Perlmann's Silence (57 page)

Now it was the turn of the problematic page 58, which he had previously put back between fresh blotters, and set on the radiator again. Perlmann went and got it and looked at the remaining traces of the subheading. The mixture of ink and dirt had by now dried completely, and could be wiped away with his handkerchief.
Pridumannoe proshloe
:
the invented past
, he thought, was the most likely reading of the pale fragment of the line. He took off his glasses and held the lenses as a magnifying glass over the paper. Now he discovered that before the first word there was a pencil marking for an insertion. Of the insertion, also written in pencil, the only letters that could be made out were
n
and
o
, which seemed to belong to the beginning and end of a single word.
Nevol’no pridumannoe proshloe
:
the involuntarily invented past
, he thought. In which case Leskov had extended his theme in the second version: apart from the linguistic impression of memories, it was also about truth and volitional control.

Once again Perlmann cast a sober glance at the few clues: nothing that could be made out there really supported this over-hasty assumption. Disgruntled, he covered the page with the blotter. When he pulled it away again and started to read, he felt the trepidation of the addict.

His reading proceeded only slowly, as he had no experience of Russian handwriting. But, eyes stinging, he continued until there were three words in a row that he didn’t know at the bottom of the page. He lit a cigarette and, as his eyes remained focused on the line, his hand reached with mounting impatience for the dictionary. The sensation of emptiness had to be repeated a number of times before it dawned on him that there couldn’t possibly be any dictionaries there now. He gave a start, as if from a forbidden daydream. His face stung. He quickly closed the text in the wardrobe and, shivering, walked to the window.

‘I need to use the computer for a moment,’ he said a few minutes later to Giovanni at reception. ‘Check something about my text. For tomorrow.’ A spasm ran from the back of his neck and down his back, and he had the feeling that he could barely turn his head.

Giovanni reached towards a drawer and then paused. Hesitantly, he raised his head and looked uncertainly at Perlmann. ‘The office . . . no one . . . I have instructions . . .’ He lowered his eye and rubbed awkwardly at the handle of the drawer.

‘I understand,’ said Perlmann and prepared to go.

Then Giovanni suddenly looked at him with a grin. ‘Oh, come on, I’ll make an exception for you.’ He took a key from the drawer, walked ahead of him and opened the door. ‘I’m sure you know how to use the computer already,’ he said as he turned on the light, ‘because I . . .’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘thanks very much.’

He hoped Giovanni would retreat into the back room. But he stayed standing at the counter, nodded and smiled and raised his hand slightly. Perlmann cursed the glass door of the office. Now he would have to do it right in front of Giovanni’s eyes. He straightened the chair in front of the screen and reached for the switch at the back of the computer. Nothing happened. He rocked the switch back and forth several times. No effect of any kind. He walked around the table and took a look at the switch. It was the right one. Giovanni raised quizzical eyebrows and made as if to come over. Perlmann hastily gestured to him to stay where he was:
Tutto bene!
Perlmann’s hands were damp, and the spasm at the back of his neck was becoming stronger and stronger. He stared blankly straight ahead.
The plug
. He slowly rolled his chair back and looked under the table. All the plugs were in their sockets. He avoided glancing over at the counter. Only now did he notice the round lock without a key.
Finished. Of course, the business documents.
He turned to the side table with the drawers and screened his hands from Giovanni’s eyes with his back. The open drawers contained only office material, he could see that as soon as he opened them a crack. The key for the computer would be in the narrow top drawer, from whose lock the key had also been removed. In the only box on the desk there were just paperclips.

Perlmann breathed in twice, slowly. His back relaxed. Relief was mixed with tiredness. The fact that he noticed the transparent box of disks when he stood up had something to do with the fact that the plexiglass reflected the fluorescent light from the ceiling. He slid the chair to the tray at the side and opened the box. The disk with his name on it was the second from the front. Under the name it said on the label:
personal past. mestre
.

Perlmann took care that his movements were easy for Giovanni to make out as he rolled himself back to the computer and put the disk in the drive. Then he sat down in a pose of concentration in front of the dark screen and simulated typing movements. He could at least remove the disk. Perhaps Maria had only worked with it, and the text wasn’t even on the hard drive. He grew calmer. With a pen from the desk he tapped the edge of his nose a few times and then stuck the tip between his lips while, leaning back with legs outstretched, he pretended to gaze into an imaginary distance. Then he made a few more typing motions, took the disk from the drive and pressed the switch. With his back to Giovanni he stuck the disk in the belt under his pullover, ostentatiously snapped the box shut and left.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’

Giovanni caught up with him in the portico.

‘You were asking about Baggio yesterday.’

‘Yes?’

‘He scored another goal tonight. Against Bayern Munich!’

‘He’s plainly a great striker,’ said Perlmann, and an emotion that was hard to distinguish from pure tiredness brought tears to his eyes.

‘
E come!
’ said Giovanni.

‘
Ciao
,’ said Perlmann and touched him fleetingly on the shoulder.

‘
Ciao
,’ Giovanni said, too. He said it hesitantly and slowly, and it sounded like an incredulous echo.

When Perlmann looked down at the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, a group of young people stood applauding because a lanky boy was kissing a girl who, in spite of her piled-up hair, barely came up to his chest. That wasn’t his jetty, not the one that led out into the black water. It was as if the jetty of two days ago had been extinguished by the young people, or rather: expelled from the world.

He went on walking beyond the rocky spur until it was quite dark. Then he slung the disk far out into the sea. The movement came from his wrist and shoulder at the same time, the little disk turned quickly on its own axis, rose for a while in a low curve, then fell spinning and chipped almost vertically into the water. Perlmann heard quiet applause, but couldn’t tell if it was only his imagination.

From the rocky spur he looked across to the Miramare. A letter seemed to be flickering in the middle of the neon writing. Somewhere in the dark hills over there were the garbage bins into which he had thrown the first version of Leskov’s text. Tomorrow, immediately after the session, he would finish cleaning the second version. He certainly couldn’t send it from Italy. Nor from Frankfurt. But the very thought was pointless. He couldn’t possibly send the text to Leskov.

The young people had moved on. The beach jetty was empty. His jetty was back in the world, washed around by black water. Perlmann felt himself beginning to crumble. There were delicate, treacherous cracks within his inner structure. He quickly went back to the hotel.

The air in the room was cold, and it still smelled sickly sweet, even though this time Leskov had only used the ashtray for a match. Perlmann washed out his toothbrush several times. But it was as if the dirt had practically eaten its way into the bristles. The foam when he brushed his teeth had a brownish tint.

In the morning, he thought in the dark, Leskov would be sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, anxiously and with almost nothing in his hands. He didn’t know it, but Perlmann had promised to defend his theme, which he didn’t know in the new version.

It was an antediluvian screen, bright bilious green on dull dark green, and it flickered so wildly that it made the eyes stream straight away. A nauseating, sickly sweet smell flowed from it. That couldn’t be, but it was, and when he sniffed at the ventilation slits smoke was emerging from there as well; a treacherous smoke that couldn’t at first be seen, but then suddenly formed a dense, suffocating cloud. A flood of incomprehensible Italian orders and file names swam across the screen. At last he somehow got hold of the right one, but Leskov’s text simply wouldn’t be erased, he pressed the key over and over again, hundreds of times, until nothing remained of the key, but Leskov’s text with Perlmann’s name went on flickering under the title. At last he clicked the on-off switch, but nothing happened; even pulling out the plug had no effect: Leskov’s text went on flickering and flickering, and now Perlmann’s name was suddenly there in capital letters. Then he gripped the huge sledgehammer in both hands. But it wasn’t so easy. You had to take a run-up with lateral, rhythmically swinging movements before lifting the hammer high above your head to deliver the crucial blow. At last the time had come, the hammer rose up, it passed the apex, but then all of a sudden it had no substance and no weight, and rather than bringing it down with a crash into the computer, as he woke up Perlmann found himself on the bedcover, his hand clenched convulsively into a fist.

46

Nonetheless, he had the feeling of having had a proper night’s sleep for the first time in ages. As he got dressed he established that he had no fresh underwear, and saw in his mind’s eye the full plastic bag falling on the stinking cabbage. The wound in his finger was no longer damp, the bruise and the swelling had subsided. At the smallest pressure, admittedly, his fingertip still hurt so much that it brought tears to his eyes. He put his last bandage on it.

At exactly eight o’clock he went down to breakfast. If they thought he was finally eating humble pie in the wake of his disgrace, that was their business. Signora Morelli had just stepped out through the portico, and was straightening one of the round tables. Unnoticed, he bent over the reception desk and shoved the stained map, which had been on the radiator all night, between other papers on the shelf.

The dining room was completely empty. Not a single place had been used at the group’s table. The waiter who brought him his coffee and egg was plainly embarrassed. With each minute that passed without anyone appearing, Perlmann felt more and more that he was being ridiculed. Asking the waiter whether the breakfast habits of his – yes, his – group had changed was impossible.

Adrian von Levetzov came at a quarter past eight. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen him without a waistcoat and even without a tie. His pale, wrinkled neck made him look old.

‘Oh, Perlmann, good morning,’ he said more flatly than usual, and rubbed his eyes. ‘We all stayed out very late last night. There’s a feeling that it’s all coming to an end.’

Perlmann nodded and took another roll. And then another. The silence was unbearable. The tablecloth was stained. The waiter’s movements were affected.

‘I didn’t know about your wife’s accident,’ said von Levetzov, holding his coffee cup, ‘until Leskov told us about it on Tuesday. Terrible. That must have brought you very low.’

Leskov: the man who explains my breakdown to other people.
‘Yes,’ said Perlmann, topping up his coffee.

Someone had put a damp spoon in the sugar; there were brown lumps in the bowl. In the fresh ashtray there was a tiny bit of chewing gum, with a drop of water on it.

Perlmann wanted to make an effort with Adrian von Levetzov, but he had no idea how to do it.

‘Yep, it’ll be back to the rat race,’ smiled von Levetzov. ‘What will you be teaching?’

As he gave a vague description of his lecture series, something quiet and dramatic happened in Perlmann: he made the decision to abandon his professorship.

What was happening inside him was not an internal action. There was nothing active about it. It was more like the process of a little gear wheel that has long been moving with his pen, slowly and inexorably towards a lock, finally snapping in place and thus setting in motion something bigger, something revolutionary. He hadn’t known that the time had come. And yet it seemed quite natural that it should have happened right now – at a time when the empty dining room emphasized his alienation from his colleagues and their world quite as self-evidently as if it had been a scene from a film.

Von Levetzov got up with a glance at his watch. ‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said apologetically. ‘See you later.’

Perlmann took in the empty room. He would think back time and again to this room and this moment. It was hazy over the bay, impossible to say whether the sun would part the clouds. He slowly finished his cigarette and ran his hand along the edges of the tables on his way to the door.

Then someone pushed the door open with his shoulder. It was Millar. He had taken off his glasses and was running a hand over his face. After that Ruge came in. ‘A bucket of coffee!’ he called to the waiter. Evelyn Mistral, who was walking behind him, laughed her pearly laugh. She had piled her hair up, and was carrying her writing pad with the shield of Salamanca under her arm.

‘See you later,’ Perlmann said, escaping from their startled stares.

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria had left the office door open, and now came out from behind her desk. ‘Giovanni told me you wanted to use the computer last night. Is something wrong? I always close up in the evening. A safety measure. If I’d known . . .’

Perlmann looked at her hands – those hands that couldn’t make any mistakes, that couldn’t under any circumstances hit the wrong key.

‘It wasn’t all that important,’ he said with forced equanimity, ‘I just wanted to try something out with my text – something, erm . . . that you can’t do with the printout.’

‘I know, people always say that.’

She ran her hand through her hair, and again Perlmann wondered mechanically whether her fingers wouldn’t be sticky with hairspray afterwards.
You’ve been living under a rock. Like way, way out.

‘Which of the two texts was it, then?’ she asked with a smile. ‘The one about memory?’

‘No, the other one,’ Perlmann said and gulped.

‘And it occurs to me,’ she exclaimed and turned towards the office, ‘that I still have to give you the disk!’

As she opened up the box and started searching, Perlmann leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded.
She’ll never find out.

‘I don’t understand this,’ she murmured, sat down and went through the disks again, slowly, one at a time. ‘It was in here, and now it’s gone.’ She looked through everything on the desk, smiling at him awkwardly from time to time. ‘I’m not usually as scattered as this.’ Distracted and incredulous, she went through the drawers, and you could tell by the wrinkles on her nose that she was battling against irritation with herself.

Suddenly, she made a dismissive gesture. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll just copy both texts for you quickly again.’ She turned on the computer and put a new disk in the drive.

At that moment Perlmann heard Leskov’s voice behind him. ‘Are we starting on time?’ He turned round. Leskov was wearing his bilious green shirt with a brown tie and a grey waistcoat stretched over his belly.

‘
Ecco!
’ Maria was saying, ‘so first we’ve got the text about memory
. . . what abbreviation did I give it . . . oh, yes, that’s it.’

He doesn’t understand Italian
. The sound of copying began. Perlmann looked at his watch for an unnecessarily long time. ‘Yes, we’ll have to be there in a minute,’ he said.

Leskov walked up to Maria and held out his hand.

‘
Un momento
,’ she smiled.
‘Now the other one. That was . . . yes, just
Mestre
.’ Her fingers flew over the keys. ‘
Ecco!
’ The sound again. Now she shook hands with Leskov, who was looking at the screen. ‘Good morning,’ she said in English.

‘Incredible how little time it takes,’ Leskov said raptly. Then he showed Maria the stack of copies that he was carrying under his arm. ‘The text from yesterday. Thank you very much, once again.’

As Leskov was leaving, Maria took the disk out of the drive and stuck a label on it.

‘Erm . . . you don’t need to do that,’ Perlmann said hastily as she reached for her pen. He slipped the disk into his jacket pocket. ‘Now you can delete the texts.’ His hoarseness and the quiver in his voice made it, he thought, the caricature of a casual remark.

‘I will at some point,’ she said and turned off the computer. ‘But there’s no rush. The computer has a huge hard drive!’ She got up and looked down at her folded hands. ‘You know, I hate erasing documents that I’ve typed up. All that work, and then one click of the keys – and poof!’ She threw her hands in the air and looked at him with a shy smile that he had never seen before. ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense really, because nothing happens to the documents in there once the people have gone . . . It’s just how I am.’

Perlmann nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and tapped his jacket pocket.

Leskov had already distributed his handwritten submission, and was now sitting at the front moving his papers back and forth. He gripped his pipe bowl with both hands as he began to speak. He had already talked about the mishap with his text, he said. His tone revealed the fact that he had firmly resolved not to start talking about it again. But then, from one second to the next, his facial expression went blank, he rubbed his pipe absently with his index finger, and you could actually feel him being sucked into the pool of his attempts at remembering.

As he had done so often in this room, Perlmann hid his face behind his clasped hands as Leskov told parts of his story again. Quickly, and even though he didn’t try fully to understand the reasons why, Perlmann’s sense of guilt turned to fury: it had been a crazy, unforgivable act of recklessness to take such an important text, a text on which Leskov’s advancement depended, on a journey without making a copy beforehand! How could he do such a thing?

Even when Leskov was already some way into his lecture, Perlmann was still quarrelling with him. Until he suddenly stopped abruptly:
What would have happened if he had told me about such a copy just before the tunnel?
He took his hands from his face and tried to listen.

The others, with their sleepy faces, weren’t taking the Russian seriously. The contrast between the tie cutting into Leskov’s neck and Adrian von Levetzov’s unaccustomedly open collar was so vivid that Perlmann succumbed to fury once more. But this time it was a fury on behalf of Leskov, even going so far as to defend that horrible green shirt. Millar, who had never appeared in the veranda without his blazer, was wearing a windbreaker, and there was a camera on the table in front of him. And Evelyn Mistral, who had always listened to the others with her pen at the ready, was drawing circles with her folded glasses on her unopened pad. The only curious face belonged to Giorgio Silvestri.

In the discussion, Leskov was spared at first, and a patronizing benevolence was apparent. But by now Leskov had shed his self-consciousness, and surprised everyone with his doggedness. He stood by what he had said, and to Perlmann’s alarm he quickly went on the attack. There was nothing now of the anxiety with which he had sat facing Perlmann in his room the previous evening, like a student before his first presentation. Leskov’s attacks, in spite of their factual harshness, were prevented from being insulting or wounding, largely because his flawed English had a unique charm. Many of his turns of phrase, which weren’t quite accurate, had an involuntary comedy about them, which he only noticed when he saw himself reflected in the faces of the others. Then he laughed loudest of all. The victims of his attacks were often uncertain: had he meant it seriously? Or did he perhaps not know exactly what he had just said? Above all Achim Ruge, who seemed to have no sense of humor at all today, seemed bothered by this uncertainty, and when he took out a pack of aspirin, Laura Sand burst out laughing.

Leskov noticed the hesitancy on the part of the others more and more often, and more and more quickly. Then he repeated his reservation in different words, and in most cases the variation in expression showed that he actually had meant exactly what he had said. After some time the doubts of the others fled. His initial phrasing was taken seriously and the fact that linguistic expression as a theme in its own right had disappeared made the discussion more tart and direct. Evelyn Mistral was writing now, and Millar hung his camera over the back of his chair. The sickly sweet tobacco smell filled the whole veranda. Von Levetzov opened a window.

He, Philipp Perlmann, had been prepared, in cold blood, to murder that person up there at the front, who was now, brazenly and without the slightest vanity, keeping to the point. As he scribbled on the back of Leskov’s submission by way of self-disguise, Perlmann desperately sought a posture – an internal maneuver – that might save him from being totally suffocated by the feelings of shame and guilt that engulfed everything else. He tried to see Leskov only externally, as just a body, so to speak, and to concentrate on the things that repelled him: the sweat on his bald head, the bulges of his bull’s neck, his sausage fingers. It was a cheap, vulgar trick, and afterwards Perlmann’s shame was all the greater for it.