Perlmann's Silence

1

Philipp Perlmann didn’t know how to live in the present. He never had. That morning, though, it was worse than usual. He reluctantly lowered his Russian grammar and looked across to the high windows of the veranda, in which a crooked-growing pine was reflected. It was in there, among the gleaming mahogany tables, that it would happen. They would look at him expectantly as he sat at the front, and then, after a prolonged, unbearable silence and a breathless halting of time, they would know: he had nothing to say.

Ideally, he would have left again immediately, without giving a destination, without an explanation, without an apology. For a moment the impulse to flee was as violent as a physical pain. He snapped the book shut and looked across the blue changing cabins to the bay, which was flooded with the gleaming light of a cloudless October day. Running away: at first it must be wonderful; he imagined it as a quick bold rush, headlong through all feelings of obligation, out into freedom. But his liberation wouldn’t last long. His telephone at home would ring again and again, and eventually his secretary would be downstairs pressing the doorbell. He wouldn’t be able to go into the street or turn on the light. His apartment would become a prison. Of course, it didn’t have to be Frankfurt. He could go somewhere else – Florence, perhaps, or Rome – where no one would be able to find him. But that would turn those cities into hideouts. He would walk through the streets, blind and dumb, before lying in his hotel room and listening to the ticking of his travel alarm clock. And eventually he would have to give himself up. He couldn’t disappear for the rest of his life. If only because of Kirsten.

He couldn’t come up with a convincing excuse. To give the true reason would be impossible. Even if he could summon the courage, it would sound like a bad joke. It would leave a sense of high-handedness, of wilfulness. The others would feel they were being mocked. Certainly, these people would take control of everything. But I would be finished. There’s no excuse for such things.

The wonderful light which made the still surface of the water beyond the cabins look like white gold was to blame for everything. Agnes had wanted to capture that light, and that was why he had yielded at last to the urgings of Carlo Angelini. And Perlmann found him unlikeable, this wiry, very alert man with the winning smile that was just a little too practiced. They had met on the edge of a conference in Lugano at the beginning of the previous year, when Perlmann was standing by the window in the corridor long after the session had begun. Angelini had spoken to him and Perlmann had welcomed this excuse not to enter the lobby. They had gone to the caféteria, where Angelini had told him about his job with Olivetti. He was thirty-five, a generation younger than Perlmann. He had taken the offer from Olivetti only two years before, after spending some years as a language assistant at the university. His job was to maintain the company’s contacts with the universities, and he was able to do so entirely on his own terms, with a considerable budget at his disposal, because his work fell under the rubric of publicity. They had talked for a while about mechanical translation; it had been a conversation like many others. But all of a sudden Angelini had become very lively and asked him if he felt like setting up a research group on a linguistic theme: a small but intensive matter, a handful of first-class people getting together somewhere nice for a few weeks, all at the company’s expense, of course.

Perlmann had felt at the time that the suggestion had come far too quickly. Certainly, Angelini had made it plain that Perlmann wasn’t a complete stranger to him, but he had known him for little more than an hour. Perhaps one had to risk such bold gestures in Angelini’s line of work. In retrospect, Perlmann felt as if his instincts had been warning him even then. He had reacted to the suggestion without enthusiasm and rather lamely, but he had still observed that, in his view, people from different disciplines ought to be represented in such a group. It had been an offhand remark, not properly thought through, and Perlmann hadn’t seriously imagined the project coming to fruition. His impression was that everything had been left sufficiently vague and noncommittal, when he had suddenly dashed to the lecture hall.

Perlmann had forgotten that conversation until a few weeks later when a letter came from Angelini, followed almost immediately by a phone call from Olivetti’s headquarters in Ivrea. Perlmann’s suggestion, it suddenly appeared, had proved very popular within the company; particularly, of course, with some colleagues from the research department, but it had also been well received by the directors. They were especially charmed by the possibility of being able to promote a project that had something to do with the company’s products, while it also went far beyond it, by taking in questions of general interest, of significance to the whole of society, so to speak. He, Angelini, suggested that the encounter should take place the following year in Santa Margherita Ligure, a spa town not far from Rapallo on the Gulf of Tigullio. They had had meetings there on many previous occasions and everything had always gone very well. The best time for the planned undertaking, he said, would be the months of October and November. It was still mild then, but there were hardly any tourists left. There was a quiet, contemplative atmosphere, precisely what was required for a research group. Where everything else was concerned, as the head of the group Perlmann would have an entirely free hand; particularly, of course, in the selection of participants.

Perlmann bit his lip and felt helpless annoyance rising up within him as he thought back to that conversation. He had allowed himself to be taken unawares by the sonorous, confident voice at the other end, and for no reason whatsoever. He owed this man Carlo Angelini nothing at all. At the time he had been glad that the man had helped him to avoid the conference, but he was also a stranger, and his ambitions meant nothing more to Perlmann than the plans of Olivetti as a whole. Certainly, in the conversation he hadn’t agreed to do anything. Quite soberly, he could still have said no. But he had missed the crucial moment, the moment when it would have been quite natural to say, ‘There has been a misunderstanding. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t fit in with my other plans. I’m, sure, however, that I have many colleagues who would be more than happy to put your plan into effect. I will think about names.’ Instead, he had promised to think about the idea. And instead of simply allowing an appropriate period of time to pass and then declining, he had fetched the map. He and Agnes had sat over it and worked out the places that could be easily reached from there: Pisa, for example, and Florence, but also Bologna, of which they were particularly fond. Italy in winter, that was one of Agnes’s pet ideas. She had lots of plans for photographs. She might even try color photography, which she usually considered beneath her. Whatever. At any rate I would like to capture the light of the south, as it is in winter, and this is the opportunity, don’t you think? I’ll make it sound appetizing to the agency. I’ll have to do a bit of persuading, but in the end they’ll let me go. Perhaps I could even make a series out of it: The Wintry Light of the South. What do you think? Admittedly, October and November were not exactly winter, but Perlmann didn’t want to be pedantic, and some of her enthusiasm had rubbed off on him. It was grotesque, he thought, and pressed his fingertips to his eyes, but at the time he had actually seen himself, above all, in the role of the person who would accompany Agnes on her photographic trip, supported and protected by her ability to conquer the present for both of them. It seemed incredible to him now, but that was how it had been: out of that vision, that daydream, he had finally agreed, had applied for leave from his job and written the first invitations. Ten months later, when Agnes died and everything collapsed, it had been too late to call things off.

Agnes had been right: the blue of the sky was strangely transparent here, as if in addition to the sun there were another, invisible background source of light. It gave the space that arched over the bay a veiled, mysterious depth, a depth that contained a promise. He had first encountered that blue and that light when his parents had driven him to Italy. He had only been thirteen, and had no words for it, but the southern colors had sunk deep within him – how deep he really understood only when the train came out of the Gotthard tunnel at Göschenen and the world looked like a picture in tones of grey. Since then the southern light had been holiday light for him, the light that was life as opposed to work. The light of the present. But it was a present that always remained only one possible present, one that one could live if one were not here only on holiday. Each time he saw it he felt as if this light were only being shown to him to make him see that he was not living his real, everyday life in the present. And because it was only ever a holiday light, the sight of it became interwoven with the sensation of something transient, something that could not be captured and that could also be taken away again as soon as it came within reach. Increasingly, he had come to see it as a light of farewell, and sometimes he hated it because it gave him the illusion of a present that perhaps did not exist.

He stared, eyes smarting, at the surface of light now cleaved by a motorboat. The crucial thing, he thought, would be this: to allow the appearance of this light to be everything, the whole of reality, and seek nothing behind it. To experience the light not as a promise, but as the redemption of a promise. As something at which one had arrived, not something that constantly aroused new expectations.

He was further away from that than ever. Against his will, his eyes slipped once more to the veranda. The gleaming red tables with their curved legs were arranged in the shape of a horseshoe, and at its head Signora Morelli had placed a particularly comfortable chair with a high, carved back. ‘Whoever is allowed to sit here must be worthy of it,’ she had said with a smile when showing him the room the previous evening.

For the third time that morning he opened his Russian grammar. But he couldn’t take anything in; it was as if there was no way in from outside – as if he were suddenly blind to signs and meanings. It had been like that the previous day on his journey here, a journey that had become a single tormenting battle against recalcitrance. On the way to the airport he had envied the people on the tram who weren’t carrying luggage, people with pale, sulky, Monday faces who didn’t have to fly to Genoa right now. Later on, he had wanted to swap places with the airport staff, and for a long time he watched the passengers, all of them, who had just landed and who were coming towards him from his plane. They’d put it all behind them. It was a rainy, windy morning, the cars were driving with their lights on, a December mood in mid-October, weather that could have intensified the thrill of anticipation of a flight to the south. But nothing struck him as more desirable than to stay in Frankfurt. He thought of the quiet apartment hung with Agnes’s photographs, and what he really wanted to do was shut himself away in there and remain incommunicado for a very long time.

He had been sitting in the waiting room by the gate for a while, when he suddenly went out again and called his secretary. It was a phone call with no discernible purpose; he was repeating things they had discussed many times: what to do about his mail and how else they would stay in touch. Frau Hartwig didn’t know what to say, her helplessness was clearly audible. ‘Yes, of course, Herr Perlmann, I will do it just as we agreed.’ Then he enquired, with sudden impertinence, after her husband and child. That untimely interest wrong-footed her, and there was a long, embarrassed pause before he said, ‘All right then,’ and she said, ‘Yes, bon voyage.’ He had been last to board.

On the plane he had struggled with himself. He told himself that while this might indeed have been the dreaded day of his arrival, it was still a day that belonged to him alone, and on which he could do something for himself. He set the Russian grammar down on the empty seat next to him. Then he waited for the magical effect of the plane as it started to move – waited for everything to come into flux in the moment of take-off, for everything to seem lighter. On a day like this you would soon be in the clouds, there were moments that were frightening in spite of one’s experience, and then suddenly one emerged into a deep blue, transparent sky, a dome of pure ultramarine, and down below was the dazzlingly bright sea of clouds, from which individual formations loomed, little white mountains with pin-sharp edges, which tended to produce in him the impression of perfect stillness. I have escaped, he usually thought, and enjoyed the feeling that everything that had held him trapped until a few moments before was losing its power and falling away silently behind him, and he didn’t have to do a thing. Yesterday, however, none of those things had happened, the whole thing had struck him as dull and boring. Forward impulsion with roaring engines, nothing else. Yes, outside it was as it always was, but he felt as if he were in an advertisement for the airline, shown a thousand times and without authenticity, without presence. He pulled the shutter down over the window, chose not to have anything to eat and tried to immerse himself in his grammar. But his usual concentration abandoned him. He stared again and again at the little boxes and exercises, but they simply didn’t take. Then, when the plane began its descent, he was as violently startled by the gentle change in the sound of the engine and the feeling in his body as he would have been by the sound of an explosion. So here he was. When someone accidentally bumped into him as they were leaving the plane, he had to close his eyes for a moment and clutch himself before he managed to walk calmly on.

In Genoa the weather had been flat and dead. Grey, dirty-looking cloud banks let through only a dull, uninspiring light. Things were obtrusively only themselves, they had no significance and no lustre. The industrial plants that the airport bus drove past were ugly; there didn’t seem to be a single unbroken windowpane, and he wondered how such a run-down terrain could produce all that bright white smoke, which looked poisonous. The few people in the station, it seemed to him, moved wearily in an alien time that flowed with nightmarish slowness. The smoking staff at the ticket counters showed no sign of serving him. Even the taxi driver didn’t seem to care much about his fare. Only after he had finished chatting to his colleagues did he bother to ask which way to go. ‘The shortest,’ Perlmann had said furiously.

Before the plane took off for the return journey, four weeks, five days and three-and-a-half hours would pass. Perlmann stared at the reddish stone tiles of the hotel terrace. It was like a huge mountain range of tenseless time that loomed all the higher the more burning his desire was that things were over. And as the desire became even more violent every time he had it clearly before his eyes, and threatened to grow to infinity overall, Perlmann had a sense that that longed-for moment would never come, because there was no possibility of climbing over all the dead time that loomed ahead of him like a menacing wall. The only way out lay in silencing the desire and achieving inner calm. Then the mountain range would remove itself, and once the inner calm was complete, time would seem like a plane that he would be able to cross effortlessly to reach that distant moment.

He finally wanted to memorize the various expressions that existed in Russian for must. He ran through the list and immediately forgot every line. Sitting back in the shade didn’t do any good, and it had nothing to do with the sunglasses, either. And learning foreign languages was something he had mastered. The only thing, in fact. It was also the only thing that could really hold his attention. Studying languages, he had the feeling that his life was advancing and he was developing. And sometimes, when a foreign sentence, a hitherto inaccessible text, suddenly opened itself up to him, he felt as if he had snatched a breath of presence.

It only he could feel that in his academic work as well. It seemed strange to him, but he no longer knew if it had ever been so. If it had, it was a long time ago, in a time when he had not yet known the paralysis that had tormented him for so long. By now he had the feeling that he didn’t really know what it was like: doing academic work. It wasn’t writer’s block, he was sure of that. He had never experienced it, and even now he still had the capacity, he could feel it, for fluent, accurate and sometimes brilliant formulations. It was something else, something fundamentally much simpler and at the same time something that he couldn’t have explained, not to himself and even less to other people, particularly not to his colleagues: he had lost his faith in the importance of academic work – that belief that impelled him in the past, which had made daily discipline possible, and the associated failures appear significant.

It wasn’t through a process of reasoning that he had lost this faith, and the loss did not take the form of an internal discovery. He simply couldn’t find his way back to concentration, to the feeling of exclusiveness out of which his academic works had previously arisen. That did not mean that he would now have declared the unimportance of his research, or of research in general, as a statement of his world view. Except that he found his way to his desk less often. He spent more and more time looking out of the window. His new chair seemed to become more uncomfortable with each passing month, and the books on the big desktop increasingly struck him as being ungainly objects that disturbed the calming void.

Since this had been the case, he looked upon academic work as if through a wall of glass, which turned him into a mere spectator. Making an academic discovery: he simply had no need for it now. Methodical investigation, analysis and the development of theories, hitherto a constant, a given, self-evident element in his life and in a sense its center of gravity – he had utterly lost interest in it, and so completely that he was no longer sure he understood how it could once have been otherwise. If someone spoke of a new idea, the beginnings of a notion, he could sometimes still listen; but only for a short time, and its elaboration interested him not at all. It felt like wasted time.

Sometimes he tried to convince himself that it had all started on that clear, white, terrible day in January when he had seen Agnes for the last time, so shockingly, so irrevocably still. Then he could have seen himself as someone still in shock, someone only slowly recovering. That would have taken the edge off things.

But it wasn’t true. He admitted to himself with amazement and some unease that he had forgotten when exactly it had begun. It had been small changes in his emotional responses to things, which had to do with his profession, emotional nuances, tiny changes of tone which had over months and years added up into something incisive that had one day entered his consciousness with total clarity. The beginning lay at a time when he, seen from outside, was at the peak of his productivity, and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that something was starting to crumble behind that facade, and silently collapsing.

He had started to forget. Not in such a way that it would have struck anyone else. There were no gaps in the structure of the academic routine. But he noticed increasingly that he was losing track of issues, especially those that weren’t yet fully entrenched, and which did not belong to the solid rhetorical stock of the subject – the new and interesting questions, then, which precisely because they were not yet all that well anchored, should have commanded his constant attention. He was, when he happened to flick through his papers, surprised by what he found there, and startled that he had simply forgotten it.

The worst thing was: he was sure that this wasn’t a passing thing, a crisis that one knew would pass, even though one couldn’t say when and how. It felt threatening, but he knew that what was happening to him was irreversible and inescapable. Behind the feeling of threat, he discovered only gradually, at good moments there was the liberating, almost cheering astonishment over the fact that something was developing within him, something in the center, at the core of his life. But this sensation which glimmered through from time to time did nothing to mitigate his anxiety. To a certain extent there was no contact between the two sensations; they ran unconnectedly side by side. And what struck him about that unsteady and unreliable feeling which he kept trying to grasp was this: he was never sure whether it was a genuine sensation or one that he conjured up within himself and, so to speak, invented in order to have something to cling to when the change that he sensed frightened him too much.

When he looked back at the book and tested himself, he found that he had retained only one Russian word for must. He gave up and reached for the other book that he had taken from the room when he had decided to spend his last free hours on the hotel terrace. It was Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, a book which had suddenly seemed like the ideal companion, as it sat on the shelf the previous morning, even though he hadn’t picked it up for many years, and the memory of the titular character and the Institute Benjamenta had become pale and vague. On the journey he had been on the point of opening it, but every time he had felt a strange, inexplicable horror that got in the way of his curiosity. As if the book contained something about him that he would rather not know.

The first sentence took his breath away: We learn very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and we boys from the Institute Benjamenta will never come to much, that is, we will all be something very small and subordinate in later life. As if anaesthetized, Perlmann watched the waiter bringing a drink on a silver tray to the red-haired man by the pool. Minutes passed before he found the courage to go on reading, reluctantly and at the same time fascinated by those shattering sentences, the ghostly lightness of the prose. And then, after a few pages, there came a passage that felt like a slap in the face: Herr Benjamenta asked me what I wanted. I told him shyly that I wanted to be his pupil. At that he fell silent and read newspapers.

That last sentence – no, it couldn’t be allowed to stand. In all its innocuousness it was a sentence that could not be borne. Perlmann set the book aside. The throbbing of his blood subsided only slowly. He didn’t understand why, but young Jakob’s story seemed in a sense to be about himself. All of a sudden he was sure the text that would be produced if he managed to capture his own distress in sentences would have a similar tone. They would have to be sentences of equal intensity, and just as incisive, if they really wanted to grab their listeners as he had done for years when he entered the auditorium.

It wasn’t stage fright. It wasn’t the fear of suddenly staring into the audience or straight ahead at the lectern and having forgotten everything. He had suffered from that idea in the past, but it had been over a long time ago. It was something else, something that he had only recognized after a long time and with quiet horror: the very precise feeling that he had nothing to say. Fundamentally, he found it ridiculous walking down the center aisle of the lecture hall under the expectant eyes of the students. With almost every step the sensation grew that he was stealing their time from them.

Then he opened his notes and began to speak in his practiced, fluent way. He was well known for being able to speak apparently off the top of his head. The students liked him, often several of them came up to the lectern afterwards and wanted to know more. That was particularly bad. During the lecture the empty space between lectern and desks had protected him, had acted as a protecting screen behind which he was able to hide his lack of interest, that stigma. When the students sat in front of him he felt unprotected, and worried that they might see that he was no longer involved. He took refuge in solicitous eagerness, spoke far too verbosely, filled up another blackboard and promised to bring the appropriate books along the next time. In many cases they were his own, which he pressed into the students’ hands like bribes. They felt that they were being taken seriously, understood. A committed professor. They needed to know him personally, and invited him to join them at their table in the pub.

The first non-residential guests arrived for lunch at the hotel. Perlmann picked up his books and went to his room. As he closed the door his eye fell on the notice showing the price list, and he gave a start. The room cost around 300 marks. For a single person, this meant that his stay cost almost 10,000 marks, not including lunch and dinner. Times seven. OK, for Olivetti that was presumably nothing, and Angelini would know what he was doing when he put them up at the most expensive hotel in the town. Perhaps he’d negotiated a discount. But still, Perlmann held his face under the gleaming brass tap and then washed his hands for a long time. If it had been up to him he would never have stayed at a hotel like this, even if money were no issue. He just knew that he didn’t belong here. And he began to sweat when he thought of his shabby, black, waxed-cloth notebook that was all he had to give in return, a loose collection of notes that he hadn’t even looked at for ages. He felt like a fraudster, almost a thief.

That was the reason why his thoughts of flight, of every variety, included an intention to pay the bill for his room himself. Under the circumstances it would have been a demonstration. The others would have been able to tell that no higher power had forced him to take this step, but that his strange action must have something to do with his attitude towards the group. And he found that uncomfortable: it ran counter to his need to give as little of himself away as possible, and where possible to leave everything in the dark. But he didn’t want to be in anyone’s debt; at least in that respect he wanted to put things back in order.

Hesitantly, he opened his suitcase and started carefully standing the books up on the desk. It had been hard for him the previous evening when he had finally set about making a selection. Even more clearly than usual he had become aware that he had had no academic intentions for a long time. How, in such a situation, was one to decide what to take along and what not? He had sat there for quite a while, playing with the bold idea of travelling without any textbooks at all, just with his own novels. But however liberating the idea might have been, he couldn’t risk it. Just in case they visited him here in the room, he had to construct a facade, a disguise. The important thing was for his distress to remain unnoticed. In the end he had packed a series of books that had turned up over the past few months and remained unread. They were books that anyone working in his field might have bought. He hadn’t yet dared to give up such routine purchases, although he was beginning to regret the money – a sensation that startled him, because since his school days it had always been self-evident to him that money spent on books was never money wasted.

The desk was wide enough for the books, and if you pushed them back to the wall, with heavy volumes at the sides, the whole thing was stable, and there was enough room to write. Bringing his computer, the little appliance with the vast storage space for all the unwritten texts, was something he hadn’t managed to do; it would have struck him as the height of mendacity. Perlmann set down pencils, a ruler and his best ballpoint pen on the glass desktop, along with a stack of white sheets. Tomorrow morning he would absolutely have to start working. I have no idea what. But I have to start. At all costs.

He had been saying that to himself for months. And yet it hadn’t happened. Instead he had gone on working on his Russian for many hours a day. That connected him with Agnes. Supported by music that they both loved, he had withdrawn into an inner space in which she, too, sat at the table and quizzed him as usual, laughing as, once again, she understood something more quickly than he did. The specialist literature had been left where it was, and had started piling up on a shelf, within reach and yet never touched, a constant admonition. The language books were almost the only things on the desk. Only when he had colleagues visiting and there was a danger that they would enter his study, did he bring some order into the great chaos of an academic in the midst of his work, with mountains of open books and manuscripts. It was always a struggle between anxiety and self-esteem, and it was always the anxiety that won.

Meanwhile, there had been regular correspondence about the research group. There were enquiries into practical details to be answered, and official confirmations to be written. He had done that in his office at the university. At home there had been nothing to remind him of his inexorably approaching departure, and he had become practiced, almost a virtuoso, at not thinking about it.

For his lectures he had for a long time been using old manuscripts that had become strange to him, and sometimes he had started feeling like his own press spokesman. If an unexpected question came out of the audience and put him in an awkward position, he gave himself a breathing space by saying with deliberate slowness, ‘You see, it’s like this…’, or ‘That’s a good question…’ These were alienated formulas that he would never have used before, and he hated himself for them. In the seminars he lived from hand to mouth and relied on his memory. He was an experienced player. He thought and reacted quickly, and, if necessary, when he no longer had anything substantial to hand, he could set off a rhetorical firework. Students could still be impressed by such things. In the everyday business of teaching, he thought almost every time he left the practice room, he would retain his disguise.

But this was very different. In less than three hours’ time some people would arrive who would not be deceived, people who didn’t have to battle with such feelings, ambitious people who were used to the rituals of academic debate and the situation of constant competition. They would be coming with new works of their own, with fat manuscripts, with projects and perspectives, and they brought with them high expectations of the others, and also of him, Philipp Perlmann, the prominent linguist. For this reason they were a threat to him. They became his adversaries, even though they could have had no inkling of the fact. People like them had a very fine sense of everything to do with the social reality of their subject. They registered with seismographic precision if something was wrong. They will notice I’m no longer involved – that I’m no longer one of them. And sooner or later in those five weeks it would come out: he of all people, the leader of the group, the conductor of the whole thing, would stand there empty-handed – as if he hadn’t done his homework. They would react with disbelief. It would be a quiet scandal. Certainly, a facade of kindness would remain, but it would be a killing kindness, because its beneficiary was certain that it was a mere ritual, which could not attenuate the silent contempt.

It was now just after one. Perlmann felt uneasy; but the idea of sitting downstairs in the elegant dining room eating with silver cutlery was unbearable. And the idea of eating repelled him too. At that moment he felt as if unease and hunger could get as big as they wanted: he would only eat on the homeward flight, at that point in time that was so horrifically far away.

He lay on the bed. Brian Millar was in Rome now. His plane from New York had landed there that morning, and now he was meeting his Italian colleague to discuss the plan for the linguistic encyclopaedia. He wouldn’t fly on to Genoa until late afternoon. So there were still a few hours until that encounter. Laura Sand would also be turning up in the late afternoon, because she first had to travel by train from Oxford to London, and was then flying via Milan. It must all have been rather a strain for her, because she had just got back from her animals in Kenya. Would she be true to herself and come here dressed all in black, as she usually did? Adrian von Levetzov had announced his arrival for early afternoon: in his stilted, baroque manner he had written something about a direct flight from Hamburg to Genoa. Frau Hartwig couldn’t help laughing at the stark contrast between his elegant writing paper and Achim Ruge’s torn-off piece of paper, in which he communicated diagonally across several coffee stains that he had to organize work in his Bochum lab for the time of his absence, and couldn’t say whether he would be arriving on Tuesday or Wednesday. When Giorgio Silvestri would be able to leave his clinic in Bologna was uncertain, but at any rate he wanted to try to be here for dinner. After the phone conversation, Perlmann had been uncertain whether he liked Silvestri’s smoky voice or not. Angelini’s reference to him had been very reticent, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he had invited him. Perhaps just because Agnes had said that linguistic disorders in the case of psychoses must surely be interesting.

The first would be Evelyn Mistral. The train from Geneva was to arrive in Genoa at half-past one. He wouldn’t regret it, her boss had written to him, when suggesting her in his place, because he himself had to undergo an operation. She was making a name for herself in the field of developmental psychology. The list of her publications was impressive for someone who was only twenty-nine. But the stack of her papers that Frau Hartwig had put on Perlmann’s desk had gone unread. All he knew of her was her voice on the telephone, an unexpectedly clear voice with a polished Spanish accent.

Politeness decreed that, as their host, he should wait for them downstairs. But it was another five leaden minutes before he finally got to his feet. When he walked to the chair to fetch his jacket he stumbled over his empty suitcase. He was about to close it and put it away when he noticed Leskov’s text half-hidden in a side pocket, a fat typescript in Russian, a bad photocopy in an unusual paper format, folded in at the corners from the journey and otherwise generally crumpled. The text had been enclosed with the letter in which Leskov said that he had not received an exit permit, and couldn’t have come in any case, as his mother had suffered a sudden serious illness. The text was about what he was working on at present, he had written, and he hoped that in this way he would be able to stay in academic contact with him. Sending him this text was a piece of flattery, Perlmann had thought. His Russian wasn’t nearly good enough to cope with it. He had set it aside and forgotten it. It had only come to hand again when he was packing on Sunday evening. It’s nonsense, he had thought, but in a way he had liked the idea of having a Russian text with him. It was something exotic and thus intimate, so in the end he had packed it along with his Russian pocket dictionary.

As he held it in his hand now, the text suddenly seemed to him to be something that he could use to distinguish himself from the others, and defend himself. Opening up this text to himself, or at least trying to do so, was at least a plan for the coming weeks. It was something into which he could withdraw in his free time, an internal region that the others could not penetrate, and from which he would defend himself against their expectations; an inner fortress in which he was invulnerable to their judgment. If he stayed in it, and one Russian sentence after the other opened up to him, he might even succeed in wresting a few moments of presence from the mountain range of time. And then, after the remaining thirty-two days, when he was sitting by the aeroplane window again and enjoying the loop in which the plane rose above the sea, he could say that he now spoke Russian much better than before, so that he had not entirely lost that time after all.

Perlmann took the text and the dictionary, and when he went downstairs and nodded to Signora Morelli, his step was lighter than in the days before. He sat down in a wicker chair under the portico by the entrance and looked at the title that Leskov had written by hand in big, carefully drawn letters: o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy. He only needed to use the dictionary once and he had it: on the role of language in the formation of memories.

That seemed familiar to him. That’s right. It had been the subject of their conversation in St Petersburg. He saw himself standing with Vassily Leskov at a window of the Winter Palace and looking out on the frozen Neva. Agnes’s death was only two months in the past, and he certainly hadn’t felt like going to a conference. But at the time when he had received the invitation, Agnes had been all for it straight away – Then we can try out our Russian – and he had gone, because, in spite of the pain it gave him, it made him feel connected to her. After the start of the session he and Leskov had sat in the foyer of the conference building and fallen into conversation; it had, he thought, been much like his meeting with Angelini. Leskov had been far from sympathetic to him at first; a heavy, rather spongy man with coarse features and a bald head, eager to talk to colleagues from the West and therefore solicitous, almost submissive, in his manner. He talked nineteen to the dozen, and Perlmann, who would rather have had his peace, initially found him intrusive and bothersome. But then he had started listening: what this man was saying in sometimes antiquated but almost perfectly correct German about the role of language for experience, above all the experience of time, began to captivate him. He described experiences that had long been familiar to Perlmann, but which he could not have described with such accuracy, such nuance and such coherence as this Russian, who fumbled around constantly in the air with the damp stem of his pipe between his massive fingers. Soon Leskov sensed Perlmann’s growing interest. He was pleased with it and suggested showing him some more of the city.

He led him across St Petersburg to the Winter Palace. It was a clear, sunny morning in early March. Perlmann particularly remembered the houses in light, faded ochre, gleaming in the sun: his memory of St Petersburg consisted entirely of that color. Beside him, Leskov showed him lots, explained lots, a man in a worn, green loden coat, with a fur hat and a pipe, advancing with heavy, clumsy footsteps, waving his arms around and snuffling slightly. Perlmann often didn’t listen. His thoughts were with Agnes, who had intended time and again to come here to take photographs, ideally in the summer, during the white nights. Sometimes he stopped and tried to see a section of his field of vision through her eyes, her black-and-white eyes, which had only been concerned with light and shade. In this way, he thought now, as he flicked through the text, a curious associative connection had formed between Agnes and this Russian: Leskov as a travel guide on Perlmann’s imaginary stroll with Agnes through St Petersburg.

The hours in the Winter Palace and then in the Hermitage collection created a strange intimacy between the two men. Perlmann revealed to his companion, whom he barely knew, that he was in the process of learning Russian, whereupon a beaming smile spread over Leskov’s face, and he immediately continued talking in Russian, until he noticed that Perlmann was utterly unable to follow him. Leskov was very familiar with the paintings collected here. He pointed out some things that one might otherwise not have noticed on a first trip, and from time to time he said something simple in Russian, slowly and clearly. Perlmann spent these hours in a mood in which the effect of the paintings and joy of Russian sentences understood mingled with the pain that he would not be able to tell Agnes all this, that he would never be able to tell her anything ever again.

He had resisted the temptation to talk about Agnes while he was in this mood. What business was it of this Russian’s? It was only when they looked down at the Winter Place from the Peter and Paul Fortress that he began now, of all times, when their earlier intimacy had fled in the bitterly cold air. It happened against his will, and he was furious when he heard himself, to crown it all, talking about how hard he had found it since then to continue with his academic work. Luckily, Leskov did not understand the full meaning of his words. He replied only that it was quite natural after such a loss, and added almost paternally that it would all come back to him. And then, from their newly revived intimacy, he told him that he had been jailed as a dissident. He didn’t say for how long and gave no further details. Perlmann didn’t know how to react to this information, and for a moment there was an uncomfortable pause that Leskov finally ended by taking him by the upper arm and suggesting with unfitting, artificial cheerfulness that they should start addressing one another informally. Perlmann was glad that Leskov had to go home soon afterwards, to look after his old mother with whom he lived, and that he didn’t invite him along. He had replied to the invitation to Santa Margherita that Perlmann sent him a few weeks later with an exuberant letter: he would apply for an exit permit straight away. And then, three months ago, the depressed missive in which Leskov had declined Perlmann’s invitation had arrived attached to this text.

Perlmann understood the first sentence immediately. The second contained two words that he had never encountered before, although, in fact, it was clear what they must mean. The third sentence was opaque to him because of its construction, but he read on, through a series of unfamiliar words and phrases, to the end of the first paragraph. From one sentence to the next he grew more excited, and by now it was like a fever. Without taking his eyes off the page, he looked in his pocket for a sweet. As he did so he touched the pack of cigarettes that he had bought the previous day when he arrived at the airport. He hesitantly set them down on the bistro table beside the dictionary and then picked them up again. He had bought them yesterday as if under a compulsion, and at precisely the moment that he had begun to feel that he had arrived here irrevocably – that there was no longer a gap, either in space or in time, separating him from the start of this stay, and that there was consequently no longer the slenderest possibility that it might not happen. It had felt like a defeat when he had bought the cigarettes, and he had, as he put them in his pocket, had a dull sensation of menacing and inexorable disaster.

It was his old brand, which he had smoked until five years before. The joyful excitement he had felt at his unexpected success in reading Leskov’s text faded away and melted with the thrilling fear of the forbidden, when he now, with trembling fingers, put a cigarette between his lips. The dry paper felt ominously familiar. He took his time. He could still stop, he said to himself, heart thumping. But his self-confidence, he felt with alarming clarity, seemed to be leaking away.

He realized that he hadn’t got a light, and was relieved by this setback. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and thought of that day on the cliff, in the wind, when they had been on holiday. He and Agnes had looked at each other and then simultaneously thrown their burning cigarettes into the sea, the full packs after them, and laughed at their melodramatic gesture. A common victory, a happy day.

Suddenly, the waiter was standing next to him on the terrace, holding out a burning match. A feeling of defenselessness took hold of him. Things slipped away. He took his first puff in five years and immediately had a coughing fit. The waiter glanced at him with surprise and concern and walked away. The second puff was easier. It still scratched, but it was already a complete puff. Now he smoked in slow, deep puffs, his eyes half-closed. The nicotine began to flow through his body. He sensed a slight dizziness, but at the same time he felt light and a little bit euphoric. Of course, it was a euphoria that went hand in hand with the impression of artificiality, the feeling that this state arose in him without actually belonging to him, without really being his own. And then, all of a sudden, everything collapsed within him, and he felt wretchedly unwell.

He quickly stubbed out the cigarette and walked unsteadily to the pool, where he lay down on a lounger and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted even before anything had begun. After a while he grew calmer. He was relieved that nothing was pulsing and spinning any more, and gradually drifted into half-sleep. He didn’t wake up until a very bright voice above him, speaking English with a Spanish accent, said, ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, but the waiter told me you were Philipp Perlmann.’

2

She had a radiant smile, the like of which he had never seen, a smile in which her whole personality opened up, a smile that would have broken down anyone’s resistance. He sat up and looked into the oval face with its prominent cheekbones, wide-set eyes and broad nose, almost an oriental face. Her blonde hair fell straight down on to a white, crookedly fitting T-shirt; it was uncombed, living hair, a bit like straw.

Perlmann’s mouth was dry and he still felt a bit unsteady when he got to his feet and held out his hand.

‘You must be Evelyn Mistral,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I must have dozed off for a moment.’ Starting with an apology.

‘Not to worry,’ she laughed. ‘It’s really like being on holiday here.’ She pointed to the high facade of the hotel with the painted gables over the windows, the turquoise shutters and the coats of arms in the colors of various nations. ‘It’s all so terribly smart. I hope they’ll let me in with my suitcase!’

It was an ancient, battered black leather case, with light brown edges that were torn in places, and she had stuck a bright red elephant on the middle of the lid. Kirsten could drag a case like that around with her, too. It would suit her. And generally speaking she somehow reminds me of my daughter, although they don’t look at all alike.

She had come by train, first class, and was impressed in the way a little girl might have been. You feel so important, she said. She had never been treated so well by a conductor. Then she had allowed herself a sumptuous lunch in the dining car. There had been no first-class carriage on the local train from Genoa to Santa Margherita, and it had struck her as quite odd to be suddenly sitting in a shabby, second-class compartment again. How quickly one was corrupted!

Perlmann took the case and accompanied her to reception. She walked lightly in her faded khaki skirt, almost dancing slightly in her flat, bright red patent shoes, and yet there was something hesitant and gawky in her gait. She was greeted by Signora Morelli, who was, as she had been the day before, wearing a dark blue, sporty-looking dress and a burgundy neckerchief, which gave her the appearance of a chief stewardess, an impression reinforced by the fact that she had put her hair up in a rather severe style. When Evelyn Mistral spoke Italian she pronounced the vowels in the Spanish way, short and harsh, in sharp contrast to Signora Morelli’s leisurely sing-song. As she checked in, leaning on the desk, her feet played with her red shoes. Sometimes she laughed out loud, and then her voice again had the brightness that Perlmann remembered from their phone call. ‘See you later,’ she said to him when the porter took the case and walked ahead of her to the elevator.

Perlmann walked slowly back across the expansive terrace to the pool. Now the red-haired man from that morning was back as well. Perlmann replied to his cheerful greeting with a brief wave, and sat down on a lounger on the other side. He abandoned himself to a feeling that was, in fact, merely the absence of anxiety. For the first time since his arrival he wasn’t battling against the things around him: the crooked pines that loomed on the coast road; the flags along the balustrade; the waiter’s red smoking jacket; the smell of pine resin and the remains of summer heat in the air. Now he was able to see that the grapes on the pergola were turning red. Agnes would have seen that first.

‘They’ve given me a fantastic room,’ said Evelyn Mistral, dropping her swimming towel on the lounger next to him. ‘Up there. The corner room on the third floor, a double room with antique furniture. I think the desk’s made of rosewood. And the view! I’ve never lived like this. But the price. Don’t even think about it! How are you supposed to earn that sort of money? But at least with a desk like that, you have no excuse not to work!’

She had taken off her bathrobe and was standing at the edge of the pool. Her gleaming white one-piece swimsuit set off her brownness, a brown with a yellowish glow. A dive and she was in the water. She stayed under for a long time and then swam back and forth a few times in the big kidney-shaped pool. The water barely sprayed up; the movements of her calm, almost lazy freestyle were elegant and contrasted with her gawky way of walking. From time to time she came over to him and rested her arms on the edge of the pool. ‘Why don’t you come in? It’s wonderful!’

Perlmann closed his eyes and tried to retain that image: the gleaming water and her radiant smile; her wet blonde hair. Even now it was no different: he could never experience the present as it was taking place; he always woke up too late, and then there was only the substitute, the visualization, a field in which he had, out of pure desperation, become a virtuoso.

As unexpectedly as before, when he had given him a light, the waiter was suddenly standing over him, passing him Leskov’s text, the dictionary and the cigarettes.

‘Someone else would like to sit there,’ he said, pointing to the columns. Then he looked in the pocket of his smoking jacket and handed Perlmann a book of matches with the inscription Grand Hotel Miramare.

Perlmann set the things down on the floor next to him and looked across to Evelyn Mistral, who was now on her back, letting herself drift with her arms spread wide. Her long hair, which looked brown in the blue water, lay like a chaotic fan around her face. She had closed her eyes, drops of water shimmered on her bright lashes, and when she glided back from a strip of shadow into the sun, her eyelids twitched. As before, when wanting to record an impression, Perlmann lit a cigarette. The inhalation and the sensation of heightened, slightly hurried vividness thus produced created the illusion that he could obtain the impossible through sheer obstinacy: hold the moment until he had managed to open it up and thus give it depth. Again he felt dizzy, but the sensation no longer crossed the boundary into nausea, and when the cigarette was finished he lit another one.

When Evelyn Mistral came out of the water and dried herself, her eye fell on Leskov’s text on the ground. ‘Oh, you speak Russian,’ she said. Then she narrowed her eyes. ‘That is Russian, isn’t it? I’d love to be able to do that. When did you learn? And how?’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t explain why he flinched at that moment, as if he’d been caught doing something forbidden.

‘I can’t, in fact,’ he said, and set down both text and dictionary on the other side of the lounger to make room for her. ‘Just a few words. This text here – it’s more of a prank that someone took the liberty of playing on me.’ The dictionary was lying with its back to her. She couldn’t have seen the dark smudges from all that flicking.

What other foreign languages did he speak? she asked as she puffed on one of his cigarettes later on.

‘I can speak a bit of yours,’ he said in Spanish.

‘Then you should be more familiar with me,’ she laughed. ‘Usted is far too formal. Colleagues don’t say that to each other. And in Spain since Franco as a rule we tend to say tú.’

After that they stuck with Spanish. Perlmann liked her Spanish voice, particularly the gutturals and the way she turned the d at the end of the word into a voiceless sound like the English th. It was a long time since he had last spoken Spanish, and he made a lot of mistakes. But he was glad of the language. He hadn’t learned anything new in English for years, nothing liberatingly strange in its newness. English no longer gave him the chance to recast himself in a foreign language.

He lost her when he talked about this subject. Her relationship with foreign languages was more serious, more practical. Yes, she enjoyed them, too; but when he talked about the possibility of becoming someone else in a foreign language, even though one was essentially saying the same thing as one said in one’s own, she was only a polite listener, and Perlmann felt like a mystic. And when he reflected out loud about whether the Spanish tú was more intimate than the English you in connection with the first name, or the same, and how both compared to the German Du in terms of intimacy, she looked at him with curiosity, but the smile that accompanied her gaze revealed that for her this was more of a game than a serious question. His monologue suddenly struck him as ridiculous, even kitsch, and he abruptly interrupted it to ask her about her work.

What someone can imagine is dependent on what they can say, and the same is true of what they want, she said. In her work with children she concentrated increasingly on this connection between imagination, will and language; on the way in which the internal play with possibilities became more refined and influential as the capacity for linguistic expression developed; and how this refinement of the imagination through language led to an increasingly rich organization of the will.

As she spoke she gripped her tucked-up knees with both hands. Only sometimes, when the wet strands slipped into her face, did she release her interlocking fingers. Her face was very serious and concentrated as she tried to find appropriate words, precise sentences. Perlmann liked her face now, too. But the more she got into her stride, the further away it became. And then when she talked about the chapters of a book that she wanted to present for discussion here, it struck him as very remote and alien. He thought of his shabby, black oilcloth notebook, which he hadn’t opened for so long, and it was only with difficulty that he managed to shake off the image of squared pages, yellowed to the point of illegibility. He dreaded the moment when she would ask him about his own work, and for that reason kept asking, apprehensive about the mendaciousness of his zeal, and yet pleased every time she began to respond to yet another question.

When Adrian von Levetzov’s name was mentioned, Perlmann gave a start. ‘I’d completely forgotten him,’ he murmured tonelessly, and he could see from Evelyn Mistral’s expression that his face revealed an anxiety that he would gladly have concealed at any cost. He hastily got up from the lounger, went over on one ankle and started hobbling to the entrance. As he passed the waiter, who was clearing a table, he forced himself to walk more calmly, unsure whether it was because of the pain in his ankle or whether it sprang from the desire to battle against anxiety and solicitude.

Von Levetzov was standing at the reception desk talking insistently, and in terrible tourist Italian, to Signora Morelli, who replied to him with a motionless face and in perfect English.

‘If the sun disturbs you, sir,’ she was just saying with a coolness that Perlmann envied, ‘you need only draw the curtains. We cannot easily alter the location of the hotel, now, can we? We do not, I fear, have a larger desk. But I’m sure we can find an additional side table.’

Von Levetzov’s face was pinched and slightly reddened when he looked over at the door. ‘Ah, Perlmann, at last,’ he said, struggling to rein in his irritation. ‘I thought you weren’t going to welcome me at all.’

‘Please do forgive me,’ Perlmann said breathlessly. ‘I was at the pool with Evelyn Mistral, and completely forgot the time.’ Why am I constantly apologizing? And to cap it all that sounded almost like a budding romance. One should meet such a man in a quite different way. One should be much more, obliging, but cool. I’ll never learn.

‘Well, you’re here now,’ said von Levetzov, and it sounded as if Perlmann were a pupil who had turned up late or a tardy assistant who was being forgiven. ‘I’m just trying to explain to these people that I need more room to work, more surface area. Above all, I need a table for my calculator alone. And then the sun. I tried it out just after I got here. There are problems with the screen. You must have noticed that yourself.’

Perlmann didn’t look at him as he nodded. Consequently, his lie felt more like an insignificant movement. He turned to Signora Morelli, whom he hadn’t liked at all at first when he had arrived the day before, but whose brittleness had made her more congenial to him each time he had seen her since. An additional table would, as she had said, be found for the signore, and, if he insisted, his room would be rearranged: the desk could be put against the back wall, which the sun didn’t reach. He could even be offered a different room, facing the rear and very shady, but perhaps a bit small for such a long stay.

Perlmann spoke Italian with her, and he spoke more quickly than his ability actually allowed him to. After the conversation by the pool the Spanish words sometimes came to him rather than the Italian, but he went on and on talking, even when the question of the room had long been resolved, so that Signora Morelli looked embarrassedly across to Adrian von Levetzov, who was irritably waggling a hotel prospectus. She couldn’t tell that Perlmann’s talking was a demonstration, a show for this man in the dark blue, almost black suit with the waistcoat and the gold watch chain. Whatever may happen over the next few weeks, I can do that better than he can.

‘I didn’t know your command of Italian was so good,’ von Levetzov said acidly, immediately changing the subject by pointing out of the door to the bay, where the light was already starting to break, producing a reddish glow. ‘I myself prefer the Anglo-Saxon to the Latin world, and, in fact, I prefer English parklands to Mediterranean idylls. But I am forced to admit that it is quite charming here. I am also, of course, looking forward to my academic dispute with you, my dear Perlmann. Recently, sad to say, I have not got around to pursuing your latest works. The last thing I heard was your report at our conference a year ago. My book created quite a considerable stir, discussion forums, lectures, you know all that. But in the coming weeks I can catch up on my Perlmann reading. You know how highly I esteem you, even if we have opposing views. I’m very excited to hear your latest ideas. I shall take my time and I will be all ears.’

It sounded like a threat to Perlmann, and he froze. For someone like him, who carried a facade around with him, and trembled behind it, waiting to be unmasked, this elegant man with the smooth black hair and the rimless glasses was a great danger. The biggest, leaving Millar aside. He talked like a character out of Thomas Mann, and the first time students heard him there were grins and giggles. But only at the outset. He was feared as an obsessive worker who couldn’t understand that other people needed a break from time to time. When he talked, as he had just been doing, about himself, it sounded like clumsy boasting. But although he was vain and mannered, he was by no means snobbish, but rather a man who lived in a modest apartment full of books and was entirely absorbed in his subject, to which he contributed more than most of the others. From time to time he was seen at the Hamburg Opera, only ever at Mozart and always alone. There were rumours about a brief liaison with an actress, and about alcohol. No one knew anything precise.

Evelyn Mistral’s hair was tousled from rubbing when she entered the lobby with her swimming towel around her shoulders. For Perlmann, the radiant presence of her laughter had disappeared into the far distance. The presence of Adrian von Levetzov, and his last words above all, had interposed themselves between him and that laughter like frosted glass. The hour by the pool was by now nothing but a lovely deception, a Fata Morgana. He was relieved that she had rolled up Leskov’s text and passed the dictionary up to him with its reverse side up. He took both of them in one hand, which he then hid behind his back.

Tall von Levetzov bowed down to little Evelyn Mistral, took her hand as if to kiss it and said in exaggerated Oxford English that he very much regretted the fact that her teacher hadn’t been able to come as he was, of course, irreplaceable. He seemed not to notice that her narrow mouth twitched at his tactlessness, and announced with a glance at the clock that he had to make a few phone calls, while his colleagues in Germany were still in the office. Then he hurried upstairs, always taking two steps at a time; as he did so his watch chain bounced up and down, emphasizing the grotesque contrast between the forced youthfulness of his movements and his old-fashioned appearance.

When Evelyn Mistral had disappeared in the elevator, Perlmann stood motionless for a while and stared at the bright stripe that the afternoon sun cast on the marble floor of the lobby. She was more than twenty years younger than him, and yet the face with which she had watched von Levetzov’s departure had expressed a confidence and an effortless detachment of which he could only dream. It’s unfair, he thought repeatedly, as he hobbled back to his lounger to fetch his cigarettes. And every time that sentence was swamped by a wave of diffuse and directionless resentment, he rejected it as ludicrous nonsense.

Laura Sand was not due to arrive before five o’clock. Perlmann went up to the room. When he slumped on the bed, he felt as if the whole supply of solitude that he had brought here with him had already been completely used up by these two encounters, and he was assailed by a feeling of defenselessness.

What bothered him most when he visualized what had happened was the way he had rushed all the way along the terrace to the reception to greet von Levetzov. He could see himself: a gaunt man in a dark blue polo shirt and light-colored trousers, with short, black hair and a pale face behind his black horn-rimmed glasses, a man hurrying to be of service. And alongside that image, another image of solicitude appeared: the memory of his father when he was called to the telephone. It was the picture of a harmless, banal situation, and yet one of the worst mental images that he had brought from home. His father walked with oppressive haste and a facial expression that suggested it was a matter of life and death. On no account could anyone address him when he was walking like this; he walked in a way that caused one involuntarily to catch one’s breath. His face always seemed to have turned red, and to be covered with a film of sweat, glistening. He walked bent forward, at the service of everyone who paid him the honor of calling him on the telephone. The caller must not be kept waiting. By the very fact of calling, this caller had acquired the right to have him, his father, entirely at his command. As the callee, at that moment his father had no life of his own, no time of his own and no needs of his own that a caller would have had to take into account. He was unconditionally available, all the time, on call.

It had taken Perlmann some time to work out that for ages this image had shaped his relationship with the outside world, the world of other people. You had to be at the service of that world, you depended on the mercy of its acknowledgement. But at the same time neither he nor his father could have been described as submissive characters. No, that wasn’t it. It was the pure anxiety that this solicitude provoked; a constant fear of the consequences it might have if you let others feel that one had desires of one’s own, which were in contact with theirs, even if it only meant that the others had to wait for a while. The idea of these serious consequences was far from clear; the closer you looked, the more their content evaporated. But that didn’t change anything about the choking, suffocating power that that anxiety held over you. Once Perlmann had heard a doctor making a phone call during hospital hours. He had come out with some quite unremarkable sentences: ‘No, that’s impossible right now. I’m busy… I understand. Then you’ll just have to call again later on.’ The doctor had said these sentences in a friendly but firm tone that clearly delineated him from the person at the other end, and he had said them with an effortless self-evidence that had practically hypnotized Perlmann. It had been like a revelation: saying sentences like that in that tone – that was what you had to be able to do. You had to be able to say them without your heart thumping, without any inner agitation or even just stress, quite calmly and without having to think about them any further. On that occasion, when the door of the hospital had closed behind him and he had gone out into the street, he had known that a lack of solicitude would henceforth be the most important ideal of his life.

When he thought of the veranda, of the gleaming tables and the high, carved armchair at the head, he sensed that he had never been as far from that ideal as he was now. When von Levetzov had spoken to him in his unusual way a little while before, he had felt as if he was at a school desk, as helpless and hopeless as a pupil at the Institute Benjamenta. Every word had been able to penetrate him unhindered, and it seemed to Perlmann that he had no way of preventing words from flourishing inside him like malignant tumours.

Starting more or less with von Levetzov’s reference to that conference the previous year, Perlmann had assumed that he would be an ordinary participant when he had agreed, nothing more. He hadn’t been to conferences for a long time, and had seen this one as a good opportunity to show himself and to secure with a few skilful questions the general opinion that he was quite on top of things. To some extent he wanted to work on his disguise. It was a shock when he received the printed program two weeks before the agreed date and saw that he was presented as the main speaker, alongside a very vague and general title that someone had cobbled together for him out of a superficial knowledge of his work. In a mixture of fury and panic he picked up the phone, but as soon as he heard it ringing at the other end he hung up. He couldn’t give himself away. A man like him, an authority in his field, couldn’t lose face because of such a misunderstanding. However, if the opportunity presented itself he could make a barbed remark on the subject. But someone like Philipp Perlmann actually needed to have a lecture ready at all times. He couldn’t phone up and just say, ‘It’s a misunderstanding. I have nothing to say at the moment. Please pass that on.’ But really, why not? Agnes asked when she saw the way he was sitting at his desk. After that question he felt very alone. For a while he considered phoning in sick at the last moment. In the end he delivered a lecture that summed up what he had published over the last few years. Not a bad text, he thought, reading it through beforehand. But when he left the lectern to polite applause, he would really have liked to take the shortest way to the station, even though the conference lasted another two days. At dinner von Levetzov had sat down next to him. ‘A lecture of familiar clarity,’ he had said with a smile that wasn’t unfriendly or malicious, yet which had had the effect of a pinprick on Perlmann, ‘but it was more of a look back at the past, wasn’t it, or have you simply ignored the new?’

A moment before, down in the lobby, von Levetzov had called that lecture a report. Nothing escaped him, that keen-minded man with his phenomenal memory, and he weighed his words very carefully. He had mastered the game like very few others. It had been almost impossible not to invite von Levetzov. Perlmann stepped to the window and looked out at the bay. The setting sun shone through a fine grey bank of clouds and gave the water the color of platinum. Lights were already going on one by one over by Sestri Levante. Only a few seconds had passed since the first cigarette, and already he was smoking as if he had never stopped. It hurt when he became aware of it. He felt as if he was crossing out the last five years, and he had the feeling that he was betraying Agnes.

He thought of the other four colleagues that he still had to welcome, and planned to be laconic. Not unfriendly, not even cool, but laconic, with a certain terseness in his words. He usually said too much, even though he didn’t feel like talking, and they were explanations that often sounded like explanations, like justifications that no one had asked for. Also, he often expressed too much sympathy with other people, sympathy that wasn’t expected and perhaps not even wished for. Then he came across as intrusive, which was anathema to him. It was like an addiction.

He reached for Leskov’s text. The first sentences in the second paragraph resisted his efforts, and several times he vacillated between the various meanings that the dictionary gave for a word; several appeared possible, yet none seemed really to fit. But afterwards things became more transparent and he understood one sentence or another without inwardly faltering in the slightest. The excitement that he had felt before, when reading the first paragraph, returned. These were not, as they had always been in the past, sentences in an exercise book, which weren’t there because someone wanted to say something particular in precisely this way, but because the reader was to be presented with a new variant of grammar or expression. Here the language was not a subject, but a medium, and the author simply assumed that the reader was a master of that medium. So you were being treated quite differently, as an adult, so to speak, as a Russian-speaker, in fact. It was like joining the real Russian world, like a reward for all that effort with your grammar book.

Perlmann was euphoric. He walked up and down a few times, then leaned far back in the armchair and folded his arms behind his head. For the first time since his arrival he felt secure and sure of himself. He understood Russian. I’m someone of whom you can say: he reads Russian. If only I could share that with Agnes. Then it would be a presence. He dialled Kirsten’s number in Konstanz, but no one picked up. She was probably in a lecture or a seminar.

It wasn’t the first time that Perlmann had crossed this point with a language. But this time it was different. The cheering experience was, it seemed to him, more intense than usual. Perhaps it was down to the fact that it had been so difficult for a long time and he had secretly expected never to get that far. Or else it was something to do with the Cyrillic letters, which still looked mysterious to him even though he had known them for almost two years. He looked at the typescript and repeated a game that he enjoyed afresh every time he played it: he studied the writing first with the eyes of someone who couldn’t read the letters, for whom they were merely an ornament. Then he let his eyes somehow tip over into the gaze of someone who doesn’t stop with the appearance of the script but, guided unnoticeably by his perfect familiarity with them, presses on directly to the meaning of what is written. It’s barely believable, he said to himself then, but I can really do it.

He went on reading now, breathlessly and always fearing that the first two paragraphs might have been an exception, and he was about to capsize and would have to go back to texts that treated him like a schoolboy again. But although his little Langenscheidt dictionary failed him now and again, he managed, and he was so enthralled that he heard the noises in the next room only after some delay. It sounded as if someone were pushing something heavy against the door; then there came the sound of men’s voices, the rattle of keys, the door snapping shut, footsteps fading away.

Only now did it become clear to Perlmann that he had assumed – had, in fact, taken it as his due – that there should be no one staying in the room next to him. As if the whole world had to know and respect the fact that he was a person who needed a lot of empty space around him. The new guest cleared his throat, then sniffed loudly, and at last he blew his nose with three long trumpet blasts. Perlmann gave a start: the walls were so thin, the building so badly soundproofed. He tried to find his way back to his cheerful excitement of a few moments before, but it had been displaced by a feeling of oppression, almost panic, and when he spent a while looking in vain for an expression in the dictionary, he discovered that the cause had been a simple reading error. His irritation grew from one minute to the next, and when something fell over with a loud crash in the next room, he lost control, stormed out and thundered with his fist on the door of the neighboring room.

The man who opened it was Achim Ruge. Perlmann felt the blood rising to his face.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he stammered and offered him his hand.

Ruge pointed at the open hard-shell suitcase, which had fallen so that the clothes now lay scattered on the floor and the alarm clock was wedged between a pair of shoes.

‘And I took such trouble packing,’ he grinned, ‘much more than usual. And it’s a new suitcase, too.’

He was wearing a brownish suit which was too short in the sleeves, and looked like a farmer’s Sunday suit, and an open white shirt that looked like something left over from the Sixties. But what chiefly captivated the eye was his big round head, which was almost completely bald. A bullet would bounce off his skull, Perlmann thought every time he saw him. The fact that there was something grotesque about Ruge’s head, something of a living death’s head, was down to his glasses, glasses with a yellowish frame of gloomy transparency that was as unmodern, as inelegant as if someone had done everything within their power to create the epitome of an anti-fashion frame. The impression was reinforced by the fact that one earpiece had been repaired with fine wire, the end of which stuck out and threatened to tear open Ruge’s temple at any moment.

The organization of the laboratory had gone faster than expected after all, he reported in his broad Swabian accent. Perlmann had forgotten how close his ä was to his e. Ruge had travelled through the night and hardly slept, because in the full second-class compartment lying down had been unimaginable.

‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he grinned when Perlmann asked him why he hadn’t flown or at least travelled first class.

As Ruge walked over to his suitcase to fetch an offprint that he had brought specially for him, Perlmann saw that the room was arranged as a mirror image of his own. This meant that the two desks stood exactly opposite one another, as in a piece with two pianos, except that there was a wall in between. That idea momentarily unsettled Perlmann. With dry words of thanks he took delivery of the thick offprint, which was actually a small book, and disappeared to his room where, without thinking anything about it, he chained the door.

It was now half-past five, and the dusk was sinking surprisingly quickly, almost headlong, on to the bay. The coast by Sestri Levante had become a flickering strip of light, and now the hotel lamps were coming on, each one four white spheres in an irregular arrangement. At midday Perlmann had cursed the southern light because it promised him a present that could never be reached. Now that it made way for darkness and was overlaid with the glow of artificial light, he could hardly expect to see it again. As clumsy as someone constantly running behind himself, only now did he miss its hypnotic power, which made one forget and which took away the past along with its heaviness, just as the need to plan anything burned away to nothing. With the dusk, the muted colors and the magic of the lamplight, his inner space filled once more with all the images that he feared one minute before feeling nothing but weariness the next, and a longing for the strength that could wipe out everything.

The figure that crept backwards out of the taxi, doing battle with two enormous camera bags, which became caught on the seat and then in the door, could only be Laura Sand. She asked the driver who set her suitcase down on the steps to hold her cigarette while she looked for money in the pocket of her long black coat. Then she heaved the case up one step at a time and, with her other arm, caught the camera bags when they threatened to hit the banisters.

Perlmann rushed out and realized too late that he had left his key in the room. Feeling a sharp pain in his leg, he went over on his ankle and came hobbling, face distorted with pain, into the lobby where Laura Sand was stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray on the reception desk.

He had forgotten the extent to which she could fill a whole room with her white face, her mockingly pouting lips and the shadow of rage in her almost black eyes. He had remembered above all the dense ponytail of deep black hair which fell unevenly to her shoulders on either side of a muddled parting. Even now, as she held out her slender hand with a smile, there was a sceptical sharpness in her eye, further emphasized by the fact that she always held her head tilted slightly to the side. For a moment he compared her face with that of Signora Morelli, who was just taking charge of her Australian passport: the Italian face now looked merely like a pleasant but pale background.

Laura Sand laid her black leather suitcase, which was scattered with faded, battered and torn stickers of foreign cities and rare animals, flat on the floor, opened the zip and dragged from a tangle of underwear, books and rolls of films, an olive-green travelling typewriter. She’d been writing on it for almost twenty years, she said, not least in the Steppes and the jungle. Twice the machine had been taken apart completely and reassembled. Only yesterday her daughter had swept it from the table during one of her fits of aerobics, and now the carriage didn’t work properly. It urgently needed to be repaired.

‘I can’t think without that damned thing,’ she said in a broad Australian accent, and with a strange fury that looked almost comical because it wasn’t aimed at anyone and seemed to be her second nature.

‘No problem,’ said Giovanni, when Signora Morelli had translated. He had just arrived to join the nightshift, and had put even more pomade in his hair than the previous evening, when he had got badly on Perlmann’s nerves with his slow-wittedness commentaries. He knew someone who could fix it in the blink of an eye, Giovanni said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Laura Sand’s face, and instead of ringing for the porter, still wearing his coat he picked up her suitcase and walked ahead of her to the elevator.

When the chambermaid who had opened his door for him had gone, Perlmann picked up Leskov’s text again. Now that it would be an hour at most till Brian Millar arrived, it was particularly important to build a protective wall of understood Russian sentences around him. The more sentences he could pile up, the less the man with the red shimmer in his dark hair could do to him.

But Perlmann couldn’t manage to translate even a single sentence. Like yesterday on the plane he was paralyzed by a kind of seeing blindness, and when finally he managed to read the words correctly, his memory played one trick on him after another. He felt anxiety welling up within him like a poison, which, released in the depths, was forcing its way relentlessly to the surface. While he stood by the window in the dark and smoked, he called Evelyn Mistral’s laughter to his aid, and then Laura Sand’s furious gaze. But he was unsure whether those two faces would be any use against Millar, and his anxiety wouldn’t go away.

And, in fact, there wasn’t the slightest reason to be anxious. All right, they hadn’t liked each other from the start. But that episode in Boston had been really quite trivial; practically childish, and not something to explain hostility.

Millar had travelled with his girlfriend Sheila, a beauty with long blonde hair and a very short skirt. He was extremely proud of her and treated her like a jealously protected property. The colleagues bowed and scraped around her and wooed with her in the most ludicrous fashion. Perlmann didn’t do a thing. During breaks in the conference and sometimes even during the lectures he withdrew into a quiet corner of the building and read a paperback of short stories. Sheila often strolled, bored, down the corridors, smoking. When she approached Perlmann she cast him a curious glance and went on walking. On the third day of the conference she sat down next to him and asked him what he was always reading. Wouldn’t she much rather have been somewhere else? he asked her after a while. The question caught her off guard, they started laughing, and suddenly there was a familiarity between them whose charm lay in the fact that it was gauzy and without any history. They walked together to the caféteria, still joking, because Sheila liked his dry, melancholy humor. When she found what he said particularly funny, she put her arm around his shoulder. Her head was close to his. Her hair brushed his cheek. He felt her breath and smelled her perfume. He turned his head, and just at that moment Millar, coming from the session with his colleagues, entered the caféteria. He saw them in this attitude of intimacy, Perlmann with his face bright red. Millar left his colleagues standing, came rapidly over and took Sheila by the arm, as if he wanted to confront her and regain possession of her. She defended herself. There was almost a scene. All under the curious eyes of the colleagues who were still streaming in. Perlmann did nothing, just went on holding his tray, and was unable to suppress a smile of amusement that didn’t escape Millar.

In the afternoon it was Perlmann’s turn to deliver his lecture. Millar was sitting in the front row with Sheila. Perlmann saw her gleaming stockings and metal stilettos. He made a stupid mistake in a formula at the board. It was quite a trivial mistake, and basically it was of no importance whatsoever for the rest of his thought process. Millar’s hand shot up in the air, even before the chairman had finished his introductory words to the discussion. With understatement bolstered by sarcasm, he pointed out the mistake. Perlmann panicked, improved things for the worse and wiped out the correct part of the formula. Millar crossed his legs, folded his arms in front of his chest and tilted his head to one side. ‘No, you see, you should have left that part as it was,’ he said with slow complacency and a malicious smile. At last the grey-haired chairman, an authority in his subject, intervened in a calm voice. Perlmann regained his sense of security, steadily wiped the whole formula out and without hesitation wrote down the right one. Then he walked slowly back to the lectern, drew the microphone to him with theatrical care and asked, looking down at Millar, ‘Happy now?’ He managed a tone and a facial expression that turned the mood in the lobby in his favor, because quiet laughter could be heard. Sheila turned her head towards Millar and looked at him with curious and malicious glee. He darted her a poisonous glare in return.

The next morning, when Perlmann entered the hotel foyer with the case in his hand, Millar and Sheila had just gone out through the revolving door. Sheila glanced back and saw him. Millar was already opening the door of the taxi and turning impatiently towards Sheila when she called something out to him, turned round and slipped back into the revolving door. For a few moments she was trapped in it, because on the other side an elderly couple – she with a thick fur coat and a hatbox – were wedged in the door, and only with some pushing and shoving did it start moving again. Sheila tottered up to Perlmann and pressed a kiss on his cheek with comically parted lips. Then she was back at the door, turned round and waved with ironic daintiness. The others watched and laughed. One of his colleagues pointed to his cheek, which must have borne the impression of Sheila’s violet lips. Sheila saw it through the glass of the door and smiled, her tongue between her teeth. Millar still stood icy-faced, holding the taxi door. Sheila got in and pulled down her short skirt.

Ruge and von Levetzov, at the first letter of enquiry, had immediately asked whether Millar was to be invited. Maybe they would have come even without him. But Perlmann simply couldn’t think of an excuse not to invite this man, Brian Millar, whose name was on everyone’s lips.

He turned the light on and went into the shower. At home he never showered during the day. But now everything was to be rinsed away so that he could meet the man with the alert expression afresh and without embarrassment. Like yesterday evening and that morning, he showered for a very long time. You’d almost think I had a cleanliness fixation. He tried to persuade himself that all that water could make the afternoon’s clumsiness and solicitude disappear. The coming dinner, he said to himself, was the actual beginning. Everything before that was mere chance and didn’t count.

When he had shaken the water out of his ears and heard the telephone, he immediately thought it must have been ringing for ages. He ran dripping through the room. As he reached for the receiver, he looked at his wet footprints on the pigeon-blue carpet and felt a desperate annoyance with his subservience, which mocked all his good intentions, rising up within him.

‘Hi, Phil,’ was all the voice said. Perlmann recognized it immediately. The two syllables were enough to remind him what he had tried without great success to explain to Agnes after he got back from Boston: the voice formed the words in a completely undetached way. Its tone didn’t just show that this was the speaker’s mother tongue; the tone wasn’t only an expression of the self-evidence with which the language was at the speaker’s disposal. There was more at stake: the tone contained – and even Agnes’s frown could not shake his conviction about this – the message that this was the only language that truly deserved to be taken seriously. Self-righteous, you understand, his penetratingly sonorous voice is self-righteous. He speaks as if the others were to blame and very much to be pitied for the fact that they, too, don’t speak East Coast American, this Yankee language. This self-righteousness, this sonorous arrogance, that was what drove me up the wall.

‘Hi, Brian,’ said Perlmann, ‘how are you?’

‘Oh, fine,’ said the voice, and now Perlmann was once again quite sure that what he had said to Agnes was the precise truth.

‘By the way, Phil,’ the voice went on, and now this American mania for shortened first names was getting on Perlmann’s nerves again, ‘apparently my room’s right next to yours.’

Perlmann saw Ruge’s desk in front of him, right up against his own, and he felt as if the two walls of his room were being pushed closer and closer together until they crushed him.

‘How nice,’ he heard himself saying and had a feeling that with those empty words he was sealing his own defeat. He had never, even when standing naked, felt so exposed.

‘Me, too,’ he said at last, when Millar stressed how much he was looking forward to seeing him later over dinner.

Big puddles of water had formed around his feet, and were spreading outwards. He was shivering, and went back into the shower. It was quite clear, he thought, as he let the water run over his face: he couldn’t stay in his room. And the new room had to be far away, on another floor and if possible in the other wing of the hotel.

But what explanation should he give to Signora Morelli when making his request? And how could he prevent Ruge and Millar from taking it personally when he moved out? He would have to destroy something that would make the room uninhabitable and couldn’t be quickly repaired. Maybe rip the telephone from the wall and claim he had tripped over the wire. But a telephone connection could be quickly mended, far too quickly. Or do something with the television aerial and say he’d accidentally bashed it with the chest of drawers. But even a television socket could be easily changed. There wasn’t anything that could be broken in the bathroom without making it look deliberate. Pouring something on the carpet, like a whole pot of coffee. But you didn’t ask for a different room because of a stain on the carpet, least of all if you’d made it yourself.

Achim Ruge blew his nose and trumpeted even more loudly than he had in the afternoon. Shortly afterwards the sound of piano music came from Millar’s room. Bach. Trembling with irritation, Perlmann tried to find the station on the bedside-table radio. Nothing. Millar must have brought a radio-cassette recorder with him.

He listened reluctantly. He didn’t know this composition. He had never had a memory for Bach. He wouldn’t have dared to say it in the Conservatoire, but he found most of Bach’s piano music monotonous and boring. Secretly, he had often thought, Bela Szabo had felt the same. Otherwise he would, like the other teachers, have insisted on Perlmann playing at least a minimum of Bach.

Perlmann picked up his Russian grammar. Leskov’s text, he felt, was going to defeat him again now. But he could at least memorize the Russian entry for must. Then he would have something, a tiny bit of progress, that he could cling to when he came down to dinner later on. He walked back and forth with the open book in his hand and spoke the words more loudly than usual, to assert himself against Millar’s Bach and Ruge’s repeated nose-blowing.

Shortly before eight Perlmann stood at the window in his grey flannel trousers and dark blue blazer, watching people coming up the steps from outside, to eat in the famous restaurant of the Miramare. Break a windowpane. That could be explained by clumsiness, and would be a reason to change rooms, now that the nights were growing rather cool. But even a windowpane was quickly replaced. Run away. Simply run away. Down the steps to the shoreline promenade, around the rocky outcrop over there, out of vision, and then keep going, keep on going. He clenched his fists in his pockets until the nails cut into the palms of his hands. On the way to the door he stopped and repeated the entry for must twice. It took. Now the important thing to be is laconic, he thought as he pulled the door shut, not unfriendly, but laconic.

On the stairs he was horrified to realize that it was already half-past eight, and he was late for the first communal dinner. Still hobbling slightly, he entered the elegant dining room with the glittering candelabras. Now that he saw his colleagues sitting at a big, round table, it was clear to him that he had no idea what official words of greeting he was going to say.

3

Millar looked at the clock and rose to his feet, although admittedly without coming towards him. He was wearing grey trousers and a dark blue double-breasted jacket, a thin-striped shirt and a navy-blue tie, with a stylized anchor embroidered on it in golden yellow thread. His appearance and his stiff posture recalled those of a naval officer, an impression reinforced by the fact that his angular face with its thrusting chin was as tanned as if he had been at sea for weeks. As he stood there by the table with his broad shoulders, while his colleagues had stayed in their seats, he looked like the man in charge of everything, who had risen to greet a latecomer.

‘Good to see you, Phil,’ he said with a smile that revealed his big, white teeth. His handshake was so brief and powerful that a sensation of complete passivity arose in Perlmann.

‘Yes,’ he murmured, annoyed at his idiotic reaction. As before, in Boston, it was the steel-blue eyes behind the flashing glasses that made him shrink inwardly to a schoolboy, a little squirt who was oppressively aware that he still had to prove himself to the teacher. Millar had just had a night flight and a working session with his Italian colleagues, and those eyes still looked as rested, alert and calm as if he had just got up. Fit, Perlmann thought, and saw the laughing face of Agnes when he gave free rein to his unfounded hatred for the word once again.

While the others were already sitting by their empty plates, Perlmann hastily wolfed down his soup. He was glad that a seat for Giorgio Silvestri had been left free between him and Millar. There was still some unpleasantness with Millar, he suddenly felt quite clearly: some shortcoming that he couldn’t call to mind. Only when he heard von Levetzov thanking Millar for a text he had sent him did he remember the package with the four offprints that had arrived from New York in August, bearing the stamp first class mail, which always made Perlmann think of diplomatic mail that had found its way to him by mistake.

The package had been on his desk when he had visited the office in the afternoon (after Frau Hartwig had gone home), aimlessly, just to check that he still belonged to the university. At home he had immediately stuffed the things in the cupboard, from which a mountain of offprints always stared at him, some of which regularly fell on the floor. At first, as outside lecturer and then as lecturer, he had responded to every offprint with a letter that was often as long as a review. A considerable correspondence had come into being, because he had never known when such an exchange of letters was over, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to make the other person’s letter the last. The others felt that they were being taken seriously, even flattered. It represented an opportunity for them to go on commenting upon their work, and Perlmann often found in a subsequent offprint that this new work could be traced back to a particularly stimulating correspondence with him. A lot of time had passed on each occasion, and he felt like his correspondent’s training partner, both self-appointed and somehow conscripted, while he wasn’t advancing his own career. Then, with his commitments as professor, these extensive exchanges had put too much of a strain on his time. He had not found a middle way, and from one day to the next he had simply stopped replying.

He himself had never sent out offprints; it was only in response to an enquiry that his secretary had ever taken one from the stack. He had never been able to believe – really believe – that other people wanted to read what he wrote. The thought that someone might engage with his work was embarrassing to him. And that sensation was, paradoxically, run through with an indifference that amounted to something like sacrilege, because it called the entire academic world into question. It wasn’t arrogance, he was quite sure of that. And the fact that other people plainly read his things and his reputation was growing did not alter that feeling in the slightest. Every time he opened the cupboard the mountain of unread material that tumbled out at him felt like a time bomb, even if he couldn’t have said what the explosion would consist of.

‘I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your prize,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann when the waiter had cleared the soup plates. It sounded, Perlmann thought, as if he had taken a very long run-up to this remark, a run-up that had begun upstairs in his room, or perhaps even on the journey. Von Levertzov fanned away the smoke that drifted up to him from Laura Sand, and then turned to Evelyn Mistral. ‘You must be aware that our friend here recently won a prize that represents the greatest acknowledgement for academic achievements that exists in our country. It’s almost a little Nobel Prize.’

‘Well…’ Millar interjected.

‘No, no,’ von Levertzov continued, and after he had sought vainly for a sign of confirmation in Ruge’s face, he added with a smug smile. ‘One sometimes wonders a little who is going to get the prize, but I am certain that in this case the decision was justified.’

Perlmann gripped his glass with both hands and studied the ripples in the mineral water with as much concentration as if he had been observing the outcome of an experiment in the laboratory. He had done the same at the award ceremony, when his achievements were being celebrated in a speech. Two weeks after Agnes’s death he had sat under candelabras there, too, emotionally dead and deaf to everything, glad that no speech was expected on his part.

It’s bound to be your turn soon. The sentence had already formed within Perlmann; but then, to his surprise, he managed not to say it out loud. A small, a tiny step in the direction of the ideal of non-subservience. Suddenly he felt better, and his voice sounded almost cheerful as he said to Evelyn Mistral, ‘There’s always something random about such decisions. I’m sure it’s the same in Spain, isn’t it?’

It was exactly the same, she said. To put it mildly. What annoyed her most was that awards were often given to professors who had basically stopped working a long time ago, who lived off their past merits and lazed about in the safeguarding of reputations earned many years ago.

‘You would be horrified, Philipp, if you saw that. These are people who have stopped achieving anything at all!’

On her forehead, right above her nose, a faint red stripe had formed. Perlmann had heard a familiarity in her tone, and the tension between that intimacy and her fury, which cut into him like a big, sharp knife, was almost unbearable. Why did I even think she was different? Because of the red elephant?

He was glad of the fuss that von Levetzov made about the food to show that he was a gourmet. He took the silence that fell a moment later, and in which all that could be heard was the clatter of cutlery and the voices from neighboring tables, as a sign that from now on he was not the center of attention.

‘By the way, Phil,’ Millar said into the silence, ‘that business with the prize doesn’t surprise me at all. The day before I left I was staying with Bill in Princeton – you know Bill Saunders – and he was telling me that you’ll soon be receiving an invitation for a guest semester. They already know what you’re doing,’ he added with a smile in which, it seemed to Perlmann, the customary reverence for Princeton was mixed with a doubt, held at bay with difficulty and nonetheless enjoyed, about the wisdom of this very special decision.

Even though he was holding his fish knife with grim desperation, as about to cut a piece of stubborn, stringy meat, Perlmann was proud that he managed not to look at Millar. Say nothing. Keep silent.

‘Bill was, incidentally, a bit cross that you didn’t invite him, too,’ Millar said at last, and because his voice contained a hint of irritation at Perlmann’s lack of reaction, it sounded almost as if he himself were Bill Saunders complaining.

‘Oh, really?’ said Perlmann, and looked at Millar for a moment. He was pleased about the mildly ironic tone that he had managed, and now he looked again at Millar, for longer this time, and quite calmly. His eyes aren’t steel-blue, but porcelain-blue. In Millar’s grin, he thought, there was a hint of insecurity, and the fact that he now started talking briskly and loquaciously about Princeton in general seemed to confirm that impression. But rather than a feeling of triumph, a vacuum suddenly appeared inside Perlmann, and then the sensations of a fugitive suddenly crashed in on him. Why won’t they just leave me in peace? As he removed fish bones in slow motion, he fought the impulse to stand up and run away. With relief he joined in just as Millar’s language was beginning to make him furious once again. He greedily immersed himself in his fury.

Millar let himself tumble into his sentences, particularly his idiomatic, colloquial turns of phrase with a delight that Perlmann found repellent. Wallowing. He’s actually wallowing in his language. Perlmann hated dialects, and he hated them because they were often spoken like that, with the same trampling presumption with which Millar spoke his Yankee American. Worst of all was the north German dialect that he had grown up with. That his parents had finally grown very remote from him had a great deal to do with it. The older they grew, the more defiantly they insisted on speaking to him in Platt, and the more clearly he sensed that defiance, the more resolutely he spoke in High German to them. It had been a mute battle with words. You couldn’t talk about it. What use would it have been to say to them that their faces were becoming more and more rigid and dogmatic, and that that had much to do with the fact that they were increasingly led simply by the phrases and metaphors of the dialect, and by the prejudices that were crystallized in it?

The man with the rolled-up jacket sleeves, the open-necked shirt and the pale, unshaven face who was now looking round in the doorway and then coming towards them must have been Giorgio Silvestri. When Perlmann shook his hand and saw the relaxed, ironic alertness in his dark eyes, very different from Millar’s, the alertness of a cat about to pounce, he was immediately won over by him. He felt as if in the form of this thin, frail-looking Italian, who appeared to be scruffy until you took a closer look at his clothes, someone had arrived who could help him. And then when the first thing he did was to light a Gauloise and blow the smoke into Millar’s face, Perlmann was quite sure of things. Only the fact that he replied to Evelyn Mistral’s greeting in fluent, unaccented Spanish and thus merited her radiant laughter, was slightly disturbing.

His English was no less fluent, although accented. Addressed on the subject by Laura Sand, who was staring at him unwaveringly, Silvestri talked about the two years that he had spent working on a psychiatric ward in Oakland near San Francisco.

‘East Oakland,’ he said, turning to Millar, and went on when he saw Millar’s sour, frowning smile. ‘After that I had enough. Not of the patients, who still write to me. But of the merciless, in fact one would have to say barbaric American health system.’

Millar avoided the renewed cloud of smoke as if it were poison gas.

‘Well,’ he said at last, suppressed what was on the tip of his tongue and devoted himself to his dessert.

Silvestri ordered from the waiter, who started treating him as an old acquaintance as soon as he heard his Florentine accent, a special dessert and a triple espresso. Perlmann made a joke about it, and that was when it happened: he was giving in to his need for contact.

For years he had battled against that habit of touching people, particularly when he had just met them, when he addressed a charming joke or a personal remark to them. As he was now doing with Silvestri, he rested his hand on their forearm, and when standing up he would often enough find himself suddenly putting an arm around their shoulders. There were people who saw this simply as evidence of an outgoing, lovable nature, and others who found his behavior disagreeable. His need for physical contact did not differentiate between men and women, and in the case of women there were often misunderstandings. The presence of Agnes had helped, but not always, and when she had witnessed the event, one had been able to tell from her face how puzzling and even weird she found it that he, who preferred to sit on the edge of big, empty squares, had this particular tic. It was no less puzzling to him, and each time it happened he felt the compulsion as a crack running right through him.

It was von Levetzov’s idea to go across, after dinner, to the drawing room where the ochre-colored armchairs stood. Brian Millar, who came last because he had been inspecting the little room with the round, green-baize-covered gaming tables, stopped and then walked over to the grand piano.

‘A Grotrian-Steinweg,’ he said, ‘I would prefer this to any Steinway.’ He played a few notes and then closed the lid again. ‘Another time,’ he smiled when von Levetzov encouraged him to play something.

Perlmann felt his breathing suddenly becoming more difficult. So he can do that too. He asked the waiter who brought the drinks to open a window.

Von Levetzov raised his glass. ‘As no one else is doing so, I would like to greet everyone and raise a toast to our favorable collaboration,’ he said with a sideways glance at Perlmann, who felt the sweat of his hands mixing with the condensation on the glass. ‘So we will be working up there,’ he went on, pointing at the door of the veranda, which was reached by a flight of three steps. ‘A perfect room for our purposes. I took a picture of it before. Veranda Marconi, it is called, after Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of radio technology, as the plaque outside says.’

Perlmann, who hadn’t noticed the plaque, looked down at his new shoes, which hurt him. The painful pinch that would always be associated with confirmation and hard church pews merged with the hot sensation of shame about his forgotten welcome speech and a looming, helpless vexation with von Levetzov’s behavior as travel guide.

‘Now we’re just waiting for Vassily Leskov,’ said Laura Sand, and Perlmann felt as if she had been reading his thoughts and was trying, by changing the subject like this, to prevent the others from rising to their feet to catch sight of the veranda. ‘When’s he coming? And more particularly, who is he?’

He was a linguistic psychologist without tenure at a university, Perlmann said. Teaching commissions only every now and again. How he kept his head financially above water, he couldn’t say. What was impressive was how good Leskov was at describing things, much better than most of the other people working in the field. It made one realize the extent to which, before any kind of theory, the important thing was to describe our experiences very precisely with language. Admittedly, his work was a kind of old-fashioned, introspective psychology, which didn’t get you anywhere these days. But that was precisely what he, Perlmann, had found interesting in their conversation in St Petersburg.

‘So you speak Russian, too?’ von Levetzov asked irritably. Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment.

‘No, no,’ he said, and immediately managed a regretful smile, ‘not a word. But he can speak perfect German. His grandmother was German and only ever spoke to him in her mother tongue when he lived with her after his father’s death. His English was a bit clumsy, he told me; but he would certainly have managed here.’

Perlmann had no idea why he had lied, and he couldn’t quite believe how unerringly he had done it. Evelyn Mistral, to whom he glanced across only hesitantly, was watching him with a face that was thoughtful and roguish by turns. Now we’re accomplices, he thought, and didn’t know whether he was pleased about it or whether his new feeling of vulnerability had predominated.

‘Unfortunately, his exit permit was refused,’ he concluded, and reached for the cigarettes with a relief that surprised him.

‘Let’s take another look at the veranda,’ said Achim Ruge, when the conversation about conditions in the former Soviet Union had run aground and Millar looked at his watch with a yawn.

Perlmann was last to go up the three steps. What will it be like when I come down them that day?

Ruge had sat down at the front in the high-backed chair whose embroidered upholstery looked like Gobelins. ‘If someone sitting here has nothing to say it’s his own fault,’ he said with a gurgling laugh, prompting general laughter. Perlmann pretended to study the tasselled coats of arms that ran along the wall.

‘So what do you have to say about language, Achim?’ he heard Evelyn Mistral asking, trying to imitate a strict teacher. ‘Or have you forgotten to do your homework?’

More laughter. Only Laura Sand didn’t join in, but investigated the old chest in the corner. Now the others were outdoing one another with caricatures of a cross-examination, and with mounting enjoyment Ruge was playing the devious idiot who hides behind a facade of intimidation. Perlmann’s heart thumped in his throat. When Silvestri made a dry remark and then, with a swift movement of his tongue, made his cigarette disappear into his mouth, Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice cracked with laughter. Perlmann didn’t wait to hear what Millar, who was just getting a breath of fresh air, would say. As if anaesthetized he left, asked Giovanni for the key to his room and hobbled hastily, toes aching, upstairs.

He put on the chain, took off his painful shoes in the dark and fell back on the bed. Immediately the sentences started circling in his head, sentences spoken over dinner and on the veranda a moment before, sentences about the prize, about Princeton, about lazy Spanish professors, about forgotten homework. They kept returning, those sentences, as persistent as an echo that refused to die away or come to an end.

Perlmann was all too familiar with these tormenting circles of sentences, that compulsion to cling to sentences that had been uttered, and every time he was sucked into that wake, he felt as if he had spent the bulk of his life listening like this to sentences that had injured or frightened him. Agnes had suffered from the fact that he would sometimes turn up days, even weeks later with such a sentence and lend it a weight, a drama it had never had – just because he had been chewing away at it for so long, on walks or during hours of sleeplessness. Often she could hardly remember having said anything of the kind. That, in turn, struck him as mockery and made him helplessly furious. He was embittered. He had felt abandoned by everybody and crept away. Agnes told him how dangerous this memory for sentences was, how inhibited it could make you, so that you no longer dared to say anything spontaneous, if the thing you had said was then placed on the scales and later held up in front of you like a crime. He had seen that. This time the insight had helped. But the next time he had fallen right into the trap all over again.

He sat up and turned on the light. Tomorrow morning, at the first work session in the veranda, he would have to act as director. He would have to do that with skill and understanding, to see to it that his own contribution was made as late as possible. To do that, he needed a clear and rested mind. But with the darkness the sentences would come back, too.

He went to the bathroom and saw in front of him the long look that the doctor had given him before writing out the prescription for twenty strong sleeping tablets. He’s a decent man and a good doctor, but he can’t understand someone not being able to sleep, he’s not familiar with it. Perlmann took half a tablet, certainly no more than that. Then he set the alarm for seven. The session was due to begin at nine. In the joking banter surrounding this question, Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov had won out over the others, even if it was still, as far as Millar’s biological clock was concerned, the middle of the night.

Perlmann turned out the light and waited for the tablets to take effect. Down on the coast road a motorbike passed at full speed. Otherwise it was silent. Suddenly, Ruge blew his nose in the next room: three trumpet blasts. It was as if there were no wall between them. Ruge seemed to fill even Perlmann’s room with his physical presence. All of a sudden everything was right in front of Perlmann’s eyes again: the mirror-image desk, Ruge sitting at it with his great peasant head and watery grey eyes behind his wired-up glasses, and on the other side Millar with his Bach.

Perlmann got to his feet and put his ear to the wall. Nothing. Back in bed he ran once again through the possible explanations for a change of room: the bed, my back; they couldn’t check that, they would just have to believe me. He relaxed and felt the first hint of numbness in his lips and fingertips.

Now the sentences couldn’t get at him any more. And Ruge could sit at his desk playing the piano as much as he wanted. From tomorrow there would be no one on this side. Ruge shook with laughter, gurgled, burped and had to gasp for air. His grand piano came inexorably closer. It expanded, while Perlmann’s piano shrank like melting cellophane. Now it was Millar who was playing. The Well-Tempered Clavier, I tell you, it’s boring, even if you find that shocking. Millar was standing by the ochre-colored grand piano, and while Evelyn Mistral squeaked with pleasure he bowed uninterruptedly until he was finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

‘I just wanted to ask you quickly if you got there all right,’ said Kirsten. A thin layer of numbness lay on Perlmann’s face, and his tongue was furry and heavy.

‘Wait a moment,’ he murmured, and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where he let cold water run over his face. His hand tingled as he picked up the receiver again.

‘Sorry if I woke you,’ said Kirsten. ‘I’m just so used to us calling each other at this time of day.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said, and was glad that it didn’t sound too washed-out.

The business with the shared house had sorted itself out nicely, she told him; only one woman was a bit difficult. ‘And just imagine: today I signed up for my first presentation. About Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, the one with the double narrative. And then it turned out that it’s my turn in fourteen days’ time! I feel quite different when I think about it. I hope you don’t have to sit at the front as well!’

Perlmann was monosyllabic, and repeatedly collecting spittle against his dry tongue. Yes, he said at last, everything’s fine; the hotel and the weather, too.

‘And did you bring your Russian things with you?’ she asked.

One half-hour passed after the other, and Perlmann still couldn’t get back to sleep. In the middle of a poisoned weariness there was still an island of dry alertness that wouldn’t go out. At half-past one he phoned reception and for safety’s sake asked to be woken at seven. Then he took the second half of the sleeping pill.

4

He was still enveloped in leaden weariness when his alarm call came, from a long way off, it seemed to him. He mumbled grazie and hung up. Immediately afterwards the alarm clock rang. Sitting on the edge of the bed he bent over and covered his face with both hands. He had the feeling of having slept deeply in the sense that a span of total oblivion lay between the current moment and the events of the previous day. Nonetheless, he felt insecure, as if we were walking on very thin ice, and something was pushing against his eyes as if someone had poured lead into his sinuses. He cursed the sleeping pill.

After he had misdialled and ended up talking to the laundry, he ordered coffee from room service. As he was waiting for the waiter, he stood in the cool air by the open window and watched as the lights went off over by Sestri Levante. Again a sunrise without any presence, the usual transparent blue seeping through the fine morning mist, but all as in a film seen too often, and this time separated from him by a wall of weariness and a throbbing headache.

He didn’t have the strength to protest when the waiter set a tray with a sumptuous breakfast down on the round table. He hastily gulped down three cups of coffee, took an aspirin and lit a cigarette. After the first few puffs he felt slightly dizzy, but the sensation was much weaker than the day before. Now music came out of Millar’s room: Bach. Perlmann went into the shower, where he shivered in spite of the hot water. Afterwards he drank the rest of the coffee. Now the cigarette only tasted bitter. Quarter to eight. From eight the others would be going to breakfast. It was enough if he appeared at about half-past. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to do with the time left to him except to wait for Millar to go to breakfast and the music to stop.

He picked up Leskov’s text. The first sentence after yesterday’s marks was difficult, and Perlmann relied on paper and pencil to make the convoluted construction clear to himself: I shall demonstrate that and in which sense it is by capturing our memories in words that we create these memories and thus our own experienced past in the first place. The music stopped, and a moment later Millar’s door clicked shut. Perlmann slowly drank the orange juice and ate one croissant, then another one. At breakfast down below he would only need to drink something. His headache was subsiding. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Creating the past by narrating memory stories – that seemed to be the idea. He excitedly looked in his suitcase for his black notebook. He no longer knew what, but that thought had something to do with his own notes.

The door to Ruge’s room clicked shut, and a few moments later Perlmann heard the sound of him blowing his nose, much more muted in the hotel corridor. Suddenly, Perlmann was painfully wide awake: he hadn’t prepared a single suggestion for the organization of his work over the coming weeks. He put the black notebook back. He couldn’t understand how he could have forgotten it, when he usually prepared everything in minute detail. If he had got up later and gone down to breakfast straight away, it might have occurred to him only when he stepped into the veranda. It was as if the fear split him deep within, and for one fleeting moment he had an idea what it must be like to lose yourself.

He quickly washed his face with cold water, thought for a moment about whether he should order some more coffee, then took his writing pad and pocket diary and sat down at the desk. No, Ruge wasn’t sitting opposite him now. And anyway, the wall was a wall and not a two-way mirror. His throbbing headache was back, and while he drew columns for the five weeks, with his other hand he gripped his forehead and pressed it as hard as if he wanted to crush it.

Seven blocks of two days in which they would assemble in the veranda to discuss each other’s current work. Three days a week, to have individual conversations or withdraw. That sounded like the correct dosage. Perlmann marked Monday and Tuesday as well as Thursday and Friday. He himself would take the last block. But even so he was left, he was horrified to see, with only three weeks, and not even a whole three, because the others each needed two or three days to read. He had at all costs to see to it that he made it into the last column, the one that had still been left blank, and in the lower half of it, so that he still had four weeks; that was the absolute minimum. That meant using any explanation to keep two half-weeks free. He looked at his watch: twenty-five to nine. He lit his third last cigarette. They’ll walk out on me during the session. The minutes passed inconsequentially. If Leskov had been able to come, the problem would only be half as big. He would have to be careful that he didn’t give himself away with his maneuvering.

When he walked over to his suitcase to get a pullover he saw himself in the high mirror on the wall, in the same trousers and the same shirt as yesterday afternoon. He stopped for a moment, then frantically started changing. As he did so, he was filled with furious shame at his insecurity. Battling tears of fury, he slipped back into the clothes he had just been wearing, put his jumper over his shoulders and walked, pencil and paper in hand, to the door. Before he pulled it shut he saw on the carpet a torn-off button of his fresh shirt, which lay on the crumpled bed. When, happy at the absence of pain in his ankle, he hurried down the purple carpet of the wide staircase, it was two minutes past nine.

All the others were already there, with notepads and manuscripts in front of them. Only Silvestri had brought nothing but an untidily folded newspaper. For Perlmann it was impossible not to sit at the front. It would have looked like a ludicrous refusal that gave the carved armchair a far too great, almost magical significance. So he sat down after a brief hesitation, which he alone perceived, at the head. Through the windows on the other side of the room he could see the blue swimming pool, and behind it, beyond the hotel terrace, the top half of a gas station. At this time of day the parasols had not yet been put up, the loungers were still empty. Only the red-haired man from yesterday was already there, tapping out the music from his headphones on his drawn-up knee.

The phrases of greeting and all other introductory words stuck in Perlmann’s throat. He wanted to get straight to business, he said, and immediately started explaining his suggestion for the course of the work. As he spoke he became more secure; what he said sounded practiced and well thought out. Then he went to the board and drew the five columns. The second half of the current and the first half of the fourth week he left blank. Sitting awkwardly, he stiffly wrote his own name beside the Thursday and Friday of the last week. Only three and a half weeks, then. And if you take in the reading time for the others, it’s only three; plus one, two days at most. How am I supposed to do that?

‘Why do you want to keep your contribution from us for so long?’ von Levetzov asked with a smile that was supposed to express appreciative interest, but in which there was also a bit of irritating surprise and, it seemed to Perlmann, a hint of suspicion, so faint that it took his special eyes to see it. ‘You’re one of the main reasons we’re here.’ Evelyn Mistral smiled at Perlmann and nodded emphatically.

Perlmann felt his stomach contracting as violently as if he were reacting to a searing poison. He tried to breathe calmly, and very slowly put a cigarette between his lips. When his eye fell on Silvestri, he thought of the doctor on the telephone. He held the cigarette in the flame for much longer than necessary and inwardly rehearsed the tone that the doctor had used – the tone of natural delimitation, the non-subservient tone. He took a deep drag and, leaning back, finished the uncomfortably long pause with the words: ‘I think the work of each of us is deserving of equal interest, so that the sequence in which we get to it is insignificant. Isn’t that right?’

Even before he had finished his sentence he knew that he had got the tone completely wrong. He looked up and looked at von Levetzov with a smile which, he hoped, took something of the edge off the rebuke.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ von Levetzov said, startled, and added sharply, ‘No need to get worked up.’

‘Perhaps everyone should give a short account of what their contribution will be about,’ said Laura Sand, ‘then we’ll be more able to judge a sensible sequence.’

At first Perlmann was grateful to her for having saved the situation like that. But a moment later he was filled with panic. He hid his face behind his clasped hands. That would look like he was concentrating. Cold sweat formed on his palms. He closed his eyes and yielded for a while to leaden exhaustion.

But it had been as clear as day that it would come sooner or later. After all, even yesterday, when he was talking to Evelyn Mistral, that question had made him shiver. So why, in the meantime, had he not come up with a clever answer? He would have had to work it out effectively and then memorize it until, at the moment it was needed, he could summon it up as something to be presented with complete equanimity and even, for the brief span of his presentation, believed – a staged self-deception that was available to him as part of his facade. But now, what I say will be completely random.

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t have said what subject Adrian von Levetzov had sketched. While he himself sought feverishly for formulae which he could later cobble together into the appearance of a subject, only the complacent, mannered tone of von Levetzov’s English got through to him. It was only towards the end, while von Levetzov was preparing for yet another question from Ruge, that Perlmann started distinguishing individual words. But it was strange: instead of receiving the words in their familiar meaning, and slipping through them to the expressed thought, all he heard was that most of them were foreign words, jargon with its roots in Latin or Greek, which, when linked together, produced a kind of Esperanto. He found these words ridiculous, just silly and then that ghostly insecurity suddenly rose up within him again, the sensation that had for some time made him pick up the dictionary with increasing frequency. Each time he did so the feeling fell from a clear sky that he no longer had the faintest idea of the meaning of a technical term that he had read thousands of times; it had an irritating blurriness that made it look like a wobbly photograph. And yet every time he consulted the dictionary he made the same discovery: he had precisely the correct definition in his head; there was nothing more precise to know. Uncertain whether this discovery reassured him, or whether the insecurity grew because it had needed such a discovery, he put the dictionary back on the shelf. And often, a few days later, he looked up the same word again.

Laura Sand had, when it was her turn, a cigarette between her lips, and tried to keep the smoke from getting in her eyes. Her initial sentences were halting as she looked for something in her papers, and anyone who hadn’t known that her books on animal languages were among the very best on the subject would have taken it for a sign of uncertainty. At last she found the piece of paper she had been looking for, let her eyes slide over it, and started talking with great fluency and concentration about the experiments she had performed over the past few months in Kenya. What she said was wonderfully concise and clear, Perlmann thought, and set out in that dark, always slightly irritated voice which, when she wanted to emphasize something, dropped into the broad Australian accent normally concealed behind an unremarkable British English. Like yesterday, when she had arrived, she was entirely dressed in black; the only color about her was the red in the signet ring on the little finger of her right hand.

Again Perlmann hid his face behind his hands and struggled to remember the specialist questions that he had recently examined, when I was still on top of things. But nothing came. Only Leskov suddenly appeared in his inner field of vision, Leskov with his big pipe between his bad, brown, tobacco-stained teeth, his massive body sunk in the worn, dirty grey upholstery of the chair in the foyer of the conference building. Perlmann tried not to listen when the vividly remembered figure spoke about how deeply words intervened in experience. He didn’t need that image, he said to himself. He really didn’t need it at all, because he had the black notebook with his own notes in it. If only he could go quickly upstairs and cast his eye over them.

Giorgio Silvestri held one knee braced against the edge of the table and balanced on the back legs of his chair. He let his left arm dangle backwards, and rested his right on the arm, a cigarette between his long, slender fingers. Un po’ stravagante, Angelini had called him. When he started speaking now, with a voice that was soft but, in spite of its strong accent, very confident, his white hand tirelessly moved with its cigarette, emphasizing certain things, casting others in doubt or making them seem vague. If one listened to schizophrenic patients, he said, the usual expectations with regard to coherence were disappointed. But the shifts in meaning and instances of conceptual incoherence obeyed a logic; there wasn’t mere chaos. He wanted to use his time here to write up his collected clinical material on this thesis. He asked for a late date, as all his work in the hospital had delayed him.

Perlmann picked up the chalk. He has a sound reason. I don’t. And the decent thing would be to offer him the last date. But then I wouldn’t even have a whole three weeks, so it’s quite impossible. He put Silvestri’s name down for Thursday and Friday of the fourth week. Even before he turned back to the others, he felt Brian Millar’s gaze resting on him. Again the American held his arms folded and his head tilted on one side. His thin lips twitched, and Perlmann was sure that the question was about to come. He could have slapped himself for not expecting this.

‘Of course you can take the last two days,’ he said to Silvestri, and drew an arrow across to the fifth week.

‘I’d like to leave it open, if that’s OK,’ Silvestri said.

So for safety’s sake I’ve got to put myself down for the Thursday of the fourth week. The others have to get my text by the previous Tuesday at the latest. That means I’ve still got exactly twenty days. Perlmann put a cigarette between his lips when he had sat down. He was horrified to see the hand that held the match trembling, and immediately brought his arm up and held his wrist with the other hand.

Achim Ruge, who was next in line, took out a huge, red-and-white checked handkerchief, clumsily unfolded it, took off his glasses and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. That suddenly brought the room problem back to Perlmann’s consciousness. The thought of it was the last thing he needed now. He pushed it powerfully away from him, but felt an additional anxiety rise up. Ruge took off his jacket and sat there in his ill-cut shirt, with rubber bands on the upper arms to shorten the sleeves. Stuffy. He’s the stuffiest person I know. And he’s straight, straight to the bone. Maybe it isn’t even the case that I have the most to fear from Millar and von Levetzov. Maybe this Achim Ruge, because of his stuffiness, his straightness, is even more dangerous. It wasn’t unthinkable, Perlmann thought, that von Levetzov would creep away from academia for a while – to a woman, perhaps, or because of an addiction to gambling. Rumours were never entirely a matter of chance. Accordingly, he might not be so hard on Perlmann – at least there would be a certain thoughtfulness about his condemnation. And Millar too had a certain straight quality, but it was the athletic straightness of an American who could sometimes go off the rails. Where Sheila was concerned, for example. In the case of Ruge, on the other hand, who knew nothing but his laboratory and his computer, any dropping off was unimaginable, and for that reason his judgment was likely to be ruthless and devastating.

Perlmann tried to protect himself with contempt. He stared at the rubber bands and did everything he could to see Ruge as a stiff who was only worth laughing at. And here he was assisted by Ruge’s horrible English accent, which sounded like a caricature. He automatically expected Ruge to make grammatical mistakes. But it didn’t happen. On the contrary, Ruge had a perfect command of English, and used words and phrases which Perlmann understood, certainly, but which were not actively at his disposal. His carefully constructed contempt faltered. Ruge’s presence seemed even more threatening to him than it had before, and again Perlmann used his hands to erect a shield in front of his eyes.

Before she started talking, Evelyn Mistral put on a pair of glasses with a delicate matte silver frame. She had put up her hair, and in spite of the skewed T-shirt under her cinnamon-colored jacket she looked older than yesterday: an academic, the red elephant doesn’t suit her at all today. All of a sudden she was quite alien to him – in fact, as a reader, as a worker, she’s an opponent I have to be wary of. Perlmann tried to hide and made one last desperate attempt to remember a subject that he knew something about. After her it’s my turn. But then he heard her bright voice, which sounded tense and harassed. Her feet under the table slipped out of her red shoes and back in again. She propped herself with her arms on the table, before changing position again a moment later. Instead of merely outlining her theme she constantly justified her work and talked for longer than necessary. After a while Perlmann felt that her tension had passed into his body, as if he could take it away from her. He thought he had to defend her against the faces of the others, even though there wasn’t a hint of criticism to be seen in them, merely a patronizing benevolence.

And then, all of a sudden, she had finished, took her glasses off and leaned back with her arms folded. Perlmann felt as if the veranda were filling up with an intoxicating silence, and time seemed only to want to go on flowing when he had started talking. He felt for his cigarettes, touched the pack and discovered that it was empty. With his hand still on the box his eye drifted above Silvestri’s head and out and beyond to the sea, to check that the world, the real world, was much bigger than this hateful room, where he was now encircled by all the people whom he had assembled here only because he had wanted to accompany Agnes on her photographic journey through Italy in winter.

Silvestri grinned, and he picked up his pack of Gauloises and threw it to Perlmann in a high arc all the way across the room. Still half-immersed in his attempt to hide in his own gaze and escape unnoticed into the light, Perlmann raised his arm and confidently caught the box. Even though that confidence seemed to issue not from himself as such, but only from his body, which he had been trying to leave behind as a decoy, it gave him back a little of his confidence. He thanked Silvestri with a nod and put one of the unfiltered cigarettes between his lips. What I say now will be completely random.

At the first drag the sharp smoke took his breath away, and he couldn’t help coughing. He heard Silvestri laughing. Perlmann hid for a while behind his cough and finally, after wiping his weeping eyes with his handkerchief, looked around.

‘I’m working on a text about the connection between language and memory,’ he said. He was both relieved and shocked by the calm in his voice. It was something, he went on, that had interested him for many years. Too rarely, he thought, did his discipline investigate how language was interwoven with the various forms of experience. And in this respect it was precisely the experience of time that had received special treatment. It was an unorthodox theme for a linguist, he added with a smile that felt like a strenuous piece of facial gymnastics. But he also understood his stay here as an opportunity to go in alternative directions.

Evelyn Mistral looked at him with radiant eyes, and now, for the first time, Perlmann noticed the green of those eyes, a sea-green with a few splinters of amber set into it. She was pleasantly surprised that he was dealing with something related to her own subject, and Perlmann had to look away to keep, in his deceitfulness, from being exposed to her smiling face any longer.

Less had happened in the faces of the others than he had expected. Millar’s head seemed to be a little more bent than usual, but there was no mockery to be discovered in his expression, and in Adrian von Levetzov’s dark eyes there was even a gleam of moderate interest.

Laura Sand’s suggestion for the sequence of the sessions met with general agreement. The date that Perlmann had fixed for himself was now treated as something quite natural. On that point, of course, von Levetzov avoided Perlmann’s eye. Instead he came to see him at the end of the session. He had found his announcement rather surprising, he said. But thinking about it properly he was also a little bit nervous. It must be a lovely feeling, trying out something new. He couldn’t wait to hear the result!

Perlmann went to see Maria in the office, and introduced Millar to her. Today, as usual, she was wearing a glittering pullover that matched her hair-do, and as on the first evening Perlmann was captivated by the contrast between the hint of punk that surrounded her and the warm, almost maternal smile with which she addressed people. His two texts would be copied by four o’clock, she assured Millar. A copy would be put in everyone’s pigeonhole.

‘One text you know already,’ Millar said to Perlmann as he left, ‘and I’ll be keen to hear what you have to say about the other one. You have been subject to severe criticism, I’m afraid. But you know it isn’t meant personally.’

5

‘It won’t be a problem to give you another room,’ Signora Morelli said off-handedly after Perlmann had told her – in halting Italian full of mistakes – his story about the bed and the pains in his back. ‘At this time of year we are far from full.’ She saw his hesitation and paused as she was about to turn towards the key racks.

Then Perlmann summoned all his courage and said firmly, ‘I would like the new room to be on the other side of the building. Between empty rooms, if possible.’

The hint of a smile appeared on Signora Morelli’s severe face, and her eyes narrowed slightly. She flicked through her papers, took a key from the rack and said, ‘Va bene, try this one.’

When he turned towards her again on the stairs, she was resting both arms on the shelf behind the counter, and was watching him with her head slightly inclined.

The new room was on the top floor of the south wing, far from the others. The corridor was gloomy, because of the three art nouveau lamps in the ceiling only two were lit: the middle one was dark, and the bulbs were broken in the other two. For a moment Perlmann was horrified by the room. It was bigger than the previous one, admittedly, and the ceiling was higher – it was almost a sort of hall – but the stucco on the ceiling was crumbling, the carpet was worn and the big mirror on the wall was half-blind. It also smelled musty, as if it hadn’t been aired for years. Only the bathroom had been completely refurbished, with a marble tub and gleaming metal taps. He opened the window and looked down the facade: the room was in the only row without balconies. Over by the swimming pool Giorgio Silvestri had stretched himself out on one of the yellow loungers. He had taken off his shoes and socks, and the open newspaper lay over his face. Like a tramp. A fearless man, a free man – and my thoughts about him are the purest kitsch.

Perlmann sat down in the big worn-out red plush wing chair next to the window. He started assessing the room with his eyes, and even before he had finished he liked it. He lay down on the bed. Suddenly it was very easy to relax. The new room allowed him to forget what had happened at the meeting. The honks of a ship’s horn and the rattle of a motorboat reached him from far away. He thought about the fact that the two adjacent rooms were empty. Their neighboring rooms, in turn, seemed to be unoccupied as well, and his imagination produced endless series of empty, silent rooms. Then he went to sleep.

It was shortly before three when he woke up shivering and dry-mouthed, at first confused by the surroundings, then relieved. On the way down to his old room he clutched the key like an anchor. Millar’s music would no longer trouble him, he thought, as he packed the clothes and books that he would bring upstairs at night when all was quiet.

There was a whole hour before Millar’s texts were due to be in their pigeonholes. Perlmann picked up Leskov’s paper. Once more he ran through the sentence about the linguistic creation of one’s own past. What he had written as a translation in the morning was true. But now the text became very difficult. Leskov introduced the concept of a remembered scene – vspomnishchaya stsena – and then seemed to develop the idea that we inevitably project a self-image – samopredstavlenie – into such scenes. Perlmann had to look up every second word, and the typescript was slowly obscured by his scribbled translations. It was becoming increasingly clear to him: he had to buy a vocabulary book in which he could write all the new words. In this way he would produce a glossary of academic Russian, a sphere of language that was barely touched upon in the books of exercises. He suddenly felt fine: he had a plan that he was able to pursue in his new, quiet room. It was a working project. At last he was a working man again. When he walked along the port into town to find a stationery shop, his steps were firm and confident.

It was his first venture into the town, and for a long time it looked as if there wasn’t a single shop selling writing equipment. At last, in a dark side street, he found a scruffy little shop selling not only stationery but also magazines and trashy novels, as well as cheap toys and sweets. Still annoyed at having had to search for so long, but now also relieved, he turned the handle with brio and pushed against the locked door with his shoulder and head. Still siesta, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He stopped by the shop window and rubbed his aching forehead. After a while his eye was caught by a big book which was set up behind the dirty pane, surrounded by tinsel and paper chains, like a holy book in a shrine. It was a chronicle of the twentieth century. The front cover was divided into four fields showing world-famous photographs, icons of the century: Marilyn Monroe, standing over the ventilating shaft, holding on to her skirt as it blew up; Elvis Presley in a pale blue glittery suit, bent far back as he played; Neil Armstrong’s first footstep on the moon; Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, bending over the assassinated president in the open-topped car. Perlmann felt the pictures drawing him into their spell as if he had never seen them before. The idea of being able to read something about the subjects of these pictures, right now, electrified him, and suddenly nothing seemed more exciting, nothing more important, than to comprehend the century in which he lived from the perspective of pictures like that. Excitedly, he tore open the packet of cigarettes that he had bought on the corner. No, it wasn’t like that: it wasn’t a matter of understanding a century like a historian. What he wanted was to reappropriate his own life by imagining what had happened in the world outside while he was alive. The idea first came to him there in that dark, deserted alley, smelling a bit of fish and rotten vegetables. He was unsure whether he fully understood what he was thinking, but he was impatient to get started, whatever it might be.

The shop’s proprietor, when she finally opened the door to him, was a fat woman with far too many rings on her plump hands. She was at first annoyed by Perlmann’s unconcealed impatience. But when he asked for the chronicle, her grumpy attitude gave way to solicitous friendliness. She was taken aback, as if she had never imagined that anyone might actually want to buy that big, unwieldy book, the centerpiece of her display; certainly not someone with an unmistakeably foreign accent, and during the dead time of the Italian siesta. She fetched the heavy volume from the shop window, dusted it down in the open door and handed it to Perlmann with a theatrical gesture: Ecco! She wouldn’t take anything for the vocabulary notebook – it was gratis. She stuffed the bundle of cash into the pocket of her apron. She was still shaking her head with surprise as she watched him leave from the doorway.

Two streets on, Perlmann saw an unprepossessing sign: trattoria. He parted the glass-bead curtain, walked down the long, gloomy corridor and suddenly found himself in a bright, glass-roofed internal courtyard with dining tables covered by red-and-white checked tablecloths. The room was empty, and Perlmann had to call twice before the proprietor arrived wearing an apron. They themselves had just eaten, he said genially, but Perlmann could still have a minestrone and a plate of pasta. Then, when he brought the food, his wife and daughter appeared as well. Perlmann was itching to read the chronicle, but the family was curious to find out about the man with the big book who plainly lived against the grain of the daily rhythm. In return for their hospitality at such an unusual time, Perlmann told them about the research group. Investigating languages, that was interesting, they thought, and he had to tell them more and more. Sandra in particular, the thirteen-year-old daughter with the long, pitch-black hair, asked question after question, and her parents were visibly proud to have a daughter with such a thirst for knowledge. Talking about these subjects went amazingly well given his poor Italian. Perlmann was pleased with every successful turn of phrase that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of, and this delight at his linguistic success, along with the desire not to disappoint Sandra made him draw a positive, almost enthusiastic picture of what they were doing over at the hotel, which was grotesquely at odds with his internal misery. When the proprietor and his family finally withdrew to leave him to read, in their eyes he was an enviable man who was lucky enough to do exactly what interested him most; the rare case, then, of a man who lived in perfect harmony with himself.

Perlmann opened the book at the year of his high-school graduation. The first controlled nuclear fusion. A come-back for De Gaulle. Boris Pasternak forced to give back the Nobel Prize. There had been elections in Italy. Pope Pius XII had died. The Torre Velasca in Milan had been completed. The Bishop of Prato, who had insulted a couple as pubblici concubini and pubblici peccatori because they had refused a church wedding, was accused of slander before a court, fined and later, after a rebellion of the church, absolved on the grounds of insindacabilità dell’atto.

Perlmann read with his eyes aflame. The texts weren’t demanding, and by and large his Italian was up to the task. The whole thing was written in a sensational style and had a tabloid whiff about it, but that didn’t bother him. He actually enjoyed it, and the fact that the selection of events was made from the Italian perspective gave the affair an exotic charm. He was boundlessly surprised by his fascination, when he read, for example, that the Hungarian uprising, which had been a great embarrassment to the Italian Communists two years previously, had not lost the Party any votes in the elections. He couldn’t understand why he asked Sandra to bring him one espresso after another, while smoking like a chimney. But he enjoyed surprising himself by making an unexpected discovery about himself, which, he felt vaguely, could be the start of something.

The sky over the glass roof was almost black by now, and the ships’ lanterns on the walls had been lit for a long time when Perlmann left. On a momentary whim he asked the proprietor to keep the chronicle for him; he would come back to go on reading. As he walked through the quiet alleys to the port, Perlmann had the feeling of having found a place or refuge to which he could retreat when the world of the hotel, of the group, threatened to crush him. And he felt a furtive joy at the thought that none of the others would ever find out about this refuge. But as he was walking along the harbor jetty and turned into the shore road on which the hotel stood, those feelings quickly seeped away, even though he paused several times and tried, eyes closed, to stop them. And when he stood by the front steps and looked up at the name of the hotel, written in white neon letters on a gleaming blue background, his bad conscience at having frittered away half a day superimposed itself over everything else.

The two texts by Millar which Signora Morelli handed him were a shock. The one that Perlmann had stuffed into the offprints cupboard at home was fifty-nine pages long; the other one sixty-five, with seven pages of notes. When he was flicking through it in the elevator, the last remainder of freedom that he had experienced in the trattoria fled. What remained was a leaden weariness and the sense that it would take him hours to read so much as a single page.

In his room he set the papers aside. There wasn’t much time left before dinner. He picked up Leskov’s text and wrote down the unfamiliar words that he had looked up so far in his vocabulary book. Several times he paused and stared in cheerful amazement at his Russian handwriting. It was a little clumsy, but correct, and it was Russian without a doubt. The annoying thing was that words appeared in the subsequent sentences that weren’t in his pocket dictionary. Nonetheless, he was by and large able to follow Leskov’s next step. Self-images, the text argued, were something quite different from the experienced contours of an internal world. Making an image of oneself was a process that required far more articulation than the inner perception, the inner exploration of contours of experience could provide on their own.

He had a nose for striking examples, this Vassily Leskov, and gradually Perlmann developed a feeling for the text. He liked its blunt, unembellished style and its laconic tone. As an author, he thought, Leskov was quite different, much more congenial than usual, and Perlmann noticed how the shapeless, pipe-smoking figure of his memory retreated behind another person who had no appearance, but a voice, and thus a clear and strong identity.

It was twenty to nine when he remembered dinner. He quickly changed, grabbed the shirt with the torn-off button and chose a wide tie to hide the spot. Giovanni at reception grinned when he saw him hurrying down the stairs. It was the grin of someone seeing a late school pupil dashing down an empty corridor to the classroom. Perlmann wanted to slap him, this clueless Italian with his bushy eyebrows and ridiculously long sideburns. The glance Perlmann gave him was so poisonous that Giovanni’s grin vanished for a moment.

He didn’t want a starter, he told the waiter before sitting down next to Silvestri who, plainly involved in a heated exchange with Brian Millar, had set his knife and fork down in a cross on his plate and lit a cigarette in the middle of the meal. Yes, he was saying, and absently blowing the smoke into Millar’s face, Franco Basaglia’s experiment in Görz must be deemed a failure. But that was still no proof that the traditional psychiatry of grilles and bolted doors could not be changed; and a malicious tone was entirely inappropriate. At any rate, Basaglia had displayed more sensitivity, commitment and courage than the whole psychiatric establishment, whose inertia was directly proportional to its lack of imagination.

‘Have you ever experienced what it’s like when someone bolts the door in front of your nose, even though you haven’t done anything, as if you’re in prison? Have you seen the big keys that are turned in the lock by the wardens with a noise that never seems to stop echoing?’ Silvestri’s white hand with the cigarette trembled, and a bit of ash fell on the Swiss roll.

‘They aren’t wardens,’ Millar said, struggling to maintain his self-control, ‘they’re nurses.’

‘Wardens is what they called them in Oakland,’ Silvestri said urgently. ‘The same word that you use for prisons.’

‘They’re nurses,’ Millar repeated, trying to stay calm, and then turned, wine bottle in hand, with a forced smile to Perlmann. ‘There are happier subjects. How did you enjoy my new paper?’

Perlmann felt Silvestri’s excitement vibrating within himself. He shoved a second piece of meat, far too big, into his mouth and made a gesture of apology as he chewed. ‘It’s OK,’ he said at last and attempted a smile that was supposed to express the fact that he didn’t take Millar’s criticism of him amiss.

‘I understand,’ Millar grinned when Perlmann failed to say anything more. ‘You can save your reply till tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it.’

Back in his room, Perlmann worked out his revulsion with particularly forceful movements and sat down at the desk with forced brio. Millar’s papers were, as usually, shatteringly brilliant; one could tell that as soon as one started flicking through them. His subheadings almost always took the form of a question, and his original questions, which had prompted so much research, had made him famous. There was also the fact that his vocabulary was unusually large for an academic author, and he had developed an unmistakeable style, juggling skilfully with the vividness of idiomatic phrases, and didn’t shy away from putting a slang expression in the middle of a dry sentence summing up data of some kind, and making it explode like a bomb. There were also people who found Millar’s style shrill and vain, but they had always been in a minority, and by now no one dared to say it out loud. Only Achim Ruge, who wrote in a desiccated, legalistic style, had made a remark to that effect at a conference some time before, and it had been passed on in whispers.

Perlmann had no reservations; not a single one. He had started with the newer of the two papers, to put Millar’s criticism behind him. He couldn’t think of a response. As he sat in front of his empty notepad, pen brandished, a fortissimo sounded from Millar’s room every now and again. Millar’s criticism was harsh, actually devastating. Perlmann was baffled that it didn’t touch him. It was a bit like having a local anaesthetic, and after reading Millar’s critical passages he felt almost cheerful.

But then, when he had finished the paper, he was shocked by his indifference. To express reservations, to be able to react to a criticism, you have to have opinions, opinions that can be formulated and stated. And that was exactly what he didn’t have. For some time he had been a man without opinions, at least as far as his subject was concerned. He agreed with everything, as long as it wasn’t obvious nonsense. It had never been so clear to him as now.

He stepped to the open window. The strip of light at Sestri Levante was now quite regular and still. What had it been like when he still had opinions? Where had they come from? And why had the source dried up? Can you decide to believe something? Or do opinions just happen to you?

Ruge’s room had been in darkness before, and now the light from Millar’s window went out as well. But it was better to wait another half hour before moving. Two days out of thirty-three. So one sixteenth had already gone. It was a sum like the ones he had done at school. And like then it felt peculiar: all of a sudden it seemed like a huge amount. In fact, he thought, it had all gone fairly quickly, and if it went on like that it would soon be over. That there was still fifteen times the same amount of time to come seemed almost trivial. A moment later it seemed like an eternity: once and again and again… You had to think of the whole thing like a long-distance runner. You had to concentrate on it and overcome the next, manageable segment.

He furtively opened the door and reassured himself that no one was in the corridor. Then he ran, crouching, to the stairs, his suitcases held just above the ground, and hurried to the top floor, taking the steps two at a time in spite of the heavy luggage. Panting, he set the suitcases down in his new room and hurried back again. Together with his grammar and his dictionary, Millar and Leskov’s papers formed a big, shapeless stack, which he covered with his coat. After a searching glance through the room he used the key to avoid the noise of the slamming door.

The ceiling light in the new room cast a cold, diffuse light that recalled a station waiting room. On the other hand, the beam of light from the standard lamp beside the red armchair was warm and clear, an ideal light for reading. Once it was lit, the rest of the expansive room sank into a calming darkness that belonged to him alone. After a while he crossed this darkness to the bathroom and took half a sleeping pill. Until it took effect, he would just manage to scamper through Millar’s first text in bed. It was a difficult text with lots of formulae. But for that reason he’d hardly be able to do it tomorrow. Perlmann set his alarm clock for half-past seven. He would, he thought in his half-sleep, have to simulate an opinion for tomorrow’s session. It wouldn’t be enough to capture it in words; it was a matter of staging the opinion inside oneself as well. Was it possible to do that, fighting against the certainty that one lacked any opinion?

6

The waiter who brought him his coffee the following morning passed no remark about the new room. As he approached the round table beside the red armchair, Perlmann covered Leskov’s paper with the hotel brochure and pushed it aside to make space for the tray. He did it with a quick, furtive motion which unsettled him vaguely, but which he immediately forgot.

There was no time now for Millar’s first paper, which he hadn’t got round to reading the night before, because the five minutes of snoozing that he had allowed himself after the ringing of the alarm clock had turned into half an hour. Perlmann looked again at the passages that Millar quoted from his own writings. He could hardly believe that he himself should have written them. Not because he thought they were bad. But the author of those lines had a grasp of his subject and a firmness of opinion that Perlmann was so unable to remember that he suspected he had not even been present when they were written. That remote, alien author was not a bit closer to him than Millar’s academic voice, so that he felt like a referee in a dispute between strangers; a referee whose neutrality went so far that he pursued argument and counter-argument without the slightest desire to become involved himself. Afterwards, when he walked through the lobby, turned into the corridor leading to the lounge and approached the steps to the Marconi Veranda, he was still engaged in a vain attempt to stand up for himself.

Millar began by explaining the theoretical motifs and long-term research interests that had guided him in the present work. After a few sentences he got up and started walking back and forth, his arms folded in front of his chest. He wore dark blue trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt with epaulettes, which had clearly been left in a suitcase for a long time. Although his hair was still damp, it looked oddly dull, and there wasn’t a sign of its usual reddish gleam. The manner in which he put his case was like a resolute admiral addressing his men. As he set one well-formed sentence against another in his sonorous voice, he radiated the certainty of someone who knew his own world perfectly and didn’t doubt for a moment that he was in precisely the right place in that world – a world in which – as in an officer’s mess, there were immutable rules like, for example, the rule that one had to appear on time for breakfast. Perlmann had never been to the Rockefeller University at which Millar worked, but somehow it struck him as quite natural that people who went in and out of it were people like Brian Millar. He looked across to Giorgio Silvestri, who, rocking back and forth on his chair, had almost lost his balance a moment ago and had only managed to keep himself from falling by supporting himself on the window behind him. He would have liked to exchange a glance and a smile with Silvestri, but feared that would betray too much of his desire for complicity against Millar.

Millar sat down and sought Perlmann’s eye. But Adrian von Levetzov had been preparing to spring for a long time, and immediately began to speak. Had he not curried favor with Millar, fifteen years his junior, by giving him an apologetic smile – Perlmann would have admired him. His questions and objections all hit home, and Perlmann wished that they had occurred to him, too. But it wasn’t the case. To think of these things you have to be right inside – as I am no longer inside. He felt a twinge of envy like the ones he had felt often before, as an ambitious student, when someone else was faster at formulating ideas that he should have been capable of producing himself; and for a moment he was annoyed by his former violence towards himself. But then something strange happened: all of a sudden he experienced these sensations as no longer belonging to him, to his present; they were only reminiscences, obsolete emotional reflexes from a time when academic work had not yet become alien to him. He was puzzled to feel the extent to which he had survived himself, and for a while, as silence fell around him, it felt like a great liberation. But then the voices of the others reached him again, and he was horrified to realize how far from them that inner development had taken him, and how menacing it was, particularly in this room, which he had feared since his arrival.

Before Perlmann was able to say something, Achim Ruge intervened in the debate. The contrast with von Levetzov’s exaggeratedly obliging manner could not have been greater. As a critic, there was something surly and blustering about him, and if he accompanied a reservation with his gurgling laugh it sounded almost scornful. He treated Millar, his contemporary, like everyone else, not without respect, but entirely without subservience, and nothing intimidated him. When Millar said rather sharply, in response to one of his objections, ‘Frankly, Achim, I just don’t see that,’ Ruge shot back with a grin, ‘Yes, I know,’ for which he was rewarded with laughter, which Millar endured with a sour smile that was supposed to look sporting.

But it was peculiar, Perlmann thought: coming from Ruge, there was nothing wounding about it at all. One simply couldn’t take umbrage at the style of the man with the bald head and the terrible Swabian accent, because through all his bluster his benevolence was discernible; there was a sense that his aggressiveness lacked the faintest trace of spite. Now that his loud nose-blowing had been evaded, and he would no longer have to imagine him sitting opposite him on the other side of the wall, Perlmann could accept this Achim Ruge. And, in fact, it was absurd to assume that his respectability and rectitude made him dangerous.

Laura Sand had put down her pen and was about to say something. But when she saw that everyone’s eyes were on Perlmann, she leaned back and reached for a cigarette. Perlmann looked across at Silvestri, but instead of finding support there, his gaze bounced off the tense expectation that lay in the darkly glittering eyes. There was no getting away now. The time had come.

What issued from his mouth were unobjectionable sentences, and their dragging tempo barely differed from the natural expression of reflectiveness. But in Perlmann’s head they thundered like hollow, meaningless sequences of sounds that came from somewhere or other and trickled through him like something alien, not unlike the quiet vibrations you feel on a train journey. That perception threatened to silence him before each next syllable, so that he constantly had to give himself a jolt to reach the next sentence – to produce the required minimum of sentences, so to speak. And then, all of a sudden, the internal pressure grew too great, and a quiet explosion followed, giving him a gambler’s courage.

‘Your critique of my work is the most enlightening, the most insightful thing that I have read in a very long time,’ he heard himself saying. ‘I find your objections completely convincing, and think they refute the whole of my proposal.’ He lapsed into laughter shaped by a feverish feeling of vertigo. ‘It’s a fabulous experience, being freed from a wrong idea. I can’t thank you enough for that! And I actually think your criticism is much more penetrating than you assume.’

And now, suddenly in full command of his powers, he conjured one argument after another from his hat, tearing into everything his name stood for, not resting before every last idea that he had ever come up with was finally swept away. He spoke from a sense of ludic inspiration whose bitterness he alone could taste, and accompanied each rhetorical lunge with a motion of his arm which, like the arc of a sower of seeds, had something at once dismissive and generous about it.

Millar was disconcerted, and the others also looked as if they had stepped through a door and fallen unexpectedly into a void. The first to regain his composure was von Levetzov.

‘Remarkable,’ he said, and it was apparent that his usual inner attitude towards Perlmann had suddenly ceased to seem appropriate, although he had not yet had time to construct a new one. ‘But don’t you think you might perhaps be going a little too far?’

And then he began to pick up the pieces and cobble them back together until a large part of Perlmann’s previous position was once more intact. Evelyn helped with this, and all at once Ruge’s chief concern seemed to be to convict Perlmann of reaching over-hasty conclusions. Everyone seemed relieved that a familiar kind of discussion was gradually resuming. Only every now and again did Perlmann feel a furtive glance upon him.

Millar had shaken off his torpor, and was talking about Perlmann almost as if he were absent. He had no evidence, but Perlmann could have sworn that Millar thought of his earlier remarks as revealing particularly foolhardy sarcasm, and felt he was being teased. Nothing could have been further from the truth. And yet: it would be hard to stop hatred arising between them on the basis of this misunderstanding.

Back in his room, Perlmann felt empty and drained, like an actor after a performance. Would they see it as a mere mood, or had he already turned himself irrevocably into an outsider with his orgy of self-criticism? Then there was the business of his supposed topic, and it wouldn’t be long until they discovered that he had switched rooms. What sort of an image would that create in their heads? Perlmann slipped into half-sleep, in which he heard someone knocking at the door, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until it was a hammering that seemed to come from a thousand fists. He pressed himself against the door, barricaded himself in with the wardrobe, and now he could hear the wood splintering under axe-blows. Millar’s teeth were first to appear – big, white teeth bursting with health – then the whole Millar in an admiral’s uniform, behind him Ruge’s giant head, from which his chuckles spilled as though from a doll, and from the darkness of the corridor came Evelyn Mistral’s voice, distorted into shrill, vulgar laughter.

Perlmann gave a start, and on his way to the bathroom he put the chain on the door, ashamed of his action. Later he stood by the open window, two steps behind the balustrade, and gazed out into the pouring rain. Without the southern light, the bay looked like an abandoned stage after a performance, or like a fairground in the early morning, when the lights are turned off – so sobering and shabby that one felt cheated and hungover. All of a sudden, on the public part of the beach, one could see above all the rubbish and the dirt, empty bottles and plastic bags, and now it was also striking that the blue changing rooms urgently needed a lick of paint.

He picked up Leskov’s paper. He had only retained a few of the words he had copied out, and it was a while before he found his way back into the flow of his thoughts. In his next step Leskov now wanted to show that this kind of articulated self-image, on which our memory is based, can only come about through linguistic contouring, through the telling of stories. This announcement was followed immediately by a paragraph that gave Perlmann the feeling that he didn’t speak a word of Russian, so opaque was it even after the second and third reading. He tried to leave the whole passage alone and go on after it. But that didn’t work. The paragraph appeared to contain an argument that was the key to everything else, and if one hadn’t understood it, that which followed seemed unfounded, almost random. What he really wanted to do was hurl the paper into the corner. But then he resigned himself to being once more nothing but a schoolboy where this piece of writing was concerned, and not a reader with a command of Russian, and he began to dissect the individual sentences as if in a Latin class.

Slowly, half-sentence by half-sentence, the text yielded up its meaning. But at the crux of the argument there was a block of four sentences which remained impenetrable in the face of all his analytical effort and patience. What almost drove Perlmann to despair was the fact that it wasn’t as if the words weren’t in his dictionary. That was true of two of the words, but they were adjectives that struck him as negligible. All the other unfamiliar words were in the dictionary, but still he couldn’t wrestle any meaning from those sentences, let alone anything like a coherent argument. In the face of all experience, however, Perlmann acted as if it could be forced, he walked up and down and repeatedly murmured the four sentences, which he by now knew off by heart, out loud, imploring and gesticulating so that he might have been mistaken for a madman. He only paused when there was a knock at the door.

He quickly stuffed Leskov’s paper and the dictionary in the desk drawer, before opening the door, which clattered as it caught in the chain.

‘Oh, I’m disturbing you,’ said Evelyn Mistral when she saw his face in the chink.

‘No, no, wait,’ Perlmann said quickly and closed the door to get rid of the chain.

She had learned of his new room number from Signora Morelli after ringing and knocking in vain. Now, with her hands in the pockets of her rust-red jeans, she let her eye wander around the whole of the room and then pounced on the wing chair, into which she proceeded to slump.

The bed was the reason for the change, Perlmann said. He had the usual problem with his back.

‘And you like to be on your own,’ she said with a quiet twitch at the corners of her mouth, and sank cross-legged slightly deeper into the chair.

Perlmann didn’t know whether he was startled by her accuracy or delighted.

‘You know,’ she said, after asking him for a cigarette, which she then just puffed on, ‘I have an eye for these things. My father spent his whole life suffering from claustrophobia, which he kept strictly secret. In the cinema, for example, he always sat on the end seat of an empty row, even if he had to keep standing up to let people past, and he often disappeared through the emergency exit when the cinema got too full. If people were jostling each other on the pavement, he was quite capable of walking out into the traffic. And, of course, he avoided elevators like the plague; he only made an exception for those old ones where you can look through the glass doors and the elevator shaft into the stairwell. The worst thing was that when he was operating he always had the other doctors and nurses around him. On more than one occasion he came close to giving up. But I only understood the full extent of his problem when I found him one night in our huge kitchen, sitting like a pile of misery over a glass of brandy, which he never normally drank. A very good friend, perhaps his best friend, whom he spoke to on the phone at least once a week and who was a great support to him when my mother fell seriously ill, had announced that he was moving from Seville to Salamanca, where our house was. “I felt as if I was petrified,” my father said. “I felt as if I was suffocating. I hope José Antonio didn’t notice.” And then, this a man who wasn’t used to alcohol, and who, coming from Valladolid, spoke the most pin-sharp Spanish that you can imagine, started talking in a clumsy, blurred pronunciation, about how we had to move away, possibly to the Far East, to Barcelona, perhaps, or Zaragoza; he didn’t even need a job as a surgeon. “You see, otherwise I’m going to lose José Antonio,” he said with tears in his eyes. At the same time, he was a very affectionate father. I’ve never understood how that worked. But since then I’ve been able to recognize people who need a lot of empty space around them very quickly, and I’m seldom mistaken. Of course, I don’t mean you suffer from claustrophobia,’ she concluded with a smile.

He could tell her. He could spill all his desperation straight from his soul into her – as if they were sitting together in the big kitchen. Perlmann lit a cigarette and walked to the window for a moment to collect his words.

‘But I came about something quite different,’ she said, when he turned towards her to speak. ‘First of all I wanted to say how impressed I was by the inner freedom with which you talked about your work this morning. I didn’t, as you will have noticed afterwards, have the impression that Brian really refuted everything you had to say. But the peace, the delight, in fact, with which you summed up the possibility of general error! How do you do that?’

‘Perhaps it’s a matter of age,’ Perlmann said with a lump in his throat, and could have sunk into the ground over the stupidity of his answer.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she smiled, unsure how seriously he had meant it. ‘At any rate I thought it was great. And the other thing was: I’d like to talk to you about your new topic. I was really excited by what you hinted at yesterday morning, because the influence that linguistic articulation has on memory must be very closely connected with the process of linguistic refinement of the imagination which is the subject of my research. ¿Verdad?’

Perlmann apologized and went to the bathroom, where he ran warm water over his cold hands for several minutes. He had to gain time above all, and then make sure that she did most of the talking. Back in the room he suggested having a coffee at the marina. He liked the light and the smell when the sun broke through after a rain shower, as it was doing now.

She found the idea of remembered scenes into which, even if it wasn’t done explicitly, one projected an image of oneself, illuminating, and was beginning to consider how this might relate to scenes from dreams and fantasies. Sometimes she leaned back, arms folded over her head, her eyes gazing through half-closed lids at the sea, and thought out loud about examples. She was so keyed up that she gave a start when the waiter appeared, and knocked a coffee cup out of his hand as her arm came down. Then, when the waiter flirted with her and forgave her everything, Perlmann heard her speaking Italian for the second time. She spoke it as effortlessly as she did Spanish, only the harsh vowels were unusual. Her mother had been Italian, she explained, and both were spoken casually at home.

‘Like with Giorgio, except that it was the other way round. We often laughed, because we didn’t know which we should apologize for. His suggestion is: until twenty-three minutes past two Spanish, after that Italian,’ she laughed.

This interlude had not, as Perlmann had hoped, distracted her from the subject, and now she asked him whether, in the case of memory, he knew a reason why the differentiation of the introduced self-image had to occur in the medium of language. She herself had long been in search of a corresponding explanation for the case of fantasy and will. It wasn’t enough for her, she said with a face on which Perlmann suddenly thought he was seeing her matte-silver glasses for the first time, that there was a clear connection between the development of the abilities in question. She wanted something that could make visible a closer, a deeper, connection, so to speak, between the phenomena. Could he help her with that?

Perlmann thought about the four recalcitrant sentences in Leskov’s paper. Yes, that was an important question, he said, and turned towards the water. Countless times he had wished he could fall silent for a moment in response to such a question – let it work on him all by itself for a while, without perceiving it as a threat that left one with no other chance but to come up with an answer straight away, or to apologize for being unable to do so. Now, sitting beside this woman, whom he would almost not have dared approach until an hour before, he managed: no, he was obliged to do something that seemed, seen from outside, deceptively similar to the fulfilment of his desire; her question struck him as so threatening that he not only felt a void of ignorance, but also a paralysing horror at the thought that his answer might further contribute to the tissue of lies of his false identity; so he fell silent, in the pose of the thinker. Ashamed, and yet once again with a hint of the gallows humor with which he resisted the horror, he then discovered that it had worked; as if the silence of an unanswered question were the most natural thing in the world, Evelyn Mistral herself began trying out answers to her own question.

Just as the moment approached when he himself would have to speak, von Levetzov and Millar walked past on the other side of the street. Von Levetzov waved and said something to Millar, and before they reached the corner, they both turned round. Evelyn Mistral brushed the hair from her face and smiled wryly when the two men had disappeared. Then she looked at her watch and said she had some more work to do; it was only another two-and-a-half weeks until her seminar, and until then she wanted to work on the two chapters of the book that it would be dealing with.

‘Do you think it would be enough if I handed the papers in for copying the Friday before?’

Perlmann nodded.

She was bound to be terribly nervous at the seminar, she said. ‘In such illustrious circles!’

Later, almost at the same time as the previous day, when Perlmann parted the glass-bead curtain and stepped into the trattoria, the rain started hammering on the glass roof. The proprietor and his family greeted him like an old friend, brought him bean soup followed by chicken, and when Sandra later set the coffee down in front of him, the proprietor came over and placed the chronicle down in front of him as if it were a ritual that had been practiced for years.

As he ate, Perlmann imagined Evelyn Mistral and Giorgio Silvestri talking, playfully switching languages and joking, and it had given him a stitch. Now he brushed that idea aside, and opened the book at the year when he had broken off his training as a pianist.

In the first days of that year Albert Camus had died in an accident. Perlmann grimly remembered the incomprehension that his own excitement had met with at home. Only years later, when he read La Peste all the way through for the first time, did he realize how much incomprehension there had been in his own excitement, and the extent to which the book had also been trendy.

He went on flicking through the pages. With the dropping of the first plutonium bomb in the Sahara, France had joined the nuclear powers. Leonid Brezhnev was the new Soviet president. The success of Fellini’s La dolce vita in Cannes. Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. The Israelis abducted Eichmann. That was quite illegal, his father had said. Caryl Chessman was executed in St Quentin’s, after the death sentence had been postponed eight times. The Olympic Games in Rome; but it wasn’t there that Armin Hary had run the 100 meters, but some time before in Zurich.

For September, the chronicle barely mentioned anything but the Italian medals table. It was in that month that Perlmann had made his decision; on one of the last days, he couldn’t remember the exact date. He saw the bare room of the Conservatoire in front of him, and that momentous moment was still very much alive, a good thirty years later, present in all its details, as if it had been stamped in his memory with very great force.

It had been early afternoon on a rainy day, with a light in which time seemed to stand still and yet had no present, or only a dead present. He had been working once again on Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat major. It was one of the first piano compositions that he had discovered, and for a long time it had been his favorite piece. By then, however, it was his most hated piece, because it had a terrifying passage that he had never mastered. He had gone through it countless times, finger by finger, but it was as if for some inexplicable reason his motor memory was blocked at that point, so that the orders from the brain to the fingers were not resolute and unambiguous, but hesitant and blurred.

That afternoon, to his surprise, that passage had gone smoothly for the first time ever. He had been glad, but from experience he had also remained sceptical at first. He hurried to repeat his success, and finally to memorize the correct fingering once and for all. It was fine the second and third times, and the fourth time it almost felt like a firmly fixed routine. He had the feeling that he had finally managed it, and went down to the foyer to allow himself a cigarette.

Then, sitting back down at the grand piano, when he tried to put his new-won confidence to the test, he immediately stumbled. He tried it a few more times, but it wouldn’t work at all. Then, still sitting at the keyboard, he lit another cigarette, which was completely forbidden, and smoked it calmly to the end, using the box as an ashtray. Then he carefully closed the lid and opened the window. Before he went outside, he looked at the little painting by Paul Klee, which, because it was the only painting, merely served to emphasize the bareness of the room. It was right in the player’s eye-line. He would miss it.

It wasn’t, Perlmann thought, as if he had simply run out of patience that time. Quite calmly, with no inner turmoil, he had walked along the corridor to Bela Szabo’s room, and later up the stairs to the Director. It would also have been misleading to say, he thought, that he had given up his training because of his defeat with the A flat major Polonaise. What happened to him that afternoon was simply that a complicated internal play of forces, which had been under way for many months – determined by very different experiences that he had had of himself as a pianist, and by doubts of very different kinds – reached a standstill in his definitive and irrevocable clarity about the boundaries of his talent. If he said to himself that the decision had been made at that moment, it could only, it seemed to him, mean the arrival of that standstill, the end of his internal uncertainty. Apart from that, there had been no further supplementary internal decision that might have communicated between his inner state and the subsequent external actions.

Bela Szabo had seen his decision as a mistake, or at least as premature. In this he had shared the opinion of Perlmann’s parents, who thought it was a shame, and ungrateful of him, too, simply to throw away his artistic future, in which they had invested so much. But he was completely certain and his mind would not be changed. He felt it in his hands, in his arms, and sometimes even as a certainty within his whole body: he would never be anything more than a piano teacher. He was proud of being capable of such a sober insight, and did everything he could not to turn his decision into a drama. Still, a wound had remained, which had never quite healed, and which he perceived as a source of personal insecurity.

For several years after his decision, he had not played a single note or set foot in a concert hall. It was Agnes who had persuaded him to start playing again. They bought a grand piano, and he gradually found his way back into Chopin, who had originally awoken his desire to learn the piano. But he never again attempted the Polonaise in A flat major. After Agnes’s death he had avoided the piano altogether. He was afraid that the notes would break through all the dams and he would start playing sentimentally. That was something he couldn’t have borne, not even when he was alone.

Perlmann gave Sandra a big tip when she brought him the cigarettes that she had bought in the Piazza Veneto. Then he went on flicking through the book. Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations. Perlmann greedily read the article about Khrushchev’s demands and the failure of his trip. And the next two pages, entirely devoted to John F. Kennedy’s election as president, he read as if they contained revelations about his own life.

When the restaurant began filling up, he barely noticed, but just changed irritably to the other side of the table, so that he had the wall in front of him. With great attention he read every single name on the list of Kennedy’s cabinet, and then it continued into the next year: Gagarin in space; Cuban invasion of the Bay of Pigs; building the Berlin Wall.

Letting his life roll out again, along the history of the world: it was, Perlmann thought, like waking up. With every page the need grew to be sure of all the things that had happened throughout all the years in which he had been chiefly preoccupied with himself – trying to use work to banish his fear of failure in life. In the midst of the chatter and laughter from the other tables he felt as if he had, so to speak, been a prisoner of that effort, and as if he were only now coming back. It was like joining the real world. It could have been a liberating, cheering experience, had it not been for the hotel, less than two kilometers away, with the steps, the painted window frames and the crooked pine trees.

Perlmann looked in horror at his watch: ten past nine. He couldn’t turn up to dinner as late as that. Nonetheless, he hurried to pay, and walked quickly back to the hotel, which he entered by the back door for the first time. He had just quietly closed it behind him, when Giovanni came round the corner with a big cardboard box under his arm. ‘Buona sera,’ he said genially, and bowed slightly before setting off again. Today Giovanni had his face under control. There was not a hint of yesterday’s grin. But Perlmann thought he sensed behind Giovanni’s expression the laughter of the servant who has caught his master in some unseemly act.

Perlmann had looked forward to turning into the dimly lit corridor upstairs, and in the middle of it, under the unlit lamp, feeling around for the keyhole. So he had been unpleasantly surprised when all the lamps were lit unusually brightly. With his key in his hand, he paced back and forth, before creeping to the cupboard at the end of the corridor and fetching a ladder. With his handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, he half-unscrewed all nine bulbs so that the lighting was just as it had been before.

Tomorrow would be even more about Millar’s first paper than today. Perlmann reluctantly bent down to the round table and flicked through some pages. Then he went to the bathroom and took a sleeping pill from the packet. He broke it in two and, after some hesitation, washed down the biggest part.

When he had given up the Conservatoire, emergency laws had been in place, he thought as he lay in the darkness and listened to the unabated traffic. He had watched the demonstrations from the other side of the street. He felt he should have crossed over. But there were all those people there, and the noisy megaphones, and the rhythmical movement of the crowd, which made one feel one was losing one’s own will. And so, till now, he had never made a political commitment, even though on his internal stage he always advocated very clear and often radical positions. Not even Agnes had known that for a while he had been almost as at home in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism as a historian.

That night he woke up three times, and still he couldn’t escape the leaden power of that accursed word. It was the word masterclass, a word that made both his parents freeze with respect as if it were the name of God. Being accepted into the masterclass run by a big name: in their eyes that was the highest attainment possible, and they had no dearer wish for their own son than such a consecration. In the dream that stayed with him even after he was awake, Perlmann didn’t see his parents, and he didn’t hear them utter the word either. It was more as if his parents were there, and the word as well, and the word was carved into their devout silence in huge letters of trepidation.

Only when he had spent several minutes under the shower did he feel the scorn that was finally able to break the power of the word.

7

The awkward question that Perlmann posed in the seminar when he could no longer withstand Millar’s challenging looks was so hair-raisingly naive that Ruge, von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral all turned their heads towards him with a jerk. Millar blinked like someone who thinks he has misheard, and tried to gain some time by writing the question down with slow, painterly movements. Then – as if looking through a long contract a final time before signing – he stared for ages at what he had written, before turning to Perlmann. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen Millar looking uncertain – not uncertain about his subject, but in his attitude towards a question which, first of all, came from a man like Perlmann, but which on the other seemed to be of almost idiotic simplicity. He opted for an emphatically modest, emphatically thoughtful tone, and explained once again to Perlmann what must have been clear to anyone who had read his paper attentively. He was visibly uneasy as he did so. He basically couldn’t believe that Perlmann had really asked that question, and he was afraid of insulting him by taking the question literally. Twice he seemed to have finished. He looked quizzically at Perlmann, and when Perlmann nodded stiffly and said simply, ‘Thank you’, Millar added something to his explanation.

The pill, Perlmann thought, I should just have taken the smaller bit. He rested his head on his hand so that he could rub his temples without anyone noticing. Perhaps that would help against the thumping heaviness that lay over his eyes like a ring of steel. When he took his hand away, he caught the eye of Evelyn Mistral, who was fighting against Millar’s sceptical face with sentences that were growing faster and faster. He nodded, without knowing what they were talking about. When Millar noticed this agreement, he looked like someone who is now utterly confused. Plainly, Evelyn Mistral’s train of thought had nothing to do with the interpretation that he had composed for Perlmann’s puzzlingly naive question.

Perlmann poured himself a cup of coffee, and when he reached into his jacket pocket for the matches, he felt the packet of headache pills. Keeping his hand in his pocket, he pressed out two tablets, brought them inconspicuously to his mouth and swallowed them. As if his head had been cleared merely by the act of swallowing, he concentrated on the formulae in Millar’s paper. With a jolt that he was able to cushion somewhat at the last moment, he sat bolt upright: a bracket was missing from one of the formulae. Struggling to control his excitement, he topped up his coffee. Don’t make a mistake now. Methodically, and with painful concentration, he looked through the whole formal part. He could barely believe his eyes: just before the end a quantifier was missing, which not only made the deduction wrong, but actually made the formula nonsensical. His headache had fled, and it was as if his impatient alertness were forcing its way out from within himself and straight onto the paper. He was absolutely sure of his case. Now everything hung on the presentation. With a furtive slowness that he enjoyed more than anything in ages, he lit a cigarette, pushed his chair back and sat down with the paper in his other hand, his legs crossed as if sitting at a pavement café. He saw Millar sitting in the front row of the lecture hall on that earlier occasion, Sheila beside him in her short skirt.

‘I see,’ Laura Sand said, and leaned back. Millar took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It was the first time Perlmann had seen his face without glasses. It was a surprisingly vulnerable face with eyes that had a boyish, almost childlike expression, and for that brief moment, before Millar put his glasses back on, Perlmann wanted to have nothing more to do with his planned attack, but the flash of Millar’s glasses had closed once more over his face, which had looked so defenseless a moment before, and Perlmann seized his moment.

‘Tell me, Brian,’ he began with deceptive mildness, ‘isn’t there a bracket missing from the fourth formula? Right at the beginning, I mean. Otherwise the domain of quantification is too small.’

Millar darted him a quick glance, pressed his glasses firmly on to his nose and frowned as he flicked through the pages.

‘Jenny, Jenny, baby,’ he muttered with ostentatious irritation, ‘why always the formulae? She’s the best secretary in the world,’ he added, glancing round at everyone, ‘but she has a block with formulae. Many thanks, Phil.’

Perlmann waited for him to make a note. ‘One other small thing,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘As it stands, formula ten makes no sense. The deduction isn’t right either.’

His whole chest becoming a soundbox for his heartbeat was something he had never experienced before. Perlmann gripped his knee, tensed his arms and braced himself against the power of his roaring pulse. Millar’s brief, slightly flickering glance was unmistakeable: this was too much, particularly when it came from someone capable of asking such a simple question.

‘Quite frankly, Phil,’ he began imperiously, ‘I can’t see anything there that isn’t completely in order.’

‘I can,’ said Ruge. He scribbled something on the paper and grinned at Millar. ‘There’s a quantifier missing in the middle.’

Now von Levetzov too picked up his pen. His face twitched with a mixture of delight and malice. Millar ran his biro along the line and faltered.

‘Hang on… oh yes, OK, there it is,’ he murmured. He added the sign and made another note on his piece of paper. ‘Jenny, baby, we’re going to have to have a serious talk,’ he said as he wrote, and then looked at Perlmann. ‘Of course, I’d have spotted it in the galleys. But still, thanks.’

His polite smile was like a contrasting background designed to make his humorless, unforgiving face stand out. It wasn’t Jenny. It wasn’t a typo.

Afterwards, on their way through the drawing room, Millar pushed his way next to Perlmann.

‘That question of yours,’ he said, ‘I have the feeling there was something I didn’t understand. Perhaps we should sit down together.’

‘Absolutely,’ Perlmann replied, and afterwards he had the strange feeling of having said it in a gruff way that was alien to him – almost as if he were Millar.

Was he happy with the new room? Signora Morelli asked him as she handed him the key and the first post from Frau Hartwig.

‘Yes, very much so,’ he replied. He wished her question had sounded less businesslike; he would have liked his sense of complicity with her, which he had felt the previous day, to have lasted a little longer.

In his post there were two lecture invitations and a request for a reference from a student. Perlmann saw the student in front of him, sitting on the edge of his chair with his hands between his knees, looking at him through his thick glasses. The university courtyard was filled with the sluggish, hot silence of an early August afternoon. For more than two hours he had talked through his unsuccessful homework with him. The boy had filled half an exercise book with jagged, frantic handwriting. Then, in the doorway, after stammering an effusive goodbye, he had suddenly bent double, and it had taken Perlmann a moment to work out that this was a deep bow, a minion from another century taking his leave. Leaning against the closed door he had stood there for a long time and considered his office, which he had now been using for seven years: the beautiful desk, the elegant chair behind it, the lamps, the seating area. All of it far too expensive, he had thought, feeling like an interloper in the office of someone who actually did something.

He rang Frau Hartwig and dictated the reference to her, recommending the student for a grant. When she read the text back to him, he was startled by all his unfounded praise. He didn’t dare take it back, and moved on to the letters declining to give the lectures. Yes, he said finally, there was a hint of summer left in the air.

‘You can be glad that you’re down there,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘The first autumn storms have started up here. Some people can’t suppress their envious remarks. You can imagine which.’

As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Perlmann sat down in the red armchair and picked up Leskov’s paper. But he soon lowered it again. You are going to write something for Italy, aren’t you? Frau Hartwig had said at the end of July. Perlmann had only nodded and continued with his business at the shelf. She had, incidentally, postponed her holiday, she explained a few days later. To just before Christmas. After that he had only gone to the office when she wasn’t there, and left her instructions on tape. In late September she had hesitantly asked if she could take two weeks’ holiday, or whether he needed her. ‘Just go,’ he had replied, and by way of disguise he had turned the relief in his voice into enthusiasm for the island of Elba, with which he associated nothing at all apart from Napoleon.

Now there were several pages in Leskov’s paper in which he engaged with the objection that we remember many episodes that we never put in story form. How then could he claim that language played such a key role in the episodic memory?

Leskov’s reply was expressed in eccentric terms, Perlmann thought, but basically the elements of his train of thought were familiar to him, and suddenly the translation started going faster than ever. When he grasped a sentence literally at first glance, he felt as if he had at that moment forgotten it was a Russian sentence – it had yielded its meaning to him with so little resistance. With breathless delight he went on reading. The truth of Leskov’s thesis was irrelevant; the main thing was comprehension. In fact, he noticed, many of the words he had copied out were now in his head. His confidence was growing from one paragraph to the next, and now all of a sudden he also had an incredibly lucky hand when it came to opening the right pages in the dictionary. It bordered on clairvoyance. When he finally had to turn on the light, he was already on page 20.

He could get cigarettes from the place Sandra had bought them from yesterday. Sandra. The promised stamps from Germany. He got Frau Hartwig’s envelope out of the waste-paper basket and tore the stamps from it. Then he left the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.

He was late today, the proprietress joked as she brought him the chronicle. He would have to choose something from the menu. Perlmann opened the book at the year when his father hadn’t awoken from his lunchtime nap. The Decca record company had, after listening to demo tapes, reached the view that The Beatles had no future, and turned down the opportunity to produce them. Antonio Segni became Italian president. It was a name that meant nothing to Perlmann, and he read the biographical outline to the smallest detail. Adolf Eichmann was hanged.

His father had lived to hear that. After the report he had turned off the radio in silence, his mother had told him. ‘He wasn’t a sympathizer, you know that,’ she had added. ‘It’s just that he feels somehow under attack when these things are talked about.’ By the graveside she had surprised Perlmann: she, who otherwise wept easily, didn’t shed a single tear.

She had surprised him for a second time the following autumn, this time with her interest in the Cuban crisis, of which he would not have thought her capable. She had, he had felt all winter, seemed better than ever. And then, sometime in the spring, her startlingly rapid decline began. Her world shrank to magazine articles about kitschy German musicals, Kennedy in Berlin interested her not at all, and when he dragged her to see Irma la Douce, she babbled something about pornography on the way home. When he told her about the death of Édith Piaf, she no longer knew who that was, although she had secretly listened to her chansons for years when his father was sitting in the pub with the other post-office workers. She was unaware of the shooting in Dallas. By day she slept with her mouth open, and from ten o’clock she terrorized the night nurse.

When Perlmann arrived at the hospital on the first day of the New Year someone else was already lying in her bed. No, he didn’t want to see her again, he had explained to the nurse, who was alarmed by the edge in his voice. And there had been another faux pas. The graveside ceremony wasn’t quite finished when he lit a cigarette in front of everyone. Why had he not managed to turn that precious moment of liberation into a permanent distinction from all the others, a calm lack of subservience, a fearlessness that needed no dramatic gestures? He laughed to himself and at the same time bit his lips when he thought about how he had simply left the relatives standing outside the pub. To the baffled question of why he hadn’t stayed at the wake, when he was, after all, paying for it, he had said: ‘Chiefly because the word disgusts me.’ Then he had disappeared around the corner.

The food over at the hotel probably wasn’t as good as its reputation, the proprietor grinned as he walked over to Perlmann’s table during a break. Perlmann looked at his watch. Ten past eight. Still enough time. No, it was fine, he said, snapped the chronicle shut and picked up his briefcase. The stamps nearly fell into what was left of his tomato sauce. They were for Sandra, he said, holding them out to the proprietor. No, no, he said, Perlmann must bring them to Sandra in person, or she would be disappointed. And then he led him up the stairs to Sandra’s room, which, like the whole apartment, was cramped and full of junk.

Sandra’s joy over the stamps was subdued by her difficulties with English. She was in every other respect such a clever child, her mother sobbed, but she just couldn’t get to grips with this funny spelling that had so little to do with the pronunciation. And they, her parents, couldn’t help. Could he stay for a moment and explain one or the other to her? Otherwise her test on Monday threatened to be a disaster. He just had to look at the last exercise in the book. There was more red ink than blue.

Perlmann stayed till eleven. Sitting on an uncomfortable stool, he went through the two last exercises with Sandra and then explained some grammar to her as well. Often she was close to tears, but in the end she smiled bravely, and he stroked her hair.

Then the proprietor brought him almond tart and a grappa. Time didn’t matter any more anyway, and Perlmann read through the year he had begun in the chronicle. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Right, that was the start of the Vietnam War. Khrushchev’s fall from power. The death of Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist. Perlmann knew him, but he hadn’t known that he had only reluctantly condemned the crimes of Stalin. And last of all Sartre, who had refused the Nobel Prize. What exactly had been his explanation? The text in the chronicle was confused, and made Sartre sound like a scatterbrain. Perlmann tried out various explanations as he walked across the deserted Piazza Veneto and along the promenade to the hotel.

Giovanni, who had been sitting watching television in the side-room, handed him a paper by Achim Ruge, almost a hundred pages thick, the text for Monday. The others had asked after him several times in the course of the evening, he said. ‘Because you weren’t at dinner yesterday, either,’ he added. Perlmann’s hand gripped the paper so convulsively that the top page was pulled out of its staple. Again he wanted to slap the pomaded head with the ridiculous sideburns. He turned away in silence and stepped into the open elevator.

In the corridor, all the bulbs were burning in the lamps. For a moment he was tempted to go and get the ladder, but then he walked into his room and sank on to the bed in the dark. After a while his head was filled again with the images of the new patient in his mother’s bed, the startled nurse, the coffin being lowered into the grave.

He went into the bathroom and swallowed the small bit of pill from yesterday. Édith Piaf’s real name had been Édith Giovanna Gassion, he thought before drifting into sleep. The individual snowflakes had melted on his mother’s coffin. He had found that distasteful. Perhaps the unseemly cigarette had had something to do with it as well.

8

Perlmann slept until late into the morning and then ordered a big breakfast. Over the first cup of coffee he was drawn back into the pull of translation, and now he found himself captivated not only by the experience of his faster comprehension, but by the ideas he was coming across in the text.

Leskov now attacked the idea that the narration of remembered scenes was a simple description of images arising, a linguistic inventory of fixed material that dictated the logic of narration through its unambiguously determined contours. That was neither the case with regard to the objective fixed points of a scene nor in the facets of the self-image read into it. The narration of one’s own past was always a fresh undertaking in which other forces were at work than the intention to call up recorded material in a detailed manner. There was above all the need to make a meaningful whole out of the remembered scene and one’s own presence within it, and accordingly a lack of meaning was interpreted as an imperfection of memory.

Perlmann faltered. What was the significance in this instance of smysl: sense? He would have liked to read the answer in an abstract form. But first there came several pages of examples, and the text became accordingly difficult, because Leskov’s descriptions were atmospherically precise, witty, and every now and again there was a sentence which, Perlmann assumed, had a poetic brilliance. He would have liked to know whether a Russian would have seen this as a break with the concise, laconic style that prevailed elsewhere in the text, or whether a native Russian would still perceive a unified stylistic form. At any rate, translating became a strain again at this point; he had to consult his grammar several times, and the limitations of the dictionary were infuriating. He irritably sent the chambermaid away again.

Dusk was already falling over the bay, giving the sea a metallic sheen, when Perlmann finally reached the conclusion drawn from the examples. The strongest power in narrative memory, Leskov wrote, was the desire to understand one’s past self through its actions. From this desire one composed past scenes in such a way that one’s own actions, and also one’s sensations, appeared accessible and reasonable. That didn’t mean measuring them against an abstract catalogue of reasonable characteristics. It simply meant this: the narrated past must be comprehensible from the point of view of the present narrator. The narrator would not rest before he could recognize himself in his past self. And that referred not only to questions of intelligence and the purposefulness of his previous action, but above all to its moral aspects. Narrative memory was always also a justification, a piece of inventive apologia.

It was just before half-past seven when Perlmann stopped, exhausted, halfway down page 43. Two dozen pages of the vocabulary notebook were full, and on the right, next to the line that ran down the middle of the page, there were many gaps. Another twenty-five pages. If he got up very early tomorrow he would be able to finish it. And now he wanted to know: that business about the inventive elements in memory was all well and good, but where, in Leskov’s essay, was the experienced, sensory content of memory? The last time he saw him, his father had, as always, been wearing his wool felt jacket, and the fact that the color of the wool had alternated between dark olive green and light charcoal, depending on the light, was really not something that he had invented; it bothered him now, in memory, exactly as it had at the time. Or the loud thump with which the frozen lumps of earth had fallen on his mother’s coffin: what did Leskov make of that? Sensory content? He wrote in the margin.

Before he went to dinner, he flicked absently through Ruge’s paper. If I start on it on Monday, I’ll still have fifteen days for my own contribution. It was only when he reached the stairs that he realized the idea didn’t throw him into a panic. He paused. It was as if the thought had occurred in the mind of someone else, someone completely uninvolved, and the weird idea crept over him that he was splitting away from himself.

‘I knocked on your door several times yesterday and today, Phil. I wanted to talk about the baffling question you asked me at the session,’ Millar said across the length of the table when the waiter had brought the soup. ‘And then, when you weren’t at dinner, I started to get worried. We all did, by the way.’

Perlmann felt that his fear of Millar was suddenly turning into black humor, accompanied by a pleasing sense of dizziness like the one he always felt when he had his first cigarette of the morning.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. Deadpan was how he would have described his face at that moment.

‘I know that now,’ said Millar, and lowered his head. ‘Evelyn’s just told me about the business with the new room.’

Perlmann looked into the sea-green of her eyes. She had her face under control, but her eyes contained a certain roguish laughter that seemed to have its origins right in the dark yellow particles of the iris.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The bed. My back. Do you get that, too?’

‘No,’ replied Millar, ‘I don’t. Not at all.’

‘He just couldn’t stand being between us, Brian,’ Ruge grinned.

Millar picked up his tone. ‘And we’re such nice guys, Phil. But seriously: can we make an appointment for tomorrow?’

The panic mustn’t show in his voice, and Perlmann ran his fingertips along his forehead, back and forth, and then again.

‘I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow,’ he said, and was pleased when he noticed that the quiver in his voice had remained a mere idea. ‘I’ll let you know some time next week.’

‘OK,’ Millar drawled, and Perlmann was sure that his drawl expressed a hint of suspicion. Or at least the drawl contained the message that suspicion would be inevitable if the matter were to be postponed again.

Perlmann lifted his plate and tried to get the last bit of soup into his spoon. With this kind of spoon that was something of a feat, and so it was that he didn’t notice Carlo Angelini until Silvestri got up to hug him. Angelini darted Perlmann an apologetic grin and walked around the table to greet the ladies first. Finally, he fetched a chair from the next table and sat down beside Perlmann. Unfortunately, he would have to leave again tomorrow morning, he said, but he wanted at least to look in this evening. How was it going?

‘Benissimo,’ said Evelyn Mistral, when Perlmann hesitated. Everything was perfect, Millar agreed, and before von Levetzov could speak, he thanked Angelini on behalf of the group.

Angelini listened to the explanation of how the work had been organized, and then asked about the subjects under discussion.

‘I know more or less what you’re working on,’ he said to Perlmann, who no longer had the faintest idea what he had told him back in Lugano. And then, with a smile that alternated between pride and irony, Angelini announced that the mayor of Santa Margherita was going to hold a reception for them all.

From the corners of his eyes, Perlmann saw Laura Sand pretending to blow her nose to keep from exploding with laughter. Only a small party, Angelini said, and the high point would be the appointment of Perlmann, as leader of the project, as an honorary citizen of the town.

‘With a certificate and a medal,’ he grinned. ‘It will begin on the Monday of the final week, so three weeks the day after tomorrow,’ he said after glancing at his pocket diary. ‘At eleven o’clock in the morning. Of course, I will be there as well.’

If Silvestri gives a presentation in the fourth week, I will gain a day because of the reception.

‘Then you just give your paper on Monday afternoon,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann.

‘And, of course, we expect something very special from a newly fledged freeman of the town,’ Ruge chuckled.

Angelini invited everyone for a drink in the drawing room. It was puzzling what connected Angelini and Silvestri, Perlmann thought as he walked behind the two of them, and saw them joking like very good friends. Angelini, the Italian yuppie in his elegant suit, who moved in the world of conventions like a fish in water, and Silvestri, this insubordinate, anarchically minded individualist, who happened this evening to be wearing a rumpled black shirt on top of everything. Was it something from their school days? Or because they both came from Florence?

My hatred of conventions, he thought when he heard the fragments that Angelini addressed, in turn, to his colleagues. That hatred had been in Perlmann long before he met Agnes. But it was only because the feeling had found an echo in her that he had become fully aware of it. What Agnes had been most unable to bear was people who not only thought and acted conventionally but felt conventionally as well. People who felt what they thought they ought to feel. Her attempts to capture the subject in photographs were a failure. He heard her dark, sonorous voice, which could sound so brave before sometimes collapsing into the deepest melancholy: At best you can show what people feel, and not that it would be more authentic to feel differently now. There are no pictures for that. The hatred of conventional feeling had been a strong bond between them. But it had often alienated her from people they liked. It had, against her will, made her shy of people.

‘This might be the moment to play something for us,’ von Levetzov said to Millar, pointing to the grand piano with a smile full of flattering respect. He’s treating him like his brilliant star pupil, who has outgrown him through his diverse and towering talents. And he didn’t need that. Not him.

‘Oh, yes, that would be super!’ exclaimed Evelyn Mistral.

Perlmann was irritated by her girlish enthusiasm and the teenage vocabulary that he had liked so much on her arrival, because it matched the red elephant on her suitcase. In defiance of all reason, he was furious about her enthusiasm, and internally reproached her for it – as if she were obliged to know what a nightmare Millar was gradually becoming to him, and as if she owed him making these sensations her own.

‘If you insist,’ Millar smiled, and heaved himself out of the deep armchair. On springy steps he walked across to the grand piano, unbuttoned his blazer and straightened the piano stool. He was making, Perlmann thought, the face of someone trying not to look vain, even though he knew that all eyes were upon him.

The movements of his hands were economical, energetic in the powerful chords, but without any effusive artistic gestures, he never lifted his hands more than a few centimeters above the keys. Reluctantly, Perlmann was forced to admit that he liked that. He himself had tried to play that way.

And yet he found Millar’s hands repellent. They were, he realized for the first time, hairy all the way down to the joints of his fingers. The thick hair on his arms continued into his hands like fur.

He compared the playing hands with the hands of the four other men. The only disturbing thing about Silvestri’s slender, white hands was the yellowish shimmer on the right index and middle fingers. Angelini was holding a cigarette, and one couldn’t have seen the nicotine on his tanned fingers in any case. Von Levetzov’s hands were folded on his knee, manicured, smooth hands with the first liver spots, on the little finger of his left hand a signet ring with his artistically intertwined initials. Achim Ruge’s hands lay on the wide arms of the chair, heavy hands that looked more like those of a manual labourer or a peasant than an academic. Perlmann liked them, just as he had found it easy to like Ruge since changing rooms.

The face that Millar made when playing matched the sober, matter-of-fact movements of his hands. It was an attentive, concentrated face that seemed to show a certain emotion, even though Millar had not made the slightest attempt to comment upon the music or his feelings through facial expressions. I like that, too, in fact. Why can’t I simply take this man Brian Millar as he is? Why do I constantly have to chafe at him?

Millar was playing Bach. It must have been one of the English Suites, Perlmann thought, but he couldn’t have said which one. It was a while before he could identify his strange sensation: it was the absence of any surprise that what Millar was playing was Bach. Fine, the music coming from his room had been Bach as well. But that wasn’t it, he thought. He had the impression that it couldn’t have been anything but Bach; that where Millar was concerned it could only have been Bach. He thought he knew that if he had been asked before what Millar would play, he would have named Bach without hesitation. Bach and perhaps classical jazz, those were the sounds that suited his incredibly blue eyes in his clear, alert face, and his well-articulated, clear way of thinking, talking and writing.

He played brilliantly, or rather, Perlmann thought after a while, he played competently, even if that was an unusual word in this context. Perlmann was immediately prepared to concede that he would have expected nothing less from Millar. But it was more to do with Millar’s playing. He noticed it only reluctantly, but Millar played his Bach in a quite particular style; a style, besides, that he had never before encountered in such an extreme form. For a long time Perlmann sought words for it, and finally opted for this formula: the melody had been completely dissolved in structure. He tried to identify two features of his experience that were conjured up by Millar’s playing. One perceived the way in which the sequences of notes were spread out over time. The notes, even though they had faded away in the usual sense, in another sense remained where they were, and subsequent notes were added as part of a structure, and thus, from one bar to the next, a kind of architecture came into being, one that was experienced as simultaneity. The leading notes currently sounding were, Perlmann thought, like the moving tip of a piece of chalk writing, the traces of whose past movements were seen as a whole on the board. But isn’t that always the case with melody? Isn’t that actually the essence of musical form? How come it sounds like something new and specific in his playing, something special? How does he do that?

The other effect of Millar’s playing was that one couldn’t surrender to the heard melody. One couldn’t allow oneself to fall into it for as much as a moment; one was kept outside as if by an invisible wall, and that made listening demanding, even though one wasn’t really aware of it. Perlmann tried out a series of descriptive words: austere, brittle, matter-of-fact, cold, intellectual, gothic. He rejected them all. They were superficial and clichéd. One had to take into account the fact that the special quality of Millar’s playing was not simply the expression of a temperament, a character, but that it represented an actual interpretation, an interpretation of Bach’s music.

Perlmann hid his right hand under his left and tried to play along with Millar’s right hand. As he did so he moved his feet inconspicuously. It was a long time since he had done that. Back then, as a sixth-former, he had gone to practically every concert in which a pianist was involved, and sometimes he had even hitchhiked to Lübeck and Kiel. His favorite concerts were pure piano evenings, when you could concentrate upon the pianist entirely without distraction. At the back, in the cheap seats, you could brazenly close your eyes and try to imitate the hands that were playing at the front. Most of the works that he had the opportunity to hear in this way he was already familiar with. His musical memory was – apart from Bach – excellent. It hadn’t been that. Does Millar know what that is: a frightening passage?

By now the guests from outside, who had previously been sitting at the dinner table, had arrived in the lounge. The ochre-colored armchairs were all occupied, the door to the bar was open, and the formal clothes contributed to the impression that a little concert was taking place. Millar had now been playing for half an hour, and all of a sudden Perlmann found his Bach flat and boring. He would have loved to run to the trattoria and read in the chronicle what had been going on in the world when he had heard the grey-haired, bent-backed Clara Haskil at one of her last concerts.

Millar, who seemed baffled by the size of the audience behind his back, thanked them for their applause with an athletic bow that reminded Perlmann a little of a salute. The loudest and longest applause came from Adrian von Levetzov, who at first looked as if he was going to get up, but then, after glancing around at the others, remained sitting on the edge of his chair.

‘¡Un extra!’ cried Evelyn Mistral. ‘How do you say that in English?’

‘Encore,’ Millar smiled, and when he saw the others nodding he sat back down at the piano. For a moment he took off his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘What we will have now,’ he then said with complacent thoughtfulness, ‘is a precious little piece that hardly anyone plays. For example, it doesn’t appear on a single record. It’s a little trouvaille of my own.’

After only a few bars Perlmann felt a sense of familiarity. With increasing clarity he had the impression that he knew this piece, or rather, he had known it well a long time ago. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the past, for a long time in vain, until it was suddenly quite naturally there. Hanna’s piece, of course. It’s Hanna’s piece. The one we called the ‘ingenuous birthday piece’, one of her favorites.

He immediately saw her before him: Johanna Liebig with the dark strand in her fine, golden hair, which framed an unusually flat face with a very straight nose and a bronzed complexion. You could call it a beautiful face, although you had to be careful not to say it to her. He had always found it a little unapproachable, and had feared the direct gaze from her hazel eyes, which she was able skilfully to deploy. That unapproachability was the reason nothing had ever happened between them. He simply hadn’t dared, and suddenly he had realized that it was too late. At the time he hadn’t known that there was a time for such things, and that you could miss it, and even today he didn’t know whether she’d been waiting for it. Then, after a time when she kept out of his way, they became good friends. They listened to each other’s playing and criticized one another, and sometimes they went to concerts together. She was more talented than him, but in her case he hadn’t minded. There was no competition between them, on the contrary, he didn’t mind her being superior to him, and mothering him slightly, in a mocking way. He only grew furious when she, who was able to take everything more easily, more playfully, accused him of stubbornness. That made him feel helpless, and afterwards he wouldn’t say a word; something that happened later with Agnes, when she tried to rage against his ponderous and often humorless manner.

‘What I like so much about it,’ Hanna had said when she played him the piece for the first time, ‘is its simplicity. I would almost say, its touching simplicity.’ He had understood immediately, but hadn’t been contented with the word. ‘Simple is too pallid,’ he had said after a while. ‘Ingenuous would be better, if it didn’t have that dismissive aftertaste.’ Then they had talked about the word for a long time, and to a certain extent rediscovered it for themselves. By the end the aftertaste had gone, and they merely found it a beautiful word. When he glanced at the score and saw that it was number 930 in the catalogue, he had laughed. ‘If you read the number the way the Americans write a date, with the month before the day, you get your birthday!’ And so the name had been born: the ingenuous birthday piece.

‘That was all Bach, of course,’ von Levetzov smiled, ‘but I can’t put my finger on that one at the moment. I know my way around Mozart better.’

‘Whereas I don’t know my way around anywhere,’ Ruge said with his inimitable dryness, receiving ringing laughter in which some of the other hotel guests joined in.

‘It was the second and third of the English Suites,’ Millar said in his explaining admiral’s voice.

‘English? Why English?’ Laura Sand asked with the sulky, irritable expression that she always wore when she didn’t understand something.

The title, Millar explained, crossing his legs, didn’t come from Bach himself. There was a copy of the score by Johann Christian Bach, who worked in London, and on it was written, without any further commentary, faites pour les Anglais. So people became accustomed to talking about the English Suites.

While Millar was talking, and extravagantly explaining every detail of the story, Perlmann suddenly had the feeling that he had made a discovery: The will to know something very precisely like that. That’s what I’ve always lacked. I only want to know the outlines of things, and I like it when the lines blur a little. That’s why academic research was always alien to me from the outset.

She would like to hear the encore again, Laura Sand said. ‘I like it. It’s so… ingenuous.’

As Millar was playing, she closed her eyes. Her face was beautiful; Perlmann hadn’t noticed that until now. Before, her furious expression with its mocking lips had dominated everything else. He had seen her as intelligent and interesting, as filled with a penetrating alertness, but not as beautiful. Now the long lashes and the almost straight eyebrows gave the white face, which the African sun had clearly been unable to affect, a marble calm. She looked exhausted.

Perlmann held Hanna’s face next to it. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled that this woman had used, in English, the very word that he and Hanna had used for the piece. Did that violate his past intimacy with Hanna, as expressed in their little naming game?

When she opened her eyes for a moment, Laura Sand must have seen that he was examining her, because an instant later she popped one eye open, and that one-eyed mockery was like a protruding tongue.

The encore had been a little Prelude in G minor, number 902 in the catalogue, Millar replied when von Levetzov asked him.

As with the discovery at the previous day’s session, Perlmann involuntarily sat bolt upright. His heart was beating like mad. Had he been mistaken, just because he couldn’t tell Bach’s pieces apart? Wasn’t it the birthday piece? While Millar spoke like an expert about Bach’s lesser-known piano music, Perlmann let the piece play out again within him. It was the piece, he was quite sure of it. So was the date he had in his head the wrong one? Was Hanna’s birthday the second of September?

After a few quick draws on his cigarette, he remembered: once they had gone to the circus on her birthday. Hanna had been furious that the trapeze act had been performed without a net. She had closed her eyes, and trembled afterwards. A few days later the youngest of the acrobats had fallen to her death, her body lying in the sawdust below. And the circus had always come to Hamburg punctually at the start of the autumn, not at the beginning of September. Millar is mistaken. Brian Millar, the star who knows everything, has made a mistake. And one that involves something he called a trouvaille. But be careful – to burst out with it before he had checked it would be too risky. Thirty years had passed, and the memory could play tricks on one. Of course, it was a ridiculously insignificant mistake. It was grotesque to make anything of it. But Perlmann felt it with almost physical certainty: while he was on his hobbyhorse, having to admit this tiny mistake, this utterly inconsequential mistake, would hit Millar in the middle of his vanity, it would hit him even harder than if he had made a mistake in his academic subject. And this time there was no Jenny to blame.

Two mistakes in the formulae, and now this. And it was always Philipp Perlmann who found fault with him. Millar would be fuming, this man who was now whipping his American ankle-boots back and forth, as he explained the difference between piano and harpsichord music to Evelyn Mistral, who was listening to him with an irritatingly devoted expression. I can’t afford to make a mistake. I must call Hanna. Tonight.

Luckily, the guests from outside – some of them slightly drunk – were so noisy that the group soon dispersed. Angelini, who wanted to go into town with Silvestri, said goodbye. He had been delighted to meet everyone. Had nothing changed about Leskov’s refusal? Shame. And that Perlmann’s session was going to take place on the Monday of the reception – that was still the case? He absolutely wanted to be there.

‘Will you tell me if the date changes?’

Perlmann nodded mutely.

‘Prometti?’

Again Perlmann nodded.

Angelini put an arm around Silvestri’s shoulder. ‘He will be the last to give a paper. Don’t you think he’s too modest?’

Perlmann didn’t wait for Silvestri’s reaction.

Back in his room, he didn’t even take the time to remove his jacket, but sat down on the bed straight away and looked up the international enquiries number. When he had lost touch with Hanna, she had been unmarried, and later someone had told him she was now a piano teacher in Hamburg. There were two Johanna Liebigs in Hamburg. Italian enquiries had no information about professions, so he asked for both numbers. As excited as he might have been before a first date, he lit a cigarette.

The first Johanna Liebig was an old woman who was outraged that someone should disturb her so late at night. Perlmann stammered an apology and put the phone down, disappointed, but secretly pleased about the little delay. The second number rang for a very long time. Then Hanna answered. He recognized her voice straight away.

‘Philipp!’ she said, much more quickly than he expected. ‘Philipp Perlmann! My God, how long is it since we heard from one another! Where on earth are you?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you remember the little Bach Prelude, the one that people don’t know, and that you played so often. You know, the ingenuous birthday piece.’

‘Yes, of course. What about it?’

‘Could you quickly play it down the phone for me?’

‘What – now? I’ve got guests.’

‘Hanna, please, it’ll just take three minutes. I need to know whether I’ve remembered it right. It’s important.’

‘But why in God’s name do you need to know now, in the middle of the night, after… wait a moment… after thirty years?’

‘Please, Hanna. Please.’

‘Like in the old days. OK, then,’ she said, and after a while in which he heard voices, a door closing and the loud sound of the receiver being put on the piano, came the piece that Millar had played.

‘So?’ asked Hanna as soon as the last note had faded away.

‘I wasn’t mistaken. Are you quite sure this is the piece? A hundred per cent? No mistake possible?’

‘Philipp! My pupils have to play it. You know how suitable it is.’

‘And your birthday is the thirtieth of September? And not the second?’

‘It still is. And incidentally that piece, the 902, is in G major.’

‘And the piece is from the Klavierbüchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach?’

‘Yes, Philipp,’ said Hanna as if to a troublesome child, ‘and it isn’t one of the two pieces some people think might have been written by the son, with the father’s help.’

‘Is it true that the piece hasn’t been recorded?’

‘No, that isn’t true. There’s a CD released by CBS. Glenn Gould, in fact.’

‘Hanna, you’re a marvel! But how will I get hold of it?’ Perlmann said out loud.

‘I can lend it to you, if that’s any use.’

‘It’ll arrive too late if you send it to me. I need to try to get it here tomorrow.’

‘So where are you right now?’

‘Near Genoa.’

‘Philipp, what on earth’s going on? You sound so strange, so… stubborn.’

‘I need to prove something to someone, and quickly.’

‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’

‘No, no.’

‘You just need to be right?’

‘Not that exactly, but not far off.’

‘You don’t seem to have changed very much.’

‘It’s a long story, Hanna, I’ll explain later.’

They were both silent for a while, until Perlmann asked in a different voice: ‘Do you remember: glass clarity with velvet edges?’

‘Of course I remember. The others laughed at us.’

‘Yes. But I’ve never heard a better formula for Glenn Gould.’

‘Neither have I. Do you still play sometimes?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not in a good way, are you?’

‘Not especially.’

Gently, as if it were fragile, Perlmann rested the receiver on its cradle. So that was how Hanna remembered him: as someone who always wanted to be right. That hurt, and he thought it was unfair. And yet after a while he admitted to himself that it probably wasn’t a coincidence. For example, the conversation from a moment ago: he hadn’t asked about her at all; he hadn’t asked a single question about her. He had effectively ambushed her with his urge to get one over on Millar, without giving her anything at all by way of explanation. Still, sitting on the edge of the bed, full of exhausted sobriety, he was shocked by the extent of his self-obsession. In the tiny world of this hotel he threatened to lose all sense of proportion.

So it was true that she had become a piano teacher. She had imagined things differently back then. I’ll visit her when I’m home again. In four weeks and one day.

Hanna had been the only one who had immediately understood his decision and found it correct. She knew the limits of his talent precisely, and she wasn’t, like the teachers, under a self-imposed compulsion to believe the student. Not that she said a single word to that effect. Not a single one. When he visited her that day, after he had closed the lid over the keys, she mutely stirred her coffee cup for a while and then asked simply, ‘So what do you plan to do now?’

That university studies would take the place of musical training was something as fixed as an axiom. He had to concede that he himself had also acknowledged this axiom, at least in the sense that he had never visibly resisted it. And yet, he thought today, it was not a principle that was the natural, undistorted expression of his feelings at the time, and in that sense his own principle. It had had its origin not within himself, but in his parents. Not so much in what they said – one could have defended oneself against that. What had exerted its unassuming, sly power was the whole way they were, the post-office worker and his ambitious, half-educated wife. She, the daughter of a director of studies, had never been able to cope with the fact that her husband wasn’t an academic, so the son had to become what the father was not. And the father, who depended upon her entirely in defiance of his domestic tyranny, had made that ambition her own. The pianist idea had at first made the parents insecure; but then they had started talking about the son as an artist, and of course it was much more than if he had just become one of the many academics who, as his mother said, were often rather respectable people. Then, when that flight of fancy had ended prematurely, a few days after the shock and recriminations, praises began to be sung about a solid academic career.

Perlmann could not remember a single conversation in which the pros and cons of university study had been discussed. Calling something so obvious into question was literally unthinkable. The worst thing, he thought, was that the silent power of this premise had paralyzed the imagination, about the very question of what one could do with one’s life as a whole – the most important question, then, that anyone ever addressed. When his interest in academia – or what he saw as academia – began to crumble, he had begun to investigate what professions other people were pursuing. He was utterly astonished by all the things there were that he didn’t know about, and then he began to irritate Agnes by complaining with childish fury that no one had told him anything about them. At first he fell into romanticizing other professions, above all those that lay far from his own. By now his gaze had become more sober and analytic, and always determined by the same question, namely whether he would have found it easier to experience the present in some other profession.

Tonight Perlmann quarrelled with his dead parents, because he thought there was a clearly visible causal connection between the unshakeable, rigidly dogmatic expectations they had imposed on their only child, and the fatal situation and inner misery in which he found himself at present. Tidal waves of accusation, of reproach, of reckonings of guilt and neglect buried him beneath themselves and dragged him, against all efforts of reason, away with them. When it was approaching two o’clock he took half a sleeping pill. At three he swallowed the other half. He was playing the A flat major Polonaise in front of an audience that seemed to extend infinitely back into the darkness of the hall. He knew he had to concentrate entirely on playing: everything depended upon him making no mistakes. Instead, he stared into the darkness of the hall and looked for Millar. He knew his gleaming glasses were there somewhere, but he couldn’t see him anywhere, his eyes streaming with exertion. Then, all of a sudden, Evelyn Mistral’s face appeared, with a radiant smile, as if she wanted to ask a question, but now it was Hanna’s face that studied him quizzically; it was Hanna’s face and also Laura Sand’s, mocking and white and still. From the very outset he heard the dangerous passage like a paradoxical, premonitory echo, he knew that he couldn’t rely on himself, that it was a matter of chance whether his fingers would do it right or not, whether they would be able to assert themselves against the paralysing influence of fear, his hands were sweating, the sweat was coming more and more, it was getting between his fingers and the keys, his fingers were slipping, now came the passage, he could hear quite loudly what it was supposed to sound like, but he couldn’t do anything, his fingers ceased to grip, it was a sensation of boundless impotence, and then he woke up with dry and very cold hands, which he immediately stuffed back under the covers.

9

The effects of the pill lay heavy on his eyes, but he still couldn’t get to sleep. While the first, pale light gave the bay an unreal presence, Millar’s invisible dream-figure transformed into a real person, to whom he had to prove his superior knowledge of Bach. But how was he to deliver that proof? Getting hold of the score was not a solution; on no account must it look as if he had made a special effort. The crucial thing, if he were to draw Millar’s attention to his error, was the incisive casualness of the man who had been familiar with these things for decades. The CD that Hanna had talked about. This would prove that it was a twofold error: it was not only the catalogue number that was incorrect, but the assertion that there was no recording. The story that it was a trouvaille thus acquired a ridiculous note in retrospect. Once again Perlmann heard Millar’s impossible pronunciation of the French word. You had to think about it for a moment before you understood. But the question about the CD was similar to the one about the score: how come he had it with him? A cassette would be easier to explain; with a Walkman, for example. He couldn’t have bought one of those little CD players that cost an absolute fortune. Or could he?

I happened to see it and just picked it up. That had exactly the right casual feeling, Perlmann thought as he shaved. And the sentence, if spoken in the right tone, had an urbane touch about it. The remark also explained why he didn’t mention it until the following day. Signora Morelli had already referred to the CD player in the drawing room upon his arrival.

He relaxed, and when he reached for the receiver to order coffee, he suddenly wanted to sit opposite Millar this morning, bolstered by the secret of his plan. On the steps he felt as if his brain were swimming around inside his skull. But somehow it would work. At eight on the dot he walked into the dining room.

Apart from the red-haired man from the pool there wasn’t another soul in the room. Perlmann greeted him and sat down in the other corner. He hesitantly ordered breakfast from a waiter he had never seen before. Then Evelyn appeared in the doorway and walked over to him with surprise. She had thrown a pullover over her shoulders, and her hair was tied in a ponytail. No, no, she said, communal breakfast was usually at eight, but for Sunday they’d agreed on nine. But that was too late for her today. She was plainly embarrassed at having to explain to him, the leader of the group. She straightened her cutlery and quickly changed the subject.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, ‘but the red-haired man’s name is John Smith. He comes from Carson City, Nevada. Brian talked to him recently, from one American to another, so to speak. He’s filthy rich and he’s spending his winter here. “It figures,” Brian said to him when he finally told him his name. If Brian despises somebody, he does it with good reason,’ she smiled.

‘And that must happen quite frequently,’ Perlmann couldn’t help saying.

Her hand, holding its croissant, stopped mid-movement. ‘You don’t like him that much, do you?’

Perlmann took a sip of coffee. His brain was swimming. ‘I think he’s fine,’ he said, ‘although he doesn’t exactly suffer from a lack of self-confidence.’

‘That’s true. But there is something he can’t deal with at all, and that’s Laura’s kind of irony. He gets completely helpless, and babbles like a little boy. But otherwise he feels he’s a match for everything – if I can put it like that.’ She gripped her ponytail, and the reddish strip appeared on her forehead. ‘Recently, at the session, I was annoyed at the way he treated me. Somehow condescending, I thought. But he played wonderfully last night, didn’t you think?’

‘Yes… yes, I did,’ Perlmann said haltingly, as if he had stumbled over a threshold.

Only the hesitation in the movement of her knife revealed that she had noticed his halting attitude. ‘I wish I’d learned an instrument,’ she said, and only now did she look at him. ‘My father urged me to; but at the time I didn’t feel like it. Juan, my little brother, did it better than me. He plays the cello. Not especially brilliantly, but he enjoys it.’

And you, do you play an instrument? He had to prevent that question being asked at all cost, so he asked more about Juan and the whole family, including the grandparents. One might have thought he was looking for material for a family saga.

They were in the doorway of the dining room when von Levetzov and Millar came down the stairs. They exchanged a glance that didn’t escape Evelyn Mistral. She raised her arm, made a delicate movement with her fingers as if doing a trill on the piano, took Perlmann’s arm with a smile and guided him out through the door to the flight of steps. It was only when they reached the promenade that she looked at him, and then they both burst out laughing.

She held his arm as they strolled along the harbor. Walking did Perlmann good, and the pressure above his eyes gradually subsided. Wrapped in the remaining after-effects of the pill, which lay on his eyes like a protective filter, he yielded to his imagination, which told him that he was enjoying this radiant autumn morning with the delicate plume of mist over the smooth, sparkling water. The present was within reach when Evelyn Mistral, who had now shaken her hair free, described Salamanca, and he was quite sure it would be his next travel destination.

They turned the corner and suddenly found themselves standing in front of a church, a bridal couple just coming out. He wished the photographs, the congratulation and the jokes would last much longer, and was disappointed at how quickly everyone suddenly climbed into the cars and drove away, honking jauntily.

Finally, Evelyn Mistral took his arm again and drew him gently away. It was nearly half-past eleven, she said, and she still had lots of plans. ‘I’ll be back at work two weeks tomorrow!’ Maria was already working on her first chapter, but in the second there were still so many gaps and incongruities that it was hopeless. ‘And when I think about Brian, Achim and Adrian sitting there…’

On the way back Perlmann had the feeling that his swallowing reflex had stopped working, and that he had to replace it every few seconds with an additional, almost already planned action. It didn’t mean anything, he said when she asked him why he was so quiet all of a sudden.

Back at the hotel he drew the curtains and lay down in bed. It was baffling, he thought, how little he had internally bridled against all that conventional business outside the church. What had the bride actually looked like? Her features were suddenly strangely blurred, and he tried in vain to give the face back its sharp contours. He fell asleep while doing so.

It was after three o’clock when he woke up. He showered for a long time, ordered coffee and a sandwich, and then sat down to Leskov’s paper. He wanted to finish it today. So that he could start on his own contribution tomorrow. He would just drop in very briefly at the trattoria to check on Sandra and reassure her about her test.

Sensory content? It was a while before he understood his marginal note again. Leskov himself now addressed this point, and Perlmann was waiting impatiently for his conclusion. But the paper approached the question indirectly. First of all it discussed the case of remembered emotional qualities. Again the text became very difficult, because now Leskov began to deploy the rich Russian vocabulary for emotions and moods, and the pocket dictionary was not up to these nuances. Irritated, and with a feeling of linguistic imposture, Perlmann inched his way along from one example to the next. The conclusion was concise: if the story of the experienced past is retold, the remembered qualities of the experience also presented themselves in a different way.

Perlmann was annoyed that he couldn’t understand the examples in all their depth because of the gaps in his language. It meant that he didn’t know what to make of the general assertion. And it was the key to what came next, because now Leskov constructed the case of remembered sensory impressions in analogy with the case of the emotions. The vocabulary for shadings in smell and taste became a problem, and there was much that Perlmann understood only very vaguely.

Could one rewrite a whole world of past sensory impressions in the course of a new narrative memory? He doubted it. What he had felt at the sight of the new patient in his mother’s bed might really look different, even in terms of its quality of experience, if the narrative memory were one day to take a different path – if, as Leskov wrote, it were on the one hand to describe larger loops and on the other hand to grow more dense. And something similar might apply to the internal drama that was played out that evening when his father accused him of ingratitude for breaking off his training at the Conservatoire. It’s my life, and mine alone, Perlmann had replied in a quivering voice before rushing into the night. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that different stories could give different shades to the remembered experience of that moment. If, for example, one added the contemporary insight that his life had remained under the diktat of parental expectations, in spite of the touching heroics of his rebellion, his fury at the time still felt quite different from what it might have been in a story of a successful liberation.

To this extent, then, one could follow Leskov. But the color of his father’s wool jacket, and the thumps on the coffin? Could that be rewritten? In a separate section Leskov, quoting no source, introduced Marcel Proust. But Perlmann found that less helpful than embarrassing, since it didn’t sound as if Leskov knew Proust at first hand.

He turned on the light. Another nine pages. In conclusion, Leskov wrote, he now wanted to address the question of what his previous conclusions meant for the idea of the osvaivat’ of his own past. The page on which osvaivat’ should have appeared was missing from the dictionary. Perlmann furiously established that three pages were missing. He flicked to the end and glanced at the last few sentences of the paper. And so, he hoped that he had shown, Leskov concluded, that the ability to narrate and the ability to create a particular, very individual past were in the end one and the same. In this way, language and experienced time were much more closely linked than one might at first imagine. No one – this was the last, rather bombastic sentence – had understood the nature of language if they did not see it as the medium which, above all others, made possible a sophisticated experience of time.

Perlmann set off for the trattoria. When he sat down to these last sentences after taking a break, he would also know, at last, the meaning of osvaivat’.

Sandra wasn’t there. A child needs to have a bit of a life, too, her mother said, so she had let her go out when her friends had called round. The test – God, yes. ‘Che sarà, sarà!’

Perlmann rested his elbow on the chronicle and smoked. He saw himself lying on his belly in the shade of the hotel garden, with his Latin book in front of his nose. Holidays on the Mediterranean, the first that his parents had been able to afford thanks to a small inheritance from Switzerland; then, seven years after the end of the war, still a sensation. Siesta time. Even his parents had had a lie down for a bit. Some of the hotel guests were dozing in the loungers on the beach. Over there was the sea, glimmering in the midday sun, and that shimmering glare, that was the present, the thing that really mattered. Some children were in the water, splashing each other and shrieking. Back then, of course, at thirteen, he hadn’t thought it explicitly but he had behaved and felt as if he had to master all those Latin words and irregular verbs before he would be allowed to go out into that glittering present.

Perlmann opened the chronicle. It must have been in July. He read what it said about politics as if it had happened before he was born, it had so little to do with his life at the time. That applied equally to Eisenhower and King Farukh, and the death of Kurt Schumacher the following month. Benedetto Croce, finally, was something from another world. He only remembered Juan Manuel Fangio, the racing driver, and the day after his return from Italy there had been that radio report on the funeral of Evita Perón. They had sat by the little radio, and the speaker’s melodramatic voice, hacked about with atmospheric disturbances, had turned the funeral procession into something mythical, making his mother cry. Was it then that he had started to understand the time difference between continents? Because it was very curious for hundreds of thousands of people to walk through the Argentinian afternoon late in the evening.

On the day of his visit to the circus with Hanna, the chronicle recorded only one event: Antonio Segni, who was still Italian prime minister at the time, set off on a trip to Washington.

A few weeks later the film The Bridge by Bernhard Wicki had been shown. Perlmann was already holding the tickets in his hand when Hanna had looked in the display case and said no, she simply couldn’t bear to see such pictures. It had been the start of the critical period between them, and when she had gone running through the foyer of the Film Palace, her coat billowing around her, it had looked as if she were running away from him rather than the images.

Sandra’s face was hot, her loose hair tousled. She greeted Perlmann only fleetingly, and the way her exuberance went out at the sight of him revealed that his presence reminded her of the test, and the fact that she didn’t want to think about it right now. Perlmann paid.

Assimilating, he thought as the hotel came into view: that might be the meaning of osvaivat’. Assimilating your own past through narrative memory. What could that mean in Leskov’s theory? And what else did it mean?

It was just before three when he had read the paper through to the end. Exhausted, he stepped to the open window. It was as quiet as the grave. He felt hungover and, what was worse, robbed of a support. What should he do now that the task of finishing Leskov’s paper no longer held him up?

What Leskov had written on the last pages, he thought as he got undressed and slipped under the covers, did not produce a clear, consistent image. First of all there was the idea that appropriation – if that really was the term – was a form of understanding: one appropriated one’s own past by giving it a meaning. It was the understanding achieved by narrative memory, Leskov continued, that produced the crucial feeling of belonging. And accordingly, he interpreted the taste of strangeness that a past experience might have as a lack in their understanding. It was through narrative memory, this was his rather pithy conclusion, that a person first acquired a spiritual identity beyond time. So: without language no spiritual identity.

Perlmann felt drawn to this thought; for several minutes he was enthused by it. Then again he felt uneasy: was there not also mental identity in the sense of an organic structure of feeling around which both a person’s actions and his imagination revolved, regardless of whether the structure of sensations was articulated in language or not? But that wasn’t the actual problem about Leskov’s theory, he thought, while, counter to his habits, he smoked a cigarette in bed. How did the business about appropriation fit with the thesis that remembering was in a certain sense invention? Appropriating – that assumed a given inner space of remembered experience that had to be paced out, so to speak, and conquered. But such a given inner space could, strictly speaking, not exist if past experience, even in its emotional quality, was only created by narration. Or not?

Exhaustion took hold of him, and he buried his head in the pillow. On the desk was Ruge’s paper, of which he had read not a word. And at some point in the next few days he would have to go and see Millar, who wanted to talk to him about his idiotic question. For a moment he rested on his elbows and made a frantic attempt to remember. But the question had escaped him, and he fell back on to the pillow.

In Santa Margherita, this little dump, he would hardly be able to get hold of the CD of Bach’s lesser-known Preludes. Should he try to do it in Rapallo, or go to Genoa? And how would he find the shop with the biggest range? Did taxi drivers know things like that?

He had taken such trouble with Sandra and now, standing by his table, she looked snootily down at him. And why were the pages of the chronicle suddenly stuck together? Two menacing shadows darkened everything, and when he looked up, Millar and Ruge were standing in front of him. Ruge was bent forwards, holding with his chin and hands on to a tower of paper that could at any time bend in the middle and collapse. Millar’s flashing glasses came closer and closer to the chronicle. The word sneering shot through Perlmann’s head, and in the middle of the desperate attempt to snap the chronicle shut in front of Millar’s nose, he woke up and heard the rustle of the rain.

10

As he sat at the front, in his inevitable brown suit with the too-short sleeves, on the ostentatious armchair, Achim Ruge looked like a member of the plebs who had usurped the Kaiser’s throne. He had – this was more striking than usual today – a problem with the switch from short-sighted to far-sighted, and constantly put his glasses crooked, making everyone scared that he would injure himself with the wire end that stuck inwards like a thorn. In spite of his bizarre pronunciation, his English was bafflingly fluent, and today, once again, he surprised Perlmann with his rich vocabulary, which made Millar’s oral mode of expression sound practically pitiful. Back at Harvard they had smiled at him at first. The peasant boy from the country, from Germany. Then, he delivered his first works on the theory of grammar, supposedly it was a hundred pages long. It went off like a bomb, and Ruge became a star overnight. He stayed three years. Then, when they made him a tempting job offer (the story continued) the American way of life wasn’t for him. He wanted to get back to the farm. And this from a boy who had grown up in Böblingen, the son of a tax official.

His paper began with a reference to experiments by Perlmann, which had attracted attention nearly ten years before, because they contradicted a current theory about the linguistic learning process. Perlmann had realized this with horror when he had sat on the edge of the bed, head heavy, quickly flicking through Ruge’s text. On the way down to the veranda Perlmann had tried in vain to call to mind the details from back then. It was all so far away. Only the summary that Ruge now repeated brought back the contours. But they were outlines of something that someone had discovered and plainly presented with verve at the time, but who was only coincidentally identical with him, Philipp Perlmann. Nonetheless, those experiments had established his position in the subject for years, and it had been a long time before the others had noticed that he had finally become a theoretical linguist. That this had come about because he didn’t like labs, and felt leeched dry after a day of teamwork, they could not know.

The bad thing for Evelyn Mistral’s father had been the other doctors and the nurses who stood around him when he was operating. Yes, exactly, Perlmann thought now, exactly.

It was strange – ironic, in fact, he said to himself as Ruge now explained his own experiments – but back then Perlmann had especially wanted to know something quite precisely, and this desire, atypical of him, had catapulted him into the spotlight. Or was what he had thought on Friday on this chair about his need for blurred lines wrong? Because his later works had been precise as well. Would they have been possible at all if there had not been a will to precision inside him? But those were two different things: the natural need and the learned will.

His writings were well liked among the students, they were well written and transparently constructed. What never came was a big hit like Adrian von Levetzov had had, and Millar with his book two years before. Perlmann was quite sure that the others sometimes wondered what, in the final analysis, his achievement really was. That certainty was always at the forefront of Perlmann’s consciousness when he was dealing with colleagues on technical matters. Then he would have an impressive idea and for a while all self-doubt was forgotten: he came up with arguments, observations and suggestions that were somehow original, too. You could see it in the faces of his listeners. He had won them round. A cushion of respect had come into being, and he stayed up half the night to hold on to the feeling. The next morning he was once again nothing but a hard worker wondering what he had achieved.

The next hour was entirely filled with a conversation between Ruge and Laura Sand, who compared her animal experiments, detail by detail, with what had been done in Bochum. To Perlmann’s surprise all the irritation and impatience had fallen away from her, and the concentrated peace and intensity of their analyses had something so hypnotic about it that from time to time even Ruge forgot to react. For the first time Giorgio Silvestri took notes. Only once was the atmosphere broken, when the red-haired American appeared and did his exercises outside the window. ‘John Smith,’ said Millar, keeping a straight face. ‘From Carson City, Nevada.’ Amidst the laughter Evelyn Mistral glanced at Perlmann.

The way the academic preoccupation with language sounded this morning, it was a good thing, thought Perlmann. An interesting thing that should be encouraged. And then, all of a sudden, he sensed that he was thinking this thought with a very particular internal attitude: like someone watching an academic program on television after work, before switching to sports.

It wasn’t really true to say that he was only marginally interested in language, but he wasn’t interested in it in this way. Dissecting, measuring, formalizing language: that basically didn’t interest him any more than chemistry. If languages constantly cast their spell over him, it was as a medium of experience, and above all as a means of feeling his way towards the present, which eluded his grasp with such diabolical dexterity. At the time it had seemed, when he was on the student secretariat, so natural, so logical, to enrol on the linguistics course. Many of the other things, like law or physics, ruled themselves out from the outset, so he didn’t even have to think about them. And medicine was out of the question, too: it meant far too much physical proximity to other people.

He liked languages. And you have such a facilité, his mother said, seeking with her sprinkling of such words to conceal her complete lack of talent for foreign languages, not least from herself. And besides, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. As with so many other things, the only thing that he possessed was hard work, endurance and an often blind constancy of will.

Achim Ruge had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. The two carved claws of the seat-back were wider than the armpits of the jacket, and stuck so far into the sleeves that they created the impression of a scarecrow that towered above Ruge’s big, bald head. But Perlmann didn’t want to be distracted either by that or by the ludicrous rubber bands on Ruge’s upper arms. For the first time he thought he understood his own choice of academia. It was a misunderstanding, nothing more. And this misunderstanding was fundamentally so simple, he thought, that it took one’s breath away: by leaving the Conservatoire he had said farewell to the hope of outwitting the present by playing the piano, and bending it to his will. Because the mere hearing of music would never extend further than to an intensified yearning for the present. And now he threw himself into a preoccupation with language as a medium that was supposed to take the place of music and replace the unfulfilled hopes for the present. These hopes had been so powerful, and so breathless the switch, that he had overlooked one simple fact: language created presence when one allowed oneself to fall into it, when one swam in it and played with it, and not when one dissected it and considered it with the eyes of one seeking for laws, for explanations, systematizations and theories. It was laughably simple, every child knew that. And yet he had confused the two things and had – in love with the impressionist, sensual density of language – devoted himself to an analytical effort that must systematically lead him away from what he was looking for, because it was quite simply defined in a different way.

While Silvestri was reporting on experiments into aphasia and thus provoking a heated debate, Perlmann was in the Auditorium Maximum of Hamburg University, accepting his record of study from the hands of the dean. Whether he really felt, when he saw beneath the photograph and his name the entry linguistics, that something was wrong, or whether he had retrospectively read his warning unease into that distant moment, was something that could not be decided. And if one believed Leskov, it was a meaningless question. At any rate it now seemed to him that he had been separated from the crowd of the others in the hall by a fine and unnameable gap that had something to do with the fact that those others had experienced their self-selected membership of a subject with greater enthusiasm. And the longer Perlmann reflected upon this insidious little gap, the more the suspicion germinated within him that his action had even then sprung from a vagueness and a lack of internal definition, on the basis of which indifference towards the whole idea of study and research lay an indifference that it had taken him thirty years to discover and acknowledge.

The departure of the others made him jump; he had been so far away. Didn’t he have anything to add? Ruge asked him on the way out. Perlmann was still filled with the insight that he had just gained into the logic of his misunderstanding, and managed a relaxed smile. He had just enjoyed listening for once, he said offhandedly. Otherwise one has to do so much talking.

‘Erm… well, yes, you’re right there,’ Ruge laughed, and it seemed to Perlmann as if his laughter was a touch less confident than usual.

Millar was leaning against the reception desk, playing with his room key. Now he walked up to Perlmann. What was happening about their meeting? ‘About that question, I mean.’

Perlmann asked Signora Morelli for the key and sought her eyes as if she could help him. The protection given him by his insight of a moment ago seemed to have been blown away.

‘I’ll give you a call,’ he said at last and disappeared so quickly into Maria’s office that it bordered on effrontery.

The many bracelets on Maria’s wrists clattered with every movement that she made at the computer. Today she had chewing gum in her mouth and, as usual, she breathed out the smoke as she spoke. Perlmann asked her to phone Rapallo about the CD. Laughing, she made the people at the other end look it up, in spite of the fact that it was the beginning of the siesta. Neither of the two music shops there had the CD, but the second offered to order it from Genoa, it would take between one and two days. Perlmann shook his head when she passed on the information, so she ended the phone call, puzzled by his haste. She showed no impatience when Perlmann asked her to try in Genoa. The chewing gum snapped from time to time between her teeth. She knew the big music shop in the city; she had, she said, grown up there. At first they said they didn’t have the CD, and judging by Maria’s face they doubted whether it existed at all. But then Maria said a few indistinct words, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, which must have been Genoese dialect, and then she asked them to take a look in the storeroom and amongst the new acquisitions. It took a long time. Perlmann felt uneasy, and he was grateful to Maria when she jokingly said that there must be some really lovely music on it. She was visibly relieved when she was finally able to tell Perlmann that the CD was there. It had come in the last delivery and hadn’t yet been properly unpacked. He asked her to see to it that it was set aside for him, and that it should on no account be sold. He would drop by in the course of the afternoon. As he left he would have liked to give Maria an explanatory word, but apart from a repeated Mille grazie! nothing came to mind.

He fetched money and credit cards from the room and then walked to the station. There was no point hurrying. He didn’t want to find himself, yet again, standing outside a shop closed for siesta. On the platform, where he had to wait for almost an hour, at regular intervals that remained inexplicable, one was assailed by a shrill ringing sound that penetrated one to the marrow. Luckily, the train was almost empty. Perlmann drew the grubby curtain over the window of his compartment and tried to sleep. A week had passed. A fifth. Was that a lot or not much? He wished Silvestri would make up his mind soon about whether he was going to deliver his lecture in the fourth or fifth week. If it was the fifth, Perlmann had only another fifteen days to write a paper. Otherwise it was eighteen days; nineteen, if he postponed the copying until Saturday. Sometimes Maria didn’t work on Saturday. Was copying possible anyway? Might she leave him alone with the machine?

Genoa was crammed with cars. All over the place trucks parked in the middle of the street to be unloaded. You sat at a green light, not moving an inch; a concert of car horns, it was hopeless. It was always like this, the taxi driver said calmly, looking at his flustered passenger in the rear-view mirror. Siesta? Yes, sure, but not for delivery men. At least not on Mondays. When they stopped outside the music shop after an eternity, the shop was still in darkness, even though the lunch break had been over for ten minutes, according to the sign on the door. Perlmann dispatched the taxi. Why didn’t people stick to what was written down? Why?

And then, as if his desperate irritation had suddenly woken him, it occurred to him that he would have to factor in at least two or three days for Maria to type out his paper. All of his previous calculations had been wrong. He took off his jacket and wiped his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief. In reality it was like this: if Silvestri opted for the fifth week, and if he also wanted to give Maria the Friday, Perlmann had no more than ten days. And if she was willing to write the whole thing out on Monday and Tuesday, that made thirteen, which required his colleagues to read the paper in a single day. On the other hand, if Silvestri made his presentation in the fourth week, that made sixteen days, again assuming that Maria could do it in two days and make the copies on Friday evening before she went away for the weekend. Trembling, Perlmann put his jacket back on and shook himself disgustedly as he felt his shirt sticking to his back.

He had to wait again in the shop because the man Maria had spoken to was late. Under the startled eyes of the salesman Perlmann tore open the wrapper and frantically fumbled around with the double sleeve without managing to get it open. ‘Ecco!’ smiled the salesman, flipping it open with a single, easy motion. The second of the two CDs was the right one. Perlmann looked for number 930, put the CD in the CD player and put on the headphones.

It was the piece that Millar had played.

His earlier panic had vanished. But he was disappointed that the feeling of triumph wasn’t stronger. That it wasn’t, in fact, there at all. Suddenly, the whole action struck him as entirely pointless – childish and pointless. He paid and stepped into the street, weary and ashamed. With a sluggish gait he set off towards the station.

At first it was hard to make out that behind the scaffolding there was a bookshop, which seemed just to have opened. Perlmann turned round and walked into the shop, which had lots of mirrored windows and was fabulously illuminated. With his hands in his pockets he strolled along the tables of bestsellers, past the shelves of literary fiction and back into the languages section.

The big book with the red back and black inscription immediately caught his eye. It was a Russian-English dictionary, and vice versa. The paper was thin and greyish, and when you touched it you were left with a soapy film on your fingers; but the entries for the words were very detailed and in many cases a quarter of a column long. Osvaivat’. Perlmann sat down in an elegant but uncomfortable chair and looked up the word. To assimilate, master; to become familiar with. He had guessed correctly: what happened in the process of narrative memory was, according to Leskov, that one mastered one’s own past and thus brought it closer; and those were precisely the elements in the term assimilation. Making it one’s own would be another formulation, he thought. How would one decide between those words if one were to translate the text into English?

He wished he had his vocabulary book with him, then he could fill in the many gaps in it via a detour through English. He looked along the shelf: they didn’t have a Russian-German dictionary. But they did have the German-English Langenscheidt that he, too, had at the hotel. Sich aneignen: to appropriate, to acquire, to adopt. So appropriating, it appeared, was the action of taking things into one’s own position, while one needed acquiring in the appropriation of knowledge, and adopting could mean assimilating an opinion and perhaps also taking up an attitude. He picked up the red dictionary again and looked up to appropriate: prisvaivat’. Then to acquire and to adopt: usvaivat’. Words, then, which were each distinguished only by their prefixes from osvaivat’. How precisely could one work out Leskov’s choice of words? Permann stepped aside to let a woman with enormous earrings get to the shelf, where she made straight for the little Russian-Italian dictionary. He was tempted to talk to her and draw her into his internal discussion, but she had already turned away with an absent smile and was walking to the cash register. You could not, he thought, appropriate your own past as you could a subject. And not like a piece of knowledge, an opinion or an attitude, either. Did appropriation not also mean recognition? For recognizing the dictionary gave soznavat’, which could also mean realizing; for acknowledging, priznavat’. Had he not seen one of those words while skimming Leskov’s paper?

He looked furtively around and set the dictionary slowly back on the shelf. Again his face was hot in that way that you could see from outside. Agnes had seen that heat, at any rate, when he sat on the floor with mountains of dictionaries, and she hadn’t liked that hot face. You look somehow… fanatical, she had once said, and it had done no good when she had later explained that it had been the wrong word entirely.

He was two streets on when he turned round. He stopped under the scaffolding for a while, teetered on his heels and looked into the gutter, where the remains of an ice-cream wrapper lay in a disgusting brown mush. Then he turned abruptly, went in and got the big red dictionary down from the shelf. As he did so, he saw in the mirror that he was wearing the expression of someone reluctantly performing a secret mission. Credit cards only from 100,000 lire, said the man at the cash register. Perlmann set down next to it the other copy of the Russian-Italian dictionary that the woman had bought before, and now that was enough.

Was assimilation really an adequate translation of osvaivat’? he asked himself in the train. Assimilating, when used about emigrants, for example, meant adaptation or conforming, which was quite far removed from the idea of appropriation. And mastering could, in principle, also mean keeping certain memories at a distance. Given that usvaivat’ was also to be found in the text, could one acquire something which, like one’s own past, already belonged to one? Fine, Leskov might say that before narrative memory it didn’t really belong to one… And what about adopting? Perlmann walked down the associative corridors that led off in his mind from the English word. You could also use it, he thought, when it came to absorbing a piece of culture or a religion. That meant that a certain internal detachment was involved, as when one was acting a part. And wasn’t there a hint of fakery and fraud in there as well? Then adopting would be impossible as a translation of usvaivat’ in the sense of appropriation. Or was it? For if narrative memory were a kind of invention…

Lots of people boarded the train at Genova Nervi, and the carriage became very noisy. Perlmann had to struggle to concentrate. Appropriating the past: didn’t that also mean standing by it? And what would be the best English word for that? He lost his thread for a moment, and slipped into an exhaustion that often came upon him when he spent too long sitting on the floor with dictionaries. At Recco Station it occurred to him: endorsing. Under the curious glances of the people sitting opposite him he looked it up, balancing the big dictionary on his knees. Indossirovat’. But that seemed to be a word that only occurred in a financial context. Podtverzhdat’ in the sense of confirming. Did that word occur in Leskov’s text? He looked out the window, past the eyes of the others, into the gloom. Incorporating something, it seemed to him, was also part of the meaning of appropriation. But now the train stopped in Santa Margherita.

‘One moment, please,’ he said afterwards to the taxi driver. He set the dictionaries down on the lid of the trunk and looked up incorporating. Vkluchat’. It seemed to him that he had read that. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said to the baffled driver.

In his room he immediately sat down at the desk. He was glad that he hadn’t stacked the books up as he had in his first room. In this way he could comfortably set out the material that needed to be translated. Above all, there was enough room for the Russian-English dictionary, which, when it was opened, occupied almost half of the desktop. The other dictionary, the one that the woman with the huge earrings had bought, he pushed into the right-hand corner at the back. He had never seen earrings that size before. He had liked the emerald green with the fine gold edge.

He started where Leskov began to speak about the idea of appropriation. For osvaivat’ he wrote both assimilate and master, with a slash between them. It was a much slower process than translating into German. On the other hand, it was much more exciting, and if he managed an English sentence easily he breathed out heavily with joy. Often, on the other hand, easiness didn’t come into it. Comprehension was also possible when there were vague edges of meaning. Then, without really noticing, one brought along the great diversity of knowledge that accompanied every word in one’s own language, and that knowledge enabled one to fill in the gaps in comprehension when confronted by unfamiliar foreign words. Translation from one foreign language into another, on the other hand, ruthlessly exposed the smallest uncertainty in one’s linguistic sensitivity. Of course, that applied particularly to Russian. But Perlmann also quickly got a sense of how great his uncertainty was with regard to certain English expressions, and there were sentences when both sides blurred, it was like an equation with two unknowns. At such points he became aware of how many things he had hitherto simply ignored.

And, nonetheless, from the start it was like a fever that he didn’t want to come to an end. He had filled almost two pages, when the word priznavat’ arrived. He was about to see if there was a translation other than to acknowledge, when he remembered dinner. He irritably slipped into his jacket and dashed down the stairs. The waiter was already clearing away the soup plates when Perlmann sat down at the table opposite Millar.

Only now, at the sight of Millar’s face, did Perlmann remember the CD. He reached into his jacket pocket and felt the cool plastic of the packaging. He had the sense of touching a relic from some past inner world that looked ridiculous in retrospect. And had Millar’s face not shown disapproval of his repeated lateness, he would have let things lie.

‘Oh, by the way, Brian,’ he began, trying to keep all sense of triumph out of his face, ‘that encore you played on Saturday isn’t number 902 in the catalogue. It’s 930; 902 is in G major.’

He had managed to say it in a relaxed, almost playful manner, and a touch of awareness of how ridiculous the whole business was had made its way into his voice. But now a silence fell upon the room, where the only person who wasn’t part of the group was John Smith, and gave the scene an ominous feeling of drama.

Millar straightened his glasses, leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. He stuck out his lower lip for a moment, shook his head barely perceptibly and said with a smile that made his eyes narrow:

‘Quite frankly, Phil, I don’t think I’m wrong there. I’m pretty familiar with the lesser-known Bach.’

Perlmann took his time. He held Millar’s challenging gaze. This one time he found it wonderfully simple. Their eyes locked onto each other. That moment compensated for much, and he savored it. After what was about to come, Millar wouldn’t dare to return to the business about his idiotic question.

He took the package containing the two CDs out of his pocket, let his eye rest upon it with theatrical elaborateness, and then pushed it slowly across the undulating tablecloth to Millar. Laconically. Very laconically.

‘You can see your mistake for yourself. It’s a very popular recording, by the way. You can have it.’ He was glad that he had said mistake and not error. It sounded more like school and would hit him harder.

Von Levetzov looked curiously across to Millar and then at Perlmann with a smile that was supposed to indicate that this time he was on his side. He’s an opportunist, a conversational optimist, who always throws in his lot with the stronger battalion.

Ruge smiled as well, but it was a smile without partisanship. He was simply amused by the matter; he who was always ready to attack in debates, and loved an exchange in which someone stood to win or lose.

Millar had opened the CD case, and shook his head with his lips pursed. ‘The label on the CD – that doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘It’s all in the booklet. In the other case.’

Millar contemptuously let the side of the booklet slide along his thumb. ‘That would mean that it’s a piece from the Klavierbüchlein,’ he said, and the comedy of his unsuccessful attempt at an umlaut took some of the contemptuous sharpness away from his words. ‘And it isn’t one of those. I’m absolutely sure of that.’ He snapped the case firmly shut and pushed it across to Perlmann, who left it in the middle of the table, right next to the gravy boat.

‘Well, Brian,’ said Perlmann, and tilted his head to the side as Millar often did, ‘we can listen to the piece over there later on.’

‘Yes, please,’ Laura Sand joined in. ‘I love that simple tune.’

If there was anything ironic about her remark, it was only the merest hint. But Millar irritably raised his eyebrows as if someone were mocking him in the most brazen way.

‘Well, Phil,’ he said, aping Perlmann. ‘Liner notes can contain mistakes, can’t they? It does happen. Even on CBS. No, no, we would need the score.’

‘Which could also be misidentified,’ said Silvestri, blowing smoke across the table.

‘Well now, Giorgio,’ snapped Millar.

‘Buon appetito,’ Silvestri grinned, raising his glass.

Millar stayed out of the rest of the conversation. He stared at the plate in front of him. Only once did he glance past Perlmann into the room, but lowered his head again immediately. Evelyn Mistral giggled, and when the others turned round they saw John Smith raising his glass to Millar.

‘By the way, Phil,’ Millar said suddenly over coffee, ‘how come you happen to have a copy of the record on you?’ He rested his chin on his folded hands and looked steadily at Perlmann. ‘Sort of a fluke, huh?’

The cool, casual sentence that Perlmann had had ready was gone. There was nothing there but a void, and in it his old fear of Millar. He put another sugar lump in his coffee and stirred it. He saw the ice-cream wrapper in the gutter and the emerald-green earrings. The translation of Leskov’s text was waiting for him upstairs. Suddenly, the sentence was there again. He looked up, and it was as if he could feel the collective eyes on his face like the heat of a lamp or the faint sting of a salty breeze.

‘I happened to see it and just picked it up,’ he said. It didn’t sound worldly, more embarrassed and apologetic, and he feared Millar’s next remark. Then he heard Laura Sand’s dark, throaty laugh.

‘A trouvaille, in fact,’ she said, and gave Millar one of her ironic glances as she stubbed out her cigarette.

There was mute, helpless fury in Millar’s face as he folded his napkin. He was the first to rise from the table.

Perlmann took the CD from the table. She would really like to hear it, Laura Sand said with a mocking glance at Millar, who was energetically striding through the door. Perlmann nodded and walked ahead of her. On his way into the lounge he felt as shattered as if he had just been through a long day’s competition.

Millar didn’t come in until the CD was already playing. The fury in his face had made way for a scornfully cagey expression. With ostentatious boredom he let his eye glide around the whole of the lounge and set his glasses on his head from time to time, so that he could get a better view of something in the far-off corner.

Perlmann was holding the CD booklet in his hand. ‘That was number 902 in G major,’ he said once the piece was over.

‘Oh, I know that piece very well, Phil,’ Millar said smugly. ‘It is, I fear, number 902a. In G major.’

Perlmann looked at the booklet. ‘902a is only a third as long. Not quite, even. You’ll hear it in a moment. Because this is the piece coming now.’

Millar’s face twitched, but he didn’t say anything. In the short pause before Hanna’s birthday piece Perlmann waved the booklet at him, pointed to a line with his index finger and said, ‘Now. Number 930.’

Millar raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t understand, and went on surveying the room.

‘I should point out the mistake to CBS,’ he said when the last note of the record had faded away. ‘I could also point out to them that I don’t think it’s a particularly good recording. Glenn Gould, of course.’

Then, in the foyer, he stepped up beside Perlmann. ‘Have you forgotten our appointment?’

‘No,’ said Perlmann, resisting his blue gaze. ‘By no means.’

Afterwards, at the desk, it was immediately clear to him again where he had broken off his trail of thought before: was there another translation for priznavat’ apart from to acknowledge? That was important, because of the inventive components that narrative memory had, according to Leskov. Wouldn’t it sound strange to talk about acknowledging one’s own inventions? Didn’t one tend rather to acknowledge facts?

Before he looked it up he paused, so as to be clear about the strange sensation that accompanied his renewed concentration on Leskov’s paper. He was surprised how quickly and easily he managed to brush aside the battle with Millar in which he had just been involved. Such things usually preoccupied him for an unreasonable length of time, and often one would have said that he was being persecuted by them. It was as if at the sight of Cyrillic script he had gone into a different room within himself, and closed the door behind him. It was wonderful being behind that door, which protected him against everything that raged in him outside it. The thought of what might be going on in him beyond the door, and beyond that in the outside world, could not be suppressed; but it was present only as a faint glimmer in the background, and one could get used to ignoring its occasional flickerings.

Priznavat’ could also mean admit, and priznanie was plainly the classical word for confession. Here again Perlmann wrote down all the possibilities. All his fatigue fell from him now; he was busy starting something new and exciting.

Admittedly something – something outside – was still missing to make everything right. It was a while before he hit upon it. Then he fetched the ladder from the end of the corridor and restored the gloomy lighting in the corridor ceiling lamps. Now it was good. Now he could work.

The business about appropriation was still unclear at four o’clock in the morning. Once Leskov used podtverzhdat’ and three times vkluchat’. So there was also an idea involved that one appropriated a piece of the past by making it part of a whole, which was oneself. One brought it, if it had previously been alien, back within this unity.

Apart from the fact that, of course, the idea of wholeness or unity required explanation: what could this process of integration look like if it was supposed to be the case that narration was what created memories in the first place? Was it true to say that the various narratives grew increasingly together, so to speak? Making something one’s own, sich etwas zu eigen machen – one thought at first of a piece of substance, a solid core that was extended by the new, which had hitherto remained outside. But for Leskov there could no such solid core, a constant that was taken for granted in all narrative appropriation, because what applied to one piece of memory applied to all. If he was ready to claim that a self, a person in the psychological sense of the word, had no solid core and nothing whatsoever in terms of substance, but was a web of stories, constantly growing and subject to a constant process of relayering – a little like a structure of cotton candy at a carnival, except without material? Perlmann grew dizzy at the thought, and excitedly turned his attention to the next paragraph.

It was half-past five when weariness overtook him. Seven of the nine last pages of the text were translated. It was years since he had been so proud of something. And it was, he thought, the first time in ages that he had managed to immerse himself so thoroughly in something.

Since Agnes’s death. He took her picture from his wallet. She was reclining on a lounger on the beach, her arms folded over her head, her sunglasses pushed into her chestnut hair. Her water-clear gaze, which had so often given him courage, was directed at him, and it was plain that she had just been mocking his wish to have a color photograph of her.

During that holiday they had learned Cyrillic script and their first Russian words. She had been faster then him. She had done it playfully, while he had as usual worked methodically, almost pedantically. While she was grasping whole words at once, he still had to think about each individual letter.

Perlmann turned off the light. She had driven that stretch of road hundreds of times, briskly and confidently. Until that jinglingly cold morning. She had only wound the window down a chink, and the waving hand in its black glove had looked doll-like and mechanical. They had both laughed, and in the middle of that laugh she had scooted off in her ancient Austin, a racing start down their shovelled driveway. She hadn’t driven more than ten minutes to the road through the forest. A film of powdery snow over treacherous black ice, a moment’s inattention. The photographic equipment on the back seat had been undamaged.

11

Three hours later, on the veranda, Perlmann struggled to keep his eyes open and poured one cup of coffee after another into himself. Silvestri grinned when he saw him reaching for the pot again, and rubbed his eyes as a sign of sympathy. Ruge was now explaining the part of his text that had nothing to do with Perlmann’s experiments. He wore a baggy, roll-neck sweater that hung in untidy folds over the collar of his jacket and made his neck look even shorter than usual. At first Perlmann attributed it to his own weary head, in which there were repeated little absences, but then he became aware that Ruge really had lost his concentration this morning. His presentation was halting and disjointed, and his eyes lacked their usual belligerent, roguish gleam. Increasingly often he ran his hand over his bald head and turned the pages as hesitantly as if he didn’t understand a word of what they said. And when he put his glasses on his head, with his sparse ring of grey hair he looked like an old man who was losing his sight. The lack of pleasure that he emanated transmitted itself to the others, too. Not even Millar stepped in when the pauses were drawn out. And for a while the session seemed to be going completely wrong.

In the end it was Evelyn Mistral who saved it. She asked a critical question, and when she saw the others nodding with relief she went on talking and, speaking more and more freely, developed a long train of thought that made the others reach for their pens after a while. The strip of red appeared on her forehead, and her explanatory hand movements were more vivid and expressive than Perlmann had ever seen them before. The nervousness with which she had previously had to battle in this room fell away from her, and only every now and again did she slip her heel from her right shoe. Later, when she became the center of a lively debate, she often tossed her hair to the left as the answers and interjections formed with her, to free her face from the hair that she was wearing loose today. But rather than swinging back, her hair hung in front of her face like an untidy veil, so that when she looked up from her notes only half of her glasses could be seen. Then she blew upwards from the left-hand corner of her mouth, and as that generally didn’t do the trick, at last she brushed the straw-blonde strands out of her face with her hand. When the coffee had produced a jittery alertness in him, Perlmann feverishly tried to find a possible way of contributing something to the discussion. But his thoughts were always too slow, and the two conclusions that he attempted were so ineffective that he started to feel like an onlooker. Both times Millar simply went on talking, without even turning to look at him, as if there had just been an irritating noise that he had had to let wash over him.

It had stopped raining, but dark clouds still hung over the bay, and drops fell into the gravel from the white tables on the terrace. The young man with the rucksack and the cape who now entered Perlmann’s field of vision had a hesitant gait, and was looking round like someone afraid of being caught doing something forbidden. He looked up at the facade, took a few steps towards the swimming pool, and when he saw that people were sitting on the veranda he walked quickly back to the steps. The gauntness of his build and the way he had held his cigarette reminded Perlmann of something unpleasant, something that had happened during the university holidays, but shortly before he could grasp hold of it, it had disappeared back into his exhaustion.

True, in fact, Millar was saying, this was the ideal opportunity to calmly revisit the various grammatical theories of the past few years and attempt to achieve some kind of balance. Achim and he himself could start work on it tomorrow, and then they could go through things together on Thursday and Friday. Would Adrian mind if his session was moved to the start of next week?

That means everything’s shifting by half a week. That means that my turn isn’t going to come in the fourth week. Which leaves me with fifteen days, assuming that Thursday and Friday are enough for the copying. He thought it was a good idea, Perlmann said when the others looked at him quizzically.

‘Talk about a good idea!’ Evelyn Mistral said to him when they were the last to leave the veranda. ‘It gives me half a week extra! Shall we celebrate in town with a pizza? In spite of the rain?’

He would rather rest for a while, he said; he had slept badly.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said and touched him lightly on the arm.

When he woke up just before four, Perlmann suddenly knew what the young man in the cape had reminded him of. For the third time Frau Hartwig had reminded him to answer a letter about his working with an Israeli colleague; so just before the end of the day he had visited the office and dictated his refusal. After that he had gone through the rest of his mail, and because he was busy hurling a book catalogue into the waste-paper basket, he had almost failed to hear the hesitant, guilty knocking.

It was a student, a gaunt young man with a protruding Adam’s apple and sticking-out ears, holding his hand-rolled cigarette noticeably far away from himself, as if it disgusted him. In the labyrinthine building he had lost his bearings, and actually just wanted a lecture list. Perlmann asked him in and quizzed him for more than half an hour; the boy didn’t know what was happening to him. Perlmann even asked him about his holiday plans and his financial situation, and suppressed the question about a girlfriend only at the last moment. Afterwards, he was shocked by his own lack of detachment. A few days later the boy had come towards him with his girlfriend on the other side of the road. Perlmann had given a start when he saw the two of them whispering and laughing, and had had to warn himself against becoming paranoid. The girlfriend was very pretty, and the boy had no longer seemed intimidated and helpless. Even his ears didn’t seem to stick out so much. Now Perlmann remembered very clearly what he had thought: I’m losing my power of judgment. If I ever had one.

He showered for a long time to wash away the memory, and then started reading Leskov’s paper from the beginning. Now, going through it for the second time, he understood everything much better, and read the first paragraphs astonishingly quickly. The new dictionary was really fabulous; only the greyish paper with its soapy smoothness was still unpleasant to the touch, so that he needed to wash his hands every now and then. The programmatic sentence at the beginning of the text wasn’t a problem in English, and it was only in the examples for the concept of a remembered scene that he faltered. His concentration waned, and he started feeling uneasy. Sandra. The test. Shortly before eight he crept out of the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.

The proprietress asked jokingly where he had been yesterday, and then she called for Sandra, who came running over, ponytail bouncing, and put her open exercise book on his plate. There was still a lot of red on the pages, but it had been enough to get her a satisfactory mark – the first in weeks. His meals would be free for the rest of the week, the proprietor said, clapping his heavy hand on his shoulder. And he was to order the most expensive thing on the menu!

Perlmann opened the chronicle at the assassination of Robert Kennedy. That was right: only a few weeks before, while he had been preparing for his doctoral examination, Martin Luther King and Rudi Dutschke had been shot as well. Prague Spring. The student unrests in Paris. From week to week, almost from day to day, the tension between Perlmann’s personal concerns about the examination and the assistant’s post, and the political developments out in the world had entered his consciousness with ever greater clarity. What was more important? What did important mean in this context? And in what sense could one speak of an obligation to participate in the political developments? Was it clear what participate meant? For a while he had changed his habits, and read the newspaper before he arrived at his desk in the morning. But it went against his feelings and so, without finding an answer to his questions, he had gone back to his old, reverse rhythm.

It had been on the train to Venice that he had read about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the newspaper. Perlmann rested his head on his interlocking fingers and thought back to that moment in Mestre when the train turned on to the embankment to Venice. He had stretched his head out into the warm evening and repeated the magic word: Venice. Even now the moment was still so vivid that he thought he could see all the other heads and outstretched arms along the train. And then, as they entered the station, he had seen his newspaper on the seat, open at the thalidomide trial. Already clutching his suitcase he had looked once more at the pictures of crippled children. A painful alertness had passed through him as he realized that he was, in his significant irresolution, the last one standing in the compartment. Since then he had experienced in countless variations that conflict between his own happiness and his sympathy for the suffering of others. He had finally left the newspaper where it was, and the terrible pictures of the children had been washed away by the noisy, wonderful hubbub of the station.

The pigeons had brought them together, the pigeons in St Mark’s Square. As he stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching them land on the heads and shoulders of the tourists, he, too, had suddenly found himself in the middle of a cloud of flapping animals whose wings smacked along his face and just missed pulling off his glasses. He felt as if he were being ambushed, and he had flailed his arms excitedly around. He had only noticed Agnes, with her big camera in front of her face, when the pigeons had stopped bothering him. Her camera clicked a few more times, and then for the first time he saw her clear, water-bright gaze and her mocking smile, softer and lighter than Laura Sand’s, because there was no background of rage.

She had come towards him in her light trousers and ankle-strap sandals. ‘I hope you’re not cross with me,’ she had said, and, as on countless subsequent occasions, he had been surprised by the darkness in her voice, which didn’t match her transparent eyes. ‘But it just looked so funny when you were defending yourself there. As if you were fighting a hailstorm or a typhoon. There was a story in the scene. I have to capture things like that. It’s like an addiction. If you like, I’ll send you a few prints.’

Before he had had a chance to answer she had laughed out loud and pointed to his hair. ‘No, don’t touch! It’s full of pigeon poop!’

When she discovered that his hotel was at the other end of the city, she pulled him with her to the little albergo around the corner where she was staying. He had to kneel on a stool, and then, in the cracked and stained washbasin, she had washed his hair. Her gentle, practical manner broke all resistance. She couldn’t explain to him why she had spoken to him in German, she said as she rubbed, something about him had just looked that way.

Back in the street she soon said goodbye to him. An appointment with a colleague from the newspaper. He had scribbled his address on a piece of paper, and then she had disappeared into the nearest alleyway. It had all been like a ghost story. He was glad that he hadn’t written his newly acquired title of doctor on the paper. And he had no idea what he felt when he sat afterwards in a café in St Mark’s Square, listening to music as he spent the little money he had on ridiculously expensive drinks, so that he was left with nothing to pay for dinner. Or rather he did. He knew one thing: he liked the way the episode with that woman had flashed into his life and cut into his present-poor time without either history or aftermath.

His train home left at noon the following day, and as he had only been there for three days he left the hotel early in the morning to see more of the little unspectacular canals and bridges. And then they met for a second time. Agnes was quite different from the day before, much more reserved, and at first he had the feeling that he was just bothering her. But then, looking again and again through her viewfinder, she had started talking about light and shade and the magic of black-and-white photography. He had felt like a blind man learning to see. Afterwards, over coffee that he paid for with the money he had set aside for a sandwich on the train, she wanted to know something about him. Linguist, he said, and before that he’d played the piano. Chopin. ‘Yeeesss,’ she had said with a nod, her eyes half-closed. And then, once again: ‘Yeeesss.’

On the long journey his thoughts had kept returning to that ‘Yeeesss’. Had it signified agreement? Agreement with him? Or had his information only confirmed her first impression, which might also have been negative? In all the years that followed he had never asked Agnes; he couldn’t say why. That mysterious ‘Yeeesss’ had also kept him from discussing the business about the thalidomide children, which had suddenly leapt out at him from time to time during those days, when the moment seemed to be perfect.

Which of his fellow passengers had it been who had lent him L’Espresso? Perlmann immediately recognized Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem, which the chronicle republished; it was the one that had been in the magazine that day when he was travelling home: When you fought the policemen yesterday in Valle Giulia / I sympathized with the police / Because the police are sons of the poor, they come from the outskirts, whether urban or rural. And then he accused the students: You have the faces of spoiled kids /… / You are fearful, insecure, desperate. Perlmann had been preoccupied with that poem for a long time, because it struck him that there was something in it, and at the same time thinking something like that struck him as an act of disloyalty. He had avoided the countless teach-ins over the years that followed, and had instead, in the silent library reading room, pursued the question of how the peasants of Andalusia had worked out the idea of freedom and self-determination during the Civil War.

By the time Agnes’s photographs had arrived, Venice was but a pale memory, and his excitement about the assistant’s post kept him on tenterhooks. Never before had he seen such vivid pictures of himself. Or such funny ones. One, in which a girl with Asian features stuck her head at an angle into the picture, even had a certain slapstick quality. And what was incredible: in these black-and-white pictures St Mark’s Square was drenched in a light more glowing than he had ever seen in color.

And yet he was startled to the core: the panic that had filled his eyes at his encounter with the pigeons revealed a profound fear of life. There’s a story in the scene, she had said. He hoped the camera exaggerated. Or else that Agnes didn’t see what he saw. Both were unlikely. Weeks passed. In the end she was the one who rang.

The chronicle was already an astonishing potpourri, Perlmann thought. Between an analysis of the way in which the Italian press reacted to the student revolt, and the report on the Soviet troops’ invasion of Prague there was a gossipy article about Sophia Loren’s latest affair, which was only slightly shorter. The photograph of the diva was in fact slightly bigger than the picture of tanks in Wenceslas Square. He would have liked to go on reading, but he was the last one in the restaurant and the proprietor was yawning as he cleared up. And tomorrow Perlmann wanted to get a good bit further with Leskov’s paper.

By now it was a familiar experience, walking across the deserted Piazza Veneto to the hotel. He wondered whether Leskov was really giving an accurate account of the matter of the self-image. His examples, he now noticed, were always about someone making a decision or at least performing a pointed action that was preceded by a process of reflection: a proclamation was signed; the military doctor was duped; a marriage concluded against the will of the parents. That in such cases there was a remembered self with complicated contours that could only be articulated linguistically was clear. But what about when he remembered the pigeons that had besieged him? Agnes might have been right that there was a story to be told about him. But he, the one who was remembering, didn’t know it, not even now. All there had been, it seemed to him, was panic and sweat and flapping feathers. And if he read a self-image into that frantic confusion, then that picture consisted of contours of feeling and nothing else. Everything else was impenetrable; that was part of the specific nature of that panic, and also of its power.

A calmer example of his past self, which resisted narrative disclosure, was the very correctly dressed young man from those days who had been irritated by the spinsterish librarian in the reading room, because she had asked him why he wasn’t over at the teach-in. And what about that wide-awake moment when his joyful excitement about Venice and his horror at the thalidomide children had collided? Perhaps, he thought, these things would become clearer in Leskov’s work if he now exposed what he had skimmed through in an impatient first reading to the precise attention of a translator.

Someone had rung from Germany an hour ago, said Giovanni. As far as he had understood, it had been Perlmann’s daughter.

Perlmann immediately called Kirsten.

‘You were away for a long time,’ she said. ‘Do you often go out with your group?’

She was nervous about her presentation. Only one more week. She was desperate about Faulkner’s remark that the relationship between the two stories was one of musical counterpoint. From one day to the next she found the various theories about the unity of the whole more and more incomprehensible. She wondered whether, contrary to most interpreters, she should claim that the unity didn’t exist at all. Or, at best, only in Faulkner’s mind. She didn’t have time to write out a whole paper, she would have to make do with detailed notes.

‘What do you do if you have a blackout and suddenly don’t know what to say?’

‘You won’t have one,’ said Perlmann, and heard how disappointed she was by his silly answer.

12

Wednesday was a radiant late autumn day with a horizon that dissolved into a dreamlike haze. When Perlmann got up from his desk and looked down at the terrace he saw Millar and Ruge, who had sat down to one side at a table full of books and papers preparing the next two sessions. Once he stepped to the window just as John Smith was approaching them with an affable gesture. Millar’s reaction was plainly so unfriendly that Smith immediately turned on his heels and trotted over to the pool.

The translation was coming on nicely, and Perlmann was becoming practiced at quickly retreating behind his fortress of dictionaries after looking out of the window. He would have liked to walk over to the window less often; but there wasn’t much to be done. When he had finished a paragraph, he picked up the Russian-Italian dictionary as a reward and translated some of Leskov’s easier sentences into Italian. Then he imagined sitting in a circular room whose walls were filled to the top with dictionaries. He would walk along these walls and translate more and more new sentences into more and more new languages. There was no reason ever to leave this room, because this was the place where he found his actual will. Here, after more than three decades, he could roll back the misunderstanding that he had become aware of back then in the Auditorium Maximum, without recognizing it or being able to keep it from unfolding.

At noon he went to see Maria in the office and asked her the Italian word for self-image. To explain to her that he didn’t mean autoritratto, self-portrait, he sketched out something of Leskov’s train of thought. She was immediately gripped by the subject and kept asking him questions until he had given her an outline of the whole text.

‘So that’s what they’re talking about on the veranda!’ she said at last, and choked on her smoke. ‘I wish I could listen in!’

He hastily turned towards her screen and asked straight away if that way of writing wasn’t tiring on the eyes after a while.

Now came the four sentences in Leskov’s text that had hitherto been a complete puzzle to him. With the help of the new dictionary they were soon translated. But it was a long time before Perlmann had worked out the concise and awkwardly phrased argument for the necessary linguistic nature of self-images.

Seeing a past action as meaningful meant attributing reasons for it to one’s past self. But reasons related to one another as only sentences can. Hence the differentiation of the self-image that bore the memory was possible only through language.

It was a strikingly simple thought, and at first sight it seemed telling. But when Perlmann lay down on his bed to rest, his doubts began to accumulate. Was it true that one considered oneself in the light of one’s reasons when one looked back? And what did the internal wrangling which – at least for him – tended to precede an important action, have to do with logical relationships between sentences? Not to mention all the ambiguities and dichotomies that ran through the emotional life, and which one sometimes remembered very clearly. Again he saw himself standing in the empty train compartment, looking at the thalidomide children and then stepping on to the platform, into the echoing voice of the loudspeaker and the unfamiliar smells.

Suddenly, Leskov’s train of thought seemed to collapse like a house of cards, and when he began translating again he felt sobriety, almost reluctance. But that passed quickly when he managed some elegant English sentences, and in the course of that afternoon he understood that apart from joy in the sensuality of language there was also something else that drew him irresistibly to translation: one could think without having to believe anything, and one could speak, without having to assert anything. One could deal with language, without having to be concerned about the truth. For a man with no opinions, like myself, translator or interpreter would have been the ideal profession. The ideal disguise.

When Perlmann next looked down at Millar and Ruge, von Levetzov was sitting at the table as well. There was a hurricane lamp between the papers, and the waiter was arranging the cable of the standard lamp, which he must just have put there. From time to time, Millar rubbed his bare forearms, before starting to speak again, making energetic gestures. Now Ruge shook his head, picked up a sheet of paper and held it up in front of Millar’s nose with two fingers like a search warrant, as the American went on speaking.

At that moment Perlmann knew that he would never, never again, want to take part in a debate. He didn’t want to be attacked ever again, and never again did he want to have to defend an opinion that was no more his own than was any other opinion.

Now he couldn’t find his way into Leskov’s text. The words he had written out over the last hour seemed to be extinguished within his head, and his vocabulary book struck him as the symbol of eternal homework which one would never finish, however long one lived. When he got a Cyrillic letter wrong twice in a row, he realized that he had had enough. He had thought he was on his way to see Maria to ask her about the lovely old fountain that he had stood by for a long time in Genoa two days previously, before he discovered the bookshop in the next street.

But then he found himself in the corridor at the end of which was Evelyn Mistral’s room and, after a brief hesitation, he knocked.

She had really organized her room. While up in his own, his unpacked suitcase and the plastic bag of dirty laundry stood under bare walls and his coat lay on his unused bed, here everything was tidy and inhabitable. She had put her second bedside table next to the desk as a storage space, and although there were stacks of paper and books lying around all over the place, it didn’t look chaotic. On the walls there were two posters of Rome and Florence and a row of photographs. Push pins weren’t permitted, she laughed, but Signora Morelli had allowed her to use them. She stood for a remarkably long time in the corner by the window, and when he looked towards the photograph behind her head she became embarrassed and held her hand over it. It was a picture of her dog Totó.

‘And he’s been dead for a year,’ she said. ‘Crazy, isn’t it?’

Perlmann sat down at the antique table with the ornate legs, and looked at her across the bunch of flowers. If she had – that night in that huge kitchen in Salamanca – understood her father’s problem, then she could understand his misery now; in spite of the silver glasses that lay on an open book on the desk in the beam of light from the lamp. He smiled, and when he then took a deep breath, it was like a long run-up to something risky.

‘I recently told you about Juan, my brother,’ she said and got up to fetch a letter from her bedside table. ‘Now the lunatic writes that he’s giving up his studies and going into films. He wants to be a cameraman! He hasn’t a hint of training in that direction.’ She narrowed her eyes and held the paper far away from herself. ‘And then this remark here: “And even if I can only carry the cables for the first few months…” Dios mío, he’s so brilliant, he could have studied law standing on his head!’

‘I envy him,’ Perlmann heard himself saying, and then again: ‘I envy him a lot.’

Puzzled, she folded up the letter. ‘That sounds as if you want to run away on the spot.’

Did he see in her smile a willingness to sympathize with such a wish? Or did her reaction to Juan’s letter reveal fixed boundaries of understanding? The red elephant on the suitcase: what did it represent?

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and straightened a flower. ‘It’s just… sometimes I think we don’t try nearly enough things out before we settle on one. Out of fear, probably. A fear that can become a prison. Juan doesn’t seem like the fearful type.’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘quite the opposite: sometimes I think he has the soul of a gambler. Then I worry for him, and get annoyed about his irrationality. But basically, I think I love him for it.’ She looked at her watch and disappeared into the bathroom to change for dinner.

They were already in the corridor when she stopped and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You are joining us for dinner?’

He hesitated and looked at her uncertainly.

‘It would be better,’ she said quietly. Then she took him by the waist for a brief moment and pushed him slightly. ‘Come on,’ she laughed, trying to parody Millar’s pronunciation, in which an o sounded like an a.

Her touch a moment ago, he felt, protected him as they entered the dining room, and that protection continued until the waiter cleared away the plates from the starters. Then Millar abruptly turned aside from Laura Sand and looked at him.

‘I’m slowly coming to think you would prefer to forget our appointment about your question. Or am I mistaken?’

‘Yes, you are,’ Perlmann replied, and was glad that he didn’t need to say anything further. His reply had sounded firm, and it had even contained a challenge. But it didn’t correspond to anything inside him. Inside there was suddenly nothing but a vulnerable void, and it didn’t help at all that Evelyn Mistral was sitting next to him.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Millar, stretching the last syllable out until it sounded grotesque.

It was this melodious sarcasm that tipped the balance. Perlmann felt himself getting hot, and he was fleetingly brushed by a warning sensation, and then the attack that seemed to come from nowhere started moving relentlessly within him.

‘By the way, Brian,’ he began, and tilted his head involuntarily to the side, ‘I was reading a newspaper article about that fellow Chessman, who was gassed in your country in 1960. He was on death row for twelve years. The execution was postponed eight times, always a few hours before the appointed day. I’m sure you know about that?’

Millar wiped his mouth so slowly that the movement looked affected. Laura Sand gave Perlmann a penetrating look.

‘Now, Phil,’ Millar said at last, ‘I was eight years old at the time.’

‘But Americans know about these things, don’t they?’

‘So what?’ Millar’s voice had become very quiet.

‘What? You mean…’ Giorgio Silvestri joined in.

‘No. Of course not,’ Millar interrupted irritably, ‘all that toing and froing was impossible.’

For a moment silence fell around the table; the voices of the few other guests and the muted clatter from the kitchen could be heard. Silvestri twirled a Gauloise between his fingers as if he had just rolled it. He looked at Millar with a dark gleam in his eyes.

‘But basically you think it’s all right for people to be gassed? Or strapped into the electric chair?’

Millar’s cheeks suddenly looked hollow, and it was as if he had blanched under his tan.

‘I have no definitive view on the death penalty. But there are points in its favor. And rhetorical tricks won’t help you at all.’

Silvestri violently pushed his chair back and had already half-risen to his feet when he calmed himself, picked up his cigarette from the floor and pretended to be examining a wobbly chair leg. There could have been an explosion between the two men at any moment, and the others all seemed to start breathing again when the waiter came in with the main course.

‘It’s the impersonal, bureaucratic aspect of an execution that makes my blood boil,’ Laura Sand said a moment later. ‘Quite apart from the terrible details of the killing. I always have the same picture in front of my eyes: two uniformed men with doughy official faces dragging this person, who has done nothing to them, along the corridor and strapping him in. When I see the stupid rectitude of their bootsteps, I always think I’d be capable of shooting at those uniforms,’ she said and clenched her fists.

‘The state has a monopoly on violence,’ von Levetzov broke in.

‘Exactly,’ said Perlmann, ‘that’s exactly why you mustn’t give it that power.’

‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ von Levetzov reassured him.

‘Anyone who thinks the death penalty worthy of consideration is suffering from an incurable disease: a lack of imagination,’ said Silvestri, who had regained control of himself and avoided Millar’s eye.

Evelyn Mistral rested her hand on his arm. ‘That’s what we always said at home, too. Our example was the garrotte, which we had right through to the end of Franco.’

‘You probably think you’re the only person with an imagination,’ Millar said to Silvestri. ‘I think that’s presumptuous.’

‘I feel much the same as Laura,’ said Ruge, ‘but we must be honest: there was also Höss.’

‘And Eichmann,’ added von Levetzov.

Perlmann had thought much the same, sitting in the trattoria, and he had felt uncomfortable not knowing what to think about it. Now, when he saw Millar nodding, something within him made up its mind.

‘The victims should have gone to Buenos Aires,’ he heard himself saying, ‘rather than the secret service. And once they got there they should have shot him down. And the same with Höss.’

Millar curled his lips and looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought, Phil, that you were in favor of lynch law.’

Perlmann felt as if he were stumbling. ‘Killing must be based on a personal relationship,’ he said quietly, stirring his coffee. ‘A hatred for one’s tormentor, for example. Otherwise it’s perverse.’

In spite of the sleeping pill, Perlmann woke up twice that night and lay awake for a long time. He thought of the vulnerable void that had spread within him after Millar’s remark, and the inner violence that had suddenly blazed through that void. He kept thinking about those two things, and no longer understood himself.

It was nearly morning when he found himself back in that circular room full of dictionaries. A calm, milky light fell through the conical glass roof. The room didn’t have a door. It didn’t need a door. It was silent. It was unreachable, untouchable. It was wonderful. Then the room began turning around him, and with him at the same time. The revolutions became increasingly swift, the bright spines of the books became colorful smears that grew paler and paler until they merged into a paper-thin wall of the palest grey, which only survived for a short time before collapsing under the merciless glow of noon and revealed the view of the bay, which was full of shouting children. He was high above the bay, but that didn’t matter, he would just step out into the light, everything was very easy and full of hope, and it was quite incomprehensible why his head should have collided with a diamond-hard, invisible wall. It allowed itself to be touched, that strange wall, but then again it didn’t, because the touched resistance could not be distinguished from an unresisting void. He feverishly tried to find a door, but the wall with its unyielding void mercilessly made his damp hands slip, so that he sank to the floor and suddenly felt his pillow growing damp from his tear-wet face.

13

For the two days after that Perlmann tried to be as unnoticeable as possible during the sessions on the veranda. Even though it had been a long time since he had looked at grammatical theory, he was still familiar with the difficulties of the individual proposals, and twice he managed to express objections that surprised and impressed the others, so that even Millar raised his eyebrows and nodded grudgingly. After that, on each occasion he could slip back into the background.

While listening, he had an experience which, he now became aware, had accompanied him for a long time, but which he had never been able to imagine so clearly before: every time a new title was mentioned, or a label for yet another theory, he gave a start, and the complicated Latinate word seemed like an instrument of torture, because his first thought was always: I don’t know and I should know. But then, when they talked about the theory, he realized time and again that he knew it down to its smallest details. In fact, he knew it at the very moment of horror, one might almost say that this knowledge was part of his horror, and gave it its peculiar coloring. Except that the knowledge had no power of any kind over the horror. And over the years, he thought, the horror at a supposed gap in his knowledge had become a horror at the powerlessness of knowledge. Knowledge was like a wheel rotating at an overheated rate, without moving anything in his soul and without being able to protect him against the iron logic of its experience. Perlmann thought of the sentences of hopelessness that Jakob von Gunten had written down.

After the sessions he slept into the afternoon and then sat down to Leskov’s paper. By now he had worked out in English Leskov’s theoretical vocabulary. There were some repetitions, and the more abstract passages went relatively smoothly. The only difficult parts were, time and again, the examples with all their sensory details and nuances. Even now he sometimes found himself at a complete loss with them, and in some cases the English text, black with corrections, remained hopelessly wooden and clumsy.

One particularly hard nut to crack lay in the many examples with which Leskov illustrated his argument that narrative memory was unscrupulous when it came to defending the moral integrity of the past self. He cited clinical material that had been assembled by two of the pupils of Luria, the famous Russian neuropsychologist. These consistently concerned people suffering from a moral trauma. The extent of the confabulation and reinterpretation of past actions took one’s breath away, and even Leskov himself was plainly struck dumb by them, because he could hardly stop giving examples.

And then came a piece of text describing how some of these people, when their truthful memories were too oppressive to be straightened out, split internally and kept the transgressive self away from the unstained self that was a refined fabrication. Perlmann stayed up half the night polishing these examples. And as he did so he discovered that in his impatient first run-through he had skipped a whole paragraph explaining the idea of these internal separations with reference to the ramification of stories. Leskov, it was clear, was playing here with the many Russian words for the concepts of separation and splitting, and it made Perlmann furious that he simply had no feeling for the nuances and had in the end to level everything out into splitting and fission. For the first time he found the new dictionary disappointing. Razdvoit’ was cognate with dvoinik, the word for a double or doppelgänger. But what exactly did that kinship mean? Then there was a missing sentence that would have given an example to confirm his suspicion that razyedinyat’ referred to the separation of people, although that – but even here he wasn’t entirely sure – wasn’t right for the severing given in the dictionary. And it was particularly irritating that the dictionary gave him no help as to whether he could use the obvious word cracking without doing violence to the text. When he looked through the English version of this section on Friday before he went to the trattoria, he crossed out the names of Luria’s pupils, and adapted the rest of the text accordingly. Who cared about those names anyway?

It was noisy in the trattoria that evening. Some sort of club that the landlord belonged to was celebrating its jubilee, and even Sandra had to help in the restaurant. She had kept the little corner table free for Perlmann, but soon he was joined by an old man with a pipe and a beret. ‘Big fat book,’ the old man said when Sandra brought Perlmann the chronicle. Then the old man’s eyelids closed slowly, and he seemed to go to sleep over his beer.

Perlmann had been surprised when Agnes had suggested getting married on the anniversary of their first meeting in St Mark’s Square, the day that she called the day of the pigeons. She normally rejected anything that carried a whiff of sentimentality. But he had liked it, and at the register office he had used all his powers of persuasion to make it possible.

Then, when they were waiting for the train to Paris that day, the headlines of the tabloids announced the death of Louis Armstrong, and now it seemed to him that the photograph used back then was exactly the same as the one in the chronicle. Agnes, who affectionately called him Satchmo, had been very quiet for a while after that, and when they got home to their first shared apartment, they had listened to the many jazz records that she owned. Their responses had been strangely contrasting: while he started liking these sounds, which had accompanied Agnes for a long time, to her they seemed suddenly alien. He could no longer remember the details, but at the end of their conversations on the subject they had decided to buy a used grand piano on instalments.

At the newspaper stands in Paris, too, Armstrong’s death had been the predominant theme. At the corner next to the hotel, even today, there was a kiosk, as he had seen straight away when he had travelled to Paris in the last days of the previous August, because the start of the new school year with its noisy fervour in the playgrounds had thrown him into a panic. But today the kiosk looked quite different from before, when he had gone to fetch the paper every morning for ten days. And the hotel was barely recognizable, too. That had unsettled him. As if the world’s chief task were to serve as a stage for my memory. He had trudged morosely through the hot streets and wondered what he was doing there in Paris. Everything was different from how he remembered it, and with every discovery of that kind his French got even worse, so that the waiters answered him in English or German. After the second night he had taken the early train home.

The pipe fell out of the old man with the beret’s mouth as he slept. He started awake and downed his glass in one. He looked curiously at the picture of Charles Manson being led along a corridor by two prison wardens. His tired face contorted into a grin and then, with the edge of his hand he made the gesture of a throat being slit, accompanied by a click of his tongue.

Perlmann quickly flicked back to the previous year. The picture of a thalidomide child, and next to it a report on the suspension of the trial. Was the report bitterly ironic or not? His Italian wasn’t good enough to tell.

The invasion by the Americans of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Perlmann flicked three years ahead: Nobel Prize for Henry Kissinger. That had been a month before Kirsten’s birth, when Agnes was finally able to leave the hospital, still weak from the infection. No, Kirsten’s leukemia had had nothing to do with that infection, the doctor had reassured them two years later. Frozen with fear, they had spent whole nights wondering whether they should take the risk of chemotherapy, which had only just been developed. For months their fear overshadowed everything else, and the news from the rest of the world bounced off it. Even the last American helicopter lifting off from Saigon left him cold.

Only the death of Dmitri Shostakovich got through to him. It had been incredible to see him come on to the stage in person after the twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, his homage to Bach, had faded away. A man with round, horn-rimmed glasses in his pinched, twitching face, who had on the one hand written this music and on the other been caught up in his love-hate relationship with Stalin. For the first time Hanna had been sitting next to Perlmann at a concert. Her bandaged, blistered hand, which had forced her to take a few days’ break from playing, had been in her lap. He had very much liked her simple black dress.

The old man had simply got up and left, without paying. Perlmann paid for him, and there was a debate because the proprietor didn’t want to take any money from him except for the beer, because of his extra tuition. ‘See you next week!’

Today a crazed motorcyclist was driving around the deserted Piazza Veneto. The roar of the engine could be heard all the way to the hotel.

Giovanni handed Perlmann, along with the key, the four texts that Adrian von Levetzov had distributed for his session on Monday. It was almost 200 pages in all. Perlmann set them on his suitcase and then fetched the ladder to unscrew the lightbulbs in the corridor, which had all been put back in.

14

Waking from a few hours’ troubled sleep, at dawn Perlmann sat down to Leskov’s text. Now came the sections which were supposed to show that not only the interpretation, but also the experienced quality of remembered feeling depended upon narration. If narrative memory became both more extensive and more dense – this was the thesis – it could be that the coloring and shade of remembered experience changed dramatically. It was, Perlmann thought, clever of Leskov to operate even here with terms like coloring and shade, which actually belonged in the domain of the sense of sight. He was thus rhetorically preparing the later thought that where the suggestibility of qualities of experience was concerned, sensory impressions behaved no differently from emotions. But was his thesis, in fact, accurate where the emotions were concerned?

It all depended on the examples. During his first attempt, they had defeated him because his pocket dictionary contained only a small part of the vocabulary that Leskov was drawing upon. That problem was solved. But now he discovered once more how uncertain he was, deep down, with the English words. It wasn’t crude uncertainty, based on simple gaps in his knowledge. He was familiar with all the English words. But it was as if, when he tried them out, he was on shaky ground that could slip away at any moment – it was a bit like walking on a thin layer of fresh snow over black ice.

That applied particularly to coloring, shade, tint, tone and nuance. What, for example, would the selection of words be like if it came to describing the colors of autumn leaves? And what about the political hue of a daily newspaper? If one were to slip at this point, Leskov’s text could easily be messed up, and even made to look ridiculous. And it was much the same with the naming and description of emotions and moods. Abandonment wasn’t the same as loneliness; melancholy and grief were not to be confused; cheerfulness and serenity – what about those? It was, he thought, difficult even in one’s mother tongue to distinguish between purely rhetorical variants and tangible emotional differences. And the further removed the foreign language, the less certainty there was in the matter.

But in that case how could one know whether an example really was evidence for Leskov’s thesis? And could one honestly expect this area of vocabulary to be clearly transferred from one language to the other? Or was it the case, in the end, that each language categorized the experienced inner world in a slightly different way? And did that support or contradict Leskov’s thesis?

Perlmann was torn between the vexing uncertainty that hung over his translation, and the cheering feeling of just having developed a new thought. The hours flew by. Every now and again he walked to the window and looked out on to the bay, which was filled once again with the glowing autumn light, so different from the broken, pallid light that would now be falling on the trees outside his window at home.

Aside from the task of translating: what was the actual substance of Leskov’s thesis? Would remembered anxiety really change if the story of Kirsten’s leukemia had ended differently? Would not the terrified wait when the young doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses had picked up the final lab report be fixed in his mind forever, just like the thump of the clods of earth on his mother’s coffin? And the unforgettable mixture of admiration and trepidation that Shostakovich’s appearance had prompted? Were such things not simply part of a solid core of past experience, around which there grew stories that one might rewrite several times in the course of a life, leaving the center of experience itself unchanged?

Trembling with hunger and exhaustion, Perlmann went to the trattoria at about half-past two. The only thing that interested him in the chronicle was the day when his anxiety about Kirsten had come to an end. No other day had embedded itself in his memory with such diamond-hard precision. Not even the day of the pigeons. Agnes had touched his arm when the doctor, holding the lab report, gave them the liberating information. Then they had walked across half the town, showing each other the colors of the gleaming wet autumn leaves, over and over again. For the first time he had cancelled his teaching duties with a lie, and they had gone to Sylt for a week. Those were days full of presence, days of wind and expansiveness and relief.

The fact that the death of Jean Gabin had been in the paper at the time had escaped him. Now that he read the long article in the chronicle Perlmann remembered telling Agnes the story of the film Le chat, while they tromped gurglingly through the mudflats. For years, Gabin hadn’t exchanged a word with Simone Signoret because she had killed his beloved cat out of jealousy. When they were sitting opposite one another by the fire in the evening, he would hand her a piece of paper that always bore the same words: le chat. She put these pieces of paper in a drawer, and one day, when she got clumsy, they all fell on the floor, hundreds of them. Agnes had thought the movie was monstrous, and Perlmann was ashamed, because Gabin’s behavior in the film wasn’t all that strange to him.

The first time since his arrival, Perlmann felt the need to leave after dinner, and near the hotel he found a small path leading into the hills. As he tapped rhythmically on the stone wall with a stick, he tried out Leskov’s theory of the emotions, which he had recalled in the trattoria a short time before. But then he simply yielded to the pride that soon he would really have translated this long Russian text into English. He had another eighteen pages before the conclusion, and seven of those he had recently dealt with, even if there were still minor gaps involving the problem with the concept of appropriation. When the path turned and ran parallel to the slope, he supported himself on the wall and looked down at the town and the sea. The translation will be ready by the middle of the week. Then the neat stack of pages would lie on the otherwise empty glass plate of the desk. He had done something he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of doing. He felt that he, whenever he thought about this moment, should also really have thought beyond it. But that didn’t work. It didn’t work.

In the middle of the week, half of his stay was over. And yet from a presentless time the mountain was just as high as it been at the beginning. And it was all much worse than it had been at the start, because the fear that ate like a silent acid into his pride as a translator – and hollowed it out so that it might collapse at any moment – made the mountain look like a gigantic wall that leaned towards him, with every heartbeat a tiny bit more.

‘It’s basically impossible to capture this light on film,’ said Laura Sand, setting her big camera bag down on the wall next to him. ‘It’s as if a luminous depth is something quite different from the physical radiance to which the film reacts.’

Perlmann had given such a violent start that she rested her hand on his arm, startled, and apologized. It was always the same, she said. David, her husband, often jumped because she was so quiet.

‘That’s balanced by Sarah’s noise! Especially with her bloody aerobics!’

They stayed together until dusk. She didn’t really like people watching her take photographs, she said at one point. ‘But since it’s you…’

She taught him how to see. Like Agnes. And yet quite different. Agnes had always talked about light, form and shade, brightness and depth, planes and edges. Listening to her, one might have thought she saw the world as a deserted geometrical structure. And her actual theme was human movement. Not just any movement: moments that point beyond themselves, scenes that concealed a story within themselves and forced the viewer to invent that story. Narrative photography she had called it. You understand: colors would only disturb us, distract us from the essential. It’s important for the man on the platform to explode in his movements when he glimpses the woman on the running board. The color of his coat is irrelevant.

She had had an incredible instinct for the density of moments. And her patience had been incredible, too, when she had waited hours and days for dense scenes, in pubs, at stations, at the beach, once even at a boxing match, which she loathed. When that wait even exceeded her patience, she had been tempted to start smoking again.

Laura Sand’s thinking was quite different. She thought in colors and moods, and what she said about them in the course of the morning contrasted so blatantly with her love of black clothes that Perlmann came close several times to talking to her about it. She used only color words that he had never heard before, and when she noticed that he couldn’t get over his astonishment, she laughed her throaty laugh and went on: ‘… medium flesh, canary, rose madder lake, magenta, true blue, sap green, sanguine…’

No, she wasn’t interested in people – ‘when I’m taking photographs, I mean’. At first, she had only taken landscape shots, and later, in connection with her job, animals had joined them. David had to take the holiday snaps.

‘He thinks I’m a misanthrope,’ she smiled. And after a pause she added: ‘He knows me well. “That’s why you leave the monkey talk to other people,” he said again recently, “monkeys are far too much like people.”’

Impressionist photography, she called her idea.

‘Actually impossible. Physical events are far too dense. I’ve become an expert in filtering things out. My theory is, in fact,’ she laughed, ‘that it has much more to do with the gaps – the void – than the rest. David and Sarah have been teasing me about it for years, and at David’s poker game my theory has turned into the monthly running joke: “So from now on let’s build the houses with a load of void, it’ll be cheaper.” Oh, well. It’s a weird theory anyway, and sometimes I don’t even understand it myself.’

You wouldn’t have to worry, Perlmann thought, about this one delivering the kind of remark that Agnes came out with at the airport that time. Standing on the moving walkway, he had turned round to look at a big poster for Hong Kong, a picture with soft, velvety contours, a dreamy picture. Nice bit of kitsch, Agnes had said, a bit like the way you look at the world. Then, probably startled by her own slipped-out observation, she had laughingly taken his arm and pressed her head against his shoulder. Don’t be cross, she had said quietly as she felt how stiffly he was walking on. At passport control he hadn’t, as he usually did, turned round again. On his return they both made more of an effort; she was particularly attentive, and talked more than normal. They didn’t mention the remark. But for a while he was rather monosyllabic when she showed him her pictures. A thin fissure had remained between them, barely visible and yet never quite forgotten.

It was night by the time they entered the hotel. After Signora Morelli had given them their keys, Perlmann would have liked to voice his feeling that the past few hours had meant something to him. But the few steps to the elevator didn’t give him enough time, and when Laura Sand looked quizzically at him, it was as if anything that might have developed into a suitable sentence had been extinguished. He raised his hand with the key, it jingled faintly, and then he went upstairs, alone, and was glad that no one had done anything to change the gloomy lighting of his corridor in the meantime.

It was pure nonsense, he thought under the shower: what was there to make her suspicious? He had asked her whether severing was an apt word for the splitting of a personality; then they had talked for a while about cracking; in the end she had, with a laugh, explained the Australian phrase cracking hardy. Then it had seemed for a moment as if she wanted to ask him the reason for his particular interest in these words, but he had managed to change the subject. No, it really couldn’t be said that he had given himself away.

Lying on the bed, he thought again of Agnes and what was special about her photographs. Sometimes she had spent months taking pictures only of the faces of ancient people, it had been like an addiction. The series had been a hit. She had had an eye for details, a gaze, it seemed, that could give a detail a stressed and unusually intense presence – as if it were her gaze that had fetched that detail from the blurry distance of a shadowy, temporal existence into the brightly lit present of solidly outlined forms. How he had envied her that gift!

She had never planned for it, forgetting things, losing her overall vision in her chaotic jumble of notes. Then he was the one who had jumped in to straighten things out. As a result he had become a compulsive planner, a fanatic of the overall vision. That had been the price, the price for her present.

The dining room looked very different this evening. Most of the circular tables had been replaced by a festively decorated dining table, and garlands of colored paper hung from the garlands. It was a wedding dinner, served by two extra waitresses who had been hired specially, as Adrian von Levetzov was able to report.

‘Hungry again?’ Millar asked, looking at Perlmann with his head inclined and a resigned smile on his lips. Perlmann said nothing, and concentrated on the shellfish starter. The jokes being made at the big table were hard to make out; most of the wedding guests spoke a dialect that he didn’t understand.

Now von Levetzov was telling everybody about a book about Henry Kissinger that had been discussed in the Herald Tribune.

‘That war criminal,’ Giorgio Silvestri said tightly. ‘He urged Nixon to bomb Cambodia and Laos. They were neutral countries at the time. That man ought to be up before a court.’ He looked challengingly across at Millar, who was dissecting his fish. ‘Isn’t that right, Brian?’

Millar slid his fish knife carefully under the spine, then used his fork to release the whole skeleton before setting it down on the edge of the plate. The corners of his mouth were twitching. He savored the moment. At last he took a sip of wine, dabbed his lips with his napkin and returned Silvestri’s impatient gaze with a soft, warm smile that Perlmann had never seen on him before.

‘Absolutely correct, Giorgio. That was exactly what I wrote in the college paper at the time. On the first page. After that my parents’ check didn’t come through for a while.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And it never really sorted itself out.’

It was incredible how quickly Silvestri’s face reacted. Barely had there been a hint of surprise and bemusement than his tense and hostile expression collapsed to make way for a grin, which revealed as clearly as in words that he had underestimated Millar. He raised his glass to him. ‘Scusi. Salute!’

It took Perlmann much longer to deal with his surprise. Millar as a spokesman for the student movement? He glanced furtively across at Millar, who was now concentrating once more on his fish. Something within him began to move, as slow and creaking as a rusty cog. Perhaps, out of pure fear, Perlmann had got him wrong. Fear was a feeling that degraded other people into mere screens. He was about to declare him a sign of his altered perception, when that silly remark over dinner occurred to him, and he devoted himself once more to the task of removing the head of his fish. It was only when the waiter had cleared away the plates that his irritation had sufficiently faded.

‘One question, Brian,’ he began, and then set out his uncertainty about the various English words for color and shade. Once again Millar surprised him. He tried out the different words, some out loud and some again with mute movements of his lips. He was starting to enjoy himself, and when he took a sip of wine it looked as if he were tasting the words along with the wine.

Again Perlmann’s feelings pulled and creaked. Millar, the man from Rockefeller, the intellectual interpreter of Bach, as a sensual man. Sheila. And then, as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightning, he was filled once more with hatred for this man Brian Millar, who was, by pleasurably weighing up nuances of meaning, contesting the activity on which he, Perlmann, had spent two weeks up in his room defending himself against the others, not least against Millar himself. And like an idiot I myself have inspired him to do so. Because I thought I had to give him a sign. Solicitous idiot that I am.

He thanked Millar in the hope of stopping him, but now Laura Sand smilingly reminded Perlmann of their afternoon conversation about other English words. Achim Ruge once again demonstrated his astonishing confidence in English, and all through dessert these things formed the topic of conversation.

‘You need this for your paper on language and memory, don’t you?’ Millar asked at last.

Perlmann felt his hands turning cold. He didn’t want to nod at any cost, and yet he nodded.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ Millar said, and through the swelling heat in his face Perlmann could see that he was saying it without suspicion or spite.

‘One has the sense that you’re working on it day and night. Well, in… wait… in two weeks we’ll be able to read it.’

Before Perlmann followed the others into the drawing room, he went to the toilet and held his face in the water that he held in his cupped hands. It’s only another eleven days. By Thursday morning Maria will have to have the paper.

‘If I play again today, it will have become a ritual,’ Millar was saying as Perlmann entered the lounge.

Von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral clapped. Millar grinned, unbuttoned his blazer and sat down on the piano stool after a hint of a bow. He played preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier.

For several minutes Perlmann sat there with his eyes closed and drove all his strength inwards to keep the panic from welling up in him like a fountain. If I’m inside something I can write very quickly. I know that. And things like that don’t change. I need a day to get into it. Or two. Then there will be nine days left. Seventy, eighty working hours. I can still do it.

His spasm eased slightly, the music got through to him, and vaguely, as if from a long way away, there arrived the memory of Bela Szabo wiping the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. Perlmann reached for this hazy image as if for a life-saving instrument, and pulled it to him and stared at it until it became clearer and denser and gradually revealed a whole scene which, in its growing vividness, forced back the flickering fear.

While telling Perlmann the story in a hoarse voice, Szabo had sat doubled up, his elbows propped on his knees, his head in his hands. Shostakovich, who had been sent as a juror to the Bach competition in Leipzig, had spoken to him at the subsequent buffet. Szabo’s composition wasn’t bad, he had said, it was thoroughly pleasant, and even a bit more. But not really a creative idea.

While trucks thundered by outside the Conservatoire Szabo had repeated that sentence over and over again, and in the bitterness of his voice there had been the certainty that he would never be able to forget it. Perlmann had got up and, in spite of the heat, closed the window.

And that time in Leipzig Shostakovich had revealed himself as a complete coward, Szabo had said as he wiped his face with his handkerchief. When he was asked about an unsigned article in Pravda, in which Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were branded as obscurantists and lackeys of imperialist capitalism, he had, albeit hesitantly, declared his agreement. He couldn’t believe his ears, Szabo said, and then Perlmann had seen the blood pulsing in the purple vein of fury that had appeared in his pale, alabaster temple. That kind of cowardice, Szabo had squeezed out, was partly responsible for the bloody crushing of the Hungarian uprising, at the end of which his father had been put against the wall. For perhaps a whole minute Szabo had sat there with his fists clenched. Then he had looked at Perlmann with his watery grey eyes, which were not dissimilar to Achim Ruge’s. Why am I telling you all this? Then, in English: Let’s get back to work! When he hated the language.

This evening once again Bach’s preludes and fugues had become invisible structures of crystalline architecture – fine white lines behind the night. That was the music that had so fascinated Shostakovich in Leipzig at the time that he reacted with his own cycle. Perlmann tried to hear the fugues of both composers side by side. Had he really liked the glass pearling and that special kind of fading that characterized Shostakovich’s pieces at that concert? Or had it been Hanna with her bandaged hand who had transfigured everything?

‘You looked as if you were very far away, on a different star,’ Evelyn Mistral said as they went outside. ‘Shall we have another walk tomorrow? Perhaps there’ll be another wedding!’ Perlmann nodded.

But not really a creative idea. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Perlmann looked up the Russian term for a creative idea and then tried to formulate Shostakovich’s whole remark in Russian. He wasn’t sure whether the way the Russian words lined up obligingly side by side caught the fluid casualness of the German remark – nicht wirklich ein Einfall. And suddenly he felt as if he couldn’t speak Russian at all. He stared at the words for a while to make sure that he really could read the Cyrillic script.

Had he himself ever had a truly creative idea? The moon shone into the room. He drew the curtains. Now the darkness was stifling. He opened the curtains again. Nine days. Ten. Panic seeped into his agonizing alertness. He went to the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill.

15

He slept long into Sunday. The room-service waiter who brought him his late breakfast handed him a piece of paper that had been stuck on the door: So, no ‘wedding walk’? If you want to do anything in the afternoon, let me know! Evelyn.

He liked her careful, forward-leaning handwriting with its rounded connecting lines, and when the waiter had closed the door behind him, he went to the telephone. In the middle of dialling he hung up. Not with this head, and certainly not in such a jittery state.

Now, in Leskov’s paper, came the pages in which the memory of sensory experience was interpreted as analogous to the memory of emotions. The rich vocabulary for nuances of smell and taste, but also for qualities of sound, was like a thicket that one had to fight one’s way through, one step at a time, and once again Perlmann became aware how many nooks there were in English into which he had never yet shone a light. Often he had to pick up his English-German dictionary to know what was being talked about, and a good two dozen points remained where he wrote down an English word without knowing what it meant. Millar would know. Then he felt like a machine arranging signs purely according to syntactical rules, without knowing anything about the correspondence of the meanings. That didn’t only produce a sense of blindness and helplessness, but also kept him from really entering the slipstream of translation, which could have protected him against the panic that was – now that the numbness of night had faded – forcing its way ever more powerfully into his consciousness.

When he became aware that anxiety could spill over and drag him away at any moment, he stretched out his arm and reached for the Russian-Italian dictionary in the back corner of his desk, as if for an anchor. He was lucky, a series of the words he had failed to understand were made clear to him via this indirect route, and now he threw himself with all his might into the attempt to translate the next few paragraphs directly into Italian.

He deleted the first few lines that he had written right after an English paragraph, and took fresh sheets of paper for the Italian text. The prickly feeling that he always had when he jumped back and forth between two foreign languages slowly appeared. The passages that followed dealt with memories in color, and now he discovered how inexperienced he was in Italian when it came to unusual words for colors. Cheerfully excited, he picked up the red dictionary, in which he found many of the words that Laura Sand had explained to him the previous afternoon. He assembled an English-Italian list of these words, and was irritated that the Russian-Italian dictionary was too limited to fill in all the gaps.

When he looked in his suitcase for new writing paper, he came across the black moleskin notebook with his notes in it. The only text of my own that I have with me. In a mixture of curiosity and dread he sat down in the red armchair and began to read:

It cannot be stressed often enough: one grows into the world by repeating words parrot-fashion. These words don’t come by themselves; we hear them as parts of judgments, mottos, sentences. For a long time these judgments behave in a similar fashion: we simply parrot them as well. Not unlike the refrain of a children’s song. And one must almost describe it as a stroke of luck if one later manages to recognize these insistent, numbing sequences of words for what they are: blind habits.

mestre is ugly, says the father whenever the topic turns to Venice. venice is a dream. mestre, on the other hand, is ugly. We hear the sentence over and over again; it comes with the regularity of a machine. It’s sheer repetition, the click of an automatism, nothing else. And then one repeats the sentence. One has not checked it, not a trace of appropriation. All that’s really happening is this: one repeats it; one says it again with increasing routine. That’s all. One understands the sentence; it’s a sentence in one’s mother tongue. Nonetheless, it doesn’t express anything that one could call a thought. It is a blindly understood, literally thoughtless sentence.

the po valley is boring is another of these sentences, this time one from the mother. One says in future: ‘If it’s night when you’re travelling through the Po Valley it doesn’t matter; the Po Valley is boring anyway,’ and so on. The sentence is no longer available. It’s an internal fixed point, a constant, a load-bearer in the construction. It represents a set of points. It makes a track impassable. It obstructs a possibility. It steals a landscape from one, a piece of earth, because it directs one around this area and thus turns them into a white, blind patch on the map of experiences. How many of our familiar sentences behave like the sentences about Mestre and the Po Valley – without our noticing?

The memory of the bare hotel room with the high walls and the ancient fittings in the bathroom forced its way into his consciousness; a memory that Perlmann hadn’t touched for years. Even today he wanted nothing to do with it. He turned the page, determined to chase away, by doing so, the distant echo of his former feelings.

And then he was baffled to see that the paper continued in English, with smaller letters and a thinner ballpoint nib. First there came sections in which the theme was picked up from the beginning and modified. The parroted sentences were now described as frozen elements which, in their treacherous inconspicuousness, kept experiences from being made, and, by being experienced, from changing anything. They had a hypnotic effect, he had noted, and then added that this applied not only to statements like the ones about Mestre and the Po Valley, but also to questions that came like a refrain in every conversation about the future: and then? what do you want to do after that? when will you be finished? what’s the point of all this?

Linguistic waste was what he had called everything that blocked experience like this, and robbed one of the chance of getting involved in anything new and surprising. Linguistic waste, Perlmann repeated to himself, and as he murmured the German word he was pulled into the slipstream of memory and saw himself lying on the bed in the bare room in Mestre, furious about all the linguistic waste that he had discovered far too late within himself, and also furious about himself because he had undertaken that senseless journey for a single sentence.

He had taken a night train to Milan, and then travelled through the Po Valley one grey morning in early October, even though it was a detour. He couldn’t remember now what it had looked like. But he very clearly remembered the defiant feeling with which he had pressed his face against the train window so that his fellow-passengers asked several times what he was looking at that was so interesting.

In Mestre he had gone into a hotel opposite the station, where the bellboy had opened up the dance hall of a room. After a few hours of sleep he had gone trotting down insignificant streets in the breaking dawn, until he was completely drenched. Afterwards, in the bathtub, he had felt nothing but emptiness. It was grotesque and bordered on madness: the whole journey, this whole exercise, just to come to terms with that one sentence of his father’s. As if he wanted to set up an example to stand in for all the other linguistic waste. Set up for whom? No one saw it; no one was aware of it. On the contrary: he would never be able to tell anyone. He would be laughed at or looked at as if he were out of his mind. Why, then? Would an indifferent shrug not have been much more effective? The worst thing was Agnes wasn’t an internal companion. She thought his journey was madness and was furious about his fanaticism. Even the film on television, with his favorite actors, didn’t help with his knowledge.

He called home later and was glad that Kirsten answered. Her voice awakened the absurd hope that he might be better understood by her, a sixteen year old.

‘What are you actually doing in this… what’s its name… Mestre?’ she asked.

After a pause, filled fortunately with hisses and clicks, he asked her how one managed to live in the present.

‘What? I can’t hear you properly.’

He repeated the question, this time fully aware of how ridiculous it sounded.

‘Dad, are you drunk?’

No, there was no need to call Mum, he said: she should just tell her that he had arrived safely.

He no longer had to prove the wrongness of the sentence to himself. It hadn’t got in his way for ages. He was ready, without further ado, to imagine Mestre as a flourishing city, something like Kyoto in cherry blossom. He had already thought that at the station in Frankfurt, and for a moment he had considered turning round. But by now he felt it was a question of loss of face, and at the same time he had flinched at the thought that such a thing might suddenly be an issue between them.

Did he still have to prove it to his father? Or was the journey a weird way of working off his fury at mountains of linguistic waste? Standing in for all the sentences? Why was no one else furious about the stifling power of linguistic waste? He had looked round at the station and also in the train – as if you could tell such a thing by looking at someone.

Would he have taken this ludicrous journey if he hadn’t had to assert himself against anyone with his lonely rage? Was it, in the end, a journey against Agnes more than anything else?

The question had pursued him when he had trudged across Mestre the following day. It was ridiculous, walking through a town – any town – and constantly asking oneself whether it was beautiful or ugly. Absurd didn’t cover it, he had thought. And then he suddenly landed in the Piazza Erminio Ferretto, an elongated square with lots of cafés and a great crowd of people smoking and chatting as they enjoyed their holiday. He had liked it there in spite of all the people. He had liked it, Agnes or no Agnes. Then, not far from the square, he found the Galleria Matteotti, a small-town echo of the famous Galleria in Milan. He didn’t know whether it was despair or self-irony, but he had paced it out, that insignificant passage, fifty-three comfortable paces it had been. He still remembered that.

In the afternoon, when he was standing outside the albergo in Venice where Agnes had washed his hair, it hurt again. The sun broke through when he sat down in that café where she had uttered her mysterious ‘Yeeess’. The tourists were taking off their coats and jackets. It didn’t keep him there. In the middle of giving his order he apologized to the waiter and walked quickly to the vaporetto, which took him to the station. In Mestre he paid the outrageous hotel bill and travelled direct to Milan, where he changed to the night train for Germany.

When he washed his worn-out, unshaven face in the train toilet just before Frankfurt, he was surprised to notice that he was pleased and contented to have made the journey.

‘Mestre is beautiful,’ he said when Agnes looked at him. ‘You should see the Piazza Ferretto! And the Galleria!’

He said it ironically, but she didn’t like that shade of irony. She sensed that it concealed an endured loneliness, and that that same loneliness gave him an unpleasant, reckless strength, a strength that could, because it was drenched in pain, drive him to a cruel act of revenge.

Perlmann showered for a long time, and then went on reading. The ballpoint nib changed again, and the handwriting became agitated, as if he had been in a hurry or irritated. Language as an enemy of imagination. He couldn’t remember this at all. He read it like something written by a stranger, astonished, uncertain and also a bit proud plainly to have had more thoughts over the course of time than he would have imagined himself capable of.

Thinking in sentences – he read – always meant a diminution of possibilities. Not only in the simple sense that the actually thought sentence by both logic and attentiveness ruled out other sentences that could have been thought instead. It was more important that linguistic thought took its initial bearings from the repertoire of familiar, tried-and-tested sentences which expressed a familiar picture of things, which seemed in their familiarity to lack alternatives. This impression, that things could not be seen differently, was the natural enemy of the imagination as the ability to envisage everything quite differently. And now example followed example. At first Perlmann was only full of amazement at the diversity of examples; but insofar as the outlined alternatives to the really existing world became increasingly radical, he recognized the text more and more clearly as his own, because his hatred of empty conventions was expressed more and more flagrantly.

In the next paragraph came observations running in precisely the opposite direction. Sentences as a medium that drove the narrator to more and more new images that could come as a complete surprise to him. Language and imagination. Wasn’t that Evelyn Mistral’s theme, too? Or was it an illusion, prompted by the mere connection between the two words? Perlmann felt his thoughts crumbling, and that slipping sensation merged with a feeling of weakness that came from his empty stomach. He slipped into his jacket and was already in the corridor when he opened the door again and pushed the moleskine notebook under the bed cover. Then he walked a secret path to the trattoria.

Sandra had plainly kicked the duvet on to the floor, and she herself lay fully clothed on the bed, with one knee-sock pulled down to the ankle and her cheek pressed deep into the pillow. He absolutely had to check on her, her parents said as soon as he stepped inside the restaurant. They were more laconic than usual. He had only learned that she had a maths test the next day, and her mother’s face revealed that there had been an argument that she now regretted.

Sandra’s shining head hung over the edge of the bed and swung slightly with each breath she took. Perlmann looked at her twitching eyelids and the dangling hand with its cheap ring and chewed thumbnail. Once her calm breathing was interrupted by a faint groan. He walked over to the little desk that her father had made and picked up the exercise book that Sandra had set defiantly face down on it. The last two pages were full of furiously crossed-out calculations. He snapped the exercise book shut, and the landlady gave a start when she noticed her anxious expression bouncing off his closed face.

‘I just thought…’ she said faintly as she brought him the chronicle.

The chronicle listed nothing for the days of his senseless, lonely journey to Mestre. Perlmann flicked back: bloodbath in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking. He didn’t read the column to the end. Against his true emotions, when he paid, and this time the proprietor didn’t dare to protest, he managed a conciliatory smile. Then he walked through the unusually warm evening to the harbor and sat down right on the edge of the embankment on a rock, against which the light waves broke.

Thousands of people had been shot, and he had wasted three days of his life on a harmless, ridiculous sentence, that anyone else would have forgotten long ago. He had the feeling of making himself very small and paying for this loss of any sense of proportion by staring, completely motionless, at the fine strips of spume that broke twitching from the night. It was not until he started shivering that he took off his glasses and wiped away the blurring layer of salt.

It was that movement that made him aware that resistance had been stirring in him for some time against his incipient feeling of guilt. It had not been a completely random sentence that he had fought against, but a sentence, my sentence, that stood in for all the linguistic waste that could bind and stifle someone’s experience. Sentences as a source of unfreedom. And the business about proportion, the sense of scale that had to be preserved – that wasn’t right either. Not here at any rate. Perlmann would have liked to know where the error was if one thought that the broadening of one’s perspective automatically produced the complete unimportance of all things in the forlorn limitedness. But the explanation didn’t come. He just knew: it wasn’t like that, even when expansion beyond the purely geographical encompass the magnitude of suffering.

With a movement of violent resolution he got up and as he walked slowly to the hotel, he silently battled his inner adversary, who was trying once again to make his sentence about Mestre ridiculous with bloody images from Peking. When the crooked pines of the hotel, the flags and lanterns came into view, he began to sense that if he admitted to that crazy journey, this also had to do with his struggle for self-assertion, which he was tirelessly fighting for over there at the hotel. And as he climbed the steps, that sense turned into a hot, palpitating defiance.

He had crossed the lobby and was on the first flight of stairs when he heard the voices of his colleagues coming from the dining room.

‘We’ll find out tomorrow!’ Millar was saying, and this was followed by Adrian von Levetzov’s laughter, accompanied by Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice.

Perlmann involuntarily took a step towards the wall, took another two steps and disappeared out of eyeshot. After that he hurried on, and was out of breath by the time he turned into his corridor. The whole corridor was pitch-black; the two lightbulbs must have blown. As he felt around for the lock with his key he was startled at how insecure that harmless darkness made him. Afterwards he stood by the window with his heart thumping, and looked down at an elegant couple who, coming from the restaurant, moved towards the steps with a hint of a tango step, before hopping down, laughing, and disappearing in an Oldtimer with chauffeur.

It was a long time before he had recovered his comforting defiance. At last he took the black notebook out from under the cover and went on reading.

The next few paragraphs described how concise sentences, apparently drawn from a wide overview, could become a prison by cutting off contradictory feelings, and thus causing the internal world to shrink still further. The particularly treacherous thing about this, he noted, was that such sentences had the deceptive sound of superior insight, against which even the author of the sentences was hardly able to defend himself. i need a lot of anonymity, was one of the examples, and another: i like listening best. And a little later: i have developed a dread of people.

Perlmann vaguely remembered: he had written those lines after a convivial evening with some of Agnes’s friends. Because time had seemed too slow and sticky to him, he had talked far too much, not least about himself. Afterwards, in the dark, everything he had said had struck him as entirely wrong, and he had got to his feet again to become clear about his feelings.

He was glad that the next paragraph was about sentences which, rather than adding something, could point the way towards a freedom that had hitherto only been guessed at, by creating a new state within one’s inner world, capturing it in words and thus keeping it from slipping away again. being able to say no without inner effort: that’s what matters. And a paragraph further on: the others are really others. others. even the ones one loves.

The air that came streaming in when he opened the window suddenly seemed much less warm than before. Over in Sestri Levante a fire raged, looking quite large even from here. Distorted by individual gusts of wind that made the pines down on the terrace bob, the sirens of the fire department echoed across.

All these example sentences, which he had with one exception written down in German, so that they now effectively leapt out at him from the middle of the English text with the intrusive familiarity of the mother tongue – were they actually sentences that applied to him?

He felt as if his inner contours blurred when he tried to look them straight in the eye for an answer to this question, and it passed through his mind that that feeling was like the impression that one had of things when one swam towards them under water. Uncertainly, almost fearfully, he turned the page and found a few very carefully written pages about the connection between language and presence. In a first attempt he had outlined – in different variations – how linguistic expression could give experiences presence and depth by wresting things experienced from fleetingness. And to his surprise he found, placed in parentheses, a digression in which he compared the linguistic and photographic fixing of the present.

Perlmann was amazed at how stubborn and precise his thinking had been in this respect, and at the same time it hurt to feel how clearly he had had Agnes’s photographs before his eyes as he wrote. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The young Sicilian in the frayed army coat who had dropped his battered suitcase and coat on the platform, and the bride he was now whirling around in the air. Agnes had shot about twenty pictures of the scene. One was published, in which the young woman, battling dizziness, held her hand in front of her laughing face, which appeared over her husband’s shoulder, half of her chin hidden by his raised coat collar. This photograph had earned Agnes a great deal of praise. But at home she had hung another one, which she thought was much better: it captured the swirl at exactly the moment when the spin, supported by flying hair, concealed both faces so that the viewer felt challenged to invent them. That’s what I thought! Agnes laughed when he expressed his disappointment at the real, very peasant-like face of the bride and invented a different one.

And then that other picture: the gaunt Chinaman, with one hand on the saddle of his bicycle, bending down to his son and offering him his cheek to kiss. The child, a nipper with a baker’s boy cap that came down over his ears, held his face up to him and pursed his lips while his eyes, half-covered by the brim of his cap, were caught by something entirely different that must have been somewhere in the direction of the photographer. Agnes had taken the picture in Shanghai, on the trip on which that fellow André Fischer from the agency had accompanied her, about whom she had been so expressively silent.

Perlmann’s thoughts sluggishly returned to the present of the hotel room. The fire beyond the bay was now clearly under control. He tore open a new pack of cigarettes and read diametrically opposite views on the next page: the present as something essentially fleeting that could be artificially deep-frozen by linguistic description. This did not establish presence, but created the mere illusion of presence. Real presence, he had noted, arose out of the readiness to yield utterly to the fleetingness of experience. And then, emphasized by their insertion, two German lines that took him completely by surprise him once again: presence: a perfume, a light, a smile, a relief, a successful sentence, a shimmer under olives.

That in this way – experimenting with words, images and rhythm – he had occupied himself with his vain search for present, had escaped him entirely. For the duration of two cigarettes he tried in vain to summon up the scene in which these lines had been produced. Suddenly, he took a piece of paper and wrote: sunk in white oblivion. As he slowly stubbed out the cigarette until the rest of the tobacco was completely crumbled and the naked filter scoured along the glass of the ashtray, he stared at the words. Then he scrunched up the paper and threw it flatly into the waste-paper basket.

Another one-and-a-half pages; the rest of the notebook was empty pages from which, when he shook them, the wing of a dead fly fell on Leskov’s text. A long paragraph and, finally, quite a short one. The long one, written with the same pen as the one before, set out an observation that moved Perlmann as if he were reading it for the very first time: experimenting with sentences was a way of finding out what experiences one really had. Because just having experiences, by experiencing something, did not mean that one had any idea what they were. Speechlessness as blindness to experience, he had written in German: Sprachlosigkeit als Erlebnisblindheit. Glum because it sounded bombastic, he read on and found an observation that struck him even more: it could happen that one went on thinking in the medium of old and outdated sentences and thus see oneself as someone who still had the old experiences, even though quite new experiences had in the meantime seeped into the old structure, and they would only be able to unfold their transforming power when they were also poured into new sentences.

While Perlmann was pursuing this thought, he suddenly realized the circumstances under which he had written the lines about present, perfume and smiling. It had been a winter evening, and the galleys of the second edition of his last book had been in the beam of light from his desk lamp. At first it had been the content of the text that he hadn’t been able to deal with. Then that feeling of staleness had spread to everything else – to paper and print as a whole, to desk lamp, desk and bent backs. The questionable line had carried him out for a moment into a brighter, freer space, the comforting enclave of the imagination. His protest had gone no further than that. Why not? Why didn’t I get up and go? Perlmann hesitated. He didn’t know whether the question had arisen within him only now, or whether it, too, was part of the memory of that moment when the sharp beam of lamplight had seemed like torture.

He read the few sentences of the last paragraph with mounting dread, and all of a sudden his eyes seemed to hurt, so that he would ideally have liked to keep them from looking at the lined paper. What separates me from my present is like a fine mist, an intangible veil, an invisible wall. They don’t put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk through it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn’t I take it long ago?

His eye still darting over the words, Perlmann started to close the notebook, and he could only catch the final question by tilting his head on one side. Then he stuffed the notebook back in his suitcase and pulled the strap unnecessarily tight.

When he got up, his eye fell on von Levetzov’s texts, which were stacked up on the desk. Soon he would be thinking another nine days – he felt that extremely clearly, and his heart was already preparing to thump at a faster rate. He hastily reached for a cigarette and stifled the thought with a look of tight concentration at Leskov’s text.

Almost another five pages, he saw quickly, dealt with remembered sense-impressions, before the conclusion about the appropriation of the past began. His notes had kept him from finishing today, and then he had wasted hours on his attempt with the Italian version. A twinge of guilt crept over him, but he resisted its burden by convincing himself it was all about the translation and not the fact that he had read nothing at all in preparation for tomorrow’s session.

What he sought was something quite particular, while afterwards, waiting for the effect of the sleeping pill, he slipped into half-sleep. He would recognize it straight away; but this abstract impression of particularity was still not enough deliberately to push open the door to the right corridor of memory. Only once he had abandoned his strenuous efforts was it suddenly there: back then, on the first trip to Venice, he had not thought once about his father’s sentence concerning Mestre. Amazed, he buried his face in the pillow and let himself slide towards oblivion. At the last moment he gave a start and propped himself up on his elbows, his hands clasped, both thumbs on the base of his nose. Again he struggled with the terrible images from Peking, which made it look like sheer scorn that someone could consider it important whether he had once thought of a particular sentence years before or whether he hadn’t. And again that struggle ended in a defiance that became all the more violent the more opaque the problem appeared from the point of view of justification.

Exhausted, he let his head drop back into the pillow, and soon slipped into a dream which consisted only of him, sweating, as if at an exam, looking for the Chinese name of the big square in Peking. His futile search made him so furious that he repeatedly wrote down the spookily intangible word so many times in a squared exercise book until it turned into sentences uttered by his parents, which, in an attempt to cross them through, he thickly underlined. At last he clapped the open exercise book face down on to the table, and was amazed that, although it was clearly Sandra’s exercise book, it had a black wax cloth cover.

16

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria stopped him as he dashed through the hall at five past nine the next morning. ‘I just wanted to ask when I can start writing out your text. It’s like this, you see: now that her old typewriter has been fixed, Signora Sand is giving me nothing more to do, and Evelyn – I mean, Signorina Mistral – has her own computer. Giorgio isn’t finished yet, so I thought I would ask you myself. I would have time to do it straight away, and I’ve been told that it’s your turn in ten days from now. Signor Millar has some work for me, too, but, of course, you come first.’

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and brought up his other arm when he felt that the stack of von Levetzov’s texts was threatening to slip out from under his arm.

‘Not for fourteen days,’ he said hoarsely. ‘My session isn’t for fourteen days.’

Maria straightened the yellow silk scarf at the neck of her glittering black pullover and looked at him uncertainly. Perlmann’s heart was beating so violently that he had the impression she must be able to hear it.

‘I would be happy to let Signor Millar go ahead of me,’ he said at last with a smile that felt as alien on his face as he always imagined it must feel when he saw an air steward smiling on a plane.

‘Va bene,’ said Maria hesitantly. He heard no clattering heels on the marble floor when he turned into the corridor to the veranda. She would be watching after him thoughtfully.

Von Levetzov was just putting his watch back into his waistcoat pocket when Perlmann sat down. This man with the smooth, black hair and rimless spectacles, who was wearing a new tie yet again and looked more than ever like a senator out of a picture book, looked so right in the high, carved chair, as if the chair had been made specifically for him.

‘We should tell you first of all,’ he said, turning to Perlmann, ‘that we have decided to have another meeting in the second half of this week. It suddenly struck us as nonsensical to waste the little time that we have. Laura will take over the block of Thursday and Friday; Evelyn will do the start of next week; and then you would be in ten days. In that way there would be a few wild-card days at the end, depending on when Giorgio can sort it out. Only, of course, if that’s all right with you,’ he added with an expression that betrayed not the slightest sign of suspicion.

Perlmann looked into the distance. Evelyn Mistral’s feigned panic looked to him like tasteless clowning, and was at the same time as unreal as the scene on a transfer picture.

‘It’s OK,’ he heard himself saying in a hollow voice.

‘Fine,’ said von Levetzov, and began to elucidate his texts.

My text has to be in the pigeonholes by Tuesday at the latest. I have to give Maria two days. Friday morning, then. I have to be ready by Thursday night. Only another four days, of which three half-days are down the drain because of the sessions. Which leaves only two-and-a-half days. And the nights. Once in the silence of a single night I wrote out half an essay. Once. A long time ago. Only when he caught the eyes of his colleagues did Perlmann notice that von Levetzov had clearly asked him a question.

‘Yes,’ he said into the blue, and saw straight away from Ruge’s frown that that made no sense as an answer. Cheeks burning, he started flicking through the texts and waited until von Levetzov went on, saying, ‘Well, then…?’

For a long time – it might have been two hours – Perlmann didn’t hear what was going on around him. He could find only a single way to resist the overwhelming panic. He began to work. Methodically, he began to draw up in his notebook a list of all the themes he had ever worked on. Then he took a new page for each heading and jotted down the associations grouped around it. He marked the relationships of the themes to one another with various kinds of arrows. A structure formed. He slowly grew calmer, and all that remained of his inner tension was a thumping headache. Wrapped up in a cocoon of forced and barely substantial confidence, he suddenly rose to his feet and, ignoring the sudden silence, left the room without looking at anyone.

She always carried aspirin with her, Maria said, and started rummaging in her handbag. When she found nothing, she ran both hands threw her gleaming lacquered hair, disturbing the quiff that had stood out above her forehead like the brim of a hat. Finally, she found the tablets under a pile of paper on the desk and offered Perlmann her glass of mineral water.

She would have his manuscript on Friday morning, he said, as he set the glass back down on the corner of the desk. The cold in his fingers couldn’t just come from the glass, he thought, his left hand was cold as well. Could she have it ready by Monday evening?

How long was the text? she asked. The question disconcerted him, and for a moment he felt as if he was stumbling.

‘It’s just that everyone else’s texts are so long,’ she smiled apologetically, as the pause got longer and longer.

‘Maybe fifty pages,’ he said woodenly. Then he thanked her formally for the tablets and left the office.

For a moment he stepped up to the glass front door. The sky of the bay, which looked strangely boring, seemed this morning to be entirely colorless. Disappear behind the rocky spur. He didn’t want to think it yet again, and forced himself to go back to the veranda.

This time there was no interruption. Laura Sand’s alto voice with its smoky petulance flowed on. Perlmann sat down and looked at his notes. Words, nothing but individual words. How could he have thought, before, that this scribble could help him out of his fix? Let alone the fact that he was supposedly working on a text about the connection between language and memory.

Now the others leaned forwards as if in response to a command, and started flicking through von Levetzov’s texts. So as not to draw attention to himself, he started flicking, too. But it didn’t work: the pages were still charged from copying, and stuck together, so that a heavy clump moved as a whole. Perlmann tried in vain to pull the pages apart, and his thumb, his ugly thumb with the ridiculous grooves on the nail, became bigger and more ugly in front of his aching eyes, as if a merciless magnifying glass were being held over it. Beyond his swelling thumb he caught the amused and sardonic glances of the others, and what he didn’t see of those glances he felt.

That he didn’t hurl his clumps of paper at the heads of the others, or bang his forehead down on the table top, struck him later as a miracle. At the very last minute something intervened so that he – outwardly untouched – pulled one of the texts apart with a faint electrical crackle, and started making notes in the margin.

But that saving gentleness was only whitewash. At the next break in the discussion Perlmann took the floor, and what he now delivered into an awkward, leaden silence for almost half an hour was a vehement, ruthless denunciation of the whole area of linguistics that von Levetzov stood for – and not only von Levetzov.

After the first, hesitant sentences, during which he had to clear his throat several times, he spoke with a calm and a fluency that startled him, and which strengthened themselves from one moment to the next, so to speak, and the pauses during which he drew on a cigarette further underlined, he thought, the firmness of his conviction. As he spoke he didn’t look at anyone, but kept his eye fixed on the reddish, gleaming wood of the conference table, after he had banished his reflection with a sheet of paper right at the beginning.

He had no idea where everything he was saying came from. He had never thought it out in the form of explicit, memorable thoughts, and yet it felt as familiar and natural as a conviction that one has carried around with oneself for half a lifetime. At that moment he was grimly determined to yield to the astonishing process that had got under way, as long as it continued, let the others react how they might. Once he almost lost the thread, because the thought came to him that this could be a rare moment of present – a present, certainly, that had the strange quality of coming to him not from outside, from the world, but rather of being produced from within, creating the impression that time as a whole was not something that made its independent progress outside him, but something internal, an aspect of himself which, according to the amount of freedom he granted it, unfolded into the world in a rich or a parsimonious form. This idea made Perlmann dizzy. He stammered and repeated himself, and only when he had furiously crushed all the marginal thoughts about time did he find his way back to the earlier flow of his speech.

After that he intervened in what he said only in a guiding sense, so that his criticism explicitly and with suicidal sharpness also referred to his own works. He wanted to soften what he sensed was the inevitable impression that he was launching a personal attack on von Levetzov. His words had long ceased to bear any internal connection with von Levetzov, but were directed against Brian Millar, although he did not mention his name a single time. As, staring blindly at the mahogany, he imagined Millar’s face, his sentences became more and more strident, his choice of words more and more uncontrolled until it verged on vulgarity. On the edges of his field of vision the world began to blanch and to darken, so that he spoke his annihilating appraisals into a reddish, glowing tunnel from which, as if they were coming simultaneously from within and without, his father’s sentence about Mestre and his own sentence about saying now came towards him. Dismayed, he felt things within himself falling into utter disarray, but there was no stopping, he talked and talked, slicing the air with his palm as though bringing down a butcher’s axe, until the energy of desperate self-assertion finally gave way to a feeling of exhaustion.

For a while no one spoke. Voices could be heard from the lounge, and from outside came the stuttering of a boat engine that wouldn’t quite start. From the corner of his eye Perlmann could uneasily see Laura Sand adding details to the figures in her notebook.

The first eye he caught was Silvestri’s. He wore an expression of calm, sad alertness, an expression that he might have used with a confused or weeping patient, free of professional condescension, filled with an inward-turning shadow of solidarity, but also a gaze that concealed a will not to be disconcerted by anything he might encounter.

Perlmann would have liked to cling to that expression, but there were all the others: Achim Ruge, polishing his glasses with a corner of his wool jacket; Evelyn Mistral glancing shyly at him as she played awkwardly with the clasp of her white bracelet; Brian Millar, his arms folded particularly energetically and his head lowered, his eye focused on his fingertips as if he were inspecting his nails. And last of all Adrian von Levetzov, whom Perlmann looked at last, in the certainty that he had just made an enemy. Von Levetzov had taken off his glasses and let them dangle lightly in one hand as he rubbed his eyes with the thumb and index finger of the other. Perlmann had never seen him without his glasses, and was startled by the baggy eyelids that could now be seen. For a few fearful seconds in which hope and fear discolored one another, he waited for his reaction.

And then he was properly put to shame by Adrian von Levetzov, whose patriarchal elegance he had privately mocked and despised. He clumsily put his glasses back on and checked that they were on straight, by running two fingers along the curve of the ear pieces. Then, thoughtfully and gently, he pushed all the papers away from him, leaned right back into the chair and folded his hands over his head – a gesture that Perlmann had never seen him perform before and of which, even though he could not have explained it, he would not have thought him capable.

‘Recently, at a conference in London,’ he began and, after looking briefly at Perlmann, raised his eye beyond him, as if looking for someone at the pool, ‘I went to the theater one evening to see Macbeth again. I was alone, and in a strange mood free of self-deception. I immersed myself fully in Shakespeare’s wonderful language, and suddenly I had the feeling that there was nothing rewarding to be discovered about language that was not already contained within that experience of immersion. In the minutes leading up to the interval the thought of our profession had something tired, almost ludicrous about it, and I was quite ready to throw off my professional garb like a tired and worn-out skin. I think the two colleagues whom I met in the foyer found me rather strange at that moment. And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing had passed like a ghost, and afterwards in the pub I talked heatedly to my colleagues about a new publication in our field.’

He drew his glance back from the distance and smiled at Perlmann. ‘Somehow your… outburst of a moment ago reminded me of that,’ he said, speaking in German. ‘Except: there’s nothing I can do about it. I didn’t invent our discipline, did I? And it isn’t as uninteresting as all that, either; in spite of Shakespeare. Otherwise, I’m sure you wouldn’t have called us all here. Would you?’

Perlmann lowered his eyes and gave his head a slight shake, without a clear intention and significance, turning it into an equally slight nod.

The awkward pause was ended by Ruge. ‘I didn’t know you had a weakness for poetry, Adrian,’ he said with a grin, drawing imaginary circles on the table top.

‘Neither did I,’ Millar cut in, ‘and I can’t wait to hear about the exciting kind of linguistics that Phil is doubtless going to introduce us to next week.’

Von Levetzov slowly packed his things together, got up and then stopped by the table, his hands on the stack of books and paper. He kept his eye – a searching eye that seemed to spring from an inner circling – fixed on the parquet floor beyond the table’s edge. His features, it seemed to Perlmann, had formed into an expression of self-reliance that he had never seen on this man’s face before, even Evelyn Mistral gazed at him the way one gazes at someone who is forming a completely independent judgment about something.

‘I don’t know, Brian,’ he said slowly, and the smile with which he now turned to Millar contrasted starkly with his usual solicitousness towards his admired American colleague, ‘that may not be Philipp’s concern. I could imagine that he’s not interested in that at all.’

He darted Perlmann a fleeting glance and then walked to the door with an attitude that suggested he wasn’t a part of the group any more.

Perlmann thought about von Levetzov’s attitude and his last sentence all afternoon, over and over again. As he did so, he oscillated between the worrying sensation of having completely lost his balance, and the liberating feeling of someone who, by voicing a proscribed opinion with no regard for the consequences, has edged a step closer to himself.

Finally, now, he read all the texts he should already have known that morning. They interested him not in the slightest, those texts which, as always with von Levetzov, were composed with almost baroque care and attention. But he forced himself to read every line. He wanted to be prepared for tomorrow.

Hidden behind that thought, however, he was driven by the wish discreetly to thank the tall northerner – about whom he had plainly been completely mistaken – for his considered reaction. And also for addressing him in German. Recalling that moment now, it seemed to him had never before felt the intimacy of his mother tongue so forcefully and gratefully. From time to time he imagined von Levetzov’s face without its glasses, looking strangely naked. Opera. Always Mozart. Alcohol. An actress.

Midway through his reading of the third text he suddenly got to his feet, slipped into his jacket and walked down to von Levetzov’s room. He had no idea what the apology should sound like, and to gain time he put his ear to the door. Von Levetzov was on the phone, clearly to his secretary.

‘Then we’ll have to move the whole program,’ he was saying. ‘Let the contributors know that their times are changing accordingly. All right, so that’s that. What about the application to the foundation? Aha… yes… good. And the galleys?’

Perlmann turned round and went back to his room. Again he called the end of the session to mind: von Levetzov’s sentence, his attitude. And now this businesslike voice, the voice of a man merging with his subject. It didn’t fit. Not at all.

He dragged himself to the middle of the fourth text, then broke off and went to the trattoria. Even as he parted the glass-bead curtain he sensed that it had been wrong to come here. He could only concentrate on the story of Sandra’s test by concentrating very hard, and he immediately forgot it again. There’s still Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. One whole day and two half-days. And the nights.

When the proprietor brought him the chronicle he waved it away at first, but then he took it after all and looked up the summer when he had been given his first professorship. Aldo Moro murdered. Sandro Pertini new president. Death of Pope Paul VI. Bored, he snapped the book shut.

What had been happening in the world back then didn’t interest him. He was looking for something quite different, a memory that forced its way to the surface and kept exploding just before it got there. It had something to do with the grand piano and a question asked by five-year-old Kirsten.

Lost. I’ve lost. That was it: that was what he had thought back then when he set his professorial certificate down on the grand piano and tried to play with leaden fingers. Little Kirsten, clutching her teddy, had clearly been standing in the doorway for a long time before she asked why he was playing so many wrong notes.

Are you sad?

We’re going to move, Kitty, to Berlin.

Isn’t it nice there?

Yes, child.

So why are you sad?

Dad is sad, she told Agnes, who was breathlessly setting down the shopping bags. Nonsense, he said and showed her the letter with a smile. The Berlin agency is bigger, she laughed, and gave him a kiss.

When suddenly he hadn’t been able to get to grips with the chronicle it was as if a safety net had been taken away. What still supported him was the translation of Leskov’s text, he thought on the way back, and hurried to get to his room.

Another five pages on the daring thesis that narrative memory also creates the sensory content of the remembered. Perlmann struggled once again through the thicket of unusual words for sensory nuances, and after three hours he had an English version of the part that he had translated directly into Italian the previous day – with lots of mistakes, he now realized. Immediately after that came the zealous, awkward passage on Proust. The last page and a half on this subject were easier again in terms of vocabulary; on the other hand, the concluding argument was so incomplete and bizarre that he kept checking whether it might be down to his translation. At last he came to the conclusion that Leskov had simply fudged matters – he had wanted to force through at all costs his exotic thesis of the past as an invention. He seemed to be truly in love with it.

Shortly after midnight Perlmann walked through the clear, cold, starry night to the Piazza Veneto to buy cigarettes. Next came the closing passage about appropriation: nine pages, seven of which he had largely finished, leaving aside the difficulties with the key concept. He wanted to get through it that night, so that he could finish the text in one go on Wednesday. At the same time he felt a suffocating sense of trepidation at the thought of having to set Leskov’s text aside and move over entirely to the emptiness in his head. He tore open the packet as soon as it fell from the machine, and then discovered that he hadn’t brought any matches. Shivering, he ran back to the hotel.

First of all he addressed himself to the last two pages, for which he still didn’t have an English version. Here, in summary, Leskov discussed the creation of the individual past through narration. And again he fudged his way past an unambiguous position by jumping back and forth without comment between quite different words for create. He began with sozdavat’, then switched to tvorit’ without explanation. The translation for both in the big dictionary was given as creating. The second word applied, judging by the example sentences, to the creation of something from nothing; it was used as if God’s Creation were the topic under discussion. The former referred more to artistic or academic creation; creative activity, such as the creation of a character in a novel. A huge difference, Perlmann thought, about which Leskov wasted not a word. Or did it only seem that way to the beginner that he suddenly felt himself once again to be?

Then, all of a sudden, came izobretat’, which was given as inventing, devising and designing and thus dealt with inventions, but now in the sense of the creation of a new object – a machine, for example – out of entirely real materials. Cutting one’s past to size by means of narration, and thus to a certain extent sculpting oneself as a character – there was a lot in it. But that was something quite different from the thought that one actually invented or even created oneself in remembering narration. But Leskov, Perlmann sensed through all his linguistic doubts, would really have liked to put forward the extreme thesis of invention, and once there was also the word pridumat’, which was translated as thinking up – as if, for example, one were thinking up an apology.

The last sentence of the text. In English it sounded less bombastic than it did in German, which had to do, above all, with the fact that essence had a lighter, more transparent sound than the whispering Wesen and – Perlmann supposed – the Russian sushchnost’. And that it was essential for language to make the experience of time more diverse – that was a claim that matched many things in his own notes.

Perlmann took his black wax cloth notebook out of his suitcase, and was annoyed to break a fingernail on the straps, which had been stupidly pulled too tight. He read once again what he himself had jotted down about the formulation of memories, and then the passages about language and present. At some points the parallel with Leskov’s train of thought was startling. He put the notebook back in his suitcase and left the straps loose.

Outside there was dense fog now. The streetlights could only be seen as a diffuse blur of light, in which approaching billows of vapour disappeared. What on earth had made him defamiliarize his notes with another language? Can one be afraid of stepping too close to oneself? Or had another fear been at work: that articulacy in one’s mother tongue – and only in it – could change experience, so that the old means of experience, which one must not lose, would suddenly disappear?

Anyway, in English he could read his observations as if someone else had written them, someone who was spiritually akin and yet different to him. He opened the window and felt the cool night air like damp cotton wool on his face. In foreign languages one could feel sheltered just as one did in fog. No attack presented in another language could ever hit him, could penetrate him so thoroughly as an attack in his mother tongue. And his own, most intimate sentences hit him less hard when they were packed in foreign words. Because he also had to protect himself against these sentences, paradoxically. Or was it, in the end, something quite different? Had he been seeking to intensify the intimacy by enjoying the open secret of being the author of these notes?

The preceding, already translated pages about the appropriation of the past remained unclear, however one might twist and turn them. Once again, Perlmann looked up the crucial words, slipped into the example sentences and experimented with every possible combination of translations. For a while, for osvaivat’ he even considered confer, which only came up under prisvaivat’; it would be good to harmonize with Leskov’s idea of invention. In the end he crossed out all but one of the many alternatives he had jotted down, and was discontent because a feeling of randomness remained.

The light grey of dusk seeped into the fog, and the halos of the streetlights assumed a dazzling white gleam. Perlmann carefully piled up the handwritten pages of the translation. Eighty-seven pages. He also arranged Leskov’s text in order, and put it in the bottom laundry drawer. Then he wiped the dust from the table with his handkerchief and emptied the brimming ashtray. The translation was finished. His translation. It was finished. A relief, a successful sentence.

Shaking, he ordered coffee and had to clear his throat several times. He was shivering with the heating turned up when he poured coffee into himself later on. From time to time he picked up the translation and flicked through it for a few moments without reading. He wouldn’t be able to show it to Agnes. He would never be able to show her anything ever again. At a quarter to nine he bathed his eyes, put von Levetzov’s texts under his arm and went downstairs.

17

When the others stepped out on to the veranda and saw Perlmann sitting there already, they interrupted their conversations and, as soon as they sat down, fished busily among their papers. Perlmann just nodded to them briefly and turned the page.

‘So, on we go with this strange discipline,’ von Levetzov said cheerfully, and summed up the next text in a few sentences.

Perlmann was winning his battle against tiredness. It was a while before he had pulled what he had read the previous afternoon out from among his memories of the night; but then behind its tiredness his brain ran like a well-oiled mechanism, and he managed some contributions that largely determined the course of the session. Von Levetzov asked him several times to repeat his objection, and then took notes. Only Millar looked, while Perlmann was speaking, with ostentatious boredom through the window into the fog. Evelyn Mistral took off her glasses several times and listened to Perlmann with the expression of someone who is glad about someone else’s recovery from an illness. Every time he noticed that, he ended his contribution sooner than planned.

‘So, Perlmann, still working on your gay science?’ von Levetzov joked as he left.

Perlmann went to sleep as soon as he had crept under the covers. Kitty, holding the bear lispingly, asked him only questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The only thing he knew was that the grand piano wasn’t where it had always been. It wasn’t in Berlin either. There were only auditoriums there with masses of students, and when he came home and looked around the rooms for the grand piano, Agnes nodded incessantly and pulled open boxes of material for her own darkroom.

It was already dark when he woke up drenched in sweat. He would ideally have liked to stay in the shower for ever, and kept turning it back on so that the water ran over his face and distorted his view of the future. At last he sat in his dressing gown by the round table and let his eyes slide over the pages of the translation. He had forgotten that there was a whole series of gaps on the first thirty pages. He contentedly noted that the work on the later parts now made the open questions look quite simple. In the end he crossed out the marginal jotting sensory content? and made sure that it could no longer be deciphered.

Only the title was still missing. Formirovanie was formation. So: on the role of language in the formation of memories. Perlmann hesitated, looked up Rolle in his German-English Langenscheidt, and then replaced role with part. The whole thing sounded wooden, he thought, and also formation was actually too weak for the subject if one considered the radical theses of the texts. Had Leskov become frightened by his own courage? If one looked up formation, one found formirovanie and obrazovanie with the note (creation). Nonetheless, creation was unambiguously sozdanie or tvorenie; those were the words Leskov should have called upon here. The intricate, programmatic sentence that had caused too much trouble also included sozdavat’, after all. Perlmann sat there motionlessly for a while. Then he wrote in capital letters at the top edge: the personal past as linguistic creation. There was no room for his name.

To make further amends for yesterday, he set off for the dining room. Maria was still sitting in front of the screen in the office. When Perlmann saw her he stopped, teetered on his heels a few times and then went back up to his room. He irresolutely held the translation in his hands, half rolled it up and then opened it again. In the end he took it with him.

The others were now standing in the hall. He waved to them with the text and stepped into Maria’s office.

‘I thought you weren’t going to give me the text until Friday morning,’ said Maria.

‘Erm… this is… this isn’t actually it,’ stammered Perlmann, feeling his face burning.

‘Ah, so this is a different one,’ she said. ‘How industrious you all are!’ She flicked through it and suddenly paused. ‘There are a few lines in Italian here! Why did you cross them out?’

‘It… it was a sort of experiment,’ he said quickly with a dismissive gesture.

‘When do you need the text by?’ she asked as he turned to the door. ‘Because of Signor Millar, I mean.’

‘There’s no rush.’

She fastened the text together with a big paperclip, and held it away from herself. ‘Cute title,’ she smiled. ‘Where do you want your name? Over the title, under it, or only at the end of the text?’

‘No name, please.’ His per favore was out of place; not only was it superfluous, but it sounded suspicious to his ears. ‘The text is just for me,’ he added stiffly.

She rocked her head as if to say she didn’t think it was a good reason. ‘Va bene. As you wish. We can always add it. And what about the other text?’ she asked, when his hand was already on the door handle. ‘Will I have it by Friday morning?’

‘Yes,’ he said, without looking at her.

‘By the way, Phil,’ said Millar as Perlmann dipped his spoon into the soup, ‘about Maria: she said she’d have time to type something out for me by Thursday. But I thought it was a misunderstanding. She could hardly have typed your text in two days. And a moment ago I saw you bringing her your text. No problem. Jenny will just have to get down to it as soon as I’m back.’

The soup scalded Perlmann’s tongue and throat. ‘Erm… no, no, you can…’ he began, and then closed his eyes until the peak of pain had passed. He coughed and wiped the water from his eyes. ‘I mean… yes, thank you very much.’

Millar looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You OK?’ Perlmann nodded and had to rub his eyes again.

He was glad that every subsequent mouthful hurt. The pain was something that he could deal with while the others gossiped about a series of colleagues who had recently published something.

‘I noticed again today how precisely you read,’ von Levetzov suddenly said to him.

Perlmann let the ice cream melt on his tongue and swallowed it in small portions. He had been repelled by the way his mother, after his tonsil operation, had enjoyed playing the role of nurse.

‘Yesterday it almost looked as if he hated the whole subject,’ Ruge giggled, unashamedly licking the cream from his upper lip.

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 open-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.

He sat down, exhausted, on the bed and stared for several minutes at the stack of texts by Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand, and the mail from Frau Hartwig. His exhaustion turned into indifference, and at last all that still interested him was his hunger. He showered quickly and then went down to eat. As quiet as someone who has given up on everything, he shovelled the food into him and answered questions with the mild friendliness of a convalescent.

Later he lay awake for a long time in the darkness without thinking anything. There was nothing left to calculate. He wouldn’t have a text to give Maria on Friday. The tension was over. Everything was over. When the effect of the pill flooded through him, he gave up and dropped off.

19

Right from the start, Laura Sand’s session went better than all the others. The veranda was in darkness and the projector cast film images on a screen that stood at a slightly crooked angle on a stand. There were quite long sequences of images, in which animals showed behavior that would be hard to see as anything other than symbolic. At short intervals, clouds of cigarette smoke passed through the beam of the projector. Laura Sand’s voice was strangely soft, and sometimes that made her seem bashful, so that she threw in the occasional brash remark. There was nothing – that much was quite clear – that she loved as much as these animals. Often she showed a sequence several times to stress an observation or enlarge upon an explanation. But she also repeated sections in which the movements of the animals were simply comical. ‘Again!’ Ruge cried out at one such point, and to Perlmann’s surprise Millar joined in, too: ‘Yes! Where’s the slow-motion button?’

Perlmann was glad to be able to sit in the dark. After the third aspirin that he put in his mouth with the most economical movements possible, and washed down with coffee, the headaches slowly faded, and he escaped into the wide Steppe landscapes that formed the background of many of the animal scenes. Often Laura Sand hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and had played expertly with the light, until the animals’ bodies moved against the light like figures in a shadow play. And sometimes the camera escaped the research discipline, and crept over the empty landscape, which glimmered in boiling midday light. Then Perlmann managed to forget that in exactly a week he would be the one sitting up there at the front.

When the blinds went up and everyone rubbed their eyes in the murky light of a rainy day, it was already past twelve. A debate immediately broke out about the fundamental concepts with which Laura Sand tried to capture what she had observed. Perlmann got involved, too, and defended them even more resolutely than Evelyn Mistral. What he said contradicted everything that he usually claimed in publications, and more than once Millar raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Barely a quarter of Laura Sand’s texts had been discussed when it was time for lunch.

‘So you had a film show today!’ laughed Maria when Perlmann ran into her outside the office. ‘By the way, I explicitly told Signor Millar again that your text, as you told me, can wait. But then he didn’t want me to type out his things anyway. I didn’t understand why.’ She smiled coquettishly and glanced at her reflection in the glass door. ‘So first of all I went to the hairdresser, and then started on your text, which I some how like – if I may say that. I’ll just interrupt it if you bring me the other, urgent text tomorrow. Va bene?’ Perlmann nodded, and was glad when von Levetzov appeared and dragged him along into the dining room.

‘Have you been able to take a look at my synopsis?’ Evelyn Mistral asked him over dessert.

‘Yes, I have,’ Perlmann said, and scraped the last bit of pudding out of the bowl as he racked his brains as to how she had described her problem to him.

‘So? You can just tell me if you think it’s stupid,’ she said with a forced smile.

‘No, no, absolutely not. I think the idea of producing the connection through the concept of the ground is a good one.’ Even before he had finished the sentence he realized that he was really talking about Leskov’s argument, which was contained in those four recalcitrant sentences.

Evelyn Mistral’s spoon circled aimlessly in the bowl. ‘Oh, right, yes. That could be a thought,’ she said at last, glancing at him bashfully.

‘I… I’ll sit down to it again this afternoon,’ Perlmann said. ‘Time is… time is a bit short.’

Something in his quiet voice made her sit up and listen. Her face relaxed.

‘Fine,’ she said and laid her hand on his arm for a moment.

Afterwards, in the room, Perlmann tried in vain to concentrate on Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand’s papers. He felt obliged to try. If he could have shown tomorrow that he had at least been working in that sense, it would have been some small protection against everything else that was now heading inexorably towards him. But faced with that writing he felt as he had done on his outward-bound flight: as if he were suddenly blind to meanings; the texts couldn’t get through to him and flattened out before his eyes into pedantic ornaments.

Over the next few hours he walked slowly and aimlessly through the town. At the stationery shop where he had bought the chronicle the window display had been completely changed. Perlmann was annoyed that this made him lose his sense of equilibrium; but only several streets further on did he manage to shake the whole thing off.

Complete nonsense, he said to himself repeatedly as he became aware of something inside him stubbornly trying to make the chronicle responsible for the dilemma he was in. At the bar of a café, where he drank a coffee, the internal struggle finally stopped. The clouds had parted, the sun glittered in the puddles, and suddenly life seemed to gain pace and color. Perlmann held his face in the dusty beam of sunlight that fell through the narrow glass door. For a moment he felt a forbidden happiness like the one that comes from skipping school, and when the sun disappeared again he clung with all his might to that feeling, although it grew more and more hollow from one moment to the next, and made way for a dull and barely restrained anxiety which suited the gloomy light that now filled the bar again.

For the time being it was only Maria that he would have to say anything to. His colleagues’ questions would only start on Monday, and the situation would only come to a definitive head on Wednesday. His anxiety was somewhat assuaged by this thought, and Perlmann continued his aimless walk through little side streets.

He got to the trattoria early. The proprietress brought him the chronicle and told him with delight that Sandra’s drawings had been singled out for special praise by the art teacher that morning. Then he had allowed Sandra to travel across to Rapallo with some other children. Perlmann forced out a smile and struggled to stuff into his mouth the spaghetti that he thought was overcooked today. The proprietor’s question of where he had been for the past two days annoyed him, and he pretended not to have heard it.

His interest in the chronicle was over now, once and for all, he established as he flicked through its pages. Just as he was about to snap it shut, his eye fell on a painting by Marc Chagall. In the cheap, miniaturized reproduction the blue had lost much of its luminous power. Nonetheless, Perlmann had immediately recognized that it must be Chagall’s blue. He fully opened the book again and read the text. There was something about that date; but it escaped his remembering gaze and remained far outside on the periphery of his consciousness, as intangible as the mere memory of a memory. It had had nothing to do with Chagall’s colors, of that he was sure. He had avoided that subject for many years, so as not to have to hear Agnes’s harsh judgment about it. And, in fact, it seemed to him, it hadn’t really been about Chagall at all. Something else was to blame for the fact that he had suddenly felt quite alone. But behind his closed lids nothing appeared that might have explained why his disappointment then seemed so closely connected with his anxiety now.

The memory only came later, when he was sitting in front of the television at the hotel, just as alone and desperate as he had been in the living room after he had called off the lecture. If you think so, was the first thing Agnes had said when he had asked her, even though there was no longer any possibility. And when she saw the wounded expression on his face: Oh, all right then, why not. It can happen to anyone. But her relaxed tone and dismissive gesture hadn’t been able to conceal her disappointment: her husband, a rising star in his subject, hadn’t managed to write the lecture that he had been supposed to deliver in the Auditorium Maximum, even though for days he had been sitting over it until late into the night.

But the worst thing was that twelve-year-old Kirsten heard him cancelling down the lecture with a reference to illness. But you aren’t ill at all, Dad. Why did you lie? That was the only time that he had wished his daughter was far away, and had even hated her for a moment. He had gone into the living room and had, contrary to his custom, closed the door. And then Chagall’s death had been announced on the television news. He had stared at the stained-glass window shown in the report with a fervour which was, when he noticed it, so embarrassing to him that he swiftly changed channels.

Perlmann had lost the thread of the film that was playing out in front of him, and turned off the television. That was seven years ago now. And throughout all that time he hadn’t thought once about that cancelled lecture. In the nights leading up to his capitulation he had for the first time the very same experience that had paralyzed and frozen him for weeks: the experience of having absolutely nothing to say. It had been such a shock, this sudden experience, that he had had to banish it from his mind. And in that he had been very successful, because he had gone on to write dozens of lectures which had flowed easily and naturally from his pen. And throughout all that time not a single trace of a memory of that failure had crossed his path. Until today, from which perspective that late-March evening appeared as the first, menacing premonition of his present catastrophe.

He took half a sleeping pill, hopped through all the television channels again and then turned out the light. It was not quite true to say that the experience that had been banished back then had never again announced its presence. He thought once more of that moment a year ago, when he had suddenly found himself presented as a main speaker. From the panic that had flared up then there was – it now appeared to him – a hidden experience arc leading six years back to the day of Chagall’s death. And why not? Agnes had said when he irritably explained to her that he couldn’t simply tell the organizers of the conference that he had nothing to say.

Perlmann’s thoughts began to blur at the edges. How did Agnes’s two reactions – the one a year ago and the one seven years ago – fit together? He tried to imagine the face that had accompanied the two remarks. But the only face that came was the one in the photograph in Frankfurt, which he had fled yesterday because it knew too much.

Whenever all thinking and wanting began to dissolve and silence could have begun at any moment, he gave a start, and then everything behind his forehead convulsed. The fourth time he turned the light on and washed his face in the bathroom. Then he dialled Kirsten’s number. Her drowsy voice sounded annoyed.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I woke you.’

‘Oh, it’s you, Dad. Just a second.’ He heard a wiping sound, then for a while nothing more. Only now did he look at his watch: a quarter to one.

‘So, here I am again.’ Now her voice sounded fresher. ‘Is anything up? Or are you just calling?’

‘Erm… just calling. That is… I wanted to ask you why Agnes . . . why Mum didn’t like Chagall’s colors.’ He cursed himself for ringing her up with a heavy, furry tongue and not at least testing out his voice beforehand.

‘What colors?’

He clenched his fist and was tempted simply to hang up. ‘The colors in Marc Chagall’s paintings.’

‘Oh, right. Chagall. You’re speaking so indistinctly. Well… I don’t know… funny question. Did she really not like them?’

‘No, she didn’t. But there’s something else, too: do you think she would have understood if I’d had nothing to say?’

‘What do you mean, nothing to say?’

‘If… I mean, simply if nothing had occurred to me.’

‘About what?’

‘About… just like that. Nothing had occurred to me. And the others were all waiting.’

‘Dad, you’re speaking in riddles. What others?’

‘Just the others.’ He had said it so quietly that he was unsure whether she had heard.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Dad, what’s up with you?’

He quickly tried to produce some spit, and let it run over his tongue. ‘Nothing, Kirsten. It’s nothing. I just wanted to talk to you a bit. Good night now.’

‘Erm… yes. So, ah… good night.’

He went into the bathroom and took another quarter tablet. Luckily, he hadn’t asked her if she remembered his cancelled lecture back then. It had been a close thing. He turned on to his belly and pressed his face into the pillow, as if by doing so he could force sleep to come.

20

Laura Sand’s second session also started with film images. It was quite different material from the previous day, and in the first half-hour there were occasional sequences in which she’d got the aperture wrong. She cursed at the poor quality of the film, but Perlmann saw immediately that that wasn’t the problem. Almost as clearly as if they were images edited in, he saw Agnes coming out of the darkroom in her white apron, furious with herself and as much in need of comfort as a child. Instead of returning to the real film, he stayed with these images and slipped back through the night to the conversation with Kirsten. He had mumbled something about Chagall, and asked her some absurd question about Agnes. The damned pill had immediately obliterated the details. I’ve got to give them up. Give them up. He reached for his mineral water, and when his glass clinked against the coffee pot the others turned their heads. Luckily, Maria had been sitting in front of her screen before. As a result he hadn’t had to spool out the prepared sentences, which had sounded even more wooden with each internal run-through.

‘¡Dios mío!’ Evelyn Mistral murmured quietly. Perlmann looked straight ahead. The images that were being shown now were, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful. The glassy light of an early morning over the Steppe turned the contours of the meagre shrubs into mysterious, poetic forms that made the imagination pounce upon them immediately, and the faded yellow of the Steppe, run through with pale grey, lost itself against the rising sun in an apparently endless white depth. The view had so captivated even Laura Sand herself that she had lingered on the same shot until her arms had been trembling with exhaustion.

Now the camera swung slowly to the side, and all of a sudden the Steppe was scattered with the ribcages of dead animals. ‘¡Jesús María!’ cried Evelyn Mistral, and then she could be heard gasping, open-mouthed. The camera moved further to the left, then came a cut, and now one saw the edge of a settlement, still in the same dreamy light. The people barely moved. They looked suspiciously or apathetically into the camera. The swollen bellies of children, fully grown bodies so gaunt that their wrists looked like grotesque enlargements. Flies everywhere, which the people had given up resisting long ago. The camera slowly crept over the settlement. The pictures were all the same. The camera glided on until the people had disappeared from the picture. For a few seconds once again the beauty of the deserted Steppe, now already in a light that gave a sense of the searing midday heat. Then the film stopped.

For a few moments no one stirred in the dark, the only sound was Laura Sand’s chair shifting. Then Evelyn Mistral and Silvestri walked to the window and released the blinds, which snapped up.

‘Well,’ said Millar in the tone of someone who has just heard something very dubious.

Laura Sand jerked her head up. ‘Something wrong?’ A lurking harshness quivered in her voice.

‘Well, yes,’ said Millar. ‘Hunger and death as a poetic backdrop – I don’t know.’

Laura Sand’s face looked even whiter than usual above her black polo neck.

‘Nonsense,’ she said, squeezing the word out so violently that only the first syllable could really be heard.

‘That,’ Millar said slowly, lowering his head, ‘I can’t find.’

Adrian von Levetzov’s nervous hand revealed that he couldn’t bear the coming argument. ‘In which area was it filmed?’ he asked with the cheerful interestedness of a member of the educated classes, something to which he would not normally have succumbed.

‘The Sahel,’ Laura Sand snapped back.

‘Indeed,’ Millar murmured, ‘indeed.’

Giorgio Silvestri blew out his smoke more loudly than necessary. ‘The pictures at the end were very impressive,’ he said. ‘Even if that light – come dire – seduces one into oblivion. Or obfuscation. But I would actually like to come back to the subject: the interpretation of the interesting looks that the animals gave each other.’

His voice had had a strange, unassuming authority, Perlmann thought afterwards when the specialist discussion had once again got under way. It was the voice of someone who was used to intervening at the right moment and giving an awkward situation in a conversation a particular turn. That intervention had not been even slightly boss-like, and now the Italian had once again pulled up one knee, and was lolling in his chair like a teenager.

In the rest of her contributions Laura Sand remained cool, and one could sense her restrained fury even when its first explosion had passed. Millar made an effort and disguised his objections in the form of questions. Today, luckily, the words just poured out of Evelyn Mistral any old how, and when she said that the animals were, in her view, exchanging a boisterous linguistic form, which also contained some funny grammatical errors, even Laura Sand couldn’t help laughing.

Perlmann said nothing. It was nearly one o’clock and he was internally rehearsing the sentences for Maria; because the idea that he could walk past her unnoticed for a second time, when she was waiting for his paper, was unlikely in the extreme.

He found all this material incredibly exciting, Millar said when Laura Sand looked at her watch and gathered her papers together. So he suggested continuing with the same thing on Monday. He flicked through the texts. ‘And on Tuesday. Because there’s is a lot I’d still like to know about it, in theoretical terms as well.’

Laura Sand took her time before returning his expectant glance. ‘OK,’ she said then, and the way she imitated Millar’s Yankee accent was a sign that she had accepted his conciliatory offer.

Millar pushed his glasses back on his nose with his index finger. ‘Swell.’

She pulled a face at the word. His mouth twitched.

Perlmann calculated feverishly: that meant that the second half of the coming week was taken up with Evelyn Mistral, and it would be his turn on the Monday of the last week. The text would have to be in the pigeonholes by Saturday at the latest. That meant that Maria would have to have it on Wednesday morning – Thursday at the latest. Five-and-a-half days. That could be enough. His heart was pounding. Suddenly, everything was open again.

‘While we’re on the subject,’ Silvestri spoke into Perlmann’s calculation. ‘As far as the last week is concerned I can only do the first half. On Thursday I’m afraid I have to sort a few things out at the hospital.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘So I can’t be at your session, which will probably happen at the end. But I’ll get the text.’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann said hoarsely. A week, I’ve gained a whole week.

As if numb with relief he walked through the lounge. Maria was waiting for him in the hall. He walked over to her with a presence of mind that later surprised him as much as it repelled him.

‘I didn’t get around to saying it in the morning. The timetable has changed slightly, and now I’m going to use the opportunity to rework my text again. As things look right now, you won’t have to do anything with it until next Friday.’

‘I see,’ she said, slightly irritated, and ran her hand sideways through her hair so that her earring jangled quietly. ‘What should I…? All right, then. I’ll just go on typing up your other text. Will that do?’

During Maria’s last words Evelyn Mistral had joined them.

‘Yes, do that,’ said Perlmann, and couldn’t help running his tongue over his lips.

‘You’ve been writing a lot recently, haven’t you?’ Evelyn said to him as they were walking together through the hall. ‘And all in secret!’

Perlmann pulled a helpless face and shrugged.

‘And now I’ve gained half a week,’ he said. ‘Not bad. Although, I’m actually finished and almost a little disappointed having to wait until Thursday. Silly, isn’t it? And I’ve got such stage fright!’

No, said Perlmann, he didn’t have time to stroll through town. He had something he wanted to work on. But on Sunday he would be available again, very definitely.

He sat for almost an hour in the red armchair before he worked out what was going on. Before, when he had parted from Evelyn Mistral and gone energetically upstairs, two at a time, he had been glad to enjoy his relief, and at the same time – for the first time in ages – he had once again felt something like buoyancy. In that one week that he suddenly had at his disposal he would surely be able to get something written. But then, when he had lit a cigarette and, to his surprise, rested his feet on the circular table, the relief he had promised himself did not come, and it had not helped at all to predict the unexpected, happy turn of events. He meekly took his feet off the table and sat up straight. And only now did it dawn on him that the cramped weariness that had set in instead of relief was disappointment – disappointment that it wasn’t all over yet, and that there was still a long sequence of days to come, in which he would have to live through that tension, that anxiety and above all that lack of belief in himself. He drew the curtains, took a quarter of a sleeping-pill and lay down in bed. Just before he fell asleep there was a knock on the door. He didn’t react.

It wasn’t, in fact, Chagall’s colors that he had been defending in his dream, he thought when he woke up in the gloom and, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbed his throbbing temples. Admittedly, the painter’s name had wandered constantly through his thoughts like a ghost, but what he had cried out – in a hoarse voice and the most indistinct of words, against a wall of incredulity – had been a defense of Laura Sand’s poetic images of suffering.

He went into the shower and tried to find the words that had remained only a furious intention in his dream. Words came. He spoke them into the stream of water, choked and then intensified his defense until it became a fiery speech peaking in the claim that only beautiful images could depict suffering for what it was – because beauty was, in fact, truth, and the only truth that could plumb the whole depth of suffering. When he turned off the water and rubbed the taste of chlorine from his face with his towel, he shuddered at his kitsch and was glad for a while to be able to listen to the sober, boring voice of the announcer on the television news.

At dinner, Achim Ruge amazed him. In the middle of the main course, and without interrupting his dissection of his fish, he suddenly said: ‘You know, Brian, I really didn’t understand what it was that bothered you so much about Laura’s film. They’re very precise, very eloquent shots – much better than anything you get to see on television on the subject.’

Laura Sand went on eating, without even looking up. Millar lowered his knife and fork, took off his glasses and cleaned them thoroughly.

‘Now, Achim,’ he said then, ‘I see it like this: in this case dreamlike, photographically successful pictures conceal more than they reveal. Beauty, you might say, is lying here. Of course, I don’t mean, Laura, that you are lying,’ he added quickly, although without getting a glance from her, ‘I just mean it in a – how should I say it? – in an objective sense. Truthful pictures of hunger and death don’t need to be bad, of course. But they should, I think, be as dry as agency reports. Sober. Completely sober. Certainly not dreamy. And I don’t think it’s an aesthetic question, it’s a moral one. Sorry, but that’s how I see it.’

He waited for a reaction from Laura Sand, but again he waited in vain, so that after an apologetic gesture in Ruge’s direction he addressed himself to his dinner again.

For a while the only sound was the rattle of cutlery, and the waiter who topped up their wine seemed like an intruder. With all his might Perlmann resisted the feeling that there was something in what Millar had said. He was tempted to adopt the opposite view, and that impulse also had something to do with the fact that Millar’s hairy hands got on his nerves, hands that were capable of producing that mysterious simultaneity of sounds in Bach and now manipulated the fish cutlery with the delicacy of a surgeon. But then he thought about the taste of chlorine in the shower and bit his lips.

‘I’m not convinced,’ Ruge was saying now. ‘Taking suffering seriously and allowing oneself to be morally touched by it can’t mean denying beauty. Or forbidding it, to a certain extent.’

Laura gave him a glance of agreement.

‘Erm… no, of course not,’ Millar said irritably. ‘And that’s not what I meant. But that’s exactly where there’s a contradiction in Laura’s film. There’s no getting round it.’

‘Of course. And nor should there be,’ Ruge smiled. ‘What concerns me is just this: it’s a contradiction that we’ve got to endure, both here and elsewhere. Endure it, without avoiding it.’

‘Ecco!’ said Silvestri.

Laura Sand leaned back and lit a cigarette. There was a complacent gleam in her furious expression. Perlmann didn’t like that gleam. Suddenly, he missed Agnes.

Millar gave Silvestri a contemptuous look. ‘I think that’s too simple,’ he said then, turning to Ruge. ‘Cheap – if the word is allowed.’

‘Oh, it’s allowed, certainly,’ replied Ruge. ‘But it’s wrong, I fear. Because enduring that contradiction – in the sense in which I mean it – that is, on the contrary, extremely difficult. Or expensive,’ he added with a grin.

Millar drummed his fingers on the table top. ‘I don’t think so, Achim… Oh, forget it.’

Over dessert and coffee he didn’t say a word. Now and again he bit his lips. Perlmann suddenly wasn’t sure whether Brian Millar was as tough an opponent as he had previously thought.

Before he went to bed, Perlmann prepared his desk for the following day. He moved the lamp to the side and straightened a stack of blank sheets on the glass, with his writing materials next to them. He went through the books in his suitcase and finally carried three volumes over to the desk. Then he took half a pill. If he was to be able to start writing straight away tomorrow, he would have to sleep well. When the first, familiar signs of numbness set in, he began to compose the structure of his paper. Four subheadings, underlined and with a number in front of them. The four lines were precisely the same length. It looked very neat. It would turn out well.

21

When Kirsten, announced by Giovanni, stood at his door at six o’clock the following morning, Perlmann had to control himself to keep from throwing his arms around her neck.

‘Hi, Dad,’ she said with a smile in which sheepishness and mockery mixed, and which also contained a confidence that he had never seen in his daughter before. ‘You sounded so weird on the phone the day before yesterday that I thought I should check everything was all right.’

She was wearing a long, black coat and light-colored sneakers, and her recalcitrant hair was held together with a lemon-yellow hairband. On the floor next to her was the scuffed red leather travelling bag that Agnes had dragged around with her like a talisman on all her trips.

‘Come on, sit down,’ he said, and cursed his heavy head and furry tongue. ‘How on earth did you get here?’

She had been on the road for fifteen hours from Konstanz, hitching all the way. Six times she had stood by the roadside, and once – at a gas station on the Milan ring road, long after midnight – it had been more than an hour before anyone had picked her up. Perlmann shuddered, but didn’t say a word. The best part had been at the beginning, in Switzerland. There, a man had even invited her to dinner before they drove down the Leventina gorge. ‘A nice respectable Swiss man with suspenders!’ She laughed when she saw his face.

No, she hadn’t actually been scared. Well, OK, perhaps a bit when the guy who drove her from Milan to Genoa kept on about her appearance. She’d been annoyed that she didn’t speak enough Italian to shut him up. But then he’d let her get into the back to sleep for a while. And when he insisted on a goodbye kiss – well, yes, apart from the fact that it had scratched a bit and she hadn’t liked his smell, it had been quite funny. She had driven the rest of the journey with a dolled-up woman in an open-topped Mercedes, who had talked without interruption about her argument with her husband and paid her, Kirsten, no further attention. Here, in the sleeping town, it had been a long time before she had found someone to show her the way to the hotel.

‘But now I’m here and I think it’s great that I’ve done it! You know, Martin was quite cross about me suddenly leaving like that. He actually tried to talk me out of it. But when I was coming out of the student canteen I met Lasker, and when he stopped specially to tell me how perceptive he thought my presentation was, I was so high that I just had to do something crazy. Do you think I could give Martin a quick call and tell him I got here safely?’

Perlmann showed her how to get an outside line, picked up his clothes and went into the bathroom. He took alternate hot and cold showers to drive away the after-effect of the pills, and every now and again he held his tongue under the stream of water.

So in the end she hadn’t come because of him, but because she wanted to celebrate her success. He tried to fight against his disappointment with vigorous rubbing. He had never seen her with purple lips before. It was the same purple that Sheila had worn. It emphasized the pout of her lips, which even as a little girl she had refused to accept. The color didn’t suit her. Not at all. And then all those rings, at least one on each finger. They were all mixed up, and yet it looked as if she was wearing knuckle-dusters on each hand.

Only now did he notice that his chin hurt because he was convulsively gripping his razor. Once again he bathed his eyes, which looked swollen and unhealthy. Then he slipped into his clothes, leaned against the door with his eyes closed for a moment, and then went back into the room.

Kirsten was still on the phone, and guiltily turned her head when she heard Perlmann. ‘See you on Tuesday, then!’ she said quickly. ‘Yes, I will. See you then. Bye.’ She put down the phone. ‘I want to be back in time for Lasker’s seminar. I thought there might be a night train from Genoa on Monday evening. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired at the next session! But… umm…’ she looked at the floor.

‘Of course, I’ll give you the ticket,’ said Perlmann, ‘after all, you came here because of me.’

She came up to him and he rested his hands on her shoulders.

‘You look tired. And pale,’ she said. ‘Has something happened? The way you asked about Mum on the phone: I couldn’t understand a word.’

‘Oh, yes, that.’ His tongue was heavy again. ‘I don’t know… I was a bit confused. It doesn’t mean anything more than that. And as to what’s happened, no, no, nothing particular has happened.’

She looked at him with the concentrated, sceptical look that she had inherited from Agnes. ‘But you’re not having a particularly great time here, either, are you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all a bit exhausting. With all the other colleagues.’

‘And it’s been less than a year. Sometimes it seems to me as if it can’t have been more than a few weeks. You too?’

He felt the burning sensation behind his eyes and pulled her to him for a moment. Then he pushed her away with forced brio. ‘Right, so let’s find you a room in this place!’

Less than half an hour after she moved into her room, she was back with him, her clothes changed and her hair still damp.

‘God, the price of a room like that – it’s insane!’

She didn’t want to sleep now. She wanted to see the sea at dawn, the terrace, the really fantastic hotel in general.

‘And you’ve got to show me the conference room as well! Have you got a session on Monday? Do you think I could listen?’

Perlmann felt as if his chest was filling with lead. Breakfast first, he finally suggested. As they walked to the elevator, she turned round and looked back down the long corridor.

‘Are you all up here?’

‘What? Oh, I see. No. Just me, in fact.’ He pressed the button for the elevator again.

‘And why’s that?’

‘Why? Umm… ah… that’s more or less coincidence. Lots of the rooms downstairs are being renovated over the winter, and there was some sort of problem with the bed. I’m quite content. It’s nice and quiet up here.’

The elevator door opened. ‘Aha,’ she said and plucked at her yellow sweatshirt with the printed emblem of Rockefeller University. On the way down Perlmann looked with concentration at the jumping illuminated numbers.

It was only a quarter past seven, and the dining room, its lights still lit, was deserted. The waiter struggled to hide his surprise. ‘Benvenuta!’ he said with a slight bow when Perlmann explained who Kirsten was.

She ate for two, admired the silver cutlery and the chandeliers and kept pointing enthusiastically at the sea, where the day was breaking, and the faint dawn light was making way for the transparent blue of a cloudless sky.

Perlmann drank only coffee. He would have liked to smoke, but didn’t dare. Before, when Giovanni told him he had sent up a signorina who claimed to be his daughter, the first thing he had done was to check whether he had emptied and rinsed out the ashtray. He couldn’t tell her now that he was smoking again. He guessed that this half hour, sitting quite alone in the big, snow-white dining room as light filtered increasingly in, so that the chandeliers suddenly were switched off, as if by an invisible hand – that this half hour would be the loveliest moment of her visit, and he wanted to hold on to it for as long as possible.

When she was finished, she took a pack of cigarettes out of her Indian-looking shoulder bag. She sheepishly put one between her lips. ‘Only one every now and again. Not like Mum and you before.’ Then she rummaged for a red lighter with a fine gold rim and lit her cigarette. Perlmann registered that she was only inhaling it half-heartedly. It was nearly eight o’clock. Soon it would be over, that moment of silent intimacy in the empty dining room.

Millar, Ruge and von Levetzov came in at the same time and stopped, nonplussed, for a moment. Then they approached the table and Perlmann introduced Kirsten. At first she didn’t know what was happening when von Levetzov lifted her hand and made as if to kiss it. There was still a confused smile on her face when Millar shook her hand and bowed athletically.

‘Good girl!’ he said, and pointed to the sweatshirt. ‘That’s my university!’

‘And, of course, he thinks it’s the best one,’ Ruge said to her in German. ‘Only because he doesn’t know Bochum!’ he added with a giggle. He shook her hand. ‘Good morning. When did you get here?’

Perlmann was glad that the women hadn’t come yet. When Kirsten had finished her cigarette, he excused himself and they went out to the terrace. Before they reached the veranda Kirsten suddenly stopped and craned her neck.

‘That looks like… Is that the conference room?’

Perlmann nodded.

She took his hand. ‘Come on, you’ve got to show it to me now.’

Inside, she immediately sat down in the high armchair with the carved back. She compared the elegance of the room with the shabbiness of the practice rooms at the university: here the mahogany tables, there the greyish Formica ones; the gleaming white porcelain ashtrays, as opposed to the cigarette butts floating in the dregs of the cardboard coffee cups; the immaculate, electrically adjustable board behind her, in contrast to the blind boards back home, which constantly got stuck. Then she picked up one of the crystal glasses for the mineral water.

‘You know, I had a terribly dry mouth when I was sitting up at the front, at least at first. Luckily, I found a boiled sweet in my jacket. Lasker nearly managed a smile when he saw how bothered I was by the stickiness on my fingers afterwards.’

On the way to the door she tugged on the tassels of the coats of arms and laughed at the clouds of dust. In the doorway she turned round again.

‘Incredibly elegant – almost illicit. And then the view out to the pool… But the position at the front is the same. Emotionally, I mean. I was worried I might forget everything at the crucial moment. Complete nonsense, of course. But still.’ She looked at him. ‘You probably can’t understand that any more, when it’s been routine for so many years. Am I right?’

Perlmann rested his hand on her shoulder and pushed her gently outside.

After a walk along the sea, in the course of which she talked about Martin and stopped from time to time to hold her face in the morning sun, she grew tired and wanted to try and get some sleep. Outside the door to her room she gave him a kiss on the cheek and laughed at the purple print it left.

‘See you later? Do you have work to do?’

He raised his hand and quickly turned round.

He stood by the window for hours on end until his back hurt. Now and again he glanced at his desk. How tidy the desk looks! she had said before they had gone to breakfast. As if you’d just finished something.

The presence of his sleeping daughter. She made everything seem unreal, or rather she created a twofold reality: two levels to a certain extent, between which he swung back and forth at every moment, not knowing which one he belonged to – or wanted to belong to – more. Above all, with Kirsten’s arrival time had doubled, two unconnected strands of time passed through him now, both claiming to be actual, real time, the time that mattered. One was the time that Kirsten had brought with her, the time of her weekly seminars, and also the time in which the weeks and months of her acquaintance with Martin were counted. That was the time into which he had threaded himself before, on their walk, to be close to her. Now, standing at the window, he tried again to slip into that time, he searched it for present, a present that could make everything apart from his daughter unimportant and free him of his anxiety. But Kirsten’s sleep had, if it hadn’t demolished that time, deep-frozen it for a few hours, and the imagined present with her would only be able to turn into a real present at the moment when she opened her eyes down there, on the second floor of the other wing. By now he was entirely back in that other time, the time of the hotel, the time of anxiety, which had gone on ticking with treacherous silence behind the back of Kirsten’s time.

Perlmann drew one curtain and lay down on the bed. There were, strictly speaking, not only these two temporal realities, he thought, and was grateful for the soft, velvety sound that his thoughts now assumed. There was, in fact, also the time that belonged to him and Kirsten alone, the time that began with Agnes’s death, the time of shared abandonment and grief. That one – Perlmann’s hands clawed involuntarily into the cover – Martin had no business with, absolutely no business at all. And before that there was, again, another time in which Herr Wiedemann or Wiedemeier or whatever that young whippersnapper’s name was, had no place: the time with Agnes and Kirsten, the time when all three of them had chosen, from mountains of pictures, the photograph of the month and in the end the photograph of the year: family time, so to speak.

Perlmann rubbed his eyes. The serious picture of Agnes on the windowsill appeared, and now he also saw the coffee seeping into the pale carpet. There was also Frankfurt time, the snowed-in time when his letterbox filled up with junk mail and the dean waited for his report. That time had something to do with Kirsten’s time in Konstanz, it seemed to him; but now the thoughts became so gentle and pleasantly vague that it would have been a shame to spoil them by concentrating.

When Kirsten woke him with her knocking it was late afternoon. ‘I slept like a log!’ she said and whirled through the room. ‘Will you show me the town now?’

When he came out of the bathroom, she was holding the big Russian-English dictionary, flicking through it and then constantly rubbing her fingers on her jeans.

‘That’s an amazing thing,’ she said. ‘Every single turn of phrase explained! I don’t think Martin knows that. Except the paper’s horrible to the touch. Actually repellent. Where did you get this great tome?’

Perlmann felt as if he were seeing Santa Margherita for the first time. And as if this wasn’t the town that had the Marconi Veranda in it. The many squares, arches, alleyways – it was as if they hadn’t been there before, and sprang into being under Kirsten’s gaze. By the wooden way he stood around when she went up to things to look at details, one might have thought he was bored. In fact, with his eyes often half-closed, he was letting himself fall into the borrowed present of her enthusiasm, feeling like someone looking out at the sea through the barred windows of his cell.

Afterwards, in the café, he was a hair away from succumbing to the overwhelming temptation to tell Kirsten about his desperation. Just before it came to that, he felt the blood pulsing through his whole body. At once disappointed and relieved, he then heard her asking the waiter the way to the toilet, and when she came back with her springy gait and swinging bag, it seemed to him impossible to take the step which, he knew, would have changed so much between them. But his blood pulsed on, so he took out his cigarettes.

She stared at him, thunderstruck.

‘You… since when have you been smoking again?’

He played it down, spoke with hollow nonchalance about Italy, the cafés and the cigarettes that were simply a part of it. He was revolted by himself, and she didn’t believe a word. There was a shadow on her face now. She felt it was like a betrayal of Agnes, a desertion. He was quite sure about that. A burning helplessness took hold of him, and without anticipating it, he started talking about intimacy, about various forms of loyalty, about love and freedom.

‘If intimacy has something to do with the harmony of two lives, one might wonder whether it’s compatible with the ideal that two people shouldn’t curtail each other’s freedom,’ he concluded.

‘Dad,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t know you like this!’

The shadow had disappeared, making way for a smile full of curious dread. She accepted one of his cigarettes and took out her red lighter.

‘Actually, I don’t think it’s so bad that you’re smoking again,’ she said. ‘At least it means I don’t have to apologize!’

Turning the corner of a building on the way back, they were suddenly in front of the trattoria. Perlmann stopped and pushed the flat of his hand between the glass beads of the curtain. Then he slowly drew it back and walked on without a word.

‘What was that?’ asked Kirsten.

‘Nothing. That kind of curtain… I like it. There’s something… something of the fairy tale about it.’

‘You’re full of surprises today!’ she laughed. ‘And on the subject of fairy tales: doesn’t that white hotel on the hill up there look fantastic? Could we go there tomorrow?’

‘The Imperiale. You have expensive tastes,’ he laughed, and for a moment he disappeared entirely in her time and forgot that the other time, the time of the veranda, was ruthlessly ticking on.

When he collected her from her room for dinner, he was struck dumb for a moment.

‘Smashing,’ he said at last, in English, after she had twirled twice on her axis in her glittering black dress, still slightly crumpled in places from the journey. Around her neck she wore a piece of Indian jewellery, and all the rings but one had vanished. When his eye settled in puzzlement on her hands, she winked an eye and grinned.

‘You didn’t like them, did you?’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘I can read you like a book. Always could. Don’t you remember?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Time to go. Don’t forget your bag.’

On the way to the door she looked at herself again in the big, half-blind mirror on the wall and straightened a stocking. If only she would drop the damned purple, he thought. And her heels didn’t need to be quite so high, either. Just before they left the corridor, he stopped and held her back by the arm.

‘I wanted to ask you a favor. Just a small thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Brian Millar will probably play in the lounge after dinner. At the grand piano, I mean.’ He paused and looked at the floor. ‘No one here knows that I play as well. Played. And I’d like it to stay that way. OK?’

She looked at him quizzically and shook her head very slightly.

‘But you don’t need to hide yourself! I’d like to see if this man Millar plays better than you!’

‘Please. I… I can’t really explain. But that’s how I’d like it.’

‘If you want, of course,’ she said slowly, and played absently with the strap of her bag. ‘But… there’s something up with you. I’ve been feeling it for some time. Won’t you tell me?’

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘or we’ll be the last ones in.’

At dinner Perlmann felt as if he were sitting on hot coals. He tried not to look, but his attention was focused entirely on what his daughter was saying, and he twitched at every mistake she made in English. But she did dazzlingly well. She had ended up next to Silvestri, diagonally opposite Millar.

The Italian had – and Perlmann wouldn’t have expected it of him – immediately stood up when they stepped to the table, and had straightened Kirsten’s chair for her as she sat down. At the sight of this, Ruge’s face had twisted into a grin, and Kirsten had blushed slightly under her freckles. When she dared to speak a few words of Italian, Silvestri immediately continued in his mother tongue, until she waved him to stop and he rested his hand, laughing, on her bare arm. And even though she talked mostly to Millar after that, Perlmann was quite sure that she didn’t forget Silvestri’s presence beside her for a moment.

English and history, she said, when Millar asked her what subjects she was studying. But that might change, she was still only starting. When answering Millar’s questions about the details of her study she made more linguistic mistakes than before, and Perlmann had no idea what he was eating.

But then, when the subject turned to Faulkner, and in particular to The Wild Palms, it came bubbling out of her almost faultlessly, and he wondered more than once where she got all these obscure words. Her dinner grew cold as she defended her thesis, face glowing, and Millar, who couldn’t quite remember the novel and whose argument was surprisingly weak, set down his cutlery several times and grabbed his gleaming glasses. When Kirsten was clearly about to win on points, Perlmann forced himself at least to eat the last mouthful of fillet steak, and thought of his colleague Lasker, who had stayed specifically because of his daughter.

Although he didn’t know why, he avoided looking in Evelyn Mistral’s direction. But twice he caught her eye, and both times he was confused by the mocking shyness in her green eyes. As if his daughter’s presence revealed something about him which, to her annoyance, disturbed her previous feelings.

Laura Sand, on the other hand, listened to the discussion of Faulkner in her sulky way and asked at the end what phase of his life the novel coincided with. Just once, when she thought Perlmann wasn’t watching her, her eye slipped over him and betrayed that she too was busy revising her previous image of him.

Over coffee, Silvestri offered Kirsten a Gauloise. Smiling smartly, she bent over his lighter, inhaled the smoke and instantly had a coughing fit. Silvestri’s unshaven face pulled into a grin, and he kept his next drag in his lungs for a particularly long time. Kirsten bravely wiped the water from her eyes and carefully took another drag; by now she had her coughing under control. As she added milk and sugar to her coffee, she let the cigarette with its purple stains dangle casually from the corner of her mouth. When Silvestri went on looking teasingly at her, for a moment it looked as if she were going to stick out her tongue at him.

As they left, von Levetzov held the door open for Kirsten and bowed slightly. Perlmann, who was walking behind her, had had enough of seeing his daughter in his colleagues’ force field, and really wanted to go upstairs. But now Kirsten was shaking hands with Evelyn Mistral, whose head was tilted sideways almost as much as Millar’s usually was, and then the two women walked silently towards the lounge without saying a word to one another.

While Millar was playing, Kirsten kept glancing across to Perlmann, giving him to understand, with the disparaging twitch of her lips that had for a time made Agnes furious, that she couldn’t understand why he was hiding in the face of this mediocre performance. And when Millar stood up and closed the lid over the keys, her applause was the shortest and faintest.

But he had been good, rather better than usual, and Perlmann was slightly hurt that his daughter felt the need to cheer him up with her partisan judgment.

Although few questions were being put to Kirsten now, she looked very excited, turned her head to everyone who spoke and, to Silvestri’s delight, smoked one Gauloise after another. When, in passing, someone mentioned Perlmann’s imminent invitation to Princeton, she frowned and smiled at him. She was the last to stand when the company broke up.

At the bottom of the stairs Evelyn Mistral walked towards Perlmann, who was with Kirsten.

‘Yet again, our wedding stroll comes to nothing,’ she said in Spanish, pointedly looking only at him. ‘I’m sure you have other plans.’

‘Erm… I don’t know… yes, we’ll…,’ he said, annoyed both by his stammer and by the fact that the Spanish woman, whom he felt he barely recognized at that moment, was so expressively ignoring Kirsten with her eyes.

‘You don’t need to apologize,’ she said with a face that reminded him of a schoolmistress. ‘¡Buenas noches!’

Halfway up the stairs Kirsten stopped and looked down to the hall, where Evelyn Mistral was standing with Ruge and von Levetzov. ‘Did I hear her wrong or did she call you tú? I mean, I don’t speak Spanish that well, but that’s what it sounded like to me.’

Perlmann hadn’t known it was so hard to sound casual. ‘Oh, that, yes. It’s quite customary in Spanish academic circles.’

Before she turned into her corridor, Kirsten stopped again. ‘Boda. What does that mean again?’

This time he managed a natural smile. ‘Wedding.’

The steep wrinkle that he didn’t like formed above her nose. ‘Wedding?’

‘A little joke between us.’

She kicked something imaginary from the carpet, glanced at him briefly and disappeared into the corridor.

22

When Perlmann woke from his light and troubled sleep the next morning, and looked down at the terrace, he saw Kirsten laughing at Silvestri’s trick with the swallowed cigarette. They both had cups in front of them, and on the white bistro table there were two blue packs of cigarettes that looked precisely identical. Kirsten’s tousled hair fell on her yellow sweatshirt, and now, as she brushed a strand out of her eyes, he saw the big sunglasses that covered half of her face.

In his dream she had been wearing last night’s glittering dress, and her piled-up hairdo hadn’t suited her at all. Had she really been wearing sunglasses? Perlmann held his face under the jet of water. Or was the feeling that she was strange to him – the feeling that he had constantly battled against – to do with something else? He had been surprised and proud that she could suddenly speak Spanish. But he hadn’t really understood what she was saying with her purple mouth as she walked past him down the stairs. His colleagues were waiting for her in the hall, and when she walked up to them, the bright sound of her laughter had made him unsure whether she really was his daughter.

He walked so slowly down the hall that Signora Morelli looked up from her papers behind the reception desk. His daughter seemed to like it here, she said. He nodded, ordered coffee from the waiter who was just coming in, and stepped outside.

Kirsten desperately wanted to go across to Rapallo.

‘Do you know,’ she asked Silvestri in stumbling Italian, ‘whether the building where the two treaties were signed is still standing?’

Perlmann was silent. She was calling the Italian tu. And why two treaties?

‘I’ve really got to get some work done,’ Silvestri laughed when he saw how disappointed she was that he didn’t want to come with her. ‘I haven’t been as industrious as your father.’

Later, on the ship, Kirsten talked about Silvestri’s work in the clinic, and if her voice hadn’t been a touch too casual, one might have thought she had known him for years. He had plainly talked to her a lot about his previous work with autistic people, and all of a sudden she also knew about Franco Basaglia, whose boldness she described as if she had been present at his experiment in opening the portals of the institutions. From time to time she drew on an unfiltered Gauloise, and it seemed to Perlmann as if the way in which she plucked crumbs of tobacco from her tongue was copied from the movement of Silvestri’s white hand. In ten days, she announced, Giorgio would have to go to Bologna to oversee the start of a new therapeutic plan, and at the same time he would be able to tend to some particularly difficult patients who would otherwise have had to get by without him.

The fact that Kirsten was, behind her big sunglasses, preoccupied with Silvestri’s appointment diary, added yet another new time to the many others, and Perlmann was uncertain whether this new time – in which Kirsten was Silvestri’s companion – brought his daughter closer to him because it was an Italian time, a time on this side of the Alps, or whether Kirsten, wrapped up in this new time, seemed strange to him, a traitor, even, because it was the time of a person who – unlike Martin beyond the Alps, for example – was waiting for a text from him.

She also knew about the time that Silvestri had spent in Oakland.

‘On the subject of America,’ she said, ‘I think this Princeton business is brilliant! Do you think I could visit you there?’ With a strange hesitation, as if she had to struggle to remember him, she added after a pause: ‘With Martin. He’d love to see New York!’

The people they asked in Rapallo didn’t know whether the historical building was still there. Over lunch Perlmann learned about the treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia that had temporarily made Fiume into an independent state. He was amazed at how much his daughter knew, and how hungry for knowledge she was. And deep down that’s exactly what I never was: hungry for knowledge.

Within a few minutes the sky had clouded over. In the gloomy, flat light that now fell through the pizzeria windows, Kirsten’s enthusiasm suddenly faded, and they looked shyly at one another.

‘I’m not taking too much of your time away?’ she asked. ‘It’s your turn on Thursday, isn’t it?’

It was hard for Perlmann to admit to himself that he was furious about her tone, which expressed the fact that she now saw every feat that anyone had to perform in the light of her first presentation. He nodded briefly and suggested they leave.

On the journey back they stood in silence at the railing and looked at the foamy crests of the waves forming under a cold wind. Kirsten asked at one point whether she could read what he was going to say here. Perlmann was glad that a gust of wind gave him a moment’s pause. Maria had the text at the moment, he said then, and told her who Maria was. For a few frightened minutes he waited for her question about the subject of his talk; but it didn’t come. Instead Kirsten said, without looking at him, ‘Brian Millar. You don’t like him. Do you?’

‘Umm… he’s OK. He strikes me as a bit too… self-confident.’

‘Cocksure,’ she said in English, and looked at him with a smile. ‘I can see that.’

As they left the ship she suddenly stopped. ‘Is that why you don’t want to play the piano? You’re not scared of him or anything, are you? I thought he sounded pretty shallow last night, when we were talking about Faulkner.’

Perlmann knocked an empty coke can over the edge of the quay wall with his shoe. ‘This just isn’t the place for it, I reckon. That’s all.’

Now he needed to be alone and started walking at a brisk pace. But when the hotel came into view, Kirsten stopped again.

‘And you won’t explain that thing about Mum and Chagall? I’m sorry. I’m getting on your nerves. But you’re so… so down.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s about to start raining.’

In the hall Silvestri came towards them, the collar of his raincoat turned up and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He was going to the cinema, he said with the guilty grin of a schoolboy skiving on his homework. Could she come with him? Kirsten asked, and turned red when she became aware of the impetuousness of her question. Again Perlmann could hardly believe how quickly the Italian was able to react. The only clue that he would rather have gone on his own lay in the fact that his gallantry sounded a little too cheerful.

‘Volentieri; volentierissimo, Signorina,’ he said and offered her his arm.

Perlmann had to turn on the light when he sat down at the desk. Only now, when he saw the skewed pens and the screwed-up paper in the waste-paper basket, did he remember that he had got up in the night and tried to work. It wasn’t a very clear memory, and there was something strange and distant about it – as if it hadn’t been him at all. He picked up the crumpled paper, only to drop it again after a brief hesitation. Then he started to jot down some keywords. When Kirsten left from Genoa on Monday evening, he would be able to take a taxi quickly back here and start writing straight away. And then he still had three days before he absolutely had to give Maria a text.

The keywords, which stood side by side and on top of one another, refused to turn into sentences, and in the growing carelessness of the writing the lack of belief became increasingly evident. Perlmann ran a bath and sat down in the tub long before it was full. The worst thing was that he wished it was already Monday evening. As he did so he thought constantly about when the film would be over and Kirsten might knock at the door. He added more and more hot water until it was hardly bearable. Then he lay on the bed in his dressing gown, and as the burning of his skin slowly eased, he dozed off.

Something had gone wrong between her and Silvestri. Perlmann could see it at once when he opened the door to Kirsten. There was something defiant in her face, an expression like the one she had worn in the school competition when she had been beaten by her arch-enemy from the same class. She walked up to him and put her arms around his neck. She hadn’t done that for years, and Perlmann, who no longer knew how to hug a daughter, held her like a precious, fragile object. When she pulled away he stroked her hair, which smelled of restaurant. She sat down in the red armchair and reached into her jacket for her cigarettes. She looked furiously at the pack of Gauloises that she had fished out, and hurled them towards the waste-paper basket, which she just missed. Perlmann picked up the cigarettes, which had slipped from their wrapping. When he looked up, Kirsten was holding one of her own cigarettes in the flame of the red lighter. Her dark eyes glittered.

‘And now I’d like you to take me out, up to the white hotel on the hill,’ she said with a purple pout.

It sounded like a sentence from a film, and Perlmann had to suppress a chuckle. He put on his clothes and chose his blazer with the gold buttons. He was glad that it wasn’t yet Monday evening. When he came out of the bathroom, she pointed to the page of keywords that still lay on the glass desktop.

‘When I get bored in seminars I doodle as well,’ she said.

It was only when the taxi turned into the drive of the Imperiale that Perlmann managed to forget that remark.

Kirsten leaned far back in her turquoise plush armchair and looked out into the backdrop of lights in the bay.

‘I wish Mum was here, too,’ she said into the quiet music that spilled across from the bar into the lounge.

Perlmann choked on his sandwich. So perhaps, after all, she hadn’t come to terms with Agnes’s death better and faster than he had. And even if she had, it had been silly to resent her for it.

‘Yesterday in the café,’ she went on, ‘you said something about intimacy and freedom. I don’t know if I understood.’ She paused without looking at him. ‘Were you happy with Mum? I mean… It was good at home, there were never any arguments. But maybe…’

Perlmann closed his eyes. The camera clicked, and Agnes laughed mockingly as he beat his arms around him to drive away the pigeons. Then they were walking together through Hamburg, pointing out the gleaming colors of the wet, glistening autumn leaves to one another, while inside he repeated over and over to himself the doctor’s redeeming words about Kirsten’s health. In his face he felt the wind over the cliffs of Normandy, and saw Agnes’s arm in the yellow windbreaker, slinging the full pack of cigarettes far into the void with a circular motion. And then, as if this new memory had pushed its way darkly over the others without quite erasing them, he felt Agnes’s head on his stiff shoulder, after she had made her remark about that dreamy photograph of Hong Kong at the airport.

He opened his eyes and saw that Kirsten was looking at him.

‘We were fine. Most of the time we were fine together.’

Her smile at that moment, he thought later, revealed that she was pleased about the confidence in his voice, but unhappy with his choice of words. After all, she had asked about happiness.

She shook her packet of cigarettes and made to go. Following Silvestri’s habit of fishing one out with her lips, she paused, started the whole movement from the beginning and then used her fingers, as she normally did.

‘You know, Martin’s OK. He really is OK.’ She paused for too long, sensed it and struggled for words. ‘Really, he is. It’s just… I don’t know… sometimes he lacks a bit of… excitement. Something, you know, like that stupid guy Giorgio… that stupid Silvestri… or François… Oh, forget it.’ Turning her head quickly she threw Perlmann a crooked grin and then looked out of the window again.

Perlmann thought of how Agnes had come back from her trip to Shanghai, the one André Fischer had been on. That one present, a little ivory dragon, she had chucked at him halfway across the living room without warning, something she never normally did. And for a few days her other movements had become jauntier than usual, sometimes practically exuberant for no reason. Then things had returned to normal and the quietness that marked their dealings with one another had swallowed up the exuberance.

Perlmann asked how good Martin’s Russian was, when Kirsten’s silence began to oppress him. He was asking, he said, because she had made that remark the previous day about the big dictionary with the bad paper.

‘Oh, not bad, I think. His father, who’s a pretty revolting character, by the way, worked in Moscow for a long time, and Martin wanted to match his linguistic abilities. It seems to be the only bond between the two of them.’ She clumsily stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is talented. In lots of ways. That’s… that’s not it…’

It was long past midnight before they got out of the taxi in front of the Mira. Over the past two hours Kirsten had done almost all of the talking, and he had learned far more about her life than he had for ages. He now knew all about the other members of their shared apartment. He knew Kirsten’s travel plans for the coming year, and had joined her in her fury about the sloppiness of the medical insurance she’d taken out for her eczema. But most of all he now knew what her everyday life at university was like. He could even have quoted some of the graffiti that she saw every day. Enthralled, he had absorbed every single detail, and with each new topic he had tried to enjoy the closeness that his daughter sought with him as she went on talking, relaxed and almost dreamily, about the various different atmospheres over Lake Constance. But then she had fallen back into that tone that conveyed her pride for her father, who knew the university much, much better than she did, and for whom all the stories she told him must have been old hat. Stop, please stop! he could have cried out to her a dozen times. I’m not there any more. I haven’t been for ages! Her naivety had become more and more of a torture – as the lounge, with its fin-de-siècle plush charm, became emptier – and had driven him into an icy loneliness in which his temptation the previous day to confide in her all his fear and despair had not once returned.

Before Kirsten entered her corridor, she walked up to Perlmann, wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his chest.

‘We haven’t talked like that very often. Maybe never. It was nice. Did you think so, too?’

He nodded mutely. When she looked up and noticed the tears in his eyes, she stroked his cheeks with both hands. And before she disappeared round the corner three steps later, she waved at him, shyly at first, and then with ironic affectation.

23

At about half-past eight he picked her up for breakfast. She was dressed as she had been when she arrived, and was wearing all her rings as well. On the other hand her lips were bare, so that you could see the spot where her bottom lip had burst. When she saw Perlmann’s expression, she ran her index finger over the spot.

‘May I?’ she asked, and walked over to the mirror in the bathroom.

The pills. I should have cleared them away. Perlmann walked over to the window, closed his eyes and sought words for a casual, innocuous explanation.

‘Tell me,’ Kirsten said when she came out of the bathroom. ‘Barbiturates – isn’t that pretty strong stuff? And pretty dangerous, too? Because of addiction and everything, I mean.’

Perlmann breathed out before he turned round. ‘What? Oh, you mean the pills.’ He managed a smile. ‘Oh, no, the doctor told me not to worry about that. It’s all a matter of dosage. And I only need them very rarely, luckily.’ Now he hadn’t needed his well-chosen words. ‘Just now and again, so if there’s a night when my back hurts. And there’s something that isn’t quite right with the bed up here. And before the whole of the next day goes down the drain…’

She put one foot on the bedstead and retied her trainer. There was no way of telling whether she believed him.

Silvestri didn’t appear in the dining room until five to nine, and only drank coffee. Although he was sitting opposite her, Kirsten tried to ignore him, suddenly bombarding Ruge with questions about his lab in Bochum. Then, when Silvestri reached for his cigarettes, he sought Kirsten’s eye to offer her one. In the end he lit one for himself, glanced at Perlmann and sent the pack sliding jauntily all the way across the table so that it bumped into Kirsten’s saucer and made her coffee spill over the edge. Kirsten gave a start, lifted her dripping cup reproachfully for a moment, and then picked up the packet. Only now did she meet Silvestri’s eye. For a second Perlmann feared that she would simply push the pack back to him. But then she very slowly fished out a cigarette, put it between her lips and, looking in a completely different direction, stretched out her arm towards Silvestri with a gesture so blasé that it looked as if she had learned it at drama school. With a grin, the Italian dropped his lighter into her open hand from an exaggeratedly high position. There was a quiet metallic sound when it rubbed against all her rings. Without deigning to glance at him, Kirsten held her cigarette into the flame, snapped the lighter shut and set it down in the middle of the table. ‘Ecco!’ Silvestri laughed and reached for it. Then Kirsten turned and looked at him and stuck out her tongue.

Perlmann caught a glance from Evelyn Mistral. Her oriental face with its green eyes shot through with amber seemed to come at him from a long way away, and he didn’t know whether he was pleased about that, or unhappy.

Laura Sand’s third session passed at a more sluggish pace than the previous two. Some films injected a little life into proceedings, raising the question of whether animals understood the meaning of certain signs only in the sense that they reacted appropriately to them, or whether – albeit in a simplified, pallid sense – they attributed to others the intention of giving them a sign. Did animals have anything like a theory about the intellectual lives of their own species?

‘But that’s blindingly obvious!’ Kirsten exploded. ‘Of course they have! You can see that in their eyes!’

‘The fact is,’ Millar cut in, ‘that you can’t see anything at all in their eyes, and that it’s pretty fantastical to assume any such thing. To put it mildly.’ He said it in his usual confident, professional tone, and only a hint of irritation revealed that a discussion about Faulkner had taken place.

Perlmann thought about the funny things that Evelyn Mistral had been saying lately about the eloquent facial expressions of animals, and expected her to come to Kirsten’s aid. But she didn’t say a word, her arms folded over her chest, and even nodded when Millar and Ruge ridiculed a suggestion of goodness that von Levetzov had, in Perlmann’s eyes, only made because he wanted to be nice to Kirsten.

Like everyone else, Laura Sand was waiting for Silvestri to join in, since he was known to share Kirsten’s spontaneous opinion. But the Italian met this tense expectation with a poker face and picked more crumbs of tobacco from his tongue than were actually there. At last Laura Sand revealed with a twitch of the corners of her mouth that she had understood his refusal, and now developed her own thesis, which wasn’t so far removed from Kirsten’s feelings. At first Kirsten listened to her with excitement; but when it got technical, she leaned back inconspicuously and looked furtively at her watch.

‘I am a bit puzzled, though,’ she said to Perlmann later in the hall, though it sounded more intimidated than puzzled, ‘about how tough the debate was there. At our seminars it’s a lot… a lot looser, friendlier. Did you think it was really embarrassing when I burst out with my opinion?’

Perlmann didn’t reply, because at that point Maria walked up to them and handed him a printout of Leskov’s text, with the pages of his hand-written translation underneath.

‘Eccolo,’ she said. ‘It took until now because Signor Millar had some other things to write.’

For the title, printed in an exaggeratedly large, bold font, she had used a sheet of its own. Now she pointed at it and started to remark upon it. With a presence of mind that he didn’t experience deep within himself, Perlmann anticipated her and introduced Kirsten. He held the text behind his back with both hands, as he uttered words of praise about Maria which struck him as unbearably hollow. And no sooner had Maria addressed a question to Kirsten than he made an apologetic gesture, walked over to the reception desk and asked Signora Morelli to put the stack of paper in his pigeonhole.

‘I thought the text was very interesting,’ Maria said when she walked back to them. ‘Only the last third, that stuff about appropriation, I didn’t really understand that.’

‘Yes, that is a problem,’ said Perlmann, and started to turn away. ‘And many thanks for your work.’

‘You’re welcome. And… Just a moment… We’re still on for the other text on Friday?’

Perlmann felt Kirsten’s eyes on his face. When he turned round again, he had the feeling of moving a heavy, shapeless load. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as agreed.’

He was already holding the dining-room door handle when Kirsten pointed towards the pigeonholes. ‘That’s the text for your session on Thursday, isn’t it? Something about linguistic creation. Or did I misread it? You whisked the pages away so quickly!’ she laughed.

‘Later,’ Perlmann murmured when he saw Ruge and von Levetzov coming towards them.

‘You know,’ said Kirsten when they sat down at the table, ‘I thought I might be able to take a copy of the text. To read on the journey. Do you think I could ask Maria to make another printout for me?’

‘Later,’ said Perlmann. He hadn’t managed to keep his distress and fury out of his voice. He put his hand on her arm and smiled awkwardly. ‘We’ll talk about it later. OK?’

It took her ages to freshen herself up for the journey and pack her few belongings. Perlmann looked apprehensively down at the bay, where the first dawn was breaking below the gloomy sky. She hadn’t said another word about the text. And that (he knew his daughter far too well) had nothing to do with the fact that they had all gone on sitting in the dining room until after three, laughing at the jokes of Achim Ruge, who had risen to the occasion under Kirsten’s admiring gaze.

She would never speak again about that text of her own free will. She would sooner bite off her tongue. It had always been like that when he had treated her impatiently about anything. As before, she then tended to put on that pointedly oblivious, uninterested face that conveyed a single unambiguous message: It’s nothing. Once, when someone in a specialist discussion had put forward the thesis that there was no other form of expressing negative assertions of existence apart from the linguistic, he had said, laughing, ‘You don’t know my daughter.’

Shortly after Kirsten had gone to her room, he had taken the text from his pigeonhole. He had only looked quickly at the last printed page: thirty-seven pages, it was now. Then he had put the printout in his suitcase and added the handwritten sheets to Leskov’s text in the lower clothes drawer. He had phoned Genoa Station and reserved a sleeping compartment. Five minutes later he had phoned again and changed the reservation to a couchette. No, she couldn’t tell him with the best will in the world, the irritated woman had said, what connections to Konstanz there would be at six o’clock in the morning in Zurich. Since then he had been standing by the window and, although his back hurt, that seemed to him to be the only position in which he could bear to wait.

She was wearing the black coat again, and holding her red travelling bag when she suddenly appeared at about half-past six. It was as if the question of the text had never come up. He was actually quite nice, stupid Giorgio, she said, but she really couldn’t stand his endless mockery. And she certainly knew more about Faulkner than he did. She was wearing make-up again, and the bright-red hairgrip, he thought, didn’t match the gleaming, greasy purple of her lips.

They got to the station far too early; the dimly lit platform was still deserted. There was suddenly an embarrassed silence between them. They looked shyly at one another, and then Kirsten began aimlessly rummaging in her travelling bag. Suddenly, the abandoned platform was filled with the shrill ringing that Perlmann already knew. It was a penetrating, endlessly protracted noise that sounded ghostly because it was in the night, even though not the slightest thing was happening. They both exploded simultaneously into laughter, and Kirsten put her hands over her ears. They hastily left the station and stepped out under the plane trees in front of the exit.

She asked him if he really wanted to ride with her to Genoa when silence threatened to fall once more. That was really awkward. But he insisted on it. So later on they sat opposite one another in the shabby carriage, and Perlmann felt like bursting into tears when he realized that he was searching for topics of conversation as frantically as if she were a total stranger. At last he brought the subject around to Maria’s hairdo and asked whether hairspray was the latest thing.

‘Have you been living under a rock?’ she laughed. ‘That’s been out for ages. It’s like way, way out. No one wears it any more!’

Later she lit her last Gauloise and handed him the red lighter. Before he gave it back, he studied it very precisely, glad to be able to do something to counteract the silence that was threatening to fall once more. On the delicate gold rim the word Cartier was engraved in tiny letters. He was about to ask where she had got it, when her facial expression warned him, and he put it in her hand without a word. She turned it between her fingers as she looked out into the night.

‘I’ll give it to you,’ she suddenly said, smiling with relief like someone who has just said a long overdue goodbye. ‘Here, take it.’

He hesitantly took it from her. Her lips curled mockingly, then she snapped her fingers. ‘Over.’ He glanced at it once more and slipped it into his pocket. François.

She was temporarily alone in the couchette compartment. That could change in Milan, he thought, and then asked if she had any francs with her. For breakfast in Zurich. She leaned out of the window and stretched out her arm. He took her hand. At the front of the train the conductor started to close the doors.

‘You didn’t come to breakfast very often at home, either. To Mum’s distress.’ She sniffed, and now he saw the tears. ‘Only on the first day of the holidays, then we always sat together, all morning. That was… that was wonderful.’ She let go of his hand and wiped her eyes. ‘Giorgio told me you never come to breakfast.’ The train started moving. She laughed. ‘Gli ho detto che ti voglio bene. Giusto?’

Perlmann nodded and raised his hand to wave. Through his tears he saw Kirsten making a sieve with her hands and calling out something that he didn’t understand. He stopped until he was quite sure that he could no longer see the red tail light of the train.

Because Kirsten’s ticket had cost more than he had expected, he no longer had enough money for a taxi. He only just caught the last train to Santa Margherita. Now and again on the journey he reached for the red lighter in his pocket and ran through Kirsten’s Italian sentence in his mind. In the hotel he threw himself on the bed and let his tears flow freely.

24

At the end of the Tuesday session, Millar suggested talking about Evelyn Mistral’s works on Wednesday and Thursday, so that he could travel to Florence on Friday to meet his Italian colleague about the encyclopaedia. For a moment Perlmann felt a helpless fury, because the last free day on which he could have written was being taken from him. But even before Laura Sand gathered her things together and the others got up, that feeling had already collapsed in on itself, making way for a numbing indifference.

It was accompanied by a leaden weariness, which was further diminished by the fact that he was yielding to his compulsive need for sleep more and more often and with increasingly little resistance. If he woke up, the weariness tended to weigh heavier on him than before, and every time he crept under the shower in his clothes, the indifference seemed to become even more encompassing until he felt as if he had, in that short time, forgotten how to feel anything at all. If he ate anything, it happened very mechanically, and where the blindness of sensation was concerned, it was barely distinguishable from the food ingestion of a plant. It was only a matter of time before he ceased that activity, too, he thought, as he slipped once more into a twilight state in which he felt sheltered for a few moments, before the next maelstrom of flitting dream images carried him away.

On Tuesday evening Kirsten rang. He had been right, she said, the compartment had filled up in Milan, and then a real snoring concert had started up, so that she hadn’t had a wink. In Zurich she had had to wait for almost two hours for a connection, but breakfast had been fantastic.

‘I hope,’ she said with anxious hesitation, ‘you didn’t misunderstand my farewell remark. It wasn’t supposed to be an accusation.’

The practice room in the Institute had struck her as even shabbier than usual. ‘And those inevitable paper cups! I couldn’t help thinking about your crystal glasses!’

Martin? ‘Imagine. He was standing at the station just by chance, because he’d worked out the thing with the night train.’ She paused. ‘When I saw him, I had a guilty conscience. Because… well, yeah, because of what I said.’

The seminar session? ‘I slept through it with my eyes open! Once, when Lasker mentioned The Wild Palms, I couldn’t help thinking about my discussion with Millar. God, is that guy pleased with himself! Cocksure doesn’t begin to cover it!’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t get to sleep, and wished his earlier compulsion to rest would return. In the middle of the night he fetched his notes from the suitcase and sat down at the desk. He slowly flicked the pages. No, translating the German examples into English didn’t work; they sounded dull, weird and even ridiculous. Presence: a perfume, a light, a smile… He had already picked up the felt-tip pen to cross out the two lines when he stopped and smoked a cigarette. He left the lines as they were and flicked to the end. What separates me from my present… Without hesitation he crossed out the whole of the last paragraph. But that wasn’t enough for him. He went on blackening the page until the last white dot had disappeared and the whole thing formed a deep black block that left traces on the next page. He waved and blew the page dry, then flicked back to the two indented lines. After a quick look he blackened them out too. For a while he sat motionless in front of the first page. Then, with the felt-tip pen, he drew the heading: mestre non è brutta.

On Wednesday morning on the way to the veranda he went to see Maria in the office and gave her the notes. She laughed at the title. Now the text was ready earlier after all, she said. She still had a whole pile of things to get done today and tomorrow, but she would manage to get it done by Monday, as agreed. Perlmann nodded to everything. He was already in the doorway when he heard her laughing again. She was pointing at the blacked-out closing paragraph. ‘Like something in a secret dossier!’ she said. ‘It really stirs the curiosity!’

It took Evelyn Mistral almost an hour to shake off her nerves. Only then did her frantic play with her glasses stop, and she started sitting comfortably in the big armchair. It was plainly hard for her to believe that Millar and Ruge weren’t just being polite, but that they had really liked her paper. But then, when she felt safe, she became more commanding from one minute to the next, delivered a lot that wasn’t in the text, and reported on a series of exciting experiments of imagination and will that Millar found really inspiring. The feeling of having succeeded in this illustrious circle was making her increasingly excited. Her face was red and she smoked much more than usual, von Levetzov holding out a burning match to her, always at exactly the right time, with the attentiveness of a trainer. Once when, contrary to her usual habits, she tried to inhale and started coughing, there was laughter which unambiguously expressed the fact that the others accepted her in her accomplishment and were glad of her relief.

Perlmann took the greatest trouble to look interested, and on Wednesday afternoon he finally – constantly struggling against exhaustion – caught up with reading her paper. But everything he said sounded wooden, and even as he spoke all the meaning seemed to drain from his words. In the first third of the text came the passage where Evelyn Mistral spoke about why the differentiation of imagination and will occurred in the medium of language. It wasn’t the same reflection as the one in Leskov’s work, he noticed straight away. But when he tried to remember Leskov’s argument, there was nothing but emptiness. That kind of emptiness, which had something definitive about it, and was quite unlike a temporary gap in the memory, chilled him to the core. He only just managed to fight down the idea that he was on the point of losing his mind.

On Thursday evening he went to the trattoria. He saw that it was on the tip of the proprietor and his wife’s tongues to ask him where he had been for the last few days. But after a long, startled look at him they both suppressed their curiosity. Perlmann went to the toilet and looked at his face in the mirror. It wasn’t, he thought, any paler than usual. On the contrary, the boat trip with Kirsten had left a hint of a tan. But the color, he saw now, had not been the cause of his hosts’ shock. It was the lifelessness of his features that had made them start. His face had something of the exhaustion of a shipwreck about it, something forlorn that gave one the strange idea that its owner had run off and simply left it there. Perlmann attempted a smile, but immediately stopped when he saw how cold and mask-like it looked.

When Sandra came skipping into the almost empty restaurant, her parents glanced at Perlmann to tell her to be quiet. Then he asked the girl to sit down with him and enquired about school. She didn’t seem to notice anything special about his face, but was bored by all the questions and relieved when she was allowed to go again. Perlmann left half of his dinner on the plate, mumbled a vague apology and was glad when the glass-bead curtain rattled shut behind him.

For a while he stood in the harbor watching the waves breaking on the concrete blocks in front of the jetty. It wasn’t at all true that it was going to happen tomorrow. Tomorrow was, after all, only Friday, the day when he had been supposed to give Maria his text. Assuming that he was going to deliver lectures at his session rather than use handouts, he still had six days to play with. Minus the time for Silvestri’s sessions. He took a few deep breaths. Now the important thing was to keep alive the little bit of confidence that still stirred. Five days, that was basically a lot of time. After all, he had experience of writing lectures, a lot of experience. Slowly, as if his confidence might be broken by excessively violent movements, he walked back to the hotel.

When he opened the door to his room, the phone began to ring.

‘It’s me,’ Kirsten said. ‘I just wanted to hear quickly how you’ve been.’

At first Perlmann didn’t understand. It was only when Kirsten called ‘Hello?’ for the second time that he got it: she thought his session had been today. It was out of annoyance at the tone of student camaraderie, which she was using again now, that he hadn’t mentioned the postponement to her on Sunday in Rapallo.

‘It isn’t my turn yet,’ he said. ‘There was a change to the timetable. I’m not for a week.’

‘Oh, so there was no point in me touching wood. Whose turn was it today?’

‘Evelyn.’

‘Aha.’

There was a pause.

‘Is Giorgio still there?’

He laughed, and was surprised. ‘Yes, he’s still here.’

‘Say hello from me. Don’t be too friendly, though! And tell him… no, leave it.’

Perlmann sat down at the desk and looked at the page of headings, on which he had drawn some figures in the margin. When I get bored in the seminar, I doodle as well, she had said. He would probably never know what had happened between her and Silvestri. And he couldn’t ask under any circumstances. He had only made that mistake once. He saw her furious face in front of him and heard the joke that Agnes had made about his startled reaction.

At that moment the phone rang again.

‘I have to go to Bologna, to the clinic, tonight,’ said Silvestri. ‘Now of all times, when the boss is away, the other senior doctor is ill and suddenly all hell seems to have broken out.’ Perlmann heard him smoking. ‘Two patients have… run away. They’re considered dangerous, and the police are involved.’ He coughed. ‘I’m sorry to be so unreliable. But I can’t just leave the others hanging. My sessions on Monday and Tuesday are out of the window. I assume you yourself will take on these dates. I’ll be coming back, and perhaps I can present something in the second half of the week.’ He laughed. ‘And if not – academia will have to go on without me!’

Perlmann slowly hung up. His fingers left traces of sweat on the receiver. Monday. Tomorrow is Friday. And I have nothing. Not a single sentence. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He shivered. What he did now didn’t matter in the slightest. Any movement was just as unfounded and useless as any other. There was now no stopping it.

With dragging steps he walked into the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill. The water tasted more chlorinated than usual. The taste reminded him of his first swimming lesson in the municipal pool, when he had almost drowned. It was an oppressive memory, but it led away from the present, and he clung to it as the numbness slowly spread within him.