‘I believe, Professor Millar,’ he said gently, his pronunciation now impeccable, ‘that I have understood you perfectly. You want repeatable experiments. Laboratory conditions with calm, stable objects. Controllable variables. Am I wrong, or would you also really like to strap these people to chairs?’ He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, took his belongings and a few steps later he was outside.
Millar had red patches on his face, and for a moment he looked almost numb. ‘Well,’ he said with artificial cheerfulness, and got to his feet. His rubber soles squeaked loudly on the parquet as he stepped vigorously outside.
Only then did the others stir.
50
The rain had stopped, and the clouds were moving. Perlmann stood at the window and tried to apologize for Silvestri’s gaffe without being unfair to Millar. It didn’t work. He went from one extreme to the other, without finding a resting point. In his memory, Silvestri’s voice had become a hiss, and it wasn’t hard for Perlmann to sense the hatred behind that hiss. It was particularly easy to understand when one remembered Millar’s unbearably didactic tone. And at such a moment no one could have demanded that Silvestri take account of the plain fact that Millar had been trying to erase the memory of his faux pas with the piece of paper by childishly going on the attack. But then Perlmann saw, again and again, Millar’s face with its red patches; the face of someone reeling inwardly from a completely unexpected slap. He had looked very vulnerable, this man Brian Millar, not at all like the monster described by Silvestri’s unfortunate remark. All right, Millar supported the death penalty, which already made him very odd. But that evening, which Silvestri would probably never forget, Millar hadn’t advocated it with any bigoted, missionary zeal. Silvestri was right: there was a certain lack of imagination at play, a kind of naivety. But did not this very lack of imagination, this naivety, mean that one couldn’t possibly attribute to Millar the perverse and inhuman desires that resounded in Silvestri’s perfidious question? Or was it exactly the opposite?
Perlmann tried to remember all of the things he still had to do today. But he couldn’t keep his thoughts together, so he sat down at his desk and made a list. It took ages, and he had to overcome a paralysing reluctance to write down each individual point. Travel agent. It was urgent that he buy his ticket straight away. Stationery shop. Going back to that mute boy was out of the question. There must be another shop that sold envelopes. Trattoria. The bright courtyard now struck him as remote and alien. But he couldn’t bring himself simply to leave the chronicle there and vanish without a word. Not least because of Sandra. Maria. He would have to say goodbye to her today; she wasn’t in the office tomorrow. And then there was something else. That was it: Angelini. Perlmann’s stomach lurched. Should he simply wait and see whether he appeared for dinner? But then if he didn’t come, Perlmann would have to call him on his private number, which was in his recent note. Perlmann bridled at the idea. After all that had happened, he wanted to thank Angelini and say goodbye in a very formal and businesslike fashion.
He was about to ask Olivetti for Angelini’s number when Silvestri came to say goodbye. Instead of a suitcase he was carrying a kind of duffel bag over his shoulder.
‘I’m leaving now,’ he said simply and held out his hand to Perlmann. ‘Thank you for the invitation. Give me a call if you’re ever in Bologna. And if you have a text like that last one again, I’ll read it.’
He had half-turned away when he paused, looked at the floor and described a semi-circle on the carpet with his foot.
‘With that particular subject I always lose control. Old sickness,’ he said in a cautious, muted voice. Then he looked at Perlmann with a smile in which embarrassment, defiant self-assertion and roguery merged, and added, ‘Incurable.’
But, as he absorbed this, Perlmann knew that he would never forget the image of the Italian with the duffel bag, the face turned crookedly upwards and the ambiguous smile, at once vigorous and fragile. It sank inside him like the frozen image at the end of a film.
‘Oh, yes, please pass on my greetings to your daughter,’ Silvestri said in the doorway. ‘Providing that she’s willing to accept them,’ he added with a grin. ‘And really, go to the doctor when you get home. You still look ill.’ Then he raised his free hand slightly and was gone.
When Perlmann saw Silvestri coming out of the hotel down below, Evelyn Mistral was walking beside him and nodding. They walked slowly, as if on a deserted platform. Just before they reached the steps, Silvestri let the duffel bag slide to the ground and stretched out both arms to pull her to him. She took half a step backwards and threw out a hand. He automatically grabbed it and, after a brief hesitation, clumsily laid his other hand on her shoulder. He didn’t seem to be looking at her any more, but bent down, threw the duffel bag over his shoulder with a forceful and possibly angry movement, and quickly walked down the steps. He was already quite far down when Evelyn Mistral’s lips formed a word that must have been Ciao. She grabbed her hair with both hands and pressed it together as if to make a ponytail. Then she let it fall again and, holding her wrist behind her back, turned slowly to the door.
When Perlmann was about to close the window, he saw Silvestri driving past in his old Fiat. He was flicking a cigarette butt out of the sunroof, and then be bent down to turn the knobs of the radio. What would have happened if he had confided to this man, whom he was going to miss, and would never see again?
The phone rang. Angelini said that sadly he wouldn’t be able to come to the farewell dinner. Something unexpected had come up: trouble with a translator whom he had recommended to the firm, and who had revealed himself to be a bit of a dolt. Perlmann gripped the receiver more tightly than necessary, and listened very carefully: no, Angelini wasn’t telling him this in so much detail in order to conceal the fact that it was an excuse. On the contrary, in an almost friendly way he seemed really to want to share his concern with him. Quite as if there had been no trashy text, as if he hadn’t fainted, and as if the whole thing hadn’t been a terrible disappointment.
‘Senti, Carlo,’ Perlmann said, suddenly inspired, and it felt like a liberating leap into the unknown, ‘there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Something personal. Could I pay you a visit up there in Ivrea?’
He would be delighted, Angelini said immediately. But Sunday . . . no, Sunday was impossible, with the best will in the world. Either tomorrow afternoon or Monday morning.
Perlmann hesitated. Leskov’s text would have been dispatched long since, and they would have to wait another day for him at the university. That was no longer of any importance.
‘Monday morning,’ he said at last. ‘At nine?’
‘For God’s sake, no,’ laughed Angelini, ‘they’ll faint if I get there as early as that.’ The pause sounded as if he was biting his lip. ‘Shall we say, shortly after ten? And should I book a hotel for you for Sunday night?’
Perlmann said no.
‘Just tell the driver, “Olivetti, main entrance”. They’ll help you at reception,’ said Angelini.
I’ll ask Angelini if I can have this job as a translator. Or something like it. Perlmann puffed away on his cigarette as he walked up and down. Yesterday morning’s decision was one thing, the idea of a concrete alternative something else entirely. A hot, intoxicating feeling of liberation took hold of him. Soon it turned into a feeling that the ground was swaying beneath him. And then, from one moment to the next, he despaired. How would he get a work permit for Italy? And what qualifications did he have? No language exams, no diplomas, nothing. Would Angelini override that? Could he just do it? Even if Perlmann didn’t have to work directly under him, somehow, in the future, he would be dependent on this smartly dressed man with the well-cut suits and loose-fitting ties. Suddenly, Perlmann saw Angelini’s boss-face in front of him, the one he had worn when that business at the town hall had got too lively for him. At the time that face hadn’t permeated through to Perlmann; it had belonged to a world that was edging further away with
every minute. Now that Perlmann imagined a life haunted by that face it struck him as hard, brutal and abhorrent. And then there was the age difference, which wouldn’t even be an easy matter on Monday: the older man petitioning the younger. I could still call it all off, Perlmann thought. A phone call would do it. And he would simply leave his flight reservation for Sunday as it was.
At the travel agent’s Perlmann was the last one before lunch. He bought his ticket for the following day and paid a horrendous price, because he was booking at such short notice. For Monday, he booked himself a seat on the afternoon flight from Turin to Frankfurt. Perhaps by the time I’m sitting on that plane I’ll have a new job. And, last of all, that hotel in Ivrea. The young man with the long hair and all those silver rings on his hands began to get impatient with all the phone calls, and kept looking at the clock on the wall. Perlmann didn’t dare to refuse when at last a room was found at an exorbitant price. To get out, Perlmann had to turn a bunch of keys that the other employee had left in the door when he went out.
The wind had got stronger. The clouds drifted across the city from the sea, and every few moments the sun bathed everything in a strangely cold, glassy light. Perlmann felt slight and a little shivery, like someone who has just taken a long-overdue step into a new future. An appointment for a discussion, a hotel reservation, a reserved flight: it was nothing, and at the same time it was a great deal. As he studied the clean, sharp shadow that he cast in this extraordinary light, he felt surprised with himself – at the fact that he had actually begun to turn a decision that was barely thirty hours old into action. He also felt a quiet pride. And after a while it became clear to him that he had never had such an experience before: knowing almost to the minute when he had started really believing in a decision. He immediately saw himself in an office filled with southern light, immersed in the thing he liked doing best since he had stopped playing the piano: immersing himself in words and phrases and circling within himself to test whether the expression in the foreign language precisely captured the nuance required. The images and feelings that rose up in him now were so precise and so powerful that, without really noticing, he kept stopping after a few steps and, motionless, stared blankly into space. Startled again by his unbridled, overheated imagination, which was actually trying to compel a dreamed future into existence, he rubbed his eyes and then walked on with a disciplined step, looking – to distract himself – more closely at the window displays than he usually did.
Even as he parted the glass-bead curtain he realized that the trattoria was alien to him now. For a moment he considered whether it might be the unusual light falling through the glass roof of the courtyard. But it wasn’t that. The restaurant was now as strange to him as a place where one had lived so long ago that it’s hard to believe that that life was once one’s own.
‘Professore!’ called the proprietress. ‘We thought something had happened to you!’
Perlmann was relieved that she didn’t try to hug him, as she seemed at first to be about to do. With the delighted zeal with which she would have served a long-lost relative, she and her husband, who was wearing the inevitable white apron, set Perlmann’s food in front of him and insisted that he have a second portion.
‘You look so overworked. You must eat!’
Although the pasta lay heavy on his stomach, Perlmann continued eating, glad that chewing excused his silence. The familiar atmosphere that had previously prevailed now struck him as a sentimental, tacky lie, and he feared the coffee, when it would inevitably become clear that he had absolutely nothing to say to these people, whose gabbling cordiality struck him today as inappropriate and actually quite peculiar. The situation was then saved by Sandra, who hurled her schoolbag in the corner when she came in and, weeping, reported on a failed dictation in English.
When the proprietor brought Perlmann the chronicle and, lowering his voice, urged Sandra to stop bothering the professore, one might have imagined it was a sacred book. Today Perlmann felt that the pictures on the gleaming cover were noisy and repellent. Tired, and with a full feeling in his stomach, he sat over the unopened book in such a way that the proprietor, before he disappeared into the kitchen, gave him a concerned look. Perlmann listlessly flicked a few pages. But the history of the world that had accompanied his life story no longer held the slightest interest for him, and the whole idea of appropriating his past present by remembering the course of events in the faraway world struck him as mystical nonsense.
Now the images of the bright office entered the foreground once more and, behind his closed lids, Perlmann drew various silhouettes of the town of Ivrea, which he would look down on from his high window. Interrupting his translation work and looking at this unspectacular, perhaps even ugly Italian town: that, he was quite sure of it, could be his new present – the first one that he had properly achieved.
With sudden haste he began to translate the page of the chronicle that he had opened at random. In the office, it would have to be done quickly. It was a business operation. There was money at stake. Would his Italian be good enough? In the text in front of him there were several words that he didn’t know. And what about business Italian? He saw himself sitting in an attic room until the small hours, filling the gaps in his vocabulary. At this new image, his high spirits faded to make way for the feeling of trepidation that you feel when relapsing into an experience you thought was firmly in the past. But only later, in the street, did he become aware that the image of the attic room had been modelled on his time as a schoolboy and a student, informed by nothing but the feeling that the present still lay far in the future.
When the proprietors heard that this was his last visit, they refused to take any money for the food. Their extravagant gestures and assurances contrasted starkly with his tense haste to leave. Sandra’s thoughts were plainly still on her muffed dictation. Nonetheless, Perlmann was upset that she only briefly shook his hand and then disappeared again. For a moment he saw her lying on the bed with her knee socks pulled down. His original impulse to give her the chronicle had suddenly been blown away. He took the heavy book under his arm. With his free hand he parted the curtain one last time. He let the cool, smooth glass beads slide slowly over the back of his hand. He felt something break as he did so, something precious and intangible.
Perlmann laid the chronicle on the step in front of the stationery shop to which the proprietor had directed him. He formed a funnel with his hands and stared tensely inside the shop, which was still dark. But it’s nonsense, he thought, of course you can’t tell what selection of envelopes they have just by looking. Next to the shop there was another, with tablecloths, napkins and that sort of thing in the window. As Perlmann waited for the siesta to come to an end, he looked absently at the display. The third or fourth time he did so, the solution leapt out at him. In the corner, right at the back, packed in a plastic jacket with a zip, was a set of handkerchiefs. Involuntarily, his attention had leapt from the content to the packaging, and now, in his mind, he was excitedly comparing the size of the jacket with the format of Leskov’s text. The yellow pages, he estimated, would slip back and forth a little in transit. But otherwise, this actually was the solution: if the whole thing was also put in a padded envelope, the snow and rain could do nothing to the text.
Unless the water forces its way through the zip. Perlmann was glad when the shopkeeper appeared, and proved to be so chatty that she kept this troubling thought from taking root. Perlmann bought the handkerchiefs and, next door, the biggest padded envelope into which the plastic jacket would fit. To write the address later on, he chose the most expensive felt-tip pen in the shop. Then, having reached the street corner, he turned round again to ask for a plastic bag. There were thousands of envelopes like his. But he didn’t want anyone to see this one when he entered the hotel.
51
Adrian von Levetzov waved so energetically that Perlmann couldn’t
help crossing the hotel terrace to the table where the others were all sitting.
‘We’re betting on when the first drop will fall,’ von Levetzov said, pointing at the threateningly dark wall of cloud that was piling up
in the mountains and loomed far over the bay. ‘The nearest one gets 10,000 lire from each of us.’ He straightened a chair for Perlmann. ‘Join in!’
Perlmann hesitantly set the chronicle down on the table. There was no room for it anywhere else. He rested the plastic bag against the leg of the chair. He was glad that Leskov was sitting far away. As he waited for his heartbeat to settle, he looked with great concentration at the sky, as if he were carefully considering his contribution to the bet.
‘It isn’t going to rain,’ he said at last, to his own great surprise. He felt as if he had just defied the whole world with that sentence.
Millar tilted his head, and his face twisted into a wide grin. ‘I like that, Phil,’ he said, and his voice expressed regret that he hadn’t thought of this ploy himself.
‘May I?’ asked von Levetzov and picked up the chronicle. He opened a few pages at random and then flicked on until he found some pictures. ‘Aha,’ he said suddenly, straightened the book and held it further away from himself with an appreciative expression. Then he turned the book round and let the others look at the picture. It showed Christine Keeler, the prostitute who had brought about the fall of the British war minister John Profumo in 1963. She was straddling a chair and completely naked. Ruge’s and Leskov’s laughter sounded unself-conscious, while there was something embarrassed about Millar’s grin.
Perlmann's Silence Page 57