SHE RESTED HER HAND BETWEEN HIS SHOULDER BLADES for a moment, then turned and lifted it in such a way that it felt as if she were scooping something out of his body – pain, exhaustion, sorrow – and releasing it into the air. It is a gesture masseurs sometimes use to indicate that the time is up. He started to sit up, but she stopped him. ‘Wait a bit. I’ve given you a deep massage. I think you might have fallen asleep.’
‘How long have you been massaging me?’
‘A little over an hour. I didn’t have an appointment after yours, so I let you stay longer.’
‘And in that time, I’ve gone back three years. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s been three years exactly since we last met.’
‘I haven’t forgotten. Of course you’re going to ask me why.’
‘Why what?’
‘Why I disappeared.’
‘Why you didn’t get in touch with me.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why did you promise me you would?’
‘I promised something else as well.’
‘What?’
‘That I’d see you again.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Running into each other here is pure coincidence, a freak chance. For all I knew, you could have been in Kinshasa. What brought you to this snowy mountaintop anyway? I didn’t even know you were a masseuse.’
‘I’ve been doing this for years. I took a course and everything. You can always earn a living at it, whether you’re in Austria or Australia. Not every country is like yours, where you can go on the dole when you’re out of work.’
‘But why here?’
‘No particular reason.’
‘A man?’
She made a gesture, a flick of the wrist, as if she might be tossing away a theoretical man.
‘Where I am has never really mattered to me.’
‘So you told me back then: “The world is my home.” You know, that really turned me on.’ He stood up and grabbed his bathrobe. He wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure what. ‘I fell madly in love with you.’
‘I know, you were pathetically eager.’
‘So you were laughing at me?’
‘No, just the opposite: I was terrified. It was all happening so fast. There was something frenzied about it.’
‘That was because of the party. All I wanted to do at that moment was leave my whole life behind.’ And if I had drowned that night, I would not have cared. But he did not tell her that.
‘It was because of the wings. You weren’t the only one. A lot of weird things happened that last night.’
‘No, it wasn’t the wings. It had more to do with the fact that it was my last day. My plane was leaving in the morning, and I knew I’d be going back to a life I no longer wanted. And I had the feeling that you understood . . . that you also felt . . .’
He looked at her. He had not been able to read the expression in those cool grey eyes back then either. He had been a fool.
‘That I also felt . . .’ she repeated, as if she were considering it. She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I know myself too well. It wouldn’t have worked. You said you wanted to become a foreign correspondent, and when I said that I never stayed in any one place for long, you said you’d go wherever I went, because you could write anywhere. I’ve heard it all a thousand times. Not those exact words, but still . . . No one can put up with my lifestyle. Besides, I knew you’d go back to your girlfriend and forget me after three months. And I was right.’
‘If you were so sure of yourself, why didn’t you phone me?’
‘Because I didn’t want to take the risk.’ And then, abruptly switching the subject, as if to indicate that the conversation was at an end, she said, ‘How long will you be staying here?’
‘Tomorrow is my last day.’
‘That appears to be a speciality of yours.’
‘So it would seem. Can we meet somewhere?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s against the rules.’ She checked her appointment book. ‘I’ve got you down for tomorrow morning, so I’ll see you then. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Do you remember,’ she said at the door, ‘the last thing I said to you that night?’
But he did not remember.
SINCE IT WAS THEIR LAST EVENING, RENATE GAVE THEM an extra portion of salmon mousse. Erik chewed his bread roll down to the last fibre, while Herr Dr Krüger lectured him on the crueller aspects of ectopic pregnancies: foetal tissue without a soul but with hair and tiny fingernails. His mind was on other things. There was a message from Anja, which he did not feel up to answering. Night was already starting to swallow the tall white tips of the trees outside the windows. He wandered through the building, went to the sauna in the hope that the heat would calm his racing mind, swam umpteen lengths until he was exhausted, and went down to the dining room for a cup of bedtime tea, a bitter brew that was always kept on a sideboard, but when he finally went to bed, sleep refused to come. If he had been at home, he would have poured himself a double brandy, but that was out of the question here. He ran his tongue over his teeth, trying to rub off the bitter taste of the graveyard tea, but that did not work either. What she had said was not true: he had not forgotten her after three months. Not after three months and not after three years. He had not forgotten her at all, and he never would. Three years ago, after he came back from his trip, he had talked about her so much that he had driven everyone crazy, especially Anja.
‘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?’
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.
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 thought 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.