Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Page B

yards apart. Only on the fifth day does he have enough breath to climb to the Resurrection. White sunlight filters down through the trees, and the transparent shaft of light seems to beam directly at him. All that is lacking is a gold frame big enough to hold the image.

7
    THINGS CAN’T GO ON LIKE THIS. IT IS TIME TO BRING him down to earth.
    Upon his return to the Alpenhof, he finds a note in his pigeonhole, informing him that Sibille has had a minor accident in the climbing school, so that someone else will be massaging him tomorrow, and a letter addressed to him in Anja’s impetuous handwriting, which he does not bother to open. Back in his room he watches the lights in the village go on one by one, listens to the bells record the angelus, and reflects on the fact that he has no desire to return to his recent past, though what he does not realise is that lurking beneath that past is another past, which has been dormant for the last three years – biding its time in the guise of an angel – and which at this very moment is preparing to take him back to that earlier time, there where he never wanted to be again.
    We grant him a night of what he supposes is dreamless sleep. Towards morning a storm comes up and blows the snow in all directions. He gets up later than usual, drinks his Bitterwasser , eats his Semmelbrötchen at the unexpectedly empty table, and watches Herr Dr Krüger fighting his way through the blizzard like a cinema version of Amundsen, then goes downstairs to wait in the room where Sibille usually comes to collect him. What happens next is, grammatically speaking, not easy to say. ‘They take each other’s breath away’ comes the closest to it, but since we already know him and do not expect to find her here, that will not get us very far. They have met before – that much is clear. What no one can see, however, are the wings he mentally attaches to her back, the wings of an angel he has never been able to forget. Before he can say a word, she puts the forefinger of her left hand to her lips and pulls him to his feet with her right hand. ‘Herr Zondag,’ she says, pronouncing his name correctly and free of any accent, then asks him to follow her to the massage room, into both the future and the past, which requires such opposing movements that his body reacts with a single spasmodic jerk. The last that we see are the strange contortions of a man standing in front of a poster with illustrations of foot reflexes and acupuncture points, a man about to attempt to lift a boulder that is much too heavy for him.

8
    ANGELS DO NOT EXIST, AND YET THEY ARE DIVIDED INTO orders, much like the hierarchy in an army. They fly to and fro in frescoes, act as the bearers of glad tidings in the paintings of Raphael and Giotto, serve as stone guardians by the graves of the rich in Buenos Aires and Genoa, and accompany the doomed to the outer gates of Paradise with their flaming swords held high. They have names, bodies and wings; they are genderless but one thinks of them as men; they are immortal, which means that no skeletal remains have ever been found, so that no one has ever been able to examine them to find out how those gigantic wings are connected to their shoulder blades – in short, they are part of the world around us even though they do not exist, and yet the last time Erik had seen the short, slender woman now standing before him in a spa in Austria, she had had two large grey wings with a silvery sheen. During that first encounter, he had not seen her face, because she had been curled up in a cupboard with her back to him, nor would he succeed in seeing it now, because she ordered him, in the tone used by masseuses the world over, to lie down on his stomach. He did as he was told. He could feel his heart beating wildly, just as he could feel her hands trembling, the same hands that had touched his body for the last time three years ago. That had been in Perth, in Western Australia, thousands of miles