‘I don’t begrudge you your fun. You can screw every one of the heavenly hosts for all I care, but I don’t want to hear another word about that angel of yours. If she was so fantastic, you should have stayed there. Who knows, you might even have sprouted wings. God, men are pathetic. A woman puts on a pair of wings and curls up in a cupboard. Great. But she still can’t fly. And making love with those things on sounds positively uncomfortable. Come to think of it, how did they attach the wings? With elastic straps or what?’
14
THE SAME PLACE, THE SAME CHARACTERS.
Before he lay down on the massage table, he asked her a question he had promised himself he would not ask.
‘Are we ever going to see each other again?’
‘We’ve already seen each other again! Have you been able to remember what I said to you at the end of that night?’
No, he still had no idea. The whole of that crazy night – the chaos, the pandemonium – was printed indelibly on his memory: the ocean, the surf, winged people running across the beach, alcohol, sirens, the sinister silhouettes of the ghostly gum trees with their diseased-looking bark.
‘Lie down on your stomach, please.’ He did as she instructed. But before lowering his mouth to the table, he asked, ‘Does massaging me make you feel uncomfortable?’
‘God, no. This is my profession. Relax and stop rooting around in the past. Otherwise the massage won’t do you any good.’
He saw the scene again, as though it had happened yesterday. A bare room with an empty cupboard. A feather had fallen to the floor, and he picked it up. By then, they had known each other only half an hour. She stood before him, a boyish angel whose face was filled with mockery and suspicion. The phone rang three times in the next room, then stopped. A moment later, it rang again, another three times.
‘That’s the signal,’ she said. ‘The festival’s over, and the angels can go home now. You didn’t finish the route.’
‘I finished it yesterday.’
He remembered coming back to the car park and seeing the last angel, this one on the roof of the building across the street: a sombre, life-sized angel brandishing a sword as if he were about to drive the whole city into the ocean. But it was a woman and not a man, the poet had said – he had seen her through his binoculars.
She left the room after the phone rang, but gestured for him to wait. He stared out of the dirty window, watching the distant sky turn red. He looked at the strange clouds, with their black and white stripes. The clouds in Australia really were lined with silver and gold. In just one week, he had inexplicably fallen in love with the country. He had gone there with no expectations, assuming it would be a kind of America. But it had been completely different. The sense of spaciousness and freedom that glowed on every face seemed to find expression in the clouds racing across that vast sky. He longed to follow them into that empty land, into the hot sandy plains he had seen on his maps. Wistfully he recited to himself the strange names derived from Aboriginal words, as a kind of incantation or promise. Still, he had seen almost no Aboriginal people in Perth. He had told her that, but she had not pursued the matter.
She came back in with two glasses of whisky – no ice, no water – filled to the brim. She drank hers quickly, then the two of them sat together for a while, until they heard a bus honking in the street below.
‘It’s the angel party!’ She laughed. ‘Tonight we’re being expelled from Paradise! All the angels have been invited to a party at one of the beaches up north.’
‘Can I come?’
‘Of course. Everyone you saw yesterday along the route will be there, plus the director, the production assistants, the people who organised it, the extras, the whole lot. Including all the angels.’
She had been right. She was greeted with loud cheers, then kissed and hugged by the angel contingent on the bus – men and women in jeans and sweatshirts. He tried to make himself invisible, but he need not have bothered since no one took any notice of him anyway. Someone shoved a glass of beer into his hand; it seemed that the drinking had already begun. Over the shouting he could hear the music of the Bee Gees. A few people were even trying to dance in the bus. The noise was indescribable. When they reached the shore, they found other buses parked there. Lost angels were walking up and down the beach, by themselves or arm in arm. He could still see a rosy glow on the horizon, but later, when he looked again, the moonlight was surfing the high waves. Its gleam kept disappearing under the water and then popping up again. There was an elaborate buffet in the party tent, but he was not hungry. He watched her, occasionally losing sight of her; he watched her dance with wild abandon, first with the angel from the car park, and then with another angel, a man with red hair. From time to time someone shouted something at him, most of which he did not understand. He also caught a glimpse of the Tasmanian poet, twirling drunkenly in the sand with the crop-haired angel, still wearing his snowy white wings. The whip cracks of the music kept getting louder and louder until he could feel the vibrations deep inside him. He tried to get closer to her, but she seemed to be avoiding him. She was constantly surrounded by other angels – young men whose muscular bodies, shaped by a lifetime of jogging and surfing, would not have looked out of place on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
‘Hey, Dutchie!’ the Dane shouted, and he pushed a girl into his arms. The girl immediately extricated herself, glared at him in a drunken rage and spat on the ground. The Dane started to drag him away, but all of a sudden she was there, as if she had been keeping an eye on him all along. They headed out towards the beach. Everywhere he looked, people and angels were lying in the sand. He heard the sound of breaking glass and laughter, and saw the glowing tips of cigarettes. People were laughing, drinking, kissing. He saw a naked angel plunge into the ocean, wings and all, and then he did not see or hear anything except the surf – a steady rise and fall that ended in a silky thump as the oily, gleaming-black, moonlit waves collapsed and went rushing up the beach. There, where the water ended and the land began, she stopped and threw her wings around him. He could not see her face, but he felt her kiss his eyes and run her hand over his face, felt her soft and yet surprisingly hard wings as they held him captive, felt her sink slowly to her knees and then lie on the sand. From far away came the sound of the music in the beach tent. The desire that he had been feeling all this time, from the moment he first saw her – lying curled up on the floor with her feet bare, her face hidden and wearing those wings – now swept over his body, and as he started to undress her, he noticed that she was looking away from him with her eyes wide open, though he could feel her fingernails gently scraping his neck, and at that exact moment, the beach was raked by the revealing white beam of a spotlight. Sirens wailed as police jeeps roared on to the beach from both sides. In the lightning-like flashes he saw angels running in all directions, heard screams and shouts and shrill police whistles, realised that she was saying something to him, though he could not hear what it was above the noise, and then, before he could stop her, she had crouched down on one knee, like a sprinter at the start of a match, dashed off as if propelled from a catapult, raced in and out of the light, and disappeared. As for him, he had walked off, away from the tumult, until he could no longer see or hear a thing, and had simply stayed where he was until dawn. At daybreak, he saw a beach littered with bottles, T-shirts, syringes, condoms, wings. He hitchhiked into town and waited in his hotel for a sign from her until it was time to leave for the airport. But no sign had come.
15
HER HANDS MOVED IN LARGE DESCRIPTIVE CIRCLES OVER his back, then made that familiar gesture – the sign that he was supposed to stand up. But he did not want to stand up, he did not want to stand up ever again. He stood up anyway. Life, he thought, is a stupid invention. She looked at him expectantly with her impish smile.
‘Why were you in such a hurry to leave the beach?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t have a work permit. I did not want to be deported.’
‘I though
t the world was your home.’
She shrugged, then placed her right hand on his left shoulder. ‘Do you remember what I said to you then?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There was so much noise that I couldn’t hear you. What did you say?’
‘Angels can’t be with people.’
For a moment he was rooted to the spot, then he felt her hand push him gently but firmly towards the door. On his way out, he saw Herr Dr Krüger sitting on a chair, awaiting his turn. Above the man’s cheerful greeting, he heard her voice say, ‘See you next time, OK?’
But it was too late to respond.
EPILOGUE
‘EPILOGUE, from Gr. epilogos, conclusion – epi and lego, to speak. A speech or short poem addressed to the spectators by one of the actors, after the conclusion of a drama.’
From New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary
of the English Language, 1952
ANOTHER STATION. LICHTENBERG, BERLIN. I LIKE THINGS that rhyme, even though I myself do not write rhyming poetry. Berlin is the departure point for trains to Poland and Russia. I have an appointment here, though I do not know it yet. The schedule reads: ‘Warszawa Centralna 20. 55, Minsk 08.49, Smolensk 14.44, Moskva Belorusskaya 20. 18 .’ Different journeys, different trains. I am going on a journey to make up for a loss. Anyone who has ever written a book knows the feeling. A leave-taking of sorts, and therefore always a form of mourning. For a year or two you have lived with your characters, you have given them names that may or may not suit them, you have made them laugh and cry, they have made you laugh and cry, and after that you have sent them on their way, into the big wide world. You hope they will be OK, that they will have enough breath to live for a long, long time. You have left them to their own devices, but it feels as if they have left you. So here you are, alone in a deserted station in what used to be East Berlin. It does not get much sadder than this.
‘Wallowing in self-pity won’t help,’ Almut would say, and that is exactly what I mean. They go on talking to you. They have been talking to each other for two years, and you have been listening. The question is where does it all begin? If the first word came from me, does that mean the second one did too? Last night I jotted down a sentence that I cannot make sense of this morning. My handwriting is always a gauge of how much I have drunk the night before.
Quite a bit, in this case. I can never just say goodbye and let them go. What I scribbled down was this: ‘Some voices are clearly written voices.’ Or was it ‘frightened voices’? I cannot read my own handwriting, but ‘written’ is better, so let’s leave it at that. An announcement is made over the loudspeaker, but my train has not been announced yet. I don’t know why I picked Moscow. Probably because I have never been there before. I will not know where I am going, so it will be easier to get lost. Meanwhile, the young man sitting beside me has a cracking whip assailing his ears – a mechanical lash that is repeated over and over again. His head bobs up and down to the beat. He is clearly not someone who has just finished writing a book.
At the end of a project I always have the feeling, for some inexplicable reason, that I am clairvoyant. I mean that literally – not in the sense that I can predict the future, but rather that the things I normally overlook are now seen with great clarity: the fake granite exteriors on the rubbish bins, the yellow-tiled catacombs beneath the station that take you from the U-Bahn to the main station, the corridors that seem to go on forever, the face of the cokehead with the cracking whip next to me. Nothing escapes my notice, but it’s of no use to me. It has come too late. The others have already left, they are on their way to Brazil or Australia. In any case I am no longer in control. At the other end of the hall I see two guards in olive-green shirts and white caps – a whiff of the past, a slight shudder. I hear the call of the wild – a three-toned gong – but I still do not see very many people. The train has pulled into the station. Cyrillic letters, curtains, table lamps, everything as it should be. The trains of Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, on their way to Baden-Baden and Biarritz. I do not have to wait long. She is wearing the same outfit she had on in the plane and is carrying the same book – the book I thought I had written, the book I still have not been able to shake off. The last part is true, the first part is not. This time I can read the title right away, as if she has come here specially for me, and perhaps she has. It is the same two words, but in a different order, though in either case Paradise has been lost. Of course we find ourselves in the same compartment. The person who thought that up knew what he was doing. At least this way we’ll be able to talk. The conductor’s whistle sounds more dramatic here than in other stations. Both of us stare out of the window, perhaps in embarrassment.
I do not know if she’s recognised me. During the flight from Friedrichshafen to Berlin she did not look at me once, and as far as I could tell she did not notice me after we landed at Tempelhof either, though you can never be sure. In any case the man who picked her up at the airport is nowhere now in sight.
A couple of fat Russians waddle along the platform, loaded down with so many suitcases they can barely carry them all. As the train glides out of the station, I see that it is raining: a grey city in a grey shroud. In my mind’s eye I can see where the now-invisible Wall used to be. Another book that the writer thought was finished, though things are never that simple.
‘So what do you think of the book?’ I ask. I have never been very clever at striking up conversations with strangers, but in my present mood I am much more daring. Those legs, which were too far away from me on the plane, are now excitingly close. The khaki is stretched over her thighs, showing the powerful muscles underneath. I do not know whether she caught my glance, but she parts her thighs ever so slightly – and that takes my breath away. As I have already explained, for weeks after a project I feel a heightened awareness – a mixture of excitement and longing – which I still have not learned to cope with. Perhaps women are more used to this kind of thing. In any case, she stares out of the window, looking right past me, at the yellowy stubble beside the tracks, the rust-coloured rocks between the sleepers, the city gradually being enveloped by the veil of rain, a pale ship on the horizon.
She has laid the open book on the seat beside her. I can see the old-fashioned spelling of a facsimile edition. My title, but inverted.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s a rather depressing book. The whole thing seems to be based on a misunderstanding, in which case the punishment is too severe. “Misunderstanding” is such a lovely word, isn’t it? What started out as a misunderstanding has gone on to repeat itself over and over again into infinity. You could add a dash of wilful disobedience to that if you want to, though it’s usually not necessary. A woman listens to a serpent just once and is cast out for all time, and then a ship lands on an unknown coast where people with painted bodies are hiding in the bushes, or early one evening a woman drives into the wrong neighbourhood and will never be the same again. You know, I think the title is the best part. In that sense the story never really ends. Why do you think writers do that? Do they do it on purpose, so they can have something to write about the next time? Actually, when you get right down to it, I don’t know any books that aren’t about misunderstandings: Hamlet, Madame Bovary, Marcel who didn’t realise that Gilberte loved him, Othello who believed Iago . . . If you stop and think about it –‘
Just then, the conductor burst into our compartment to check the tickets, which took forever since the various bits of paper had been stapled together.
‘If you stop and think about it?’ I asked her, after he had gone.
She laughed, then said, ‘Are you sure you want hear what I have to say?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why? Do you really think it’s so important?’
I noticed that her eyes were green, and I also understood that she was seeing me for the first time.
I paused. It was necessary to strike the right tone. I took one last look at the snow-capped Alps in Vorarlberg, at the rock paintings i
n Ubirr and the Sickness Dreaming Place, at the old man with the signet ring who at that very moment was being laid to rest in Darwin, at the deserted bedroom above the luxurious gardens of Jardins where the bem-te-vi sang its high-pitched song, and finally at the only one who was left, and said, ‘Because the last sentence is the most important one.’
‘And you’d like me to say it?’
I did not answer. I waited.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘it’s so easy, you could have written it yourself. Have you ever thought about the creator of Paradise – a place where there were no misunderstandings? It must have been incredibly boring. Whoever thought that up must have meant it as a form of punishment. Only a very bad writer could have come up with something like that. Is that good enough for a last sentence?’
‘All I have to do now is add a place and a date,’ I said.
‘And an epilogue,’ she said. ‘You usually have one, don’t you? Here, I’ve already found you one.’ She opened the book to a page towards the back, marked by a slip of paper, and then passed it to me. The lines she wanted me to read had been underlined in pencil.
Amsterdam, February 2003 – Es Consell,
Lost Paradise Page 10
