Perlmann's Silence

  ‘Sì, Dottore,’ she said, and on her face her initial surprise made way for an expression of preparation for self-defense.

  ‘And those were the copies that you put in my colleagues’ pigeonholes on Saturday morning?’

  ‘Sì.’

  ‘And you didn’t copy and distribute any other text?’

  ‘No, Signor Perlmann,’ she said, now visibly annoyed with this breathless questioning, ‘this is the text that Maria gave me. I haven’t had another one.’

  He held the papers up as closely in front of Signora Morelli’s face as if she were half-blind.

  ‘This text here? This one here? No other one?’

  Signora Morelli’s tone changed when Perlmann lowered the pages and she recognized the harbingers of tears in his face.

  ‘But yes, Dottore,’ she said gently, ‘it was this text here, this one exactly, and only this one. What have I done wrong?’

  ‘Wrong? Nothing, nothing,’ he stammered between the sobs that he could no longer control, ‘on the contrary, this is . . . this is my salvation.’

  He turned away and searched in vain for a handkerchief. Then he rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and looked at her again.

  ‘Many apologies,’ he said quietly and vainly resisted his returning tears. ‘I can’t explain it to you, but I have never felt such relief. It’s . . . indescribably great. Indescribably so.’

  When he took his hand away from his eyes, she was looking at him as if she were seeing him properly for the first time. She smiled and touched his arm. ‘Then you should go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘You look completely exhausted.’

  He watched her go until, without turning round, she disappeared down a side street. It was a moment of presence. A redemptive present that he would not have thought possible.

  Then, when he walked back very slowly to savor the precious present, he felt as if he were treading on needles each time he set down his ice-cold foot, and a stinging pain in his lungs pierced him from time to time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more apart from his overwhelming relief. No plagiarism. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism. It was like slowly, disbelievingly, emerging from a very great, very dark depth, accompanied by a jumpiness that he thought he could feel in every fibre of his body. Again he read Maria’s instruction on the card. And then twice. It was that text that Signora Morelli had copied, exactly this one and only this one. That was what she said. Did she say it?

  When he turned the corner and saw the crooked pines, which were no longer illuminated at this hour, but only stood out against the night sky with their milky greyish green, his relief blew apart, and he felt as if he were being pressed down into the depths again by an incredibly heavy weight. Giovanni must have made the copies himself and distributed them. That’s why she doesn’t know anything about Leskov’s text. An iron claw grabbed him by the chest, and each individual twinge in his foot was genuine torture as he hobbled hastily back, slipped into his lost shoe on the steps and walked, breathing heavily, to the reception desk.

  ‘On Friday night,’ he gasped, ‘when the football match was on television, I brought you a text. What did you do with it?’

  Giovanni glanced down. ‘Erm . . . nothing,’ he said and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then, when he had expelled all the smoke, he looked at Perlmann uncertainly. ‘It was like this . . . I wasn’t really concentrating, so to speak, because . . . You see, there was this equalizer in the ninetieth minute, and then the penalty shoot-out . . . and afterwards I couldn’t remember exactly what you’d said to me, so I just put the text in your pigeonhole. I’m sorry if that meant something went wrong, but it was so exciting that . . .’

  Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled in slow motion. Then he rested his hand on Giovanni’s. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Exactly the right thing. I’m very glad. La ringrazio. Mille grazie. Grazie.’

  A stone fell from Giovanni’s heart. ‘Really? I . . . You know, I had quite a guilty conscience because of it . . . Is there anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ Perlmann said with a smile, ‘and once again, many thanks!’

  Giovanni made a clumsy movement with his arm, interrupted halfway, which expressed his admiration better than any word or any facial expression could.

  Perlmann walked to the elevator, but didn’t wait for it. Instead he started hobbling up the stairs. He took his time. He was too wound up to have been able to turn it into a sentence. But the feeling was there: he could move freely in the hotel again. He wasn’t a cheat.

  When the line started crackling he put the phone down. What had he actually wanted to say to her? And in an alarming call at a quarter to two in the morning. And with that heavy tongue. His hand enclosed the red lighter. Now he didn’t need to explain anything to her. He had nothing to apologize for. He could meet his daughter just as he had before. He was back from no-man’s-land. No plagiarism. No plagiarism, and no murder. He repeated the words again and again, loudly and in his thoughts, who knows how many times, until, hollowed out by fatigue, they were no longer the expression of an emotion, but only a mechanical inner echo that grew increasingly sluggish.

  If I hadn’t gained self-confidence by writing in that harbor pub, and the courage to stand by my own notes, I wouldn’t have called Maria, and the text wouldn’t have been finished in time. If I hadn’t taken that tour of the harbor, and hadn’t got worked up about interpreting, I wouldn’t have ended up writing in the harbor bar. So exactly the same inclination that had put him in the greatest danger, had also saved him. Perlmann sighed. That connection made him feel that he didn’t just owe the redeeming turn of events to a concatenation of coincidences, but that they had their origin within him, in his way of thinking and feeling.

  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 Regi
na 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.