Perlmann's Silence
55
Leskov was standing by the edge of the road, opposite the landing stage for the boats, attentively studying the traffic. He had one leg in the road and the other, strangely bent at the knee, lightly touched the pavement. His torso was leaning forwards expectantly, and he tried to hold his head upright, clutching his big glasses with one hand. When the taxi a little way in front of Perlmann’s came towards him, Leskov bent down to get a better view of the passenger. He maintained this posture when he saw Perlmann’s taxi. He jerked his back, tipped his glasses slightly to check what he had seen, and then walked, with swinging arms that crossed above his head, into the middle of the carriageway, as if to stop the only car on a lonely stretch of road at night.
The driver stopped with a cry of alarm. From the moment when he glimpsed Leskov, Perlmann had been unable to think about anything. He had just gripped the handle of the suitcase even tighter. Now he gave the driver a large bill and got out.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ said Leskov, immediately trying to keep the reproachful tone out of his voice. ‘The boat’s here already!’
For the first half hour of the trip it wasn’t especially striking that Perlmann said hardly anything. Leskov enjoyed standing at the front of the almost deserted ship, looking out at the still, dazzling water. After a while he took a map out of his jacket. Signora Morelli had lent it to him. Perlmann recognized the traces of dirt straight away: it was the same map that he had used when planning his crime, and which he had used, when collecting the yellow sheets of paper, as an underlay for the fragile page with the subheading. No, he said, when Leskov pointed to Portofino, he had never been there. And he didn’t know Genoa harbour, either.
Later, when Leskov came back from the toilet, he sat down on the bench next to Perlmann, and as he lit his pipe, he studied the suitcase. Every time he had seen a suitcase over the past few days, he said, he hadn’t been able to keep from thinking of his missing text. And the piece of rubber band in the zip of the outside pocket.
‘Do you think it’s most likely that I left it at home? I mean, after all the things I’ve told you?’
Perlmann nodded and picked up his cigarettes. ‘At any rate, I don’t think the text is simply lost,’ Perlmann said, relieved at the firmness in his voice. ‘Lufthansa is famous for its care with lost objects.’
‘So you really think they’d send my text back?’
Perlmann nodded.
‘But the address is written in Russian, and by hand,’ Leskov said. His eyes were unnaturally large behind their thick glasses, and that made the anxiety behind them seem enlarged as well.
Perlmann glanced quickly away. ‘Lufthansa is one of the biggest international airlines, and they fly to Russia. I’m sure they have people who speak Russian.’
Leskov sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right. If I could only be sure that I really did write the address on it. The night before last I suddenly started having doubts.’
Perlmann closed his eyes. His heart pounded. He braced himself. ‘What address do you usually write at the end of a text like that?’
‘What? Oh, my work address.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘You mean because I asked you only to use my home address? No, because it’s different in cases like that.’
Perlmann excused himself and went inside, where he leaned against the wall next to the toilet. The pounding in his chest subsided only gradually. No, it was too dangerous to ask him for his address, quite apart from the fact that he had no convincing reason to do so. Perlmann would have to ask him to write it down, and the whole thing would thus become an action that would linger vividly in Leskov’s memory. Perlmann slowly walked back, avoiding a sailor on the way, and stepped out on deck.
His heart stopped. Leskov was holding the suitcase on his knees, and was just snapping both locks shut. Now he set the suitcase back on the floor. Perlmann took a few steps to the side. No, Leskov wasn’t holding the envelope, and he stood up now and filled a pipe by the railing. Perlmann walked slowly up to him and touched the back of each individual bench as if seeking reassurance that he could use them to support himself.
‘You people in the West have lovely things,’ said Leskov, indicating the suitcase with the stem of his pipe. ‘That leather. And those refined and elegant locks. It would really make a person envious.’
Perlmann clutched the railing until his knees started obeying him again.
When they stepped out on land in Genoa, Leskov suddenly stopped. ‘Let’s assume I left it on the plane. Do you know what I’m most afraid of? The cleaning crew. If they found something like that, how would those people know it was precious?’
There was no other option. Perlmann had to find out, and this was his chance.
‘Anyone would hesitate if faced with such a thick stack of papers. If they’re typed, they’re going to be important. And it’s half a book. Isn’t it?’
Leskov nodded. ‘You could be right. It’s eighty-seven pages long.’
That means there are seventeen pages that Leskov will have to rewrite. The length of a whole lecture. But he still has it all in his head. You keep things like that in your head for a long time.
Perlmann avoided the harbor bar from which he had called Maria a week before. But it was hard to find anything else nearby, and in the end they sat down at the only table by a snack bar that smelled of fish and burnt oil. Perlmann was glad of the noise in the street and the children sliding right past them on their skateboards. These things would give a casual sound to the question that he couldn’t hold back for much longer.
‘When do you need to hand the text in? For that job, I mean.’
‘Two weeks’ time.’
Perlmann couldn’t stop himself. ‘That gives you exactly fourteen days.’
Leskov looked at him with distracted surprise. ‘Thirteen,’ he said with a smile. ‘Saturday doesn’t count.’
‘What would happen if you didn’t turn up with the text until the following Monday?’
The puzzlement in Leskov’s face was more alert now than it had been a moment before.
‘I just wondered how fussy they are in your country,’ Perlmann said quickly.
‘They would probably acknowledge me anyway,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But you never know. They’re bureaucrats. It’s better not to give them a formal excuse. And the date isn’t a problem either,’ he added calmly as the waiter set their food down in front of them. ‘I really just need to type up the text, and I’m quick at that. For the notes I would need half a day at the most.’
Perlmann choked down his sheep’s cheese and felt his stomach tightening. He won’t have the text before Friday. Then he has a week. That could be enough. But what if he only gets it the following Monday, or even Tuesday?
‘Incidentally, how long did it take my letter to get there?’ Perlmann asked.
Leskov doesn’t understand at first. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about what will happen if Lufthansa send it. I can’t remember exactly; about a week, I think.’ He poked around absently at his salad. ‘Good that you ask. That means, in fact, that the text might still be on its way if I don’t find it tomorrow evening. It could even take one or two days before the business about the Russian address is sorted out. So I can’t give up hope straight away. Particularly as the post doesn’t usually come on Monday. But if there’s still nothing there by Wednesday or even Thursday . . . Oh, it’s all nonsense,’ he said with a forced smile, filling his fork. ‘The text is there on my desk, in the middle of all that chaos, I can see the yellow sheets right in front of me.’
That year’s harbor tours had stopped the previous day. They wouldn’t start again until the beginning of March. Leskov read the English text of the notice three times under his breath. Suddenly, his enthusiasm for his surroundings and the southern light seemed to collapse in on itself, and all his confidence vanished.
‘Now I myself have destroyed my only hope of a secure post and a bit of calm,’ he said as a taxi took them to the upper edge of t
he city, to get as good a view as possible. And then, on a terrace with a heavenly vista, Leskov talked about the power struggles and intrigues at the institute, and about his insecure position. It wasn’t true to say that the others didn’t think much of him. Quite the reverse, in fact: they feared and envied his independent mind. And then there was his time in prison, he said with bitter mockery. It gave him a degree of moral authority that he didn’t like because it created a circle of grudging and uneasy respect around him, so that certain conversations regularly stopped when he entered the room.
And then this new post had recently become available.
‘I’m the logical candidate. But you can imagine that for all these reasons they don’t want me.’ And there was an argument: he hadn’t published very much. Leskov rested one leg against the edge of the railing, gripped his knee with both hands and looked down at the sea, where the light had already lost some of its glow. His face twitched and trembled. ‘First you’re thrown in prison, then you’re accused of not having published enough. You see, that’s why the text is so important. Would have been so important. The argument they advanced against me would have lost validity. “If only we had a longer, more recent text!” I’ve heard that often. And now the text is on a garbage dump somewhere. Gone. If only I had been able to make a copy of it! But after waiting around in the travel agent’s and at the telegram office it was too late: having photocopies made in Russia is still terribly difficult.’
Perlmann turned sideways, and touched the suitcase with his foot. He covered his face with his hand. I just need to take it out. But no, it’s impossible. There simply isn’t an innocent explanation. At some point he would bump into the truth. Inevitably.
Leskov touched him on the arm. ‘Let’s walk down a little way. And now let’s stop talking about me!’
The sea was the color of copper when they stood side by side by the railing on the way back. They hadn’t spoken for a while, and it seemed to Perlmann that every further moment of silence, as in the tunnel, would produce an undesirable intimacy. Soon Leskov would start talking about Agnes.
‘At the end of the session,’ Perlmann said, when Leskov turned towards him, ‘you made the surprising assertion that there is no true story about our experienced past.’
Leskov grinned. ‘The assertion that cost Achim a pencil.’
‘And then you added two words – Russian, I think – that I didn’t understand. What was that about?’
‘So someone noticed,’ Leskov laughed. ‘I thought everyone would have thought it was simply Russian babbling. But you, of course, noticed.’
Perlmann felt as if he were being presented as a prize pupil in a school class.
‘The two words were Klim Samgin. It’s the name of the central character in Maxim Gorky’s last novel, a four-volume work, over two thousand pages long, with the title: Zhizn’ Klima Samgina: The Life of Klim Samgin. With this character Gorky creates a narrative perspective for the description of forty years of Russian history. One important motif is that Samgin has a self-conscious, one might say a broken relationship with reality, into which radical doubts about the narratives of others, as well as his own perceptions, often creep. In this way Gorky allowed the little boy Klim to discover that the invention of things is an important component of life, something without which we cannot exist. There are wonderful sentences like . . . wait . . . yes: I vsegda nuzhno chto-nibut’ vydumyvat’, inache nikto iz vzroslych ne budet zamechat’ tebya i budesh zhit’ tak, kak budto tebya net ili kak budto ty ne Klim. Did you understand?
‘One moment,’ said Leskov. He closed his eyes and murmured the Russian sentence to himself again. ‘In English it would be something like: You must always be inventing something, otherwise the adults won’t pay attention to you, and you will live as if you aren’t there, or as if you aren’t Klim. Or another sentence . . .’ As he said the words to himself, Leskov mutely moved his lips. ‘Something like this: Klim couldn’t remember when he had actually noticed that he was invented, and he himself had begun to invent himself. Gorky always uses the same word: vydumyvat’: to invent or fabricate. And in the subheading of my new text, which I mentioned in the session, I use this word in the special sense that it has in Gorky.’
In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw the sheet covered with road dirt, lying on the map that now peeped from Leskov’s jacket pocket.
‘A hint of plagiarism,’ Leskov smiled, ‘but really only a hint.’
Perlmann experimentally took the hand holding the cigarette off the railing: no, outwardly it wasn’t shaking; it only felt as if it was. He inhaled deeply, and from the bottom of his burning lungs he wished he had the power suddenly to extinguish that most terrible of all words – plagiarism – from the minds of all human beings, so that he would never, never again, have to hear it. To do so, he thought, he would be prepared to enter any – really any – pact with the devil.
‘The theme associated with this word,’ Leskov continued, ‘assumes a particularly dramatic form in Gorky’s work when it is linked with the idea of a trauma.’ He saw Perlmann turning his head away. ‘Am I boring you?’
Perlmann glanced at him and shook his head.
‘One day Klim Samgin sees another boy, a boy he hates, falling into the river while skating, and disappearing into a hole in the ice along with his female companion, whereupon the girl clings to him and drags him down. He sees the boy’s red hands clinging to the edge of the ice, and his glistening head with its bloody face emerging every now and again from the black water and shouting for help. Klim, who is lying on the ice, throws him one end of his belt. But when he feels himself being pulled closer and closer to the water, he lets the belt slip from his hand, and shrinks away from the red hands which are breaking off more and more ice as they come towards him. And all of a sudden there’s just the boy’s cap floating on the water.’
Leskov paused and sought Perlmann’s eye. The red hands coming closer and closer: wasn’t that an image that could be pursued?
Perlmann nodded. He was glad it was quickly darkening.
‘Gorky doesn’t just call the hands red. He uses an expression that is stronger, more insistent. But I can’t think of it right now,’ said Leskov. ‘Anyway, at the end of that scene he has someone say: Da – byl li mal’chik-to, mozhet, mal’chika-to i ne bylo?’
Perlmann, who had understood straight away, responded to his questioning gaze with a shake of the head.
‘Yes – was there a boy there at all, perhaps there was no boy there? That’s how you would have to translate it,’ said Leskov. ‘And you see: this question, which returns in later passages like a leitmotiv, picks up the theme of invention.’
The lights of Portofino were already coming into view when Leskov started talking about prison. They had locked him up for just three years. No, no torture, and no solitary confinement, either. Quite normal imprisonment. Four of them in a cell at first, later alone. Not being able to read anything, that had initially been the worst thing. After six months they had allowed – it was a miracle – his mother to bring him Gorky’s novel. She had no idea of its content. She had come across it in a junk shop, and had bought it just for its length. Two thousand pages for so little money!
‘What it meant for me back then to hold those volumes in my hands and feel their weight – it’s impossible to capture that in words,’ Leskov said quietly. Throughout his remaining time in prison, he had read it fourteen times. He knew hundreds of scenes off by heart.
‘The theme of invention grabbed me straight away. But it took a long time before it assumed the form that it now has in my text. Gorky is primarily concerned with the invention of objects and events outside in the world or – when Klim Samgin talks about the invention of himself – of episodes in his external life story. And one slightly disappointing aspect of the novel is that Gorky effectively throws the theme down at your feet without really developing it. Although the story with the hole in the ice is ideally suited for that. There is, in fact, a moment, as Gorky says,
where Klim enjoys seeing his enemy, normally so arrogant, in that desperate state. And this yields the question of whether he lets go of the belt out of pure fear, or whether hatred is also involved. Because it is a traumatic experience, Klim will have to invent something about it, too, and this time it’s an invention of the inner world. He will narrate his inner past. And there is nothing, nothing at all, that he could cling to when he wonders which of the various stories is the true one.’
Leskov held the flame to his unlit pipe. He was now standing with his back to the water, staring, it seemed, at the numbers on the hull of a lifeboat, and when he went on, it sounded as if he were a long way away.
‘Then something strange happened to me. When week after week passed in this terrible, grey monotony, which is worse than any kind of bullying, I gradually lost all sense of my own internal past. After a certain amount of time you simply no longer know what your experience was like before you came along. It must sound insane to an outsider, but you lose a certainty that was previously so much taken for granted that you knew nothing about it. It’s a silent, creeping, inexorable loss of your inner identity. You fight against it as you have never fought before. You narrate your inner past to yourself over and over again to keep it from slipping away. But the more often you do that, the more intrusive the doubt becomes: is that really true, or am I merely inventing this past experience for myself? And I’m sure you can imagine how Gorky’s theme and his own experience increasingly merged until the name Klim Samgin became a symbol within me for that abyss of lost identity.’
Leskov left the ship as though in a trance and stopped a few steps later. ‘And yet I hadn’t yet got to my crazy thesis. That is only reached when one accepts the thought that experience is not formed by narration, but in a sense created by it – the idea, then, that you know from my earlier text.’