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

by Wolf, Christa

  At the cave entrance I saw a bundle of short blades of grass, tied together with another blade and charred on one end. I asked what it was and Denis said it was an offering. He pointed to a stone farther back in the cave where there were similar bundles of longer blades of grass. This was an old place of sacrifice, he said. Yes, some people still came here and brought their modest offerings to the old gods. That was the clearest proof that the old Hopi beliefs were still alive. Denis seemed to have an ambivalent relationship with these beliefs: when he sold me a hunchbacked Kachina (not cheap), a god figure he had carved out of light wood and painted, he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it would keep watch over me that very night and guard my sleep.

  But I stood in front of the humble offerings for a long time. Was this the soul of America that I was looking for? I suddenly felt that I understood how the anonymous powers that create human history had ordered the world: A couple of centuries meant nothing to them and they were driving us toward a goal that they did not make known to us.

  The Kachina did keep watch over me that night. In my sleep I felt that Angelina was near me and I talked to her. I said that when you go deep enough down the differences between people and between peoples disappear. A spirit hovers around us all, I said, asleep. It was the spirit of these offerings, which also lived in her, in Angelina. And in Pema the nun, someone she probably didn’t know. Should we call it reverence? We whites have moved farthest away from it, I said. But now I realized that this overcoat of Dr. Freud’s had been sent to me for no other reason than to remove my doubts about this spirit. Angelina said nothing.

  Breakfast tasted good: blue cornmeal pancakes with maple syrup.

  All the villages on First Mesa, where the Hopi spring ceremonies were to take place, were “closed” to non-Indians because so many whites had failed to observe the prohibition against taking pictures or making audio recordings. Everywhere we went, at the entrances to the mesas, we found signs: INTERMITTED FOR NON-INDIANS, and we had the experience for the first time in our lives of being turned away because of our skin color.

  We met Denis in Hotevilla at two o’clock sharp, or one o’clock in Hopi time—they had their own time, we learned: they set their clocks back an hour by day and moved them forward again at night. We could not find out the reason why, but Lowis told us that there was no way to refer to time in the Hopi language, or space either, and I realized that we were living in a different world than they were and that we could not understand their way of thinking. Denis had put on his best, brightly colored American shirt for us and he lifted Deniseya onto his shoulders and set out. Are we walking? Lowis called after him. Yes. So we ran after him for a few hundred feet to the edge of the mesa—he wanted to show us the tiny fields far below in the canyon, surrounded by primitive fences, which the women worked. It felt to me like looking down from above into an earlier era of human civilization; there was something painfully touching about these women’s fields. They had to take a laborious path down to the fields and back up, to plant, sow, and tend their crops, and in the summer it must be unbearably hot down there. But their families couldn’t do without the meager harvests they brought back home.

  We all got into the car. Denis didn’t let us stop anywhere; he wasn’t exactly sure what to show us. He led us to a lookout tower with the high plateau of the mesa all around. I felt obliged to look out for Deniseya, who kept wanting to escape into the street. Her daddy didn’t give a thought to paying attention to her or telling her she couldn’t do anything—she walked with us to the very edge of the mesa, where it dropped off steeply, and stood next to or even in front of her father with her toes over the edge, but he didn’t feel it necessary to hold her hand. She had learned to look after herself early.

  We drove back to Denis’s sister’s house. Old James came and joined us too. Coffee was handed out to us in plastic cups from the big aluminum pot on the stove and then we were invited to join them for a real Hopi meal, cornbread: a flat corn cake wrapped temptingly up in corn leaves, filled with chili (hot but not too hot) and beef. Good food. Denis’s sister, who hadn’t sat at the table with us but instead devoured her meal in an armchair off to the side, packed up three more cornbreads for us for the road.

  All of a sudden, the taciturn Denis took an interest in our way of life. He asked Lowis and Sanna if they were married; they exchanged a look and then Sanna said, We live together. Denis and James gave a knowing laugh at that. I asked Denis how they got married and he said In Las Vegas! which made everyone laugh. Then it came out that they did have their own marriage ceremony, performed by an elder, but that the state did not recognize it. If the wife wanted to get on her husband’s health insurance or inherit his property if he died, she had to get married a second time. Their life seemed very complicated to us: inadequate agreements with the whites that were not kept anyway. A little island of Hopi country in a big Navajo ocean.

  Now a lively conversation got going around the kitchen table. James saw the watch on Lowis’s wrist and showed us that he had the same kind, also Swiss. Those are very good watches, he said, he had lost his working in the field once and found it again two years later, still ticking. He laughed mischievously at this trick the watch had successfully played on him. Denis wanted to know where you could get a watch like that. Would he like one? Lowis asked. Yes. Lowis said he would give Denis his. It turned out that Denis was a member of the Blue Bird Clan. There were ten clans in Hotevilla. He, Denis, had also been to the Kachina Peaks, the holy mountains the Kachinas come down from to live among humans. Later, when we talked about how Denis didn’t seem to take the Hopi beliefs entirely seriously, Lowis said: A people that no longer believes is lost. Its soul is destroyed and it is buried under the rubble of our civilization.

  We had to leave. James said that he might go to London in November, for a conference. The Hopi felt cheated by the agreement that had been signed between the state and the Indian tribes in the previous century and they were working to get it revised.

  He said goodbye, full of dignity.

  Lowis gave Denis his watch, and Denis said only Pretty good! and put it calmly in his shirt pocket. The days of the week on the watch were in German, so Sanna wrote them out for him in English. When we drove off, back to the hotel, we were sore at heart. Were the Hopi a people in decline?

  We sat up late in my room, maybe because I was secretly hoping that Angelina would join us. Lowis’s scholarly area, as he put it, was the study of peoples and empires in decline. The riddle of their downfall could not be solved in every case, he said. In analogous circumstances, some societies collapsed and others lasted, if in diminished form, and seemed to draw strength from the ruins of the edifices that had adorned their golden age. And we have witnessed collapsing empires too, I said, and were no more prepared for their collapse than those who came earlier, it seems. But can we put ourselves in their place? Sanna said. She was about to put on a play about the fall of Troy and she needed a straightforward reporting witness’s voice for it, nothing else. That’s what has the greatest effect, she said.

  Lowis said that decline was in the air, you could smell it. Had I “smelled” the decline and fall of my own country? Strangely, an event came to mind that I had never before put in the category of decline: a meeting with the Soviet ambassador on March 30, 1990, in his big embassy on Unter den Linden that you had often viewed as the actual government of your country and where you had not been invited for years. Then, suddenly, came a private invitation to lunch. The yawning emptiness of the cloakroom, the extrawide staircase, the enormous, empty foyers, and then an intimidatingly large dining room with a giant table in the middle, set with far too many place settings for you and G. and the ambassador and his wife sitting opposite you. A young interpreter sitting at the narrow end of the table, who didn’t have time to eat anything, translated brilliantly and without an accent. A printed, gold-edged menu. Caviar and veal, baked pollock, borscht, baked chicken, served by an imposing woman with a white cap and apron. The
ambassador’s wife, a matron, said nothing. The ambassador felt the need to discourse at length about the advantages of perestroika and glasnost in his country. He had been specially transferred to Berlin, and now he was there in this difficult, unpredictable situation. The last elections for the GDR’s People’s Chamber, with the victory of the conservative coalition, had taken place less than two weeks before. But his own country’s position was difficult too, you countered. And he said: Exactly. Just look at the complicated situation with Lithuania.

  Why had you and G. been invited to see him? The ambassador was worried about the trouble around the Stasi files. Couldn’t they make an end to it? You said no, they should archive the files and make them available to the courts and other institutions doing research on behalf of the victims.

  The ambassador spoke about the total censorship of his official communications under the old SED leadership. You expressed the suspicion that Gorbachev had treated the old leadership too gently and he disagreed. He had been present six times at meetings between Gorbachev and the SED leaders in the past few years and the Soviet side had never minced words. The last time, Gorbachev said to the people with him in the hall after one of these meetings: What should we do now? The SED people had always objected that everything was going fine in the GDR, especially the economy.

  You asked about the opening of the borders in November. Hadn’t anyone consulted him? He only learned about it afterward; he could have spoken out against it but no one would have listened to him anyway. Everyone was in a panic and hoped that opening the borders would stop the flood of people leaving the country through Hungary.

  When you asked, he assured you that the USSR would never allow the GDR to join NATO, you could be sure of that. There was no way they would give up their most important line of defense.

  There would be rapid improvements in supplying the population in the USSR with what they needed, he said; the production of consumer goods as well as food had risen, the shortages everywhere were mainly due to low transportation capacity and the fact that people had too much money and bought everything up. He was either stonewalling or totally blind.

  It soon became clear that he knew hardly anything about the political currents in your country, that the forces which had led to the peaceful revolution were foreign to him, and that he had apparently invited you to lunch to learn something about them. What in God’s name had his secret police been doing all this time?

  Without much hope of success, you tried to impress upon him that he should finally recast the role of his embassy in Berlin—that he had to see it as a connecting link between East and West, he should invite writers from the West, the GDR, and the USSR and arrange major conferences there. Show his country from its best side, the cultural side. He found everything I had to say “very important and interesting.” Boilerplate.

  You and G. spent three hours in the embassy. When you left, the young interpreter walked you across the front courtyard to the outer gates. In the few feet where none of the guards could hear him, he gushed that he had never heard such an interesting conversation in the embassy before. He dismissed the ambassador as an “old grandpa” who didn’t have a clue. The situation was so bad in his country that many people thought a civil war was unavoidable and the question was only if it would be bloody or relatively nonbloody. You could forget about Gorbachev. He had done an awful lot for his country, if it was up to the interpreter they would build a monument to him in platinum, but now all he was good for was to be a counterweight as president. The USSR was finished anyway. The only solution would be for a social democratic party to quickly take control.

  You and G. stood numb on Unter den Linden. It was a close encounter of the third kind. You had smelled the end.

  * * *

  Our next destination was the Grand Canyon. Thousands of tourists were going to the same place and the nearby hotels were all booked; we looked out from one of the observation platforms down into the bizarre depths of the canyon, which left me strangely indifferent—the monstrosity of nature here simply exceeded every human measure. Then we found a room at the Red Feather, some distance away from the tourist circus we did not want to be a part of. In the room, over the rest of our whiskey, we talked more about the decline and fall of ancient civilizations. Lowis thought that their disappearance almost always had to do with the people’s or tribe’s or clan’s inability to defend itself against a technologically superior civilization. We need only remember the letters from the three Indian chiefs on display at the Hopi Cultural Center’s museum, apparently sent to a government agency, describing the terrible hardship and poverty of their people and calling for assistance from the white man (machinery, seeds, technology). The whites are candid and generous, one letter said, and then went on to discuss in detail how stubborn and narrow-minded many of his own people were, as if deaf and blind, rejecting the advantages of the white man’s way of life.

  In the morning I sat in the Red Feather and wrote this down, while Sanna and Lowis wanted to take the zigzagging trail down to the base of the canyon and, especially, wanted to hike back up again. It was a strenuous physical effort that was out of the question for me. That afternoon we had a view of the whole panorama from a helicopter. A stupendous feeling.

  Later we ate an excellent steak and baked potatoes and drank a big glass of homemade beer. We had underestimated the amount of whiskey that was still in the bottle, which we had decided we needed to finish that night, for reasons we ourselves didn’t know. I felt like I was traveling in a great circle around the reality I lived in and entering it again through a back way.

  My consolation was that I felt Angelina steady at my side.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. My grandmother’s face appeared before my eyes. Angelina wanted to know why I was so depressed about it. What happened to your grandmother? —She starved to death in 1945, while fleeing. —And? —And I never really mourned her.

  Didn’t you like her? Angelina asked.

  She was an upright woman, stingy with her feelings. She was a simple village girl, bitterly poor, who worked binding sheaves of wheat on farms in the Eastern Elbe, where she met my grandfather. He did seasonal work reaping before he joined the railroad and worked his way up to stoker on the locomotive. He learned enough reading and writing to pass the test, from a teacher that his son, my father, got for him. They lived in a basement apartment for many years. I don’t know if my grandmother ever learned to write—I never saw anything she wrote. She saved her pennies and we children got a groschen from her every time we got a good grade.

  And? Angelina asked. What kept you from mourning her?

  I refused to let myself think that she was an innocent victim, I said. I cut off my feelings because I needed to, and wanted to, see the loss of our home and our sufferings as a just punishment for German crimes. I didn’t let myself feel my pain. When she died, my grandmother was only a little older than I am now, Angelina. And now I see her face at night when I can’t sleep. Why now? And why here?

  Angelina didn’t answer.

  The next morning I wrote in my spiral notebook:

  I have known for a long time that the real transgressions are the ones that happen on the inside, not out in the open. And that you can deny these silent transgressions to yourself for a very long time, and hide them, and never speak about them out loud. We cling tight to this innermost secret and keep it and keep it.

  We wanted to spend at least one night in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, we had been told, was the focal point of the America that foreigners so craved. The Mirage Hotel had tempted us with its advertising brochure, so we booked a room, amazingly cheap. You’re supposed to give them your money in the gambling rooms, Lowis said. I was amazed at how restless he seemed, how eager to get to Las Vegas in a hurry. Sanna and I exchanged amused looks behind his back. Lowis said we shouldn’t be so stuck up. We shouldn’t try to deny that certain needs, which modern people usually have to repress, are taken seriously in places like Las Vegas and can be acted
upon. And that that is what lets these modern people continue to function, without getting sick, when they get back to their everyday lives.

  He waved to the people on the side of the road whose job it was to lure couples who wanted to get married to the particular one of the many small wooden buildings that they were advertising. The wedding could take place there very quickly and affordably. So? Lowis said to Sanna. Should we? —Better not at all than like that, she said. Did he see this offering as a kind of therapy too? —Why not? he answered. Compared with the strict puritanical marriage laws that held sway everywhere else.

  * * *

  The Mirage promised everyone who crossed its threshold an

  ENTRANCE INTO A PARADISAICAL WORLD OF WONDERS

  Looking back at the pictures in the brochure, I remember what I felt when we set foot in the gigantic lobby, filled with exotic plants, ingratiating music, and overpowering smells: my defenses went up. I followed the signs to the elevators unwillingly, since they led us on long, unnecessary detours to force us to walk past the gambling rooms with the roulette tables and rows of slot machines. Lowis made fun of our dislike of these cheap tricks: So, we thought that especially here at a place like this there was some kind of competition over which establishment could be most honest, could fool its guests the least, or what?

  From the very beginning I felt a shortness of breath. As though someone had pumped out air from the bubble we were in, thinning the oxygen we needed to survive. I threw myself onto the bed (too soft) in the enormous, luxurious room and had to fight off a strong need to fall asleep. But I also had the feeling that I had signed a kind of contract with the power that ruled here and now I had to fulfill it. To feel such an obligation was the last thing I expected, I thought that the atmosphere there would have a narcotic effect, which in fact it did too: it muffled all my feelings so that they wouldn’t be crushed by the overpowering force that had them at its mercy.