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

by Wolf, Christa

  While Ruth was talking, she was bringing up more treasure out of the chest: Lily’s passport, a bundle of documents from her time in Berlin, her doctor’s diploma, and, I had hardly dared hope for it, a picture of her and my friend Emma as very young women, surrounded by other women, deep in a serious conversation, apparently during a congress. The photograph was yellowed and worn around the edges—Lily had kept it for decades, through exile in several countries, had brought it across the ocean and kept it safe.

  How young they were. How beautiful. How energized. How full of hope.

  What could they have been talking about so intently? Their differing opinions? Ruth said that Lily was an ardent anarchist. She had rejected—loathed—any narrowing and constraining of ideas into a dogma. A political party, she had often lectured me, Ruth said, turns into an end in itself too quickly; it can’t produce real change.

  The philosopher, for his part, held the view that people had to be forced to do things for their own good. In our century, he had said, humanity has come to a crossroads: for the final time, they could choose between two seemingly opposite directions—and then it turned out that both paths led them astray, to tragedy. And taking part in this process, the philosopher had said: That was our life. So? Lily had countered. Wasn’t it exciting? Wasn’t it interesting?

  Ruth pulled an ordinary gray file folder out of the box and held it up. This is the core of Lily’s legacy, she said: a debate, an exchange of opinions and arguments, between Lily and the philosopher, conducted over a long span of time, partly to try to convince the other person and partly to clarify their thoughts for themselves.

  That’s unbelievable, Peter Gutman said.

  Ruth handed him the folder. He should use it in his work. Peter Gutman immediately started paging through it. Unbelievable, he said, again and again. I had never seen him so excited. Something like this happens to a scholar only once in a lifetime.

  There, you see, Ruth said in a friendly voice. And here and now, of all places. Through me, of all people.

  The image of the crossroads had taken hold of me. When had I realized that I had to learn to live without alternatives? In stages, I remembered, it’s not the kind of thing you can learn overnight. You’re sitting with comrades who are going through the same thing as you. Your numbers are shrinking. The older ones are in a better position than you younger ones: They have had practice clinging to hope against all reason. In their view, you don’t have the right to give it up yet. The project they have dedicated their lives to is one that will take generations, it is no short-term task for our minuscule lifespans. When I think about them, I told Peter Gutman and Ruth—when I think about my friends, all dead now, I see their bright, individual faces rising up from a dark flood that is about to swallow them. When I asked one of them about it, he said: Something always remains. Just look what horrors the French Revolution ended in, and what do you think when you think about the French Revolution now? Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

  I didn’t ask, I said, what posterity will think when it thinks about us.

  Maybe, Peter Gutman said, people will say: In the end they lived without illusions but not without remembering their dreams. Remembering the wind of utopia in the sails of their youth.

  From your lips to God’s ears, I said.

  I got into my red car alone, since Peter Gutman had something else he needed to do downtown, and I drove down Sunset Boulevard. I saw the crowds of people, white, black, brown, yellow, drifting down the street. No one in posterity is asking about them, I thought, and that is the fate of the vast majority, so what do you care?

  I had gradually lost my reluctance to join the avalanche of metal hurtling along the network of roads through Los Angeles. My little red car was a great help in filing away the layout of the city in my brain, but suddenly something was very wrong, the car started shaking, luckily a gas station appeared up ahead and luckily I reached it. The attendant, an extremely bright Latino man, quickly figured out that I had gotten a nail lodged in my left rear tire; I watched in admiration the speed with which the man repaired my car, Los Angeles is a car city, it was obvious to everyone that everyone needed a drivable car at all times, Thank you so much. You’re welcome, ma’am, good luck!

  Onward, down Sunset Boulevard, down to the ocean, don’t fight the flood of forgetting that flushes us all down this famous road into the dark sea.

  I had no trouble finding our street, the door to our underground garage, and in one bold turn, without any back-and-forth maneuvering, I parked my little car in its place between Francesco’s wood-paneled classic car and Pintus and Ria’s elegant black coupe. Mrs. Ascott had parked her enormous white car by the entrance, as always, blocking half of the lane—as the manager of the MS. VICTORIA she gave herself permission to do so. We ran into each other by the entrance and said our friendly hellos. When had it taken hold, actually, this feeling that when I opened my apartment door I was coming home?

  I must have made something to eat that night, I probably sat in front of the TV while I ate it, and only then did I open my Indian bag that I had brought to Ruth’s. It was probably late. I can still see before my eyes the big white envelope with my name on it—no one besides Ruth could have stuck it in my bag. The envelope contained a page with Ruth’s handwriting and an unopened airmail letter addressed to Lily. The letter, Ruth wrote to me, had arrived from Germany while her friend lay dying. She had found it with the other papers Lily had left her. She had not wanted to open it. Now, she wrote, she wanted to give it to me, because she thought that that was what both Lily and the letter writer would have wanted.

  It was written by my friend Emma.

  It was postmarked from a West German city, with West German stamps. I held it in my hands for a long time, turning it over and around, before I finally opened it. This letter must have almost crossed Ruth’s letter with the news of Lily’s death. It was written in Emma’s sweeping, old woman’s handwriting, on the marbleized stationery I recognized as hers.

  Dear Lily,

  This is going to be a long letter. I have a chance to give it to West German friends who can mail it from there, so it’ll get past the censors.

  I have cancer. No one knows except me. I’m sure you’ll believe me when I say that it wasn’t a great shock to learn that I don’t have long to live: the feeling we had in the Nazi years, that we’re all dead people temporarily on holiday among the living, sank its claws deep into us. During all these years since, I lived as though behind a curtain. I always kept busy and didn’t want to let myself get paralyzed. When Stalin died, I was in jail here “under false accusations,” and when a guard whispered the news to me, I cried. Don’t say anything about that, I have already told myself everything there is to say.

  You’ll remember the time, right after Hitler seized power, when we were in the audience at one of the “Führer’s” speeches in a giant auditorium and we heard the thunderous applause of the crowd. When we were leaving, you said: Now they have their Messiah. We have to get out of here as fast as we can. You were clear-sighted and decisive.

  I stayed, I had my instructions from the Party. A suicide mission, in retrospect. We were a little group and they caught us after a year. It’s only because none of us gave away any names that we made it through with our lives. Three years in jail and then kept under strict surveillance so there was no way I could do anything else. Almost no way.

  I wonder what we would have done if we had known everything back in the thirties—known all about the purges in the Soviet Union, the gulag. We probably would have despaired and been unable to act. Our nightmare was a Fascist Europe, and we told ourselves Stalin had prevented it.

  We ran aground. The country I live in and placed my hopes in at first is getting more and more fossilized and rigid from year to year, and the moment is in sight when it will lie there on the side of the road, a motionless corpse for anybody to plunder. Then what? A long phase of rotting and putrefaction?

  Is there an obvious answer I jus
t can’t see? Oh Lily, write back soon, your old friend Emma really doesn’t know what to do anymore. Warmest regards, my dear. What did we used to say? Adieu.

  Emma kept her cancer a secret from me for a long time. Then she died quite quickly. She didn’t talk about death. Only once did she say that she wouldn’t mind ending up on another planet, a little one, moving away from Earth quite fast, from which she could see our planet from the outside, as a whole, for the first time. She said that that would be very instructive.

  I was overwhelmed with an indescribable exhaustion that night. Strangely, Emma’s letter had consoled me. I fell asleep right away and slept far into the next day. I remembered one dream clearly: Plummeting through layer after layer of increasing density, first air, then water, swamp, garbage, gravel, I was in danger of getting stuck, suffocating. Suddenly there was stone beneath my feet, where I could stand, and a voice: You are on firm ground. The sentence stayed with me for a long time. I understood it.

  * * *

  On Sunday I wanted to go with Therese and Jane and the others in the gang to church, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the neighborhood where the church was, the day of rest seemed to be honored: the streets were empty. Our gang had arranged to meet and we were there early, so we walked around the block. Therese knew her way around here too and showed us the buildings that the parish had bought and set up for social services—school, kindergarten, old-age home. The community did not seem poor; in fact, the neighborhood exuded a modest prosperity and respectability. The well-tended lawns were not extravagant but were kept in meticulous order; almost all of the houses, wooden like everywhere else in the city, had received a new coat of paint in recent years (bonbon pink, sky blue, turquoise, with blinding white window frames); there were garden swings behind the houses and lower-middle-class cars in the driveways, which the black home-owner would wash on Sunday mornings while his children, in cute clothes, came out of the house holding hands with their mother, who was done up in a big hat and an elaborate lace blouse, and together they would gracefully make their way to church.

  They’ve made it, Therese said. Still, they’re not totally secure—they’re bank tellers and insurance agents and retail managers and traveling salesmen and city employees, they overdo it a little sometimes in their eagerness to imitate the whites, and they still think they can manage to be as successful as the whites and religious too, I mean truly religious, in the biblical sense. You’ll see.

  We signed in and were taken to the office, where the ministers gradually came in: black women and men in white robes with long silk shawls in various colors draped over them. They greeted us, hugged us, offered us something to drink, asked about our backgrounds and jobs—the room was suddenly full of people, it was a relaxed, cheerful atmosphere, and finally the reverend arrived. He was the oldest one there and his face reminded me of a dark, shriveled fruit, it was the face of a kind old clown; he beamed and hugged us too, I felt the pressure of his strong hands on my upper arms, and I thought: There is more than one kind of security, and the kind that this man exuded is probably the hardest kind to acquire.

  The reverend asked one of the ministers, a stately middle-aged woman with a violet shawl hanging over her white robe, to show us to our places. There were seven of us: Jane, Margery, Manfred, Toby, and Susan along with me and Therese. I was glad that we were sitting in the fifth row, not the first, and we seemed to be the only whites in the crowd of at least four hundred people who had filled the church by then. It didn’t make me uncomfortable, it was just that in that moment I felt many gazes upon me: watching, testing, but what did this test consist of? Should I act like a white person did in this situation? How exactly was that?

  Then the floor started shaking under our feet, rhythmically, and I heard the clapping, then the singing. I turned around with everyone else and the choir was marching in; everybody stood up, including us, and everybody began to clap in time with the song. I hesitated, I always avoided clapping in time to things, but then I did it too, it wasn’t embarrassing. The fifty or sixty men in the chorus rejoiced, there was no other word for it: they were so joyful they could barely contain themselves but they nonetheless kept to the song, the words, the melody, the rhythm of the clapping and the dragging, hesitating double-steps they were taking down the center aisle before dividing into two groups in front of the pulpit, still singing and clapping, and symmetrically taking their places on the platforms rising steeply up on either side of the pulpit, facing the congregation. They sang loud and long, delighting the listeners, and a female soloist stepped out from the choir to a microphone and was met with shouts and applause, her radiant voice opened our hearts, there is no other way I can say it, then the singer stepped back, waving, into the choir that continued to sing, sing, praise and rejoice. One of the ministers had stepped up to the pulpit, almost unnoticed, and now I saw that the other ministers were sitting on benches to either side of him, and he started the liturgy in a spoken and sung call-and-response with the congregation.

  My gaze fell upon an elegant woman in the first row, in a grass-green, tight-fitting suit with a green-and-white hat on her head, white cotton gloves on her hands, and she jumped up and loudly answered the minister’s questions, yes, He is the Lord my God, yes, I believe in Him and His only son, no, I will have no other gods before Him. The woman threw up her arms, swayed in time to the choir that had started up again, and a second minister was standing at the pulpit and joyfully pronouncing the confession of sins, and, just as joyfully, certain of being heard, the plea for forgiveness. This community’s God did not seem to be a jealous God who insisted on repentance and contrition, he seemed to know that it was not possible for his children to keep his commandments, in fact there were many things in this world that even he could not change, he seemed to know that they tried their best and that they were sorry when it yet again didn’t quite work out, their efforts to be good and avoid evil, maybe it would turn out better next time if Father in Heaven was willing to let it pass this time, and He certainly was willing, the minister knew it and thanked him for it and the whole congregation joined in his thanks with all their hearts and I felt that nothing divided me from them more categorically than this ritual of confession and forgiveness, but I couldn’t indulge in this painful feeling for long, since now there was a woman minister introducing us, the guests, and I saw that there were a few other white people in the church, including a few people I knew from the CENTER, we all had to stand up and the congregation was asked to welcome us, and they did. First the people right next to us hugged us, then people sitting farther away came up and stood in a short line, I felt lots of black cheeks on my cheek, heard a lot of voices say Welcome, and I started to smile, to laugh, to feel good.

  The service took its course, interspersed with crescendos of song from the choir. Now the reverend was standing at the pulpit, kindly and confidently responding to the happy welcome from the congregation. Today he wanted to talk to us about how it’s up to us, every day we can change our life and start a new one. Yeah! many people cried, Right! cried the woman in the green suit, the reverend waved at her and she enthusiastically waved back. The reverend started to speak. He had a froglike face with incredibly supple lips. Almost every single sentence he spoke was met with cheers and affirmation, Oh yes, you’re right, the ministers in the background were the chorus, but without any tragedy, expressing with mimicry and gesticulations: Isn’t he wonderful? Sometimes one or another of them jumped up to cry out loud: Great! Wonderful! Sometimes one of the ministers was so excited that he nudged the reverend in the ribs, and the reverend took a few sidesteps, rock-and-roll style, the audience liked that, he danced a few more rock moves, the congregation jumped up and cheered, the woman in the green suit brilliantly performed a solo number in front of the first row, the people next to her applauded, the reverend gave a full-throated laugh and proclaimed to his people that he had no trouble imagining that every man and woman among them could see everything in a new way, just like that
, starting right now, see with the eyes of love, and that it would be so easy for them with the help of the Lord to simply turn their life inside out like the old hat hanging in his closet at home, many of you know the one I mean, he said. They certainly did, oh yes, they knew that hat, they described it to each other and thought it was a brilliant idea their reverend had had, to compare their lives to that hat, but was it an unfair comparison? No, it was fair, he was right, as always, and they cried it out to him too, and they would have kept up their cries for a long time if the choir hadn’t powerfully started up again, this time led by the large bass voice of one of the older singers.

  At the same time, some of the ministers were taking the plastic sheet off the long narrow table that stretched almost the whole width of the church between the pulpit and the first row, and which now was revealed to be the communion table, with a row of believers already kneeling before it, including the woman in the green suit, who wanted to receive communion from the reverend himself and looked up at him with deep devotion.

  And now came something I didn’t expect: the whole church went up for communion, man after man, woman after woman, row after row, starting in the back, and the ministers skillfully and affectionately managed the access to the table of the Lord, put the women’s handbags on one bench, supported the disabled, there was a great movement, but completely calm, in the church, to the long, drawn-out notes of the music, I saw white people kneeling down too, including one of the directors of the CENTER. I saw Annie, who was Jewish, receive the Christian sacrament. Now it was our turn. I couldn’t be the only one to refuse. Therese pushed me, I kneeled on the little bench in front of the table, tiny wafers were lying in the little plates, and a sensibly organized row of holes held little plastic thimbles of wine. I ate the bread, I drank the wine. God bless you, the minister standing in front of me said.