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

by Wolf, Christa

  Rome in its final days. I rest my case, said Lutz standing next to me. This can’t end well. It’s always a bad sign when the top stratum of a society does not want to live in its own era anymore, but prefers to imagine itself back in an earlier age.

  Then I realized, I remember, that I was happy to live in my own era. I could not wish I had lived in any other time. Despite everything? Despite everything. I felt a certain curiosity about whether that would remain true. Maybe the explosions in the corridors of capitalism are signs of the end times, at least for our Western culture, but I enjoy the advantages of this culture like almost everyone else.

  The trip to Hearst Castle was a turning point: after it my goodbyes began, although they stretched out for weeks, during which I had the feeling of living in an ever more fragmented reality. It was as though the substance of the world, whatever that might mean, were eluding me. I lived between two realities: one of them sunk beneath the sea, no longer in need of any interventions from me, and the other, supposedly future reality, seeming to pull farther and farther away and not have anything to do with me

  Maybe it doesn’t touch me yet, I said to Peter Gutman during our last long conversation. We were sitting one more time on our bench on Ocean Park Promenade, talking and falling silent, watching the joggers and walkers and strollers go by individually and in groups, talking to each other in their various languages. We would miss that. We spent one more long afternoon waiting for the sun to go down.

  He now knew, he said, that he would be able to finish his book about his philosopher. He said he had not had the courage until then to pose questions as radically as this man demanded: always keeping the sentence “But a storm is blowing from paradise” in mind, and always exposing himself to the storm.

  Once again we cannot hope for what will happen, I said to Peter Gutman. A patchwork life, I said. The different pieces sloppily stitched together.

  Write that down, Peter Gutman said.

  The air grew gentler toward evening, the heat receded over the ocean, we didn’t want to leave. I thought: I will always remember this light. But now I remember only that that is what I thought—the light itself, hanging over the Pacific Ocean shortly before sunset, I have forgotten. The smell of the eucalyptus trees too. But I know that it’s there, so I haven’t entirely lost it.

  Did you know that Freud asked for an assisted suicide at the end of his life? I asked.

  Naturally he knew.

  By the way, he said after a while, do you still have it memorized?

  I knew right away what he meant and I quoted it back to him almost without missing a beat: “Be undismayed in spite of everything; do not give up, despite everything.”

  We agreed that he could request the full text from me at any time, in case he should ever need it. He never did request it.

  By the way, he said after another while. We’re not phoning each other anymore. It’s going all right. Not great, but all right.

  I had thought so.

  The sun quickly vanished. It was quickly dark. We stood in front of our bench and formally bowed: Nice to meet you, Monsieur.

  The pleasure is mine, Madame.

  * * *

  Rachel, in her tiny shack on the corner of Twenty-sixth and Broadway: Feldenkrais teaches us, she said, to achieve greater effects with less effort through small movements. I lay down on a table and she had me find the most comfortable position and then she started to move my legs in various ways, very little and very gently. Your mind will tell you: That’s a Feldenkrais therapist, she wouldn’t hurt me. But your system is not so sure. I respect your system. She had me find the right distance apart to place my feet, and showed me a way to stand up that was less of a strain. What a person has learned badly can be relearned properly, she said, it was all about gently readjusting one’s inefficient movements. After the treatment my joints really were “softer,” my mood was brighter, I felt eager to do something good for myself, for instance to make myself some hot chocolate and “let it be.” Was that my last hour with her? Did she give me that advice to take with me when I left?

  * * *

  The nun would have said the same thing. I took her book with me when I drove out to see Sally, who had begged me to come see her one more time. She wanted to show me a video, a movie she had shot herself, with herself as the only actress. I scanned her face for signs of a change and didn’t find them. She may have looked even older. There was one bit of progress at least: she had filed for a divorce, stating as her grounds for divorce: hate. Hatred of Ron and of herself. She was so out of touch with reality that she was hoping this step would hurt him. And I did not have the courage to tell her.

  She was seeing her therapist four times a week, she said, and had of course discovered that her feelings of worthlessness were connected with her mother—who, by the way, was paying for the therapy. Sally made a salad while she talked without stopping, heated up some fish and vegetables in the microwave, made pasta, and talked and talked. About how lonely she was, how jealous she was. That she couldn’t stop digging deeper and deeper in her imagination into Ron and his lover’s love life. That she was unable to do what her analyst kept waiting for her to do—feel a normal straightforward pain at her loss. Instead, she had only this endless self-torture.

  We ate. The light in her small apartment was pretty that evening—a northern light that picked up the reflections of the evening sun from different surfaces outside before it entered her room.

  Then Sally showed me the video she had been working on for a while: a ruthless piece of self-expression, a naked display of pure suffering. First, herself as a younger, beautiful woman, putting on makeup and getting dressed. Then herself as she was now: looking much older, with gray hair, crying, talking to the camera, asking questions. Herself driving a car, talking as she drove. Herself in a bra and panties, in her apartment, moving, trying out a few dance steps. Ron’s voice, something that she happened to have on tape, and her own voice saying the same words, intercut with each other. Fade in to toys, clowns, penguins in their full puppetlike nature, a dog that couldn’t stop rubbing his sexual organ against a rock. Then more of herself, again and again. Her face, her body, sometimes naked too. Suitable music as a soundtrack.

  I was surprised at first but then touched and moved. None of it was embarrassing or sentimental, it was all professional without being the least bit professionalized, it was courageous, going right up to a borderline and then crossing it. Why do such artistic expressions always have to be caused by suffering? But why did I even ask, I knew the answer myself.

  I told Sally how good I thought the piece was, what she had done, and we talked about the final lines that she still had to add. I knew my praise would not ease her pain. We hugged each other a long time when we said goodbye. Will you come back? she asked. —I don’t know, I said, and I thought: Not likely. But maybe you’ll come to Europe? —I don’t think so, she said. Finally I gave her back the nun’s book. I had underlined a sentence for her—and for myself: My whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.

  * * *

  The goodbyes. I try to recall them—such an appropriate word in German for “recall”: vergegenwärtigen, “bring them into the present”! The “gang” was sitting in the MS. VICTORIA’s inner courtyard, everyone had brought along “something to eat,” by which was meant mainly something to drink. We had to say goodbye to Therese, who had finished her assignment on the mayoral election in this city. The candidate we liked had lost, of course. It takes some effort now to put myself back into the mood of that evening, which by the way was as if bathed in a long, bright twilight—the word fits, for once, as though the darkness had not simply fallen all at once as it usually did in that country; as though there were no moon or stars, just our circle grouped around a couple of camping tables on patched-up chairs with bottles of the most various sorts and colors in front of us. We topped off each other’s glasses—any old glass we had snatched up—and ate sandwiches, a big wheel of ch
eese, bread, crackers, vegetables. If only someone had turned on a tape recorder! Or at least preserved in memory what the hours-long conversation was about. We were amazed to realize that we already had memories in common, which were perfect for letting us give the sturdy, basic conversational formula—“You remember…?”—and cascades of laughter, as though we had only experienced utterly hilarious things together. Susan had in fact missed out on buying the house she had been in negotiations for—weeks ago by that point. Typical Susan. She laughed along with us. Or Therese, with her L.A. mania. How she was excited about everything, even the homeless man who had shamelessly robbed her. Laughter. Or even Margery, who had in fact flown to Berlin and come back in raptures—it’s the center of the world these days!—with the idea, in all seriousness, of opening an American Western restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg: they don’t have one of those yet. For that she would give up her rich American married couples in need of therapy in a heartbeat. Sympathetic laughter. Toby offered to design her restaurant’s interior for her. So his plans to head off to Mexico weren’t set in stone? Therese perked up, felt hope. Well, if we’re turning it into an expedition, Jane said, maybe you need a photojournalist there too? To document the whole thing, from the planning and construction phase on? Wild cheers. You can stay with me, I said.

  Yes, of course! We were all a bit drunk but that can’t have been all it was. It was also the moment in time that was well suited to such fantasies. A year earlier, they would not have come up; a year later, they would no longer come up. For a very short time, what we called “reality” hung suspended, and we unconsciously adapted to this condition of suspension.

  The word “Iraq” used as a threat didn’t exist yet; certain photographs had not yet appeared on the front pages of the newspapers. In retrospect it seems that, whatever we liked to believe about ourselves—that we were hard-headed cool customers, ready for anything—we were still, even then, a little naive. Still a little too innocent, measured by today’s standards. “Innocent”: an unjustifiable word at the end of a century of extremes, of violence, rivers of blood, waves of betrayal, denunciations, every possible kind of mean and dirty trick, which no one alive in that century escaped. But still, but still … These people sitting here on a bright twilit evening, I felt, seemed to be placing an almost culpable hope in the future.

  Someone suggested we sing. Again I had the experience of seeing that Americans don’t know any songs. Finally we decided on “We Shall Overcome.” They had sung it with enthusiasm back in the day. They wanted to hear “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore” from us two Germans.

  Suddenly the stars leapt out after all and we blew out our candles so that we could see them clearly. There was silence. Greg shouted down a nighttime greeting from a window on one of the upper floors. It was late when we picked up all the trash, put it in bags, and parted. Angelina too had vanished.

  John and Judy had gone to Berlin, to meet John’s new East Berlin relatives in person.

  The time that had seemed so endless grew short.

  I saw Bob Rice one more time. Hey, he said, when we were saying goodbye. What about my overcoat?

  Oh, Bob, I said. That overcoat is indestructible. It has served me well. I believe I’ve given it back to you already.

  Bob said he had figured as much.

  * * *

  The goodbye parties came closer and faster. One time, I drove my Geo without air-conditioning all the way down Olympic Boulevard, in melting heat, to Doheny Drive to buy sixty veal sausages from the famous German butcher shop there and then spent a whole morning making an enormous bowl of potato salad. We all brought a dish from our homeland along with all the bottles we had with any alcohol left in them. That was an especially nice party. Francesco, still with his thick accent, gave a warm speech of thanks and farewell, and the director of the staff told us how happy he was that we seemed to have enjoyed our time here after all, that we had not only viewed them and the whole institution with skepticism—he could say without hesitation that we seemed like the most skeptical group that they, the staff, had ever had, but also the most capable and independent.

  Mrs. Ascott was wearing one of her big flowy dresses with a floral print, and still barely knew who any of us were, but started, under the influence of the strong drinks she seemed to prefer, to talk to various residents who crossed her path and trap them in long, meandering conversations, during which she never looked at the person she was talking to but fixed her gaze on a point behind their left shoulders. Francesco said: You know what’s wrong with her? She has a complex. Mr. Enrico, meanwhile, threw caution to the winds and revealed himself to be a dashing Mexican, by no means disinclined to dance with preferred members of the female sex. Ria and Ines took turns—he’s wearing us out, Ria said.

  The director sat down next to me. He wanted to know what I had planned now. I’m taking a trip through the Southwest, I said. To see the Hopi Indians, among other things.

  Ah, the director said. You’re looking for the soul of America. Good luck.

  Angelina stood on the stairs, watching the party. She smiled when I walked past her. I did not say goodbye to her. See you later, I said. She did not seem surprised.

  I remember I vacillated about whether I should really take that trip to the American Southwest with Lowis and Sanna. I finally agreed, mostly because of the friends who said I couldn’t pass up a chance like that, and then I was surprised to find myself actually sitting in the plane to Albuquerque, a city I had hardly ever heard of and knew nothing about. I noticed that I entered an atmosphere of clarity, somewhere over Arizona, and that this clarity remained with me for my entire trip (which lasted not even ten days), and that the seat next to me in the plane was empty but I knew who was sitting there—Angelina had come with me, we had wordlessly agreed on that. I had understood that she would always be there when I needed her. The confusion of the period I had just been through fell away.

  Was I only now, finally, arriving in this country? It was a country built on myths and it was as if the previous months, lived in the thick of reality, were melting away; as if this dusty place with the desert winds blowing in were the first American city I saw, the Indian women sitting in their taciturn row under the arcades on the main square and offering ceramics with Indian patterns for sale were the first American women I saw, and the round, beehive-shaped pueblos we visited on the road to Santa Fe were the way dwellings here should be.

  Lui, a friend of Sanna’s, was a psychoanalyst who had been given her name by the Indian healer who had saved her from a serious childhood illness when the other doctors had given her up for lost. She lived with her dogs in the northern part of the city, on the edge of the desert, and she let us spend the night in her bungalow filled with Indian art: colored pottery and masks, carvings, woven rugs and fabrics that Lui herself wore. She had no intention, she said, of worming her way into another culture and claiming to belong to something she didn’t belong to, but it also would have felt wrong to her to live here surrounded by the insignificant everyday objects that the average American is so unable to do without.

  Her bungalow cast a spell that we could not escape and didn’t want to escape. We could easily imagine that patients would want to come see her here. She mentioned in passing at some point that people came to see her from Los Alamos too, seeking advice and healing, including a lot of women who could no longer bear their empty lives on the margins of the research labs where their husbands worked on the most horrible weapons under the strictest orders to keep their work top secret. When the husbands came to her for advice themselves, she said, the FBI came hot on their heels and wanted to find out what they had said, whether they were a security risk. Lui said she didn’t lie but didn’t tell them the whole truth either, and she discussed with her patients what she could tell the FBI agents—intelligent, psychologically trained people—without causing problems for the patients. “The soul of America,” I said, and Lui told me with a resigned laugh that this soul had long since been strapped down to an o
perating table, to be dissected and indoctrinated under glaring surgical lights.

  But then how could she do her job?

  By making compromises, like everyone else, she said. And taking care that the core of her work wasn’t damaged in the process.

  Luckily I marked our route with a thick red pen on a map of Indian Country, otherwise there is no way I would have been able to remember the bizarre path we took—heading basically west but with two long detours north. And without the notes I took, in a red spiral notebook, what would I still retain from our trip, which, the whole time it lasted, I felt was unforgettable? Or without the photos showing us deeply immersed in our notebooks, surrounded by sparse, spiny desert plants, in the shade of our hardworking greenish Opel glittering in the sun?

  Did we already know that we were on our way to the outermost extremes of American life?

  LOS ALAMOS wasn’t on our way but we had to include it, no question. So, north: from Santa Fe on a road lined with pueblos. The atomic bomb had been planned and built in the middle of one of the largest Indian reservations in the United States. The paltry, unassuming little museum—the first to be dedicated to the pioneers of Los Alamos—claimed that the Indians had gladly put part of their land at the disposal of the builders of the bomb, because they were loyal citizens of the United States who wanted to do their part for victory in the war; they were proud of their sons who served in the army and fought on the front lines together with white Americans.