The new time, he thought in the taxi, was more abstract than the other one, and more static. It didn’t flow, but consisted in an arid succession of moments which one had to live through, or rather, deal with. A lack of present, he was puzzled to note as he looked out through the open car window at the smooth, gleaming water, was suddenly no longer a problem. In the new time, which would last until some point tomorrow afternoon, before disappearing from the world along with his consciousness, present did not exist even as a possibility, so that one couldn’t miss it either. All that existed now was this: coolly calculating and sticking to his schedule in the planning and execution of his intention. Perlmann wound up the window, asked the driver to turn off the radio and leaned back in the tatty seat whose broken springs stuck into his back. He didn’t open his eyes until the taxi stopped under the yellowed plane trees in front of the station.
On Monday evening, when he had waited with Kirsten on the platform, he had been thankful of that meaningless, shrill ringing noise. It had freed them both for a while from the embarrassment of being together in silence. In his mind’s eye Perlmann saw Kirsten’s liberated laughter as she held her hands over her eyes. Today the penetrating, endless sound rendered him defenseless, and he went back outside to the plane trees.
He would leave a piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number on the desk, so that they didn’t need to rummage for it in his belongings. That was quite natural. After all, Kirsten hadn’t been in Konstanz for as much as three months. Which of his colleagues would call her? In all likelihood von Levetzov would take on the task. Such bad tidings were, if possible, best passed on in the mother tongue, and Ruge would take a backseat. But how would his colleagues find out in the first place?
The carabinieri would have to find something in Perlmann’s wallet to show that he had been staying at the Miramare. Unless the car went up in flames. It was the first time that Perlmann thought of the possibility of burning to death at the wheel, and he started perspiring with terror at the idea that the flames might engulf him when he wasn’t even dead, perhaps only unconscious. He was relieved that the sound of the arriving train tore him away from that idea.
The rhythmical knocking of the wheels did him good; it gave him the feeling that everything was still in suspension. He was free and could at any time revoke his desperate decision. He would have loved to be carried along by that knocking for ever, and was annoyed that he had taken a slow train that stopped at every station. When the knocking started again after a halt, and grew faster again, he managed to escape for a few minutes into the thought that things weren’t that bad, it was just a text, after all, a few written pages – that couldn’t possibly be a reason to put a violent end to everything. But then, when the train stopped again, he was seized once more with horror at the idea of having to live through the discovery of his plagiarism and the ostracism that it would entail, minute by minute, hour by hour, until the end of his life. When an old woman in a black crocheted headscarf sat down opposite him in Nervi, made a friendly remark and gave him a maternal smile, he got up without a word and went to another compartment where the seats were free.
The worst of it was that because it was supposed to look like an accident he couldn’t sort anything out before his death. There were people he would have liked to say something to. Kirsten above all, even though the right sentences wouldn’t come to mind. He would have liked to see Hanna again, too. He owed her an explanation for that sudden ghostly phone call in which he hadn’t asked her a single thing about her own life. He tried to imagine what she must look like now. He saw that flat face in front of him, framed in her blonde hair with the single dark strand, but her face remained frozen in the past, and refused to develop through the three decades that had passed in the meantime.
He would have liked to walk through his bright Frankfurt apartment again, sit down at his desk for one last time and look, for one last time, at Agnes’s photographs. And then his diaries. He wished he still had the chance to destroy them. This way, Kirsten would find them now. He tried in vain to remember what was actually in them. He fervently hoped he was mistaken, but when he stepped on to the platform in Genoa, he had the oppressive feeling that he was leaving behind a big pile of kitsch.
He went out into the station portico, had to put off a number of taxi drivers and finally found a quiet corner. He would take the smallest car they had, one with a short hood and no crumple zones. So that it would happen quickly and he could be sure that it would work. Suddenly, he felt he was having an attack of diarrhea and ran to the toilet. It was a false alarm. His heart was pounding in his throat when he went back to the car rental company’s counter. He stopped in a corner and forced himself to breathe calmly. Renting the car, in itself, didn’t force him into anything. He could always bring it back as if nothing had happened. He had to utter that thought out loud to himself a few times, slowly and with great concentration, before he managed to contain his excitement, and he had a sense that he could be sure of his voice.
The counters of all three companies were closed. He hadn’t expected that, and he hadn’t noticed before, even though they were all right in front of his nose as he stepped out. For a few minutes he just stood there, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed into the void. Then he slowly walked over to the timetable and checked when the next train left for Santa Margherita. On the way to the platform he paused abruptly, bit his lip and then walked back to the taxis.
‘Here you are, after all,’ grinned the driver he had turned away before.
Perlmann slammed the car door shut. ‘To the airport,’ he said in a tone that made the driver turn round and look at him in amazement before he drove off.
‘I’m sorry, Signore,’ said the Avis lady, with bright make-up and a red dress, ‘but we just have one car free, a big Lancia. All the others are out until the middle of the week. There’s a big industrial fair in the city.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Perlmann said irritably, fighting down his mounting hysteria, ‘then why is your counter at the station closed, and why are the other companies here closed as well?’
‘That, Signore, I can’t tell you,’ the hostess snapped back and turned her attention to her computer.
Perlmann looked at his watch: half-past eleven. In five hours it would be dusk, and it could take a long time before he had found a suitable location.
‘All right, I’ll take it,’ he said.
The hostess took her time before starting to fill in the form. How long did he want to rent the car for?
The question took Perlmann aback, as if he had been asked something obscene. That he was being asked for information that extended beyond his death and was hence without any significance for him once again made him keenly aware how deep the gulf had become between his private time, which was about to come to an end, and public time, the time of contracts and money, that would go on for ever.
‘For two days,’ he said hoarsely.
Would he be bringing it back tomorrow evening?
It was far too long before he finally, without any reason and with the feeling of saying something completely random, opted for a ‘yes’, and the hostess was visibly surprised at how little this customer, who had seemed so arrogant only a few moments before, seemed to know about his own plans.
What insurance did he want to take out? Did he want to include fully comprehensive cover?
‘The usual,’ Perlmann said tonelessly.
‘I’m sorry?’ the hostess asked, not trying to conceal her impatience.
‘The usual,’ Perlmann repeated with forced firmness, and had the feeling that she must be able to see how his face was burning. In the worst case, then, the police would be able to get to the hotel via his licence and Avis, he thought, when the hostess finally entered his local address.
As he walked towards the exit he stopped in front of the monitor showing the arriving flights. The last one currently on the list was coming from Paris and was supposed to be landing at five to three. It didn
’t matter in the slightest, he said to himself, where Leskov’s flight came from. There was, of course, no direct flight to here, but it really couldn’t have mattered less where Leskov changed. And the plane that he took tomorrow wouldn’t necessarily be a daily flight. Nonetheless, Perlmann stopped, smoked, and stared fixedly at the flickering screen. And when he had stamped out his second cigarette and looked up again, the flight was there: AZ 00423, 15.05 from Frankfurt.
For a moment Perlmann saw Leskov flailing and snorting his way through Frankfurt Airport in the threadbare loden coat that he had worn before. It was childish and, in his situation, grotesque, Perlmann thought, but the possibility of Leskov changing at his, Perlmann’s, airport enraged him, and he felt as if Leskov were violating his personal sphere. Irritated, he dismissed the image and went outside to the parking lot.
30
As he got into the long, dark-blue limousine, his eye immediately fell on the handbrake. In this car it was unusually far over towards the passenger seat. So, he would inevitably have to touch Leskov’s broad body when he freed the lever over the abyss. It gave him a feeling of helplessness that this idea held him prisoner for a moment, even though it was obsolete and no longer had any practical significance. In the end he managed to shake it off, and he unfolded the map.
For a frontal collision with a truck in which no one else would come to any harm, the coast road was out of the question. Heavy trucks would be unlikely to drive there, and it was also true that at the time in question there would be far too much traffic. For this plan the only possible road was the one via Molassana to Chiávari. He would have to assume that trucks drove there on Monday afternoons. It was disagreeable to him that his terrible scheme depended on other people and their temporal plans. Immediately, before it disappeared in darkness and silence, his own time would have to cross the time of others. When he set the map down on the seat beside him and lit a cigarette, Perlmann was overcome with nausea at the unbridled self-involvement expressed in such thoughts.
The handbrake was pulled up tight, and was only released the third time he pushed the button. As if in a dream, he thought, as he steered the car uncertainly out of the car park. He drove like a beginner, and very soon he had hit the curb and cut off someone’s right of way.
Judging by the map, the turn-off to Molassana was to the east of the center, so he drove first along the industrial plants and then the harbor, down a deserted road with dilapidated houses, dead construction sites and mountains of rubble. In spite of the radiant weather it was an oppressive backdrop, and he drove so quickly over the uneven cobbles and the many potholes that several times the steering wheel was knocked out of his hand. He saw no signs for the center, and when it was all becoming impossible he discovered that he was already on the way to Genova Nervi. He started sweating and took off his jacket. It wasn’t that bad, after all. He had just lost a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at most. He turned and took the next road that led into a residential district. ‘Straight ahead,’ said the sulky gas station attendant when Perlmann asked the way.
Immediately, it seemed to him, he found himself in one of the squares that he had passed – it was an eternity ago – on the way to the record shop. He hesitantly drove on, turned at random into the next street, had to do a loop because of the one-way system and ended up in the same square. The city center was curiously quiet this Sunday, there was no sign of the industrial fair, and he had to chase after the few passers-by to ask them the way.
‘Keep going along the river,’ an old man told him at last, dressed in his Sunday best and creeping past the dark shop windows with his walking stick. Only now did Perlmann see the river on the map. Annoyed with himself, he drove in the direction indicated. At a bus terminal he asked a driver.
‘Molassana is a well-known part of Genoa, a suburb; nobody needs a road sign,’ the driver replied to Perlmann’s reproachful remark, looking at him as if he had lost his marbles.
Behind the wheel, Perlmann cursed the misleading representation on the map, and only calmed down when he crossed the river, where there was in fact a road sign. He had just put his foot down on the accelerator when he braked and turned off to the right. I can’t get lost tomorrow. That would be hell. For a while he tried to reconstruct the direct route here in his head, cutting out the various diversions. But it didn’t work. The toing and froing had been too confusing. Five past one. He’ll be landing in exactly twenty-six hours. He took a few hasty drags, threw the cigarette out the window and drove back to the port road.
Driving back to Molassana, he stopped repeatedly and memorized the crucial spots. First of all there were the two ironmongers’ shops, which were precisely identical: the same size, both on a corner, both with rusty shutters. If you turned by the first, the one-way system forced you back to the port, while a similarly inconspicuous turning near the second led towards the center. On no account turn at the first. Next he had to be careful that at the square where the building with the portico stood he didn’t – as he had before – follow the tram tracks to the right, but take the bend to the left. At the construction site with the diversion he got lost twice: you had to turn off immediately past the bakery to get back to the main road. And finally, the place with all the bus stops was critical: you couldn’t follow the three-lane road into the underpass; you had to keep to the left and keep going along the cobbles at a sharp angle to the main arterial road. It was still a rather roundabout route, he thought. Probably there was a simpler one, but he couldn’t lose any more time.
At two o’clock he was back at the river, where he had turned. On the almost empty street he drove far too quickly. He was afraid of reaching a spot where it could be done, but even worse was the uncertainty, and it became more unbearable with every kilometer that didn’t match his requirements. He might have to wait longer for a truck. At the spot in question there had to be a rest area where he could park beside the road. He would have to be able to see the truck coming from a long way off, so that there was enough time to drive off, speed up and pull the car over to the left at the last moment. And it would have to be impossible for the driver to swerve. Ideally, there would be a cliff on his side of the road.
On the steep piece of road before the tunnel which cut off the loop into the mountains and formed the apex of the stretch, there was just such a point. Perlmann stopped, his heart thumping. No, this wouldn’t do, he thought, as he dried his moist hands with the towel. Having the long, stable hood between himself and the truck, everything depended on high speed, and even with this car he couldn’t achieve that on the mountain. Besides, the truck’s brakes could be damaged by the impact, and then, with the wreck of the Lancia in front of it, it would roll down with mounting speed and unforeseeable consequences.
After the tunnel there were a few spots which might have been possible in terms of the course of the road. But in those there were houses with people who leaned, gawking, in the windows. There would also be people like that tomorrow, and it would be impossible to do it in front of them. There were too many houses generally; one village followed on from the other. And everywhere there were people in the windows, hundreds of them, it seemed to Perlmann. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. On the map there was no sign of these hamlets.
He had already covered far more than half of the stretch when a piece of road that was the right length appeared: straight and at a slight slope, with a supporting wall on the other side. At the exact spot where he expected the collision to occur there was a road sign, black on white: pian dei ratti. At the end, where the truck would appear around the bend, there was a house, but the shutters were closed and it looked uninhabited. At the bend around which he came himself, there was a workshop for the cutting and grinding of slate slabs. People would be working there tomorrow. Perlmann drove to the spot where the trees meant that he couldn’t be seen from the workshop. The rest of the stretch was still long enough. Only stopping was a problem. On the right there was a sheer drop to the river, and in spite of the damaged cras
h barrier he could only get about half of the big car on to the narrow strip of grass. Nonetheless, he thought, it could be done here. But he would have to fix in his mind the features leading up to that spot so that he didn’t miss it tomorrow.
He turned and drove to the next road sign: so the name of the village was piana. After the road sign came a biggish, abandoned-looking factory building, then two well-tended houses and behind them, at the start of the bend, three pines with a big poster for Renault customer services. When he passed the poster, he was already in the bend with the workshop. He could see the sign that said pian dei ratti, and then it was only another fifty meters.
He wanted to drive down that stretch of road very slowly to etch it in his memory as sharply and in as detailed a way as possible. But a car with a bridal couple and a tail of rattling tins was hooting behind him like crazy, so that afterwards he had the impression that he couldn’t rely on his memory. He drove back, turned in the factory yard and repeated the whole thing. But it felt as if his memory was simply refusing to absorb the images. It was as if he was jinxed: every time he read the words pian dei ratti again, it was as if what he had just seen had been erased.
He needed more advance warning time and more pointers. Sweating, he drove two villages back, staring at the signs until his eyes hurt: tomorrow he would pass first monleone and then pianezza, which turned directly into piana. Then the pines and the poster, and finally pian dei ratti.
He stopped at the spot in question, exhausted, and lit a cigarette. When he looked forwards to gauge the distance again, he saw that a shutter had been pulled up at the house on the bend. Again he began to sweat. Had he ignored that before? Or had someone come home in the meantime? He put his glasses on his head, but still couldn’t make out whether someone was standing at the window. Perhaps the people were just away today, and tomorrow, when he came round the bend with Leskov, they would be leaning in the window. They would see the Lancia stopping at this unnatural spot, for who knows how long, and dashing off exactly as a truck came from down below. And they would see the car suddenly being pulled off the road. In his mind, Perlmann took up position there at the window: to any observer it would look intentional. There was no doubt about it.