Perlmann's Silence (54 page)

‘
Two
waters,’ the waiter said abruptly.

‘I’m sorry. Yesterday I was a bit . . . a bit under the weather.’

‘I can see that. And I’d also say that we could do without a second visit from you,’ the waiter said and simply stuffed the three 10,000 lire notes in the pocket of his red jacket.

The two things – being barred and that movement – assembled themselves in Perlmann’s feelings into something strangely liberating. He looked the waiter in the eyes with undisguised contempt. ‘Do you know what you are?
Uno stronzo
.’ And because he wasn’t sure whether the insult was strong enough, he added his own translation, ‘An asshole. A great big asshole.’ The waiter’s face colored. ‘
Stronzo
,’ Perlmann said again and went outside.

On the way back he felt more confident and, all of a sudden, he felt properly hungry – a sensation that he had almost forgotten over the past few days. At a stand-up bar he ate several slices of pizza. The five o’clock news was just coming to an end on the television behind the bar, and a weather map appeared. Perlmann stared at the clouds to the east of Genoa. They were white, not grey. But then the clouds on maps like that always were. Weren’t they?

‘Do you know the road from Genoa via Lumarzo to Chiávari?’ he asked the man in the vest who was taking the pizza out of the oven with a long shovel.

‘Of course,’ said the man, without interrupting what he was doing.

‘Do you think it’s going to rain there tonight? Up by the tunnel, I mean.’

The man paused abruptly, left the shovel half inside the oven and turned round.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘I really need to know. It’s very important.’

The man in the vest took a drag on his cigarette and looked at him as if he were someone very simple, perhaps even disturbed.

‘How on earth am I supposed to know that?’ he said mildly.

‘Yes,’ Perlmann said quietly and left far too big a tip.

*

‘That conversation last night,’ Perlmann said to Signora Morelli when she set Frau Hartwig’s yellow envelope and another little one for him on the reception counter, ‘I . . .’

She folded her hands and looked at him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tiny twitch in the corner of her mouth.

‘What conversation?’

Perlmann gulped and shifted the two envelopes until they were exactly parallel at the edge of the counter. ‘
Grazie
,’ he said quietly and looked at her.

She gave only the hint of a nod.

The room smelled of Leskov’s sickly tobacco. The haze had escaped, but the open window hadn’t been able to do anything about the penetrating smell. Except it was cold now. Perlmann tipped a mountain of pipe ash and charred tobacco into the toilet and shut the window.

Frau Hartwig’s envelope contained two letters. One was his invitation to Princeton, written on expensive paper that looked like parchment, and signed by the President. The invitation had been issued because of his
outstanding academic achievements
, it said. And the President assured him that it would be
a great honor
to have him as a guest for a while. Perlmann didn’t read the letter twice, but immediately put it back in the envelope and threw it in the suitcase.

The other was an invitation to give a guest lecture. He was to open a series of lectures, and it was very important to the organizer that Perlmann should be the first speaker. The letter talked about works that he had finished three years ago, but which had only appeared in print at the beginning of the year. Back then, he thought, everything had still seemed all right. Except that he had been getting increasingly bored with his things. And every now and again he had woken up in the middle of the night and hadn’t known where to go from here. He hadn’t had long conversations with himself when that had happened; few thoughts came to him on such occasions. He listened to music, and he usually stood at the big window as he did so. Then Agnes was surprised to find him at his desk so early.

In the other envelope there was a note from Angelini. Unfortunately, he had to go back to Ivrea that afternoon. He wished Perlmann a speedy recovery, and hoped it was nothing serious. He would try to come to the last dinner on Friday, although he couldn’t yet promise anything. At the end was his private telephone number.

The words were friendly, if conventional. Perlmann read them several times. He thought back to their first meeting and the enthusiastic phone calls that had followed. You couldn’t say that these words gave off a sense of disappointment. Not at all. And not detachment or coldness. But he sensed them. He, Philipp Perlmann, had revealed himself to be a bad investment.

He turned on the six o’clock news. But on that channel they only had a schematic weather map that was no use to him. No big change to be expected tomorrow. A little while before, the roads had been almost dry again. He walked over to the window. There was no point now in staring up into the starless night sky.

He took a long shower and then lay down in bed. The pillow smelled of Leskov’s tobacco. He fetched another one from the wardrobe. The sheets and the wool blanket smelled too. He pulled off the sheet and covered himself with replacement blankets from the wardrobe. The heating intensified the smell. He turned it off and opened the window. His body was vibrating with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. He didn’t take any pills. On the seven o’clock news the clouds around Genoa looked denser than they had done two hours before. Outside it was still dry. He was shivering, and fetched the last blanket from the wardrobe. It was too noisy on the coast road, and he closed the window. If he set off at half-past five, he would be there by first light. He set his alarm for five. He went to sleep at about eight.

He saw no bulldozer, no tunnel walls. In fact, he saw nothing at all. No seeing took place. It was simply the case that he hadn’t the strength to take his hands off the wheel. He held it tightly and turned it to the left, further and further to the left. It could be that he was the one who turned it. Or else it was something inside him, a force, a will, but it was alien to him and not really his. And perhaps the wheel had gained its autonomy, and was guiding his hand against his will. He no longer knew what was going on; the impressions piled up on top of each other and he didn’t know what – of all of it – he was most afraid of. He was completely paralyzed by fear, and he had the feeling of losing control of his bodily functions, particularly his abdomen. That took half an eternity, in which he expected a collision at every moment, and then he woke up with a twitch of his whole body that had something terrible about it, something uncanny, because it too completely escaped his control; it was an animal, a biological twitch that seemed to come from a very deep region of his brain.

Perlmann leapt up and examined the mattress. It was clean. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked. From time to time he felt the physical echo of a turn to the left. Later he took off his wet pyjamas and went into the shower. It was just after midnight. The coast road was wet. But now it wasn’t raining any more.

Over the next few hours he kept waking from the same dream at brief intervals, before dozing off again. This time it wasn’t a nightmare, but a bothersome and ridiculous combination of things that were completely unconnected as far as the dreamer was concerned. There was the name
Pian dei Ratti
, which returned with such frequency that it was like a constant background noise, an incessant echo that filled every last corner. And the name smelled. It was enveloped in a smell of sickly tobacco and mist; it was as if that smell stuck to the name, so that without the smell the name had no meaning whatsoever. The fact that the name was always there, ringing out, made one shiver and, sniffing, look for coins, which kept slipping with a painful rub through your fingers. Your shoes tipped over, and women laughed. Then everything was full of yellow sheets, and there was no point making yourself very small in the trunk.

Perlmann changed the bandage on his finger. The inflammation was beginning to ease. Every time he woke up he opened the widow. Only a few drops were falling outside. The dream had the dependability and monotony of a record that always sticks at the same place. At half-past four he showered, shaved and dressed.

‘
Buon giorno
,’ said Giovanni, rubbing his eyes and looking at his watch.

Perlmann turned round again in the doorway. ‘That equalizer that led to the penalty shoot-out. Who scored it?’

Giovanni was almost struck dumb. ‘Baggio,’ he said at last, with a grin.

‘From which club?’

Giovanni looked at him as if he had asked him what country Rome was the capital of.

‘Juve. Juventus Turin.’

‘
Grazie
,’ said Perlmann. He felt Giovanni’s startled eyes watching after him.

He had become a weirdo.

43

The coast road was so quiet and deserted that Perlmann instantly forgot the three or four cars that came towards him, in their brief, eerie presence. Rapallo was a night-time silhouette with motionless lights that called to mind paper cuts and engravings. The flashing traffic lights in the dead streets of Recco gave him the feeling of driving through a ghost town, and the two old men who were creeping along close to the houses further intensified that impression. Lots of lights were on already in the farmhouses along the road to Uscio. The crowing of the omnipresent cocks drowned out the quiet sound of the engine. Perlmann tried not to think back to Monday. The main thing was that it plainly hadn’t rained here in the past few hours. Past Lumarzo, however, the gear stick was suddenly damp with sweat, and he had to swallow more and more often. On the climb towards the tunnel he drove with his arms outstretched on the wheel, and decided not to look and to think about nothing.

He braked. Over on the light-grey crash barrier: dark strips. He put his foot down – only to put the car out of gear again straight away.
Here, exactly here is where I took my hands off the wheel.
He sat up. There was nothing to see. It was idiotic. He furiously screeched his tires and then stepped hard on the brake as if to prevent a pile-up in the empty tunnel.

Most of the pale mud had been covered up with a tarpaulin, which had been weighed down with bricks. By the wall there stood an empty wheelbarrow, with an untidily rolled-up rope underneath it. He had never worked out what happened at this passing-place, and this latest change made no sense to him at all. He knew it was nonsense, bordering on paranoia, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he – he in particular, he alone – was being played for a fool – that someone was constantly rearranging things at this spot, with the sole intention of confusing him, goading his useless thoughts and stoking his apprehension. He bit his lips and drove out of the tunnel. The toothless old woman’s shop was in darkness, and looked like a discarded dream backdrop. It was a quarter past six, and still the darkest night.

It could only be two kilometers, or three at the most. Only a few bends. But it wasn’t behind this one, or the next. Seen from this direction everything looked very different. Suddenly, so quickly that he couldn’t believe it, he was at the gas station where he had made the first attempt to
disappear
Leskov’s text. Yes, that was the word. He stopped outside the dark cottage and tried to imagine what had happened afterwards. His memory was sluggish; nothing came back of its own accord. It was hot and stuffy in the car. He had been driving the whole time with the heating turned up full. But the air from outside made him cold, and he whirred the window back up. The skin of his face tensed and felt like paper.

What was he actually doing here? In the end he would be holding a pile of dirty, ragged pages in his hand. Then what? What in the world would he tell Leskov when he handed him the papers? It would, that was clear, have to be the story of an oversight, an ineptitude, an unintended stupidity. And the story would also have to explain why he had discovered his stupidity only today, of all days. Perlmann felt his head emptying, and felt that emptiness filling with a paralysing weariness. With the best will in the world, even calling on the furthest reaches of his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t possibly explain how the text had made it out of the closed suitcase and the closed trunk into the mud, without anyone having had a deliberate hand in it.

A first shimmer of diffuse, grey light lit up the solid cloud cover. A car passed now every few minutes. If he simply kept on driving to Genoa, he would be at the airport just before eight, and soon after that the Avis counter would open up.
But I can’t just let the sheets of paper lie here and rot. That’s out of the question. He has to get his text back. Somehow.

Perlmann set off slowly, even more slowly than on Monday. It was up there on the bend that the truck with the full-beam headlights had appeared, the one he had allowed to pass him. And, sure enough, the first pale sheet lay there in the roadside ditch. The sight of it electrified him and all of a sudden he was wide awake. Hurriedly, as if the paper might escape his clutches at the last minute, he got out and bent down. It was a piece of half-transparent, crumpled grease-proof paper. He couldn’t halt his hand, he had to touch it. Now he had mayonnaise on his fingers. Disgusted, he rubbed them on his trousers and got back into the car.

It couldn’t have been the next bend; there was no paper to be seen far and wide. It was the next but one. Perlmann could see all the pale sheets in the ditch from far away, and accelerated as if on a home straight. He came to a standstill with both wheels in the ditch, climbed out of his crookedly parked car and ran breathlessly over. The pages were often far apart, but in two places several had fallen on top of each other and formed irregular little piles. Perlmann laid them on the hood. The sun must have been shining here yesterday, the two top sheets were both dry. The pale yellow had faded almost completely, the sheets were curling, and it looked as if they had blisters. Then came a few that were still damp, and under those several that hadn’t been touched by rain at all, at least in the middle. Only at the edges were they all wet and grey with dirt. The ink on the top sheets had run. The first two were hard to read, but it got better after that.

So far there were seventeen sheets, including page 77. Now it was the turn of the individual, widely scattered sheets in the ditch. When Perlmann was bending down for the first one, a car drove past and its wake blew three pages down from the hood. He hurried back and gathered them up. One page had fallen under the wheels and been ripped. Annoyed, he laid the whole pile on the mat in front of the passenger seat. Half of them were completely smudged, but Leskov would still be able to reconstitute the text. The others, which had been lying face down, were in a better condition. There, too, the round letters of Leskov’s careful handwriting had often dissolved at the edges, and flowed outwards. At those points the background was no longer yellow, but a washed-out pale blue shimmering into green. But the text was still legible. The sheets that had lain among the trees had been dried by the sun and had warped; the others had softened and were unpleasant to the touch.

After that, Perlmann often had to climb the steep embankment to fetch the next sheet. Many were sticky with mud, some were crumpled and torn. At one point he slipped on the damp soil, the pain from his ankle shot through him like knives and he nearly fell. At the very last moment he was able to cling to a tuft of grass. Now he had earth under his fingernails. From here he managed to gather fourteen pages together, including page 79, which had a space at the bottom, but which still couldn’t be the last, as there was no address on it. So at least twenty-five pages were still missing. He leaned, exhausted, against the hood and smoked.

By now it was twenty to eight and broad daylight. The traffic was building up, and now the last truck was coming towards him. Its bumper was far too narrow, its gas tank unprotected. When it had passed, Perlmann, who was standing in the middle of a black cloud of smoke, became aware – to his amazement and relief – that his heart wasn’t pounding. Only his cigarette had fallen into the road without his noticing. It was, he thought, as if a first thin dividing wall had formed between him and the trucks; a first protecting distance which would get bigger and bigger over time until one day he would also be able to forget the red mist.
As long as Leskov has his text back.

Astonishingly, large numbers of sheets had been blown on to the embankment that sloped downwards on the other side of the road. The ground there was soft and damp, and at one point Perlmann sank beyond the edge of his shoes into the quagmire. The sheets had been resting on the tips of the grass, and weren’t very dirty. With two exceptions, they had been lying writing-side down, and were still legible. Now he had rescued a total of sixty-seven pages. He looked around a wider area, methodically, patch by patch, the whole thing three times. The rising sun pierced the cloud cover and Perlmann looked up, blinking. There were sheets in the tops of two tall bushes, one in each. It took a desperately long time before they finally came floating down, and with his furious shaking he must have presented a comical sight, because the school bus drove unusually slowly, and the children laughed and pointed at him.

One sheet was the first page with the title. There was no name underneath. It was creased and had a hole in it from a branch, but reading it wasn’t a problem. At least eight pages were missing now. Perlmann looked at the wheels of the passing cars and imagined the sheets getting stuck to tires like those and then being pressed rhythmically between rubber and tarmac, before ending up lying in rags somewhere.

When the road was empty for a little while, his eye fell on a brown rectangle, which hid part of the white marking in the middle of the road. It was a page of Leskov’s text, drenched with rain and dirt and driven over countless times. He lifted it by one corner, but the paper was fragile and tore immediately. A bottom layer. Puzzled, he opened the glove compartment and saw the map that Signora Morelli had lent him on Saturday night. He half-unfolded it and pushed it carefully, centimeter by centimeter, under the soggy sheet. On the lid of the trunk he started carefully dabbing the page down with his handkerchief as if it were an archaeological find.

It was page 58. In the middle, Leskov had written a subheading. All that could still be made out was that it had consisted of two quite long words, preceded by the number 4. But the ink had run almost completely; it had mixed with the dirt, and all that remained was a smear. Perlmann wiped the words again with another tip of his handkerchief. Perhaps something of the old ink traces that had been put on paper in St Petersburg would be revealed if one dabbed away the diluted and running ink that now lay over it. And some clues did become visible. But they weren’t enough to make out an unambiguous sequence of words. He lit a cigarette. The last word, he was more and more certain of it, must be
proshloe
:
the past
. But he could imagine at least three variants:
iskazhennoe
proshloe
:
the distorted past
;
pridiumannoe proshloe
:
the invented past; obmanchivoe proshloe
:
the deceptive past
. And even a fourth:
zastyvshee proshloe
:
the coagulated past
. That he knew
zastyvat’
,
to coagulate
, he owed to a viewer of Agnes’s photographs, who had dared to compare her particular way of capturing the living present in images with the process of coagulation. Her fury had been boundless, because
coagulation
was her name for the process in which people rigidified into lifeless figures because of their conventions. And to keep from suffocating on her fury, afterwards she had done something that was usually Perlmann’s own habit: she had looked up the word in every available dictionary.

Smoking hastily, Perlmann repeatedly compared the words he tried out with the thin traces of ink. But the vague lines simply made any decision impossible. He measured his conjectures against what he had of Leskov’s thoughts in his head, and against the vocabulary that he had appropriated from Leskov’s text. But even that didn’t yield complete clarity. The intervention of language in the events of memory could, according to the first version, be characterized in all four ways. And besides, the text that he knew was not a reliable standard, since Leskov, as he had said, had thoroughly reworked it for the second version.

What was it that he had said about the new version on the drive on Monday? In the middle of traffic that was now becoming increasingly dense, and in which the trucks were beginning to accumulate, Perlmann tried to call Leskov’s words to mind. He had perceived them, he remembered that. And something had passed through his head as he did so. He closed his eyes. On his face he felt the heat of exhaust fumes. A truck’s gears clashed. He saw the beam from its left headlight in front of him, with nothing matching it on the right. Otherwise, he had no memory. And for a short and terrible moment he had the impression that he no longer knew how it was done: remembering. Then he put the card with the sheet on the rest of the pile and got in the car.

He would have liked to arrange the sheets to see how big the gaps were between the missing pages – whether they were all gaps of one or two pages, which it would be relatively easy for Leskov to fill, or whether there were bigger breaks in the text that would take him weeks, because a whole train of thought would have to be reworked. But in the state in which the pages were, that could not be accomplished without further damage.