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

by Wolf, Christa

  Exactly like in Czechoslovakia, I thought, after the Warsaw Pact troops marched in: Translators forbidden to publish found colleagues who would put their names on other people’s work. Similar behaviors and forms of solidarity seemed to develop under similar pressures. Then I was lost in memories.

  Your Czech translator friends could obviously not translate your books under their own names anymore, they were in the inner circle of dissidents. They found a Slovakian German professor who was willing to let his name be used and who didn’t ask for a krone in return. The reader for the publishing house knew, of course, but other than him, you thought, it had to be kept an absolute secret, and when I could read in Prague for the first time after the “Turn,” I told the story and lots of people came up to me after the reading and laughed, saying: But we all knew!

  It was absolutely no consolation to me to learn that dissident opinions were punished on both sides. That what had seemed to be the most deeply divided world was, in its deepest depths, nourished from the same roots, in other words was even more menacing than most of us were willing to believe.

  My name was called and I got my chicken salad sandwich and sparkling apple juice. I put down the newspaper and wanted to start eating but I felt someone looking at me: ten feet away, on the far side of the sidewalk, a very young black woman sitting on the edge of a large stone urn of flowers and staring at me. From her clothing, she could be a homeless person, but I wasn’t sure, since a few feet away from her was one of the little carts people used in supermarkets here, with a neat stack of several bundles inside. She’s hungry, I thought, and my first impulse was to offer her my sandwich but I had already taken a bite. How could I eat under this stare? Which sometimes turned upward, actually, so that only the whites of her eyes were visible. She had woven her hair into many thin braids and tied them into a bun on the back of her head; a few of the strands were dyed a little lighter than the rest of her black hair. She was wearing a thick red parka in the heat and was fussing with the string of pearls on her left wrist; every now and then she let out a mocking laugh, or you might say a mocking laugh slammed into her. I ate my sandwich and decided to give her some money when I walked past her later, but how did I know she wanted money, how did I know she wouldn’t reject my money with the same mocking laugh? How did I even know that her stare saw me at all? She was clearly mentally ill. I didn’t give her anything when I walked past her, or rather slipped past her. I gave the money to two men sitting on two different benches, each man holding a sign: HOMELESS AND HUNGRY; one of them had a paper cup set up in front of him for coins. On the way back I avoided the location where the woman might still be sitting on the edge of the urn of flowers with her mocking laugh. I knew I wouldn’t forget her, but what good did that do her?

  In the Midnight Special bookstore I looked for and found the books by Art Spiegelman that someone had told me I had to read: Maus. The fate of a Jewish family—the author’s—depicted in cartoons, with the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats. A daring, risky move. These are the saddest mice anyone has ever drawn, the woman who had recommended the books to me had said—and she herself was one of the people the books were about. A Survivor’s Tale was the subtitle. I had met people here who defined themselves as survivors of the Holocaust, including this woman, Agnes, who a few days later would take me to a meeting of members of the “second generation.” They survived, she said, which is not the same as living. That’s how some of us still see ourselves, just like our parents.

  On the title page of the first volume of Maus was an aggressive black swastika with a cat face stylized into a Hitler caricature in the middle, and a mouse couple, clearly fugitives, cowering in the swastika’s shadow down below. I stayed up late reading, crying again and again.

  I crossed Wilshire Boulevard; to the right on Third Street was the little dry cleaner’s where I took the silk blouses I had bought cheap. The friendly Korean woman there knew me by that point, called me by my first name, I no longer had to give her my address, she would cry when I left, she said. She worked day after day, twelve hours a day, in this dark and stifling room between cleaned clothes hanging down from the ceiling. After California Avenue was the block with the MS. VICTORIA at the end; the street was lined with exotic trees that would one day burst into thousands of intense red flowers in the shape of bottle brushes, and I was happy when I learned that the trees were actually called bottlebrush trees.

  What else? I pause. I fight against time. In the stacks of paper that I brought back to Europe over the ocean, most of the verbs are in the present tense, of course. I keep forgetting to transpose what I take from the various documents into the past tense. Everything I am describing now is in the past: The day when we finally carried out our plan to take a day trip south, to San Diego, where I bought a wooden snake with some of its joints missing from a kiosk selling Mexican art, the snake that now sits on my little cabinet of souvenirs and reminds me of the conversation I had with the seller. She didn’t want to sell me the snake: It’s broken! she said. And I said: It doesn’t matter, I am broken too. She gave me the snake at a discount. Broken—a good way to put it. My colleagues who had driven south with me noticed that my mood had cleared up, when we were sitting later at a long table at Alfonso’s and enjoying his Mexican cooking: grilled shrimp and steak, or tortillas and red beans.

  Then I spent a long time in the museum, standing in front of Jana Sterbak’s Medea dress: a woman’s body woven out of wire, wrapped in an installation of electrical wires plugged into a socket and flashing on and off and on again. Everything burned on this woman’s skin—life was burning on this woman’s skin—it was the dress that Medea was said to have given to Glauce, her rival, that burned her skin. A text was projected onto a screen and I wrote it down:

  I want you to feel the way I do: There’s wire wrapped all around my head and my skin grates on my flesh from the inside. How can you be so comfortable only 5" to the left of me? I don’t want to hear myself think, feel myself move. It’s not that I want to be numb, I want to slip under your skin: I will listen for the sound you hear, feed on your thought, wear your clothes. Now I have your attitude and you’re not comfortable anymore. Making them yours you relieved me of my opinions, habits, impulses. I should be grateful but instead … you’re beginning to irritate me: I am not going to live with myself inside your body, and I would rather practice being new on someone else.

  The woman with her burning skin who wanted to slip into my skin, make me feel what she was feeling, free herself from her pain, but who couldn’t feel at home in someone else’s body after all. A longing I knew well. A disappointment I knew well.

  * * *

  The “second generation” group met in the San Fernando Valley. Agnes, a tall, bony woman around sixty, drove me the long way north on the freeways. She had to talk. She had to tell me about her husband, a Russian writer, who had emigrated from the Soviet Union as a Jew in the pre-Gorbachev era and whom she, a child from a German-Jewish family, had met here, to her unspeakable happiness. He had written a book critical of Stalin, which she gave me. She could not get over his death three years ago. She was furious as she told me what several of her female friends had told her: that at least she could be happy that her husband had died and not left her for another woman.

  We found the building where the second generation group had reserved one of the smaller rooms, but the room was still much too big, there were maybe forty people spread out in the first few rows. I was glad to see Ruth there; I was feeling very OTHER. These were not the same people who had met at Ruth’s: these were mostly older. The head of the group, running the event, was a good-looking man in his mid-forties, a doctor, very confident, experienced as a moderator. He introduced me with a comment that shocked me and that I disagreed with: that I was “a lone voice in the wilderness.” He said I was the first German they had invited. He said that most of the people there had never spoken to a German person. There were hardly any old people from the “first generation” there, e
xcept for his own, very old mother, a Viennese woman, who was supposed to help me with translation but who was so agitated that I had to try to get by as best I could on my own with my clumsy English.

  The people there took me, totally understandably, as representative of today’s Germany. They asked me about the situation in “Germany”—West vs. East meant nothing to them. They asked tough questions and I tried to be clear but sympathetic in my answers. The reports they were getting from Germany today confirmed the judgment they had of that country, with which they identified me. I tried once again to assure them that most Germans today were not anti-Semitic. I could see that many of them did not believe me. I felt that it was especially important to convince one younger, attractive woman but she kept not believing my protestations and I could not convince her.

  At the end of the event, the young couple who had asked me if they could take their child to Germany came up to me and told me they had decided to do it. I was glad to hear it. We were still sitting in a large group in a café; I was eating ice cream and could hardly take part in the conversation because I was exhausted and had almost completely lost my ability to speak English. Ruth said a particularly warm goodbye and Agnes drove me back. It was already dark. She was a bit embarrassed during the drive and told me that the young, attractive woman had been telling people in the group that I had collaborated intensively with the secret police in the GDR and had denounced my colleagues. That was an unexpected blow. So now I had to tell Agnes all about that too.

  The room I returned to felt alien to me. My little BROTHER computer sat there spitefully on the narrow end of the long table, with its gaping lid, yearning to suck in empty sheets of paper and spit them out again covered with my confessions, an automatic process for which it no longer needed me. Diskettes with mysterious labels were filled up behind my back, again and again I would be told the disk was full and I had no idea what it could be so full of. DISK CAPACITY EXHAUSTED—finally I told the machine that I was exhausted too and it coolly replied: BACKUP FILE SAVING PLEASE WAIT. My breaks and pauses were dictated by my word processor, now it was rattling again already and spitting out what I had not typed in, it was a master at undetectable forgeries, someday it would have to answer for its crimes, when I had had enough of this unpleasant game and stopped production. Because how could I continue to put up with the manipulations it was imposing, in the depths of its unfathomable program, on my unprogrammed, comparatively harmless and credulous entries? It even confronted me with questions of conscience: SAVE? DELETE? Do whatever you want, that’s what I really wanted to say; my index finger played with the tempting key. One soft little push and the text would disappear. So now I had to see what I really wanted. Had my rage and disgust reached the point where it wanted to destroy the object of this rage and disgust? I pressed the other key: SAVE. Rattling in triumph, my little machine gulped down a new portion of characters. READING DISK INDEX. Then I pressed the button that erased the screen, but the text’s disappearance was deceptive. Onward.

  It’s strange, I don’t feel guilty, can you explain to me why that is? I had recently started talking to the gray American squirrel that darted across the low wooden shingle roof and up to my window every day; when I was sitting at my little word processor, I saw it from very close up. But no matter what I felt like asking it, my squirrel never answered. It was February by that point, the buds on the trees on Third Street between Wilshire Boulevard and California Avenue had opened all at once, a lush white cherry blossom in the middle of winter. But what does “winter” mean here?

  I was standing on Santa Monica Pier with Therese—I saw her often in those days and her desperate love for this city was contagious. The pier enchanted her. It was a flawless day: the sea beat against the shore in little, foaming white waves. Malibu Bay, Therese claimed, was the most beautiful stretch of beach in the world, and I didn’t argue, but had she really never noticed that the water here had no smell? This magnificent Pacific Ocean beneath us, this unforgettable translucent green with a white fringe of foam, no show nature could put on could ever be more beautiful, but did it smell like the ocean? Algae, fish, water, like the modest, gray Baltic? Therese had never noticed the lack of smell and in fact she didn’t want to. She wanted to take me to see her friends in Venice, I had to meet them but first she had to introduce me to Venice with its unique charm, of course it’s a bit overrun with tourists, true, the canals that were supposed to imitate or suggest the original Venice had been filled in, true, the formerly romantic buildings were a bit dilapidated now, it’s true, but wasn’t that precisely its appeal? Wasn’t this the epitome of the spirit of California? In Venice, where it’s too crowded to walk even on weekdays and where all the weird and semiweird types in Los Angeles—now including us, apparently—come pouring in on Saturdays and Sundays, squeezing past shacks with millions of T-shirts for sale and crowding around the squares where the performers are. A thin black man pulled his volunteers—or should I say: victims?—out of the crowd with snakelike movements: a black woman, a white woman, a Mexican woman, a Japanese woman. The white woman didn’t want to do it, she absolutely refused to go out onto the dance area, she was a little chubby and was wearing a dress that was too short for her given her unshapely knees, the other three women were more attractive, but the black man had no mercy and pulled the white woman into the center, she slipped out of his grasp and now he got annoyed, he held her tight in his grip while her baby-faced boyfriend left her in the lurch and accepted with an embarrassed grin her handbag which the black man condescendingly held out to him, then the man turned on a tape recorder, a tango, and took the Mexican woman first and danced with her: he was an artist, he danced with each of the women according to her own music—he danced them, if that’s a word, he made the puppets dance—he never got too close to them, it was all out in the open, and nonetheless it was a rape taking place that no one could prove against him, no one could even mention it without seeming ridiculous, only the black woman was a match for him and she whirled around him, laughing loud, with obscene gestures, until he laughed too and accepted it and transformed the duet from a kind of animal-training into the dance of a true pair. The white woman looked pathetic in contrast, especially since the black man treated her with exaggerated politeness: he danced out all her weak points, so to speak, to the thunderous applause of the predominantly nonwhite audience.

  He’s taking revenge, Therese said, and we hurried to leave.

  It was an unforgettable day, the day Therese took me to meet the gang. The day I met Jane, and Toby, and Margery. I called them “the young people” and I could tell that I felt curious about them. Not Susan yet—Susan was just a rumor, a topic of conversation. Susan was one of them, and then again not. Actually, she had wanted to be there too that day, but no one who knew her had really expected her to show up. She never kept appointments. She wants to make herself seem interesting by acting ditzy, Margery said. Jane thought she really was ditzy, there was no other explanation for her baffling behavior. If they were trying to make me curious about this Susan, they certainly succeeded.

  We were sitting in the blazing sun outside the famous German café on Main Street in Venice, eating authentic German apple tarts and talking as though we had known each other a long time—unlike the way it usually was in America, I thought, where people do talk right away but it stays at the level of nice-to-see-you conversations. This was different. I liked that they acted with each other like I wasn’t there, as though I wasn’t disturbing them, thereby proving that I truly wasn’t. Susan, I learned, was a rich woman—No, not well-off, Therese said: really rich. She owns an island. Not a big island, but still. At the same time she was rather stingy, like many rich people. For instance, she lived on one of Venice’s narrow streets in a tiny little house that was about to collapse, like all the houses here. But expensive! Margery shouted. Don’t kid yourselves about that! Anyway, Susan was also about to buy a villa in Beverly Hills, she’s haggling with the broker so much that she’s going to le
t it slip through her fingers. Everyone laughed. I learned that the modern buildings forming one side of the small square where we were sitting belonged to Susan too, and that she had let Jane open a photography gallery in one. Would I like to see it? Of course.