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

by Wolf, Christa

  OLD AGE IS THE TIME OF LOSSES

  But also of seeing clearly?

  When Ruth came by I could see it in her face: Her mother had died. Ruth brought me a volume of poems by Nelly Sachs that had belonged to her mother. I fought with all my might not to accept this gift: nothing could be less deserved, I said to Ruth, especially now. It would crush me to have it. Ruth didn’t let up. She could see I needed it, she said, from the very fact that I was refusing it so vehemently. Maybe I wouldn’t see that myself until much later, but I should just stick the book in a corner and stack some other books on top of it. Sooner or later I would crave it, and that was how it should be. I opened the book:

  World, they have taken the small children like butterflies

  and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire—

  I had to accept the book, and would have to read these lines again and again.

  Peter Gutman’s unexpected knock on the door that day was one of those coincidences that you are staggered by only after the fact, once its consequences have become apparent. He picked up on our mood and wanted to leave right away but we kept him there. I introduced them and saw that they went up to each other like old friends. While I got bread, cheese, and tomatoes from the kitchen and poured some red wine, they were already deep in conversation, talking about their lives. It was unbelievable, shy as they both were.

  They barely noticed that they had started eating and I kept quiet and listened. Ruth even trusted Peter Gutman enough to tell him the story of her mother, which she normally kept locked up tight, and he spoke in hints about what he called his “life problem.” And from there it wasn’t far to the realization that their problems had been forced upon them by the dark history of the century. Still, Peter Gutman said, it was highly likely that the catastrophes of our time would be overtaken by the horrors of the century to come, at whose threshold we were standing.

  Ruth argued strongly against him. What good did it do anyone to be purely pessimistic about the future? she said. Didn’t he know that it was possible to think and wish catastrophes upon oneself?

  Peter Gutman did not believe that, actually, and said so more with the expression of his face than with words. Unfortunately, he said, it’s impossible to wish away hard facts no matter how much psychological energy you apply.

  I realized only then that we had been speaking in German the whole time—Ruth with a slight Rhineland accent that she had never lost; she sometimes had to hunt around for the right word, which I found moving. She had worked herself up, she really wanted to convince him. She knew only too well, she cried, where it leads when a man gets himself caught in the web of his hopeless thoughts and even the most intelligent and deeply loved woman can’t free him.

  Then how could she explain, Peter Gutman asked, that the deepest thinkers of our time had the pessimistic worldview she was so opposed to?

  Like who?

  Well, Sigmund Freud, for example.

  Yes, Freud! She admitted that. Of course, he was one of her intellectual leading lights. But, she said, no matter how painful the insights were that his life had forced upon him, he had never given up, he had kept working, kept pursuing his efforts to heal damaged souls. He showed, in other words, that he hadn’t lost hope. A man like that had overcome his despair at humanity through his own heroic life. Whereas others …

  Ruth suddenly broke off, as though she had said too much.

  Peter Gutman pushed her to keep talking. Later, he admitted to me that from that moment on he had felt an inexplicable excitement. Yes, well, Ruth said, she knew “deep thinkers,” as Peter Gutman called them, who could no longer free themselves from the whirlpool of that word “futility.” Not even the most passionate efforts of the women they loved could help them. She knew that, she said, from her friend Lily.

  Unbelievable, I thought. I still remember, I thought: Unbelievable.

  Her friend? You haven’t mentioned this friend yet, Peter Gutman said.

  No? My mistake, Ruth said. She should have mentioned her friend Lily right away. A psychoanalyst. From Berlin. Where her good little colleagues had looked on without a word as Jewish psychoanalysts were expelled from their organization under pressure from the Nazis. They had had to emigrate and it was they who made psychoanalysis flourish in America. Her friend, even though she was not Jewish herself, had realized that there would be no possibility for analysis under Nazi Germany. She also refused to be separated from the man she loved, who, as a Jew, had emigrated to the United States in time, because of her.

  What Ruth was saying about Lily, her life, her character—I felt like I recognized it all. From L.’s letters lying in the red folder on my shelf.

  And her lover, the philosopher? I heard Peter Gutman say. What was his name?

  I knew it already, he later told me. It wasn’t possible, but I already knew it.

  Ruth said the name Peter Gutman was waiting for.

  There was silence for a few seconds, then Peter Gutman said softly: Yes. It’s him.

  It was the man whose life and work he had been living and breathing for years.

  He was in greater and greater despair as time went on, Ruth said. He saw human beings as badly designed, willing to risk their lives for immediate gratification. He suspected that the self-destructive urge was programmed into our genes.

  Coincidences like this never happen in real life, I thought. But on that evening I was filled with a feeling of absolute rightness like nothing I had felt for a long time. Everything seemed to fit together in a meaningful way. I thought I could sense the same mood in Peter Gutman—he was lively, curious.

  Only right at the end, around midnight, when Ruth was about to say goodbye, did Peter Gutman ask her, quietly: How did he die? Ruth said: He killed himself. Peter Gutman did not seem surprised.

  We parted quickly, suddenly very tired. We made plans to go see Ruth. Maybe she would find letters from my friend Emma in Lily’s papers, which had been entrusted to her. My stay in this city acquired a new urgency. I sat down for a few minutes more at my little machine and I wrote:

  The workings of chance are strange. I find it almost embarrassing that chance can change a mood so drastically, so that it suddenly seems possible that things will get better. Only now do I realize I had stopped believing they ever could.

  I went to sleep; the tape recording in my head had paused. I was too tired to read. I dreamed about an enormous dark body of water that I had to cross. A red full moon hung in the sky. A voice cried out: You haven’t had enough yet? No! I answered. Shine, good old moon, shine! I walked and walked through the knee-high water. I couldn’t see the shore and it seemed impossible that I would ever reach it. Still, I didn’t feel afraid or hopeless. When I woke up, a voice I didn’t recognize said: CITY OF ANGELS. I took it as a challenge.

  * * *

  And since I could in fact write for hours and hours a day but not every single hour of the day, and I had to pass the remaining time somehow, and since there wasn’t any way I could get the time to simply disappear—it’s strange, time is always there, indestructible, immune to all our efforts to sway it—since, in other words, I needed what is called distraction (which doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves), I was glad to drive to Chinatown again and go to Mon Kee. The ten of us sat at the big round table in the simple room and right away, after we drank our first cups of tea and ate the spring rolls, the table filled up with ten oval platters: prawns in every shape and disguise, Francesco had to have sweet-and-sour fish, Pintus was in the mood for beef, I stuck with the crispy roasted duck, the bowls of rice were passed around, a bottle of beer per person was not enough, of course, we turned the large lazy Susan in the middle of the table and helped ourselves to all the dishes, Ria had on new earrings from the flea market in Pasadena, Ines complained about Francesco’s inability to decide where to spend the next couple years, in Italy or here, where the famous Frank Gehry was living and building the buildings Francesco wanted to write about, Pat had had a total falling out
with her landlady and had to move yet again, Hanno still didn’t know what to focus on in his work, Pintus had finally finished reading the proofs for his book on the spirit of the early Middle Ages, Lutz had gotten word that his application for a teaching position in Frankfurt had been accepted, we were happy for him and toasted him and Maya. And Peter Gutman, who had come along for the first time, told us for the first time everything about his philosopher and the man’s fate.

  Four or five months later we would be scattered across Europe and might never see each other again, but the sympathy that bound us together was no illusion, I knew that our feelings for each other were genuine, we liked knowing so much about each other, we liked how we wanted to tell each other things, we were happy about the network of relationships that had formed. I realized that it was quiet around the table and that I had said out loud what I had only meant to think. Actually we’re a good team. Then the fortune cookies were brought out, with advice from the oracle. We opened them and I read: You are open and honest in your philosophy of love.

  And the next day, or one of the days after that, I was sitting with Bob Rice at Gladstone’s. He had invited me to dinner. How are you, he said when we saw each other, and I said: It is very hard, and he answered: I know, and then he said something that made me laugh: I am proud of you. Gladstone’s is a gigantic restaurant on a cliff, with an almost vertical drop down into the ocean, where hundreds of Americans can eat with their families at the same time, and big wooden tables, gigantic portions, most of the diners fat, the children already fat too. We ordered my obligatory margarita—not as good here as elsewhere—and coconut shrimp. The hamburgers are good here, Bob said.

  Bob hadn’t realized it would be so loud, that we would have to scream because everyone else was screaming. He had brought me there to tell me about how it had been my books, of all things, that had helped him come out. He had to cup his hand to his mouth like a megaphone to shout the quote from my own book at me and tell me how terrible it is when you have to keep an important part of yourself hidden all the time, when you have to always conceal yourself, and what a relief it is when you finally stop. You think, he shouted, now with the menu rolled up in front of his mouth like a megaphone, you think that once you’ve said that you can say anything, and you’re free.

  The overweight mothers and fathers of the families all around us had no problem adding to the general noise with their own; the portions they were polishing off were unbelievable—gigantic steaks, mountains of sausage, hamburgers bigger than the palms of their hands—and everything the children asked for was put before them. But Bob hardly seemed to notice. He told me about his boyfriend, about their life together, named various great men who were gay, and shouted at me (I didn’t catch every word) how happy he was to have found a way to a kind and loving relationship with his wife, after a long, difficult time, and that his children loved him and came to stay with him sometimes.

  We were sitting very near sea level, the sun had just set into a haze, and Bob said: Do you see those bright stripes on the horizon? That’s what I love the most. There was a gray light that you rarely saw here. The noise got louder and louder.

  Bob, who had heard me read from my text “Trial by Nail,” had brought along a poem he wanted to recite for me, but it was impossible in the pandemonium. We went out onto the wooden patio, where it was damp, cold, and dark, and we were alone. We sat right next to the railing that divided us from the ocean and couldn’t hear anything except the roar of the surf; it sprayed us, the wind had gotten strong, and Bob read, once again shouting, the poem about the nails of the Cross that the English poet Edith Sitwell had written in 1940:

  Still falls the rain—

  Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—

  Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails

  Upon the cross.

  Yes, I said, the nails of the Cross come up in my text too.

  That evening really stuck with me. What will stay with me from today? That it’s spring again, in all its glory? That the question of whether this is my last spring, or one of my last springs, underlies everything I see? That the news reports of ten thousand Iraqis and three thousand American soldiers killed in the past four years in Iraq do not seem to have shocked anyone?

  It’s a nightmarish thing to imagine: being able to see into the future.

  But at the time this gift was something I actively sought out. I had been foolhardy enough to show my new friends—the “gang,” as we called ourselves by then: Therese, Jane, Margery, and Toby—my tarot cards. We met up outdoors, at a private airport where Manfred (Jane’s boyfriend, a German painter) had set up a studio in an unused hangar. It was one of those afternoons that turn into an evening under a magnificent sky. Country songs were coming out of Manfred’s stereo; a grill had been fired up outside and the air smelled of bratwurst. We had brought wine and beer in coolers and private jets and helicopters were taking off from the nearby airfield: the rich, they told me, flying home at the end of the day from their offices in L.A., where they made their money, to their palace-like villas in San Diego or Malibu.

  Friends of friends came and went, were given food and drink, drawn into the conversations, said hello to me without showing any intrusive curiosity, praised Manfred’s iron sculptures, and some of them sang along with a song or two.

  You see, Manfred said, for me this is America. Once you’ve lived here a while there comes a dangerous point where you miss the boat and can’t go back to Europe again. That had happened to him. He had spent a few weeks in Germany the previous year, he said, as a kind of test—and it didn’t work anymore, he had to accept it. It’s true that the friendships here are not very deep, that you find yourself moving in pretty shallow waters sometimes, but the lightness here is just so refreshing most of the time, compared to the German need to complicate everything.

  I wondered when was the first time I had heard anything firsthand about America. Have you ever heard of Leonhard Frank? I asked Manfred. He hadn’t.

  You can see him sitting there—white-haired, thin, dressed correctly but casually too. He has come from Munich because of a book that had been published by an East German publishing house, and he is sitting in a group of fellow writers, mostly East German, who like him had had a shorter or longer stay at a writer’s colony on a lake in Brandenburg; there were two German states at that point but no Wall yet, no travel restrictions. There was a currency shortage in the GDR, though, and Frank, the West German, had to stay in the GDR long enough to spend the money he received for his books sold there. The West Germans weren’t exactly beating down the bookstore doors for Leonhard Frank’s books, any more than for those by Heinrich Mann, or Lion Feuchtwanger, or Anna Seghers. You all knew that he had lived in the United States as an émigré, and you asked him about it; he was happy to talk about it, but he stuck to anecdotes and little stories. When his wife, Charlotte, walked into the room his face lit up and he didn’t take his eyes off her. She was an actress and had been in an American television series, he told you, as a beloved star who got sick with tuberculosis and died at the end. She had had a doctor demonstrate to her how people with lung disease cough, so she could play it more convincingly. After the death of their favorite character, the public wanted to say their farewells to her publicly, so the producer made Charlotte lie in a coffin as a dead body on the stage of a theater so that the public could file past her. Charlotte had lain there, stiff and rigid, and thought the whole time, like a mantra: A hundred dollars, a hundred dollars. Leonhard Frank admired her for that the same way he worshipped her for everything she did and every word she said.

  Apparently he had spent his first few months in Los Angeles, when not serving time sitting idly in the film studio, staring out over the Pacific Ocean from a bench in Ocean Park. When someone asked him what he saw there, he said: Europe’s over there. No, he was told, that’s not Europe over there, that’s Japan. He had shaken his head and left. And, I told Manfred, I couldn’t help thinking of that myself, m
any times, when I was sitting in Ocean Park, maybe on the same bench he used to sit on.

  And just now, more than fifteen years later, I find in Leonhard Frank’s autobiography, Heart on the Left, this description of the condition exile imposes on the émigré: “Now there was no going back. This crippling consciousness accompanied him for seventeen long years, day after day…: there was no going back to Germany, to his studio, his life, his landscape, the place he felt at one with, as though he were a part of it … His life was not his life anymore. It had snapped in two in the middle.”

  Manfred said yes, he understood very well how a person could yearn for the old country. But then Jane was here too, he couldn’t transplant her to Europe. I saw the look Jane gave him, I saw how attached to him she was; it surprised me and made me happy. We ate, drank, circulated between the different groups; Jane came up to me and told me she never thought she would ever find someone again who would matter to her as much as Manfred. Why not? I asked. I’ll tell you later, she said.

  She told me later that same night. When it got dark we left but didn’t want to part company yet; we arranged to meet at Toby’s in Venice later, then we split up into the different cars and I ended up with Jane in hers. We drove on the freeway in silence for a while; I had the feeling, not for the first time, that freeway driving in the dark awakened the desire to talk. Jane asked me if I thought Manfred was wrong for her, since they were so different. I said that that’s what I thought at first, but after I saw them together I didn’t think it anymore. She herself hadn’t known, she said, that this was exactly what she needed. The only relationships she had known up to that point were difficult ones, especially between people who were close to each other. I have to tell you, she said, that both of my parents were German Jews who had survived different concentration camps and met after the war in one of the camps for displaced persons. Her father had had a family before, a wife and daughter, who’d been killed. I think he could never really love me, Jane said, he always saw his dead first daughter behind me. Can you imagine what that means to a child? Photography had helped her find herself, she said. Strangely, it was because when she was behind the camera she had to concentrate on other people and totally disregard herself.