Free Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom

something to happen, so you can get out of doing whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.‘
    ‘But in the meantime I’m thinking.’
    ‘Of course you are. About an even better way to ruin someone’s reputation.’
    It was not true, but how could you explain that? Most of what was being published was simply not good enough. New writers were appearing every day, and yet if you looked back at the twentieth century, how many real writers had withstood the test of time? So many of the trashy books that were published began to moulder while still on the best-seller lists.
    ‘Your standards are too high,’ she said just before he left, and there had been a trace of pity in her voice, or even, God forbid, motherly love. ‘Promise me one thing. Forget about all of this once you’re there. If it’s the waste of time you say it is, there’s no point in getting worked up about it. Remember your blood pressure! You’re not a twelve-year-old any more.’
    He had been hearing that last sentence all too often lately. He had no idea why she had picked the number twelve, rather than twenty-four, or thirty-two, neither of which he was of course, though perhaps, to her, twelve seemed light years away. His blood pressure was too high – that was true. And he did have arthritis, and several more of those insidious ailments that made life unpleasant for a person in his late forties – intimations of greater calamìties to come. He had caught himself calculating the average age of death in the obituary columns. It was good when there was an outbreak of salmonella in a nursing home, but bad when three drunk or stoned teenagers, in the grip of an overpowering death wish, came out of a disco and drove straight into a wall and thence into eternity. But he was supposed to forget all of that. ‘Otherwise you might as well chuck the money into a canal.’ It was expensive, all right. Especially if, as Arnold claimed, they gave you next to nothing to eat.

4
    THE BLUE TRAIN TURNED OUT TO BE A TRAM THAT RANonce an hour. Within minutes they had left Innsbruck behind and were passing through a snow-covered forest. ‘White soot, cut feathers,’ Constantijn Huygens once wrote in a poem about snow, a line that Erik Zondag now repeated to himself. No one had ever described snow so beautifully. The Dutch, who were quick to point to the greatness of Shakespeare or Racine, were usually incapable of quoting even one line of Brederode, Hooft or Huygens. A few lines of Cats and Vondel and that one line of Gorter’s had left their mark on the language, not to mention ‘Oh land of dung and mist’, but that was about it for the Dutch classics.
    The snow glittered. The gloominess that he had been carrying around with him ever since he left Amsterdam fell away. Trees, houses, fields – all buried beneath those cut feathers. There were only two other passengers left when he got out at the tiny station of Igls, which was also the end of the line. A church, and frescoes of saints on the rustic houses, whose upper storeys of unpainted wood had retained their original use as haylofts and barns. A sign, with ‘Alpenhof’ in hand-painted Gothic letters, pointed him towards the road, up a fairly steep incline. He slipped and slid so much in his city shoes that it was all he could do to stay on his feet. Huffing and puffing at the top, he saw before him an austere L-shaped building with a natural-stone exterior and extensive grounds, now blanketed in snow. The car park in the front was filled up with BMWs, Jaguars and Volvos with licence plates from Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany and Andorra. Arnold had neglected to mention that. He had talked about how nice the people were, and how being in the same boat had helped them to bond. ‘Besides which, a bit of connaissance du monde might be helpful, Erik. After twenty years in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary supplement, a bit of oxygen might do you some good.’
    Through the glass doors he could