Perlmann hadn’t given his rental period a thought until that moment. He was startled to notice that he was grateful for the reproach. Being reminded of a contract meant being fetched back into the normal world, into normal life, in which things resumed their regular course. It was as if he were being granted permission to leave the private time of his nightmare with its frantic lack of present, and return to public time, which flowed at its normal pace.
‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ he said and attempted a smile. ‘I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t do anything about it.’
‘Any accidents?’ the woman asked in an unforgiving tone and straightened her fashionable glasses.
Perlmann took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was forced off the road and drove into a crash barrier. The right side of the car is damaged.’
‘Were the police called?’
‘No,’ he said, and quickly cut off her next question, ‘the other car had disappeared even before I stopped.’
‘You should have called the police anyway,’ she said curtly and took a form out of the drawer. ‘Where was that?’
He gave the correct details and signed.
‘Half a million excess,’ she said, glancing at the insurance details. ‘It will come off your card, along with the rest.’
Perlmann picked up the suitcase and went up to the bar. There was a different waiter there today, and otherwise only a girl in sneakers eating an ice-cream sundae and glancing often at her watch. Only gradually did he realize how relieved he was to be rid of the car. The sky had darkened, and the airport hall was bathed in a gloomy November light. He liked the sobriety that lay in that light. He grew calmer and, as he took slow, long drags on his cigarette, he kept thinking: It’s over. Over. On Saturday they would all be leaving: Leskov on Sunday morning. In four days’ time, at this hour of day, he himself would be on his flight home, and in the evening he would be in his familiar apartment. Exhaustion made way for quiet confidence. He paid and, hands in his trouser pockets, strolled over to the stairs that led up to the viewing area. He wanted to see the runway by the water and imagine his plane flying in a great loop out over the sea as it rose to ever higher altitudes.
‘Your case, Signore.’ The girl in the sneakers had come running. Perlmann took the suitcase from her, and struggled to hide his feelings.
‘Oh, yes, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you.’
The girl returned to her ice cream. He was filled with helpless fury, and stopped on the stairs with a blank expression on his face. A few moments ago, with his hands in his pockets, he had felt strangely light and free, unreally free, in fact. But he hadn’t tried to know why that should be; with no plan in mind, he had simply, thoughtlessly pursued the impulse of leaving everything that had happened over the last few days, everything that was part of it, behind him along with the car. It had been like the first unimpeded breath of air after a near-suffocation. And now the suitcase holding Leskov’s text, a ludicrous amount of blotting paper, the black notebook and the ridiculous props from the town hall hung leaden from his arm. He felt as if the whole nightmare of the past few days were contained in compact form in that suitcase, engraved with his initials.
He stepped on to the terrace and leaned against the balustrade. A Lufthansa plane was heading for take-off. He looked at his watch. My plane. As it roared into the air, just at the moment when the back tires lost contact with the runway he had the feeling that he could bear it no longer. That must be the end of notes and texts and translations and copies and lies and false leads and secrecy. It had to stop now. It had to stop. Right now. Now.
His foot brushed the suitcase. As if in a trance he stuck both hands in his jacket pockets, lowered his head and strode to the door, trousers flapping. He almost collided with the girl in sneakers. ‘Mio padre!’ Then she slipped past him through the door and started running to the parapet. Perlmann gave up. Slowly he followed her. When she turned round and, with a laugh, pointed to the case, he raised a hand in thanks. The Lufthansa plane disappeared into the low cloud.
Leskov’s address, which the anonymous sender couldn’t possibly know, wasn’t the only problem, Perlmann thought on the train. There were, for Leskov, only three places where he could have left the text: Moscow, Frankfurt or the plane. And there was simply no way to explain how the sheets might have ended up in that condition in an airport building or an aeroplane. And how so many of them should have vanished without trace.
If you added these two points together, Leskov was left with only a single hypothesis: someone who knew his address independently of the text had done something strange with the pages under the open sky, and was now sending them to him out of a guilty conscience. And on that day there was only one person who had been outside with him, and who could have had access to his suitcase: Philipp Perlmann, who had known his address for a long time. When Leskov ran through the drive in his mind, he would quickly see that there were, in fact, two places where it could have happened: the gas station and the roadside stop shortly afterwards. The shortness of the time in both cases could mean only one thing: Perlmann hadn’t done anything unknown or inexplicable with the text – he had simply thrown it away.
But why, for God’s sake? What harm could it do him? What did he have to fear from a text that he didn’t even know? He had the first version, and possibly he’d just read it. Then there was . . . yes, exactly, then there was only one condition under which the second version could have constituted a threat to him: if he had presented the first version, in translated form, of course, as his own text.
At this point Leskov’s thoughts would become very, very wary, and he would ensure that they came slowly. It was irrational to throw away the menacing text, when its author, who could reveal his act of plagiarism much more quickly and directly, was sitting next to him in the car. That was only rational if – the tunnel.
There was no question of Perlmann sending the text to St Petersburg. There was only one thing for it: to throw it away a second time. Throw the carefully preserved, ‘restored’ text, into a garbage bin, like before. Or quietly let it somehow lose itself. Perlmann glanced at the initials beside the lock on the suitcase. Then, when Santa Margherita was announced over the loudspeaker, he took out the certificate, the medal and the black notebook. He left the suitcase on the seat in the empty compartment and quickly walked to the front, to the carriage door. The wheels squeaked on the rails. Someone beside him opened the door. You know what this text means to me. The blacklists still exist, and I’m on several of them. Perlmann ran back, picked up the case and got out.
Leskov would be sitting beside Maria in the office, leaning forward and staring, his hands between his knees, at the screen. Perlmann wouldn’t immediately know what it was about this sight that alarmed him. Only in the elevator would he understand: his translation, the fraudulent text, was still stored downstairs in the computer. Certainly, Maria had no reason to put it on the screen in Leskov’s presence. But such a thing could easily happen inadvertently. In all likelihood she’d given the group their own folder. A couple of mistyped keys and Leskov would read: the personal past as linguistic creation. The title would electrify him, and he would lean still further forward to read the first few sentences. Who’s this text by? would be his excited question. Maria might be distracted, or tired, or scattered, and already it would have happened. There would no longer be an innocuous explanation to give Leskov. Now, a full three days after his arrival – not to mention the conversation about the missing text – his mind would start working.
A curse, Perlmann thought. Leskov’s text weighed on him like a curse that he wouldn’t be able to shake off, wherever he went. The suitcase that he hadn’t got rid of. And now the clues in the computer that could give everything away if Maria made just one tiny, innocent slip. He set down the suitcase in the wardrobe, closed the wardrobe and put the key in the bedside table drawer. He had just pulled the heavy curtains closed and lain down on the bed when he got up and took the
suitcase out of the wardrobe. Working as carefully as a picture restorer, he replaced the old, stained sheets of blotting paper with new ones. The treatment had helped. The bits of ink had been absorbed where they had run, and the original lines now stood out more clearly. The dirt had dried, and turned paler. Perlmann put the suitcase with the text back in the wardrobe and crept under the covers. If Maria was working with Leskov now, she would have set up a new data file for him. Then there would be no reason to call up another. There was no opportunity for a mistake. When she went home at five or six, she simply turned off the computer.
Later. Sometime later he would gain access to the office and erase the dangerous file himself. It wasn’t impossible. He relaxed.
The girl in sneakers had swung the suitcase over her head as if it were as light as a feather. When he had tried to lift it himself, however, it was like a piece of lead, fastened to the floor by a magnet. Around him, a sea of blotting paper darkened and ended up looking like a huge slab of rust. Did he think this was an ironmonger’s shop? the white teacher had asked him, pulling her Salvation Army hat down over her face. No! he cried, his voice failing, and tugged on the suitcase, which was wedged in the carriage door. On the platform, as he tried to keep pace with the accelerating train, he saw the black tunnel coming ever closer.
45
It was pitch-dark when Perlmann was finally woken by the stubborn buzz of the telephone. He wanted to apologize for not coming to dinner, Leskov said. Maria had said she was ready to spend some more time working with him at the computer, so that his written submission would be ready for tomorrow’s session.
‘I don’t know what I would do otherwise,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just finished, even though I worked nearly all night. And all because I forgot the damned text like an idiot!’
Perlmann fetched the text from the wardrobe. The fresh sheets of blotting paper were only very slightly stained. Most of the pages were dry by now. The biggest problem was the page from the middle of the road, the one with the fourth subheading. And the one from the ditch was difficult, too, the one that had been so wet that it must have been under a dripping tree. He packed these two between fresh sheets of blotting paper again. He closed the valise in the wardrobe and stuck the key in his blazer pocket when he went down to dinner. For the first time in weeks he was punctual.
How was he to explain the friendliness, the warmth, even, that they all showed him when he stepped to the table? There was nothing fake about it, and nothing obtrusive either, he thought, as he ate his soup. And yet it was hard to bear. Because it had something of the friendliness, the zealous humanity, that you would show towards a patient – someone who was being granted a breathing space, a period of convalescence. For a while lots of otherwise quite natural expectations and demands were put in parentheses. And that meant: temporarily he wasn’t taken entirely seriously. Perlmann was glad when Silvestri asked him across the table, in quite a matter-of-fact manner, whether it would be all right for him to deliver a brief talk on Friday.
The perception that began to preoccupy him when he listened to the conversation at the table took time to assume a clear substance. While he had been enclosed within his delirium and his anxiety, the others had been getting on with their lives. And they had done that together, as a group in which all kinds of relationships had formed. There were constant hints, allusions and shared memories. There was irony, a knowledge of the forgivable weaknesses of the others; there was a playing with criticism and self-assertion, a delight in intellectual and personal banter. And there were shared experiences involving this town, its restaurants, churches, the post office – experiences that the others had been having while he had been sitting in a courtyard with his chronicle, trying to find the present through the past. He felt a pang, and remembered school journeys on which he had often come in last.
Achim Ruge – and Perlmann noticed this with astonishment, as if he had only just got here – had in the meantime plainly become something like the secret star of the group. His chuckle regularly set the others off, and with each new subject it seemed to Perlmann as if they were all waiting for one of his dry remarks. When they had been discuss-
ing Laura Sand’s film, a personal aspect of Ruge had come to light. Otherwise, Perlmann didn’t actually know anything at all about this man Achim Ruge.
I never gave the others a chance to get to know me better. Perlmann had never shown anything of himself but his purely professional side. From the very outset, his anxiety had reduced the others to one-dimensional, schematic figures. They were adversaries first and foremost. That applied even, in the end, to Evelyn Mistral. He had been constantly trying to work out the others. Inside, he had delivered harsh judgments about them. At the same time he knew – outward appearances aside – as good as nothing about them. His panic at the idea of being exposed had frozen his perception at a terrifyingly superficial level. Another two days, then they would be leaving. He had found out nothing about them, learned nothing from them, and the only relationship that he had developed with them lay in his attempts to close himself off and protect himself from them.
But Leskov was really unlucky to have left his text behind, von Levetzov said. He’d taken that long journey, it was his first time in the West, and now he’d been sitting nonstop in his room since yesterday afternoon preparing himself. And he had to go back on Sunday.
‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘he seems to be anxious that the text has been lost somewhere en route. He hinted as much to me this afternoon. He looked really distraught. Something professional seems to depend on it, too.’
Perlmann left his dessert and went out to Maria’s office. When Leskov saw him through the glass door, he came up to him with a bleary-eyed face, red with excitement.
‘We’ll be finished soon. Unbelievable what a computer like that can do! Calling a text up to the screen just with a click on a key! Just one click! You just have to move the cursor to the right place!’
Perlmann went out on to the terrace and smoked a cigarette. In his mind’s eye he saw Maria’s hands with the red fingernails and the two silver rings. She would be careful with the name of the file. She wouldn’t be scattered. She would pay attention. Before he turned to the door, he couldn’t help looking up to his room. The only row of windows without a balcony.
Over coffee, Laura Sand asked him if his father was still alive.
‘He was completely mistaken, in fact. There are wonderful corners of Mestre. If you know how to look. I always feel that modest, hard-working town is a relief after spectacular and somehow unreal Venice. I always stay in a hotel in Mestre, never in Venice. David thinks it’s a fad of mine. But I like it. Quite apart from the price.’
‘While I think Mestre is quite dreadful,’ said Millar, looking at Perlmann with a grin that was filled with conciliatory mockery. ‘I had to stay there once because there was something wrong with the causeway to Venice. The evening seemed to go on for ever.’
Perlmann was grateful for the remark: Millar wasn’t condemning him for yesterday. He’s lifted me up. Their eyes met. He, too, seemed to be thinking of the moment in the town hall.
‘I knew a girl in Mestre once,’ said Silvestri, expressionlessly. ‘Great town.’
‘Well,’ said Millar, frowning satirically.
‘Ecco!’ said Silvestri, blowing smoke towards him.
‘I’m going to take my next holiday in Mestre,’ chuckled Ruge as they broke up after dinner, ‘and I’m not going across to Venice once!’
The two most badly damaged pages had once again transferred moisture to the fresh sheets of blotting paper. But they were still far from dry and Perlmann laid them on the radiator along with a few others. Then he cleared the round table, fetched his toothbrush and started removing the dirt from the dry pages.
A lot of brownish stains remained, some of them speckled, which couldn’t be got rid of, and where fat drops of water had fallen, the paper had been warped when it had dried. But even if it was faded, the text was legible again,
and Leskov himself would soon know, even with the shapeless ink stains. Perlmann became quite practiced with his toothbrush. He now had a feeling for the correct angle of the bristles, and knew how to remove damp bits of soil. He kept blowing the dust away, and every now and again he fetched a towel from the bathroom to clean the toothbrush. As he worked, he rocked his torso slightly back and forth, and tapped out a rhythmic beat with his foot.
He had just started on page 49, and it was half-past eleven, when there was a knock on the door.
‘It’s me,’ said Leskov. ‘Can I come in for a moment? I need to talk to you.’
I need to talk to you. Perlmann froze, and suddenly felt as if he had been sitting in icy cold for hours. She made a mistake with the file name. He’s seen the text. He knows everything.
‘Philipp?’ Leskov knocked again.
‘Just a moment, please,’ Perlmann called, unable to keep a hysterical squeak out of his voice. ‘I’ve got to get dressed!’
He feverishly packed the finished pile on top of the others and collected the pages on the radiator. As he did so, the problem page with the subheading slipped from the sheets of blotting paper, fell to the floor and ripped as he picked it up. Valuable seconds elapsed. Perlmann looked frantically around, and then shoved the whole stack under the bed. On the way to the door he threw his towel and toothbrush on to the bathroom floor. Before he opened the door, he looked back. The wire waste-paper basket was full of stained blotting paper. The powder-blue carpet covered with pale dust. The table unnaturally empty. Too late. The time has come. He’s caught up with me after all.
‘Sorry for disturbing you so late at night,’ Leskov said, hastily blowing big clouds of smoke into the room. He set a computer printout down on the table. It was his submission for tomorrow. Reading it through, he had suddenly been unsure if it would work – if one could present such a thing at all. He had a sense that it contained some contradictions, some inconsistencies. ‘But I no longer trust my tired mind. Having to do the whole thing in such a short time and without my text: it was simply too much. Would you read it through for me?’
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