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

by Wolf, Christa

  That fate must have been just what had befallen the emaciated-looking woman who sat down at our table in the Italian restaurant for a few minutes, after we refused to let her do what she made her money doing: take pictures of us. She seemed to only want to talk about her job but then her monologue turned into a delirious cry of pain, shading more and more into an indictment of the system or machine that called itself Las Vegas, which had sucked her in as a naive young woman. Her boyfriend had won at roulette and left the gambling hall with a slim young beauty, she never saw him again and he had left her completely without money, in the clutches of a monster that never had let her go, God have mercy on you, the woman said, it devours you down to the bones and then gnaws on them too. Her deathly appearance, which she tried to cover up as best she could with a lot of makeup, was a warning about precisely that. You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes here, she said. The things they dream up just to get you to leave your money here. Down to the last penny. And then, when you’ve lost it all and if no one comes to ransom you, they cart you off to the nearest train station and give you a one-way ticket to somewhere else. They’ve set up a discreet operation to handle the suicides who pile up in the hotel rooms around sunrise. No guest ever sees the dark side of this desert city.

  But we didn’t want to plumb the radiant city’s depths, we just wanted to take a little stroll around this glittering world of pretense. We marveled at how complete the illusion was that brought us to Rome after just a short walk, the facades exactly like the real ones we knew, the sky in no way inferior to the real sky of Rome, except that the heavenly bodies traveled across the sky once an hour, imitating the course of a whole day. Suddenly we could no longer tell if the people there were visitors like us or real citizens of this mythical Rome. It scared me. I wanted to leave right away, but there was no way out except the long walk past the gaming halls.

  First we wanted to try the one-armed bandits. They stood in long rows and the players sat in long rows in front of them, tightly packed together, working the machines and trying to get them to give up their money. The sound we heard—sometimes soft, sometimes loud—was the jingling and rattling of money whenever a pull of the lever forced one of the machines to empty its contents into the receptacle. Then the lucky man or woman swept their booty into the little plastic buckets they all carried, and then less lucky men and women gathered around the winner’s location, for encouragement, or to recharge themselves by shyly approaching the mystical forces the winner had called down, or, best of all, to take the winner’s place. If a series of wins became too conspicuous, an envoy sent by the management appeared and inconspicuously checked to make sure that everything was in order.

  After we had figured out “how it goes,” we found seats in front of machines far apart from each other. I halfheartedly stuck my dollars in the slot and with waning interest and pleasure saw what my one-armed bandit had to tell me. It only turned up a modest win once, not enough to make up for what I had lost. The same thing happened to the others. Lowis appeared, impatient to take me where the “real games” were played. How Lowis knew the system of roulette and could explain it to us remained a mystery; he didn’t let our ignorance stop him, though, and sat down at a table and started to play. I put up modest amounts of money, lost as I had expected to, and stopped when I reached my limit: sixty dollars.

  It’s stupid to stop now, Lowis said, you have to give the fate lurking behind the game a chance to show itself. He turned back to the roulette table and I said goodbye to Sanna, who was not playing anymore either but had stationed herself behind Lowis. Why did I want to leave now? It was before midnight, to go to sleep now was against the customs here. I was bored, I said, which was the truth. Sanna laughed: I obviously wasn’t a game-playing type, in that case. Lowis, on the other hand … He seems to have just discovered a part of himself he never knew he had, Sanna said.

  I said that that happens to everyone at least once in their lives, it’s just that in my case there were facts of my nature of a different kind that had forced their way to the surface. Anyway, Sanna said, I should go to bed. She had to stay with Lowis, whatever happened tonight. This was a special night in his life.

  I could only marvel at this young woman’s intelligence. Suddenly I was so tired that I could barely find my room. Before I went to sleep I tried to make contact with Angelina, but obviously no angel would follow me there. So, you were lying, I said, when you promised you would be there whenever I needed you. Angels lie too. There was something consoling about that. It would have been hard to endure something perfectly perfect.

  Outside it was bright as day from the electric lights flooding the street. Excited people were screaming. I had to get back up and pull the heavy curtains shut. I found a little bottle of champagne in the minibar and drank it all down. Then I had to call Berlin.

  Has something happened? cried a worried voice. —No, nothing. That’s the point. —Hey, are you tipsy? —That too. But the main thing is I want to ask you something. —Ask. —Do you really realize that everything in your head will disappear when you die? —Of course. Except for what you’ve written down. —Oh, that tiny fraction. It doesn’t seem to bother you. —I don’t think about it constantly. —I do, at least recently. Nothing to say to that? The other thing I wanted to say was: We’re getting older. —Thanks for letting me know. —Good night.

  A distant voice. A distant place. Masses of people, a protest march, moving toward the Rotes Rathaus without needing any instructions. They pour out of the subway stations onto Alexanderplatz, hold up their signs, unfurl their banners. They give off a mixture of merriment and pride and determination that you have never seen on so many faces, neither before nor since. It’s contagious. You can feel the night’s fears dissolving, they disappear in the early morning when you see the marshals with the orange sashes saying NO VIOLENCE come toward you, in the best of spirits, around Alexanderplatz. There are theater people there, you know a lot of them, one actress friend comes up to you and says: Brecht should have been here to see this. “We have now decided to fear / bad life more than death.” Here to see his plays coming down off the stage onto the streets. And the miracle is that the slogan NO VIOLENCE is followed throughout the whole country, by everyone.

  A makeshift platform erected on a handcart, with people taking turns on it. The unimaginable trying to become reality. And—you all sense it—it could only last a historical second. But it had happened. The flower seller standing in front of her store, handing out flyers: the need to act now. Not miss it.

  Later came malice and scorn and mockery, of course. No utopia allowed. But these open, wide-open faces—they were there, I saw them. The shining eyes. The free movements. They were soon stopped, yes. The eyes were soon looking at the displays in the shop windows and not toward any distant promise. The roulette tables gained in popularity.

  Noise in the hotel woke me up and I could not get back to sleep.

  In the morning, there was already a light there that hurt the eyes. Lowis came down to breakfast wearing enormous sunglasses. He’s a bit tired, Sanna said. They hadn’t gotten to bed until four. Aha. I realized that it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask how much he had won. Much later, when we were sitting in the car, he said, from deep in thought, that you really had to wonder what it meant for human evolution that in certain circumstances our brain can be overcome by a drive that is stronger than reason. At one point he had won six hundred dollars but instead of stopping he kept playing. He had lost not only his winnings but quite a bit more.

  An old Japanese woman was sitting in front of the slot machines that morning at the same place as she had been the night before, playing as though possessed. We couldn’t help recalling the rats in the experiment who kept pressing and pressing the button that gave them an orgasmic feeling in their brain, forgot to eat and drink, and would have died, unable to forgo this pleasurable feeling, if the experimenters hadn’t stopped them.

  My need to escape this place grew stronger and st
ronger. When we were paying our bill, we asked the older woman at the reception desk if she ever gambled here. Oh, never! she cried. Those people are sick!

  * * *

  We drove in silence away from the city—the shimmering, glittering oasis set down in the middle of the desert to lead us into temptation. Sanna drove, I sat next to her. We drove and drove, it got monstrously hot, and before long our car’s air conditioner couldn’t keep up.

  Death Valley. Yes, this is how I had imagined the desert—endless, blinding sand dunes. Scorching heat. Warnings posted at the gas stations never to walk or drive into the desert alone, and never without supplies of water. Every year the desert claimed more victims.

  Valley of death. Valley of the dead. There they lay, all of them, my dead, struggling out of their graves as I flew over them. Just look, Angelina said. How long had she been there next to me? How long had we been floating above the landscape? I thought: I wonder if the dead will tell me something. Angelina, who could read my thoughts, said: No. The living superstitiously believed that the dead had a message to tell them. But they were no more intelligent when they were alive than the living are today.

  So, in death you don’t learn anything. I found that sad.

  Angelina paid no attention to moods. She had not the slightest interest in whether I was frightened by the uncanny pull exerted by the dead. We flew toward the coast. The incomparable feeling of flying. Angelina next to me. I knew that this was goodbye. A task has been finished, Angelina, but why don’t I feel a sense of accomplishment? A word came to me that I had been unconsciously seeking for weeks: preliminary. A preliminary work has reached its preliminary end.

  Angelina laughed: But isn’t that always the case?

  We flew directly into the thick smog over L.A. from the northern edge of the city. Downtown stayed on our right. Was the little country I came from too insignificant to deserve sympathy? Wasn’t the writing on the wall portending its downfall—Into the void with it!—there from the beginning? Was it really possible that I could have suffered so much for a simple, ordinary mistake?

  Angelina categorically stated that that wasn’t the point. Only feelings count, not facts.

  Maybe it was her job to be sure of that. But I had to ask: Count to whom? Counted by whom, with what units? The questions were no match for Angelina, and the way she exultantly—yes, I would almost use that unsuitable word—flew over the landscape, toward the marina with the yachts and their masts and white sails, and farther up the coastal road to the giant parking lot with its hundreds of cars, sparkling and dazzling in the sun.

  My misgivings didn’t bother her in the least. My suspicion that now, only in a dream—a dream, Angelina!—did I perceive a glimmer of what the real issue was. Or should be. The earth is in peril, Angelina, but we’re worried about the state of our souls.

  That’s the only thing worth worrying about, Angelina said. Every other catastrophe comes out of that. The wind from our flight blew her hair back. Black is beautiful, I said, after looking at her from the side for a long time.

  We approached Venice, I recognized the buildings, the narrow streets, the squares full of entertainers, even on that day. Before us lay the flawless curve of Santa Monica Bay (which, recent news forces me to remark, has now been damaged by storms and raging forest fires).

  I don’t have to fly in a big circle now, do I? I said. Back to the beginning?

  Do it, she said, unmoved.

  And those years of work? Just throw it all away?

  Why not?

  Age, Angelina, that’s why not.

  Age meant nothing to Angelina, she had no conception of it. She had all the time in the world. And she wanted to make me as carefree as she was. She wanted me to enjoy our flight, to look down, and, saying goodbye, etch into my mind forever the magnificent line of the bay, the white edge of foam that the ocean spilled onto the shore, the strip of sand between the water and the coastal road, the row of palm trees, and the darker mountain range in the background.

  And the colors. Oh, Angelina, the colors! And this sky!

  She seemed satisfied and flew on in silence, keeping me at her side.

  Where are we going?

  I don’t know.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  Much of the information in this book about Hopi mythology and history is taken from Frank Waters, Das Buch der Hopi (The Book of the Hopi) (Munich: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1980).

  C.W.

  Where possible, translations in City of Angels have been made consistent with previous translations into English. The translator would like to acknowledge in particular Christa Wolf, Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990–1994, trans. Jan van Heurck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Eyre Methuen, 1976), and Bad Time for Poetry: 152 Poems and Songs, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1995); Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago Books, 2010); and, for the Paul Fleming poem, The Penguin Book of German Verse: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem, ed. Leonard Forster (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957).

  D.S.

  ALSO BY CHRISTA WOLF

  Divided Heaven

  The Quest for Christa T.

  Patterns of Childhood

  No Place on Earth

  Cassandra

  Accident: A Day’s News

  What Remains and Other Stories

  The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays

  Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990–1994

  Medea

  In the Flesh

  One Day a Year

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christa Wolf (1929–2011) was one of the most celebrated German writers of the postwar era. A central figure in East German literature and politics, she was arguably the foremost German-German writer, awarded major literature prizes in East, West, and reunified Germany. Her wide-ranging work—nonfiction, fiction, and hybrids of the two, from socialist realism (Divided Heaven) to feminist epic (The Quest for Christa T.), from ancient Greece (Medea) to Chernobyl (Accident), and from German Romanticism (No Place on Earth) to a real-time chronicle of life in the second half of the twentieth century (One Day a Year)—is marked throughout by rigorous self-examination, political engagement, and committed feminism. Her most important reexaminations of the cultural past and personal memory include Cassandra, a crucial text for Western feminists and a secret social critique for her readers in the East; Patterns of Childhood, a groundbreaking reflection on her growing up in Nazi Germany; and City of Angels, a sequel of sorts to Patterns of Childhood that takes place after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Damion Searls has translated books by Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, the Dutch writer Nescio, and others. He rediscovered the work of Hans Keilson and has translated two of Keilson’s novels, Comedy in a Minor Key and Life Goes On, for FSG; Comedy in a Minor Key was a 2010 New York Times Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Searls received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2010 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Damion Searls

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in German in 2010 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin, Germany, as Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First American edition, 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolf, Christa.

  [Stadt der Engel, oder, The overcoat of Dr. Freud. English]

  City of angels or,: The overcoat of Dr. Freud / Christa Wolf; translated from the German by Damion Searls. — 1st American ed.

  p.cm.

  ISBN 978-0-374-26935-7 (alk. paper)

  I. Searls, Damion
. II. Title. III. Title: City of angels or, The overcoat of Dr. Freud.

  PT2685.O36 S6713 2013

  833'.914—dc23

  2012018515

  www.fsgbooks.com

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  eISBN 9781429942782