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

by Wolf, Christa

  I remember how glad I was to have met Jane.

  Toby’s rooms in his small Venice house had been almost entirely cleared out; I saw how shocked Therese was. No one had told her that Toby was about to burn his bridges again and go to Mexico. The models for buildings he had designed were standing in the corner: delicately crafted, original constructions of thin pieces of wood. No one wanted to execute the projects, as usual, Toby said with a certain bitterness. He had to try somewhere completely different again, he said. He handed around wine and crackers and then I had to bring out the tarot cards. Everyone had to whisper in my ear the question he or she wanted to ask the cards. I let everyone assure me that they didn’t actually believe in tarot cards, that it was only a game we were playing. Then I shuffled the cards and it started.

  Toby surprised me by wanting to know whether his relationship with his father would improve. I laid out the cards in the prescribed pattern and found that two male figures, very far apart, were on the path toward each other. Toby seemed happy about what the oracle had said—he had never thought that they would stay enemies forever, he said, and I didn’t have the heart to repeat: It’s a game, Toby, it’s just a game!

  Therese wanted to know which continent she would find happiness on, and the cards said that she should keep moving and seek her happiness precisely in her restlessness. Or if not her happiness, at least her destiny. Therese grew pensive and leaned against Toby.

  I wanted to keep Jane from handing herself over to the cards too— you’re not superstitious! I wanted to say, but I didn’t know the word “superstitious” so I said Don’t believe in the cards, please, Jane! She said: Of course not, don’t worry. But she insisted I lay out the cards for her question too. She wanted to know whether anyone could love her. I cursed my thoughtless, foolhardy willingness to start this game and shuffled the cards for a long time, desperately determined to draw out the right answer for Jane. I was lucky: as the last card, shining out over all the rest, I turned up THE WORLD, which promised, beyond any doubt, a universe of love to everyone it appeared to, love both given and received. I certainly had a lot to say about that, in Jane’s case. Satisfied? I asked her. Thank you, she said, and I couldn’t tell if she had seen through me. Did she want to believe the cards? I realized that the cards inevitably gave me power over other people and I made the firm decision never to bring out my tarot deck for anyone again.

  Until, a few days later, Peter Gutman knocked on my door and asked me, without beating around the bush, to use the cards to help him figure out how you should act when you love someone but any hope of ever being able to live with that person is a complete illusion. I no longer remember the tricks I used to force the cards to give the result I had been working toward from the beginning: Sublimate, I said. You and she have to sublimate your feelings.

  Oh, yes ma’am, he said.

  Incidentally, they had long since broken their vow not to talk on the phone anymore, of course. They called each other much more than they should, but it didn’t make them any happier. There was nothing to say to that.

  He asked about my own “symptoms.” Were they behind me? Not entirely, I said. He expressed his disapproval. Couldn’t I finally accept being an average person, with mistakes and misdeeds like everyone else? Good God, cut it out already! he said. You didn’t hurt anyone!

  Yes I did, I said defiantly. Myself.

  What is this really all about? It’s about clarifying to myself that this will pass. Experience says it will, even if I can’t believe it myself yet. A time will come when it will be hard for me to remember this.

  I wanted to do without sleeping pills for once. A glass of warm milk would be nice. I stood up and made myself a glass of warm milk with honey. It was still dark but the birds were already starting their morning concert. Who said I always had to think along with the thoughts running through my head? Where was that written? Hollowed out, that was the right word: I was hollowed out. Just drink this milk in small sips now, I told myself. Now just lie down. Now I’m tired. Now the homeless man who looks for bottles in the garbage bins under my window every morning has arrived. I heard the clinking of the bottles, then nothing more.

  How are you today? A whole elevator full of oblivious, innocent people. Oh, thank you, I’m fine. That’s wonderful. Someone had told me that the women who worked in this building were expected to wear a different outfit every day. I noticed myself starting to follow this rule. What was wrong with me? I talked with Kätchen in the office. She said she was tempted a lot of the time to just throw all these faxes arriving for me from Europe into the shredder. I could laugh about that. I had told her she could give up the search for L., and told her Lily’s story. I stuffed the new stack of papers sitting in my cubbyhole into my Indian bag without looking at them.

  I went to Third Street and ate a sandwich. I bought myself another inexpensive silk blouse. When I got home I heard my phone from the stairs. It kept ringing and ringing and then I heard the outraged voice from Berlin. Where were you, dammit! I couldn’t reach you, I kept trying and trying! —I was just eating lunch! —Ah, okay. I thought I shouldn’t have faxed you that article. —What article? —A rather unpleasant article by someone you wouldn’t have expected it from … He named the writer’s name. —Haven’t read it yet. —Then don’t, okay? Listen, I mean it. Don’t read it. I shouldn’t have sent it. —Ach, you know? What’s too much is too much. —Exactly. But then I couldn’t reach you and I just broke out in a cold sweat, you know? —Listen, once and for all: I’m fine. Nothing’s happening to me. There’s no danger. —Okay, good. I was being ridiculous, I only thought, because of that damn article … —No. And especially not because of that damn article. Go to sleep. Isn’t it midnight there? —Yes, you’re right, it’s midnight here. —Here it’s only four in the afternoon. It’s hard to get used to that, don’t you think? —Yes, I think so too, it’s hard to get used to that. —Good night.

  I read the article a few days later, in small gulps. It was the overdose, and I waited to see my reaction. There was almost none. Was I starting to build up defenses and immunities at last?

  I know it sounds unbelievable but there were pink birds there, a smoky pink—and one such bird appeared early that morning on the edge of the roof outside my window.

  For days, this whole teetering disk of a planet wavered and wobbled on the point of a needle.

  The MS. VICTORIA had an underground life. When I took the elevator down to the basement to use the washing machine, I sometimes met our cleaning staff, almost all Latinos, except for Angelina from Uganda. Down there they were among themselves and free to take out their sandwiches and drink their coffee from paper cups, to make fun of each other and maybe of us too, laughing loud, in fact shrieking with laughter, they barely noticed me, they were with each other and showing around photos of their children, slapping their thighs, with joys and feelings that I would never share, and as long as they had these miserable jobs they were freer than I would ever be, I thought, they didn’t worry about what else was going on in this city, they had been there only three or four years, maybe illegally, they spoke only the most necessary English and were almost impossible to understand, they never voted—whoever wanted to be in charge should be in charge—their lives were harder than I could ever even imagine but now, in these fifteen minutes in the middle of their workday, they were sitting there and were with each other and in a good mood and didn’t care about the dirty, sticky basement hall and the white woman carrying her laundry bag past them, who, two hours later, when they came up to her apartment to scrub the sinks and vacuum the floors, would get the feeling from them that her well-being mattered deeply to them.

  I feel a pull from the end and have to brace myself against it, have to let things I have kept my silence about until now, or at least haven’t mentioned yet, rise up in me and have to put them down on paper. “A pull from the end”: only now do I notice the double meaning of this metaphor, but I let it stand, even though—or because—it applies in
both senses. The pull from the end of life, not just from the end of this book.

  Always the same thing on every station, I said to Peter Gutman while we were driving through Los Angeles again and listening to the radio. It’s the same with me, always the same old song and I can’t turn it off.

  You realize, of course, that you would be off the hook in an instant if you expressed regret, he said. Let your friends help you. And if they don’t help, why not use your enemies? Your contempt for the journalists who say to your face that they couldn’t carry out their duty to be thorough when they heard that the competition was about to publish the story, they had to get in there first? Hate can make a person strong too, believe me.

  You’re telling me I should hate? Monsieur?

  Peter Gutman refused to take the bait. He wanted to know why I still refused to get mad, for God’s sake.

  It never occurred to me, I said. Then: I wonder if it was all for nothing.

  You have to wonder? Of course it all was for nothing, and it was all inevitable too.

  You sure know how to console a person, I said, and he said yes, he certainly did, if that’s the word I want to use. Wasn’t it any consolation to know that we weren’t the first? And wouldn’t be the last?

  WE ARE STRANGELY DESIGNED CREATURES, AREN’T WE?

  You’re right, Madame, we are.

  And then I told him to turn around and look at the sun setting into the ocean at the end of Wilshire Boulevard: as always, it took the last handbreadth above the horizon incredibly fast, as though it had pulled itself together with a last burst of energy for its final sprint. And so it was again, and now it would get dark fast, and I thought that in the long run I did not want to live in a country without twilight. I am very fond of the northern twilights, I told Peter Gutman, and then we were quiet the rest of the way and before long we got to Ruth’s house.

  She had invited us over to talk about Lily and show us a few things.

  Now, so many years later, my astonishment has only grown: Did the three of us really act as though our gathering there, for that reason, were the most natural thing in the world? I can hardly believe it. Did Peter Gutman and I never once express our nervous astonishment at the unbelievable number of extremely unlikely coincidences that had had to take place so that the riddles we each carried around with us could find their answers here? Or had we so accustomed ourselves to the state of acute psychological crisis we clearly were all living in that no miracle, no matter how unimaginable, could throw us off track? Was that how it was? If it hadn’t happened like that I would have had to invent it.

  Ruth bringing out a wooden box with Lily’s effects. Her offering us tea and cookies, because hospitality demanded it. That we drank the tea and ate the cookies even though secretly we only had eyes for the wooden box on the side table. It was a simple chest, with a bolt to close it; Ruth had probably originally gotten something or other in it in the mail once. It contained, as we saw when she finally opened it, mostly papers.

  Lily had put everything in order before she died: since she had no children and no relatives, she had to worry about her estate herself, she had told Ruth. Lily was a woman without the slightest self-pity, Ruth said, with a coarse sense of humor sometimes—totally unlike her philosopher, who had been her lover for more than forty years, Ruth said she had just recently calculated it for the first time. She would not go so far as to say that no other man ever darkened Lily’s doorstep, Lily was a passionate woman, but she had told Ruth many, many times that out of the billions of people on this planet of ours she had found the one man she was meant to be with. And she had never stopped marveling at her luck.

  And the philosopher? Oh, him! No, other than his wife, Dora, a paragon of fortitude, and Lily, he had not had any other women, and didn’t need another one either. And believe it or not, Ruth said, there had never been the slightest hint of jealousy between the two women.

  So Lily entirely subordinated herself to her love for this man? I asked, unconsciously a bit aggressively. Oh, no! Ruth cried. She said she couldn’t imagine another woman less suited to a subordinate role than Lily. Sparks flew between her and the philosopher sometimes, she said. She had often thought that for someone like Lily one of the worst things about exile must have been that she had to perform a kind of mimicry just to survive. Or hadn’t we noticed how conformist American society was, through and through? Lily had opened Ruth’s eyes to that too. Up until then, Ruth had truly believed in the free critical spirit that the newspapers advertised as American. Lily had a little test she used: How did the person she was talking to react when she mentioned, apparently in passing, the word “Communist”?

  You are the first American I’ve met who says that word like an ordinary, everyday word, I said.—I used the informal pronoun with her, and we stayed with it from then on.

  They both taught me that, Lily and her philosopher, Ruth said. They showed me how every—or almost every—American talks around the word, total cowards, and how they—how we—cut ourselves off from an enormous and momentous field of European thought and action, and imposed a disastrous taboo on ourselves, when we define all Communists as criminals. I later asked about certain writings, certain authors, certain names. It even helps me with the patients I treat, as a matter of fact, which I hadn’t expected.

  How? Peter Gutman asked. Surely you don’t try to instill Communist ideas in your patients!

  Good heavens, no, Ruth said. She wouldn’t have any patients left if she did that. But it’s strange how clear-sighted you can be about the inhibitions in someone else’s thoughts and feelings after you have seen through one of your own. Well: seen through it to some extent.

  I was the only one of us three, I reflected, who had ever known real live Communists. At first I could count them on my fingers. The first ones were bogeymen, rumors, I remembered. You saw before your eyes the face of your maid, Anneliese, who told you, the child, how her family had cried when the Communists in your hometown had had to publicly burn their flags on Moltke Square after the Nazis’ victory. Really, were you Communists? you asked in disbelief. Yes, they were Communists, she said. The next one was a man from the neighborhood, who drove a beer truck if you remembered correctly, and you could only pick up rumors about him that the grown-ups were whispering among themselves—he had come back from a concentration camp but had had to sign something saying he would never talk about it, and he really was mute as a fish now. From that point on, it was firmly imprinted in your mind that to be a Communist was just as bad as to be a Jew. Luckily, neither of these conditions applied to you or your family.

  Then, your first real live Communist—I have told his story many times—was the man from the camps, doubtless a prisoner the SS were bringing north on the death march from Sachsenhausen, who, together with the other survivors hastily left behind by the team of guards, mingled with the refugees on the field that the first occupying force, the Americans, had set aside for your caravan to spend the night on. The man your mother offered a bowl of soup to. Then she asked why he had been in the concentration camp and he said: I am a Communist. Ah, your mother said. But they don’t send people to concentration camps for that! The man’s expression didn’t change. He said: Where have you all been living?

  Your second real live Communist was Sell, the shoemaker in the Mecklenburg village where you were stranded with your family in the spring of 1945, after your flight. The Russian occupying force demanded that the villagers put horses and carts at their disposal for all their transportation needs, and your job, as the mayor’s assistant, was to divvy up the corvée according to the size of each villager’s property. The shoemaker, who owned only one horse, burst into your office and started yelling at you: The burden you had imposed on him and other landless homeowners was absolutely too large! You were outraged and sure that you were in the right, so you denied his accusations, but he continued to storm and rage, banged his fist on the table, and slammed the door shut behind him. The mayor, who hid in his bedroom whenever
there was any conflict, appeared and informed you that Sell was a Communist, the only one in the village by the way, and that from now on whatever they say goes.

  I had to break off my stream of memories so as not to miss what Ruth was bringing up out of the box of Lily’s belongings. First, a photograph: Lily, in the last decade of her life, leaning against one of the palm trees in Ocean Park with the Pacific in the background. However I may have imagined her before, it was immediately obvious that this is how she had to have looked: short, delicate, but powerful, with a face sensitive but at the same time bold. Her hair was lightly bunched together, not tied up, as though the wind were blowing in her face, and even though she was standing still she gave the impression of someone walking. Walking straight ahead.

  Yes, Peter Gutman said. Then he inspected the second photo for a long time, apparently taken the same day in the same place, but this time Lily was sitting on a bench in Ocean Park next to a man. They weren’t looking at each other or touching each other but there was no doubt that they were a couple. He was petite for a man; his hands lying on his knees could almost have been a woman’s hands; his head was too big for his body. His eyes were hidden behind the thick lenses of his glasses. None of us said it, but I think we all thought it: The man in this photograph had used up almost all of the material substance of his life.

  Ruth said she had taken these pictures. She remembered the afternoon exactly, because of her ambivalent feelings. The three of them had been having a particularly good time together that day, but at the same time she was overwhelmed with a grief that she couldn’t put into words. It was grief over the fact that it would all be over so soon.