Only once he interrupted his reading and looked down at the snowy mountains. The perspective of eternity. If one did everything from that perspective, wouldn’t that mean losing the present completely – so completely that one wouldn’t even miss it? Was it not, to put it this way, a precondition for the experience of the present that the plane would eventually sink below the clouds and touch the ground?
58
The rain was pelting down in Frankfurt, and the wind whipped the water so violently against the aeroplane that Perlmann involuntarily flinched behind the window. All the while, Leskov’s text had been in the net on the back of the seat. It was in such a net, Leskov would think, that he had forgotten the text. As he was going, Perlmann clamped the envelope under his left arm and also held it tightly with his right hand.
His calculation was correct. As the counter where he had to ask for his suitcase, there was a stack of Lufthansa stickers. As the man at the desk fetched his case, Perlmann slipped three of them into his pocket. He sat down near the post office counter, opened the envelope and stuck one of the labels on the plastic jacket. He stuck the other two on the envelope, one on the top left, the other on the bottom right. He held the envelope at arm’s length: it looked good, business-like. The home address. An address that no one here could know but me. Perlmann felt the whole mechanism of his tormented reflections beginning to set itself in motion. For a moment he pressed his fingers against his brow, got up and walked to the counter.
As the post office clerk was sticking the stamps and the label for express delivery on the envelope, Perlmann asked him how long, in his view, it would take to arrive. The clerk shrugged.
‘Three days, a week. No idea.’
Why should it take a week? Perlmann asked irritably. The man threw the envelope into a basket, counted the money and then looked at Perlmann in silence for a second or two.
‘As I said: no idea.’
So why are you worrying me, then? Perlmann yelled at him inwardly. Out loud he said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s . . . so much depends upon it. Do you perhaps know . . . I mean, can you estimate how great the danger is of the package going missing?’
The expression that now appeared on the clerk’s face reminded Perlmann of the pizza chef in Santa Margherita whom he had asked about rain near the tunnel.
‘Nothing gets lost here. As to the Russian post – no idea.’
Slowly, as if he needed to free himself of another internal obstacle, Perlmann walked towards the exit. He avoided looking over at the book display where, almost three weeks before, Nikolai Leskov’s book had leapt out at him. Just as he stepped through the light barrier and the sliding door slid sideways, it occurred to him. A copy. For safety’s sake I’ve got to copy the text. He practically ran to the post office counter and, at one point, his case, which was on wheels, tipped over. Now there was a line. Perlmann stood on tiptoes: his envelope was covered up by others, but the basket with the blue label was still there.
‘As if we didn’t have anything else to do,’ murmured the clerk as he sought out the envelope a little while later.
Was there a photocopier anywhere in this building? It was already dark outside when Perlmann was finally allowed into the back room of a newsagent’s in a completely different part of the building. The half-closed zip of the plastic jacket could only be opened fully by a violent tug. Now six of the teeth weren’t working, and there was no point even thinking about pulling it closed again. After sixty-five pages the machine ran out of paper, and Perlmann had to wait a quarter of an hour until the staff could take the time to come and fill it up. Two copied pages fell on the dusty floor. When he cleaned them with his handkerchief he had a feeling that he would never, ever be done with Leskov’s text, and he started breathing with difficulty. The metal of the staples on the envelope had become far too soft from all that bending, he thought. He hoped they wouldn’t break on the journey.
As he left, he handed the flustered staff a fifty mark note and then walked the long way back to the post office. He asked the clerk, who stared silently into the distance after recognizing him, whether it was a good idea to register the package, or whether that might slow everything down.
‘What now?’ was the only reaction he got.
And then he won’t be at home, and they’ll take the envelope away again. ‘Don’t register it,’ he said.
The taxi progressed slowly through the city traffic. Perlmann had closed his eyes, and was trying to use his exhaustion to keep all thoughts at bay. The rolled-up copy in his hand was getting sticky. There’s no point in it whatsoever. I could never give it to him without exposing myself. He gave up, and at that moment he had the feeling that he had just relinquished absolutely everything he had, and that it was a more complete surrender than he had ever experienced before. As the wall of rain lashed the taxi, he saw the black lines of the felt-tip pen running and the address on the envelope blurring to illegibility. When the taxi had driven off and he was looking for his front-door key, drips fell, unnoticed by him, on to Leskov’s text.
III
The Message
59
On the first night Perlmann had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. But the doctor on duty saw no reason to keep him in. All his readings were normal. He diagnosed complete exhaustion, gave Perlmann a tranquillizing injection and signed him off work until the end of the year.
Perlmann spent the rest of the night sleeplessly in an armchair, looking out at the garden, where it started snowing towards morning. Every now and again he wrapped himself up even more tightly in the blanket, and enjoyed the fact that the injection slowed everything down and kept his thoughts away.
Shortly after eight he told Frau Hartwig. His voice sounded so flat that she didn’t ask a single question. Later, he stepped out into the dense snowstorm, and walked slowly to the bank, where he put the copy of Leskov’s text, now blistered and browned by the rain, in a safe deposit box. He bought the barest necessities, put the chain on the door and, after disconnecting the phone, went to bed.
He spent most of that day, and the two next days, sleeping. When he was awake for one or two hours he thought about Leskov waiting for the post. Each time he was unable to bear the idea for long, and was soon glad to feel exhaustion pulling him back into sleep. At four o’clock on Thursday morning he was woken by hunger pangs. He found that he had lost eight kilos, and forced himself to prepare a proper meal. After a few bites he couldn’t go on, and left it. While he stared at an old late-night western without following the plot, he slowly ate half a loaf of bread and drank camomile tea that reminded him of the time of his childhood illnesses. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since Turin, and he didn’t feel like one now.
On Thursday afternoon he stayed awake for longer. As it went on snowing outside, Perlmann sat on the sofa and stared blankly at the coffee stain on the living-room carpet. He felt as if he had, silently and without really noticing, shattered apart, and was now lying around in vague pieces somewhere outside, far removed from himself, and as if all those scattered pieces now had to be drawn together on invisible threads from some imaginary middle point, and carefully reassembled until his inner essence was complete once more, seamless and unbroken.
As he walked from room to room looking at Agnes’s photographs, he moved cautiously and with deliberate slowness, like an invalid. The post office clerk had clearly thought it possible that the text would only take three days to arrive. The information had just been flung out like that. But he had still been given a time limit. If that was so, the text would arrive in St Petersburg today. The courier could bring it to Leskov tonight. At any rate, it would be delivered tomorrow morning. Will something like that really arrive? With all the chaos over there?
That night he dreamed about Signora Medici, who lived in Pian dei Ratti. She spent the whole day leaning in the window, watching him, with Leskov next to him as a driving instructor, practising driving straight ahead in front of the slate-grinder’s, and having to fi
ght against the steering wheel’s constant pull to the left. Don’t worry, you can speak German! she kept shouting. That will make things easier!
Perlmann woke drenched in sweat and made coffee. Six languages. If you included Russian, he had the same number. He lit a cigarette. Wrapped in the feeling of dizziness that began after the first drag, he got to work on the signora. He chased her through all the languages he spoke, and ruthlessly set her up for the most obvious traps. It was already past eight and broad daylight when he was finally able to free himself from that hate-drenched compulsion.
Now the courier could ring Leskov’s doorbell at any moment. The Russian’s despair would be at an end. He could immediately start copying it out and filling in the gaps. He still had exactly a week. Hopefully, when the courier came, he wouldn’t already be on his way to the university to wait. Most letter boxes were too small for an envelope of that size, and who knew what might happen if it were simply left outside the door?
Now the time had come to phone Kirsten. He got her out of bed. She had called every evening at the usual time. Where had he been hiding himself? Perlmann dodged the question, saying something about tedious professional dinners. He didn’t mention the hospital, or the fact that he had been signed off work. Kirsten hemmed and hawed for a while before saying that she probably wouldn’t be coming home before Christmas. She had to deliver two more presentations, and she also wanted to help Martin move house. Perlmann concealed his relief, and said magnanimously that that was all perfectly fine.
In the afternoon he unpacked his case. The phone rang as he was stuffing the blood-stained and the torn trousers into a bag, which he fastened tightly. He suddenly dropped it and ran to the corridor. That might be him! But the ringing had already stopped. Perlmann carried the bag outside and threw it in the bin. He laid out the pale jacket with the strips of dirt ready for dry-cleaning. The blazer, which hung on a hanger from the wardrobe door, had fine, white traces of sweat on the back. He saw that only now. He put it with his jacket. As he did so he discovered a strip of dried tomato sauce on his sleeve. Stronzo.
The chronicle had plainly slipped around in the suitcase, and the cover was torn. He threw the cover away and set the volume down on his empty desk. Next to it were the unopened envelope from Frau Hartwig, the invitation to Princeton, his notes. He opened a page of Jakob von Gunten at random and read a few sentences. Then he put the book back on the shelf. He would never read it again.
He fetched a new bag for the medal and the certificate. It was the first time he had unrolled the certificate. It referred to one filip pereman, who was henceforth an honorary citizen of Santa Margherita Ligure. On the way to the bin Perlmann couldn’t help grinning. The last things he unpacked were the new handkerchiefs from the plastic jacket. He held them indecisively in his hand, then set them down on the chest of drawers in the corridor.
Later he collected his private post from two streets down. While he was still in the post office, he tore Hanna’s letter in two. She had been delighted by his phone call out of the blue, she wrote, but also unsettled. Could he call her when he was home again? And could they see each other again? It would take a few days, he thought, as he stamped through the slush, before he was ready to make that call.
He saw on the television news that the match Giovanni had mentioned – the one between Stuttgart and Juventus Turin – took place today. It was already half an hour in. Roberto Baggio was playing; his name kept being mentioned. If he hadn’t scored, I would have been guilty of plagiarism. Perlmann waited for a throw-in that provided a close-up of Baggio’s face. A strange face, he thought, and turned off the television. But it would only have been a disaster if Maria had finished typing up the text on Friday. If she hadn’t had a cold. Or if Santini had had something that urgently needed typing.
The woman at international directory enquiries was very helpful. They had only a few numbers of major companies in St Petersburg to hand, but they could call information there to ask for a private number. However, that could take a long time – up to a day. Should she call him back? Perlmann gave her Leskov’s name and address and said that the time of day didn’t matter; it could be the middle of the night.
While looking for the piece of paper with Leskov’s address on it, Perlmann had come across the two unused plane tickets: the original one for his flight home, Genoa–Frankfurt, and the horrendously expensive one for the flight to Frankfurt on Saturday. Together they were worth more than 1,000 marks. He tore them up. It was like an expiatory sacrifice.
Then he started cleaning the apartment. He had never cleaned it like that before. He had never cleaned anything like that before, with such furious, fanatical thoroughness. Every last nook and cranny was scoured till it shone. Every now and again, shivering with exhaustion, he sat down on a stool and wiped the cold sweat from his brow with a kitchen towel. When he had finished his study, he stood at the window for a long time and looked out into the night. Then he took Agnes’s picture from the windowsill and put it on the little table in the corner. Last of all came her room, where he still hadn’t changed anything. On a stack of books on the floor he found her copy of the Russian grammar. Her underlinings were rougher, her notes more carelessly scribbled than in his copy, but there weren’t as many. He walked back and forth with the book in his hand. In his mind’s eye he saw the dark-brown cabbage and smelled the warm, stinking fumes that had come out of the container. Breathing with difficulty, he took the Langenscheidt and the two-volume German-Russian dictionary out of the shelf. He put everything on the chest of drawers in the corridor and then assembled the few Russian books that they had both – always with a sense of imposture – brought home from some specialist bookshop or other. It would be hardest for him to part with the volume of Chekhov short stories, a particularly beautiful book bound in black leather, which he had come across in a side street behind the British Museum when he had spent a few days in London with Agnes and Kirsten.
Later, when he lay in bed, exhausted and shivering, and imagined Leskov sitting at his desk now and brooding over the gaps in his text, Perlmann’s heart started racing. Neither conscious breathing nor reading did any good; only the tranquil landscape pictures on late-night television helped. He moved the phone still closer to his bed and checked that it was set to the loudest volume.
That night, for the first time, he had the tunnel dream that would haunt him at regular intervals over the coming weeks. He was driving – pressed back into his seat by the acceleration – along the vibrating floor of the tunnel, which described an endlessly long loop to the left, and fell away to the left like a cycle-racing track, so that there was always a danger of slipping into the opposite carriageway. The headlights coming from the opposite direction were like huge waves of dazzling light that sloshed over the car and obliterated his vision. At the start of the journey he was holding a steering wheel, but later his cold hands simply clutched the air, and now he could only wait, with a feeling of boundless impotence, for the impact, his ears full of that terrible whistling that gave way, after a time, to a rattling, ringing noise with regular interruptions, and dragged him from sleep.
‘You registered for a call to St Petersburg?’ asked a dark female voice.
‘Yes,’ he said and looked at his alarm clock: twenty past four.
‘Just a moment, I’ll put you through.’ There were two clicks followed by a hiss, and then, through a filter of background noises, he heard Leskov’s voice.
‘Da? Ya slushayu . . . Kto tam?’
Perlmann put down the phone. He got dressed, packed the stack of Russian books in an old bag and dragged them through deserted streets to the big supermarket garbage bins.
At the weekend Perlmann started his training in slowness. He wouldn’t have imagined that it would be so difficult. Again and again he made hasty movements, abrupt changes of intention. Then he forced himself to repeat the whole thing so slowly that a slow-motion calm was produced. After some time he came up with a ritual: before any lengthy sequence o
f actions he went into the living room and listened to the ticking of the big clock for half a minute. All that Saturday he waged a stubborn battle against his unfounded haste, and often felt as if he would never learn to do it. But by Sunday he had already managed to slow some things down all by himself, and he felt his nervous exhaustion turning every now and again into a natural, redeeming tiredness. Now each time he spent a good minute listening to the big clock.
Late on Sunday afternoon he sat down at his desk for the first time. He thought of the many books that he had left in Genoa in the airport restroom. Would he buy new ones? He managed to push his tiredness like a buffer between himself and that question and, for a while, he span out that thought still further: the important thing was to take that tiredness, which was too deep-rooted ever to disappear entirely, and turn it into a protecting shell – a substitute for serenity.
The envelope from Frau Hartwig, which he opened now, contained only requests and demands with deadlines that had already passed. He threw everything into the waste-paper basket. He hid the letter from Princeton in his desk drawer. Then he put the chronicle, along with the old wax-cloth notebook, in the kitchen along with the out-of-date newspapers.
Then he sat for a long time at his completely empty desk. From time to time he ran his hand over the gleaming surface. For the next little while the important thing was not to think too much, and even then to think slowly. Above all, he didn’t want to think in sentences, in articulate, properly formulated sentences that he heard internally. For a long, very long time, he didn’t want to look for words, weigh words, compare words. His thoughts should be entirely concerned with doing certain things rather than others, going to the left rather than to the right, into this room rather than that one, taking that path rather than that one. His thoughts should be apparent in the fact that he did things in their logical sequence, that there was order in his movements, a meaning in his behavior. Beyond that, his thoughts should go unnoticed, even by himself, without conscious traces, and above all without an internal linguistic echo. Even if he wrote one sentence rather than another, silence was to prevail inside his head. The pen was to pursue its path across the page, leaving its trace, without the sentence produced by that trace possessing an internal present. In the end Perlmann would send the trace to wherever it was that they were waiting for a text from him.