That’s how it was everywhere we went. We were let in everywhere, everyone living in the various houses knew Bob. In one of them, originally built for a famous actress, a woman lay sick in bed upstairs but even so we were allowed to walk around the ground floor, in the large, bright rooms, appreciating their proportions and interrelations.
It seemed only natural that Neutra would want to experiment not only with new ways of building, but also with new ways of living. Bob drove us to the Schindler House, built by the other great émigré architect who had left his unmistakable mark on this faceless city. That was where the Neutras and the Schindlers had lived together. A Japanese-style building, very low, flat, with moveable walls and numerous doors to the bright, open air outside, where, we learned, they could sleep outdoors all year round. We stood on the flat roof and Bob took a bottle of red wine, six small silver tumblers, and a little tin of salted peanuts out of his leather briefcase—here was where he wanted to toast with us, here and nowhere else, he had a knack for symbolic gestures.
There was at least one more building we had to see, he said. It was at the edge of Koreatown, the neighborhood where the most businesses had been set on fire during the riots in April, by blacks who felt discriminated against due to the rapid social advancement of the Asians. The house Bob showed us had been built by Neutra in the thirties as a prototype apartment building for affordable social housing. We were not let in there; poor people lived there now, mostly Hispanics. Five stories tall, symmetrical rows of windows, half-drawn curtains, bottles on the windowsills, women’s and children’s heads peeping out, laundry hung over the window ledges. Across the street were small single-family houses, also poor, with unemployed men in straw hats hanging around in groups outside the front doors. They observed us in silence. With the climate here, Bob said, even the slums aren’t as miserable as in New York or Detroit.
Francesco and Ines had moved off and were strolling along next to the Neutra house; Francesco was taking pictures. A car approached them from behind with a black man driving and a black woman in the passenger seat. She rolled down her window and shouted a curse word at them, thinking they were idle curiosity-seekers. Francesco, instead of keeping his mouth shut, answered aggressively and the driver braked right next to our car; the woman jumped out, an imposing woman, maybe thirty years old, very confident, unleashing a loud barrage of curses on us. Bob grabbed my arm and quickly shoved me to the car, saying to the woman in a soothing voice, We’re just looking at the architecture, and we probably both realized how ridiculous this explanation must have sounded to the black woman, who got back into her car, which then sped off, tires squealing. Francesco and Ines got in the car with us. The men in the straw hats in front of the houses showed no reaction at all. Bob said: She’s just angry, and I thought: Well, that was something we had to experience too.
Karl, a photographer friend of Bob’s, was waiting with a few other guests in Bob’s apartment and he mixed us drinks. Gin and tonic, I drank it too fast and felt better. With glasses in hand we strolled through Bob’s house, a Neutra house of course, like a shrine, one of the women visitors said softly. There was the bookshelf filled with books by and about Neutra. Handwritten letters from Neutra under glass in the study. But the piece that was most important to Bob, the only thing he and his wife had fought over during their divorce, was the poster for an old movie called I Married a Communist. Tom wanted to know if we in the GDR would have been allowed to make a film called I Married a Capitalist. It totally depends on the ending, I said. If the contradiction breaks up the marriage, why not?!
There was a lady there, a professor’s wife, all done up—professional hairdo, a lot of attention to her clothes, and too much makeup on the same kind of wrinkly, suntanned face that so many older American women had. She wanted me to tell her if it was right to let the German Communist leader, what was his name again, escape abroad, where was it, I said: Chile, and: His name is Honecker. Right, the lady said, and where was it I lived? Berlin, I said, adding: East Berlin. Oh, the lady said, and had I always lived there? Yes, I said, taking slightly perverse pleasure in it, and the lady didn’t know what else to say, but I would have given quite a bit to be able to see what pictures were running through her head.
Bob Rice, always attuned to what was going on around him, started to tell us a story: the story of how he acquired Freud’s overcoat and lost it again. It was Richard Neutra’s widow who had given him, her husband’s faithful chronicler, Neutra’s overcoat as a memento after Neutra’s death. Originally, she assured him, it had been the overcoat of Dr. Freud—they were both Austrians, both from Vienna, and had known each other well. The coat was old by that point but not shabby: good prewar manufacture. Bob was certain that he would be able to handle any situation in life in this coat, and we knew that he could definitely end up in situations where he desperately needed such protection. Bob said he had not worn it but had hung it on the door of his office at the university so that he could always see it. Then, he had had to go away for a few days, and he had locked his door, contrary to normal practice and to what he usually did. He could swear to that. When he came back, he couldn’t believe his eyes: The coat was gone. In desperation, he asked around and launched a massive search, in vain of course. He was and remained inconsolable. All he had was the thought that, through a chain of implausible coincidences, the coat had ended up on the back of one of the homeless people and was keeping him warm through the cold, wet winter.
What do you think of my story, Bob asked me later.
Listen, I said, tomorrow I am going to start writing a book that will be called:
THE CITY OF ANGELS, OR, THE OVERCOAT OF DR. FREUD
Do it, Bob said, and then came his generous offer: Take everything you can use.
Everything? I said.
Everything, he said.
That will be a book, I said, I can never publish.
It’s a working hypothesis you use to get closer to things, Bob said.
That won’t be enough this time, I said. I’m scared, of course.
I know, Bob said. Take care of yourself.
He brought a book of poems to the table, bilingual German and English, for me to pick one and recite it in German. I looked under “Baroque” and found Paul Fleming (1609–40), a rhymed and metered sonnet in German and a prose translation in English. I read in German:
TO HIMSELF
Be undismayed in spite of everything; do not give up, despite everything; give way to no twist of fortune; stand above envy; be content with yourself and think it no disaster even if fortune, place, and time have conspired against you.
I read it, happy to have found it again, I felt my way along the words that rose up once more, the words you used to know by heart, and right next to the poem in your desk drawer were the little green sedative pills you took because you wanted to make yourself insensitive to the conflicts you had with the people you still thought were your people. You still hoped it would all turn out to be some kind of misunderstanding.
What saddens or refreshes you, think it chosen for you; accept your fate, regret nothing, do what must be done and before you are told to do it. What you can hope for may happen any day.
But then, I remembered, in one of the serious conflicts you had with them—all at once the whole course it took, its cause and its outcome, were there in my mind—you were supposed to admit something you couldn’t admit, and they refused to budge, and you refused too, and all of a sudden you knew: No. I do not want to be the same as them. It was a bitter insight, a liberating insight.
What is it that we lament, or that we praise? Each man is his own fortune and misfortune. Look round at everything—all this is within you; leave your empty delusion,
and, before you go any further, go back into yourself. The man who is master of himself and can control himself has the whole wide world and what is in it at his feet.
The last lines in German hung in the air: “Wer sein selbst Meister ist und sich beherrschen kann, / Dem ist
die weite Welt und alles untertan.” For the man who is master of himself and can control himself, the whole world and everything in it is untertan: subjugated, underfoot. That can’t be how it is, I thought. Nobody uses words like “untertan” anymore.
Typical German, Francesco said. First you Germans want to master yourself and then the whole world. Karl, the photographer, said that “untertan” was the one German word he hated most—that single word might well have been the reason he’d left Germany. I wouldn’t have guessed that Karl was originally from Germany: even when he spoke German he had a faint American accent and sometimes he had to stop and hunt for the right word. He said that in English there’s no way to say the word “untertan.” We turned to the translation, which said: he “has the whole wide world and what is in it at his feet.”
There, you see, Francesco said. That’s the crucial difference: whether you want to master the world or whether the world lays itself at your feet. Yes, but, I said, there’s nothing wrong with self-mastery! There is, there absolutely is! Francesco shouted. Suppressing yourselves is what causes the whole disaster! And you don’t even see that it’s your undoing! We had been drinking quite a bit. Eager for a fight, we went through the poem line by line, some of the lines passed muster in Francesco’s eyes and others not. I insisted you couldn’t have one without the other—misery and grief were the lining of Dr. Freud’s overcoat—but Francesco wanted his joie de vivre and optimism and assertiveness pure, without the shadow of melancholy, defeat, and failure. Without the background of German history, in other words, I said. Francesco said I was playing games with the German Misère, and he wouldn’t stand for it! Our argument got louder. The voice of the lady from earlier sounded in a sudden silence: But when the Wall came down, you all celebrated, didn’t you? And she couldn’t understand why her simple question unleashed a burst of laughter. I said: Oh yes! to the lady, and looked cheekily at her. I was so happy!
Bob, I said, I need that poem. I’ll fax it to you, he said. I would find it the next morning in my mailbox at the office, I would need it, and soon I would know it by heart again. And Bob would watch over me, he would be there when old friends gathered or when I met new friends, How are you? he’d ask, and I wouldn’t have to say Fine, I could sometimes say Bad, sometimes It’s very hard, and he would say I know, and one day he would take me to a very meaningful dinner at Gladstone’s, but that came later.
First, after the long day with the Neutra houses, I dreamed about emigration again. We were sitting in a car that had rotted away, it was clear that “new money” would come and then we would emigrate. A man with a wide face and a nose overgrown with fur, who was authorized to make the decision, confirmed that we had to “go.” We wanted to know if a lot of people had to “go.” No, the man said, most of them wanted the new money. In my dream I was very aware of my position as an outsider. It pained me that we had to “go.” Apparently we could bring a few things with us, some women stowed items of clothing in the car for us and then more passengers crowded in. The car got more and more full. But we still had to say goodbye to our daughters, we said. Apparently they already knew, and they were going to stay.
When I woke up I remembered our drives in the country when you held the road atlas on your knees and looked and looked for the country you could find refuge in, and you never found it, and you and G. mockingly recalled Brecht’s poem “The Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House” (“Truly, friends, / Unless a man feels the ground so hot underfoot that he’d gladly / Exchange it for any other, rather than stay, / I have nothing to say to him”), and then one day, after flipping through the atlas for a while, you finally cried: Strassburg! Not in Germany but they speak German! But secretly you knew it was just a game.
Wasn’t it almost Christmas then too, in that dark winter of 1976 that sharpened the outlines of the situation and put the thumbscrews on you and G. But now, after more than a quarter century and so far removed from the origins of that calamity, I could calmly ask myself what it actually was that unleashed this pain that took your breath away: at first you didn’t recognize the pain, you tried to run away from it through the dim, badly lit streets, up Friedrichstrasse to Chausseestrasse, the unassuming drugstore on the corner, a bright shop window with toothpaste tubes, sponges, detergent, and a many-pointed Christmas star hanging there lit up pink from within, an ordinary little display that it clenched your heart to look at, until you suddenly recognized and felt with a sense of liberation: So, this is pain. An almost unbearable pain at a loss.
You can regret false feelings, you can curse them if you want, but you cannot deny them or change them. Or at least it takes years, even decades, before what used to be a false feeling is only false, no longer a feeling. Maybe that’s precisely what we mean when we say a person has changed. Of course you can coddle your false feelings too.
Or maybe it was just fear? I asked myself, when I looked up from my machine. You certainly knew what fear was. You certainly were afraid, that November of 1976 which is under discussion here, when you all were driving home from that meeting at a friend’s and mentally tracing the path of the protest letter you had drawn up together, which, at that very moment, as you arrived back in your apartment, might well have already been passed up the various steps of the “apparatus” to “Number One” and also, as a copy, transmitted wirelessly out of the divided city, via the Western news agency you had given it to, to various radio stations, broadcasts that, even if the stations obeyed the delay period imposed on them, would unleash a firestorm that you could only vaguely imagine. They’ll throw us in jail, said the comrade of yours sitting in the backseat. And you didn’t really believe that the singer they had expatriated would really be allowed to return to the country because of your protest, did you? That was the question people kept asking you—some of them furious, some despondent, some cowardly—and all of you said “Yes, we did,” or “No,” depending who was asking or who had called you in for questioning, and on whether you were acting strategically or straightforwardly, and in any case, you all said that you had to do it, and that was the honest truth, and sometimes you added that this singer’s expatriation recalled Germany’s darkest hours and that you would not have been able to continue to write if you had accepted it without saying something. Was the word “socialist” spoken? It certainly was. It was used on both sides, as accusation and as defense, and the ones who felt worst about their own cowardice were the ones who were angriest with you and repeated the word “damage” most often: you and the others had done your country irreparable “damage.” You seized on that word and threw it back. Only when an old comrade, a Jewish woman who had spent many years in the emigration, shouted at you in a trembling voice during an assembly that you wanted to bring back the concentration camps did you and the others stay silent, there was nothing to say to that, and you knew: It was hopeless. That was when the pain came. Pain and rage at the people sitting across from you, angry or cold, trying to get you to recant and to reveal the originator of the conspiracy and to play you off against each other, and the realization grew and grew that you and they were enemies, irreconcilable enemies—that there was no longer any common language between you, or any shared future.
It was early in the morning, I couldn’t take it anymore in my apartment in the MS. VICTORIA and I walked to the Ocean Park Promenade. The tape player of memory kept running in my head, I thought it was really too bad about the diary in which, in a sulfur bath in Hungary a year after that winter of our discontent, you had written out an exact chronicle of the events, and which you put in your suitcase like a criminal, so that you would not have it on you in case you were searched; the suitcase was loaded into the airplane with the other suitcases but it never arrived at the Leipzig airport. You and G. waited at the lost luggage counter for a long time, submitted every possible search request designed for such cases, which almost always, they assured you, brought results. And yet you did not include in the list of the missing objects the diary you missed most. Nothing was fou
nd, but the travel insurance replaced all of the lost objects without a hitch—towels and nightgown and shoes—just not the diary, which couldn’t officially exist at all. It was documented nowhere, not even by me, to be safe, and so it was easy for it to dissolve into nothingness, and now there is nothing to compel anyone to believe it ever existed since even the official files, in which I had placed a certain hope, failed in this particular case: the diary was not to be found in the big green wooden chest with the mass of other documents, and I caught myself criticizing the people who had kept themselves so well informed about everything we did for being so careless. But was it their job to be complete? Or truthful?
We also found no record in the files of that dark night when a fully manned police squad car was stationed at the corner across from your house, for hours. You and G. were standing at the window behind the curtain, which you had hung only after the young gentlemen in their cars had put your apartment under observation from the parking lot on the other side of the street. You and G. saw someone from the squad car separate from the team and walk to the phone booth on your side of the street, at which point your own telephone immediately started ringing, in the middle of the night, and when you picked up the phone no one on the other end of the line said anything, and the squad car drove off after a while, and you and G. could go to bed, though without being able to fall asleep. The next day, the official party newspaper was delivered late, not until noon.
City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel Page 15