Perlmann's Silence

  Something else that he had to carefully avoid was trying to work out what other people were thinking. Henceforth, he didn’t want to think about what other people might think or do if he did one thing or another. He would do what he did, and the others would do what they did. There would be nothing else there. And he also had to silence his obsessively detailed imagination. He would complement his slowness training with lack-of-imagination training.

  The first thing he saw later on, when he turned on the television, was a close-up of hands gliding over piano keys. Someone was playing Bach. He immediately switched to another channel. Here, a Russian physicist was being interviewed, and someone was simultaneously translating. Perlmann kept his finger on the button of the remote, he would soon switch this channel, too, but then he stayed with it, one more sentence, and then another. He felt himself being sucked into a vortex that summoned up everything again. Now the interpreter was losing the crucial balance between the old sentence and the new. No, now you’ve got to skip the old sentence and concentrate on the new one! Perlmann silently yelled at him, and slipped to the edge of the sofa. It was only when the tension turned into a stomach-cramp that he tore himself away.

  Then he took a long walk through the dark park and paid attention to the emptiness in his head. When he took his glasses off to go to bed, he thought about the tunnel. Perlmann slept better than he had done for the first few days. Only once did he start awake: he had taken on Signora Medici in Russian, and then worked out that he himself didn’t know the words, and had forgotten his own questions like a senile old man.

  60

  Perlmann spent the next week waiting for Leskov’s letter. If the text had arrived on Friday, the letter could already be here by Tuesday. But it would arrive by Saturday at the latest. He stood at the window for hours and waited for the postman. Why didn’t Leskov call him? Or send a telegram? Recently, not a single half hour had passed without Perlmann thinking about Leskov and the promised letter. But no letter came. The postal clerk at the airport had probably been right, and it would take a whole week. The post doesn’t usually come on Monday, he heard Leskov saying. So Perlmann couldn’t expect the letter before next Tuesday.

  The offer from Olivetti came in the middle of the week. Now they were talking about a three-month probationary period. His tasks: translating business correspondence with German, English and American partners; overseeing the German and English edition of a large advertising brochure that was to be produced next summer; occasional interpreting at trade fairs. Signor Angelini had mentioned that Perlmann also spoke Russian; they would bear that in mind in the future. And, lastly, it would be nice if he could support Signor Angelini in his collaboration with the universities. They offered him four million lire per month – just half of what he currently earned. They would speak about pensions, insurance and the like when he had fundamentally agreed. For those things they would need a raft of documents.

  Who had told Angelini anything about his Russian? Evelyn Mistral had kept mum, he was sure of that. It must have been Leskov, at the dinner after he arrived, when Angelini was there. He had told him how they had met, how they had walked together through the Hermitage

  . . . But why, then, had Adrian von Levetzov been so unsettled in the café, when Leskov had talked about sending his first version to Perlmann? It must have been like this: over dinner Leskov had told only Angelini, who had been sitting next to him . . . Perlmann struck his knuckles against his forehead. He must stop trying to work out other people!

  He had just set the letter aside when Frau Hartwig called him and passed on a message that Brian Millar had sent by email. His publisher was extremely interested in Perlmann’s book. Could he suggest a delivery date? He missed Italy, Millar had added, and: ‘How’s your Chopin?’

  Was he still there? Frau Hartwig asked after a long pause.

  The book would take a while yet. Perlmann asked her to write and thank Millar for his trouble. And in conclusion: ‘How’s your Bach?’

  ‘I knew nothing about a book,’ Frau Hartwig said, piqued.

  ‘Later,’ he replied.

  The sun was shining, and everything was thawing as he walked along the river. But he didn’t notice much. He was too busy trying out letters with which he could return the prize he had recently been awarded. At last he had a text with the right tone. But when – his shoes still soaking – he had sat at his desk and written it down, he found it melodramatic and threw it away.

  During the night Perlmann had pains in his heart and came close to calling the doctor. Early the next morning he went to see him at the hospital. The doctor, whom he had known for many years, didn’t say much, and made long pauses that Perlmann found uncomfortable. At last he hesitantly prescribed him some new sleeping pills and told him not to smoke.

  On the way home Perlmann walked past the familiar bookshop. He wished he knew more about meditation, the technique for reaching inner peace. For a long time he stood by the shelf with the books on the subject. But each excerpt that he read contained something that repelled him, something sectarian or proselytizing, an emotionalism that he didn’t like. He didn’t buy anything.

  Friday. Today, Leskov had to hand in his text. And still no letter. Of course, he had had to work day and night, there had been no time left for a letter. And anyway, it probably wouldn’t arrive until the weekend. That meant another week of waiting. But that was actually a good sign: it proved that the text had arrived. Otherwise, Leskov would have had any amount of time for a letter. Unless he was in such a bad condition that it was out of the question.

  At the time when she had usually come back from lunch, Perlmann called Maria. She sounded spontaneous and sincere when she said how pleased she was to hear from him. Nonetheless, the conversation was something of a struggle. Those two weeks had been enough to move everything far into the past, and each sentence sounded like a frantic attempt to warm up something obsolete. He had done a lot of preparation for the question of whether she had deleted the files in the meantime; it was supposed to sound quite casual, like a joke at the end of a flirtation. When he asked it now, it seemed to come completely out of nowhere. She had just cleared up her hard drive, said Maria; but right now she couldn’t remember whether his files had been among the deleted ones. Did he want her to check?

  ‘No, no,’ he said, trying to make it sound light and playful. ‘It really doesn’t matter!’

  ‘Even if they aren’t in the computer any more, I still remember those texts very clearly!’ said Maria, laughing.

  It would be impossible to call her again, he thought as he hung up.

  His credit-card bill arrived on Saturday. They had deducted the sums for the rental car, including the excess for the repairs, and for the two dictionaries from the bookshop in Genoa. That day Perlmann had wanted to start on a book that he had been offered for review. Now he just sat around and kept hopping from channel to channel.

  He had been worried that he would dream about the tunnel again. Instead, he spent half the night – it seemed to him – battling with a computer, which, when he tried to delete a file produced a back-up copy instead. Brian Millar watched over his shoulder, so closely that Perlmann could feel his breath. All at once Millar’s arm was thrown in front of Perlmann’s face, holding out a plate piled high with ice-cold food. Perlmann turned to him and, when he recognized the waiter, he threw the food so hard in his face that half of it splashed on Evelyn Mistral’s hair and her snow-white blouse.

  On Sunday Perlmann started taking down some of Agnes’s photographs and clearing them away. Only a few were to remain – not necessarily the best ones, but the ones with a personal history. For example, the one with little Kirsten in the beach chair on the island of Sylt. It was hard work, and more than once he got chest pains. In the end he had a sense of having gone too far, and hung a series of pictures back up, whereupon the plaster started crumbling as the nail was hammered in for the second time.

  Evelyn Mistral rang in the early evening. It was a con
versation with a lot of pauses. Perlmann wished she was sitting opposite him. Had he heard anything about Leskov and his text? No, he said, nothing.

  ‘You know the phone call I suddenly remembered after the reception at the town hall?’ she said towards the end of their conversation. ‘It was a good thing I called. Once again, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And the coast road was closed anyway!’ she laughed.

  Over the following week Perlmann sat down to write his review. He saw the author in his mind’s eye, a glittering Berliner with a French wife and a house on the Côte d’Azur. Perlmann had to take a lot of breaks and, sometimes, when his reluctance became too violent, his chest felt like concrete. Then he reached for a cigarette.

  The key chapter of the book presented as new discoveries things with which Perlmann had long been familiar from the work of a little-known French writer. He knew exactly where he should have looked: the book was on the top shelf on the right. He waited for a feeling of triumph or at least of calm satisfaction. When it failed to materialize, he was at first disappointed, but then glad. He left the French book on the shelf, and in his review, which was objective, fair and positive on the whole, he didn’t mention the matter at all.

  In the middle of the week he sat back down behind the wheel for the first time. He was surprised at how close the handbrake of his car was to the passenger seat. He drove to a carpet dealer he knew and bought a light-colored Tibetan runner to cover up the coffee stain at long last. On the way back, in the early twilight, several trucks came towards him, one of them with its headlights on full beam. Each time a truck appeared, Perlmann braked to a walking pace and drove on to the grass. He decided not to drive in the near future, and wondered whether he should give the car to Kirsten.

  As he was taking out the ignition key in the garage, he remembered that moment at the gas station next to the hotel, where he had thought he had understood that the problem of inner delineation from other people and the lack of a presence were one and the same problem deep down. He clearly remembered that this had struck him as the most important insight of his whole life. On the way to his front door Perlmann had rephrased that insight over and over again. But now it was just a sentence. A sentence, admittedly, that sounded right, and one that he agreed with, but only a sentence now, not an experienced insight. At the front door he turned round, opened the garage and sat down at the wheel again with his hand on the ignition. Afterwards it seemed ridiculous to assume that an experienced insight could be poured into a particular physical posture.

  There was still no letter from Leskov on Friday. No wonder, in fact, because it must have taken him the past weekend to recover, and a letter could – as that veteran postal clerk had estimated – be en route for a whole week. Leaving from his mailbox, Perlmann finally put away the new handkerchiefs, saving one for his pocket. Then he wrote a letter to Olivetti turning down their offer, and a second letter to Angelini. He cited his reason as unforeseen family difficulties that would keep him in Frankfurt for the time being. He wrote both letters quickly and effortlessly. He tried to exploit that momentum, and started on the letter to Princeton. But he couldn’t get beyond the salutation, and then took a long walk through the familiar city, which seemed alien to him in the gloomy December light.

  Laura Sand’s photographs, which arrived on Saturday, disappointed him. He didn’t know why. They were dreamy landscape shots. Some of them must have been taken on the misty morning when he had completed the translation of Leskov’s text. In a separate envelope were several shots of colleagues, which, to judge by the unselfconsciousness of posture and expression, must have been taken unnoticed. On the accompanying slip of paper were the words: There are exceptions to every rule! The pictures showing him with Leskov he immediately threw away, and the other shots of colleagues ended up in the waste-paper basket as well. He kept only a single snapshot of Evelyn Mistral. Her laugh, her skewed T-shirt, her red shoes. He put the landscape shots in a drawer, then walked through the rooms for a while and looked at Agnes’s photographs.

  He should really, in fact, have chosen her best shots, not the most personal. He swapped them round.

  After the Sunday night concert on television he sat down at the grand piano. He played the Nocturnes that he had chosen in the lounge. There was a vacuum between him and the notes, a thin hiatus, which didn’t even disappear the second time. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, and played the A flat minor Polonaise. It didn’t matter at all that he got snarled up in the frightening passage. What was worse was that everything, even the liberating chords, sounded as if it had been dunked in fine sand.

  There was no point even thinking about sleep. In the middle of the night he sat down at the piano in his pyjamas and played other Nocturnes. They sounded as they had before, and now he understood: what he had played in the lounge had shifted away from him because he had abused it, abused it as a weapon in his battle with Millar. That was an abuse different from the one that Szabo had meant. Music couldn’t be used as an instrument like that, or you lost it.

  Towards morning Perlmann took a sleeping pill. When it started to take effect, a thought passed through his head, even though he hadn’t been thinking about the tunnel: Leskov had never asked him why he hadn’t just stopped in the passing bay to let the bulldozer through. Why not? It would have been a quite simple question, the most natural, in fact. And Perlmann couldn’t have told him the answer.

  61

  The bundle that the postman held in his hand on Tuesday contained Leskov’s letter. Perlmann could tell from the brownish paper of the envelope, which he knew from his earlier letter. Still in the hall, he tore open the envelope and looked, with thumping heart and feverish brain, for sentences that could immediately reassure him . . . there was no text there when I entered the apatment . . . I slipped, without really noticing, into a state of apathy . . . a state of dull endurance, of wordless resignation . . . desire to end it all . . . And then came the words that let him breathe again for the first time: . . . if the text hadn’t turned up after all . . . He closed his eyes and hung on to the chest of drawers for a moment before he went on reading, his eyes still burning: . . . the envelope just lying by the front door . . . the two yellow stickers . . . The state of the text was a shock . . . Seventeen pages! Perlmann had to skip through five endless paragraphs until it came at last: . . . I had, contrary to my custom, written my home address, that’s all . . . He pressed his hand to his stomach and breathed out, before dashing on to the next bit of redemption: . . . typing errors. But just after eight o’clock on Friday morning the thing was finished . . . And, at last, in the next paragraph but one, came the sentence that his eye really devoured: . . . the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post.

  Perlmann leaned against the door frame, the sheets slipped from his hand, he started silently sobbing and went on sobbing, on and on, for several minutes. He only paused to blow his nose. With trembling hands he collected the sheets, sat on the sofa and started from the beginning:

  St Petersburg, December

  Dear Philipp.

  I feel very guilty about writing to you only now. I had promised to tell you about the text straight away. But if I tell you how it all came about, you will, I hope, understand.

  I reached home very late, because Moscow Airport was chaotic as well, and the plane here set off only after an hour’s delay, it was already the middle of the night. The passengers were delighted that there was still a bus into the city, even if its heating didn’t work and it was an icy-cold journey. The deepest winter had set in here in the meantime, in fact, and even though I somehow like the curiously cold, almost unearthly light that a fall of snow emanates even in the darkest night, I found myself longing for the glowing, yet transparent light of the south, from which I was coming. I will never forget how that light overwhelmed me when I stepped out of the airport with you and then stood next to the parking cabin (with that stubborn man in the red cap!). I fee
l as if months have passed since then!

  And it’s just two weeks. They were, however, a nightmare. Because there was no text there when I entered the apartment. Throughout the whole journey it was as if I was sitting on coals, and I was so furious about the delay in Moscow that I snapped at everyone I came across. When the plane prepared to land here, something strange and almost paradoxical happened to me: out of pure fear that the text mightn’t be there, suddenly I didn’t want to go home. The state of uncertainty that spoiled some aspects of my stay with you all, and which became all the more unbearable the closer we got to St Petersburg (which is somehow strange in itself), that state suddenly seemed the lesser evil, compared with the feared discovery. But of course I then walked from the bus stop to the flat as quickly as my suitcase allowed me, and my hands – albeit from cold – were shaking when I opened the door.

  As I have said: when I dashed to the desk, the text wasn’t there, I saw it straight away, because I had written that text on yellow paper. Of course I looked around the whole room, and also in the corridor, from where I had phoned before I set off. But fundamentally I was under no illusions. Even less so since now, since now, when I was back where it happened, my memory of packing the text was quite clear and unambiguous. I could actually feel the hasty movements with which I had put the pages in the outside pocket of the suitcase. I knew immediately: you must have taken it out and left it somewhere on the way. Hence the piece of rubber band in the zip.