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

by Wolf, Christa

  That was my first time in fifty years, I told Therese, the first time since my confirmation, and I don’t even belong to any church anymore. Therese said she had been brought up in a convent school and left the church as soon as she could, at fifteen, but here it meant something different. That was what all our friends said, gathered in a small white group in front of the church, a little embarrassed, barely able to hide how moved we all were, waving in every direction to people who said goodbye to us with nods and smiles.

  It was brutally hot. We split up into our cars and I ended up in the back of Therese’s car with Margery sitting in front next to her. Margery, the couples therapist, said that if her patients could feel reverence and self-renunciation like that once a week they would not need any more therapy. I was tired, I closed my eyes and slipped back into memories: of the joyless, sour confirmation classes in a bare, ugly room; of the lips of the pastor grimacing hypocritically when he spoke the name of God; of my unsuccessful efforts to avoid being confirmed; of our eagerness to scoff at the sacrament.

  Not the breath of a single wing beat was granted to us then, Angelina, but today I felt a steady gentle fluttering. Who was I talking to? It was Angelina, the angel, the black woman from the MS. VICTORIA, sitting next to me in the backseat of Therese’s car, perfectly naturally, relaxed (if that is an appropriate thing to say about an angel) and smiling. You have to relax every once in a while, right? I said. I didn’t want to bother her with any direct questions, and in any case, according to the ideas I’d had as a child about my guardian angel, it must be able to read my thoughts. Not always, Angelina said, often she was just too tired to relax after so much work. Anyway, you know it yourself. What, I asked, what do I know myself? Here I was, nagging the angel, I couldn’t help it, and she said that I know that whenever I ask a question for the first time I am already very close to the answer, so why did I want an answer from her? She was there only for emergencies, what would it come to otherwise? Was she saying I should be ashamed of my question or something? Did she really not feel that this was an emergency for me, that I needed the security of a tiny little bit of certainty? About what, she asked.

  WHETHER SHE, THE ANGEL, WAS PART OF MY RECOVERY

  And whether I would ever feel what it meant to be happy again, I said, to my own amazement, I’m afraid I might even forget what happiness feels like, Angelina!

  The angel didn’t answer, it was gone. The midday heat clobbered me and I was covered with sweat as I crawled out of the car; we had to park it in the blazing sun on Broadway. The palm-lined street was free of angels from downtown to the Pacific Ocean, empty of both cars and people in this fierce Sunday heat. There were buildings, palm trees casting no shadows—where were we stranded thirsty people supposed to go? Then the miracle happened and a narrow, sky-blue door appeared in the white wall of a building, there was Susan standing in the doorway, the door opened behind her and we stepped into a darkened lounge, empty of people, which we crossed to get to a courtyard with tables set up under shady, exotic trees where people were eating and drinking, where the table we were meant to sit at was free, of course, where a big glass of iced tea was standing in front of each of us after a minute, a refreshment we hadn’t even ordered but here they seemed to know what was good for you, we liked what was on the menu too, salads in many varieties, the service was fast but not too speedy, we needed time to cool off and restart our conversations with each other.

  In one of the conversations, which now, in retrospect, seem to have filled those last weeks—I can see them as one single continued conversation, but not describe them, I think with regret, conversations seem to be made out of the most fleeting material of all our experiences, more fleeting even than some thoughts, because when I tried to note down what I remembered from the previous day the next morning, already only a few key words remained with me—we talked about everything under the sun, about “God and the world” as the phrase goes in German, or, more precisely, about God and the Devil: we asked each other (and ourselves) when it was that the ancient religions had found it necessary to adopt a morality that divided human action, and eventually human thought, into “good” and “evil.” When, in other words, had heaven and hell, angels and devils, been invented? And why.

  Angelina, my angel, had leapt up into the branches of the eucalyptus tree we were sitting under and was listening attentively to what we were saying, a little mockingly too. I was the only one who could see her: that was normal, and that was how it would remain, I stayed rational and well-disposed to verifiable facts but I got used to having her with me. She, the angel, had me say—how else could I know, except from her?—that there was a dark mystery among the angels too, not only among human beings, namely that the dark angels had rebelled against God and for their deed had to stay in the lower heavens, within the categories of space, time, and illusion, and thus closer to human beings, unlike the bright angels who stayed in the upper dimensions, circling God’s throne in eternal light and song. Angelina seemed not to need my sympathy for the fact that she was one of the banished angels: she made a dismissive, almost obscene gesture that I wouldn’t have expected an angel to make.

  Our group had grown bigger with the arrival of Lowis—a man with a magnificent head of curly hair flecked with gray, an anthropologist, I learned, at the university there, and passionately welcomed by everyone at the table, especially Therese. He had a young woman with him whom no one had met before and he introduced her as Sanna, a kind of director by trade. There was no doubt that they were a couple. Everyone, including me, inspected the woman, surreptitiously but very thoroughly. She was exceptionally thin. I found myself drawn to her. Everything about her was brown—her skin, her artfully tied-up hair, her chic loose clothes, and even her eyes, which I noticed only later, when she turned to face me. She had sat down next to me and for a long time I saw only her classical profile.

  We put before Lowis and Sanna the question we were considering: Why did the old religions require sacrifices, human sacrifice? Not every ancient religion had human sacrifice, Lowis said, for example the Hopi, an Indian people he had studied, sacrificed a human being to their gods only very rarely. The conversation then went back and forth about the forms that the scapegoat ritual takes in the present day; apparently we couldn’t do without it, apparently it would continue to be performed. Even now that crucifixion is out of fashion, there is still hounding out of the city.

  Sanna leaned over to me and asked quietly: Do you think they treated you like that because you’re a woman?

  I couldn’t be the first to say it. The only way to prove it would be to collect all the terms they used against me and compare them to the ones they used against men.

  Hello, Jane said, anybody home?

  She was a powerful woman with thick blond hair hanging down in snakelike coils; she had a wide, beautiful face and straightforward blue eyes, strong hands, a healthy figure.

  Toby, sitting across from me next to Therese: you could see from his thin hands that they could work with the tiny pieces of wood he made his models out of—models of the constructions he wanted to build but that no one wanted to have. He had a hard time dealing with his sense of inadequacy, which was about to make him go to Mexico, and he wondered if the message history was trying to tell us wasn’t precisely that material values always prevailed over spiritual ones.

  Sanna said she didn’t think that was true. Hadn’t we simply committed ourselves to the most literal way of looking at things, so that now we could see only the hegemony of material things and were no longer in a position to perceive the decisive effects of spiritual forces?

  So you don’t think, Susan said, that people are genetically programmed to give precedence to material values? Then how do you explain the mass of humanity’s unstoppable pursuit of cars, houses, washing machines, and money, money, money?

  Some of us who knew Susan better concealed our amusement over the fact that it was she, of all people—the millionaire—who was concerned about humanity�
�s materialism. But we were being unfair to her: she was well aware of her ambivalent situation. You should talk, she said to us. Yes, especially she, but actually all of us belonged to the fraction of humanity that lived in luxury. We had a car, other people could only dream of that, and so how could we judge her for her needs?

  Margery said she thought it all depended on what we considered normal. She couldn’t count how many times in her practice she saw a couple who had lived their whole lives according to certain rules: the man earns the money and the woman spends it, has children, throws parties, and supervises the help. Nothing could be more normal than that. Until the woman, approaching sixty, suddenly has a fit and starts hurling the most violent and obscene curses at her husband and everyone else—outbreaks of madness that she doesn’t remember afterward, but then there the couple sit, helpless in front of her, and the woman goes off on her husband in the therapist’s presence while he sits next to her like a lamb, letting it all roll off his back, understanding nothing. There are people whose downtrodden, constricted lives just burst out at some point and a revulsion comes over them at the normality they have lived in up until then.

  We sat in the shady inner courtyard for a long time, and Susan told us how much she wanted us to meet up and drive into the desert at the next full moon to admire the moonrise, and we agreed to do it. At some point Lowis said that he and Sanna were about to travel through the Southwest, including a visit to the Hopi reservation, where he knew an old chief, and I heard myself say: Will you take me with you? and they said: Yes, sure.

  So that was set. We parted. I drove with Lowis and Sanna, the heat had not let up much, but I felt wonderfully refreshed. To step into the cool hallway of the MS. VICTORIA was like pulling into my home port. Mr. Enrico had two pieces of mail for me. The first was a postcard sent by a young lawyer in Leipzig. He wrote: “Unlike you, I always hated the GDR and was thus immune to many things. You, however, were an important part of the GDR, and I hate you!”

  The second was a note from Peter Gutman, who wrote that he wanted me to have a quotation he had just run across from his favorite essayist. The quotation ran: “I do not deny the horrors of the gulag and am disgusted by everyone who denies the Stalinist past, but Communism was a tremendous hope. In Marxism—this is very Jewish—there is an insane overestimation of human beings. It makes us believe that we are creatures capable of social justice. A terrible mistake that countless millions of people have paid for with their lives, but a generous idea and a great compliment to humanity.”

  I lay down on the bed to rest for a moment and slept for twelve hours.

  * * *

  What else? Danger is approaching, I hear on every channel while I write this. The politician on TV says it is not a question of whether a terrorist attack will strike Germany, but when, even though they were able to prevent it this time. Fears are rising in the population, but that is in no way what we’re trying to achieve, he says, that is the wrong reaction. This era, I think, has a hinge that it pivots around—we can name the date, September 11, 2001, after which Time is different than it was before. Different how? Made of different material, a substance saturated with dark geological inclusions which, if they were set free, would mean our death. We weren’t prepared for it, and we notice only gradually and against our will that we have realized it too late and can no longer “defeat” “it.” “It” is here to destroy our roots.

  Time passed, I had started to count the days. Sometimes, at night, I permitted myself a word like “homesick.” There had recently actually been an earthquake too, with the epicenter farther south in California: for hours on end the TV showed the measuring device whose needle shot up past the acceptable value, and then the relaxed, competent earthquake scientist who had to comment on this swing of the needle so that panic wouldn’t break out among the population. I remembered the lecturer, a German woman, who had sat next to me at a university dinner and told me that her husband, an earthquake scientist, could not preach often enough that it wasn’t a question of whether, but when, there would be a major earthquake in Los Angeles: THE BIG ONE. Everyone knew it but no one wanted to believe it, no one took seriously the fact that the city had been built on tectonic plates, the San Andreas Fault, that were drifting apart ever more dangerously. She and her husband, in any case, always had gallons of drinking water ready in their house and a week’s supply of nonperishable food. In an emergency situation, all hell would break loose all around them, so they hid their supplies. Carefree Americans simply refused to see what even the collapse of computer networks would mean, never mind anything else. What would happen, for instance, if the financial system collapsed? Her husband didn’t dare to imagine it. They wanted to move away from this dangerous area, and sooner rather than later, but her husband’s career kept him here.

  The road, nestled up against the ocean. The light, the heavenly light. The cars, bumper to bumper, my little red Geo right in there with them, one of the few afternoons when I dared the traffic to drive to the beach even though I had a headache. My thoughts had gotten fixated on the earthquake.

  It went fine this time too, didn’t it? —Who was talking to me? —Angelina. —So angels really can read minds? —By the way, you should turn left here, there are no more parking lots for a while. —I know, I just wasn’t thinking about it. —That’s the headache’s fault.

  The parking lot was full, like every parking lot always was. Angelina directed me to the one free spot. She let me discover the patch of beach where I could set up my folding chair with its sun umbrella and look at the ocean, not just at half-naked people. I let Angelina know that I wanted to be left alone. My headache was getting worse, in fact. When I had looked my fill and the glitter of sunlight on the water had started to hurt my eyes, I picked up the book I had neglected for so long: The Wisdom of No Escape by the nun, Pema.

  Now I do not intend to say anything to justify or provide any sort of explanation for the Angel Angelina’s appearance on the scene. According to surveys, 86 percent of Americans believe in miracles and of course in heavenly creatures too, such as angels. Or that a statue of the Madonna no one had really ever noticed before, in the house of a priest no one had ever really noticed either, could suddenly start to shed tears. And obviously I, with my unshakable belief in the Enlightenment, did not and do not believe in such occurrences, let me make that perfectly clear. I clearly remember my reaction when Emily, the American, after an excellent big dinner, told us openly, as though it were entirely natural, about her “psychic,” a woman who lived in Mexico, had paranormal abilities, and had just relayed oracular wisdom to her over the phone for more than two hours, including the information, very important to Emily, that her two cats who were being boarded in New York absolutely did not want to be moved again so soon. That information removed a terrible burden of guilt from Emily’s conscience. I remember that I kept quiet and thought: This can’t be happening. Emily called herself an “intellectual Marxist,” was certainly a materialist, but she nonetheless thought that extrasensory phenomena were possible, we couldn’t know what kinds of energy traveled through our unconscious and the universe. And actually, I thought, what about my overcoat of Dr. Freud? My fetish? —No, the other voice in me said, that wasn’t the same at all. That was purest, crystal-clear rational science compared to Emily’s psychic.

  Angelina told me you don’t have to explain everything, and by the way, I was sick. —Sick? Me? That little headache? —And the fever? —What fever?

  My forehead was hot, but we were having one of the hottest days yet. I opened a newspaper that called itself the Weekly World News and that I had picked up at the deli while I was buying my Greek salad and bread. Headline: “The Most Horrifying Photo Ever Published!” Then, in giant letters: FACE OF SATAN APPEARS OVER WACO! And a photograph of a cloud of smoke rising up from the compound of this sect that had apparently set its own building on fire, in which was visible a face that looked like how a child might imagine Satan to look. The same grotesque face, I read, h
ad appeared above several major catastrophes in recent years and was proof that the great battle between God and Satan had begun, and that it was everyone’s duty to choose sides—now.

  I leaned back in my chair, forgot my headache and chills, and lost myself in the life around me: the blue of the sky, the lively movements of the half-naked bodies on the beach, the fine bright sand, the wind that had picked up and was caressing my skin. All of this, the nun said, everything in this moment, is exactly the way it should be. Your whole life. Let it be. I understood.

  That night I had chills. I slept badly, I hadn’t been able to eat, I kept tossing and turning under damp sheets, my head buzzed, the aspirin hadn’t helped. Instead of feeling sorry for me, Angelina followed me with her mocking gaze. Why did I always let myself get talked into things that weren’t right for me? Hadn’t I realized, at long last, that patient acceptance was not my thing? But people can change, I countered. Angelina saw through that, of course, and understood that I was trying to avoid suffering. Didn’t I see that I was still always fleeing from something? I said she should leave me alone. She disappeared.

  An older woman, Gertrud, dressed in light blue, a kind of nurse’s uniform, came by and took good and attentive care of me, she said she wanted to cook me something tasty that I would definitely eat, and then suddenly she slowly fell over on her side and started to die. I knew right away what was happening, Gertrud is dying, I thought, then she metamorphosed before my eyes into a giant dying elephant, who was very sad and made me very sad too, then it was Gertrud again in her bed, and then she was dead. Then I started crying. I didn’t know anyone named Gertrud, the only person I could think of was the old queen Gertrude in Hamlet, who had betrayed her husband with his brother.

  Then it was morning, and standing at my bedside was Angelina, her dust cloth in her hand, which didn’t surprise me. I said: My angel, but she didn’t let herself get drawn into any of that. She said I was sick, she wouldn’t turn on the vacuum cleaner. Shouldn’t she go get a doctor? I said: No doctor, and she said: Yes, they’re very expensive. Angelina, I said in English: We all must die. That wasn’t news to her; she smiled knowingly and said: Yes. That’s true.