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

by Wolf, Christa

  I learned that Jane was a photographer herself—an excellent one, Margery whispered to me. She, on the other hand, gave counseling to married couples who couldn’t get along, she explained with a shrug. Gotta earn your money somehow. Sometimes she really had it up to here with these rich people who made each other’s lives hell out of sheer boredom. And Toby? A thin, quiet, younger man; I got the impression that no one wanted to walk too close to him. I saw him fleetingly put a hand on Therese’s shoulder and saw how she rubbed her cheek against it while we were crossing to Jane’s studio. Jane had discovered a very gifted young Hungarian photographer—landscapes, faces as I had never seen them before. Jane loved the Hungarian’s work and was as proud of the photographs as she would have been if they were her own. I felt more and more drawn to her, but did I still have enough time to start new friendships here? Then Therese was already arranging our next get-together.

  Ruth called. She absolutely had to see me and discuss the evening with the “second generation,” which she couldn’t stop thinking about. She was disappointed with the people there, they only wanted to wrap themselves up in their worries and prejudices about Germany and refused to make an effort to perceive new realities. They categorically refused to set foot in Germany. They had terrible problems with their parents, some of them had moved far away just so that they wouldn’t have to see them so much, but they had uncritically adopted their parents’ views about Germans.

  That’s certainly understandable, I said.

  Yes and no, Ruth said. The other side of the coin was that they longed to talk to Germans about the wounds that the Germans had inflicted on them. I had probably noticed that myself. Several of them had called her after the event and said: Finally, they had been able to talk to a credible German for once in their lives.

  What more could anyone expect? I said.

  My mother is very sick, Ruth said. She’s going to die.

  My heart started pounding: The mother would die without the daughter having reconciled with her. Ruth guessed my thoughts. No, she said, they had talked things out. They had found their way back to each other. There was no trace of resentment against her mother in her anymore.

  Are you crying? Peter Gutman asked when he walked in. Tears of joy, I said. You’ve come at a good time.

  Glad to hear it, he said. And I don’t hear it often.

  Self-pity? I was trying to provoke him.

  Sarcasm, he said. Better than self-pity.

  Is your mother still alive?

  No. My older brother died of cancer suddenly a couple years ago, and his death broke her will to live. We had kept his cancer a secret from my mother. My other brother, who now has cancer himself and doesn’t want to acknowledge it, now blames us for that. To this day I’m not sure what the right thing to do was. She died of grief, you’d have to say.

  I said nothing.

  So I’ve managed to leave you speechless. I’m using you as a life raft, you realize.

  The blind leading the blind, I said.

  I sometimes wonder what could have implanted such a powerful superego inside you.

  So we’re back to Freud? But that’s something I can tell you exactly, Monsieur: Prussian Protestantism. Work hard, be humble, loyal, and always honest. Virtues preached by my dear mother.

  And forgiving oneself did not belong among these virtues.

  Absolutely not, Sir!

  And it’s probably very hard to learn that skill later.

  Yes, Sir.

  But where does this sense of sin while you’re writing come from?

  Ah, you’ve noticed. It’s because of the cold gaze. The writer’s cold gaze upon the object. And the moment you have enough distance from your pain to write about it, the writing is no longer wholly authentic.

  So when you should write, you can’t, and when you can write, you shouldn’t.

  Correct, Sir.

  Hmm. You’ve really worked out quite an argument there. Is Madame a closet Calvinist perhaps?

  Let’s talk about you, Monsieur.

  What do you want to hear? That I acquired all my neuroses on my own? In puberty I started working like mad in school. My teachers actually advised me to take it easy. I even changed my handwriting, suddenly it turned all precise and finicky. No, my family didn’t put any pressure on me. Although naturally—but what does “although” mean here!—anyway: Although naturally—and what does “naturally” mean here either, dammit!—there was a “guilt” that was never talked about, as in many Jewish families. My mother’s parents didn’t make it out of Germany, they died in Theresienstadt. An aunt who had emigrated early to America tried to explain to me once, in a roundabout way, why they hadn’t been able to save their parents; I repressed it right away. I don’t think that this sense of guilt played a role in my immediate family. Although, it occurs to me, my mother, when she was dying and very confused, suddenly asked: Where are my parents?

  I said nothing. Peter Gutman said maybe he should leave. I said: You do realize I’m German?

  So now you’re thinking that as a Jew I must find it hard to talk to a German about these things?

  I’m asking. I’ve met Jews here who never want to set foot in Germany. I can understand that. I think I would probably do exactly the same thing in their place.

  That’s what I thought too, when I was young. Then I went to study in Germany, got excited along with my German contemporaries about the German thinkers on the left, some of whom were also Jewish. No, it wasn’t hard. There was only one time something snapped in me, when the registration office kept insisting on seeing my official police certificate of a clean criminal record, which they don’t have in England, and they threatened not to accept my registration if I didn’t supply one. Then, to my own amazement, I suddenly started screaming in the middle of this German office that they had kicked my parents out of the country and murdered my grandparents and I was not going to stand there and let any German bureaucrats threaten me. And then I ran out of the office, and I was rather satisfied with myself, although at the same time I did feel a little bit ridiculous.

  There, you see.

  See what?

  A real German wouldn’t have felt ridiculous in the least, he would have felt goddamn great. Anyway, what happened?

  Oh, my registration went through after a while without the police certificate. But how did we get onto these old stories?

  The German-Jewish question.

  Yes, right. By the way: I have exactly the same problems talking to certain Jews as I have talking to certain Germans. The same way I’ve never been with a Jewish woman. Until now, now’s the first time, and that’s the problem.

  I asked what the problem was exactly.

  He said he couldn’t help inflicting another Jewish story on me. It was the story of Esther, whom he had met while at the university. She was from a rich Orthodox Jewish family, worshipped by her father and also by a husband she loved very much. He, Peter Gutman, had created a terrible conflict for her, and his conscience tormented him over it, but he couldn’t suppress his feelings.

  For Orthodox Jews it’s a permanent stain for a wife to leave her family. She’ll never do it. It was all completely hopeless, he said. Sometimes he truly could not figure out what made them keep putting themselves through this torture.

  Maybe it would make sense to think seriously about why you do it first, I said cautiously. Did he understand now why I had tried to get him to tell me about his family?

  You mean: Unto the third and fourth generations?

  Yes. And now do you also understand why trying to come up with an aesthetic form for certain kinds of content so often seems obscene to me? By the way: How long have you been depressed like this?

  A year.

  That’s too long.

  It’s hell, I would say if I believed in heaven and hell.

  Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?

  I live with them. Don’t you know how consoling it is, to know that you don’t have to go on living?
r />   I do. I do know that.

  And? The tape recording in your head, is it still running?

  It’s running. But we were talking about you. Is there anything that helps you?

  It’s better when I can talk about it.

  I hope you don’t wake up in a panic attack tomorrow.

  I will give you a full report, Madame.

  * * *

  The tape keeps running. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO EXPLAIN TO THEM THAT NO OTHER PATCH OF GROUND ANYWHERE ON EARTH INTERESTS ME AS MUCH AS THIS LITTLE COUNTRY, WHICH I THOUGHT WAS UP TO THE TASK OF THIS GREAT EXPERIMENT? IT FAILED, IT HAD TO FAIL, AND WITH KNOWLEDGE CAME SUFFERING. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO EXPLAIN TO THEM THAT THIS SUFFERING IS A SIGN AND MEASURE OF THE HOPE I HAD STILL BEEN HARBORING IN A LITTLE HIDING PLACE SOMEWHERE, HIDDEN EVEN FROM MYSELF?

  * * *

  Shenya called from Moscow, in the middle of the night, she had mixed up the time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles. Oh well, doesn’t matter now. Was I asleep? No? She disapproved. She read the German newspapers, she wanted to check in. —Oh, Shenya! —What? —Don’t try to fool me, you wanted to sound me out. She sometimes found German idioms funny—this one was literally “you wanted to feel my teeth”—but if it has to be your teeth, okay, she said. So what’s going on? —It’s hard to say in a sentence. —Well, I could take two sentences. She had time.

  Shenya, older than I was, liked to call herself “the Red sailor.” She had come to Germany with the Red Army in 1945 and been a cultural officer in Berlin for the next few years. She kept up lasting friendships with the writers and theater people she’d helped back then. She devoted her life to the task of promoting German literature in the Soviet editorial and publishing offices where she worked. We were agreed, she said that night on the phone, that we wouldn’t let things get us down. I knew how often people had tried to take her down. She was Jewish, that was an added hurdle. I said: But that was in a different time. Ach, she said, that’s just what people think. The people who want to take you down are always the same people, just painted different colors. You listen to what they have to say and then you ignore it. Or had I forgotten what I told her once? How my deepest wish was to be clear, to make myself clear through writing? So. Who was stopping me?

  You have a good memory, Shenya.

  Thank God, she said. I can still see us sitting in the hotel room with the head of the publishing house, do you remember?

  Did I ever remember! It was about a book of yours, which Shenya absolutely wanted to publish and the publisher could publish only if you took out certain scenes mentioning the Red Army. They were too critical, he said, and the Red Army was the only thing holding their enormous empire together.

  You didn’t want to be responsible for the collapse of their enormous empire but you couldn’t take out the scenes, just as you couldn’t take out the scenes about the Vietnam War that the American publisher wanted cut. All that would be left of your book was a fish skeleton, you said.

  Yes, he was truly sorry to hear that, and you were too, and Shenya was too. Suddenly both of us burst out laughing on the phone. When we were done, Shenya said that the real reason she was calling was to tell me that now they’re going to print the book that was at issue back then, without a single sentence cut. It was the Americans, in fact, who had simply left out the passages they didn’t like, against my will and without my knowledge. And she knew that.

  Well, I said, now your enormous empire has collapsed even without my help.

  Don’t be so sure, she said. The intellect can undermine even what seems most solid.

  Shenya, I said, after a short pause, would you ever have thought I could have forgotten it?

  She understood the question right away. Nothing could be simpler, she said. If I didn’t forget most of the things in my life, I wouldn’t survive.

  But that I never felt even the slightest hint of a suspicion all these years! Who would believe me?

  If you still care whether or not they’ll believe you then you’re not yet through it, my dear. If you let the past defeat the present then they really have won.

  Was our whole life for nothing?

  Now that’s not worthy of you. Go read a page or two of your books.

  I just have. In the first one, the one you didn’t translate because the Soviet officer supposedly came across as too weak compared to the German doctor, she asks the Russian she used to love about the most important characteristics of the men and women of the future, and do you know what he says? Brotherhood. The ability to be honest and open. Not mistrusting others. Being able to speak the truth. Not seeing innocence, softness, and naiveté as weaknesses. Living in a world where coping with life no longer means having to walk over dead bodies without flinching.

  And? Shenya said. That would all be wonderful.

  Shenya! Even the youngest, most idiotic writer in the world wouldn’t write that today! I wrote it five or six years after Stalin’s death. I was thirty. They were already keeping those files on me. How many times in our life do we turn into a different person, Shenya?

  She said she would have to think about that. I knew, did I not, that we were living in the most diabolical century in history? That overpowering forces were tugging at every one of us in all different directions. You had to try to stand firm. There was nothing more you could do. And with that, do svidaniya.

  Shenya is dead now. At the time, I still remember, I went back to bed, there was no question of getting back to sleep. I thought about that time in Moscow. Stalin’s picture, larger than life size, hung above the hotel entrance, it hung over the desks in every office, it was almost never out of your and G.’s sight as you drove through the city in a bus or a taxi. The term “cult of personality” hadn’t been invented yet, not that it would have come to your mind; Russian friends thought that pictures and banners had replaced the newspapers and pamphlets during the Revolution, for the people who could barely read, but now it was possible to forgo them after all. Anyway, those were side issues that you could work out together, they said.

  But the friend who had accompanied you the whole time as an interpreter—and probably not only as an interpreter—poured a glass of vodka over the desk lamp when you were saying goodbye in your hotel room, and uttered a curse too. He clearly thought you were being bugged; you laughed but took his suspicion seriously. He was the first one who communicated to you, without words, that he no longer believed in anything. You felt uneasy when he left—but where did that anxiety come from? What did it matter to you what this Russian man believed in?

  There was a movie running in my mind, I hadn’t forgotten a thing. Not how you and your family had experienced the march of the Red Army into Mecklenburg, not your fear when the occupying forces changed, when the Americans left and the Russians came—but it wasn’t just Russians, there were Mongolians with them too, Kalmuks, the people said with a shudder in the Mecklenburg village, you lived through the scattered bands of Soviet soldiers raping and marauding through the countryside, the torn uniforms, the sorry state of their weapons, the peasant carts that had brought them to the center of Europe, while you, in the spring of that year, 1945, had trekked in your fugitive caravan past highly valuable German war materiel just lying there thrown away, left standing, made unusable, tipped over into the ditches in the roads, and it was deeply demoralizing that these badly armed, inadequately clothed and fed, mostly dark-skinned, sometimes slit-eyed soldiers had defeated our well-armed troops who were supplied with everything, but over the course of very few years your feelings shifted, unnoticeably at first, to the point where the victory of these Soviet troops seemed not only the desirable outcome but your very salvation, and the idea that you, the Germans, the National Socialists, might have won instead of them became a horrifying vision.

  A series of faces appeared before my eyes—people from Moscow, from Leningrad, people you could talk to openly without holding anything back. Some of them, former officers in the Red Army, had entered what was then the German Reich as
victors, with their troops. One of them even arrived in your hometown just after you had fled. He had become a writer, was part of a delegation to Berlin, and he sat next to you at dinner one evening. Suddenly he said how much it depressed him that they had needlessly destroyed the central part of the city you were from. This part of the city has since been rebuilt with ugly new buildings, I have seen them … Later, someone else asked you to look for a woman in a Mecklenburg village and, if she was still alive, to find out if she had a child, born in 1946. Unfortunately there was no trace of her to be found.

  Professor Yerussalimski: the historian who met you in the park of Cecilienhof Castle, of all places, where the historic Potsdam Conference had taken place and where he had come for an event. Who clarified the historical roots of Stalinism to you and beseeched you never to give up your critical attitude toward the official proclamations coming from the Soviet side. He was very sick and had trouble breathing. You were able to visit him once more, in a Moscow hospital; he insisted on walking with you in the garden, so you could talk. He died shortly thereafter. Or the colleagues who also, suspiciously often, walked with you on the streets or in the parks and told you the true stories of their country, and their own stories. So that you thought, for a while, that there were vast numbers of intelligent and critical men and women there, to reform their enormous empire from within, that that’s what they wanted to do themselves, until, with “glasnost,” the work they had longed to do for so many years was made possible and in fact forced upon them: To reveal the true face of their country and make their fellow citizens look at it straight on. It was a Herculean task. “Utopian,” a word people say today with the corners of their mouths pulled down in contempt. But you saw their tired, determined faces in the editorial offices where, suddenly, a new spirit was in the air.

  Hardly one of them is left, one name after another in my Moscow address book has dropped out. I don’t dare cross them out.