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

by Wolf, Christa

  First, the small private groups, often disguised as reading circles, who made contact with each other, united, led political discussions, developed platforms, approved resolutions, formulated demands. Busily shuttling back and forth from one apartment to the next, people exchanged documents and practiced the ways of conspiracy, under close surveillance from state security, of course. It seemed unavoidable that parties would form, names would be passed along, NEW FORUM, DEMOCRACY NOW. All while the anniversary of the state was celebrated with military pomp and honors. And the government authorities took it as the most serious possible threat when the masses on the street shouted out the slogan: We’re staying here!

  There is always a point of no return, I said to Peter Gutman. But you don’t always realize it at the time.

  We let ourselves be carried along by the stream of people enjoying the offerings of the street performers and artists. I felt something like envy inside me. It’s possible to live like this too. The idea of trying to tell these people, most of them young, acting out their precious selves in the most marvelous masquerades and given totally over to the moment, about the passion with which people on the other side of the globe, decades before, equally young, had sat together day after day, night after night, and tried to talk into existence a future in which man would not be wolf to man—the very idea struck me as absurd. I said something of the sort to Peter Gutman, who replied that he was familiar with such discussions too. With us, he said, they were castles in the air, whereas you had your feet on the ground, we thought: I mean you were living within the new property relations, the ones that are now held against you as crimes and that they’re rushing to try to annul. Whereas the real crime is the “toxic money economy,” Ludwig Börne already knew that. Even if he didn’t know the kind of crimes that new property relations could call forth when combined with totalitarian power structures.

  We walked in silence. Hats and caps lay out on the street in front of the dancers, musicians, and magicians, the spectators strolling by were free with their dollars. I stood spellbound in front of a very thin black man who was standing on a pedestal dressed as Uncle Sam, wearing a top hat covered with an American flag and representing a kind of machine-man moving in slow motion in tiny jerks, powered, you couldn’t help but think, by some device hidden somewhere within his human exterior, so that I was unconsciously expecting to hear the gears whir. I was fascinated and followed how he jerkily bent his arms, with infinite slowness, then stretched them out again, bent his upper body, straightened it up again, which all took several minutes and required total physical control. The audience applauded wildly. We kept walking, to the end of Second Street, where we bought warm waffles with acacia honey at a stand and ate them there.

  When we walked back past the black Uncle Sam, I threw the dollar he had earned into his top hat and turned to go. Now he’s waving! Peter Gutman cried. And so he was. The mechanical human moved his right index finger in a jerky wave and a masklike smile appeared on his face. I stepped closer. He reached out his hand to me in slow motion, bent down, hugged me, and I tried to imitate his movements, laughed, and left. Now he’s following us! Peter Gutman cried. For the black man had freed himself from his mechanical state and stepped down off the pedestal, and he came up to me with quick steps and the relaxed, supple movements of many African-Americans, he was beaming, he shook my hand again, for real this time, loose, loose, we hugged again, as though the machine-man’s embrace didn’t count, and then he let me leave, waving after me. And I felt the shock in every bone in my body at this transformation from an artificial creature into a human being, as though that were the unnatural thing, as though a chain had just been shattered and the bonds that had held him for so long been broken.

  I felt that something had happened, as though this physical contact was what I had needed, and Peter Gutman seemed to see it in my face. We hurried back to the MS. VICTORIA in silence and parted almost without a word in front of my apartment door. I sat down at the table and wrote, as if taking dictation, what today, paging through my old notebooks, I am amazed to read:

  In any case, the time of lament and accusation is past, and we have to get past grief and self-reproach and shame as well, so that we will not keep falling from one false consciousness into another. “The flags rattle in the wind”—whatever colors they bear. So what? So they rattle, but why did it take us so long to realize that? We have to live following an uncertain inner compass, without any appropriate moral code. Only we cannot keep deluding ourselves any longer. I don’t see any end to it, we are digging in a dark tunnel but we have to just keep digging.

  I went to the shelf with the folder of L.’s letters. Her second letter to my friend Emma was from January 1947. It began with exclamations of joy that Emma was still alive, and that they were in touch with each other again. Then she wrote:

  Even if a letter can never take the place of our kitchen conversations, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Do you remember? We sat at the kitchen table, the streetcar line ran practically through your room, a room and a kitchen was all you could afford, we drank coffee substitute, you didn’t have a job, the office could no longer afford an addiction counselor, but I was still getting by as an assistant doctor in the clinic for the poor where we had met. I met my dear gentleman then too. Life became precious to me. And so it has remained.

  So, now the old lady has told you the most important thing, that I’m still acting like a silly schoolgirl, and I can see the shocked and mocking look on your face. My ambassador, the young journalist, has probably told you that I have been working as a psychoanalyst for a long time.

  And, since I know how curious you are: Yes. His wife, Dora, is still there too, they live together as they always have. Don’t laugh, it’s nothing to laugh about.

  As I write this everything rises up to the surface inside me. I can see you before my eyes. Do you know how beautiful you were back then?

  Was Emma beautiful? Not when I knew her. When we met her, she had just finished her jail time in the small town of Bützow in Mecklenburg. Her features were sharp and exhausted at the same time. Still, in the biggest room of her ridiculous little bower house there was a picture hanging above an old-fashioned sofa that a painter friend, who later had also had to emigrate, had painted of her in the late 1920s and that had survived the Hitler era through a series of remarkable adventures. It showed an attractive young woman, confident and provocative. You have to always look out for yourself, child. She was disappointed in me sometimes, she wanted to cure me of my feelings of guilt.

  * * *

  Sally called. Nothing new with her. Her therapist was trying to convince her that what was happening to her was normal. Normal! Sally cried. When the person closest to you betrays you! I was tempted to ask her if she thought “betrayal” was the right word to describe someone’s love ending, and if she would want Ron to stay with her even though he no longer loved her. But I suppressed the question. That was the scandal, after all: that he no longer loved her and it was nobody’s fault. She couldn’t sue his love.

  And you? Sally asked me. What are you up to? Have you settled in? How are you feeling?

  Without having planned to, without even seeing it coming, I suddenly asked her what the English word for “Akten” is. Why do you want to know? Sally asked. I ignored her question and used circumlocutions to describe what I meant until she finally arrived at the right word: files, she said. But what do you need that word for? —Later, I said. Maybe I’ll tell you later.

  I looked it up in my Langenscheidt dictionary to make sure. I couldn’t believe that this short bright little word “file” could mean the same thing as the dark, threatening German word “Akten.” So “to lead an Akte about someone” is “to keep a file on someone”; “to put something aside” is “to file it away”—letters, reports, surveillance records, credit statements, whatever. The main thing was that all these words were neutral: a file number could be something completely harmless, I told myself, no reason to get sweaty palms.


  The break I had given myself, or taken for myself, was coming to an end. I hadn’t memorized my file number, which the agency had assigned me. The agency where—as in the fairy tale about the porridge overflowing out of the magic pot until it covers and smothers the whole city—sheet after sheet of paper is brought forth from a dark well and painstakingly archived until they take up many rooms, a whole new building, one space after another, from which in turn spill out their calamitous effects. Copies of the “good” files—called, perversely, “victim files”—sat in a chest at home and still sit there today, and I couldn’t help but think about the whole series of containers that had been hidden for years in a crate, before this chest: cardboard boxes tied with string and taped around all the edges and diagonally, document boxes, travel bags, with material, manuscripts, and diaries that “they” mustn’t find. If these various containers stayed in their obvious hiding place, it was a sign that you did not think they were in any real danger. This hope was always fragile, and consisted in large part of self-deception, as you knew perfectly well in another layer of your consciousness, and if the delusion collapsed you would have to take immediate action: friends would have to be ready to take in the boxes and bags without asking what they contained, agreements would have to be made about where to take them if they turned out not to be safe anymore with these friends either, code words would have to be agreed on, with embarrassed laughter, it would be humiliating—codes that could be given over the phone in case of emergency to produce behavior the opposite of what we seemed to be asking for. And you were always afraid that you would mix up the code words, since of course you couldn’t write down even the most harmless password, that was agreed. None of which is in the files, I thought, that this agency is bringing to light. I have told it to only a very few people. The chest is not empty. I haven’t opened it for years.

  I sat down at my little machine. I wrote:

  TO TURN EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN YET AGAIN

  I know how far I can trust my memory, don’t I. I can only hope that I never get to the point where I have to tell all these innocent people, with their pure, lacuna-less memory, something about remembering and forgetting.

  * * *

  Then I got ready to go out to dinner. A couple in Pacific Palisades, both German professors, had invited me, and this dinner, among all the many dinner parties from that year, remains crystal clear in my mind. A Polish couple fetched me, which I was especially looking forward to. I wanted to ask him, an essayist I admired very much, all sorts of questions about the early sacrificial rites of primitive peoples, I had just read something by him about them. But sitting next to me in the car was a sick, gaunt man, obviously hard of hearing, who had great difficulty breathing and spoke American English with such a thick Polish accent that I could barely understand him. His wife, a frail older lady, sat mutely next to the driver, with an aura of mourning, it seemed to me.

  As we drove through Pacific Palisades, I tried to see as much as I could—the well-tended gardens and expensive villas, often hidden behind high, impenetrable hedges. Two white dogs, of a rare, aristocratic breed I had never seen, sprang at the wire fence next to our host’s front door, barking furiously, jumping high. One of the dogs was named Willy but he didn’t listen to his name, or any other command from his master. Both dogs had to stay outside. I already knew the couple who met us at the door—Marja, a Hungarian Jew, and Henry, the son of a German-Jewish family—from Berlin, where they had spent a semester as visiting scholars. Marja was a bit older than me and we had liked each other from the beginning. The guests who had arrived before us—Gottfried, a director, and his wife, Sylvia—were already standing with champagne glasses in their hands in the front part of the living room, furnished with deep armchairs and sofas that were flanked in turn with two floor lamps, as in every American living room. We sat down to the obligatory snacks and dips. Ted was led into the room, a member of the German Department at the university, and presented to me as “liberal and leftist”; his wife, Elizabeth, an anthropologist, dressed and coiffed especially meticulously, did not speak German and was clearly bored when the others shifted into German for my sake.

  Finally the last guests arrived, and Marja meant them as a surprise for me, which they certainly were: Svetlana and Koma, Lev Kopelev’s stepdaughter and son-in-law. We were friends from Moscow and rushed to hug each other. She was a stately woman, dark-skinned, in a black dress with a black-and-white shawl, a typical Russian woman, I couldn’t help thinking. He was bursting at the seams, a man who loved to talk and was thrilled to be able to give a seminar at the university here on the poet Osip Mandelstam. For ten students, he said with a shrug.

  Whenever I hear that name I see the book by Nadezhda Mandelstam before my eyes: one of the first books that revealed to you what life under Stalin was like. Nadezhda Mandelstam, who memorized all of her husband’s poetry to save it in her head during the decades when it was banned. I thought back to the Moscow gathering that Lev had taken you to one night at his relative’s apartment, where we met Koma, who had just gotten out of prison; he had protested on Red Square against the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia with a small group of like-minded demonstrators. That night they had sat in the apartment and talked about emigrating. It was more than twenty years ago. Since then they had been driven to the four corners of the world; Lev, who by then had had his own citizenship revoked, once said to you at his kitchen table in Cologne: My family is scattered across the globe. But that was later.

  On that night in California, with emigrants from various countries, an apparition forced itself into my mind which must have been summoned up while the party continued, while we sat down at the big dining table for rice and seafood. The need to fix in my memory someone whose ashes lie in a grave in Moscow and who is vanishing the way the dead do. Lev. Forced out of the country that was his, the country he had fought for as a soldier and among whose enemies he had won friends, because the principle he lived his life by is well described with the obsolete word: humanity. Even if everywhere else, for almost every other person, the term is an exaggeration or mischaracterization, it was true of him. Lev was humane, he couldn’t be anything else. It stung me to see, one day, at the Midnight Special bookstore on Third Street, a copy of his book from the autobiographical cycle To Be Preserved Forever next to the shrill book by Madonna that had just come out, Sex: the expensive, opened copy which some bookstores would let preferred customers page through for a dollar so that they could enjoy the star’s naked body in its various daring poses. But together with the twinge of revulsion I felt, I knew that Lev himself would have accepted the juxtaposition with a generous smile.

  He was incapable of hate. In the book where he describes the crimes that brought him a sentence of many years and resulted in the gruesome stamp being placed on all his belongings, “” (“To Be Preserved Forever”)—namely, that as a Soviet officer he had spoken out against the violent trespasses of Soviet soldiers against the German civilian population in East Prussia—in this book there is no hate. I wonder if I ever once heard him speak a hateful word. Definitely not on that first evening, when you met at Anna Seghers’s place and Lev got into a serious argument with her, whom he greatly admired, about Ilya Ehrenburg’s pamphlets calling on the Soviet troops to hate the Fascist enemy. Anna Seghers, the German Communist whom Ehrenburg had helped in Paris when her countrymen in Nazi uniforms were on her trail, defended him, while Lev, the former Soviet officer, refused to condone what he had done. They fought bitterly about it, and at the end gave each other a big hug. That was one of the moments in life you happened to witness that taught you more than a lot of big books.

  And Madest Thyself an Idol: The Education of a Communist is the name of the book in his trilogy where Lev tries to justify to himself the false beliefs of his youth. Did you not later share those beliefs yourself? It is not least because of him that you understand how ruthless self-examination is the prerequisite for the right to judge others.

 
That night I could call up numerous images of him. How he, a big man, trudged around in the small rooms of his Moscow apartment, always packed with visitors who had come to him for advice and support and some of them, no doubt, to inform on him too. How he stomped on the phone: “You little traitor!” How he grimly walked around Moscow with you, taking you to see a painter who was officially not allowed to exhibit—the same day that the reactionary journal Ogoniok unleashed yet another campaign against the people close to Vladimir Mayakovsky who were still alive: Lily Brik and her husband. All Jews, Lev said, himself a Jew. This could get bad. They’re stirring up anti-Semitism here again. He seemed anything but furious and filled with hate, more like concerned and sad.

  The Soviet Union that expatriated him and his wife, Raisa, to their great sorrow, no longer exists. Lev survived it by a few years. I rummage around a little in my unsorted papers. Yes, there it is: the copy of the journal Ogoniok that you brought back from Moscow with you, I kept it.

  I could think of nothing that characterized him better than the phone call I received two days after the fall of the Wall: I’m here. —Where? —With you! Can I come see you? Carried away with the euphoria of the masses who were surging back and forth between East and West Berlin even though the border restrictions had not been officially abolished yet, he had gotten into a car and come to Berlin, without passport or visa. When the border guards tried to stop him, they were loudly and vigorously instructed by GDR passersby: Surely they did not intend to stop the famous Soviet writer Lev Kopelev? He was allowed through, on the condition that he “leave the country” at the same border crossing. The first thing he wanted to see were Brecht’s and Anna Seghers’s graves. He always felt an almost childlike reverence for great writers.