Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom

gleaming white desks. He listened to the people around him, who were speaking German and Russian, along with the strange variants of German that he liked to think had been shaped by high mountains and deep valleys: Swiss German, Austrian– languages he associated with air-dried beef and unusual types of cheese. It was not an unpleasant wait.
    ‘Herr Sontag?’ Another figure in white. Sibille. She had one wall eye and moved as if she were weightless. He was aware that they had shaken hands, but he had not felt a thing. The same could be said of the blood sample. Sibille was a star with a needle. He watched the vial fill with blood and tried, not very successfully, to think of something else. ‘You’ll see,’ Arnold had said. ‘After two days you’ll surrender altogether. You’ll be like putty in their hands.’ It was true. The wall-eyed creature floated weightlessly ahead of him as though they were inside a spaceship, pulled aside a curtain, told him to take off all his clothes, held up a sheet of transparent plastic for him to see, spread it over a bed, and instructed him to lie down upon it. He tried to make contact with the good eye so he could tell what was going to happen next, but she had already pressed a button, and a moment later he found himself inside a womb, in which the amniotic fluid, smelling strongly of hay, sloshed wildly up and down before finally coming to rest. In her mountain dialect, the Sibille butterfly told him when she would be back, but he felt himself sinking into a state of deep relaxation and accepted that, at least for the time being, he had no desire to be born.
    ‘You’d really like to stay in there, wouldn’t you?’ said Sibille the midwife when she woke him out of his dream of barnyards, heifers and haystacks. She handed him a towel and led him into a larger room, where an elderly lady, lifting her feet as high as possible, was walking through a pond, filled with pebbles. The idea, Sibille said, was for him to pick his way across the pond like a heron, just as the lady was doing. First you had to dip your feet in a wooden tub filled with hot water, and then walk across the pebbles. It was good for your circulation. Scarcely was he out of the womb, and already the suffering had begun. The pond water had been flown in specially from Spitsbergen, and the sharp pebbles hurt his feet. Clutching the hem of his robe, he tried to step like a stork, and imagined what his colleagues at the paper would say if only they could see him now. He read a cryptic motto on the wall, something to the effect that ‘you are who you are where you are who you are’, and listened to a discussion about traditional Chinese medicine, in which the fifth season, late summer, is also the season of the earth. ‘In the Fire element,’ a voice explained, as he dipped his feet into the hot water again, ‘man reaches the fullness of his “I”, but in the autumn the Earth element comes into play, going from the safe “I” to the risky “you”. It takes courage to do that – the courage to connect to others, to grow towards the earth. Connections, connective tissue, the infrastructure connecting everything in our bodies . . .’ He lost the thread of the monologue, vaguely heard the words ‘spleen’ and ‘pancreas’, wondered whether these organs could also be found in his body, did another round in the icy water, then fled to his room – the Heather Rose room. On the way he passed Larkspur, Goldenrod and Columbine, before reaching the fitness room, where slaves were working out on torture machines. One young woman was running a Sisyphus-like race on a rubber belt that kept rolling round and round, the Russian from the waiting room was trying to lift a massive set of weights on a pulley from a sitting position, and another victim, with a bright red face and a strap around his hips was fighting gravity as he tried to raise himself. All that labour, he thought, and not a single product to show for it.