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

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