvious contempt for you, you saw your neighbor walking ahead of you down the long hall between two American MPs who were tall as tree trunks: a short, thin person with thin colorless hair. You had pictured spies rather differently.

  Then the election was over, with humiliating results for the Communists. Interest in you faded and you were released; two students you didn’t know met you at the prison gates carrying flowers and smuggled you onto the streetcar with their tickets since they thought it was inexcusable to exchange your good Eastern money for Western currency to buy a streetcar ticket.

  I still remember how relieved you were when you could ring the bell of your apartment door. When your young daughter looked up from the bathtub and saw you. I don’t think any mental picture of her from that time has etched itself as firmly in my mind as this one, and I still remember the pang you felt at the strange look she gave you at first, and I remember that the question occurred to you of whether this whole effort was worth the fact that your child had had to be without you for more than a week.

  It goes without saying that your strongly worded complaint to the comrades at the union headquarters, about the fact that they hadn’t told you the whole truth about the nature of the agitation material they were giving you, was gently but firmly dismissed. The comrades in the leadership had done it for a reason, you could be sure of that. Besides, you had proven yourself in the best possible way. But precisely because you had proven yourself, you could continue to disagree with them and could also give them your opinion of the pathetic quality of the material—with all its other problems, it was terribly written. That was when you heard for the first time the charge that would accompany you from then on: aestheticism.

  Would “dogmatic” be the right word, I wonder, to label the person you were then? Uncompromising. Rigorous. Radical. It’s words like that that come to mind. Above all: Sure that you possessed the truth, which always makes a person intolerant. The overcoat of Dr. Freud. But what if I turned the coat backward? Inside out? Described my conversion—the con-version, the turning-around—and could stop being intolerant of myself? Right now? I thought. If not now, when? But it was impossible.

  I sat in the hairdresser’s chair and didn’t like the face in the mirror, as I usually didn’t when I was forced to look at it for a long time. Everything in the salon was finely orchestrated, first an apprentice named Jerry draped a cloth around me and washed my hair, then a sort of senior designer had me describe the haircut I wanted while Caroline was there, who then quickly and skillfully took care of me without a moment’s hesitation or a single superfluous movement, I thought. She had ended up here from Munich, she said, the first year was hard, without knowing the language, but now she spoke English perfectly, it seemed to me. And didn’t we have to be intolerant, I thought, the tape recording in my head didn’t stop for a second, against those who wanted to turn back the wheel of history while we were eliminating the reasons behind humanity’s false paths, pulling them up radically, by the roots. Caroline told me about her trip to Mexico, freedom is the consciousness of necessity, what else, you were free to take the step from prehistory into the history of humanity, you freed yourself of the errors, the deeply etched habits of the old era, including not least the greed for possessions, a barely comprehensible absurdity for all of you who had nothing to possess. I saw that Caroline was cutting my hair carefully, but clearly much too short, a summer cut, at least in my opinion. Human beings are good and can be improved, or else what is there? Caroline’s story of the American boyfriend she had found and then lost again didn’t exactly touch me to the core, she said to err is human, and I said: You’re right about that.

  I knew that a journalist from Germany I couldn’t put off was waiting for me at the MS. VICTORIA. I felt flush and I was nervous about standing up, my joints were probably blocked again. Dr. Freud could probably have explained to me why my body, or whoever was responsible for it, was trying harder and harder to prevent me from walking. He would probably have advised me to follow my instinct and not agree to the meeting with Miss Leisegang in the first place. But since I no longer trusted my instincts, and since Miss Leisegang knew how to frame the meeting with her as a kind of duty, I violently suppressed my unease and met with her.

  Waiting for me was a towering blonde with a ponytail wearing red capri pants, a shiny beige blouse with bright stripes and colorful top hats all over it, and a short red-and-yellow satin bomber jacket. She immediately started talking and didn’t stop for an hour. Her illness, which had brought her to America, she was trying to cure it in the desert in Palm Springs. Her father, whose fault it was that she never drank a drop of alcohol, although unfortunately she was a chain-smoker. How she met her husband. How he knew how to handle her dealings with the editorial offices, where there were intrigues against her, exactly the same as with TV, everyone there was out to get her, which made her deeply depressed, so now she only worked for the stations on short-term, concrete assignments. I understood that her concrete assignment this time was me.

  I soon realized that she cared much more about her questions than my answers, which she had brought along with her, already worked out, and which there was hardly anything I could do to change by that point. She had gathered from certain publications that I had become totally disillusioned with East Germany quite early on—so why had I not acted against the regime? Why had I stayed? I must have had to constantly twist and deform my writing. No, she couldn’t think of any examples at the moment. Why hadn’t I written a book about the deplorable state of the GDR instead of Cassandra? How do people live under a dictatorship? She knew the GDR only from two visits to the Leipzig Book Fair. She had not read my most important books, but she was a huge fan of my work, really. She was going to make a movie about intellectuals in the GDR. With us in the West, she said, you can say anything you want in public.

  I was speechless and helpless. I knew that no explanations I offered would be of any use. I tried to object by pointing out how the West German public and media were currently reacting to my file. Yes, of course they do have this mode of investigative journalism, it’s frightful, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what nasty people the editors were, real hunting dogs. She wouldn’t have believed it herself. But was it really so important what people were saying about me in public? I drew her attention to the fact that journalists who had tried to present the facts objectively had been reprimanded by their bosses, and that neither she nor anyone else had had the courage to speak in public about the conditions in the editorial offices that she had just described to me; they all kept nice and quiet so they could keep their places at the trough.

  Yes, well, capitalism—although actually she would call the Western world a “free market society,” not “capitalism”—it was dog-eat-dog, of course, naturally that goes with competition, but she had traveled almost everywhere in the world and had never found a socioeconomic system that worked better. Next, of course, came her support for the Gulf War, the Americans had such problems these days because they were protecting threatened peoples all over the world and also had to spend their money supporting the poor. Marx didn’t understand a thing about the economy, unfortunately, she had read both volumes of Capital and discussed it all with her husband. Then she had to leave in a hurry, if I hadn’t warned her she would have missed her flight. She hugged me goodbye. I shouldn’t worry if we saw the world differently in some ways. She was a huge fan of mine and would always be one.

  I sat there, numb. If I had read this scene in a book, I thought, I would never have believed it. And I would never use such clichés myself. But why shouldn’t someone be allowed to ask questions, even if, partly out of ignorance, they were painful questions? How would understanding ever arise if no one paid attention to these questions? Again I felt the same feeling of hopelessness: None of it had any point, we didn’t have a chance. But
who was this “we”?

  EVERY LINE I WRITE FROM NOW ON WILL BE USED AGAINST ME

  But hasn’t that always been true, or in any case true for a long while? Haven’t I had quite a long time in which I could, or had to, get used to that fact? What is there to stop me from simply breaking off right here?

  I headed out, it was still light outside—and there it was, the normal life of the normal people walking with me or toward me on Ocean Park Promenade. Wretched, wretched, when was it that I had repeated this word over and over again to myself, like a mantra? It was when you sat looking at your files and a feeling seized you of having been poisoned, a kind of queasiness you had never felt before; when you got to the documents in your files about your works. IM “Jenny,” who clearly had academic training, grew more and more concerned from book to book about your straying into negative-hostile ideological currents; eventually it happened, as happen it must, that she could find nothing in an admittedly somewhat complicated text but a tissue of secret, cleverly encoded messages inimical to the state. You let off some steam by laughing but the subtle poison forced its way inside you and had its effect: Wretched, wretched! you said out loud, driving home from that agency, and another voice inside you countered: There are worse things. Which was true.

  I sat down for a while on a bench in Ocean Park, in the last moments of sunlight. I wanted to drink in the light. A chubby little man around my age sat down next to me, pointed to the ocean where the sun was just going down, and said: That’s wonderful, isn’t it? —Yes, I said. Marvelous. He saw that I had a book with me with the word “Patriarchy” in the title and respectfully asked if I was “a student”; I said: Just reading. He wanted to talk. He told me where he lived in L.A., that it took forty minutes by bus to get here, he loved this place. Oh, I lived in Santa Monica? How fortunate! —It’s just for nine months, I said, I am German. The man thought that was interesting. He had emigrated here from Ireland, twenty years ago already. He wanted to know how it was in Germany since the reunification: Better or worse? I said, Different. Difficult. He said that whenever two different things were thrown together there was always a difficult transition period. In the end would I decide to stay here instead? —No, no, I said. My family is in Berlin too … He understood that. —My husband had let me come here all by myself then? —Yes, I said. He did. —I wondered: Could a scene like that ever happen in a German park?