27
He was relieved that no one was standing behind the reception desk when he stepped into the hotel lobby. Sticking from his pigeonhole was Leskov’s text, the fatal stack of papers that he had at this very spot, twenty-one hours ago, handed to a distracted, impatient Giovanni. The others had collected their copies, but there was still one in Silvestri’s box. Perlmann quickly went round the counter and took the sheets from his own pigeonhole. He was tempted to take Silvestri’s copy as well, and had already begun to stretch out his arm out when he heard a noise in the next room and quickly withdrew.
On the stairs, walking ahead of a group of people in evening dress, von Levetzov was coming towards him. Before von Levetzov could say anything, Perlmann raised his rolled-up manuscript a little bit high, said hello and slipped past the people, taking two steps at a time, relieved that the group which was now once again occupying the whole width of the stairs, was between them. It wouldn’t have done any good if I had taken Silvestri’s copy away, he thought as he turned into his corridor. It would probably only have led to confusion. Perhaps even provoked suspicion. You can make copies of copies. And more from those. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands.
In his room he went first to his cupboard and shoved the text in the top laundry drawer among his shirts. Then he looked round. The contrast between the cramped room that afternoon and this great space was overwhelming. He felt as if he had spent days in that gloomy, musty den. He waited anxiously for the luxury of the room to seem once more like something forbidden, something he was no longer permitted. But that feeling didn’t come, and after a while he turned on the gleaming, decorated brass tap and ran a bath.
It was nearly eight o’clock, and he was amazed at how calmly he was approaching the moment in which he would confront his colleagues for the first time as an undiscovered fraudster. It was only when he was sitting in the marble tub that he understood that this peace was the indifference of complete mental exhaustion. After two days of wandering around, of hopelessness and despair, all that remained within him was a dull void.
That void, which bordered on insensitivity, persisted as he slowly went down the stairs, and he carried it before him like a protective shield as he stepped into the full dining room with the Saturday evening guests, and sat down at the table next to Evelyn Mistral, grateful that the other chair next to him was free because of Silvestri’s absence.
The others were already at work on their starters. The conversation in which Millar, Ruge and Laura Sand had plainly been involved broke off, and the subsequent silence, broken by the sounds of cutlery and laughter from the next table, sounded to Perlmann’s ears like amazed startled observation: he’s come to dinner again for the first time in four days, and even then he’s late. Without looking at anyone Perlmann started to eat his avocado. It tasted of nothing; the white, floury flesh was just like any random substance in his mouth. He prepared himself to look at them, and each time he dug his spoon into the pale-green flesh with a twist of his hand, it was as if that moment were being delayed for ever.
At last he raised his head and looked at the others, one after the other, trying not to make the sequence seem too mechanical. Their eyes, which must have been resting on him for quite some time, seemed to reach him only now, and the important thing was to resist their gaze, protected by the certainty that they couldn’t read his thoughts. They don’t know. They will never find out. He felt his pulse quickening when he looked at Millar, who raised his eyebrows in ironic resignation; he had to meet his gaze for a moment, lest he avert his eyes too early, like an admission of guilt.
But overall it was easier than he had expected, and after a jokey remark from Laura Sand about his long absence, conversation resumed. The everyday nature of the topics gave Perlmann the sense of being safe with his dangerous secret; but it also clearly showed him how alone he was with the drama of his experiences over the past few days, and the degree of isolation he would have to maintain if his deception was to remain undiscovered.
No one said a word about the text they had received from him. He didn’t need to invoke a single one of the reactions that he had assembled on the jetty at Portofino and later on the bus. He must be mad after all, but there was no denying that even though he was pleased about it, he was somehow hurt as well. They can’t have been painfully touched by Leskov’s text either. What hurt him most – and again he was aware of the absurdity of the sensation – was that even Evelyn Mistral, sitting next to him, didn’t make a single remark about the text, even though it had many points in common with her own subject. When their eyes met he could discern no disapproval, but her smile was fainter than usual, as if she were afraid of hurting him.
During the main course, which he shovelled mechanically into himself with his eye focused on his plate, he defended Leskov’s text in his mind. He tried himself out as a particularly strict reader and as a mocking critic. But even then, he thought, one could not ignore the substance and originality of this outline, and by the time dessert arrived he was so absorbed in the defense of the text that he almost regretted having to wait until Monday morning to defend it publicly. A faint feeling of dizziness and a heat in his face warned him not to be driven any further in that direction. But then his furious doggedness passed. He lit a cigarette and turned to Evelyn Mistral to talk to her about the text.
At that moment the waiter’s black arm appeared with the silver tray, on which there lay a telegram.
‘For you, Dottore,’ said the waiter when Perlmann turned his head towards him. ‘It just arrived.’
Kirsten, he thought suddenly, Kirsten has had an accident, and that thought suddenly filled him so completely that all the things that had preoccupied and tormented him over the last few days and hours seemed to have been erased. With trembling fingers he tore open the telegram and unfolded the sheet. He took in the text with a single glance: Arriving Monday Genoa 15.05 Alitalia 00432. Grateful to be picked up. Vassily Leskov.
For one or two seconds he didn’t understand. The message was too unexpected and too far away from the thought about Kirsten that had wiped everything out for a moment. Then, when the meaning of the words on the glued white strip seeped into his consciousness, the world around him became colorless and quiet, and time froze. All his strength fled, and he felt the weight of his body as never before. So that’s what it feels like when everything’s over, he thought, and after a while a further thought formed in the hollow, dull interior of his mind: I’ve been waiting for this for years.
He must have sat there motionless for a long time, because when Evelyn Mistral pushed an ashtray under his hand and he looked up, he saw a long piece of white ash fall from the cigarette. She was looking at him with an expression of uncertain concern, when she pointed at the telegram and asked, ‘Bad news?’
For a moment Perlmann was tempted to tell that open face, that bright, warm voice everything, regardless of the consequences. And if, when she pushed the ashtray at him, she had touched him with her hand, he thought later, that was actually what would have happened. So unbearable was the feeling of isolation that spread within him like an ice-cold poison.
But then, for the first time since the waiter had held out the silver tray in front of him, he saw the expressions on the faces of the others. They weren’t mistrustful expressions, faces that displayed suspicious feelings. Rather they were mild expressions, with a hint of curiosity. Not unfriendly faces, on the contrary, even Millar’s eyes seemed to hold a willingness to be sympathetic. And yet they were eyes that were all directed at him, as they had been before on that bus. Perlmann felt nausea welling up within him, he got to his feet, stuffed the telegram into his jacket pocket and ran out across the lobby to the toilet, where he closed himself in and threw up in quick, violent spasms.
When his retching ebbed and only trickles of burning gastric acid ran from his mouth and nose, he went out to the wash basin, rinsed his mouth and wiped his face with his handkerchief. The expensive wash basins of gleaming marble, th
e fashionable faux-antique taps of flashing brass and the huge mirrored wall were at that point unbearable. He avoided catching his own eye, and locked himself in a stall again to have a think.
Going back to the table was unimaginable. Admittedly, it would look very peculiar to the others, and border on impertinence if he didn’t come back after his abrupt departure. The most varied conjectures would be made about the apparently dramatic content of the telegram. But now that complete social ostracism lay ahead this was no longer of any importance. The only unpleasant thing was – and on the edge of his consciousness Perlmann was amazed that such a thing could preoccupy him at such a moment – that his cigarettes and the red lighter that Kirsten had given him in the train were still over there on the table.
His thoughts went no further than these banal reflections. There was an impenetrable grey wall there, and a curious feeling of inanition. Never in his whole life had it been more important to think and plan clearly. But he faced this task like someone who had never come into contact with such intellectual activities; like someone who hadn’t even mastered the ABC of any sort of planning that extended beyond the next moment. Body and emotion had reacted immediately; thought, on the other hand, was sluggish and wouldn’t move from the spot. He felt how hard it was. Sitting on the toilet seat, he stared at the white door in front of his nose and registered that there was no graffiti on it. He felt the burning aftertaste of vomit on his gums and crumpled up the wet handkerchief in his fist. When two men came in and went on talking in Italian at the urinal, he involuntarily made his breathing very shallow and didn’t move. He could only grasp a single thought, and it repeated itself at increasingly short intervals, like an accelerating echo: A day and a half. I have a day and a half left.
28
When the two men had gone, Perlmann left the stall, checked through a chink in the door that none of his colleagues was in the hall, and hurried back up to his room. Sitting on the edge of the bed he reread the crumpled telegram. Leskov had sent it. He could see on the white strip at the top right: yesterday afternoon just before four o’clock in St Petersburg. The other details, recorded in a code, were not quite clear to him. But plainly the message had been transmitted via Milan and Genoa to Santa Margherita, and had arrived shortly after half-past seven. If the connection had been quicker and the telegram had been brought to me before Signora Morelli started copying this morning, I wouldn’t have become a fraudster, and wouldn’t now face professional annihilation. He took another good look: it was three minutes to four when the message had been dispatched in St Petersburg. Perlmann’s ship had been supposed to set off from Genoa at a quarter past three, but in the end it had been almost half-past. Three minutes to four – the storm had already been raging. By then it was already clear that he would come. It was already clear. It was already a fact.
That Leskov was stuck in St Petersburg because his exit permit had been refused and his mother was sick had been axiomatic in all of Perlmann’s calculations. These two independent obstacles had given him the impression that they were insurmountable, so that he hadn’t even begun to consider the possibility of Leskov’s arrival. And now, through some unexpected concatenation of circumstances, Leskov had been able to free himself after all, and everything was collapsing. And yet the information in Leskov’s letters had sounded so definitive, so immutable.
Perlmann’s emptied stomach convulsed painfully. He went to the bathroom and slowly drank a glass of lukewarm water. As he did so his eye fell on the pack of sleeping pills. He knew precisely how many were left. Nonetheless, he took the box over to the red armchair and checked: seven. That’s not enough, not even with alcohol. If my doctor hadn’t recently been on holiday, I’d have had enough by now and I’d be able to do it. He went to the window, opened it and stopped, as he usually did, two steps behind the balustrade. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cool night air, and felt his stomach cramp slowly easing as a slight dizziness set
in. He heard cars pulling up down below, voices moving across the terrace to the flight of steps, laughter, the Saturday evening outside guests driving off.
He took two paces, held on to the balustrade with both hands and looked down the wall of the house. The only row of windows without the obstacle of a balcony. He would crash against light-brown marble. He wouldn’t do it now, of course, not till after midnight or in the early hours of the morning when everyone was asleep. To be quite sure, he would have to jump head-first, and it would take three or four endless, terrible seconds before his head touched the stone. He closed the window and leaned his head against his hands, which were clamped around the handle of the window. For a moment everything went black.
When he straightened up again, there was a knock at the door. The thought of having to talk to someone now, even just a few words through the door, threw him into a panic. He had never before felt so exposed and defenseless. He had nothing to offer the presence of someone else at that moment, and even that presence, he felt, would crush him. And even so, he was pleased at the knocking, which freed him from the frozen solitude of the last few minutes. Halfway to the door he turned round and fetched the pack of sleeping pills, which he stuffed with cold fingers into his sponge bag in the bathroom before opening the door.
It was Evelyn Mistral, bringing him his cigarettes and the red lighter.
‘We were worried when you didn’t come back,’ she said with an uncertain, inquisitive look. ‘Bad news?’ Then her eyes narrowed a little, and she added more quietly: ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
He stared at her straw-colored hair, her oval face, its complexion looking even darker than usual in the faint lighting of the corridor, and at the skewed T-shirt that she wore under her broad-shouldered raw silk jacket. The temptation to ask her in and, in the intimacy of his room, far from the eyes of the others, to confess everything, was as overwhelming and physically tangible as a wave crashing over him. He lowered his head and pressed a hand against his forehead, just above his closed eyes.
‘Everything is all right,’ he said in English when he looked at her again.
He saw immediately that her face assumed a hurt and embarrassed expression. It was the first time since their initial conversation by the pool that he had refused the special intimacy of Spanish, which they had always spoken when they were alone. And even though he hadn’t addressed her directly, it was as if he had now destroyed the closeness and the magic that her Spanish tú had held for him. It hurt like a farewell, and pain mingled with despair that he would never be able to explain to her that it had arisen out of a helpless attempt to protect himself.
‘And thank you,’ he said, pointing at the cigarettes as he reached for the door handle.
‘Yes, all right. Good night, then,’ she said quietly, and left without looking at him again. Perlmann threw himself on the bed, buried his head in the pillow, and after a while he subsided into a series of slow, dry sobs.
When Perlmann sat back up and went to the bathroom to wash his face, he felt the cold, desperate strength of a person who has just burned all his bridges. He lit a cigarette and all of a sudden he was capable of clearly and methodically thinking about his situation. He banished from his consciousness the image of his head smashing on the marble, shattering and being crushed to a pulp as he now, more coolly this time and with a synoptic view, considered putting an end to his life.
What would such a deed look like to the others? From Monday evening onwards – when the truth came to light, after Leskov had seen the text that had been handed out – as far as the others were concerned Perlmann would simply be a craven fraudster lacking the courage to even come clean to them. Dead, Perlmann would no longer have the chance to explain anything, referring to his distress and explaining to one or other of them – perhaps even to Leskov himself – his strong feeling that the text contained so many thoughts that were also his own that in a sense it was also his text. His deception would be subjected to the simplest and most superficial interpretation, and he would no
longer be there to mitigate the judgment and make it more sophisticated. No one would take the trouble to pursue it, but the suspicion would spread that Philipp Perlmann, the prize winner with the invitation to Princeton, might have copied the work of others before, although perhaps not so brazenly as he had this final time.
Perlmann tried to adopt the view that this might all be a matter of complete indifference to him: as long as he was in the world and experiencing something, the time had not yet come; and when it did, he would not be there to endure it. He was unable to find an error in his reasoning on this point, but, confusingly, regardless of its simplicity and transparency, it struck him as fallacious, almost insidious, and so unconvincing that it immediately eluded him again as soon as he ceased to grasp it by concentrating on it particularly hard.
The idea that certain people might henceforth see him merely as an audacious trickster, a cheap fraudster, was easy to bear. Angelini’s opinion, for example, left Perlmann cold. And, in fact, he didn’t care too much about Ruge either, he reflected with a certain surprise. Even though Perlmann had by now become quite fond of Ruge, he had for four weeks been afraid of him, this respectable man with the chuckling laugh, in which Perlmann hadn’t been able to keep from hearing a dangerous self-righteousness, often against his better judgment. But now, when fear should have overwhelmed him, the big bald head with the watery grey eyes behind the broken glasses seemed merely alien and distant and had nothing to do with him. The fact that Ruge had defended Laura Sand’s beautiful images of suffering barely did anything to change that.
A more difficult case was Adrian von Levetzov, whom Perlmann had come to revere, even with all his affectation. Outwardly, he would join in with the chorus of outrage; that was the game. But Perlmann hoped – and thought it possible – that von Levetzov might secretly bring him a certain understanding and even a certain sympathy. What had von Levetzov said to Millar at the end of that session? I could imagine that he’s not concerned with it at all. Once again, Perlmann imagined von Levetzov’s tall figure, leaving the veranda with that strange posture of his. No, von Levetzov’s judgment was not a matter of indifference to him.