Lost Paradise (6 page)

‘DIDN’T YOU AT LEAST HAVE A FEW LAUGHS TOGETHER?’ Almut asked. I knew she was going to ask me that. I also knew that she was angry, indignant. If there is no laughter, something is wrong. In Almut’s book, at any rate. I had come back to Adelaide alone. We still had one night left in the cabin in Port Willunga, and she wanted to see it. The same beach, the same ocean, the same birds, though now I knew what they were called. We were sitting high up on a dune in a little restaurant called the Star of Greece because a ship by that name had once been shipwrecked there. It was high tide again, and the surf still had many things to say. Unlike me. I knew that Almut was waiting for me to tell her everything, since our relationship had always been based on sharing. We had no secrets from each other. But I also knew that I could not talk to her. Not yet.

‘What did you do this week?’ I asked her at last.

‘Me? I partied every night, OK? No . . . I spent all my time wondering what I ought to do next. I didn’t know if you were coming back.’

‘I said I’d be back at the end of the week, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, but the expression on your face might have meant the exact opposite: that you would never want to come back.’

I shrugged, but she blew up. I knew that my best bet was to wait out the storm.

‘Why can’t you admit that we’ve got a problem? For one thing, we’ve run out of money, though that’s beside the point. I didn’t know how you were doing, and I’m not used to that. I was worried. Not because the man took no notice of me, but because I don’t think he saw you either.

‘His work is beautiful, especially the painting you were so crazy about. I’ve forgotten the title, but if you labelled it “The Gates of Hell” you wouldn’t be far wrong. No wonder the guy never laughs. Actually, I never see any of them laugh.’

‘Them?’

‘You’re right, I’m sorry. But one night in Alice Springs, when you were asleep, I wandered off and got lost. I didn’t tell you.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. But I found myself face to face with three of these great big guys. They stopped, I stopped. They reeked of beer. That’s all. They stood there staring at me until finally I turned and walked away. End of story.’

She paused, then added, ‘It was all so sad.’

‘You can see the same sadness in São Paulo.’

‘No, not the same. For one thing, there’s always laughter in São Paulo, no matter how terrible things are. Our slaves came from Africa, so at least they know how to dance. Really dance, I mean. Can you imagine a samba school here? But that’s not what I meant. It’s all so hopeless. Do you know that Groucho Marx joke? “We were standing on the edge of a precipice. Since then, we have taken a giant leap forward.” Even that was denied them. They were snatched away long before they got to the edge. Anyway, half of it is fake.’

‘What’s fake?’

‘Everything. They used to paint their bodies or draw pictures in the sand. It meant something, and then it was gone. A bit of wind, and the drawing was swept away. Nothing was for sale. If I buy a piece of painted bark that was once given to the dead, how can I be sure it’s worth anything? How many of them can one person make? And then what happens? Do they sit out there in the bush with their secret whatevers, waiting for another gallery owner with bags of money to land his Piper Cub on their airstrip?’

‘You’re disappointed.’

‘Maybe. And maybe I’m right.’

‘Because our precious dream has been shattered? And yet a week ago in Ubirr you were in ecstasy. Or have you forgotten already?’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten. But I can’t help feeling that somehow or other it’s all doomed. And then when you disappeared like that . . .’

‘I didn’t disappear.’

‘No, but you looked terribly unhappy . . .’

‘I wasn’t unhappy. I was just . . . somewhere else. Trying to work something out.’

She laid a hand on my arm. ‘OK, I’ll stop asking questions. I’m sorry. But the least you can do is make me laugh. Tell me a funny word, and then I’ll tell you my news. We’ve had an offer that ought to make you laugh. At any rate I hope so. But first a funny word.’

‘Maku.’

‘
Maku
,’ she repeated. When am I supposed to start laughing?’

‘As soon as you know what it means.’

‘Use it in a sentence.’

‘“Out in the desert I ate delicious
maku
.” Witchetty grubs – the larvae of ghost moths – and beetles. They can be found near mulga trees, along with
tjala
, honey ants. You can dig them up underneath a mulga tree after it has rained. The ants swell up to the size of frogs. They’re full of a yellowy, sickeningly sweet nectar that’s meant for the worker ants. They come over and suck it up. You see, I‘ve learned a lot. Send me into the desert, and I’ll survive. So what’s this about an offer?’

‘It’s in Perth. That’s miles away, but I think our junk heap can just about make it. There’s going to be a literary festival with a couple of theatre performances. They’re looking for angels, or rather extras dressed up as angels.’

‘To act in a play?’

‘No. I’m not sure I really understand it, but the way they explained it to me was that while the festival is going on, angels will be hidden all over the city. People are supposed to go and look for them.’

‘What do we have to do?’

‘Nothing. They give us a pair of wings and every day for a week someone picks us up and takes us to a hiding place in a church, or in a ruin, or in a bank. We just have to stay put all day and let people find us. Somehow it’s all related to
Paradise Lost
.’

‘Never read it. No, wait, we had to read it at school, but I’ve forgotten most of it. There’s an angel with a flaming sword who expels Adam and Eve from Paradise.’

‘God, that’s right. Plus Satan. The first book, about Satan’s hatred of God, goes on forever. And then there’s Eve, who thinks she’s supposed to eat the apple. All very sad, but I don’t remember exactly what happens, not in any detail.’

‘Me neither. So what do we do when people find us?’

‘They’re not allowed to talk to us. They will, of course, but we’re not supposed to answer. And we have to stay perfectly still. Anyway, the pay’s good.’

‘How did you hear about it?’

‘There was an ad in the theatre section of the paper here. I gave them a call. They’re going to hold auditions. I’m sure they’ll take you, but it’ll be a bit harder for me.’ She pointed to her breasts. ‘Have you ever seen an angel with boobs?’

SO NOW I’M AN ANGEL. IT WASN’T DIFFICULT. THE director picked me out of the line-up straight away. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘you have to be able to lie very still.’ Turning to her assistant, she added, ‘She’s so small she could fit inside the cupboard in that building on William Street, by the Gledden Arcade. Make a note of that.’

And then to me, ‘Do you think you can lie very still? Because that’s what you’ll have to do.’

I said it would not be a problem. After all, I had enough to think about. Almut also passed with flying colours. She had done her best to hide her breasts, but she need not have bothered. ‘We’ll put her on the roof of His Majesty’s Theatre, across from Wilson’s Car Park. She looks like she could hold a sword in the air for a couple of hours.’

Yesterday was our first day. Last night Almut was so tired she couldn’t think straight.

‘I have to stand all day in that bloody sun, but the view’s fantastic. Mind you, I don’t see any of the people up close. How about you?’

‘I don’t see them either.’

I don’t see them, but I can hear them. I listen to the way they walk up the stairs, then stop and stand still for a moment until they see me. I can always tell when they have spotted me, I can feel it, which is strange because there is never more than one of them at a time. They have to promise to look for the angels alone. I try to guess from the footsteps whether it’s a man or a woman, since I am not allowed to turn round. I have to curl up on the floor of the cupboard with my face to the wall. Whenever someone comes in, I try to hold my breath for as long as I can, but after a while you get incredibly stiff and the wings are fastened so tightly that it starts to hurt like mad. Thank God I can always hear them coming up the stairs, so when there is a lull I rotate my shoulders. Otherwise I would go crazy. The other thing that annoys me are the people who deliberately stand there for a long time, hoping you will break down and turn round. It’s always a man, you can tell. When that happens, I concentrate on my favourite Annunciations – on the poses, the position of the wings. And I think of
him
, of how we lay there together in the desert, also on the ground. Too bad I didn’t have my wings then. I wish I knew whether he has been thinking of me, and where he is. And then I fantasise a bit about what he would say if he walked in here, and whether I would recognise his step and turn round, even though it’s against the rules, but of course that is ridiculous. I discovered afterwards where his mob lives. It wasn’t hard to work out because they have a very distinctive style. The whole kinship group paints in the same way. Here in the museum in Perth, I have seen the paintings of the rest of his mob, the people I was hoping to meet, though they were kept secret from me, or perhaps it is the other way round, since of course my existence was kept secret from them. Time passes quickly when you’ve got so much to think about. The wall of my cupboard holds no secrets from me – I know every last crack, scratch and paint mark. My mind wanders through it like a walker in an empty landscape. When no one is there, I sing softly to myself. After a while you go into a kind of trance, or dream that you can fly. It gets really crazy at the end of the day when the bus comes to pick us up. It is full of angels – a really motley bunch. We each have our own way of coping: coke, tranquillisers, maths problems. We are all exhausted and bubbling over with stories. The angels in full view have a particularly hard time, because people say the strangest things to them: declarations of love, abuse, obscenities. They know we are not allowed to react, and some people seem to get really turned on by that.

Almut and I have said nothing more about the week I was away. I keep those days locked inside me. Sometimes I think about what we will do next, and whether we should stay in this country. I know that Almut would like to go home, but I am not ready to leave. What I would really like to do is to go into the desert on my own, but I do not dare say that to Almut. In the evenings, when she is downstairs in the hotel bar, I unwrap the painting, put it on the table and lean it against the wall. Then I sit across from it, like a nun at her devotions. After a few minutes, it starts to have an effect, and I feel a longing that I can’t put into words, but that I know will be part of me forever. I don’t want to say anything to Almut, at least not yet, and though I am not sure this is something you can decide, I think I will always be a wanderer, so I can make the world my desert. I have enough food for thought to last a lifetime. There are honey ants and grubs wherever you go, or else roots and berries, and now I know how to find them. I can survive.

ALL WE NEED IS A CITY ON THE WATER, THE MONTH OF January, a day of sleet, a station. Grey is the best of all colours: a hidden sun saving its warmth for the other side of the world and the stories written there. Thirteen train platforms, some more crowded than others. And then the divining rod – that indispensable tool of our trade – begins to home in on a specific direction, twitching and jerking until it clearly points to a loosely assembled group of trav-ellers: the walk-ons, the extras. We are not sure whether they have been assigned roles today. After all, we are not the only ones in this line of work, and they might be characters in someone else’s story. The chap in the brown jacket? No. The young mother with the toddler? No. Not those three soldiers either. The man in the funny-looking hat is too old – he would only complicate matters. But we had better hurry, the train should have been here by now. Ah, that chap over there, the one standing behind the man – obviously from Bavaria – who is reading the
Bildzeitung
, he is the one we need, he is clearly our man. Wind-blown wisps of thinning hair, eyes watering from the cold. No, not the one behind him, he’s no use to us, you’re looking at the wrong person, I mean the other one, the man who has looked at his watch twice already. He will do. Suede shoes – an English make, a bit worn, though – cotton trousers in a drab army colour, a grey loden coat and a red scarf, which is cashmere at least. There is an inherent contrast in all those textiles, in terms of both colour and age: a touch of the artist, an off-duty army captain, a man who goes to watch his daughter play hockey in a ritzy town like Laren, with the various items of clothing cancelling each other out, as if the wearer was not sure who he really wanted to be and was using the defiant red of the scarf to try and mask his uncertainty. OK, let’s take a closer look. Some women might find this man attractive, though he probably is not at his best today. He looks around, to see if someone is coming, but he can forget it. The train has just passed Haarlem, so let us get started. Mixing people’s lives together, if only for a short while, is no small matter. Some elements, just as in chemistry, attract each other, and others repel. Lives actually need long preparation. Just like food. Hmm, you are right, there does not seem to be a chef, unless you want to think of life itself as one big culinary experiment, and why not? In any case, the chemistry is far from easy. One life takes longer to cook than another, the stoves are located in different parts of the world, the result is uncertain. Our metaphor is wearing thin, so we have only this to say: life – to use this ridiculous analogy one last time – is the stupidest of culinary experiments. For the most part this leads to human suffering, but every once in a while – though not very often – literature profits by it. We shall see.

ERIK ZONDAG WAS NOT SURE EXACTLY WHAT MOOD HE was in when he boarded the train to Austria, which was hardly surprising. It was cold, he was feeling under the weather, and he did not know what to expect, other than that he was on his way to a health spa that his friend Arnold Pessers had recommended. Arnold, like Erik, had reached that unmapped area described by poets as a ‘dark wood’ and by doctors as ‘midlife’ – an absurd label, especially since the end date is generally unknown. If the end occurs earlier than the statistical norm, ‘midlife’ ought to shift along with it, so that in some cases it was already far behind you and you did not even know it, a reflection that did not make Erik Zondag any more cheerful. The train was late. Through the dirty glass roof of Amsterdam’s Central Station, he could see the gusty winds blowing sleet across the water of the IJ. It was Friday, and still too early to buy the newspaper for which he worked as a literary critic, which meant that he could not read the printed review in which he had savaged the latest novel of one of Holland’s literary giants. Some writers did not age gracefully; after a while you knew all of their mannerisms and obsessions. There was not enough dying going on in Dutch literature. Reve, Mulisch, Claus, Nooteboom and Wolkers had all been writing when he was in his cradle, and it did not look as if they were ever going to stop. He could only conclude that they took the idea of immortality much too literally. His girlfriend Anja – an art editor at a rival paper – had accused him of writing an unfair review.

‘You’re in a bad mood because you’re going off on your journey tomorrow.’

‘That has nothing to do with it. I’ve known the man my whole life. By now I feel as if I could write his books myself.’

‘So why don’t you? Maybe you’ll even earn some decent money for a change.’

Anja was eighteen years his junior, and that was in excusable. They had been living together for the last four years – if you could call it that, because they both still lived in their own apartments: hers in Amsterdam Noord and his in Oud Zuid, which tended to complicate their daily lives somewhat. She thought that his place looked and felt like the basket of ‘an ageing dog’, while he thought that her eighth-floor high-rise overlooking the polder had all the charm of a laboratory. Bare, white and spotless, not really where you would want to spend the night for fun. After all, he thought, it was better to do what had brought you together in the first place in a dog basket rather than in a laboratory. But Anja disagreed. In fact, it occurred to him now, she had been disagreeing with him more and more lately. Yesterday’s conversation about the review had also ended disastrously.

‘If you ask me, you’re jealous of the man.’

‘Jealous? Of that conceited fathead?’

‘He’s conceited, all right. But at least he can write.’

‘Your paper gave him a bad review too.’

‘That may be, but at least it was subtle. Yours was unmixed venom.’

There was no question of making love after that. Dutch authors had a lot to answer for.

‘It’s high time you went to that spa.’ This was her conclusion the next morning. ‘You’ve been moping around for ages!’ That was true. An unshaven man going on fifty who finds himself staring out over the endless melancholy of the polder at seven thirty on a January morning is aware of this, especially when the radio announces that twelve more Palestinians have been shot in the Gaza Strip, that the stock market has surely bottomed out by now, and that the latest attempt to form a new cabinet has reached a deadlock.

‘I’m not in the mood for a spa. It’s a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a week of fasting.’

‘You won’t get anywhere with an attitude like that. This is your chance to shed those excess kilos you’re always going on about. Besides, Arnold says he came back a different man.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘What?’

‘A different man. Am I supposed to become a new person at my age? I’m just beginning to get used to myself.’

‘You might be, but I’m not. You depress the hell out of me sometimes. Besides that, you drink too much!’

He did not bother to reply. At the crossroads below, a white delivery van had manoeuvred itself with geometrical precision into the side of a pale blue Honda.

‘Arnold is looking a whole lot better. And he hasn’t had a drop to drink since he got back.’

‘That’s because he’s too busy moaning about all the food he’s not allowed to eat.’

No, that conversation had not gone well either. He looked at his watch. Just then, the loudspeaker announced that his train would be delayed for another few minutes. In point of fact, he was not sure why he had chosen to take this train. To catch the night train to Innsbruck, he had to change trains in Duisburg, and something about the name ‘Duisburg’ had appealed to him. It conjured up something cold and grey, a German city still smelling faintly of a long-ago war – an atmosphere of hardship and suffering that matched his present mood.