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

by Wolf, Christa

  * * *

  When my thoughts were going around in circles I jumped up and went out to Second Street, in the late afternoon light, into the multicolored crowd of people drifting back and forth as evening approached, to see and be seen, to sit outside at the little restaurants and eat hamburgers, Italian pasta dishes, Mexican tortillas, Japanese sushi, and gather around the many performers putting on their shows. And, in the middle of this lively crowd, unnoticed by everyone, as though invisible, the homeless people drawn to this gentle climate like little splotches of color that didn’t match. I would have to learn to suppress my tears when one of them said, in an abject voice with a slight singsong to it, Have a nice day after I’d given him a dollar, or, even worse, God bless you. My sympathy came cheap. How would it help that homeless woman with the mouse-gray felt hat if I sat down next to her on the bench in front of the discount clothing store, where she always was with the shopping cart from PAVILION that held a few discolored items of clothing, empty bottles, several plastic bags filled to bursting, and a wool blanket, all her belongings, her survival kit—she pushed it around with her, she didn’t want any money, she shook her head and pointed at the bottles she had picked out of the garbage cans whose deposits she lived on. I remember that I felt inferior to her, guilty, due to my unearned life of luxury; she was probably as old as I was, early sixties, life had left its marks on her, white curly hair poured out from under her cap, she had grown fat and shapeless from the low-quality food she was forced to eat, she confidently stretched out with her bundles on the bench that no one challenged her claim to and struck up a conversation with the homeless woman on the bench across from her. I heard her raw voice, slang I couldn’t understand, though I picked up a few words here and there, “children,” “family,” I saw the woman gesticulate wildly and laugh a loud hearty laugh with her mouth wide open, revealing bad teeth. This woman, I said to myself, doesn’t kowtow to anyone, she is beyond every kind of conforming or compromise to fit in with other people: if that is what freedom means then she is free, free of possessions too, with only the barest minimum a person needs. She did not have to fearfully protect and defend her wealth, she took nothing from anyone, she took no part in the exploitation of natural resources, she is innocent, I thought, while the rest of us are guilty, because we don’t want to pay the price demanded of us.

  And so the tape player in my head started up again, while I ate my grilled fish and salad, while the people drifted by in front of me, darkness approached, and I went back to the MS. VICTORIA, which, I had to admit, mildly amused, had among all its other virtues the fact that it would have made an ideal location for a thriller, I thought, crossing the half-dark hallway and climbing the narrow steps to my apartment: everything a little dark, everything a little creepy, and, as if to furnish proof for my feeling, there was actually a bulging wallet right in front of my door with a lot of checks inside and credit cards embossed with the name of their owner, one Mr. Gutman, Peter Gutman, who must have lived in the building. I had to decipher his apartment number on the badly lit and almost illegibly scribbled list on the front door in order to ring his buzzer. He lived a floor above me. Luckily he answered, but I couldn’t think of the English word “wallet” so I informed the bewildered Mr. Gutman that I had found something of his.

  What did you find?

  Something, Mr. Gutman. Please, come down.

  He came downstairs. So that is how I first saw him, in the half-dark, on the stairs. He was a very tall, angular man, whose clothes seemed to hang negligently on his limbs, with a tall, bald, egg-shaped head, I couldn’t help thinking egghead, a typical egghead, and how strange that I hadn’t yet run into this striking person in the MS. VICTORIA. He was happy to get his wallet back, “wallet,” oh yes, that’s what it’s called, another word learned. He hadn’t noticed it was missing. He politely asked if I would care to come upstairs with him so that he could repay my kindness with a drink. No thank you, I surprised myself by saying, I’m too tired. I’d be glad to another time.

  Later he would tease me about this first rebuff and I would laugh at him for having stubbornly continued to speak English with me even though he must have known from my first sentence that I was German. But you know why I couldn’t shift into German from one word to the next, he said. There is always a barrier between the two. Unconscious. Unwanted. And anyway he had gotten used to hiding behind the second language he had grown up with.

  Then I told him—this was weeks later—what obsessively occupied my imagination when he went back upstairs and I went into my apartment and sat down with a margarita, my favorite drink, in front of the new episode of Star Trek: I had spun a thriller plot around his mysterious person, invented a business card that had fallen out of his wallet and that I hadn’t returned to him. On it, I imagined, stood the address for a lawyer’s office, a reputable address in Beverly Hills—Malrough & Malrough, I boldly invented, two brothers, why not—and on the back of the card I discovered, in Peter Gutman’s difficult-to-read handwriting, which of course I had to invent too, an appointment and the note that he, Peter Gutman, had to call a Pacific Palisades number very urgently to talk to one “Gladis Meadow.” What would happen, I wondered, if I called this Gladis myself. I would surely hear a dark, sympathetic voice, who would answer the question “Is this Gladis Meadow?”—the name came to me just like that—with a surprised Yes, and I would say Thank you so much! in a friendly but firm voice and hang up, at which point I realized with a feeling of elation that with this one phone call, whether it took place in banal reality or only (but what does that mean, only!) in my head, I was inextricably entangled in this story taking place between Mr. Gutman, the dark-voiced Gladis Meadow, and the law firm of Malrough & Malrough.

  Peter Gutman was delighted with this imagined story and would have liked to keep playing his role in it, and to classify Gladis Meadow as a real person. What does “real” mean anyway? This was one of the core questions his philosopher had slaved away at, he said. By then I already knew that Peter Gutman had spent years toiling over this philosopher, whose name he hardly ever spoke, as though tying him to a name would be to break a magic spell. Yes, you see, I’d said, but neither of us knew what exactly he was supposed to “see.”

  I don’t want to jump too far ahead. I will only say that Gladis Meadow did her part to bring us together and then unobtrusively vanished from the screen.

  I ran into Peter Gutman again unexpectedly the next day in the lobby of the CENTER. He stepped out of one of the elevators and came up to me, said a polite greeting, and headed for the exit, while I detoured to the right, to the counter of the First Federal Bank, where I was finally able to pick up my ATM card. An elfin young lady handed it to me with a triumphant smile, and I understood that only from that moment on was I a full-fledged customer of this bank, and more: a full-fledged (if temporary) inhabitant of this city. What was Mr. Gutman doing in this building? Sunk in thought, I took the elevator up to the fifth floor, forgot to return the black security guard’s greeting, picked up my bundle of keys from the little locker, went up to the seventh floor, skimmed the nameplates on the doors as I walked past, and dropped into the chair behind my desk. While the question about Mr. Gutman’s activities continued to run through my head, I had to figure out at the same time what had so disturbed my walk to my office, it must have been a minuscule observation that had not found its way into my consciousness and only rubbed up and down against my brain like a grain of sand in a shoe rubs against one’s foot. Since you were staying in the MS. VICTORIA, I thought your job might have something to do with the arts—this was the next day, we were speaking in German by then, but still with formal pronouns, one step at a time. Or maybe a businessman in some art field. A movie producer? Nope. Museum director going around buying? Hardly. Keep guessing, Peter Gutman said. Consultant, I said. Some type of consultant. Or expert, there are thousands of those. The only question is, in what field. We had our fun.

  But where did that nagging feeling in my office com
e from, the feeling that I should really have known what Peter Gutman’s job was? That the solution to the riddle of his person was close at hand? I closed my eyes and emptied my mind of thoughts. A little white card appeared before my inner eye with his name on it, and the card had a border just like the nameplates on our office doors in the CENTER. No, it couldn’t be—I jumped up, went out into the hall, and inspected the door of the next office. There it stood: Prof. Peter Gutman, really and truly, I told Peter Gutman later. I was almost sorry that this vexing enigma had such an ordinary solution, would you believe it? I had constructed such beautiful, intricate figments of the imagination about the entanglements I thought you were caught in, and I had decided to avoid you for as long as possible.

  Fooled you then, Peter Gutman said, with his serious professorial face. You gave up too soon. There are entanglements galore here. I inspected him closely. Aha, I said. Now we’re talking. We were standing by the copy machine in the CENTER’s office and a feeling of almost giddy happiness came over me.

  Sally called me that night. Have you read the book I gave you? By the Buddhist nun?

  I started it, I said. Seems pretty good. But you—did you take her advice to heart?

  Oh no! Sally cried. What she wants us to do is the hardest thing of all: let go! Sally couldn’t do that, she said, and didn’t even want to. She had just started therapy and her therapist encouraged her to calmly take the money Ron offered her—no, owed her—from his mother, an inheritance meant for them both. In the end, they were still married, and Ron’s mother had loved her and obviously assumed that they would use her legacy together. But the way things were now—wouldn’t people say she was taking a payoff to give Ron his freedom?

  You would say that about yourself, I said, but you’re the only one who would. I wanted to ask her if she still hoped Ron would come back to her, but I suppressed the question. What Sally believed and hoped was only too obvious, and if this therapist was good she would have to take this hope away from her, and Sally would hate her for it, but I wasn’t her therapist, I could leave her her pipe dreams, and I also didn’t want her to hate me, I had had enough of being hated.

  The nun, in any case, felt that people had a widespread misunderstanding about trying to avoid suffering as much as possible and “getting comfortable,” and I had to marvel at this Buddhist nun’s insight. I wanted to avoid suffering, of course, I wanted to live “comfortably,” of course, which didn’t necessarily mean “affluent,” not that, Brecht. But yes, in relative prosperity, in circumstances that made it possible for me to work: that was what I meant by “comfortable,” and in this world, I told and tell myself every day, that level of comfort is a great and unearned privilege. Suddenly I felt gripped by a kind of curiosity about what this woman thought. She saw it as a much more interesting, more adventurous, kinder, and more joyful approach to life to cultivate your own thirst for knowledge and not worry about whether the results of your explorations will prove bitter or sweet. You had only to realize that you could stand an enormous amount of suffering and joy in order to find out who you were and how the world was. How you work and how the world works—how this whole thing really is.

  I said goodbye to Sally, sat down at my little machine, and wrote:

  It’s a good opportunity. Why not find out how I really am, if this nun insists that I can get to know myself through and through and still like myself. She calls it “loving-kindness,” which is a problem for me since I cannot translate that into German. Apparently we don’t have this friendliness toward ourselves. There is self-hatred, and self-love, and vanity, and on the other side of the coin this nagging sense of inferiority, but not that. It really is strange.

  I found a note slipped under my office door at the CENTER. For the first time, I saw the tiny, calligraphically perfect handwriting of Peter Gutman, my mysterious neighbor (he later told me when he had trained himself to write that way), and I read the information that today was the birthday of our mutual friend Efim Etkind, from Leningrad but exiled and stripped of his citizenship, now living in Paris. His number was on the note. So, we had mutual friends? How did he know that? And would items found lying in front of my door be the only way I ever came into contact with Peter Gutman? I went out into the hall again and the door to the next office was closed, as always. Kätchen came in with the latest computer printouts: bibliographical references that the Orion computer system had spit out after being fed certain keywords. Not that you could enter the fateful cipher “L.” by itself, although Kätchen had tried, in vain of course. Then, without much hope of success, she had entered the name of my friend Emma, the old comrade who had left me the bundle of letters from L. in her will, and Orion had hit pay dirt, printing out the title of a book that I immediately found in the university library and borrowed (The Left-Wing Press in the Weimar Republic, ed. Emma Schulze: Frankfurt, 1932). Emma had never mentioned this book and I doubted that she herself had still owned a copy.

  The thought came to me that Kätchen knew what was going on at the CENTER backward and forward. Who is Peter Gutman? I asked her. Oh, him, Kätchen said, he’s not around much. Almost never here. This morning I saw him, he picked up his mail and then disappeared again, she said. It’s like he intentionally avoids joining us for our teas.

  That made sense to me. But why, actually? I dropped off my mail, shouldered my brightly colored bag from the Indian store, and walked to the MS. VICTORIA, sunk in thought. To find out why he was acting so strangely I would have to know something about Peter Gutman’s past, I said to myself. I ate, then made myself comfortable in the deep armchair in front of the television, wine within reach, and as usual Star Trek was on Channel 13 and I followed Captain Picard and his crew in shameless delight, given over to the outer-space adventures of the Starship Enterprise, where the Picard crew demonstrated that unconditional discipline could go perfectly well with mature humanity ennobled by masculine understatement.

  The telephone. Peter Gutman. What a coincidence! I said, and then had a hard time explaining why I called his phone call that, after all I couldn’t tell him I was brooding about him. He, on the other hand, only wanted to check whether I had gotten the note he had slipped under my office door. Indeed I had. In fact, I had called Paris right away and learned from Efim that he, Peter Gutman, was an old friend of his. And of course I wished him happy birthday. Great, Peter Gutman said. But how did I know this friend? he asked, all in English. I answered in English that it was a long story. Then, in flawless German, came the reply: Why didn’t I tell it to him? Right now? Why not? He owes me a drink in any case and can’t even imagine what might have happened if his wallet had fallen into the wrong hands. Ah, I said. Sounds like top security clearance. But I’m already drinking some wine, I said, still in English. —White or red? —White. —Good, Peter Gutman said. I’ll bring another bottle.

  I can no longer tell apart the numerous times—more than I can count—that Peter Gutman knocked on my door over the course of the next few months, stuck his polite tall bald head into my room, and settled down into my deep armchair. But I remember the first time very clearly. He accepted my breadsticks, I accepted his wine, and he proclaimed for the first time his thesis that we lived on a luxury liner, here in the MS. VICTORIA and especially over at the CENTER. We went back and forth between the deck of one luxury liner and the deck of the other, even more luxurious vessel, and only in order to take ourselves seriously when we excreted our actually rather superfluous texts. What was it Brecht had said about Thomas Mann? “I say that he is blind; he’s not been bought.” We can only hope that someone will be able to say that about us someday, Peter Gutman said, in German of course. None of us has the slightest idea if they will, he said. He had not been in my apartment ten minutes, and my apartment was not used to such tones. Aside from the television and occasionally a song I sang softly to myself, it was not used to any sounds at all.

  Hello, I said. What’s going on here? In German. Now we were both speaking German. Then Peter Gutman made hi
s characteristic, defensively apologetic hand gesture and got to the point: How exactly did I know our apparently mutual friend Efim?

  Were you ever in Leningrad, his city before he was expatriated? I asked him. Peter Gutman shook his head.

  Or St. Petersburg, as it’s called today?

  No. Peter Gutman had never been to Russia, he had met Efim at a university in Texas where they were both teaching. Classes on the various stages of German literature—me, the German-English Jew, and he, the Russian Jew, Peter Gutman said. We had a few laughs about that, he said.

  So, I began, back when Etkind was still a professor in Leningrad, G. and I took the whole family on vacation to a writer’s residence in Komarovo, near Leningrad.

  Now I am trying to remember everything I told Peter Gutman on that first evening, and I look in all my drawers for a certain document that could buttress my memory. Once again I realize that I have treated my files that include this document carelessly and inattentively. Lev Kopelev, our Moscow friend, had sent Efim to you and your family: one day he turned up unexpectedly at the residence to get you in his old Pobeda. Then a drive in the direction of the Finnish border, to his dacha, you remember a pine forest, mountain pines. It was late summer. Suddenly Efim whispered: Duck! at which point all your and your family’s heads disappeared below the car windows and you drove unchallenged past a military guard with a Kalashnikov hanging diagonally across his chest. They don’t need to know that I’m bringing you here, Efim said, and he took you to a wooden house in the middle of the forest, where it was bright and warm and comfortable. His wife gave you a friendly welcome, his two daughters started talking in German and Russian with your daughters. If I remember correctly, there were cookies and tea from the samovar first, later probably pelmeni. I still remember exactly how, in the place where icons and oil lamps hang in old Russian houses, that room had a corner dedicated to Alexander Solzhenitsyn: photographs, books, letters, you even thought you saw something like an altar candle. Do you know him? you had asked Efim, and he had answered simply: We’re friends. Which promoted him, as far as you and especially your daughters were concerned, into another category of living creature. The friendship cost him and his family their country—he was accused of concealing Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts and arranging for their translation in the West; it couldn’t be proven but everyone who knew him believed that the suspicions were not entirely unjustified, you believed it too, but you never asked him about it, not later either. In any case, he lost his job and then was forced to emigrate. You saw him again in Paris, years later, in an ultramodern part of the city; his apartment was full of mementos and soaked in nostalgia and homesickness, which is what I think his wife died of even though the official diagnosis was cancer.