Perlmann's Silence

  The pencil in Ruge’s hands broke in two with a loud crack. Millar took a film from the pocket of his windbreaker and picked up his camera. Von Levetzov smiled appreciatively when he saw that.

  As he got to his feet, Silvestri stepped up and invited Leskov for a drink in the bar. Laura Sand wanted to know if she could come, too. She wanted to find out more about this cheeky thesis.

  47

  The paces that Perlmann later took as he walked up and down in his room were both exaggeratedly cautious and aimless. Often he interrupted his restless walking, folded his arms and lowered his head on his chest. How did one do it? How did one abandon a professorship? What did one write in the requisite letters? They would have to be laconic. He sat down at his desk and wrote some drafts. The texts grew shorter and shorter. Even words that seemed at first to be the bare minimum struck him, on rereading, as superfluous. Ideally, he would just have written: I’ve had enough and request my dismissal. An explanation would be demanded. After a while he noticed that in his thoughts he was sitting opposite the dean, a small, pale man with a crooked mouth, a ramrod-straight head and faultless creases in his trousers. You would like to know why? Very simple: I’ve just discovered my professional incapacity. That was the explanation he liked best. Especially if he managed to deliver it with a laugh. He couldn’t see enough of the dean’s uncomprehending expression. But suddenly the whole scene collapsed, and he felt as exhausted as if he had been talking for hours. He tore the pages with the drafts on them into tiny scraps. All of a sudden he was anxious after all.

  He had left the toothbrush unused in the morning. He took Leskov’s text from the wardrobe. In many places, where yesterday there had still been a hint of damp, the dirt could now be blown away after a light touch with the bristles. But that wasn’t the only reason why the work was different today. Suddenly, Perlmann was no longer interested in the yellow sheets. No, of course that wasn’t quite true. He was resolutely determined to give the text back. He just needed to think about how Leskov had savored his punchline a little while before: the man must have his text back, regardless of the matter about the position. No, it was something different. All of a sudden he didn’t care that he didn’t know the Russian words for inevitable and invented, which Leskov had pronounced so quickly and indistinctly, and couldn’t fit them in his mind into the inky traces that remained of the subheading. That it was a Russian text at all – he didn’t even care about that. He didn’t understand the connection, but it had something to do, he thought, with the fact that they had talked about the text in the veranda. It was as if the others had stolen the text from him by learning of its content – but without freeing him of it.

  Perlmann rang Frau Hartwig.

  ‘You are missed,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s asking when you’re coming.’

  He asked her to give him Leskov’s home address, the only one she had. He wanted to bring the conversation to an end as quickly as possible, and sensed how hurt Frau Hartwig was that he was so abrupt.

  ‘When shall I tell the others you’re coming?’

  ‘Don’t tell them anything.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Frau Hartwig said stiffly.

  Perlmann studied the sheet of hotel paper with the jotted address. It had been on a street corner with mountains of swept-up, dirty snow. Leskov had rested on his briefcase and scribbled his address on a piece of paper that fluttered in the wind.

  ‘I’m sorry, my handwriting’s a disaster,’ he had said when he noticed how much difficulty Perlmann was having in reading it. He took out another, crumpled piece of paper and wrote down the address again, this time in Latin capitals. ‘When you write to me, please use this address,’ he had said. ‘It’s safer.’ Perlmann remembered his embarrassed facial expression, because it was that expression that had kept Perlmann from asking whether it was because of the secret police or because he didn’t have an office at the university.

  What use was that address to him? An envelope would arrive at Leskov’s house, containing the text which would turn out to be missing, among other things, the final page with the address. After his first, massive relief Leskov would start brooding. How had the stranger who must have found these sheets somewhere on his travels obtained his address? It had been sent from the West. Who in the West apart from Perlmann knew this address?

  Perlmann had thought the same thing yesterday. But was it really inevitable that Leskov should suspect him? It wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. You had to think about it for a while. But there was also another possible explanation: whoever had collected and dispatched the text had been distracted or otherwise diverted, and had – after writing down the address – forgotten to put the last page in the envelope with the rest. An act of carelessness, of negligence. Thoroughly within the realms of the normal; by no means impossible. And was that not much more likely than a monstrous suspicion of Perlmann?

  Perhaps Leskov’s embarrassment had been caused by the idea that he would need a home address even for a text like this. But perhaps that wasn’t it. After all, he taught at the university and he would want to signal that, even if he didn’t have his own office there. And the subject was politically neutral, at least in the eyes of the thugs in the secret police. And besides: didn’t colleagues from the East sometimes say that their work address was the politically safer one to use? But if Leskov had written his work address on the last page, it would be a complete mystery to him why the unknown person had used not that address, but his private one, which they couldn’t possibly have known. Now the suspicion could no longer be averted: Perlmann had lost the last page and picked up the only address available to him. Leskov would remember how the two of them had stood on the street corner.

  But what was Perlmann supposed to do? He didn’t even know the name of the university in St Petersburg, let alone the name of the institute or the street. And writing something vague on it was too unsafe. Who could say where the text would end up? Let alone the fact that this was incompatible with the innocuous explanation: either the unknown person had the address, in which case he had it exactly. Or else he didn’t have it, in which case he couldn’t even know that it was St Petersburg.

  What about simply asking Leskov for his work address? But why would he ask that, when their correspondence had hitherto been sent via his home address, at Leskov’s express wishes? Eventually, when the text arrived, Leskov would remember that question, and he would remember finding it a bit surprising. And if it turned out that his home address had been at the end of the text . . .

  Did he usually write his private or his work address at the end of his academic texts? A casual question among colleagues. It could also be asked in a more generalized form: what was the usual practice in Russia? A question asked out of harmless curiosity about the foreign country that was now edging closer. But Leskov would remember even that when he was puzzling about the envelope with the western stamp. And if Perlmann got the answer that the work address was usually the one given, he would look even more stupid than before: if he asked what that address was, that conversation would be the first thing that sprang to Leskov’s mind when he opened the envelope.

  A steadfast will was of no use whatsoever. It was simply impossible to put into practice. Not, at any rate, without giving oneself away.

  There was a knock at the door. While he was still bundling the sheets together and blowing the dust from the table top, Perlmann noticed to his surprise that he wasn’t panicking. Without hesitation, almost with a feeling of routine, he pushed the pile of papers under the counterpane and slipped his toothbrush into his trouser pocket.

  It was the new chambermaid, bringing him a hotel folder. She had meant to bring one for ages, but it had kept slipping from her mind. Had there never been one? ‘There was,’ Perlmann said and bit his lip. The chambermaid looked at him in surprise for a moment and plucked at the duster in her apron pocket. Then she asked if everything else was all right, and left.

  There were another dozen pages to be cleaned.
It was surprising that the pages with numbers in the seventies didn’t look worse. Lots of tires must have passed over them. Did that mean that there had been a thicker clump underneath? Or did it mean the opposite?

  In the midst of these inconclusive reflections the phone rang.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you in the evening for ages,’ said Kirsten. ‘So I thought I’d try during the day. Although it’s going to be really, really expensive. Is everything all right?’ And she asked if his turn had come to make a contribution. ‘Did it go well?’

  Perlmann sat down on the edge of the bed and gulped convulsively. The receiver grew damp.

  ‘I’m sorry. What sort of question is that?’ Kirsten said, laughing with embarrassment. ‘Of course it went well. Things like that always go well for you. It’s just, the day before yesterday, Astrid – my friend from the shared apartment, I told you about her – made a complete flop with her presentation. Lasker obviously doesn’t like her, and he really tore her off a strip. Afterwards I had shivers up and down my spine.’

  He would be coming home on Sunday, Perlmann said in response to her question.

  ‘You sound tired. You’re glad it’ll soon be over, aren’t you?’

  Perlmann sat down on the edge of the bed until he was dazzled by the sun, which had found a gap in the low cloud. Then he pulled over a corner of curtain and wiped down the last two pages, which were only dirty at the edges. He slowly flicked through the whole pile before at last precisely aligning them. Leskov would manage. When he typed out the whole thing he would be able to fill the gaps from his memory. Unless there was a big chunk missing at the end. The thing that annoys me most, you know, is that I can’t get the complicated business of invention and appropriation to come together. And yet it’s all there, in black and white. In St Petersburg. I hope.

  Perlmann picked up the last page. If he fought his way through the battlefield of deletions and additions, he might be able to estimate if there were lots of pages still to come. But at the top on the left there were two words that he couldn’t make out, and he didn’t know the one after that. A paralysing fatigue set in. Never again. He pushed the sheet under the pile.

  The envelope in which he sent Leskov the text would have to be especially tough. Practically weatherproof. Perlmann saw it lying on an open mail car. It was at an abandoned Russian station, night was falling, and the snow was coming down in thick flakes. There was no point telling oneself that it was nonsense, because the consignment would go by plane, straight to St Petersburg. All the way to the stationer’s shop and also in the moment when he rested his hand on the shop door handle, he saw the deserted platform and the snow falling on the envelope.

  The shop was still shut. Forgetting the siesta and then standing stupidly outside a closed shop – suddenly that felt like the theme of his whole stay. Ashamed, he looked round to see if anyone had noticed him. But apart from one bent old man, who was almost being whirled round by his dog, there was no one to be seen. In the shop window where the chronicle had been, a Christmas crib had been set up. Perlmann slowly began to walk around the block. When someone pushed up the iron shutter of a pharmacy with a pole, he waited and then bought a new toothbrush.

  Leskov had said nothing about the deadline by which the text had to be presented if he were to have a chance for the job. But regardless of that, Perlmann really wanted to take the text to the post office that afternoon. It couldn’t possibly be there by Sunday evening, when Leskov excitedly stepped into his apartment. But the thought of the days that Leskov would have to spend assuming that the text was irrevocably lost was unbearable, and Perlmann didn’t want this nightmare to last an hour, a minute longer than necessary.

  But sending it from here, with the Santa Margherita postmark, was out of the question. Should he drive to Genoa later on and send it from there? The day before yesterday, when he was listing the places where he might have left the text, Leskov had stopped at Frankfurt. It didn’t seem possible that he could have left it on the Alitalia plane. Or was it just a coincidence that he hadn’t mentioned it? If there was a reason for it, though, and he was sure that it couldn’t have happened on the flight to Genoa, the Genoa postmark would hardly be any more revealing than the postmark from Santa Margherita. No, Perlmann absolutely couldn’t send the text from Italy. He would have to do it in Frankfurt.

  But he wouldn’t be there until Sunday lunchtime, and that meant three more days of despair for Leskov.

  Perlmann looked at his watch. There was still the evening flight at six. But he wouldn’t get back today, and after everything that had happened he couldn’t possibly miss Silvestri’s session tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon and evening were also out of the question: they were the last few hours that the group was able to spend together, and it would be far too outrageous of him suddenly to disappear. Which left Saturday, if everyone but Leskov had left in the morning. Leskov could spend the afternoon alone, and he would be back so that they could have dinner together. Anyway, it was one less day of despair.

  Perlmann quickened his pace and went to the travel agent’s in another part of the town. Here, too, he had to wait another ten minutes, during which he paced uneasily up and down. How long would it take for an airmail package to travel from Frankfurt to St Petersburg? And how secure was the mail? He couldn’t have the text couriered – airline company employees wouldn’t think a manuscript worth sending with any great urgency. Was it possible to imagine them sending it registered post?

  The computer for flight reservations was on strike, and he was told to come back later. Perlmann was glad that the stationer’s was quite a long way away; the walking helped to combat his helpless anger. Apart from the fat woman, there was a lanky boy with a pimply face behind the counter. At the woman’s request the boy silently spread out a selection of envelopes. Perlmann immediately discarded the ordinary ones without reinforcement and padding. Then he took the one with the cardboard backing and bent it back and forth until the cardboard nearly snapped. He liked its firmness, but the paper was nothing special, and he wasn’t sure whether the envelope was big enough for the unusual format of the yellow sheets. He moistened his index finger with his tongue and rubbed the saliva on the paper, which turned dark brown and dissolved layer by layer.

  ‘Don’t worry. Of course I’ll pay for it,’ he said to the woman, who was furiously gasping for air.

  The two padded envelopes that struck him as exactly the right size were made of matte paper, less tightly pressed than the other, shiny paper, which his saliva dissolved worryingly quickly. A revolting-looking, grey wadding came out of it; the other one was padded with transparent plastic. The corrugated foil would keep the moisture out. But what happened if the address disappeared under the snow along with the disintegrating paper? Perlmann set this envelope aside as well. As the boy stared at him, mesmerized, the woman sniffed agitatedly and made a face as if he were busy pulling the shop apart.

  ‘You really don’t need to worry,’ Perlmann reassured her and took some cash out of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll pay for everything.’

  The last envelope was made of well-glued, shiny paper, but the padding was much thinner than it was in the others, and it was far too big. The pages would slip back and forth inside it, and be damaged even further. He asked the boy, who was glancing anxiously at the woman and still hadn’t said a word, to give him a pile of typing paper, and tried it out, shaking the envelope wildly back and forth. The result wasn’t quite as bad as he expected, but some of the pages were already slightly crushed. He asked them to show him various staplers, but none of them was capable of producing a line of staples that would have reduced the envelope to the right size. The paper survived the saliva test very well. Perlmann turned the envelope inconclusively back and forth, then suddenly asked for a glass of water.

  He had to repeat the request. As the boy was going into the back, the woman resignedly lit a cigarette, and when a man came into the shop on crutches, with his foot in a cast, and greeted her like
an old friend, she gave him a significant look. Perlmann walked to the door with his water and poured it over the envelope. For two or three seconds it looked as if the water would drip off the shiny paper without leaving a trace. But then the envelope was covered with dark patches that quickly got bigger and came together to form a single damp patch. Perlmann reached into the envelope and tested the dampness. The image of the Russian station platform appeared, and this time the dripping was melting snow. When he turned round he saw the three faces just behind the window. The madman with the water on the envelopes.

  Mutely, and with the face of someone who is pleased to have had a bright idea, the boy gestured to him to wait and went to the back. The man with the crutches put his wallet in his pocket and left the shop, shaking his head. Perlmann paid and wedged the damaged envelopes under his arm. He was reading the chronicle a lot, he said to the woman, who smoked as she stared at the floor in front of her. But she didn’t seem to remember, and Perlmann was glad when the boy broke the awkward silence.

  The envelope he handed to him was ideal; Perlmann saw it straight away. It was a used envelope with an address and an American sender. The boy, he read from his gestures, had taken off the stamps. The envelope was made of thick yellow cardboard that felt waxy. It had plastic padding and reinforced corners and it was exactly the right size.

  ‘Perfetto,’ Perlmann said to the boy, who beamed at him and indignantly waved away his offer of money.

  ‘Three thousand,’ the woman said, looking up from the floor for one brief moment.

  As Perlmann gave her the money, the boy furiously grabbed the envelope, looked in a drawer and finally stuck fresh labels over the address and the sender’s details. Without deigning to look at the woman he handed Perlmann the envelope and gave him a jokey salute.

  On the next corner Perlmann threw all the other envelopes into a garbage bin. When he crossed the street, he saw the man with the crutches, who seemed to have been watching him the whole time. The lunatic throwing away envelopes. At a school drinking fountain Perlmann splashed water over the yellow envelope. Spherical droplets formed, and disappeared completely when shaken and blown on. Suddenly, the Russian platform couldn’t have mattered less.