Perlmann thought of the cramped nursery with its floral wallpaper, and managed a vague smile.
‘By the way, there really is another wedding in our church on Sunday,’ said Evelyn Mistral when they were going upstairs together afterwards. ‘This time I went in. An unusual space. Just chains of colored lights. There’s something of the fairy tale about it. Shall we go on Sunday? Now you’ve finished your text?’
Perlmann said nothing.
‘Oh, well, let’s see,’ she went on and touched his arm. ‘You look as if you’ve been working solidly for the past few days. Get some sleep!’
She had already turned into her corridor when she suddenly came back. ‘Maria printed out a copy of my text for you this afternoon. It’s in your pigeonhole. Would you tell me what you think of it? Especially the thing we talked about in the café.’
‘Yes . . . of course,’ said Perlmann and turned round on the stairs.
Only now did he become aware that he hadn’t looked in his pigeonhole for days. Giovanni handed him a big stack of things. Laura Sand’s texts for Thursday were there as well, and two envelopes from Frau Hartwig.
‘A lot to read!’ grinned Giovanni, who had been flicking through a magazine. Perlmann walked in silence to the elevator.
As soon as he had set the papers down on his desk the telephone rang.
‘Guess what – it worked!’ said Kirsten. ‘Admittedly, Lasker frowned at first and fiddled with his bow tie even more than usual. Luckily, Martin was there. But then when I plucked apart one after another of those theses of unity, the old man suddenly looked attentive and flicked through the text. I shifted into gear and got cheekier and cheekier. I even attacked the claim that elements of one story are echoed in the other. And at last, even though it wasn’t in my notes, I went so far as to say that the romanticism in the two stories was very different. I stumbled a bit there. But in the end there was a lot of applause, and then Lasker said in that grouchy tone of his: “Quite clever, Fräulein Perlmann, quite clever.” Incredible: Fräulein Perlmann! He’s the only one in miles who could still get away with something like that. But the comment, I’ve learned in the meantime, was huge praise coming from him. Imagine, the great Lasker! Dad, I’m quite high!’
She was talking like a waterfall, and it was only towards the end that he remembered the presentation had been about Faulkner’s The Wild Palms.
‘Aren’t you glad?’ she asked, when he didn’t reply.
‘Yes, yes, of course I congratulate you on your success,’ he said woodenly, and even before he had finished the sentence he found himself in a strange panic: for the first time in his life he couldn’t find the right tone with his daughter.
‘That sounded very formal,’ she said uncertainly.
‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ he replied and cursed his awkwardness.
She gave an audible jolt and found her way back to her cheerful tone. ‘When will you be ready with your presentation? I mean your lecture?’
‘The middle of next week.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Thursday.’
‘How long do your sessions actually last?’
‘Three or four hours.’
‘God, that’s twice as long as a seminar. And you have to talk all that time?’
‘Well . . .’ he said so quietly that she couldn’t hear him.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is there anything wrong? You sound so far away.’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing, Kitty.’
‘You haven’t called me that in ages.’
Perlmann felt his face falling. ‘Sleep well,’ he said quickly and hung up. Then he buried his head in the pillow. Only after almost an hour did he get undressed and turn out the light.
Tomorrow. I’ll have to do it tomorrow. The hours of the next day stretched out in his mind until he saw a long, silent expanse of time ahead of him, turning increasingly into a ramrod straight, wonderfully broad and empty road along which one travelled in shimmering heat towards the blurred outlines of an ochre horizon.
18
Shortly after six he woke with the certainty that he had to travel home straight away and convince himself that not everything he had written so far had been fraudulent. Without showering he slipped into his clothes, made sure that he had passport, money and the key to the apartment, and crept out of his room like a fugitive.
Giovanni had been dozing; now he looked at him like a ghost and misdialled twice before he got through to the taxi company. It was only when he was sitting in the back of the car that Perlmann noticed how exhausted he was. He stretched out against the back of the seat, and after a while he remembered the dream that had held him imperceptibly in its clutches. The most prominent and oppressive thing about it was the rubbing of his sweaty thumb on the little slate with the wooden frame – a movement that stuck to him like a physical stain. Again and again he wiped out his incorrect conversions from Réaumur to Fahrenheit and stared at the blackboard which, from the front row, he could almost have touched with his outstretched arm.
‘Who hasn’t got an answer?’ yelled the man with the bulbous nose and the open-necked shirt. Perlmann kept his hand down and stopped breathing, while his heart beat deafeningly – until it suddenly stopped beating when the man’s wrinkled arm entered his field of vision from behind and his short, knobby fingers reached for his empty slate.
Perlmann straightened and asked the driver for a cigarette. What the teacher had drilled into him with a smile of relish had been a proverb. But he couldn’t call it to mind.
When he stepped into the airport departure lounge it was a quarter past seven. The first flight to Frankfurt left at a quarter to nine. He bought cigarettes and drank a coffee. Then, as he waited to buy a ticket, he suddenly felt vulnerable because he had nothing to read.
The plane rose into the bright sky, and if you half-closed your eyes, that brilliance merged with the silver gleam of the wing. When the stewardess brought newspapers, Perlmann suddenly felt as if he had woken from the nightmare of the hotel and returned to the normal world. He greedily read the newspaper, and for a while – behind his reading, in a sense – he managed to pretend that it was all over and he was flying home for good. But as soon as the plane dipped into the blanket of clouds, which he noticed only now, this comforting illusion collapsed, and what remained was the thought that he was now wasting the whole last day that he could have spent writing, and that he was wasting it on a trip that couldn’t have been more pointless.
The landscape that opened up below the clouds was covered with a blanket of snow. He hadn’t expected that, and his first impulse was to want to stop the plane and turn round. He forgot to fasten his seat belt for landing, and was told off by a brusque stewardess. When the engines stopped with a whistle, he would have liked to stay in his seat, as if he had arrived at the tram terminus.
When he passed the shop with the books and magazines in the big hall, his eye fell on the name leskov. He gave a start like someone who is suddenly caught in bright spotlights while carrying out some forbidden operation in the dark. The cover was a detail of a painting showing the Palace Quay in St Petersburg, seen from the Peter and Paul Fortress, with the Neva in the foreground. They had stood at the spot chosen by the painter as the most favorable, he and Leskov, and it seemed to Perlmann as if it really must have been precisely the same place. It was there that Perlmann had, against his will, told Leskov about Agnes, while the cold almost took his breath away.
He excitedly opened the book and read the titles of the short stories. He didn’t say a word about this. Then, holding the book irresolutely in his hand and making his first attempt to get over his surprise, Perlmann finally noticed: the author was, of course, Nikolai Leskov, whose work he had not yet read, but whom he knew as a famous name in Russian literature. Annoyed with himself, he set the book back down. As if someone whose books are translated and sold here would
have Vassily Leskov’s material concerns!
But he wasn’t, in fact, annoyed about his thoughtlessness. What enraged him more and more with every step towards the exit was the excitement that he had felt at the sight of the name. As if he had somehow injured Vassily Leskov with his translation. Why had he felt as if he had been caught?
He stepped through the automatic sliding door, out into the bitterly cold air, and almost collided with the dean of his faculty.
‘Herr Perlmann! I thought you were in the warm south! And instead here you are wearing your summer clothes in our premature cold snap, and shivering! Has something happened?’
‘What could have happened?’ Perlmann laughed irritably. ‘I just have a small thing to attend to here. I’ll be back down there this evening.’
‘By the way, there are mutterings about you being invited to Princeton. Allow me to congratulate you. Some of that glory will rub off on the faculty, too!’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Perlmann, and the firmness in his voice gave him back some of his confidence. He shivered.
‘You’re shivering,’ said the dean, ‘so I won’t keep you. After Christmas I’m sure you’ll deliver a full report to the faculty – given that we let you go off in the middle of term. Not everyone looked kindly on that – understandably enough.’
Twice on the journey home the taxi stopped at the lights near a bookshop window. Each time Perlmann’s eye was caught by Nikolai Leskov’s book, and he boiled with rage as he discovered that he reacted to it as if to a wanted poster of himself. To the driver’s annoyance he rolled down the window and deeply inhaled the cold air.
His letterbox was full of junk mail, his freezing apartment smelled musty and strange. For a moment he felt like an intruder who could not touch anything. Then he opened the balcony door and, in his light shoes, took two crunching steps in the snow.
He put on a thick pullover. He didn’t turn on the radiators. He couldn’t live here now.
He lay on his belly by the open chest and read his writings. He had last lain there on the floor like that as a boy and, through all his trepidation, he enjoyed the unfamiliar posture.
He was amazed at what he read. Boundlessly amazed. Not just by all the things he had once known, thought, discussed. Even his language surprised him, his style, which he liked for a moment and then didn’t like at all, and which struck him as strangely alien. He didn’t read any single text all the way through, but dug his way frantically through the mountain of his offprints, reading a beginning here, there a conclusion, and sometimes just a few sentences in the middle. What was he looking for? Why had he come here? But it was ludicrous to imagine that he would be able to find out in this way whether he had copied anything. And why that suspicion, which he had previously only felt in a dream? Everything was cited meticulously enough, the bibliographies filled many pages.
He hesitantly lit a cigarette and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. The bread in the bread bin was as hard as a rock. He took the coffee pot into the sitting room. From the sofa, he looked out into the driving snow. The white backdrop was so strange that it was impossible to think it coexisted in time with the bay in front of the hotel. He braced himself against the white wall outside and escaped to the hotel terrace, the crooked pines, the red armchair by the window, the strip of lights at Sestri Levante. But over these images there lay a murky film of anxiety and trepidation, so he cleansed them of everything until they made way for a world full of silent, southern light, in which there was only Evelyn Mistral’s radiant laughter, Silvestri’s slender white hand with its cigarette, Ruge’s cheerful face and Millar’s firm handshake. And countless colors, with countless names of colors.
The ring of the telephone made him start. He knocked the coffee pot over with his arm, and watched as if paralyzed as the brown liquid seeped into the pale carpet. After a pause the telephone rang again. It rang for a very long time. He counted, for no reason. On the fourteenth ring he suddenly leapt to his feet. When he picked up the receiver, the line was already dead.
He slowly brought the pot and the cup to the kitchen and rinsed them out. It was just before three. The plane didn’t leave until six. He sat down on the edge of the piano stool and lifted the lid of the keyboard. No, it couldn’t be the touch, and it didn’t seem to be a trick of the pedal, either. How did Millar manage to make those sequences of notes achieve that strange simultaneity of experience? When he closed the lid, he saw the traces of his fingers in the dust and wiped them away.
On the windowsill by the desk there stood a photograph of Agnes, a serious picture, in which she rested her chin on her hand. He avoided her eye and got back to his feet. Something had come between them. She hadn’t been ambitious in the conventional sense. Nonetheless, would she have understood what was happening to him down there? And would he have dared to confide in her what he knew about it?
He hesitantly walked across to her room, where it seemed even icier. He let his eye slide over her photographs. It was insane: of course he had always known that they were all black-and-white photographs. He wasn’t blind, after all. But only now, it seemed to him, did it really become clear to him what that meant: there were no colors in them. None at all. No ultramarine, no English red, no magenta or sanguine.
I’ve remembered the names. His stomach hurt.
Now his eye fell on the two-volume German-Russian dictionary that Agnes had one day brought home triumphantly after a long search. He looked it up: crib (homework, answer): spisyvat’. To plagiarize. He quietly pulled the door, which had been open, shut behind him.
He glanced quickly into Kirsten’s room. Only half of her furniture had been there since September. The rest was in Konstanz. She had taken her teddy with her, but not her giraffe. The day she moved out he had gone to the office early, and only come home late at night, after going to the cinema. It wasn’t until the next day that he summoned the courage to open the door to her room.
Perlmann gave the taxi driver the address of his doctor. Without another prescription he wouldn’t have enough sleeping pills. The practice was closed for a holiday, and the locum’s receptionist was adamant: no, no prescription or consultation with the doctor, and he was doing house visits until the evening. Perlmann furiously asked the taxi driver to take him to the airport. As he stepped into the departure lounge all that remained of his fury was a feeling of impotence. I can’t possibly ask Silvestri.
But Nikolai Leskov’s short stories really hadn’t the slightest thing to do with him, Perlmann said to himself over and over again as he waited by the cash register with the book in his hand. Nonetheless, when he reached the waiting room he immediately opened the book and started excitedly reading it as if it were a secret document. On the way to the plane he held the book in front of his nose and, once he was on board, sat down in the wrong seat at first.
Would the shapeless man in the shabby loden coat have been capable of writing such a book? That snuffling man with the fur cap, the pipe and the brown teeth? Perlmann compared the text with sentences from his translation, laboriously and without the slightest sense how one could answer such a question across the boundaries of literary genres. They were already far above the clouds when he finally managed to shake off this compulsive activity. No sooner had he snapped the book shut and stowed it in the pocket in front of him, than he had completely forgotten what the story was about.
‘Not exciting enough?’ the fattish man in the seat next to him, reading an cheap novelette, asked him cheerfully.
A last glow of light lay over the dark sea of clouds. Perlmann turned off the reading light and closed his eyes. Yes, that was it: Agnes had looked at him from the photograph as if she guessed his thoughts – even the ones that he himself didn’t yet know. He tried to banish that gaze by conjuring up her living face, a laughing face, a face in the wind, bathed in flapping hair. But those memories had no endurance, and soon made way for images from the classroom, in which the man sat at his raised desk, always in the same op
en-necked shirt, and damply yelled the names of the pupils into the room. And all of a sudden there it was, the proverb: Honesty is the best policy. Isn’t that right, Perlmann?
Perlmann asked the stewardess for a glass of water and ignored the curious gaze of his neighbor by closing his eyes again. Perhaps he would have got through his Latin and Greek tests even without that little notebook under his desk? But he wouldn’t have dared. Because in point of fact he had never found foreign languages easy. There was no question of a particular talent. He wasn’t like Luc Sonntag, who would see through the most intricate ablative constructions, even though he was always going around with girls. Perlmann was industrious, and thorough – so thorough that Agnes had often fled from the room because she was afraid of his particular kind of thoroughness. Then he had firmly dug his heels in still further and gone on swotting so that, at some distant point in the future, he could enjoy his new linguistic understanding.
He was good at that, he thought. It was perhaps the only thing he really was good at: with an unimaginable firmness of will, undertaking an effort with a distant goal in mind, for the sake of a future ability that would someday make him happy. He had mastered his renunciation, this deferral of happiness, in a thousand variations, and his gift of invention was inexhaustible when it came to thinking up more and more things that he had to learn in order to be equipped for his future present. And thus he had systematically, and with impeccable thoroughness, cheated himself of his present.
When the plane touched down he had the feeling that a seal was being put on something, even if he couldn’t have said what. The fat man next to him turned down the corner of his page and put his book away. ‘Bad as that?’ he asked with a grin when he saw that Perlmann had deliberately left his book in the seat pocket.
White columns of smoke rose into the night sky from the industrial plants beside the airport. Perlmann trudged heavily across the tarmac towards the red building. When he took his passport from the official’s hand the thought suddenly struck him: I may not get out of here alive. In the taxi he asked the driver to turn up the music. But from time to time the thought flickered up anyway. As he stepped into the hotel he was grateful for Signora Morelli’s crisp ‘Buona sera’, and tonight it didn’t bother him that someone had once again fixed the lighting in his corridor.
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