Lost Paradise Read Free Page B

, making me repeat the story over and over so they could get off on it themselves, or the chromium table with those awful stirrups and the mumbling head down between my legs, looking for traces of semen – or even worse – and finally observing that I had got off lightly, though for all I knew he doubted anything had happened. The only person who was allowed to ask me why I had driven there that night was Almut.
    ‘Was it the mood?’
    Mood. Just a word, an ordinary word. Almut once told me that it comes from the Old Saxon mod , but I didn’t like the sound and have never wanted to look it up. Sometimes I would sooner ask a question than know the answer. Anyway, it was a code word between us; we both knew exactly what it meant. One day, when I was twelve or thirteen, I tried to explain to her how it feels – the terrifying fear that sucks me into a bottomless pit, as if I am about to tumble off the edge of the world. It is hard to put into words. You are dragged out to sea, incapable of resisting the pull, or actually not wanting to, since your one desire is to disappear forever, to be consumed by the menacing darkness, to seek out your fear so that you can surrender yourself to it, yet while all of this is going on you feel dizzy and you hate your disgustingly dizzy body – all you want is to be rid of it, to make it go away, to make the thinking stop. Rage, pleasure, melancholy are all rolled into one, and when it’s over, I’m left with a terrible sharpness – a white, electrifying clarity – in which I realise that I don’t want to be alive, that everything is riddled with hate – plants, ordin ary objects, the road I take to school every day – until that too subsides, leaving behind a sensual composure, in which I feel reconciled to the world again, though at the same time I know that the whole thing is paper-thin, transparent, an illusion, that I will never be able to make my peace with the world because I am part of it and yet not part of it – a contradiction I need to resolve. ‘You’ve got that look again,’ Almut would say at such moments. ‘Come on, let’s exorcise the demons.’ And then in her room or mine we would dance like mad to the music of Chico Buarque or the Stones or whoever, until we collapsed on the floor and lay side by side. From there we would set off on our great journey. Almut had an enormous map of the world taped to the ceiling. I can still see it. It wasn’t like most maps: Siberia and Alaska, looking strangely elongated, were not at the top of the map, but on the left and right sides; Australia had been moved to the top, making it look even more like an island, an island hovering above the rest of the world, and we knew we would go there one day, to that upside-down world where everything was different, where the whites were the descendants of convicts and felons who had clung to the edges of this huge island because the land in between was a broiling-hot desert inhabited by the others – the people who had lived there forever and looked as if they had sprung from the land itself: scorched, sun-seared beings who trod softly over the earth and lived as if time didn’t exist; they, too, lived an upside-down life unlike that of anyone else on the planet, as if all they had ever wanted was simply to be, and had passed down this changeless existence without ever changing anything in the world. We read about the Dreamtime, the time before time and memory began, when the world was flat and empty and shapeless and there were no trees or animals or food or people, until at a certain moment the Heroes, their mythical ancestors, appeared. No one knows quite how it happened, whether they came out of the ocean or the air or over the edge of the world. Os heróis creativos – in my language the words resound with an enchantment that still fills me with awe whenever I say them. Almut and I knew exactly what we meant when either of us spoke those words, for they invariably triggered