Or should he sit up there and in dry words, stony-faced, tell the truth? What words would he use? How many sentences would he need? Where would he look? And when he had said it, what then? Could one, in fact, apologize for such a thing? Was it not almost mockery simply to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry’ and then get up and go? And where to?
Could one go on living with such ostracism? Really live and inwardly develop, so that you weren’t merely crouching and creeping, enduring and surviving, vegetating? You would have to find a possible way of making yourself independent of the judgment of others and of the need for recognition. A way of becoming free, truly free. All of a sudden Perlmann felt calmer. The surge of panic and despair subsided, and he seemed to be standing very close to a crucial, redeeming insight, the most important of his whole life. Why, then, should it not be possible to withdraw entirely from his professional role, his public identity, into his private, authentic person, the identity that was the only thing that counted?
Basically, it had been simply the pleasure of translating – his old love of jumping back and forth between linguistic worlds, his dream of being an interpreter – that had brought him back repeatedly to Leskov’s text. That was how he was. There was nothing wrong with it. He could stand by it. No intention to deceive had been involved, either consciously or as a hidden undercurrent. He was absolutely sure of that. It was just how things were. He didn’t need to persuade himself. And the rest – the rest had been self-defense. He had held Leskov’s text up in front of him as a shield protecting him against the intrusive eyes of the others, against their unchanging, monotonously updated expectations, which they treated as if people developed in an uninterrupted, linear fashion – as if the successful life consisted in making those professional decisions that were taken early, too early, and that hardly ever merited the name in any case, in total identification, with a complete lack of emotional detachment, decade after decade. What do you want to be? You have to be something. Whatever would become of him? Those were the principles his parents expressed over lunch and dinner. He had heard them countless times, and they had sunk into his deepest depths, and deeper still. They were sentences that had never been up for discussion. They came along hypnotically, as if they were completely natural, and in their monotonous, thoughtless repetition they became a background noise, so vast and all-consuming in its diabolical self-evidence that afterwards one couldn’t imagine what a life without it might be like.
You have to be something, or you’re nothing. That was the axiom, in all its perfidious simplicity and obviousness. He would take it, that iron axiom, Perlmann thought, he would summon all his powers, even those at the hindmost corner of his soul, and then use those concentrated powers to bend it until it broke. What he had become – a respected professor with prizes and an invitation to Princeton – he was as of tonight no longer. That was destroyed. But that was a long way from saying he was nothing now. There was a great deal left in him, a very great deal, and the others had no idea about it. He would lodge himself in there, and then it would be a question of making his soul quite spherical and coating it with wax so that everything would slide off it, even the hostile glances of the others. He would walk along the streets quite upright, with his head held high.
It was a liberating train of thought. But it was still new, so it threatened, as soon as it had concluded, to slip away again. He would have to repeat it often and, so to speak, internally perform it, until it was solidly rooted within him. Perlmann took the second half of the pill out of the box and swallowed it, along with what remained of the whisky. His finger didn’t hurt any more, and the itch in his scalp had faded away. He ate the sandwich. He had a future again. He felt comfortable in the deep armchair and was pleased that he immediately recognized the melody that reached him from across the bar. The crucial thing was not to lose one’s sense of proportion. What did it matter, from the point of view of eternity, whether the thirty-seven pages which were, in the end, quite unimportant, came from his pen or from Leskov’s? Who really cared seriously about that? There were milky ways and beyond them more milky ways, without end, and here, on this tiny clump of earth, imprisoned in their insignificant little lives, which would be completely forgotten after a few decades, they made a hell of their lives for a handful of letters. It was laughable, quite simply laughable. Perlmann tried to imagine what people’s coexistence would look like if everyone always considered himself and others from the point of view of eternity. But he couldn’t quite do it. The question was hard to grasp and kept slipping away again. But that didn’t matter. The main thing was not to lose sight of the correct proportions. The corrected proportions. Proportions.
When he – addressed by the waiter – started from his half-sleep, it was five to eleven and the room was empty. He was going to stop serving soon, the waiter said, and asked if Perlmann wanted anything else. Perlmann ordered a mineral water. He had a dry mouth and a thick, furry tongue. He no longer had the faintest idea of what had happened for the past hour. He was shivering. He didn’t know where to go from here. Not a single step. He still had four pills. That wasn’t enough. He took the text and went outside, without waiting for the waiter and without paying.
The cool night air made him dizzy, but it also felt good. On the way down to the big square he saw a garbage bin in a side street. It seemed to belong to a hotel or a restaurant, because kitchen smells came from the extractor fan above it, and he could hear the clatter of cutlery. Apart from a layer of potato peelings the bin was empty. That was the third time today that Perlmann had got rid of a text. He was good at it, and he felt as if he had been busy doing nothing else for weeks. But this time it was something special. Because this time it was completely pointless. It was as if he were destroying his copy of a newspaper in order to impose a news blackout.
Perlmann rested both arms on the edge of the bin and started laughing quietly. In the hope of relief he tried to keep that laughter going and to spur it on from within, but it was hysterical laughter that soon dried up and turned to retching. The papers fell on top of the rubbish.
At Piazza Vittorio Veneto he caught a taxi to the Regina Elena. He asked the driver to stop in a dark spot near the hotel. He flicked through his banknotes and gave him the biggest one, a 100,000 lire note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said.
‘Ma no, Signore,’ the driver stammered, ‘I can’t take that. Can’t you see what you’ve given me?’ He held the bill right under the ceiling light.
‘It’s fine,’ Perlmann said irritably and got out.
He sat right at the end of the little beach jetty reserved for hotel guests and set the pills down next to him. Walking into the water with his clothes on and swimming out further and further until his strength gave out. Since that day at the public baths it had always been a drama if his head went under water when he was swimming. But the pills helped. He wouldn’t feel much, and soon he would lose consciousness.
A wave of pill-weariness washed over him, and then there was a void. He was glad the beach was unlit. He could only think very slowly, and often lost the thread.
It was an undramatic, quiet way of saying goodbye to life. No onlookers, no excitement after a bombshell. Tomorrow a police boat would pull him from the water. That was all. It accorded with his desire to disappear unnoticed from the world. He wished he could also magically ensure that all the traces that he had left in the minds of the others would be erased. As if he had never existed.
A textbook suicide, he thought, practically classic: a man who can see no way of escaping his shame. Forty-eight hours ago, after looking down the hotel facade, he had rejected that way out. It had been the thought of the judgment of the others that had put him off. But back then there had still seemed to be some leeway, a set of other possibilities. He could still plan things that might have prevented his exposure. And that had created a perspective from which something could be pondered and rejected. Now that the only possibility left to him was the black water out there, when he thought about the othe
rs he had a new, strange experience. It was actually too complicated for his heavy head, and everything was intermittently suspended as if he were having a blackout. Then he shivered all the more violently in his thin trousers on the cold stone. Nonetheless, he kept returning to that experience. He homed in on it and, in the end, he managed to grasp it more precisely and dependably.
It was the experience of an unexpected inner disengagement. He had to concentrate on one of those feared people, on that person’s face, but even more on their atmospheric outlines, on the kind of situation that they created through their presence. The important thing was not to avoid the threatening and almost unbearable feelings which arose when he thought of the judgment that that person up there in their illuminated hotel room had by now formed about him, and to which tomorrow they might, once he had been found, add the thought of cowardice. The important thing was to let these feelings get near him without resisting them, and to stand up to them with disciplined calm. After a while, the person in question lost their threatening, oppressive proximity and began to retreat. His dented soul was able to bulge outwards, the tormenting feelings slowly died away, and he was free. It was an ethereal and fragile freedom that was coming into being, a floating present in which one seemed to be balanced on the point of a needle. He was on a narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the life behind him, a life interwoven with the lives of others, and the darkness in front of him, in which life would be no more. Being free like this could have been a form of happiness, had it not been for the black water, which would rise higher with each step he took. And without the water, he sensed with great clarity, that freedom would not exist. If he turned round and returned to the land, it would have fled in a moment, and the others would have buried him beneath their stares.
The one face that refused to go away was Kirsten’s. On the contrary, the longer he saw it in his mind’s eye, the harder it was to let go of it. He had had no opportunity to explain it to her. The news of his suicide, followed by the news of his deception, would fall on her as if from a clear sky. For her they would stand together dry and mute, those two pieces of information: he had perpetrated a deception, and when the matter came to light, he had walked into the water. He would sound like the little clerk who had taken money from the cash register.
It was so shabby, so shockingly shabby, that familiar story, its short version untrue, even for the little clerk. Somehow Kirsten might sense that it wasn’t true for him, either. But she had no way of getting to the true story all by herself, or even getting close to it. He had never talked to her about his profession slipping away. Or about his unsuccessful delimitation from others. Or about the fact that a preoccupation with languages was his attempt to regain a tiny shadow of the fleeting present. Those weren’t things that one could explain to a person of her age. Or at least he had always assumed as much.
But perhaps that was wrong, Perlmann thought, and he started talking to his daughter under his breath. At first the words came out only haltingly. He spoke them into the quiet, dark water, and only occasionally raised his eyes to look into Kirsten’s face for signs of understanding. Later the things he had to say came fluently. He began to sound more convincing, even to himself, and Kirsten started nodding. Admittedly, his tongue remained heavy, his lips didn’t always obey, and some words were blurred. But Kirsten wasn’t repelled. She understood, so he didn’t need to be embarrassed and was able to go on talking, more and more, until everything was completely clear, its every impulse comprehensible. So that he could be forgiven.
He put the pills in his pocket, got up stiffly and uncertainly and went back to the street. He couldn’t drive himself in this state. But he could persuade a taxi driver to fetch his passport and drive him to Konstanz. If he paid a princely sum, one would certainly be found. He could sleep on the back seat, and by the time they arrived tomorrow morning he would have a clear head again, and clear speech. Then he could tell Kirsten everything, explain everything, just as he had just done a moment ago, only much more thoroughly and much better.
40
In the lobby of the Regina Elena, inebriated wedding guests were rowdily forcing a glass of champagne on the night porter, who was trying to conceal his annoyance behind a sour smile. Under these circumstances Perlmann couldn’t possibly ask him to call a cab. He wasn’t even a hotel guest. He had no gettoni, so phone boxes were of no use to him. He went over to the Miramare and leaned against the wall at the foot of the steps. Dart in quickly, say the few words to Giovanni and then immediately come back here to wait, unseen, for the taxi. He wouldn’t be in there for ten seconds. That he would, during that time, meet one of the others, was unlikely. It was already half-past twelve. But it wasn’t impossible. Laura Sand, for example, sometimes took another walk at this time.
Perlmann climbed the first few steps until he could see the entrance beyond the edge of the terrace. His heart was thumping, and his breathing, involuntarily, was quite shallow. Giovanni was propped with one elbow on the counter, reading the paper. Rethink. Again he leaned against the wall. Otherwise he would have to look for a taxi stand in town. He could drag himself as far as the station. But hardly any trains stopped there in the middle of the night. What would taxis be doing there? And he couldn’t remember another rank. He would wander, lead-limbed, through the quiet alleys, each step a form of torture. Again he glanced across to the reception. Giovanni was now leaning against the counter on outstretched arms, reading the page under him. Shadows stirred in the bar, and a moment later a grey-haired man walked through the hall to the elevator. It was too dangerous. Perlmann would have to wait for another hour or two. He closed his eyes. A paralysing irresolution took hold of him.
‘Buona sera, Dottore,’ said Signora Morelli, coming energetically downstairs, her coat flapping behind her. ‘Is . . . is something wrong? Are you waiting for someone?’
‘No, no . . . nothing,’ Perlmann replied, startled, and making a special effort with his pronunciation. And because it seemed impossible not to say anything else, he added: ‘You’re still here?’
‘Yes, sadly,’ she said and pulled a face. ‘Taxes, we have nothing but problems with taxes. It gets worse by the year. I was working on it until a moment ago.’ She smiled. ‘Well, yes, and it’s mad to run such a hotel without more managerial staff, almost like a family business.’
It was the first time he had heard anything so personal from her, and if he had still belonged to her world, and the world in general, rather than mutely nodding he would have loved to show an interest.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, already turning to go, ‘I put the original of your text in your pigeonhole. In my haste on Saturday I left it by the photocopier. I hope you didn’t miss it.’
Perlmann didn’t understand. And he didn’t want to understand. Never again did he want to have to understand a sentence with words in it like text, original and copy. Never again.
‘Venga,’ the signora said when she saw his blank face, and went back upstairs. It was impossible not to follow her. She shoved aside Giovanni, who looked up in surprise from the newspaper and was saying hello, and took a text out of Perlmann’s pigeonhole. ‘Eccolo,’ she said. ‘But now I really have to go. Buona notte!’
Giovanni looked at him quizzically when she had gone.
‘A taxi,’ he said. ‘I need a taxi.’ Giovanni reached for the receiver.
Perlmann realized then that he was confused by the fact that he stood there, contrary to his plan, as Giovanni made the call. He held the text limply in his dangling hand, and he held it the way you hold something that you’re going to drop in the gutter at the next possible opportunity. Never again did he want to hold a text in his hand. Never again.
The taxi company took its time, and an unpleasant, silent wait began. It was just to do something that Perlmann looked down at his hand that held the text. And it was a moment before he noticed the small, long card stuck under the paperclip that held the pile of papers together. Even before he knew what it said, something
in him began to vibrate. He abruptly bent his arm, brought the card up in front of his eyes and read: 6 copie. Per il gruppo di Perlmann. Distribuire, come sempre. He didn’t understand. I threw away the original a little while ago. But his breathing quickened, he read again, lifted the card and saw the title: mestre non è brutta. Underneath, his name.
For a few seconds he stood there motionless, blind and deaf to his surroundings, wrapped in the beating of his blood. Maria. The call from Genoa. She finished typing up my notes. In spite of the people from Fiat.
It lasted until the thought had found its way to his body. Then Perlmann started running. He collided with the door, twisted his ankle on the steps and lost a shoe, but in spite of the pain and in spite of the cold cobbles he ran as he had never run in his whole life, clutching the rolled-up text in his fist like a relay baton. He got a stitch in his side and started coughing. Good God! I hope I’m thinking the right thing! Now he saw the figure of Signora Morelli walking along the marina. He ran with lungs that threatened to burst. There was no breath left to call out and, at last, when his soft knees refused to support him and he began to stumble, he had caught up with her. He couldn’t get a word out, just bent down breathlessly and coughed, his hands pressed to his ribs because of the stitch.
‘This note here,’ he panted at last, and now he no longer cared that his mouth wasn’t properly obeying him, ‘does this mean that you copied the text six times?’