Perlmann's Silence

  Perlmann picked up the six pages and held them in front of his nose. He wasn’t in a state to read a single word with any understanding. The blood pounded all the way to his cold fingertips. The only sounds in the room were Leskov’s wheezing and the gurgling of the radiator. Perlmann estimated the time for a single page and turned to the next one. When it was time for the third page, he felt he urgently had to go to the toilet. For a moment he looked over the edge of the page. Leskov looked at him uncertainly. Could he quickly use the bathroom?

  Perlmann threw the counterpane over the bed and pulled it up until it touched the carpet on the side of the window. Then he leaned back with his eyes closed, Leskov’s pages read in his lap. Maria had been careful with the file name. Maria wasn’t scattered. And Leskov’s text, a summary of which lay in his lap, was under the bed. It was hidden, even if Leskov were to bend down. Nonetheless, his anxiety didn’t go away. Perlmann felt twinges in the region of his heart. Fine smoke rose from Leskov’s pipe in the ashtray. Once again, it would smell sickly sweet all night. He hated Leskov. No, that wasn’t true. He just wanted him to disappear. Everything to disappear: his smell, his text, the man himself. That all of it would disappear without a trace. For ever.

  ‘So you really think it will be all right?’ In Leskov’s relieved face there were traces of anxiety and doubt.

  Perlmann nodded.

  ‘And the contradictions? You know, the thing that annoys me most is that I can no longer bring together the complicated business of invention and appropriation. And it’s all there, in black and white. In Petersburg. I hope.’

  ‘These theses here can be defended, I’m sure of it,’ said Perlmann, handing him the sheets with a gesture so resolute that it seemed almost violent. He watched his own movement with astonishment, and was amazed at how loud and firm his voice sounded. It was the voice, he thought a moment later, with which one makes a promise.

  The doubts vanished from Leskov’s face, and he held a match vertically to his pipe. Could Perlmann now see the similarity between the two texts?

  Perlmann nodded mutely.

  Leskov was about to start talking about that similarity when he broke off. ‘I’d better let you sleep now. You still look exhausted.’ At the door, he surprisingly gave Perlmann his hand. ‘That was very important for me,’ he said with a grateful smile. He slowly reached for the door handle behind him. ‘You know, over in my room, at the desk, the thought came to me over and over again: The text is lost. All I have in my hand is these few lines. The more tired I got, the more often that thought got in the way.’ He smiled. ‘High time for me to get a good night’s sleep.’

  Perlmann looked at the coarse hand that gripped the smoking pipe bowl, and nodded. The moment when the door clicked shut took an eternity to come.

  With the window wide open, Perlmann set about cleaning the rest of the text. Tomorrow morning, when he saw Leskov stepping into the veranda and sitting down at the front, he wanted to be able to think that the manuscript was upstairs in the room – ready to be given back at any moment. But all of a sudden all the dexterity that he had acquired over the past few hours seemed to vanish. He rubbed either too gently or too hard, and in his patience he forgot that dry-looking crumbs of earth could still be damp inside. More and more often the cleaning became a smudging, and now he also discovered that moisture had entrenched itself at the top of the bristles of the toothbrush; it must have come from the bathroom floor, and was now increasingly forcing its way to the tips of the bristles and into the proximity of the paper. At the bottom of page 57 he gave up, and when he set the page aside he saw that his hand was trembling.

  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.

  Perlma
nn 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 a
nd 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!’