‘What did he want?’ asked Leskov.
Perlmann said nothing.
The policeman took off his cap and got into the car. He hadn’t looked back. The car stayed where it was. The driver would now be watching them in the rear-view mirror. Now the passenger lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out of the window, laid his arm on the frame; they both laughed, and then the car lurched off. They will testify that I was feeling ill. That’s good. It was twenty to six.
As long as the policemen were within view, there was somewhere for the eye to rest. When the tail lights disappeared into the night, the tunnel was quiet and deserted. Perlmann would have liked to light his last cigarette. He had a craving for one like never before. But he couldn’t risk it. He didn’t want to do it with a cigarette in his hand. From the corners of his eyes he saw Leskov’s massive legs in their brown trousers, the ankle-high boots with the thick soles and the hands folded in his lap with the yellow thumb and the black under the nails. The span of time in which two people can sit side by side in a stationary car was already long past. Perlmann tried convulsively to do the impossible: the absolute unrelatedness of two people who were sitting a few inches apart. He felt Leskov looking at him, and closed his eyes. His scalp twitched and his nose started running. He was glad to be able to do something, and reached for the handkerchief with his ice-cold hand.
‘You think about Agnes a lot, don’t you?’ Leskov said into the silence.
Through all the coldness and fear a terrible fury flamed up, a rage at the emphatically mild, almost tender tone that Leskov had used; the sort of tone one adopted with children or sick people. But more than that it was a fury at the fact that this fat, repellent person next to him, whose fault it all was, dared to talk about Agnes at all, and took it upon himself to touch that open wound and thus to touch Perlmann in his innermost depths. And it was also a fury with himself, over the fact that he had given that part of himself away for no reason that time, in the icy air of St Petersburg. This fury acted as if he were in the middle of life and not on its outermost edge. It crashed in and flowed through him as if there were no tunnel full of fatal silence and white-hot lights in the high, thundering front of a truck. It was such a violent fury that it left him dazed. Perlmann buried his face in his handkerchief, and now his fury discharged itself into his nose-blowing. He went on blowing his nose even though his whole handkerchief had been damp with snot for ages and repelled him. One pant came more violently than another. The preparation for each was even bigger than the last, but all in vain. His nose went on running. Fresh mucus kept coming from somewhere, and more and more. It flowed. It streamed. Perlmann pressed and pressed and only paused when the moisture in his cold nose suddenly turned warm and his handkerchief turned red. As he held the handkerchief away from him and looked with surprise at the blood, it dripped from his nose, and when he looked down at himself, his white shirt and the light-grey leather upholstery between his legs were covered with bloodstains. He stared, motionless, at those stains, which were still spreading at their edges. It was as if he were hypnotized by them and forgot to keep the handkerchief to his nose, so that the blood went on dripping, fast and constant.
That was the reason he felt it so late. It was a light, choppy vibration of the ground that conveyed itself straight to the car and his body. Still captivated by the sight of the blood, Perlmann glanced quickly forwards over the steering wheel, and then he saw the two bright orange lights flashing at short intervals. A giant bulldozer was already quite a long way into the tunnel, moving towards them rather jerkily on caterpillar tracks as big as tank treads. The two flashing lights were attached to two poles sticking out at the sides, and provided the visual limitation of the machine, which kept quite close to the crash barrier and still extended some way beyond the middle strip. It took two or three seconds before Perlmann had torn himself away from the bloodstains and the sight of the oversized shovel of the bulldozer: a slightly curved, high wall with prongs at the sides. But then he reacted in a flash. He dropped his handkerchief, put his foot on the clutch and turned the key in the ignition. The penetrating whistle assailed him. He had forgotten it, and gave a start just as he had the first time. Again he turned the key, a crunching noise, because of the whistle he hadn’t heard that the quiet engine had already sprung into life.
The Lancia, the safest Italian car, accelerated with silky smoothness, but Perlmann pulled out all the gears so that the engine screamed. The blood flowed warmly down his lips and chin. The whistling was maddening. He looked rigidly straight ahead, his arms outstretched. Just under a kilometer: now he saw, in the narrow, yellow driver’s cab, a lanky man in blue workmen’s overalls with a beret. The curved wall covered with pale earth was high. It’s high enough. Nothing will happen to him. So now the time had come. The last few seconds of his life – and even now no presence. He was driving at over a hundred now – that would be enough. His head emptied completely. All his plans for careening and pretending the steering wheel wasn’t working were forgotten. All he knew now was that he had to pull the steering wheel to the left at the right time, but not too soon because of Leskov. Now he heard the clattering engine of the bulldozer, the vibration of the ground merged with the sensation of speed, and that insane whistling noise and Leskov’s fearful voice, and then all of a sudden it was perfectly silent. It all happened soundlessly as if in cotton wool and snow. Less than 100 meters: the glasses – he pulled them from his face. Now he had to do it – now. He pressed himself into his seat, closed his eyes and took his sweat-drenched hands off the wheel.
Beside him, only inches from the car window, there was a red flash. He opened his eyes. They were past, but everything was blurred. The lines were broken, as if under water. He pushed his hand against the wheel. The car veered to the left. Perlmann pulled it back and oversteered. The right fender crashed against the guard rail. The whole length of the car scraped along the metal. It was a deafening crunch. Now he heard that whistling noise again. He pulled the car to the left, into the middle of the tunnel, but now two headlights came towards him out of the dark, each one of them like a tattered bundle of gleaming crystals, shifting blurrily towards one another. Perlmann pulled to the right: again it crashed and crunched. In the midst of it all was that mad whistling, but he kept the wheel turned firmly to the right. The approaching car was past. Another crunch, then they were outside in the dark. Perlmann drove blindly to the right, put both feet on the pedals. The car slewed round, then only slid and, finally, after an eternity, it came to a standstill by a pile of rubble.
At first Perlmann was merely grateful that the whistling had stopped. He felt his blood thumping from his head all the way down to his feet; his veins seemed to be about to burst. Then, after a delay of almost half a minute, he started shuddering. It wasn’t just trembling or shivering, but an uncontrollable, violent twitching of his limbs the like of which he had never experienced before. To stop his arms from drumming against the steering wheel, he rested them on his thighs. Now he sensed that his trousers, too, were covered with blood, and that his nose was still bleeding, more violently than before. He bent for his handkerchief, which was down by the pedals. The blood on the cloth was mixed with dirt. A drop of blood fell on the lapel of his blazer when he sat up, rested his head against the headrest and pressed the handkerchief under his nose with a trembling hand.
‘Take mine,’ said Leskov, who had turned in his seat and held a crumpled handkerchief in front of his face. It was the first thing he had said since they had come to a halt. Perlmann had no idea what Leskov was thinking at that moment, or what his face was like. But he was astonished by the calm, matter-of-fact tone of his voice. He would not have thought him capable of it, having seen him looking around so anxiously at the airport. Perlmann was revolted by the handkerchief, which smelled of sickly tobacco. ‘No, thanks,’ he said and got out.
He held his head tilted far back as he walked past the old tires and the rubble. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cold night air. His nosebleed
was subsiding, and his shivering was gradually easing, only every now and again there was a spasm of twitching. He stopped at the side of the road and put the last cigarette between his lips, but for fear of his nosebleed starting up again he didn’t dare light it. In the windows down at the road that he had pelted up the previous day, a light was burning. He saw shadows moving. I haven’t become a murderer.
‘The right headlight’s broken,’ Leskov said two steps behind him, ‘and there are nasty scrapes.’ Now he rested his hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘But otherwise not much has happened. Just body damage. It was a horrible shock, though. And without a belt.’
Again Perlmann started shuddering, more weakly than before, but unmistakably.
‘You’re trembling like an ashpen-leaf,’ said Leskov. ‘That’s what you say, isn’t it?’
The linguistic mistake and the innocent question that followed it brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes, he didn’t know why.
‘Aspen-leaf,’ he finally managed to say, and attempted a smile. ‘It just came over me when I saw the bulldozer,’ he added after a pause. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Came . . . over . . . you?’ asked Leskov, clearly enunciating the individual words and placing them side by side like someone who had never heard them in that sequence before.
Perlmann felt his intestines. He gulped and looked into Leskov’s eyes. No, it wasn’t the biting sarcasm it had sounded like at first. It was merely linguistic curiosity. Perlmann’s alarm gave way to irritation.
‘Panic,’ he said tightly. ‘I panicked when I saw that monster. I had to get past it as quickly as possible.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Perlmann said bluntly. ‘It’s always been like that.’ He lit the cigarette.
‘And what about the glasses?’
No, it didn’t sound suspicious. There was real sympathy in the question, which simply overlooked Perlmann’s coarseness.
‘I felt dizzy again, so I involuntarily grabbed my head and pulled them off by mistake.’
There was nothing new. Over the last few days he had got to know himself as a talented, cold-blooded liar. Not as someone who reached for a necessary lie from time to time, but as someone who lied confidently and as a matter of routine.
Perlmann looked silently and fleetingly at the damage to the car as something that affected him not in the slightest. What bothered him were the bloodstains on the pale leather. He moistened the last clean tip of his handkerchief and rubbed, but it only made it worse. Leskov was fumbling around with his seatbelt when Perlmann sat down at the wheel. At one point Leskov gave it a quick, strong tug. In the dark, Perlmann held his breath until he realized: It doesn’t matter now. The two coins held.
Leskov was silent as they drove on, and when Perlmann at one point glanced at him his eyes were closed. The silent figure in the dark struck him as the embodiment of suspicion. No, he’s not suspicious. Because he doesn’t know the motive. In as little as an hour that could be different. Perlmann would park at the gas station near the hotel, and perhaps have to answer a question about the damaged car, then up the steps, the veranda on the left, greeting from Signora Morelli, who would hand the text to Leskov. Leskov would rest for a bit, then Perlmann would have to introduce him at dinner. There would be the usual ritual greetings, the clichés, the conventional smiles, elegant, smooth words from Angelini, and then, back in the room, Leskov would make his discovery. He would reach into the outside pocket of his suitcase to confirm the monstrous discovery – horror – and then, once the first paralysis was past, it would dawn on him and he would know everything. Or else Leskov would be too tired this evening; then it would happen tomorrow morning when he, Perlmann, was sitting at the front on the veranda. Or else Leskov would be so curious that in spite of the long journey he would start reading immediately, perhaps even in the elevator. They would step towards one another under the chandeliers in the elegant dining room, and then . . . At that point Perlmann’s imagination failed. The images collapsed, and inside him it turned grey, dark grey, but above all opaque, impenetrable and gloomy, numbingly gloomy.
He knew he didn’t have the strength to endure it. Pian dei Ratti. It ran through his head. Pianezza, Piana, Pian dei Ratti. Those names, black text on a white ground, were bound up with trepidation and haste, and they echoed within him a thousand times over. There was no one at the slate works at that time of day, and in the dark the people were no longer leaning in the windows. And it wouldn’t matter if there were people up in the house by the bend. He hesitated. It was very questionable whether another truck would come along. It was twenty past six by now. But that wasn’t it. Perlmann felt that he no longer had the strength to try again. He could no longer summon the will, and if he tried to force himself to believe that he had it, it felt like a will that was hollow inside and could at any moment, at the slightest resistance, collapse in on itself.
They were now past Lumarzo, and soon the first of the two roads would branch off, leading straight down to the coast and skipping yesterday’s route to Chiávari. Perlmann slowed down when the sign came into view.
‘So has your own contribution been discussed already?’ asked Leskov when Perlmann had turned on the indicator.
At first Perlmann couldn’t find his voice. ‘No,’ he finally managed to say, and it was almost a croak. He slowed down still further until they were rolling only very gently.
‘Oh, then I’m lucky.’
Right by the turn-off, in the middle of the opposite lane, Perlmann tapped on the brake, and for the duration of a breath they stood quite still. Then he turned off the indicator, put his foot on the accelerator and drove on towards Chiávari. He didn’t reply to Leskov’s question. He could assume that Perlmann hadn’t heard it, because he was dealing with the turn-off, or that he was wondering how to describe his subject as simply as possible.
‘Is it something formal, technical?’ Leskov asked.
‘No,’ Perlmann said quietly.
‘I’m glad of that. At least I’m looking forward to it. When’s the session?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘It’s as if you’d just been waiting for me,’ Leskov laughed.
I’ve got to tell him. Now. Here. Perlmann had no idea how Leskov would react to this confession. There was this almost paternal relationship that he had with this man, who was practically his own age. Would those feelings come into it? Of course, the information would shock him. But perhaps he’ll be able to see it as self-defense if I explain to him how it came to this. And clearly he hadn’t forgotten the misfortune with Agnes. What had prompted a blind, intoxicating fury was now suddenly a hope, a straw that Perlmann clung to. Perhaps Leskov could see the deception as the deed of a person who had completely lost his equilibrium as the result of overwhelming grief and was no longer himself.
Perhaps, though, and this was far more likely, Leskov would be so dismayed that Perlmann couldn’t possibly ask him to keep the matter quiet. He would need time to grasp the full significance of the confession; only gradually would it become clear to him how monstrous Perlmann’s revelation was. Perlmann, the one who had issued the invitation, had shamelessly exploited the refusal of an exit permit, Leskov’s lack of political freedom, and his connection with his mother, which was a moral obligation. Perlmann had also exploited his trust, which had led Leskov to hand over his first draft, an unfinished and, to that extent, intimate text, unprotected. His colleagues were now holding in their hands that provisional, rough text, which was unorthodox and might scandalize. It was awkward enough appearing with such a text. Leskov would feel unmasked, even if he conceded to Perlmann’s request and didn’t come forward as the author.
‘Has a time been fixed for the session with my contribution?’ asked Leskov.
‘Thursday,’ said Perlmann, and that day seemed to him to be infinitely far away. It was a day he could no longer imagine reaching, a day that might have appeared on the calendar and might exist theoretically, so to speak, but an unreal
day without morning, noon and evening, a day that he would never experience.
Perlmann’s request would mean asking Leskov to stand up and say that he had no lecture to deliver – the clueless Russian who had been invited out of sympathy with his political situation, as development aid. It meant, Leskov would say, that the second version in the trunk, the one he had brought with him, was useless. He couldn’t either. Generally speaking, he couldn’t present any of his ideas, nothing of the whole of his recent work. Otherwise it would seem as if he were the one who was copying Perlmann and simply hanging on to his theme. It would at least be screamingly obvious that the two men were writing about similar questions in a very similar, unorthodox way. Suspicion would be inevitable and, of course, the question of originality would be resolved to the disadvantage of him, the obscure Russian. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that it was the other way round, particularly since Perlmann, as it appeared at the time, was able to present a proper text, while Leskov would at best be able to quote verbally from his work.
‘You know, I’ve got this idea that you can appropriate your own past through narration,’ Leskov said out of the middle of his thoughts. ‘In the new version, this idea in particular has become much clearer. It took me a long time. And at the same time, in fact, I want to say that remembering is in a sense inventing.’ He laughed. ‘That must sound a little bit crazy to you, hearing it out of the blue like this. But in the text I develop it step by step. And just assume, hypothetically, that there’s something in it: then, of course, I’m immediately left with the question of what appropriation could mean with reference to one’s own inventions. In the first version, the one that you have, that’s still quite unclear. But now I think I have the solution. It’s rather a complicated story, and I’m glad that I managed to capture it on paper before I set off.’
Perlmann's Silence Page 43