Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Page B

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.

11
    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