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

by Wolf, Christa

  If you wanted to see the museum you had to buy a ticket from an older man, possibly a veteran, who was hardly right for his job and whose unhelpfulness only increased the impression of something provisional and makeshift. We saw in illustrations that the technology developed in the labs of this scientific oasis had been literally conjured up out of the desert sands, and the top scientists who brought this miracle about had lived very modestly, almost primitively, submitting to the most rigid security precautions of a director who probably suffered from paranoia. They had had to endure living completely cut off from the outside world. The letter from one young scientist to his mother, after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, was bursting with relief: now that their project had successfully been tried in public, he could finally reveal what he had been working on for so long. And neither he nor any other scientist who spoke up after Hiroshima had any doubt about the noble purpose and necessity of building the bomb. The whole museum told a story of heroes. It was as though, we said to each other, depressed, someone had waved a magic wand, back in 1945, and turned normal human feelings to ice.

  THE BOMB: The new museum that had just opened—steel and glass, massive, built with the latest technology—was one big display of pride. Unlike the pathetic little museum next door, this one showed the various individual steps that led to the desired result: THE BOMB, replicated actual size in the middle of the central room. How can I put a name to the feeling that came over me as I circled around this bomb, stood in front of it, looked up at it? It was a mixture of shuddering horror and grief. While the Americans, who had come in their bigger and smaller groups to see Los Alamos, showed their admiration and pride.

  I couldn’t help thinking about Einstein, not for the first time, whose signature on a letter to the president of the United States had set in motion the production of the bomb. About the nights he spent after it was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I thought: We have gotten used to seeing well-intentioned men like him, who had the misfortune of being geniuses in dangerous scientific fields, in strangleholds of irresolvable conflicts and unavoidable guilt.

  We walked back to our car in silence. As a kind of compulsory exercise, we circled the giant no-trespassing zone, secured in an unbroken ring of barbed wire and with strict warnings posted. A cluster of ugly new buildings—labs and testing sites—had spread. We had no doubt that highly specialized scientists, under much more ideal conditions and for much more money than the first pioneers at Los Alamos had, were developing here, in strictest secrecy, much more effective means of destruction than the good old-fashioned atomic bomb. They had already destroyed the natural beauty of the region—that was an unavoidable side effect. We wanted to leave this place as fast as we could.

  Then we were sitting in a somewhat gloomy Western-style restaurant, gnawing on steaks the size of the plate: the only dish on the menu. Sanna wondered out loud why our civilization had chosen the path of self-destruction, a decision Lowis considered irreversible. Was it a disposition in our genes? Newer research contradicted this hypothesis: Very small children, even before they could talk, apparently helped adults when something happened to them and they needed help, without being trained to do so. But was early man’s merciless struggle for survival so deeply ingrained into us that even today the drive to be on top at any cost crushed all the other, “more human” needs? She thought about such questions all the time—she was just then preparing to put on a play about Robert Oppenheimer, with nonprofessional actors who wouldn’t settle for the usual superficial answers. I had also planned to write something about an atomic physicist once, I said. A film script. Did they know the name Klaus Fuchs? They did. The famous atomic spy, right?

  He came from a family of Protestant theologians, I said, and was given a classical education. When Hitler came to power, he had to leave Germany and he worked in England on developing the prerequisites that led up to building the bomb. Then he passed his knowledge along to the Soviets. He was convinced, I said, that the only way to prevent the destruction of huge swaths of the world was if the two superpowers were equally advanced in atomic research. When he was caught, he was sentenced as a British citizen to fourteen years in prison, I told Sanna and Lowis, and after his pardon he came to the GDR in 1959, where he became the deputy director of the nuclear research facility in Rossendorf, near Dresden. Neither of them had known that.

  At the time, you and G. were fascinated by his moral conflict and what he saw as the only way out: creating a balance of terror. Your and G.’s friend, the director Konrad Wolf, wanted to make a movie about it. He had to pull strings “in high places” to get access to Fuchs.

  Then, one day, you were actually standing in his office in Dresden. He was a tall, very thin man, reserved, almost severe. The word “Prussian” came to mind, and: “man of integrity.” He listened to what you and G. had to say, then told you that he had given his word never to speak about this matter with anyone. As long as he remained bound by this promise, he would say nothing. With that, you were shown the door.

  Might have known that would happen, Konrad Wolf said. Still, it was worth a try. You never forgot the impression Klaus Fuchs made on you and the aura of unapproachability that surrounded him.

  Still, Sanna said, did the scientists’ work on the atomic bomb really help defeat National Socialism? Didn’t a scientist have a fundamental duty to refuse to work on a weapon that in the end could destroy the human species? Or did the end justify the means, and scientists had to do everything in their power to go after the destroyers of humanity with their own terrible weapons? In other words, guilty in either case? And then another, even more unimaginable turn of the screw: being asked to determine the targets on which to drop the bombs they had built.

  They surely could not have imagined beforehand how Hiroshima would look afterward. It’s the conflict of the ancient tragedies, Sanna said. But why does the conflict of Orestes, or Iphigenia, seem human to me, while the conflicts our atomic physicists find themselves in seem inhuman? Is it the monstrous perfection of the means of destruction? Does the fact that human existence itself hangs in the balance raise the conflict to another level? Is our history divided now into a Before and After?

  Lowis said that when well-intentioned people are faced with such dilemmas, it is the society they live in that is sick. Maybe fatally sick.

  I wondered what you had actually done on August 6, 1945. You had not heard anything about the bomb, in any case; I think you wouldn’t hear anything about it for a long time. There was no newspaper where you were living, in a barn in a Mecklenburg village, and the occupying forces had confiscated the radios. It was a beautiful summer. You probably sat in a mayor’s office and filled out forms.

  In my motel room I took up the chronicle of my trip. My word processor was already on a ship crossing the ocean on its way back to Europe. I wrote by hand:

  A history of irresolvable conflicts would be worth writing. Where would it have to start? With the Greeks? In any case, irresolvable conflicts are characteristic of modernity. What made stone-age people or primitive farmers unhappy was different in kind from the misfortunes of modern men and women. There is no way they could have felt the terrible demands of conscience we feel when we see that we cannot avoid making a decision but that none of our choices is the right one. That no choice we have is between right and wrong.

  I was not surprised that Angelina had joined me here. Without her, the night I spent in that grim, damp-smelling motel room on a gigantic double bed would have been too horrible. From the threadbare armchair in the corner of the room, next to the television set, she surveyed all the objects in this sad dwelling. Through her actions alone, she made me understand that there was a connection between such rooms and the glowing bomb in the museum flooded with light. One was a precondition for the other. What are you doing, Angelina? I said unhappily. She straddled the bomb and flew out through the big window.

  The next day we drove a long way through New Mexico in bad weather and spent the nigh
t at the Thunderbird Lodge, whose rooms were depressingly like all the other rooms we stayed in during our trip.

  I dreamed: A few tourists are setting out for an expedition, we are all wearing yellow parkas and even rain hats, the leader of our group warns us about the “nasty” weather we will face. He doesn’t inspire much confidence but for some reason it seems to be impossible to change our minds now that we’ve agreed to go. One of the two inconspicuous women in our group says: God sees all. We have to take a “hidden way.” Then the other says: If God sees everything anyway, we can take a totally open way too. I brood about what it is we have to hide and which of the two is right, and I cannot decide. I know only that I don’t want to be here, but I can’t think where else I want to be. Then I think:

  I want to live in a world where there are still secrets. Where it’s not the case that every secret has to be violently ripped away from everyone because that is the only way to purify the world.

  I woke up exhausted and with sore limbs. The weather was even worse than in my dream: cold, rainy, windy. We decided to spend an additional day in the Thunderbird Lodge and we let ourselves be talked into joining a tour group taking a trip to the Canyon de Chelly that afternoon, despite the nasty weather. We pulled on all the warm clothes we had. We would be driving in an open truck. Rain gear was handed out—that is what saved us. The wind had dropped off a bit too, but still, we got miserably cold as the day went on.

  Timothy, a Navajo Indian—the Navajo are the largest Indian tribe in Arizona—was our driver and guide. He introduced himself as having been born in the canyon, it was his playground, and he had been leading tours through the canyon for nine years, twice a day. He stopped the truck at the tourist attractions. We stood in driving snow at a lookout point on the northern rim of the canyon, from which we could not only look down into the deep ravine but see the Anasazi ruins farther below: dwellings nested into one another, built into caves—the remains of a mysterious ancient people who had lived there for centuries and then inexplicably vanished, Timothy said. They must have been short, judging from the size of their homes. We saw their pictograms on the steep opposite cliff—white drawings of antelopes, dancing men, two swastikas too, and the sun and moon as two circles, one bigger and one smaller, beautiful and moving. Timothy thought the Anasazi had prayed every morning to “Sunny Moon.” He did not say how he knew it, how he could have known it, but I wanted to believe it. I could feel the mystery of this ancient people taking hold of me, and it would never let me go.

  The later Navajo people had added other pictograms in red next to the Anasazi’s white ones: more antelopes, but also horses, which they must have seen when the Spanish came. We kept seeing more Anasazi ruins in the caves in the steep cliff faces under overhanging rocks. They were probably ceremonial sites and could only be reached from above, by ladders. No, said Timothy (who had an Indian name too, of course, which he told us when we asked him to)—no, he couldn’t tell us why these original inhabitants had left their territory, somewhere around the year 1200. Or where they had gone. The Hopi, they said that the Anasazi were among their ancestors. Timothy shrugged his shoulders.

  He spoke English with a thick accent. He told us words from the Navajo language. The “little words” in Navajo were analogous to the “little words” of the Alaska Indians in Canada, he said. Not the big words. But they could understand each other’s language. The Anasazi did not have a written language, he said, so we don’t know much for sure about how they lived or what they believed.

  It got dark and ice-cold; we were freezing. Timothy still wanted to show us the farmland at the base of the canyon, which had been in the possession of the same families since the start of the nineteenth century and had never been sold. They farmed wheat and corn. And—what I don’t like, Timothy said, with an embarrassed laugh—is that the land belongs to the women. They pass it on to their daughters. Something’s got to change there, in Timothy’s opinion. And names? I asked excitedly. Children get their names from their fathers, of course, Timothy said. I would have very much liked to learn more about these remnants of matriarchy in patriarchal culture.

  It happened at some point during this tour of the canyon, with its intense red and ocher tones that blazed back to life almost painfully against the bright green of the trees shortly before sunset (the sky had cleared up toward evening)—it was then that something fundamental changed within me. By the time we got out of the truck in front of our motel, the moon had risen too—big and red and aggressive. I stood there and looked at it and felt a message reach me, or an insight, I don’t know what to call it. I took a deep breath. I was free.

  All right then, Angelina said. —But now is when I really need you, I said. Stay with me! —Okay, Angelina said, not with much enthusiasm, but why should the first angel I meet be enthusiastic about my requests anyway? Okay, okay, my angel was a black woman who didn’t take me especially seriously, I couldn’t deny it, but still, she had agreed, and angels keep their promises. Angelina smiled mockingly. She would keep an eye on me. I could see that she was overextended but nonetheless I didn’t hesitate to take advantage of her.

  We went to a Navajo-run restaurant where the service was unfriendly and the portions were generous but the food was not to my taste. Suddenly, because of the storm, which had picked up again outside, the lights went out; the Navajo waitresses stood giggling in a corner, it was dark for a long time. The room got quieter and quieter—it had been very loud before, with tourists carrying on in ways they probably wouldn’t have permitted themselves at home. Then candles were distributed to the tables, first very thin candles, then a bit later thick ones, in tall glasses. How romantic, Sanna said. Like Lowis and me, she could not get free of the images she had seen on our tour.

  Maybe this was why I had come to America?

  The rooms in all the motels are big and furnished the same: at least three people could spend the night in them, the beds are very wide and very soft, with the same synthetic blankets covering the sheets, the TV preset to the same channel, the same slightly musty smell that the same cleaning products try to banish. Arizona is a “dry” state, so we sat together in Sanna and Lowis’s room for another fifteen minutes or so and had a sip of the good whiskey Lowis had brought along. Both of them were sensitive to the same vibrations as I was—I could tell by the way they were talking about the Anasazi. They were deeply moved, even reverent, and shaken.

  Did it already come to my mind that first evening—the motto that would be a kind of guidepost for our whole trip?

  A JOURNEY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF REALITY

  The feeling of going outside of time grew stronger and stronger. Outside of time or outside of my own skin. At some point, the motto came to me: It was a Dream Vacation, and not only because I was taken through the strangest dreams during it, night after night. They came as less and less of a surprise as the trip went on, in fact—I prefer to avoid the word “addicted”—I started to wait for them.

  Sanna came to breakfast with two beautiful ceramic drinking bowls in black and white Navajo patterns from the gift shop, where she had already spent an hour looking around. She gave one of the bowls to Lowis and they both drank, each from their own bowl, toasting each other with their eyes. It seemed to me that they were renewing a promise.

  Lowis was studying a brochure about the life of the Anasazi—we had decided to see what we could of their traces. Their name, by the way, meant “The Oldest People”: a name the Navajo had given them since no one knew what they had called themselves. We would set out for Mesa Verde, then, apparently one of the main Anasazi sites. We unexpectedly ended up back in an incredible red landscape, where the sandstone the roads and ground and cliffs were made of was every shade of red and ocher. We looked and looked; we couldn’t get enough of it.

  When I close my eyes, so many years later, a pale reflection of the sight rises up, providing a background for the news report that occupies my attention today: Geologists plan to declare the Holocene—the era in which we
live and which, compared to earlier geological eras, is actually quite short—already at an end, and to proclaim in its place the Anthropocene. It has been proven that the human species is now the most powerful force causing changes in and on the surface of the earth—the mass extinction of species, the emergence of new building materials (bricks, concrete), and changes that geologists will perceive only in future centuries. Some want to take Hiroshima as the start of the new epoch, others the start of the industrial age: 1800.

  The Anasazi left no destruction behind them when they silently cleared out of their old settlement areas and moved to the more miserable regions that we were yet to encounter on our trip.

  Since the red in the landscape is indescribable, I took an enormous number of photographs, going against my usual habit, even though I already knew that I would end up with prints that could only be disappointing. The red faded as we drove farther along the almost empty road; gray-green took its place. When we saw the signposts pointing us toward Four Corners Monument we had to follow them, until we found ourselves in front of the rock that marked the meeting place of four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. We saw that other groups of people gathered before the monument apparently felt great respect for this place; we were unmoved, left quickly, and approached Mesa Verde, which we had read and heard so much about. We passed Sleeping Mountains, which communicated their relaxation to the landscape and whose peaks and cliffs were covered with snow.

  It had taken longer to drive there than we had thought it would, and then it was another forty-five-minute drive up to the high plateau, the “green table.” It was late and the friendly ranger working at the museum told us it would close in half an hour, but we didn’t let that stop us, we wanted to learn about the various stages of the settlement of Mesa Verde and about the Anasazi, who had lived there for eight hundred years, built their houses in the sandstone under the overhanging rocks—under the edges of the canyons, so that they were almost impossible to reach from the outside—and dug their ceremonial chambers even deeper underground: the round kivas that you could enter only via ladder from an opening up above. It is presumed, we read on the plaques on the walls of the museum, that the women built the houses and that the tribes were matrilineal. Then we walked around the mesa and saw many of the cave ruins, and ended with the famous, many-chambered Sun Temple. There was a biting wind; it was sunny but unbelievably cold. We had not expected to spend so much time on our trip freezing.