Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Page A

Later it occurred to him that he had never been so aware of his body. He was incessantly reminded of it, as it was smeared with oil, massaged, rubbed with salt, put into a bath filled with mud and hay, and fed a measly roll in the morning and a minimalist composition in the afternoon, on which the painter/ sculptor had clearly lavished great attention, though every last calorie had no doubt been burned up by the time he had finished the first mile of his daily walk. In the evenings he was allowed to choose between a bread roll and a potato – a lonely tuber whose elongated shape made it look more substantial than the roll – lying in the middle of his plate, dreaming of a juicy pork chop that would never come. The thick drops of cold linseed oil that he dribbled onto the lonely potato by way of compensation reminded him of the cod liver oil he had been forced to swallow as a child. On top of that they were served two heaped teaspoons of salmon mousse or avocado mush – company for the long night ahead, in which the only thing to happen was the consumption of a white powder dissolved in a glass of water, just as every day began with a bitter brew that a few hours later set off an internal cataclysm not unlike volcanic eruptions and mudslides that wiped out entire villages and killed thousands.
    He no longer knew what to think of it all. If someone had told him he would have to spend the rest of his life with Herr Dr Krüger, he would not have batted an eyelid. Dutch literature, the paper, the approaching war, even Anja – everything had sunk to the depths of his consciousness. He slept like a log, and noticed to his amazement that he had no desire for sex or booze, that he looked forward to his vegetable bouillon – for which they all lined up daily at quarter to eleven – and also to Sibille’s massage. When he finally got up enough courage to tell her that he had never come across a woman with such strong fingers, a woman who (though he did not dare to add this part) looked like a pixie whose weight could hardly be registered on an earthly scale, she replied that she owed her strength to being a mountain climber, so that he had visions of those same ten fingers clutching the jagged edge of a cliff as she dangled above a yawning abyss.

6
    WE WILL LEAVE HIM NOW TO FEND FOR HIMSELF IN HIS new universe of dietary laws and virtuous digestion, of monastic hours and herbal tea. He will never again be able to eat raw vegetables in the evening without a pang of guilt, he can feel an ocean of herbal tea sloshing around inside him, and he cannot imagine what his days would be like without Herr Dr Krüger – who has explained the secrets of Chinese medicine to him – or without the two charming lesbians at the next table, or without the sausage manufacturer from Liechtenstein who swims with him in the Olympic-sized pool, or without aqua fitness and qigong. The list of things he is not allowed to eat, drink or do grows day by day. Sometimes he has the feeling that he is wresting a new body out of his old one, which he can either leave behind in the Alpenhof, like a pile of dirty laundry, or else donate to a medical school for dissection. He does not know exactly what he is going to do with the new one, except that he is not going to pollute it with coffee or alcohol. This new body belongs to a saint with a transparent digestive tract and the heart and liver of a twenty-year-old Tibetan nun.
    In the afternoon he goes for a walk in the mountains, hiking a bit further each day through a forest of tall, snow-tipped firs. One day he walks to Patsch and Heiligwasser, calling out ‘ Grüss Gott ’ to every hiker he meets. This, he thinks, is what Death must feel like – euphoria at being cut off from your previous life, free at last! Along the path he habitually takes, simple souls have depicted Christ’s suffering, painting the Stations of the Cross on little wayside altars, mounted on wooden posts and placed a couple of hundred