Perlmann's Silence (52 page)

He went into the shower and washed his hair. The water stung his scratches. But it was a salutary sting, because it meant that the fog of alcohol and pills was beginning to clear. He showered, hot and cold, and then the same again. New life flowed through him, and now he felt sober and clear again.

It wasn’t at all true that he had saved himself. Precisely the opposite was the case.
If I hadn’t phoned Maria, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning. I would have taken Leskov’s text again and wouldn’t have had to live through that whole nightmare with the tunnel.
His fanatical obsession with the translation had brought him not only to the brink of plagiarism, but also to the brink of murder and suicide. Back in Genoa, the frantic, desperate search for presence in the familiarity of foreign languages had for a moment given him the courage to stand up for himself, not least in front of the others, and because of that same courage he had ended up spending three endless days and nights in a world of fantasies and terror which had absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

All that saved me was coincidences, banal coincidences and inattentions.
A sluice opened up in Perlmann’s head, and he was deluged by a cascade of if-thens.
If that equalizer hadn’t been scored, there wouldn’t have been a penalty shoot-out. Giovanni would have been on top of things and would have passed on the instruction to copy Leskov’s text. Then on Saturday morning both texts would have been in the pigeonholes, and that would have allowed me to rectify matters without loss of face. If Giovanni had done what he was supposed to, and if Maria hadn’t finished because of the people from Fiat, only the fatal text would have made it to the pigeonholes; the disaster would have taken place in the real world and not just in my imagination. If Giovanni had just left Leskov’s text on the shelf under the counter, my pigeonhole would have been the only one empty on Saturday morning. I would have checked, learned what had really happened, and there would never have been a murder plan. But perhaps I wouldn’t have checked, paralyzed as I was. If Giovanni had left the text on the shelf, then when Signora Morelli was distributing them she would have noticed that my pigeonhole was the only one that was empty, and then she would have looked for the original by the photocopier. If my pigeonhole had been in a row with the pigeonholes of the others, I wouldn’t have switched rooms; the signora would have hesitated when distributing the texts, then seen that the text in my pigeonhole was a different one; she would have looked for the original by the photocopier, and when I came back from Portofino I would have had two texts in my pigeonhole, and Maria’s card would have resolved the matter. So if I hadn’t had this exaggerated need for empty space, I would have been spared the tunnel. If when I returned from Portofino there hadn’t been all that noise in the next room, I would have taken Silvestri’s copy out of the pigeonhole and discovered the true state of affairs. And if, arriving with Leskov, I had glanced at the feared text in my hand, just a single short glance, I wouldn’t have needed to imagine wading out into the dark water.

Perlmann knew it was absurd, this orgy of unreal conditional clauses, but it also devoured his sense of relief, so that he yearned now for the tears he had shed when he first discovered his redemption. But that knowledge didn’t help, the search for more and more connections was like an involuntary addiction.
If Larissa hadn’t been plagued by a guilty conscience, she wouldn’t have urged Leskov to make a fresh application; there would have been no telegram and no fear of exposure, and what had appeared the night before would not have been a planned suicide, only a nagging feeling of guilt. If the waiter hadn’t brought me the telegram just as I was about to talk to Evelyn about Leskov’s text, I would have been able to tell by what she said that something was wrong, and even then I would have been spared the bulldozer. If there hadn’t been a wedding party at the Regina Elena tonight, I might have asked them to call for a cab, and then I would have told Kirsten in Konstanz about an act of plagiarism that didn’t even take place.
Perlmann stopped.

So for days now they had been holding his notes, headed by an Italian sentence that must have seemed mannered and pretentious. He picked up the computer printout. It was fifty-two pages long.
I could have told from the thickness of the pages. Seventy-three pages in my pigeonhole compared to fifty-two in everyone else’s; that’s a difference that could have been spotted from a mile off. And this evening, when I turned up, I could have felt in my hand that it couldn’t be Leskov’s text: that the sheaf of papers was too thin.

He let the pages slip through his fingers and weighed the pile in his hand. He didn’t dare flick through it properly and tentatively read it, and he took care to ensure that his eye didn’t get caught on the top page. Now that he felt like the survivor of a disaster, he didn’t want to alarm himself on top of everything else – with trashy metaphors or a maudlin tone, for example. And he didn’t want to encounter his written English right now, either – English that was seldom exactly wrong, and yet never had the effortless precision that he would have wished for. He slipped the papers into the desk drawer.

Angelini’s remark on Sunday evening, he thought, now appeared in a new light.
Un lavoro insolito
, he had called the text. And it was no wonder, either, that no one else had wasted a word about the text. That they had basically pretended it had never existed.

In six and a half hours he would have to go up the three steps to the veranda and sit down at the front. All the people sitting there looking at him would have his text in front of them, from the first page to the last.
Only I and I alone don’t know what’s in it.
That was a plainly incorrect, nonsensical thought, Perlmann knew. Even on Friday, on the ship, he had gone through the notes in his head. But the thought wouldn’t go away. In fact, it swelled still further. They knew more about him than he knew himself. They were waiting, and he couldn’t think of anything to say. They delivered their criticisms, and he had no response to give.

It couldn’t be the case that the unimaginable relief that had filled him even just an hour before was already being stifled by a new anxiety. It just couldn’t be.
I didn’t become a fraud and I didn’t become a murderer. What other reason can there be for being anxious now?
Perlmann clutched that thought and then tried with a single lurch to wrest away the inner freedom that would make him invulnerable to everything the others might or might not say, to their faces and their stares, and also to the stares which, in the awkward silence, fell on the gleaming table top.

He phoned Giovanni. He could do him a favor right now, and sort him out with two pots of strong coffee. He still had six hours. That wasn’t enough for a complete lecture. But he could write a memo that could be further developed orally. The thing was to develop something in the abstract and draw up the outlines of a conception. Then the discussion would focus on that. He could say, off-handedly, that the distributed text was incidental; he had only wanted to provide a small insight into the observations that he had used as his starting point.

Perlmann’s heart was thumping as he sat down at the desk. Until now, sitting here had meant translating Leskov’s text. Hour after hour, day after day, he had removed himself further and further from reality. Each translated sentence had brought him a little closer to the deadly silence of the tunnel. A quiet feeling of vertigo took hold of him as he carefully straightened the chair, lit a cigarette and reached for his ballpoint pen. For four weeks he had avoided that moment. His hands were sticky, and the stickiness transferred itself to the pen. He got to his feet, washed his hands in the bathroom and wiped the pen. Giovanni brought the coffee. Perlmann put it first on the right of the desk, then the left. He threw the piece of paper with Kirsten’s address into the waste-paper basket. He prepared a back-up pack of cigarettes and fetched the red lighter from the bedside table. Wearing only his dressing gown he would soon start shivering. He dressed completely. His light-colored trousers were too cool by now. But the tear on the other pair bothered him. Then there were the dark flannel trousers, the ones with the bloodstains. And it would be better to put on the lighter pullover. And turn up the heating a bit instead. Again he straightened his chair. He would have to be close to the desk. But not too close.

Why hadn’t he tried it much sooner? The sentences came in spite of everything. They actually came, one after the other. At first he was anxious before each period, for fear that everything might dry up after it. But when the first page was full, this anxiety melted away; feeling in general faded into the background, and the calm logic of the sentences themselves took charge. For months, almost years, he had struggled to force out each individual sentence; it had seemed as if, in future, he would only be able to think in very small units. And now all of a sudden each sentence led quite naturally on to the next. Something started building up. He was writing a text, a real text.
So I can still do it after all. Now everything’s fine.

His pen went flying over the pages and the thoughts came one after another so quickly that he could barely capture them on the paper. At last his block had gone. Again he had something to say. He only lifted the pen from the paper to light another cigarette or pour himself the next cup of coffee. He held his cigarette in his left hand, and with the same hand he brought the cup to his mouth – it was unusual, but his right hand must not be interrupted while writing.
Not a memo; it’s turning into a lecture, a complete lecture.
The unfamiliar way of holding the cigarette meant that smoke kept getting in his eyes; it stung, but his right hand wrote on and on. He was amazed and cheered at how good, how apt were the phrases that flowed so naturally on to the paper; some of them, he thought, practically had a poetic force. He hoped he had enough paper; otherwise he would have to start writing on both sides. Eventually, he would run out of coffee. It was lucky that he had even more cigarettes in the wardrobe. He hoped the lighter wouldn’t suddenly pack up on him. At one point he paused and closed his eyes.
The present. This is it. Now I’m experiencing it at last. It took all these traumas to break through to it.

At five o’clock he opened the window. Billows of smoke drifted out into the night. He took a deep breath of the cool air. He felt dizzy, and had to hold on to the window catch. He felt as if he were moving on dangerously thin ice at breakneck speed. The strip of light beyond the bay was quite even, narrow and still. When his eye fell on the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, he quickly shut the window. He wanted to believe that all those things happened a very long time ago.

Perlmann didn’t immediately know how the next paragraph should begin, and started to panic. But then he read the last three pages and found his way back into his writing frenzy. After a while, when all the coffee had gone, his tongue felt furry. Annoyed at the interruption, he went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water. He was used to his pale, anxious face; he had seen it often enough over the last few days. But now he gave a start. His features were sunken and skewed. He thought of pictures of people who had been exposed to enhanced gravity. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered were the sentences that had originated behind that face and were flowing into his right hand. It was a complete mystery how it was happening, and for one brief moment Perlmann experienced the fascination of the scholar confronted by a mysterious phenomenon, a fascination that he had lost.
Everything’s going to fall back into place.
Even though he didn’t have a headache, he took two aspirins from the pack on the mirror shelf and washed them down. Then he walked back to the desk with a glass of water.

Dawn began to break just before seven. Without the darkness of the night Perlmann felt vulnerable and lost his sense of equilibrium. His sentences started to go wrong. He had to cross some of them out, and eventually he reached the last sheet, which he crumpled and threw in the waste-paper basket. The mixture of lamplight and daylight enraged him. As he walked across to turn off the standard lamp, his ankle throbbed violently, and felt as if it could no longer support him. He couldn’t quite manage without electric light, and turned the desk lamp back on. His memory began to fail. The simplest English words stopped coming to mind, and all of a sudden he was uncertain about his spelling, too.

A short break. He could lie down for a moment, until it was really light. Just for a few minutes. After that he still had an hour and a half to finish writing his lecture.

41

A wild honking of car horns on the coast road woke him with a start. Perlmann felt disoriented and immediately sank back into leaden weariness. His eyelids seemed paralyzed, and would only open after he had made an extreme effort of will to sit up on the edge of the bed. His head hurt at the slightest movement, and his veins seemed to be far too cramped for his violently pounding blood. The noise of traffic was unbearable. It was seven minutes to nine.

No time for showering and shaving, nor could he order any more coffee. He was relieved to establish that his tongue, although thick and stinging, was under his command again. He shovelled cold water into his face with both hands, evoking the memory of the gas station toilet in Recco.
No murder. No plagiarism
. He hurriedly bundled together the sheets of paper on the desk. There were at least twenty pages, he thought. The last half-page was crossed out.
I’ll have to improvise at the end.

The elevator was busy. Two minutes past nine. Perlmann gritted his teeth and hobbled downstairs. He had forgotten the printout of his notes, and when he went to check that he was at least carrying a pen, he saw that there were two big stripes of dirt running diagonally across his jacket.
The garbage bin by the fan
. He looked at his trousers: bloodstains everywhere. Arriving in the hall, through the glass front door he saw the sea glittering in the morning sun. At some point in the night, he remembered, he had thought he had finally found the present. An illusion, woven from relief, alcohol and pills. The present was further off than ever.

The door to the veranda was open. Perlmann felt no more twinges as he walked through the lounge towards it and took the three steps. The anxiety settled on him like a numbing veil. He wasn’t quite in the room before he had seen that they were all there, even Silvestri and Angelini. And at the back, on the right, Leskov with his pipe in his mouth. Perlmann immediately looked away. He didn’t want to be wounded by any of those faces. As he had been during the night. He wanted to stay completely closed away in himself, inaccessible to the others.

As always, there was coffee on the table, a special pot for the speaker. Perlmann sat down without a greeting, poured himself a coffee and concentrated on not shivering. The coffee was hot. One could only drink it slowly. He couldn’t possibly drain the first cup with everyone staring at him. After taking three sips he set it down. He had planned to say some introductory words of explanation, about the distributed text and his relationship to what he was about to say. But he couldn’t have said such words with his eyes lowered, and he couldn’t now bring himself to meet the eyes of the others. Not before they had heard last night’s text, which would rehabilitate him. He took another sip of coffee, lit a cigarette and began to read.

The introductory sentences were too long-winded. Perlmann noticed it immediately, became impatient and rattled them off hastily so that he could finally get to his first thesis, which, in its originality – he was quite sure of it – would immediately grab the attention of everyone present. He set aside the first page and was glad to see that there were only three lines to go before the crucial paragraph. When they were over with, he took two big swigs of coffee, looked up for a moment, and then plunged into his train of thought.

When he read them the words were so unutterably weak that the sentences literally stuck in his throat. It took a special effort – almost a retch – to read each of them to the end. It was pure kitsch, nothing but sentimental nonsense, cobbled together by someone at the end of his powers and also under the influence of alcohol and pills, so that all critical capacity, all self-censorship, had completely closed down. Perlmann wanted to sink into the floor, and when he went on reading, in a voice that grew quieter and quieter, he only did so because he didn’t know how he would bear the silence that would fall if he stopped.

Leskov choked on his pipe smoke and had a coughing fit. His face bright red, he bent double, his coughing so loud that Perlmann’s lecture was interrupted. Perlmann looked over at him, and in that moment a thought forced his way into his consciousness that had until then been suppressed by some power or other:
I would have killed him for no good reason whatsoever. It would have been a completely pointless murder. A murder based on an error.
Without his really noticing, the sheets slipped from his hand, his mouth half-opened, and his face went blank. He shivered. He heard the penetrating, high-pitched whistle, and saw the huge shovel of the bulldozer with its side prongs coming towards him. It turned quite silent, as if they were surrounded by cotton wool and snow. Perlmann took his ice-cold, sweat-drenched hands from the wheel. Then there was nothing but weakness and darkness. Perlmann’s cigarette fell from his hand and, in a curiously retarded, flowing motion he slipped sideways to the floor.

It was a pleasant, effortless glide up through ever thinner, ever paler layers. At the end there came a faint, quiet start, the world stood quite still, and with a tiny hesitation that he only just noticed, before immediately forgetting it again, it became clear to Perlmann that the impressions forcing their way to him through his open eyes meant that he was awake.

He was lying under the covers in all his clothes except his jacket and shoes. In the red armchair by the open window sat Giorgio Silvestri. His back was turned towards Perlmann and he was reading the newspaper. Perlmann was glad that he was smoking. That made the situation less like a sick-bed visit. He would have liked to look at his watch. But Silvestri would have heard that, and he wanted to be on his own for a little while longer. He closed his eyes and tried to order his thoughts.

His unconsciousness had calmed him, and even if his tiredness slowed everything down, he still had the feeling of being able to think clearly. He could no longer remember the details of what had happened in the veranda. All he remembered was his horror at his embarrassing text, and then the coughing Leskov, who had slipped uninterruptedly into a maelstrom of images from the tunnel.
I have disgraced myself for ever. It couldn’t have been more embarrassing. But now it’s over. I didn’t commit fraud and I didn’t commit murder. And never again will I have to sit at the front in the veranda. Never again.

Two men must have carried him upstairs. Perlmann was glad they hadn’t undressed him. Who had it been apart from Silvestri? Apart from those two, had anyone else come into his room? The strong sleeping pills were in his jacket pocket. Had Silvestri found them? Had he seen that he was poisoned, and deliberately looked for them? Or had they perhaps fallen out when he was being carried upstairs?

Leskov’s text. For God’s sake, I hope they didn’t find it here.
Perlmann sat up involuntarily. Silvestri turned round, got to his feet and looked at him with a face that strangely combined a warm smile and a professional, medical expression.

‘I came back at just the right time,’ he said.

‘How long was I unconscious for?’ Perlmann asked.

Silvestri looked at his watch. ‘Just a few minutes. Stay calm. There’s no reason to worry.’

Perlmann sank back into the pillow.
A few minutes. That could be ten, or twenty. Enough at any rate to find the text. If they hear Leskov saying practically the same thing as in the text on Thursday, they will know that something’s wrong, and put two and two together. It isn’t over yet.

‘Was Leskov in here, too?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘Yes,’ Silvestri said with a smile, ‘he insisted on helping Brian Millar carry you. He started wheezing terribly. A nice guy.’

Then he saw his text here, and now he’ll be thinking back to the tunnel.
Perlmann started sweating and asked for a glass of water.

As he drank, Silvestri looked at him thoughtfully. He hesitated at behaving like a doctor, but then he took Perlmann’s pulse. ‘Has that happened to you many times before?’

‘No,’ Perlmann said, ‘that was the first time.’

‘Do you take sleeping pills?’ Silvestri made the question sound innocuous, almost incidental.

Perlmann liked and knew straight away that he was being seen through.

After he had folded up the newspaper and lit a Gauloise, Silvestri leaned against the desk and said nothing for a while. Perlmann was about to tell him everything. Just so as not to be alone with his thoughts any more. To have peace at last.

‘You know,’ Silvestri said slowly, without a hint of an instructive or patronizing tone in his voice. ‘You are in a state of profound exhaustion. Not quite dangerous yet. But you should be a bit careful. Take a rest. Get a lot of sleep. And go and see your doctor at home. He should give you a thorough examination, at any rate. If you need anything, just give me a call.’ He walked to the door.

‘Giorgio,’ said Perlmann.

Silvestri turned round.

‘I . . . I’m glad you were there.
Grazie
.’

‘
Di niente
,’ Silvestri smiled and reached for the door. Then he let go of the handle and came two steps back. ‘By the way, I find a lot of the observations in your text very interesting. Particularly the things about the freezing of experience through language, and the point that sentences can both inspire and paralyze the imagination.’ He grinned. ‘Of course, the others expected something slightly different from you. But I wouldn’t place too much importance on that. And, generally speaking, you shouldn’t take all of this too seriously,’ he said with a gesture that took in the whole hotel.

Perlmann nodded mutely.

When the door clicked shut, he threw back the covers and hobbled hastily over to his case. He saw with horror that the lock was set at the correct combination. No text in there now. The veins at his temples seemed about to burst with each pulse beat. He sat down on the edge of the bed, only to jump up again a moment later.
The phone book.
Pressing his hand to his head, he pulled open the desk drawer. There was no text under the phone book either. He knew there was no point, but he checked in the bedside table and the wardrobe as well. So they’d discovered it and taken it away as evidence. Leskov would identify the text. Attempted plagiarism. That was the only explanation for Perlmann so carefully keeping the existence of the text a secret. And seen in that light, what happened in the veranda also became comprehensible. They would go easy on him today. To some extent he was unfit to stand trial. But tomorrow they would call him to account.

Perlmann stubbed out his cigarette and was glad that the nausea subsided when he lay down. Now, he couldn’t present the text as a welcome gift. He had learned of Leskov’s arrival less than three days before. And why hadn’t he given him the present ages ago? He had thought the text was so good that he had planned to send the finished translation to St Petersburg and suggest publication in a relevant journal. Then, when he learned that he was coming, he had prepared the text as a surprise. He planned to hand it to him tonight at dinner.
That’s OK. That doesn’t sound incredible. At any rate, they can’t refute it.
The thumping in his head subsided.
It’s over. One or other of them may be left with a feeling of suspicion. Nothing more can happen. It’s over.
He turned onto his stomach and let his face sink deep into the pillow.

But the text was no longer here. I threw it away during the night.
Perlmann sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. The big garbage bin under the fan had been empty apart from potato peelings. And the open lid had covered the fan. He conjured up as many details of the situation as possible, to assure himself that these were really memories, and not a trick being played on him by his imagination. He heard once again the dull thud when the stack of paper had landed, and smelled again the kitchen fumes that had passed through the fan. It was an effort to call all that to mind, because it was swathed in fine mist that wouldn’t be dissolved even by the utmost effort of concentration, as if it were not merely a veil of the remembered objects, but belonged to their essence. And the images were erratic and hard to hold on to; it was as if the remembered perceptions last night had not really had the opportunity to bury themselves into his brain. Nonetheless, Perlmann’s certainty grew that they were real memories. The imagination would not provide images that were so dense and coherent, in spite of the mist. Yesterday evening – he remembered that, too, now – getting rid of the text had struck him as the epitome of senselessness. Now he was glad of this attack of unreason. Loads of refuse, huge great loads of it, had fallen on the dangerous text in the meantime, and buried it.