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

by Wolf, Christa

  Peter Gutman said: What if you wrote up your observations someday, about your stay in this America? A once-in-a-lifetime chance, he thought. That’s what you think, Monsieur. Defamiliarized, of course, Peter Gutman said, I don’t have to tell you that! But totally ruthless about anything personal. Wouldn’t he be afraid of my ruthlessness himself? Doesn’t matter, Peter Gutman said. He didn’t think a writer could ever impose caution or consideration upon him- or herself when writing. I said that it was an unresolvable conflict, and to minimize it I had made it my rule to show less mercy to myself than to anyone else. But what if I was fooling myself there too?

  The same conversations over and over again, with changing interlocutors.

  I have realized that I take myself as exemplary; in other words, by seeming to focus entirely on myself I leave myself out. A strange motion in opposite directions.

  You know, don’t you, that Orson Welles had the rug yanked out from under him precisely because he was a little too ruthless in his movie about the powerful Mr. Hearst? He has Kane say on his deathbed the word that becomes the key to the whole movie—“Rosebud.” Apparently—listen to this, I have it from an American source—that is what Hearst himself liked to call “a certain part of his lover’s anatomy,” she was a famous actress, and he was beside himself that the movie went on and on about this intimate secret of his. He made sure that the movie was not shown in theaters, he bought up and destroyed what he thought were all the copies, and none of the Hearst newspapers was allowed to even mention the movie. Orson Welles had made himself an all-powerful enemy and he never made anything as good again.

  I asked Peter Gutman whether he could imagine people who were eager to learn as much as they could about human nature, and to accept all the negative consequences that would arise as a result. To cut up the inner lining of the overcoat of Dr. Freud into all its component parts, you know what I mean? The way there are scientists who cannot rest until they figure out all the smaller and smaller particles our universe is made of.

  I can imagine that, Peter Gutman said.

  Maybe everything that’s happened to me recently had to happen so that I could get closer to this knowledge. Directly, through my own skin.

  We looked out through the giant windows at the twilight falling and quickly turning into darkness. It seemed to me that a shape was slipping past, I wanted to see Angelina, my angel, in it, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but I wasn’t sure.

  But as we rode down in the glass elevator, Angelina was standing (or floating?) next to me. How did she always know when she was needed? She seemed especially mocking today.

  Do you believe in angels? I asked Peter Gutman.

  Excuse me, Madame? he said. What’s this about?

  Just answer.

  Okay, fine. I believe in the mind’s power to have real effects. That what someone firmly believes becomes reality. If you believe in God then that makes a God and prayers to him can work.

  Faith can move mountains?

  It gives the faithful confidence that they can move mountains, in any case. And it’s certainly possible that the City of Angels is teeming with angels.

  Black angels too, Monsieur?

  What a question! There’s no racism where angels come from.

  There was a tried-and-true ritual that played out whenever our community of scholars planned a trip. Hearst Castle was scheduled. The bus stopped in front of the MS. VICTORIA, the travelers showed up, always in the same order—the people from the staff very punctual, of course, because for them the trip was work; I was usually in the middle; Ria and Pintus came last, without a shred of guilt, or else Peter Gutman, strolling up with an indifferent look on his face, no one dared to criticize him. The driver stowed our bags in the luggage compartment under the bus. I observed who sat next to whom—the married couples stayed together, and at first all the singles sat in their own rows, including me, which I preferred anyway, I wanted to see again the views to both the left and the right of the famous Route 101, where the Christian missionaries had erected their missions in intervals of a day’s journey, to convert the peaceable Indians of the hinterlands to the Christian faith by any means necessary. Malibu sped by out the windows, where at the time, as I read in my old notes, almost uncontrollable fires were raging. Santa Barbara.

  Detour: The ranch owned by the director of Dallas and Dynasty, who had bought himself a beautiful plot of land from his insane wealth—a state-of-the-art ranch, in fact, as we learned from Greg, our tour guide, who was sitting as always next to the driver’s seat with a microphone in his hand. Ronald Reagan’s ranch was nearby too, and when he landed there in his government plane while he was president, Greg said, all the garage doors in the area opened and closed and the other electronic devices in the houses went crazy because the airplane was so high tech.

  My old-fashioned taste in art was not news to me; I didn’t care at all about the postmodern art that the director of Dallas had collected and showed in a bunker-like high-security building—giant canvases, garish colors laid on with wide brushes. Sometimes only a single color. Monochromes, said Lutz, our art historian, who was showing me around. They were “in” at the moment. They fit the taste of the times and fetched fantastic prices. There were, of course, several uniformed guards closely watching our steps, along with two art historians on loan from the nearest university to do their master’s bidding. Once or twice a month he spends a weekend at his ranch.

  You know what this reminds me of? Lutz said. The final phase of the Roman Empire. They didn’t know they were living in a final phase either. —They didn’t want to know it when everything was going so well for them, I said. Why should they ruin their beautiful lives thinking about a bleak future that they couldn’t change anyway?

  Back on the bus. You’re sleeping and missing the best views, Peter Gutman said. We had arrived at the day’s destination: the Cavalier Inn in San Simeon, a reasonable hotel near the ocean with nice rooms. I unpacked my bathing suit and nothing else, and went swimming in the comfortable, heated hotel swimming pool. At first I could hardly move my limbs from the pain but slowly my joints relaxed and moved more easily. When I let myself glide on my back through the water, I was looking directly up into the sky, which was then, in the late afternoon, still an unbelievable blue. The crowns of a few palm trees jutted into my field of view. I was alone in the pool and I crossed it, traversed it, on the surface of the water, underwater: it was like a purification ritual.

  How I’d always loved to swim. Your river back home was already pretty wide by the time it got to your city, not far from where it flowed into the bigger river called the Oder and from there into the Baltic. It had an incomparable smell—never again did a river smell like that. The public swimming area where old Wegner the attendant taught you to swim was built out of wood directly in the river. Wegner held you under the arms and pulled you against the current, I can feel the flow on my ribs to this day. Swimming around for fifteen minutes, precisely timed, in the deep pool was called “swimming yourself free,” a beautiful expression. Then you put your towel carelessly by the other swimmers’ towels on the hot wooden planks and lay down on your belly in the sun. In the winter, there were regular swimming lessons in the community pool, which had a strong smell of chlorine; there the swimming was timed, and sturdy Christel, your age, hopeless in all the other classes, was unbeatable. The two thin, awkward girls who were afraid of the water, Brigitte and Ilse, were teased.

  Why have I never realized until now that for years, after you were sixteen and settled elsewhere, you had no water? You lived in areas without lakes, without rivers, without swimming pools. After that, your sea was the Eastern Sea, as the Baltic is called there. In the morning, before breakfast, it was ice cold—60 degrees at the very most, a swim of only a couple minutes. The primitive accommodations where you froze and your things barely dried whenever you had ended up there in another rainy summer. But then, in the sun, the glittering water to the horizon, the foaming white crests of the waves
that you let yourself be carried by, the big breakers you threw yourself into, swimming all the way out to the buoy, the salt on your skin, wicker beach chairs packed close together, the children with their complicated sand castles, passionate conversations with your friend up on the bluffs about the future of your country—anything was possible. After all, this little Eastern Sea, an ocean of peace, was linked to all the waters in the world, you were “washed with all waters,” as the German saying goes—shrewd about everything—why not? Year after year the island, free of cars, flat as the palm of your hand, tea and card games in the glass veranda on days when the rain wouldn’t stop outside and evenings with red wine and guitar-playing in the hollows behind the dunes. Carefree, oh how carefree it was. The following year, the guitar was not with you anymore; the famous singer later killed himself, in a lake as it happens.

  WASHED WITH ALL WATERS

  Why not? But when we went back to the coastal town again last year, we stayed in a chic little hotel and could barely cross the street to the beach since the cars were parked there bumper to bumper, their license plates not just from the area, or Berlin or Dresden, but also from Hamburg and Cologne, and we had to be glad about that, the country is poor and needs tourists on its coast, but we knew we would never go back.

  And one time, it comes to me now, you were on the Eastern Sea where it is called the Baltic: in Lithuania, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union. You and G. had come from Leningrad, when the city was not yet named St. Petersburg again. There you had stood on the riverbanks and looked out at the battleship Aurora, but here, in Lithuania, you went to see friends you had first met by the Black Sea, on the stony beach of Gagra, and the blond young man there told you he was a writer who was currently working on a piece about Jonah and the whale—you understand, he said, the whale swallows Jonah. You hadn’t understood, and he could hardly believe it, the whale was Russia, he said, and Jonah was little Lithuania being swallowed up by it, and you hadn’t known that that was how the Lithuanians saw it, and when you and G. visited them they brought you along to some friends’ house where they used to meet, and you were not to let it be known that they had brought you there, and they told you about their Lithuanian traditions and gave you a present, cloths woven in their old patterns, cloths that still cover our table today, and they took you with them to the Baltic Sea, which, it seemed to you, they loved in another, more heartfelt way than you loved your Eastern Sea.

  And the Scandinavians’ way was different still. Out from Stockholm in a ship full of writers, through the archipelago, with Germany East and Germany West down below, and the tentative, polite, attentive conversations. Or else on the crunching ice, at the edge of Copenhagen, discussing with a representative from your country your and his concerns about that country. I had no idea how much would surface within me when I thought the word “sea.”

  Yes, you swam in the Black Sea too—it was your first encounter with the South, the oranges glowed in the gardens against the deep green leaves. On the beach you belonged to a group in the blink of an eye, a group centered around and led by Marya Sergeyevna, a lawyer from Moscow whom you and G. later had to go see in her high-rise on the Moskva, but here, on the Black Sea, she took you newcomers under her wing and initiated you, in her rough, low, penetrating voice, into the customs of the place and the jurisprudence of the country. These were indeed impenetrable for a foreigner, but Marya Sergeyevna understood them down to the core and left no doubt in her Russian clients’ minds that the best she could do for them as their defender was get them off with a milder sentence of five years instead of ten, there was nothing in between, her voice blared out across the beach, and if she did manage five years then the relatives of the sentenced person brought her presents, she thought that was “swell.” She had picked up slang like that when she lived in Berlin in the twenties, the greatest time in her life, she said, and my memories of the Black Sea mingle with Marya Sergeyevna’s voice and a generous supply of caviar, wrapped in wax paper and an issue of Pravda, that she had collected for you at the back doors of the big Moscow restaurants, from cooks who owed her a favor, so that she could give it to you and G. for the plane to Berlin.

  Or Brittany. Raw, rainy days by a raw, gray sea, lovely colors and bright warm beaches in Normandy. Looking out from Lisbon and Cannes, and from the edge of Sicily, at the Mediterranean. And now the Pacific Ocean. Was it enough?

  And I haven’t even mentioned the lakes, where you loved to go swimming—the lake near your childhood home, the lakes around Berlin, the wonderful Mecklenburg lakes. The one lake that became a kind of home for you, on whose shore, far away from the bathing area, the cows came and drank—formerly the co-operative’s cows, now the corporation’s cows—and whose other shore had a trout farm that has now been given up too. That lake is so clean and so deep that vendace live at the bottom, the sensitive, delicious fish that cannot be transported. The children went crayfish hunting there one summer.

  Oh, and yes, Lake Zurich, along whose shore you and G. decided to go back to where you came from. Was it enough?

  I had not known that I could link the story of my life to that of the waters in which I swam or by which I stood—and now, inexorably, the rivers of several countries emerge from my memory. Who will have heard of the Wipper, a stream in the Thuringia town where you found a place to live after the war, but almost everyone knows the Pleisse, carrying its stinking whitecaps past you while you were a student in Leipzig; later, in Halle, you lived on the bright bank of the Saale. Then, already, the Spree, Berlin’s river, again and again to this day, with the Weidendammer Bridge you crossed again and again at various times: sometimes expectant, sometimes cheerful, sad, hounded, scared. Should I mention the jolly Panke? Definitely the Elbe near Dresden, in the evening light, incomparable, when the light from the low sun in the west fell straight into its riverbed. The Danube, which is not blue and no longer flows through Vienna, though it does flow through Budapest, your first foreign city. But the Vltava, with stones shifting around on its riverbed, which has seen and heard so many things that were important in your life. The majestic Rhine, a foreign river you admired. The quick, smiling Seine; the stolid, hardworking Thames. The Tiber in Rome. And the unforgettable Neva in Leningrad during the white nights, when the graduates processed along the embankments, singing, the girls in white dresses and the boys in dark suits. The Moskva of course, the sullen, taciturn Moskva—one time you even took a ship called Gogol along it all the way to Nizhni Novgorod. You never went farther east, never saw the great rivers of Asia and Africa, and never wanted to either. Just one more, the Hudson River, with skyscrapers reflected in it.

  Is it enough? Maybe it was too much? Too many good things, that had to come to an end sometime?

  I still remember it: Someone gently shook my shoulder. It was Ria, with Ines and Kätchen standing behind her. They had worried looks on their faces and asked me if I was sick. I was lying in bed in the hotel. What do you mean, sick? Well, no one had seen or heard from me since yesterday afternoon; I hadn’t come down for dinner, or for breakfast either, and it was already noon.

  I was swimming in the pool, I said stupidly, and I realized that that was the last thing I remembered. How I had gotten back to the room, unpacked my nightgown, gone to bed—I had no memory of any of it. I laughed when I told them that. They didn’t laugh along with me.

  Greg, who was asked for advice despite my protests, pronounced the diagnosis: a blackout. He wanted to take me to a doctor. I refused so violently that he let it go, but he made me promise to tell them immediately about any symptom I had, no matter how small. In any case, there was no time for a long discussion because the group was already gathering for the drive to Hearst Castle. Peter Gutman sat down next to me in the bus and looked sidelong at me.

  So there was something your subconscious was trying to tell you, he said.

  Yes, I said, there was. That I am a water person and shouldn’t always stay on dry land.

  I’ve never seen you
in such a good mood, he said.

  And that makes you suspicious, or what?

  I sat next to Peter Gutman in my good mood, in the bus that drove us up the mountain in a magnificent hilly landscape with barely any trees. We were dropped off in front of a building that resembled more than anything else a small airport’s departure hall, where you had to stand in line for tickets. I was in a mood to find everything funny, especially the welcome the visitors received from a man, no longer young, in a proper sea-blue suit, white shirt, and tie, wearing a straw hat, an employee of the state of California but one who deeply identified with William Randolph and led us through the site, from the outdoor pool ringed with Greek columns and statues—some genuine, some less genuine, the guide said straight out—through the magnificent garden, tended by eight gardeners, up a swooping staircase into one of the guesthouses, whose rooms were stuffed full of old furniture and were mostly dark and lugubrious—we wouldn’t want to stay there, we assured each other—but everyone had stayed there, from Garbo to Chaplin, and whenever any of the guests misbehaved and fell from their host’s good graces, they might get back from an excursion and find their suitcases packed and standing in front of the door, next to a waiting taxi: goodbye for good.

  It all made me laugh, including the fact that Mr. Hearst let his guests sleep in double rooms only if they were married, while he himself was bringing Marion Davies here, his mistress of many years, because his Catholic wife would not agree to a divorce. In some sort of compensation, he had Marion’s bedroom hung full of genuine paintings of the Madonna, and kept the alcohol locked away from her in a metal safe.

  I thoroughly disliked the main building in the complex, where the owner lived, the one whose facade was like a cathedral—I hated everything about it: the gloomy room where the guests had to appear for dinner punctually thirty minutes before the master of the house, the massive flower-pattern armchairs, the refectory more like a medieval knight’s hall than anything else, with rows of flags along the top of the walls, dark wainscoting, gigantic expensive tapestries, every inch of wall space filled with art that had been bought up around the world during the Depression, when everything was cheap. Original Renaissance ceilings in every room. And then, as the showstopping high point, the phenomenal “Roman Pool,” which not a few cities would surely have loved to have for their residents, bathed in a mysterious light from a row of milky lanterns.