‘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?’
15
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.
PART TWO
1
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.
2
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.
3
HE WAS RIGHT. DUISBURG WAS AS COLD AS AMSTERDAM. The threat of war that he had earlier glimpsed in a fellow passenger’s Bildzeitung was broadcast here from every newsstand in huge red and black letters. He walked aimlessly around the city and realised that this had unconsciously been his intention. Why did it always take him so long to work things out? He had phoned Anja, but she had not answered and he had not left a message. The German train had left on time. He had installed himself in his single berth and been awakened from time to time by the broadcast of metallic voices on deserted platforms and the plaintive cries of the train, which had not been at all unpleasant. He liked travelling by train. His berth swayed gently, the invisible drummer on the rails beneath him beat a fabulous rhythm, and before falling asleep he had felt reasonably happy for the first time that day. Why he had let himself be talked into this ridiculous adventure, God only knew, but Arnold Pessers had been rather convincing. He had gone on for hours about how light he had felt on his return from the spa. Now that he thought about it, ever since his return Arnold had become pretty much of a bore. The two of them were about the same age and knew each other’s stories. Once, when Arnold was in Japan, he had fallen madly in love with a model he met in connection with his work as a photographer. The whole thing had ended badly, as was to be expected. Stormy romances might flourish in TV dramas, but they were only tiresome in real life. Arnold’s friends had had their work cut out for them, but after two years of serious alcohol abuse, the photographer had eventually pulled himself together. Why people went on making the same mistakes over and over was a mystery. Erik shuddered. Imagine never being able to have another drink. That must be about the worst thing that could happen to you. A day never went by in which he did not have at least a couple of drinks. In strictly medical terms, that made you an alcoholic, but he never got drunk nor actually had a hangover, and whenever he went in for a check-up, his lab tests were fine. ‘I know,’ Arnold had said, ‘but it’ll catch up with you sooner or later.’ And Arnold had started rhapsodising again about his new life, his regenerated liver, his lost flab, his new-found energy and his amazing diet, which was based on several monastic rules – totally incomprehensible to Erik – in which certain foods were not allowed to be eaten in combination with certain others, lettuce was taboo at night, eating fruit after dinner was a deadly sin (‘because it’ll rot in your stomach’), smoking was out of the question, hard liquor was a form of suicide and wine a medicine rather than a harmless pleasure. One or two glasses were the absolute limit. My God, he was going to die of boredom. But one thing was indisputable: Arnold had lost a lot of weight.
He woke up around seven. It wa
s now or never – the train was due to get in an hour from now. They were speeding past mountains, pockets of mist, villages, houses in which the lights were already on and people were moving in and out of the rooms. In Innsbruck he put his bags in a locker. Arnold had told him how to catch the Blue Train to Igls, but he was in no hurry. He wanted to walk around a bit first. And maybe look for Café Zentral, which Arnold had recommended as a nice old-fashioned Austrian café, the type of place in which Thomas Bernhard would have sat and read his newspaper. Erik liked Thomas Bernhard, not only because, like the Dutch author W. F. Hermans, he had perfected the art of ranting and raving, but because, also like Hermans, his anger seemed to stem from an embittered, disappointed love. He particularly admired the style of the tirade – the urgent, passionate, rhetorical anger with its secret, and often invisible, ingredient: the compassion with which the Austrian wrote about his surroundings, about his country and his own life, which he himself had referred to as ‘a life dedicated to death’.
In the café he read Der Standard, a newspaper whose pale orange colour made it seem as if the pages had yellowed and aged before you even touched them, and which, given the world news – Iraq, Israel, Zimbabwe – produced in him an anachronistic confusion that seemed to go wonderfully well with the furniture and the gentle hum of voices: a Central European buzz in which people such as Kafka, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus and Heimito von Doderer had so comfortably been able to do their thinking. Perhaps Austria had deliberately chosen to lag behind the times, he thought, because the world was going much too fast. He ordered a second cup of coffee.
The king of procrastination. That’s what Anja called him.
‘Do you have any idea what you do? You circle around your desk, as far from it as possible, taking hours to reach your computer. As if you’re waiting for something to happen, so you can get out of doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.‘
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