Perlmann's Silence

  In the travel agent’s they booked Perlmann a flight to Frankfurt for lunchtime on Saturday. For the return flight at five they could only put him on the waiting list. Then Perlmann walked slowly towards the hotel and wondered how he could disguise his handwriting when he wrote Leskov’s address on the label – and which address?

  48

  A hand grabbed him by the sleeve from below, and when he turned round, startled, he found himself looking into the laughing face of Evelyn Mistral, who was sitting at a café table. She pulled him down on to a chair and waved to the waiter. Perlmann hesitantly laid the yellow envelope on the table. It’s not dangerous. She can’t possibly know what it’s for. As he waited for his coffee and they talked about how warm it still was, even though the sun was setting and the lights were being lit at the tables, he frantically wondered what he could say if she started talking about the envelope. Then, when he was stirring his coffee, she rested her hand on his other arm for a moment. What had been up with him over the past few days? She wanted to know. They’d hardly seen him, and when they did he had been so strange. ‘Reservado,’ she smiled. And then fainting like that. They’d all been rather puzzled, and concerned.

  Perlmann took another spoonful of sugar. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and when he put them in his jacket pocket, he touched the disk, which he had forgotten in the meantime. As if he had touched something burning hot or particularly disgusting, he immediately took his hands out of his pockets and lit a cigarette. Then, for a while, he looked across at the moored yachts, rocking on the wake from a motorboat.

  ‘I don’t even know myself,’ he said at last, and avoided looking at her. ‘I . . . I’ve just somehow lost my equilibrium.’

  ‘And you really didn’t want to deliver any kind of lecture, did you?’ she asked softly and brushed the hair out of her face, which rested on her open hand. Perlmann looked at the levelling waves and nodded. He really wanted to leave, but at the same time he wished she would go on asking him questions.

  ‘Can I say something? But you must promise not to take it amiss.’

  Perlmann attempted a smile and nodded.

  ‘If I may put it this way: I think you’ve made a mistake. You should have explained at the outset that everything’s a bit difficult for you at the moment, and you could also just have said that you didn’t want to give a lecture. Your wife’s death – everyone would have understood straight away. As things stand, everything that happened – dinner and everything – was interpreted as arrogance. Until Vassily put us right. The rest of us were completely in the dark.’

  So it was a good idea to tell Leskov about Agnes at the fortress back then. It meant that he was able to provide a redeeming interpretation. The man I was inches away from murdering.

  In their seductive simplicity, Evelyn Mistral’s words had been an enticing offer of self-deception, which Perlmann was unable at that moment to resist. He had committed a social solecism. He had made a very simple error. He wanted to enjoy the peace that lay within that insight. It could happen to anyone. You could avoid it in future. And in three days, at this time, he would be at home.

  ‘You’re completely right,’ he said, ‘it was a mistake. Nothing more to be said.’ It sounded shallow, almost insincere. So, after a pause, he added, ‘Sometimes it’s so hard.’ He hoped he wasn’t overdoing it with his tortured face.

  Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov slumped on to their chairs with feigned exhaustion and put their shopping bags full of presents under the empty table next to them. Perlmann had been able to see them coming from a long way off and, with a movement that looked like a reflex, he had taken the envelope off the table and rested it against the leg of the chair.

  ‘At exactly the usual time,’ Evelyn Mistral smiled, glancing at her watch.

  ‘Yes,’ said Millar with a nostalgic sigh. ‘The first time we came here, a month ago, it was still light at this time of day. I’ll miss these daily meetings.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘Just a shame you were never there.’

  The others nodded. Perlmann felt cold, and when he buttoned up his jacket, the disk bumped, with a quiet, dull sound, against the arm of the chair.

  ‘But if I imagine,’ Millar went on, ‘the same thing happening to me as happened to you – I don’t think I’d feel like doing anything. Except sailing,’ he added with a grin.

  The remark took Perlmann’s breath away for a moment, and he felt himself welling up. Achim Ruge must have seen that something was happening in his face. With an expression and a voice that Perlmann wouldn’t have thought possible, he started talking about his younger sister, whom he had loved very much. He couldn’t even have imagined her taking drugs. Until she was found dead.

  ‘You know,’ he said to Perlmann in German, and his bright green eyes seemed to be even more watery than usual, ‘I basically dropped out for almost a year after that. Things went up and down in the lab. I had to cancel lectures, and my irritability towards my colleagues became legendary. Nothing seemed to have a point any more.’

  Superficial, thought Perlmann, my fear of them has made me terribly superficial. So superficial that he couldn’t even imagine them capable of the most elementary, the most natural impulses and reactions. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so flabbergasted. Fear made other people bigger and stronger than they were, and at the same time they became smaller and more primitive. Couldn’t he have gone to them on Saturday morning and explained his irrational actions? And wouldn’t that still have been possible at a later time?

  ‘I could imagine,’ von Levetzov said, ‘that your invitation to Princeton hasn’t come at exactly the right time.’

  Perlmann nodded, and again he was surprised by the sympathy that he was suddenly encountering. Was it, perhaps, not only fear that had made him superficial, but also that fear had come about because his view of things had been superficial from the outset – because he hadn’t thought the others capable of sympathy, and hence of depth?

  ‘Things like that can be postponed,’ confirmed Millar, when Perlmann looked at him quizzically.

  He was actually considering that, Perlmann said, and tried to look at von Levetzov with a particularly open and personal expression, as a way of apologizing for his abruptness over breakfast. A personal relationship with Adrian von Levetzov would be more easily achieved in the presence of the others than in private. When Perlmann realized that, he became very confused. All of a sudden he had a sense that he didn’t know the slightest thing about people and their relationships with each other.

  The others seemed not to see Leskov, who was waddling and flailing his way towards town. Perlmann hadn’t recognized him at first, because tonight he was wearing a peaked cap that lay on the bulges of his neck and, as a result, looked too small. If only he would walk more quickly.

  ‘Hang on, that’s Vassily!’ called von Levetzov, jumping to his feet and running after him.

  Perlmann reached for the envelope beside the leg of the chair. No, it would attract less attention down here than on the next table.

  Leskov liked the jokes about his cap. He showed it around and acted the clown. Later, when the conversation turned to the session, he touched Perlmann on the shoulder and said he hadn’t been able to get over his amazement when listening to him.

  ‘I would have bet my head that you’d read my text,’ he laughed, ‘and very carefully, too. I sent him,’ he said, turning to the others, ‘the earlier version. But he denies it. Apparently, my Russian’s still too hard for him.’

  ‘Didn’t you say you didn’t speak Russian?’ von Levetzov asked with a face in which irritation and admiration balanced one another.

  Perlmann avoided Evelyn Mistral’s eyes, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism. ‘Just a few words,’ he said.

  He couldn’t bear the pause that followed for very long, and went inside with an apology. At the end of the corridor where the toilets were, a door was open, leading to the other side of th
e quay wall. He walked to the water. Kitchen waste floated below him. He took the disk out of his jacket pocket and looked round. When he let go of it, it was caught by a gust of wind and fell with a clatter on the wall. He looked round again, and then kicked it out.

  ‘We’re just talking about this amazing envelope,’ said Leskov, and rested it on the table. ‘It fell over a moment ago when you stood up. Brian knows this kind from home. I wish we had things like that.’

  ‘Anything important I send in those envelopes,’ said Millar, ‘especially manuscripts.’ He rubbed the cardboard with his thumb and forefinger. ‘The things are practically watertight.’

  Perlmann felt as if all the strength were suddenly draining from him, so much so that lifting his coffee cup seemed too much. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of pointlessness. Unable to think of an answer, he waited to be asked where he had got hold of the envelope. But the question didn’t come.

  The conversation now turned to dinner. Just for once, the others didn’t want to eat at the Miramare. Suddenly, Millar, who had folded his hands behind his head and was looking over towards the hill on the other side of the bay, said, ‘Why don’t we go to that white hotel up there? What’s it called?’

  ‘Imperiale,’ said von Levetzov. ‘I had a drink there. The restaurant looked good.’

  It was agreed that Silvestri and Laura Sand would have to be told, and Signora Morelli as well. Perlmann nodded. On the way to the hotel Leskov joined him and, with a smile, handed him the yellow envelope.

  The lamp in the corner of the lounge where Perlmann had sat on Monday night was on again today. On the chair, two children were practising gymnastics, while their grandmother struggled to keep them under control. It made everything look very ordinary, even banal. The viewpoint of eternity, that was what Perlmann had thought about in that corner. The fear that he had been using that idea to defend himself against had been terrible. But it had given the thought a weight and a depth that were now lost. Now, surrounded by his good-humored colleagues, who were studying their menus, the thought seemed shallow and dull; it was little more than a sequence of words.

  Perlmann was also generally bothered by the others, and he had to take care that his irritation, which had made him tear off two shirt buttons when he was changing earlier, didn’t intensify still further. This was the place where Kirsten had asked him whether he’d been happy with Agnes. And it was where he had experienced an extreme despair. It was his hotel. The others had no business here.

  Through the swing door of the kitchen came the waiter that Perlmann had called an arsehole. He was wearing the same red jacket as on Tuesday, and now he whipped out his order pad and stepped up to their table. Standing at an angle, he didn’t see Perlmann at first, and took Ruge’s and Silvestri’s orders. Then, as Laura Sand was speaking, his eye wandered one chair along. Perlmann waited with his eyes half-closed, annoyed at the pounding of his heart. The waiter wrote something in his pad, then paused. His eyes narrowed and, after a further motionless moment, he turned his head sharply and looked at Perlmann, who was pressing his hands together under the table. The waiter jutted his lower lip, looked slowly away and then it seemed as if he would go on writing. But then he slipped pad and pen into his jacket pocket, turned round abruptly and walked quickly through the swing door.

  ‘What’s up with him?’ Laura Sand asked irritably, tapping the back of her menu rhythmically against the edge of the table.

  ‘No idea,’ said Perlmann, when she looked at him quizzically.

  The maître d’ in the black tuxedo stood, arms folded, by the swing door and watched furiously as the waiter came back to their table. The waiter turned to Laura Sand.

  ‘Scusi, signora,’ he said tightly, ‘would you please repeat your order?’

  Then he turned the page of his pad and, without deigning to glance at Perlmann, looked at Millar. Surprised by the silence, Millar looked up, glanced sideways at Perlmann, who was sitting next to him, and said in a cool voice which Perlmann envied him, ‘You seem to have forgotten someone.’

  The waiter didn’t move, but just raised the pad over Millar’s head and looked into the room. The maître d’ was about to move, when Perlmann gave his order, in dry, clipped words. The waiter brought the pen to the pad, but didn’t write. Then he looked again at Millar, who, after a brief hesitation and with raised eyebrows, dictated his wishes.

  She had had no idea about his wife’s accident, Laura Sand said. Why hadn’t he said anything? It would have made a lot of things easier to understand.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Millar, and in his mouth it sounded yet again like a reproof.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Perlmann, and was glad that his voice revealed nothing of the anger that was starting to rise up in him. Now, after they had experienced his breakdown, and he had been dropped as a rival and an adversary in the academic game – now they were all speaking so sympathetically, they were full of generosity and didn’t seem to have the faintest sense of how repellent moral complacency could be. Would they have thought and spoken like that if nothing so dramatic had happened to him, nothing that came so close to an illness? Superficiality as an effect and a cause of fear; that was right. On the other hand: how exactly should he have said it? Where were the individual words of which his explanation would have consisted? And when exactly would he have made it? Perlmann was furious at the shallowness of their generosity, at their lack of precise imagination. With each question about details that passed through his head, his fury intensified still further, he became blind and deaf to his environment and didn’t notice that a long piece of his ash was falling on the freshly starched, blossom-white tablecloth.

  The others had been served ages before, but Perlmann still had nothing. The waiter, who had treated him as if he didn’t exist when he was serving, let the long minutes pass, and an awkward silence fell in which the others cast puzzled glances at his empty plate. Perlmann had just pushed back his chair to go in search of the maître d’, when the waiter, with a face like ice, brought him a piccata alla Milanese and slammed the dish down on the bottom plate with a loud clatter, ensuring, with deliberate negligence, that it landed at an angle. The others resumed their conversation.

  With his first bite, Perlmann knew: after it had been prepared, the dish had been put in the fridge for a while. Inside it was still warm, but its surface was chilled, and the coldness felt artificial to the tongue. The tomato sauce was particularly cold, and the outermost layer by the cheese was like rubber. He kept an eye out for the maître d’, then got up and walked to the swing door. The waiter, as far as one could make out, had stood watching through the little window in the door. Now he kicked the door open and stepped defiantly out towards Perlmann.

  ‘My dinner is cold,’ Perlmann said, so loudly that the people at the other tables turned round. The waiter chewed on his lip and looked at him with a hate-filled, contemptuous grin. Then he walked at a pointedly sluggish pace to Perlmann’s place, took the plate and disappeared with an eloquent shake of the head, designed to accuse Perlmann of grouchiness, into the kitchen. When the food was put in front of Perlmann again, it tasted warmed-up and stale, and after a few bites he left it.

  It wasn’t just that they were making things look far too simple by reproaching him – in what was intended as a friendly way – for having said nothing and for not having made use of their sympathy. Much worse was that he couldn’t count on their sympathy at all if he told them the truth: that the academic world and its lifestyle had long ago slipped away from him and become something quite alien. To keep from drawing attention to himself, every now and again he poked around at his food, which he could only see now as a disgusting orangey paste, and as he did so it became clear to him that the rage that seethed in him was actually directed far more at the simplistic chatter about his missed explanation than it was at his personal situation.

  Before, in the café, he had allowed himself to yield for a moment to the thought that his distress had been caused by t
he commotion that had resulted from Agnes’s death. That could happen, he thought with amazement: you fled into a thought that you had several times exposed as deceptive, and you did so and opted for blindness because you wanted peace, peace from the flickering questions that oppressed you if you admitted the truth. And, of course, what had happened had had something to do with the fact that it was Evelyn Mistral, of all people, who had suggested that old and seductive thought. But now, as he looked with revulsion at his plate and waited to be able to smoke again at last, Perlmann was once again filled with rage at the idea that they were forcing him, through their lack of sympathy, to leave the excuse about Agnes uncontested, and to distort his pain still further with a lie.

  What did that lack of sympathy really mean? At last he could light a cigarette, and his concentration on the question helped him ignore the waiter, who deliberately brushed his sleeve with the plate as he cleared the table. He ran through his colleagues one by one, glancing furtively at each as their turn came. No, in this matter he didn’t underestimate the others out of fear. He couldn’t allow himself to be deceived even by Evelyn Mistral’s face, red with wine and laughter. If he closed her eyes, her head with her piled-up hair and glasses superimposed itself over the image that he had just seen. The only one he thought capable of understanding was Giorgio Silvestri. But he didn’t represent the hated academic world anyway. And besides: could he really understand how someone could have fallen victim to an incurable indifference towards all desire for knowledge? Perlmann doubted it, looking at him now, leaning tensely forward and making the gesture of precision with his thumb and forefinger.