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 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.
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.
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 from Sydney, on the opposite shore of the continent. She said not a word. Not then, and not now. The years in between had been sucked away with a violence that made his head spin. He took hold of the massage table with both hands.
‘Don’t tense up like that.’ The well-remembered, rather husky voice – as bewitching as ever – spoke softly in an accent that had puzzled him the first time he had heard it. He began to reply, but since he was lying face down and a towel was draped loosely over the table, it came out sounding more like a sob. She laid her hand on his head for a moment, which only made it worse. Suddenly, all of the sadness which he had disguised so well that he had been able to pretend it had gone away came back to him now with such force that he felt as if a bandage had been yanked viciously from a wound. He started to raise his head so that he could look at her, but she pressed it firmly down again. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Later.’ And as if it were a magic word, he felt his body relax, felt the lost time flowing back to him, felt himself being enveloped again in the madness of their tale – which had been perfectly logical despite the madness. He wanted to fire off a thousand questions, but he knew this was not the right time. He was the only man who had ever been embraced by an angel. Even now he could feel how she had enfolded him in the wings that she no longer had, and during the massage – no, even before that – he surrendered himself to his memories with such ease that he seemed to be stealing back to the past, to seek refuge there. Who knows, he might even have fallen asleep.
IT HAD BEEN SUMMER WHEN HE ARRIVED IN PERTH. HE had never been cooped up in a plane for so long. The eighteen hours to Sydney had been followed by a flight across a continent with a population only slightly larger than that of the Netherlands, though it was nearly as big as the United States. Much of the land was empty: a rocky, sunburnt, sand-coloured desert, where the Aborigines had led their unwatched, autonomous lives for thousands of years. The others – the sheep ranchers and the winegrowers – lived on the periphery.
He had been invited to Perth for a literary festival, which, for a change, was not just for writers and poets, but also for translators, publishers and critics – the whole parasitical or gritty underlayer that revolved around the lonely core of a book or a poem in a relationship of mutual dependence that was sometimes fruitful and sometimes disgusting. He loathed most writers as people, especially those whose work he admired. It was better not to meet them at all. Writers were supposed to lead a paper existence – between the covers of a book. You should not have to be distracted by body odours, awful haircuts, bizarre footwear, unsuitable spouses, needless gossip, professional jealousy, whorish behaviour, coquetry or boastfulness. The plenary sessions were held in tents; it was summertime in March, with temperatures well over a hundred degrees. He found himself on a panel with a Tasmanian poet, a literary editor at the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, a novelist from Queensland and a publisher from Sydney. Their wisdoms burbled over the heads of the audience, which consisted mostly of middle-aged women. He noticed that many of his points of reference were not valid here. The importance of the difference in outlook between the two major Dutch newspapers had begun to fade by Dunkirk and Düsseldorf, and at greater distances most of the topics hotly debated among insiders in his now so faraway country were about as scintillating as an obscure tribal war in Swaziland or a theological dispute in the Middle Ages. After the panel discussion, the novelist and the poet signed books at a table set up outside the tent, but since publishers and critics do not normally have anything to sign, he and the publisher, along with the literary editor and a Danish writer who had been in the audience, sat down on a patch of grass with a bottle of wine and four glasses. Erik Zondag soon lost interest in the conversation. While the editor and the publisher rambled on about print runs, best-seller lists, advertising and the connection between them, he listened to the histrionic cries of an Indonesian poet, which could be heard coming from one of the tents, watched the evening slide with tropical torpor between the spreading trees, and wondered if he ever wanted to go home again. After his divorce, he had been on his own for a while – a time of brief affairs, bar-room friendships and attempts to write poetry, which he later rightly tore up. It was after that – too soon, he now understood – that he had met Anja. He had made quite a name for himself by taking potshots at a few literary giants, so the newspaper for which he still worked had offered him a permanent position. He was exactly what they were looking for: someone to ‘raise hell and shake things up’. The literary pond was cluttered with too many ducks and swans, and it was necessary to cull them from time to time. Literature had become a career. Every numbskull who had with gathering distaste studied Dutch literature felt the need to write a novel, which meant that masterly debuts were following on the heels of one another more rapidly than ever. He was part of the clean-up crew. It was a nasty job, but useful. The times he had been able genuinely to wax lyrical about a book had been glorious exceptions. All that mediocrity week after week seemed to cling to his hair and creep under his nails. Besides, the work itself had been a bitter disappointment. The books he really wanted to review were usually assigned to a man with a turgid style – a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic who would have been better off teaching at a school somewhere in the provinces. The man had a preference for authors such as Jünger and Bataille, but had never written an original word about one of the writers and thinkers he was forever reviewing. His reviews were echoes of things he had read elsewhere, and yet the editor-in-chief had lured him away from Anja’s paper purely on the strength of those big-name authors he reviewed, because even though no one read his dull and excruciatingly long essays, a newspaper with any pretensions at all had to have a philosopher on its staff. To make matters worse, in some bewildering way the man always seemed to miss the point – an intellectual colour-blindness or lack of instinct or intuition that no one else seemed to notice. When the first – and also the best – of the so-called Three Great Writers in Dutch literature set off on his journey towards posthumous publication, the man had immediately proclaimed another triumvirate, prompted no doubt by his Catholic instinct for hierarchy. Judging by the conversation going on around him, things were no different here, although Australian writers were separated by blissfully vast distances, which must cut down on the jealousy, inbreeding and backbiting. The best solution, he thought, would be to live in an abandoned house on a rocky northern shore, where a winged messenger came once a week to deliver a book that you could really sink your teeth into. At least you would not run across a review in which someone ridiculed a poet because she dared to use a fancy word like ‘rhetoric’ in one of her poems. ‘Baseborn products of base beds,’ Yeats had called the new Neanderthalers. But Anja had warned him not to get upset.
‘What you haven’t grasped is that there’s a new gene ration of writers,’ she said. ‘They’re used to a fast pace. They’re not interested in those cobwebs of yours. These days it’s all about plots, madness and humour, not grandiose speculations, philosophical drivel and intellectual posturing.’
But it was too late to learn Norwegian or emigrate to Australia. He’d have to go on writing for the literary supplement until he died, unless they fired him for not keeping up with the spirit of the times, or until the paper itself was sold, and that was also a possibility.
He was startled out of his reverie by hearing one of the men beside him say the word ‘angel’ in a thick German accent: ‘Zer are an-chels all over zis city. Zey are
ev
-ry-vere!’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them,’ the publisher said. ‘A fantastic idea! I did the tour yesterday.’
Erik remembered reading about this tour and immediately dismissing it as a waste of time. Considering the publisher’s enthusiasm, however, he had apparently been mistaken. In addition to the literary festival, there was a theatre and ballet festival, and angels had something to do with that. He had seen a picture in the
Australian
of a life-sized angel with a sword, poised atop a department store or a multi-storey car park, and wondered if it had been an actual person or a statue, like the one on the roof of the insurance company on the Singel Canal in Amsterdam, not far from where he lived.
‘No,’ the poet said, ‘this one was real. I saw it too, because it moved. Oddly enough, I had a hard time spotting her – at any rate, I’m pretty sure it was a she, because I had my binoculars with me. Here, you can have my booklet, I won’t be needing it any more. The whole tour takes a few hours.’ He reached into his bag, rummaged through the muddle of poems he had used for his reading, then handed him a spiral-bound booklet with narrow plastic pages. When you joined them up, they charted the route of a maze-like treasure hunt through Perth, with detailed directions and photographs of buildings. It opened with a quote from Rilke: ‘Angels, it is said, are often unsure whether they pass among the living or the dead.’ The next quote had been taken from
Paradise Lost
:
In either hand the hast’ning Angel caught
Our ling’ring Parents . . .
Adam and Eve. He had never thought of them as parents, if only because they were generally depicted in the nude, with just a fig leaf. And angels? When was the last time he had thought about angels, he asked himself, or had he never really thought about them because they had been so much a part of his childhood? You saw them everywhere in those days, in prayer books and stained-glass windows. If you were a Catholic, you could not avoid them. Even Lucifer was a fallen angel. And if all was well, you had a guardian angel watching over you. There were various types of angels, all of which you had to learn: seraphim and cherubim, thrones and powers. For some inexplicable reason angels never seemed to grow old (a middle-aged angel was inconceivable!), they had ‘locks’ rather than hair, their feet were always bare, and of course they never wore glasses. There is a moment in which something that appears to be quite ordinary suddenly becomes mysterious. So while he wondered what an angel would look like in full flight and how much air would be displaced by the wings – mysteries in both the sacred and the aerodynamic sense – he decided to go to the festival office and sign up for the ‘angel hunt’, because, as he now realised, that was what it boiled down to. Angels had been hidden in various places throughout the city, and the idea was for you to find as many of them as possible. All you had to do was to show up at a specific time, promise to go on your own, and let yourself be taken to the starting point by someone who had been instructed not to answer any questions.