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

by Wolf, Christa

  How should I get through the night? And the next, and the one after that, and the one after that? No, I would not go back to the CENTER anymore to collect my mail, the newspapers, the faxes. I don’t have to know everything right away, I thought.

  Peter Gutman didn’t come to the phone. He let himself not be there when you needed him. The crew of the Starship Enterprise on television couldn’t hold my attention that night. There was red wine, cheese. I paced back and forth in my apartment. There were Thomas Mann’s diaries, I could flip through those, picking out passages unsystematically. I was touched to read what he wrote there about his last great love, Franzl, a young waiter. How he had asked himself whether he should burn his diaries or whether he wanted posterity to know who he was. Finally: They should know who I was, but only after twenty or twenty-five years when everyone is dead. “To write about all that, admitting everything, would destroy me.” I thought: Not writing about it at all would have suffocated him. Breaking off the writing, and what the writing meant—the experiment on yourself, the desire to get to know yourself down to the bottom—that would have been like stopping a life-sustaining treatment in the throes of a serious disease, I thought.

  So is life a serious disease, the way we are forced to lead it? I wondered.

  How do people live under a dictatorship? That word “dictatorship” in reference to our social relations came with the “Turn.” I thought I knew what a dictatorship was, I had lived through one already, after all, until I was sixteen, and you couldn’t compare that regime to the following forty years I had also lived through, I thought, and I resisted equating the two. But the question stayed with me: How do people live under a dictatorship?

  I sit here in my study, one and a half decades after I was asked that question, in front of a thick pile of manuscript pages that has unexpectedly turned up recently, from the literary estate of a colleague I had known fairly well, who was younger than me and who died young. He drank himself to death, it was said, and we all knew why. You were there in person at the beginning of the tragedy—that is the only word for a chain of events that ends with a dead man—and you never forgot it: A gathering of authors, convened on orders from “the highest places,” in the new building of the Council of State with carpets on the stairs and thick curtains that opened or closed in front of high windows with the push of a button. The government of the workers and peasants could now afford that. A gloomy and at the same time tense mood; partly informed functionaries indicated that there was danger up ahead. Once again, literature and writers were going to be blamed for societal problems, this time excesses on the part of the youth. Literature was giving young people models of behavior inimical to the state and an example was lying right there on the table: the advance publication of a chapter from an unfinished novel, Rummelplatz (Amusement Park), whose author had done exactly what the Party had not long ago demanded that writers do—spent time in one of the biggest companies, SAG Wismut, lived and worked with the workers, and described the development of several characters in that environment. The journal had printed a chapter describing the crazy state of affairs in the company’s early years, mining uranium for the Soviet Union’s armaments program and thus helping to secure world peace. Who was that supposed to be useful for? the general secretary of the Party asked. Taking all these long since overcome conditions and blowing them all out of proportion now, in a novel? Did they think the Party hadn’t known what was going on? Of course it knew, but it had to work with the people it had—including old Nazis, including criminals—and it reeducated them as best it could. Some of them did have leading positions in this or that big company. Some of them finally had come down in the world, others had disappeared into the West, fine, you always have to count on taking a few losses. But what did this comrade writer accomplish by describing drinking binges to the readers of today, especially the young people? The journal was slid across the table to the general secretary, where the passages in question had been marked; he read them, clearly for the first time.

  A long, embarrassed silence. The break was announced ahead of schedule, with drinks and snacks, and the lower functionaries pleaded with all of you to say something for God’s sake. A transcript exists of the statement you contributed, trying to defend the fact that literature has to deal with conflicts and suggest a different way of interacting with “the young people.” Other people also spoke up for the author under attack, and in the end it seemed as though the worst had been prevented.

  That was in 1965. Did we still believe that we could influence the opinions and even the actions of the people in charge of the government by talking, by presenting arguments? Reality, we thought, was a powerful argument itself, if only one could hear it. Power and intellect joined together: a typical illusion of German intellectuals and one that had already run aground once on the German Misère. The author’s close connection to the country he was writing about rang out from every page of the book being criticized. He had not wanted to live anywhere else. No artist in our society would be ruined the way they were in the exploiter’s societies before us and all around us—this was a moral code we thought we shared with the government.

  I remember a night in California. Christmas, with its temperature in the high seventies, was over. Social life was at a standstill; no one seemed to be in the mood to meet anyone after work. Or maybe it was only I who felt isolated, even rejected. I had brought a heavy package of newspapers and faxes with me back from the CENTER, refusing to protect myself, and I read through the articles and essays about my case, one after the other. By that point they were appearing in different languages; reports about my case filled the news shows and newspapers not only in Germany but in the United States too, and in almost every European country.

  After hesitating a long time, I called Berlin, no one answered, and I pictured all the people I knew so well sitting in a brightly lit restaurant, clinking their glasses. I seriously wondered what I should do. How to get through the night. I paged through Pema the nun’s book and she informed me that every day, every single minute of my life, was exactly the right one for me and that I should accept this fact in order to keep my spirit in balance. I turned on the television and saw a program about a group of women with cancer: they met to do exercises against fear, and died one after the other. I lay down in bed and sought long and hard for evidence I could use to defend myself. I didn’t find any. There was not a single corner of Dr. Freud’s overcoat I could cling to. I could feel myself sinking into a whirlpool and knew I was in danger. To lose myself at the bottom of the whirlpool seemed very tempting, like the only possible way. I thought about how to do it, that distracted me a little. The voice inside me saying I couldn’t do this to the people who cared about me, suggesting that I should at least wait until the next day, was very soft. I took some sleeping pills and paid close attention to make sure I wasn’t taking too many.

  I fell asleep, or lost consciousness at least, and experienced my own death. It was not a dream, it was another kind of experience. It was my limbs growing cold, from the feet up, while I stayed fully conscious, I knew what was happening, I wasn’t scared, I knew that the wave of coldness would reach my heart, I gradually got stiff, with my eyes open, I was dead, but I could still see, I saw my surroundings, the walls, the window, I also saw myself lying on a wide bed. It wasn’t bad. When I woke up it was still dark, it took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t dead and to start to work the stiffness out of my body. I thought: Now I know what it’s like to die, and I’m not afraid of it anymore. I felt something like a small consolation.

  The next few days, I remember, were very dull and ordinary. I did what there was to do, read everything I was sent, saw the flood of paper swell, didn’t feel a thing. I was dead after all, and it was good, nothing mattered to me anymore. As always, I sat for hours at my little machine and wrote up everything I saw and heard. At the CENTER people looked at me sidelong and avoided me, that was good too.

  A senior staff member who was respon
sible for taking care of us invited me out to an expensive, sterile restaurant and wanted to hear “my version of the story.” He can’t have found it very reassuring. I could hear from the embarrassed things he was saying that he had had to defend my presence at the CENTER to his superiors at the highest levels, who in turn had to justify themselves before a shocked public. As I must know, people took “such things” very seriously here. I asked if I should leave. He was startled by the question and said so. They stood behind their scholars here, he said. They had even had a scholar a few years ago who turned out to have been a not totally insignificant member of a Nazi organization. I had serious difficulty suppressing a wicked burst of laughter.

  An instinct for self-preservation still seemed to be operating within me: I made sure to spend an hour every day around noon on my bench in Ocean Park, looking at the water. At some point, Peter Gutman found out and simply came and sat next to me. He didn’t say anything. Finally he said: You are neglecting your friends, Madame. I shrugged. After another while he asked if I had any plans to take part in life again at some point. That was just what I didn’t know. Did I think that there was something to be gained by this isolation, then? It wasn’t about that. What was it about, then? Then I knew: It was about getting through a danger zone. Crossing it while staying as numb as possible. As a way to avoid pain. But I didn’t say that.

  Well, fine, Peter Gutman said. He only wanted to tell me that he had gotten up to speed. Read a few items. Probably understood a few items too. He realized that at the moment I didn’t want to listen to what he wanted to tell me, but he would rather say it too early than too late. I was working myself up into an unnecessary psychosis. The cause, when you looked at it objectively, was minor. Obviously the media was blowing it out of proportion. Why did I let it get to me so much? Did I really take myself that seriously? Had I wanted to see myself as unerring and irreproachable? Isn’t that a bizarre kind of vanity?

  This, of all things, is what never should have happened to me, I said. It was a kind of inner refrain.

  Well, in that case, Peter Gutman said, if that’s how it is, I hope that one day you will be happy that it happened to you of all people.

  And in fact that eventually came true, weeks later, when, to my relief, I could write, in an angry letter to someone who should have known better but who had expressed a hypocritical regret about my alleged misstep in one of the countless newspaper articles about me: You can all go to hell. But some other things had to happen before I got to that point. The telephone had to take on a life of its own and bring me voices from a world I had lost, where people were apparently still living a normal life. Grace Paley had to call me from her house in the woods on the East Coast, and she had to say: You should know I am with you. The world gets worse and worse but people get better and better. Lev Kopelev had to call and beg me to explain things only to myself and my children, not to the petty small-minded people everywhere. While we were talking I saw him walking around his Moscow again, with his patriarch’s beard, powerfully striding ahead with his walking stick, grim about slanderous newspaper articles and worried that a new wave of anti-Semitism might be looming. I saw before me the writers’ house in Leningrad, where they fed you cutlets and greasy kasha even in the morning, I saw you and G. sitting on the stairs with the old translator couple, listening to their stories about the intrigues against Akhmatova and the condemnations of her in the Party Congresses, I saw the flowers still lying on Akhmatova’s nearby grave. Saw the man who kept aloof, spoke little, and was surrounded by an aura of unapproachability in which he had had to spend many years. The term “gulag” was not yet known. You and G. drank in the information, you wanted to know where you were living. I wrote on my little machine:

  Sometimes I think I only have to make the right kind of effort and then the right sentences, the saving sentences, will appear. But then I learn yet again that no efforts are of any use. What I need to see does not want to show itself. I suspect it is something very simple, and that’s why it is so well hidden.

  After a long time I am reading the nun’s book again. It says that you should not try to avoid pain and suffering. You should just sit there and calmly observe yourself. That’s how a person is. We are not in this world to improve ourselves, but to open.

  But it’s just when you try to do that, I thought, that you’re punished for it. You have to be prepared for that, the nun would say. That too is something you have to withstand.

  What else had to happen? One evening, when I was going home and I had turned in my keys to security on the fifth floor, the guards were sitting in front of the little television and they turned to face me. Over their shoulders I saw the dark outlines of a city, with flashes of light from explosions. One of them said: We’re bombing Baghdad, missiles. One of the men kept saying Unbelievable, and I couldn’t tell if this was an expression of horror or admiration for American technology. An American reporter in Baghdad was answering questions and he said the worst was twenty-five minutes ago when the earth shook from a rocket strike. It’s an indescribable feeling, he said, when the missiles fly right over your head with an eerie wail. Yes, Baghdad was under fire, “but we don’t know much.” An older woman walked past, from the photography department, and she looked at the images and asked: What happened? The men said: Baghdad is being attacked. Oh my goodness, she said, and she murmured something along the lines of how she hadn’t watched the news for a couple days and now this! I felt that my role was to stay quiet, not butt in. These were Americans among themselves. A hotel for foreigners had been hit, I heard the announcer say, and also a building where the Iraqis had been working on material for building nuclear weapons, but immediately after that someone from the UN said he had been in that facility a few weeks earlier and it had long since stopped operation.

  Had Bush discussed it with Clinton? we asked each other and ourselves the next day, sitting in the lounge drinking our tea. The Clinton government took power. The bells were supposed to ring throughout the country, everywhere, at the same time—a new era was supposed to begin. While the bombs were falling on Baghdad.

  Francesco said: The American dream. It turned out the Americans in our group did not believe in it. A blond woman, middle-aged, a friend of Emily’s, a lawyer, said that only now, from reading the book by Malcolm X, did she really understand how a black person experienced white America; she had recently moved to a neighborhood where middle-class blacks lived too, which at first really annoyed her, because she simply wasn’t used to seeing black people doing normal things like white people. Her son was going to a private school where there were no black children, and he didn’t play with any at home either.

  That morning I had heard an interview on the radio with a black cook. She was very old now and had worked for a long time for the Rockefeller family, and later for the family of an eminent politician who was apparently involved in a case of fraud. She was asked if she had known anything about that, or if they had talked about it among themselves in the kitchen. Oh, no! she said, very surprised at the question. We had too much to do. Cooking three meals a day! It wasn’t easy.

  Hmm, Peter Gutman said. Classless society.

  He had shown up again at my door one night with as harmless a look on his face as he could manage. May I? he asked. He was curious about what I was writing. I handed him a couple of pages. It was the answer to a friend’s letter, a kind of self-analysis. He read it for a long time, too long I thought, and said nothing. We drank the wine he had brought and ate crackers.

  As you know, Peter Gutman said after a while, I have a telephone relationship.

  And what does she have to say at the moment?

  She counsels moderation. Especially toward oneself. She can’t stand it when she sees someone lashing out at themselves.

  Who does that, you?

  I do it too, Peter Gutman said. Sometimes.

  At the moment?

  We are not talking about me, Madame. We are talking about you. Listen to what a wise old m
an has to say: To love oneself is the most difficult love of all.

  And you, my friend, win the prize for transparent attempts to dodge the question. But I’ve been asking myself recently if I didn’t miss out on the greatest chance of my life.

  And what might that have been? Peter Gutman asked.

  To come to the West. In May 1945. To cross the Elbe. Our caravan of refugees was trying to get there, like all the other caravans and all the war-weary soldiers who had thrown down their weapons too. The officers too—they had torn off their epaulettes and stripes and medals and burned their papers in little fires at the side of the road, which I despised them for, by the way. It was a matter of hours. We thought we had made it, the Americans were the initial occupation power, they took us in, then the English controlled the corner of Mecklenburg where we were being put up. But in the end, that same summer, it was the Soviet troops who advanced to the Elbe after all, as agreed, and who established their system in the eastern part of Germany. That was where I grew up, and where I lived as though it were a matter of course. It came down to a couple of hours: if the landowner whose carts we were crouching in had had horses that were not so worn out that even blows of the whip couldn’t get them to move any faster—I would have lived an entirely different life. I would have been a different person. That’s how it was in Germany then, you were in the hands of utter chance.