Read Online Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom - Free Book Online Page A

Amsterdam Noord and his in Oud Zuid, which tended to complicate their daily lives somewhat. She thought that his place looked and felt like the basket of ‘an ageing dog’, while he thought that her eighth-floor high-rise overlooking the polder had all the charm of a laboratory. Bare, white and spotless, not really where you would want to spend the night for fun. After all, he thought, it was better to do what had brought you together in the first place in a dog basket rather than in a laboratory. But Anja disagreed. In fact, it occurred to him now, she had been disagreeing with him more and more lately. Yesterday’s conversation about the review had also ended disastrously.
    ‘If you ask me, you’re jealous of the man.’
    ‘Jealous? Of that conceited fathead?’
    ‘He’s conceited, all right. But at least he can write.’
    ‘Your paper gave him a bad review too.’
    ‘That may be, but at least it was subtle. Yours was unmixed venom.’
    There was no question of making love after that. Dutch authors had a lot to answer for.
    ‘It’s high time you went to that spa.’ This was her conclusion the next morning. ‘You’ve been moping around for ages!’ That was true. An unshaven man going on fifty who finds himself staring out over the endless melancholy of the polder at seven thirty on a January morning is aware of this, especially when the radio announces that twelve more Palestinians have been shot in the Gaza Strip, that the stock market has surely bottomed out by now, and that the latest attempt to form a new cabinet has reached a deadlock.
    ‘I’m not in the mood for a spa. It’s a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a week of fasting.’
    ‘You won’t get anywhere with an attitude like that. This is your chance to shed those excess kilos you’re always going on about. Besides, Arnold says he came back a different man.’
    ‘Is that what you want?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘A different man. Am I supposed to become a new person at my age? I’m just beginning to get used to myself.’
    ‘You might be, but I’m not. You depress the hell out of me sometimes. Besides that, you drink too much!’
    He did not bother to reply. At the crossroads below, a white delivery van had manoeuvred itself with geometrical precision into the side of a pale blue Honda.
    ‘Arnold is looking a whole lot better. And he hasn’t had a drop to drink since he got back.’
    ‘That’s because he’s too busy moaning about all the food he’s not allowed to eat.’
    No, that conversation had not gone well either. He looked at his watch. Just then, the loudspeaker announced that his train would be delayed for another few minutes. In point of fact, he was not sure why he had chosen to take this train. To catch the night train to Innsbruck, he had to change trains in Duisburg, and something about the name ‘Duisburg’ had appealed to him. It conjured up something cold and grey, a German city still smelling faintly of a long-ago war – an atmosphere of hardship and suffering that matched his present mood.

3
    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