HE WAS RIGHT. DUISBURG WAS AS COLD AS AMSTERDAM. The threat of war that he had earlier glimpsed in a fellow passenger’s
Bildzeitung
was broadcast here from every newsstand in huge red and black letters. He walked aimlessly around the city and realised that this had unconsciously been his intention. Why did it always take him so long to work things out? He had phoned Anja, but she had not answered and he had not left a message. The German train had left on time. He had installed himself in his single berth and been awakened from time to time by the broadcast of metallic voices on deserted platforms and the plaintive cries of the train, which had not been at all unpleasant. He liked travelling by train. His berth swayed gently, the invisible drummer on the rails beneath him beat a fabulous rhythm, and before falling asleep he had felt reasonably happy for the first time that day. Why he had let himself be talked into this ridiculous adventure, God only knew, but Arnold Pessers had been rather convincing. He had gone on for hours about how light he had felt on his return from the spa. Now that he thought about it, ever since his return Arnold had become pretty much of a bore. The two of them were about the same age and knew each other’s stories. Once, when Arnold was in Japan, he had fallen madly in love with a model he met in connection with his work as a photographer. The whole thing had ended badly, as was to be expected. Stormy romances might flourish in TV dramas, but they were only tiresome in real life. Arnold’s friends had had their work cut out for them, but after two years of serious alcohol abuse, the photographer had eventually pulled himself together. Why people went on making the same mistakes over and over was a mystery. Erik shuddered. Imagine never being able to have another drink. That must be about the worst thing that could happen to you. A day never went by in which he did not have at least a couple of drinks. In strictly medical terms, that made you an alcoholic, but he never got drunk nor actually had a hangover, and whenever he went in for a check-up, his lab tests were fine. ‘I know,’ Arnold had said, ‘but it’ll catch up with you sooner or later.’ And Arnold had started rhapsodising again about his new life, his regenerated liver, his lost flab, his new-found energy and his amazing diet, which was based on several monastic rules – totally incomprehensible to Erik – in which certain foods were not allowed to be eaten in combination with certain others, lettuce was taboo at night, eating fruit after dinner was a deadly sin (‘because it’ll rot in your stomach’), smoking was out of the question, hard liquor was a form of suicide and wine a medicine rather than a harmless pleasure. One or two glasses were the absolute limit. My God, he was going to die of boredom. But one thing was indisputable: Arnold had lost a lot of weight.
He woke up around seven. It was now or never – the train was due to get in an hour from now. They were speeding past mountains, pockets of mist, villages, houses in which the lights were already on and people were moving in and out of the rooms. In Innsbruck he put his bags in a locker. Arnold had told him how to catch the Blue Train to Igls, but he was in no hurry. He wanted to walk around a bit first. And maybe look for Café Zentral, which Arnold had recommended as a nice old-fashioned Austrian café, the type of place in which Thomas Bernhard would have sat and read his newspaper. Erik liked Thomas Bernhard, not only because, like the Dutch author W. F. Hermans, he had perfected the art of ranting and raving, but because, also like Hermans, his anger seemed to stem from an embittered, disappointed love. He particularly admired the style of the tirade – the urgent, passionate, rhetorical anger with its secret, and often invisible, ingredient: the compassion with which the Austrian wrote about his surroundings, about his country and his own life, which he himself had referred to as ‘a life dedicated to death’.
In the café he read
Der Standard
, a newspaper whose pale orange colour made it seem as if the pages had yellowed and aged before you even touched them, and which, given the world news – Iraq, Israel, Zimbabwe – produced in him an anachronistic confusion that seemed to go wonderfully well with the furniture and the gentle hum of voices: a Central European buzz in which people such as Kafka, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus and Heimito von Doderer had so comfortably been able to do their thinking. Perhaps Austria had deliberately chosen to lag behind the times, he thought, because the world was going much too fast. He ordered a second cup of coffee.
The king of procrastination. That’s what Anja called him.
‘Do you have any idea what you do? You circle around your desk, as far from it as possible, taking hours to reach your computer. As if you’re waiting for something to happen, so you can get out of doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.‘
‘But in the meantime I’m thinking.’
‘Of course you are. About an even better way to ruin someone’s reputation.’
It was not true, but how could you explain that? Most of what was being published was simply not good enough. New writers were appearing every day, and yet if you looked back at the twentieth century, how many real writers had withstood the test of time? So many of the trashy books that were published began to moulder while still on the best-seller lists.
‘Your standards are too high,’ she said just before he left, and there had been a trace of pity in her voice, or even, God forbid, motherly love. ‘Promise me one thing. Forget about all of this once you’re there. If it’s the waste of time you say it is, there’s no point in getting worked up about it. Remember your blood pressure! You’re not a twelve-year-old any more.’
He had been hearing that last sentence all too often lately. He had no idea why she had picked the number twelve, rather than twenty-four, or thirty-two, neither of which he was of course, though perhaps, to her, twelve seemed light years away. His blood pressure
was
too high – that was true. And he did have arthritis, and several more of those insidious ailments that made life unpleasant for a person in his late forties – intimations of greater calamìties to come. He had caught himself calculating the average age of death in the obituary columns. It was good when there was an outbreak of salmonella in a nursing home, but bad when three drunk or stoned teenagers, in the grip of an overpowering death wish, came out of a disco and drove straight into a wall and thence into eternity. But he was supposed to forget all of that. ‘Otherwise you might as well chuck the money into a canal.’ It was expensive, all right. Especially if, as Arnold claimed, they gave you next to nothing to eat.
THE BLUE TRAIN TURNED OUT TO BE A TRAM THAT RANonce an hour. Within minutes they had left Innsbruck behind and were passing through a snow-covered forest. ‘White soot, cut feathers,’ Constantijn Huygens once wrote in a poem about snow, a line that Erik Zondag now repeated to himself. No one had ever described snow so beautifully. The Dutch, who were quick to point to the greatness of Shakespeare or Racine, were usually incapable of quoting even one line of Brederode, Hooft or Huygens. A few lines of Cats and Vondel and that one line of Gorter’s had left their mark on the language, not to mention ‘Oh land of dung and mist’, but that was about it for the Dutch classics.
The snow glittered. The gloominess that he had been carrying around with him ever since he left Amsterdam fell away. Trees, houses, fields – all buried beneath those cut feathers. There were only two other passengers left when he got out at the tiny station of Igls, which was also the end of the line. A church, and frescoes of saints on the rustic houses, whose upper storeys of unpainted wood had retained their original use as haylofts and barns. A sign, with ‘Alpenhof’ in hand-painted Gothic letters, pointed him towards the road, up a fairly steep incline. He slipped and slid so much in his city shoes that it was all he could do to stay on his feet. Huffing and puffing at the top, he saw before him an austere L-shaped building with a natural-stone exterior and extensive grounds, now blanketed in snow. The car park in the front was filled up with BMWs, Jaguars and Volvos with licence plates from Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany and Andorra. Arnold had neglected to mention that. He had talked about how nice the people were, and how being in the same boat had helped them to bond. ‘Besides which, a bit of
connaissance
du monde
might be helpful, Erik. After twenty years in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary supplement, a bit of oxygen might do you some good.’
Through the glass doors he could see people walking about in white bathrobes. This was his last chance to turn round and run.
‘Coward.’
‘Yes, Anja.’
He went in. A woman his age was seated at a reception desk. If her tan was anything to go by, she must have flown in three minutes ago from Tenerife, where she would have spent hours every day under a grill. Frau Dr Nicklaus. He told her his name, which she immediately translated into German.
‘Herr Sontag!
Herzlich wilkommen!
‘ She made it sound as if she had been looking forward to his arrival for days. The first step, she explained, was to be introduced to Renate, the woman in charge of the dining room. Renate had also been looking forward to his arrival. While she did not actually smother him with kisses, she did clutch him in a kind of embrace, as if they were about to launch into a waltz, and led him to a table for two by the window which, she informed him, he would be sharing for the rest of the week with Herr Dr Krüger from Regensburg. He had no objection, surely?
‘
Ja, ja
, Herr Sontag, and since you’re Dutch, I’ve given you a table with a view of the mountains because I know there aren’t any mountains in your country. Officially, your stay here begins tomorrow morning, so you can either eat in the dining room tonight or go down to the village for one last meal before your diet begins. It’s up to you.’
He opted for the village. He unpacked his suitcase and arranged his books as he invariably did, delighted finally to be able to read something of his own choosing, and then took a short nap before walking back down to the village. In the Goldene Gans he ordered goose, to honour the restaurant’s name, and drank a heavy Austrian wine. It started snowing on his way back, big fat flakes that swirled about him so hard he could scarcely see the road. The
Blauer Burgunder
had given way to a glass of
Himbeergeist
– and then another glass. After all, you were supposed to go all out on your last meal. In bed he tried to read the book that Frau Nicklaus had given him, but gave up when he got to the words of Maimonides: ‘Copious meals work on the body like poison and are the primary cause of illness . . .’ That did not go down well with the goose, and certainly not with the wine and the
Himbeergeist
. He discovered that he had committed his first mortal sin by eating shortly before bedtime, got hopelessly lost in statistics about potassium, magnesium and calcium, decided not to get up in time for the morning exercises in the forest, and at last abandoned himself to the merciful darkness . . .
. . . IN WHICH ALL KINDS OF THINGS HAPPENED, THOUGH we know more about that than he does. No lowlander can sleep with impunity in the high mountains. The window, which has been left slightly ajar, lets in the cold night air. The man in the bed works his way through a series of dreams, none of which he will remember. In the silence, which he does not notice, an owl hunts its prey and a startled deer plunges into the black syntax of the forest, where Erik Zondag will take a walk tomorrow without identifying the deer’s tracks. When he wakes, he will see a snowy mountain range lit by the first rays of the sun – a row of sharp, gleaming-white teeth, daubed here and there with blood.
Herr Dr Krüger – dressed, like Erik, in a white bathrobe – was already sitting at their table when he arrived in the dining room. There was a single bread roll on the plate, and next to that a tiny pitcher with a gooey yellow substance. Erik stared at it helplessly, and then at Herr Dr Krüger, who immediately introduced himself: two gentlemen in bathrobes shaking hands. Krüger was tall, and gave the appearance of not having skipped the morning exercises in the forest (true) and as if, like Ernst Jünger, he took a cold shower every morning, in the hope that, as his shining example, he would live to be a hundred. ‘Ach, Holland,’ Krüger said, then proceeded to tell him that his car had been broken into once in Amsterdam, that he was a gynaecologist, that he came to the Alpenhof for two weeks every year and always felt rejuvenated afterwards, and that Erik should cut that dry and rather stale-looking bread roll on his plate into thin slices, which was not as easy as it sounded because the bread began to tear. The yellow goo was linseed oil, which he was supposed to dribble on to every slice, since it would lower your cholesterol. Coffee and tea – real tea – were off-limits. The only teas served here were lemon balm or rosemary or some other medicinal witches’ brew that you were allowed to drink only twenty minutes after breakfast. ‘And don’t forget,’ Herr Krüger said, ‘to chew every bite twenty times.’ Erik looked around the room. The woman at the next table was sitting up so straight that he would be willing to bet she had been taking ballet lessons since the day she was born. She stared into space, no doubt counting the bites.
‘
Guten Morgen
, Herr Sontag! Did you sleep well? What would you like on your roll?’
Immediately he lost count.
‘You have a choice,’ Herr Krüger said. ‘Either sheep’s milk yogurt or goat’s milk cottage cheese with chives.’ A few minutes later the waitress brought him a bowl of sheep’s milk yogurt. Krüger explained that he was now being put on a mild deprivation diet.
‘We all eat too much! Look around you, especially at the shape of people’s abdomens – they tell the real story!’ As he spoke, he peered over the edge of the table at Erik’s abdomen. ‘Humph.’ It was evidently not as bad as it might have been. ‘People always look at themselves in the mirror face on so they don’t have to see their paunches, but if they were to look at themselves in profile, they’d see bulging tummies, pot bellies, beer guts – real monstrosities. You’ll see what I mean when you go to the sauna or the swimming pool. That’s why this is such a good diet. No raw vegetables! No beans! No cabbage, no onions, no garlic! No pork fat – and that means no sausages – and no refined cooking oils! Only easily digested grains and dairy products. Everything has been calculated with ruthless precision in terms of digestibility, because that is the key to good health. Don’t think of a human being as an animal, rather as a plant! A plant with a root system! Just as the aerial roots of a plant absorb the nutrients in the soil, the intestinal villi extract the nutrients from the food in the digestive tract and pass them on to the organism’s blood and cells! But if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my Kneipp cure.’ Herr Krüger bowed slightly and strode off, leaving Erik in a state of confusion. He had never given a moment’s thought to his digestive tract, and knew as little about the functioning of his body as he did about his computer or his Volvo. Blood was just something you had, and if you were lucky it stayed inside your body while your heart pumped it around, which in his case it had been doing for almost fifty years. ‘You’re still living in the age before Vesalius,’ his doctor had once said to him. ‘When the body was yet a mystery.’ That was when he had first prescribed pills to lower Erik’s cholesterol level and bring down his too-high blood pressure.
‘But I feel fine.’
‘I know, but you’re not. That’s why heart disease is known as the silent killer. The combination of these two factors puts you in the danger zone. Follow my instructions, and you’ll be all right.’
Renate materialised at his table.
‘You do know that they’re expecting you downstairs, don’t you? Your first appointment is with Sibille, who will measure your blood pressure and take a blood sample. Then you’re scheduled for a hay bath.’
He hurried down the slate stairs to a small room, where several other guests were waiting to be summoned. Across from it was a room – as white as the snow outside – where two young women in white were at work at 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. 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.