Lost Paradise (9 page)

PERTH IS IN SOUTHWEST AUSTRALIA. THE NEAREST STATEcapital is Adelaide, about 1,200 miles to the east as the crow flies. If you do not want to take a plane, you have to drive along the coast or through a broiling desert. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are a continent away, which makes Perth an exception in more ways than one: it is the capital of Western Australia, though it does not quite fit in with the rest of the state; it is located on the Swan River, which curves sensuously before flowing into the Indian Ocean; it has made a half-hearted attempt to resemble a real city by erecting a few skyscrapers; and it is a mixture of England and the tropics, with many public parks and suburbs, with lots of low houses and gardens full of flowers – all very welcome in a hot climate that slows the pace. In short, thought Erik Zondag, it is the very last place you would expect to find angels in the early years of the new millennium, though that was hardly a reason not to go looking for them. Who knows, he might even get a good story out of it for the paper. According to the instructions, he was to report to the tenth level of Wilson’s Car Park on Hay Street at 2.40 p.m. High-rise car parks were not his favourite architectural structures. Although it was nearly April, it was high summer and sweltering hot as he stood on the roof, scanning Perth stretched out below him, and the Swan River disappearing with a glitter of sunlight into the infinity of the ocean. It was here that Dutch traders had first clapped eyes on this continent, only to turn up their noses when they found nothing of value. No gold, no nutmeg – just weird furry animals that leaped instead of walked and natives that were nothing like the ones they had been dreaming of.

On the tenth level he encountered a young man who seemed to be expecting him. ‘Mr Sundag?’

‘Yes?’

‘Here’s a copy of the booklet, showing you the route you need to follow. This gentleman here will drive you to Barrack’s Arch, which is the actual starting point. The whole thing will take about three hours, and at the end the route will lead you back here.’ He sat in silence beside the stranger, who drove him to a brick building, where another silent man opened the door for him and then left him on his own. A dusty stairwell, a heap of rubbish on the landing, dry eucalyptus leaves blown in by the wind, old newspapers, steps painted a reddish brown. Silence. An empty room, an open sleeping bag, a couple of snapshots on a windowsill. Was this supposed to mean something? Was he following a trail? An indistinct map – not of any place he recognised, aerial photographs, spider webs. The roar of the nearby highway. There were six lanes here. Where did all those cars come from? Perth was not
that
big. He could hear the sound of his own footsteps. There was not an angel anywhere to be seen. He had obviously missed whatever it was he was supposed to see. Maybe it was all a stupid joke. He felt somewhat uncomfortable, and also tired, as if that endless flight was still playing havoc with his body. Why had he agreed to this nonsense? According to the booklet, when he emerged from Barrack’s Arch he was to turn left and walk down the hill to 240 St George’s Terrace. He walked as he normally would – a mere pedestrian among other pedestrians. They cannot see what I am up to, he thought. I am looking for angels, but they do not know that, and if I were to tell them, they would think I was crazy. That last part appealed to him. He found himself noticing things he would not usually have noticed. After all, anything might be a clue, a key, an allusion. Then he found himself in a bare room with just a few scribbled messages:
Anne, which corner are you on?
Etiam ne nescis?
After that another heap of dusty leaves, spokes without a wheel, an entryway, a closed steel door, and then, suddenly, hanging on a railing, a few lines of
Paradise Lost
– the ones in which Adam and Eve, evicted from Paradise by a heavenly bouncer with wings, turn back for one last look:

And it was true. Before him lay a sorry patch of no-man’s-land: a rusty refrigerator, dead twigs, sand, weeds, a bare concrete wall. Behind him things were not much better: an empty lift shaft, disconnected electrical wires leading nowhere since the power had long since been shut off, and not an angel in sight. Here Paradise had been lost for good. If they were hoping to evoke a feeling of despair, it had worked. Erik caught himself thinking of original sin, confessionals and the musty smell that goes with them. Stale cigar smoke coming out of shadowy mouths which you could barely see in the semi-darkness, speaking of sin and penance.

No, these are not agreeable thoughts. Feeling as if he is being watched, he checks the walls for a hidden camera, but does not see one. The choice is clear: he can either give up right now or go on to the next clue.
Go to the Paragon foyer,
take the lift to level
5
and walk up the stairs to level
6 . An empty office suite, dust on the floor, a long row of metal filing cabinets. According to his count, there are twenty-nine of them. The rest of the space is empty, apart from two birdcages, each with two birds. A torn label attached to one of the cages turns out to be blank. Erik and the birds stare at each other, the way people and animals do – a meaningless gaze across an unbridgeable distance. He goes out again, passing through what was once a kitchen, climbs up a flight of metal stairs, listens to his ringing footsteps, and finds himself in another vacant office. Instead of filing cabinets, this one has a huge metal bin filled with books. The titles all have something to do with God or saints – Anglican life in an earlier era. A bit further away is another bin, this one filled with white feathers (angels have to start somewhere, after all), as if someone had given a good shake to a pillow full of cherubs. As he flees the building, a man thrusts a note into his hand:
On your way to Bank West, please stop at the Hay Street Shop, between
the Croissant Express and the Educina Café
. He follows the directions. His hotel cannot be far off, he thinks, though everything looks different now. He does not want to become an ordinary pedestrian, but he catches sight of himself on a surveillance monitor and is unpleasantly surprised. The fruit has apparently already been plucked from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because there is a box of apples on the pavement.
Take an apple
.

It is cool inside the Bank West building, with the sudden chill of air conditioning in the tropics. A girl in blue stands up and all but takes him by the hand. In the lift she presses 46 . The white-shirted office-workers who get in as the lift makes its way up have nothing to do with the angel hunt, but when he reaches the forty-sixth floor, another white-shirted man gets up from his desk, opens a door for him, then closes it behind him, so that he finds himself alone in an executive suite, listening to a fax machine regurgitate reams of white paper. He picks up one of the sheets and sees two dozen lines from
Paradise Lost
. On the desk are file folders about various projects. The text on the computer screen changes to read: ‘. . . if you will come I will put out fresh pillows for you. This room and this springtime contain only you,’ then switches over to the hierarchy in the kingdom of angels: Archangels, Powers, Virtues. ‘Come soon, Death is demanding: we have much to atone for, before little by little we begin to taste of Eternity. In a bed of roses the Seraphim slumber . . .’ Still not craving eternity, he stands by the window and stares down at the streams and streams of cars on the highway. As he leaves the room, he bumps into the Danish writer. Surely that cannot be part of the plan? They exchange guilty looks, then simultaneously raise their fingers to their lips. Later on, he sees a girl in a tight grey skirt. Is she an angel? She avoids his glance, struts around as if she owns the place, looks out towards the hills and the faraway ocean, and plays with the plastic water bottle in her hands. Once again, he is struck by the absurdity of the whole thing. Why is he here? What is he doing in a vacant office suite that has in it only a couple of flowerpots filled with primroses? Is he inspecting the available property? But now that he has begun, he does not want to stop. Then at last his perseverance pays off: in the small, nondescript church that he has passed each day, he sees his first real angels – two men, sitting a couple of feet apart in the choir stalls. They are clearly flesh and blood, but they do have wings. He sits in the muted light poring in through the stained-glass windows and stares at the angels. They stare back at him. No one says a word. The angels rearrange their wings, the way swans and sparrows do. After a while he leaves the church and turns into a narrow side street that leads to a courtyard, which is piled high with rubbish bins. And then he spots his third angel: a man with close-cropped hair sitting behind a chain-link fence, a heavenly prisoner in a cage filled with cardboard boxes. He starts to go over to him, but then catches sight of the Tasmanian poet – taking the tour for the second time, apparently – standing on the other side of the cage and gazing lustfully at the angel, as if to elicit a promise. The moment the poet leaves, the angel relaxes his stare. He is sitting on his heels, and as Erik approaches, there is another silent vis-à-vis, even worse than with the birds. After that, there is a rapid succession of angels. He follows the invisible threads that have been laid for him, goes in and out of buildings, sees a paralysed angel in a wheelchair with his wings draped over the armrests, almost trips over a man lying on the floor, his bare feet crossed disarmingly at the ankles and his white wings stretched out on a dirty grey carpet, then two black women in a window seat who smile at him, but do not speak. Clues and messages are being thrust at him all the time:
I am deeply sorry for any pain
you may be feeling. Please call
. Call who? At what number? The message is about as meaningful as the other objects in the room: an open drawer full of feathers, a yellowed copy of the
West Australian
, the score of Ethelbert Nevin’s ‘Rosary’, white grains of salt scattered across a roof. Later he would come to believe that this series of increasingly outlandish absurdities had inevitably led to that one small room, where the woman who was massaging him now had then been lying in a cupboard with her face turned to the wall. Even at the time he knew it was a moment he would never forget. A flight of unpainted stairs that kept going up and up until eventually he reached an empty floor, and then a room with dirty windows, through which he could just make out the grey outlines of the skyscrapers, and at last, curled up in the cupboard, that small body, half hidden by a pair of grey wings. For a moment he thought it was a boy or a young child. He stared at the wings. They had been made out of real feathers and put together so cleverly that it was almost creepy. Who knows, maybe this woman could indeed fly. He caught a glimpse of black hair and light brown skin. He could hear her breathing. She had not moved a muscle, and yet she knew that someone was in the room.

SHE TAPS HIM GENTLY ON THE SHOULDER AND ASKS HIM to turn over. For one split second he is still there, in the past, back in that little room. He turns to lie on his back, though he is not ready to look at her face, if only because he had not been able to see it then either. ‘Tell me what it felt like,’ he says.

‘You know what it felt like.’

‘Perhaps, but tell me anyway.’

‘You weren’t the only person who stood there for a long time. We had been trained to deal with that kind of situation. To us it was just a role. And yet there was an irresistible pull – on both sides – that you were supposed to resist. Except that in your case it was different. I felt the intensity. As if you were looking at me with laser beams. I could also hear you breathing. You coughed once. I recognised the sound the next day when you came back. That’s when you reached out and touched me.’

‘And you turned over.’

‘Yes, but not until later.’

She knows he is dying to ask just one question, but this is not the right moment. She knows all that went on before: the reason for her untouchability, things he cannot possibly know. She had almost been tempted, though she would never tell him why, because it had something to do with compassion, with the things that had happened to her in the weeks before that. He had no way of knowing who she was, and that was fine. She did not know his story either, and that was also fine. As long as things stayed that way.

But what about him? A man standing in a room in Australia, staring at an angel lying on the floor. Angels are mythical creatures. In this day and age, however, they are usually relegated to the realm of kitsch, irony or theatre. And yet that tiny curled-up body, those bare feet, the whole of that womanly being (he was sure it was a woman, despite the boyish appearance), evoked something in him – fear, tenderness, desire – that made him want to see her stand up and spread those wings, now draped so foolishly across the dusty floor. But he did not dare to say a word. Only at the sound of footsteps on the stairs did he steal away. That night he could not sleep. He took part in a debate on the function of criticism, together with a writer from the Solomon Islands (‘There’s no literary criticism in my country, and the Australians ignore us. The advantage is that no one says anything bad about you; the disadvantage is that you don’t exist’), and after that he got drunk with the Danish writer (‘The angels are all actors. It’s just a game. If you want to see them without their wings, you’ll have to go to the bar in the festival building. They all hang out there till late’). And that is exactly what he had done, although he had not seen anyone even remotely resembling her. But how can you recognise a person whose face you have not seen? You have to imagine her without the wings, mentally unbend a curled-up form, set it on its feet – it was impossible.

The next day was the last day of the festival. He jotted down the name of the street and the number of the house and spent the day in a kind of daze, wondering if he would have the courage to go again, as nervous as a teenager. At the end of the day, he climbed the unpainted stairs. She was lying in the same position.

The phrase ‘Life is a gamble and an illusion, fraught with risk,’ which he had read somewhere, kept running through his head. He no longer remembered who had written it, or even the context in which he had read it, and was not really sure what it meant either. The silence in this house was indeed spooky, but where was the risk? As he stepped into the room, he heard his own footsteps, and she could undoubtedly hear them too. He stared at her motionless body, the bare feet, the wings. What would happen if he said something? It would be like hurling a brick at a mirror, the sound of shattering glass, ugly, a kind of crystal shriek, followed by another silence – a silence that would violate the untouchable. He sat down, leaned back against the wall. Everything – the tension, his feeling that a trap was about to be sprung – had conspired to make time, which is weightless, as heavy as lead. Once he thought he heard someone coming, but it was a false alarm. He brushed her wing with his fingertip, the lightest of touches.

‘Please go away.’

‘I can’t. I want to talk to you.’ That was true. He could not leave. Everything about him had become heavier: his body, the discussions he had been having since his arrival in Australia, the flight, the strange city, the new faces, and before that all the rest, his life, his work, Anja, whom he had met after a failed marriage, his unfinished PhD on F. C. Terborgh, still tucked away somewhere in a drawer. An overwhelming desire for sleep came over him. He wished he could lie down, just as she had, on those dirty wooden floorboards in front of the cupboard. Suddenly he no longer cared what might happen. She could dial an alarm number, or else spring to her feet, jump over his outstretched body and race down the stairs. In that case he would follow her and no doubt get himself arrested for assault by the first policeman who answered her call for help.

‘Please go away.’ Those three simple words hung in the silence as if they were waiting to be sculpted.
Please go away
. An accent. Probably one of the Romance languages, which meant she could be from anywhere. Spain, Romania? No, it was a bit too melodious for that.

Outside, the clock struck six. The festival was officially over. Breathlessly he waited to see if she would move, but she still surprised him. Later he found it impossible to describe how she had managed to sit up so quickly with those wings. It was almost like a spin. In any case she unfurled herself with a corkscrew-like twist, so that in one easy motion she went from lying down to sitting up cross-legged on the floor, with her wings folded behind her. And he knew immediately, with absolute certainty, that he would have waited for days to see that face, even though he would never be able to describe it adequately. It was both open and closed, serene and troubled, defiant and withdrawn. But also full of promise and, as he now understood, now that he was seeing it for the second time, it was like a trap. The grey eyes and the mouth with its slightly parted lips were expectant, mocking.