Perlmann's Silence

59

On the first night Perlmann had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. But the doctor on duty saw no reason to keep him in. All his readings were normal. He diagnosed complete exhaustion, gave Perlmann a tranquillizing injection and signed him off work until the end of the year.

Perlmann spent the rest of the night sleeplessly in an armchair, looking out at the garden, where it started snowing towards morning. Every now and again he wrapped himself up even more tightly in the blanket, and enjoyed the fact that the injection slowed everything down and kept his thoughts away.

Shortly after eight he told Frau Hartwig. His voice sounded so flat that she didn’t ask a single question. Later, he stepped out into the dense snowstorm, and walked slowly to the bank, where he put the copy of Leskov’s text, now blistered and browned by the rain, in a safe deposit box. He bought the barest necessities, put the chain on the door and, after disconnecting the phone, went to bed.

He spent most of that day, and the two next days, sleeping. When he was awake for one or two hours he thought about Leskov waiting for the post. Each time he was unable to bear the idea for long, and was soon glad to feel exhaustion pulling him back into sleep. At four o’clock on Thursday morning he was woken by hunger pangs. He found that he had lost eight kilos, and forced himself to prepare a proper meal. After a few bites he couldn’t go on, and left it. While he stared at an old late-night western without following the plot, he slowly ate half a loaf of bread and drank camomile tea that reminded him of the time of his childhood illnesses. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since Turin, and he didn’t feel like one now.

On Thursday afternoon he stayed awake for longer. As it went on snowing outside, Perlmann sat on the sofa and stared blankly at the coffee stain on the living-room carpet. He felt as if he had, silently and without really noticing, shattered apart, and was now lying around in vague pieces somewhere outside, far removed from himself, and as if all those scattered pieces now had to be drawn together on invisible threads from some imaginary middle point, and carefully reassembled until his inner essence was complete once more, seamless and unbroken.

As he walked from room to room looking at Agnes’s photographs, he moved cautiously and with deliberate slowness, like an invalid. The post office clerk had clearly thought it possible that the text would only take three days to arrive. The information had just been flung out like that. But he had still been given a time limit. If that was so, the text would arrive in St Petersburg today. The courier could bring it to Leskov tonight. At any rate, it would be delivered tomorrow morning. Will something like that really arrive? With all the chaos over there?

That night he dreamed about Signora Medici, who lived in Pian dei Ratti. She spent the whole day leaning in the window, watching him, with Leskov next to him as a driving instructor, practising driving straight ahead in front of the slate-grinder’s, and having to fight against the steering wheel’s constant pull to the left. Don’t worry, you can speak German! she kept shouting. That will make things easier!

Perlmann woke drenched in sweat and made coffee. Six languages. If you included Russian, he had the same number. He lit a cigarette. Wrapped in the feeling of dizziness that began after the first drag, he got to work on the signora. He chased her through all the languages he spoke, and ruthlessly set her up for the most obvious traps. It was already past eight and broad daylight when he was finally able to free himself from that hate-drenched compulsion.

Now the courier could ring Leskov’s doorbell at any moment. The Russian’s despair would be at an end. He could immediately start copying it out and filling in the gaps. He still had exactly a week. Hopefully, when the courier came, he wouldn’t already be on his way to the university to wait. Most letter boxes were too small for an envelope of that size, and who knew what might happen if it were simply left outside the door?

Now the time had come to phone Kirsten. He got her out of bed. She had called every evening at the usual time. Where had he been hiding himself? Perlmann dodged the question, saying something about tedious professional dinners. He didn’t mention the hospital, or the fact that he had been signed off work. Kirsten hemmed and hawed for a while before saying that she probably wouldn’t be coming home before Christmas. She had to deliver two more presentations, and she also wanted to help Martin move house. Perlmann concealed his relief, and said magnanimously that that was all perfectly fine.

In the afternoon he unpacked his case. The phone rang as he was stuffing the blood-stained and the torn trousers into a bag, which he fastened tightly. He suddenly dropped it and ran to the corridor. That might be him! But the ringing had already stopped. Perlmann carried the bag outside and threw it in the bin. He laid out the pale jacket with the strips of dirt ready for dry-cleaning. The blazer, which hung on a hanger from the wardrobe door, had fine, white traces of sweat on the back. He saw that only now. He put it with his jacket. As he did so he discovered a strip of dried tomato sauce on his sleeve. Stronzo.

The chronicle had plainly slipped around in the suitcase, and the cover was torn. He threw the cover away and set the volume down on his empty desk. Next to it were the unopened envelope from Frau Hartwig, the invitation to Princeton, his notes. He opened a page of Jakob von Gunten at random and read a few sentences. Then he put the book back on the shelf. He would never read it again.

He fetched a new bag for the medal and the certificate. It was the first time he had unrolled the certificate. It referred to one filip pereman, who was henceforth an honorary citizen of Santa Margherita Ligure. On the way to the bin Perlmann couldn’t help grinning. The last things he unpacked were the new handkerchiefs from the plastic jacket. He held them indecisively in his hand, then set them down on the chest of drawers in the corridor.

Later he collected his private post from two streets down. While he was still in the post office, he tore Hanna’s letter in two. She had been delighted by his phone call out of the blue, she wrote, but also unsettled. Could he call her when he was home again? And could they see each other again? It would take a few days, he thought, as he stamped through the slush, before he was ready to make that call.

He saw on the television news that the match Giovanni had mentioned – the one between Stuttgart and Juventus Turin – took place today. It was already half an hour in. Roberto Baggio was playing; his name kept being mentioned. If he hadn’t scored, I would have been guilty of plagiarism. Perlmann waited for a throw-in that provided a close-up of Baggio’s face. A strange face, he thought, and turned off the television. But it would only have been a disaster if Maria had finished typing up the text on Friday. If she hadn’t had a cold. Or if Santini had had something that urgently needed typing.

The woman at international directory enquiries was very helpful. They had only a few numbers of major companies in St Petersburg to hand, but they could call information there to ask for a private number. However, that could take a long time – up to a day. Should she call him back? Perlmann gave her Leskov’s name and address and said that the time of day didn’t matter; it could be the middle of the night.

While looking for the piece of paper with Leskov’s address on it, Perlmann had come across the two unused plane tickets: the original one for his flight home, Genoa–Frankfurt, and the horrendously expensive one for the flight to Frankfurt on Saturday. Together they were worth more than 1,000 marks. He tore them up. It was like an expiatory sacrifice.

Then he started cleaning the apartment. He had never cleaned it like that before. He had never cleaned anything like that before, with such furious, fanatical thoroughness. Every last nook and cranny was scoured till it shone. Every now and again, shivering with exhaustion, he sat down on a stool and wiped the cold sweat from his brow with a kitchen towel. When he had finished his study, he stood at the window for a long time and looked out into the night. Then he took Agnes’s picture from the windowsill and put it on the little table in the corner. Last of all came her room, where he still hadn’t changed anything. On a stack of books on the floor he found her copy of the Russian grammar. Her underlinings were rougher, her notes more carelessly scribbled than in his copy, but there weren’t as many. He walked back and forth with the book in his hand. In his mind’s eye he saw the dark-brown cabbage and smelled the warm, stinking fumes that had come out of the container. Breathing with difficulty, he took the Langenscheidt and the two-volume German-Russian dictionary out of the shelf. He put everything on the chest of drawers in the corridor and then assembled the few Russian books that they had both – always with a sense of imposture – brought home from some specialist bookshop or other. It would be hardest for him to part with the volume of Chekhov short stories, a particularly beautiful book bound in black leather, which he had come across in a side street behind the British Museum when he had spent a few days in London with Agnes and Kirsten.

Later, when he lay in bed, exhausted and shivering, and imagined Leskov sitting at his desk now and brooding over the gaps in his text, Perlmann’s heart started racing. Neither conscious breathing nor reading did any good; only the tranquil landscape pictures on late-night television helped. He moved the phone still closer to his bed and checked that it was set to the loudest volume.

That night, for the first time, he had the tunnel dream that would haunt him at regular intervals over the coming weeks. He was driving – pressed back into his seat by the acceleration – along the vibrating floor of the tunnel, which described an endlessly long loop to the left, and fell away to the left like a cycle-racing track, so that there was always a danger of slipping into the opposite carriageway. The headlights coming from the opposite direction were like huge waves of dazzling light that sloshed over the car and obliterated his vision. At the start of the journey he was holding a steering wheel, but later his cold hands simply clutched the air, and now he could only wait, with a feeling of boundless impotence, for the impact, his ears full of that terrible whistling that gave way, after a time, to a rattling, ringing noise with regular interruptions, and dragged him from sleep.

‘You registered for a call to St Petersburg?’ asked a dark female voice.

‘Yes,’ he said and looked at his alarm clock: twenty past four.

‘Just a moment, I’ll put you through.’ There were two clicks followed by a hiss, and then, through a filter of background noises, he heard Leskov’s voice.

‘Da? Ya slushayu… Kto tam?’

Perlmann put down the phone. He got dressed, packed the stack of Russian books in an old bag and dragged them through deserted streets to the big supermarket garbage bins.

At the weekend Perlmann started his training in slowness. He wouldn’t have imagined that it would be so difficult. Again and again he made hasty movements, abrupt changes of intention. Then he forced himself to repeat the whole thing so slowly that a slow-motion calm was produced. After some time he came up with a ritual: before any lengthy sequence of actions he went into the living room and listened to the ticking of the big clock for half a minute. All that Saturday he waged a stubborn battle against his unfounded haste, and often felt as if he would never learn to do it. But by Sunday he had already managed to slow some things down all by himself, and he felt his nervous exhaustion turning every now and again into a natural, redeeming tiredness. Now each time he spent a good minute listening to the big clock.

Late on Sunday afternoon he sat down at his desk for the first time. He thought of the many books that he had left in Genoa in the airport restroom. Would he buy new ones? He managed to push his tiredness like a buffer between himself and that question and, for a while, he span out that thought still further: the important thing was to take that tiredness, which was too deep-rooted ever to disappear entirely, and turn it into a protecting shell – a substitute for serenity.

The envelope from Frau Hartwig, which he opened now, contained only requests and demands with deadlines that had already passed. He threw everything into the waste-paper basket. He hid the letter from Princeton in his desk drawer. Then he put the chronicle, along with the old wax-cloth notebook, in the kitchen along with the out-of-date newspapers.

Then he sat for a long time at his completely empty desk. From time to time he ran his hand over the gleaming surface. For the next little while the important thing was not to think too much, and even then to think slowly. Above all, he didn’t want to think in sentences, in articulate, properly formulated sentences that he heard internally. For a long, very long time, he didn’t want to look for words, weigh words, compare words. His thoughts should be entirely concerned with doing certain things rather than others, going to the left rather than to the right, into this room rather than that one, taking that path rather than that one. His thoughts should be apparent in the fact that he did things in their logical sequence, that there was order in his movements, a meaning in his behavior. Beyond that, his thoughts should go unnoticed, even by himself, without conscious traces, and above all without an internal linguistic echo. Even if he wrote one sentence rather than another, silence was to prevail inside his head. The pen was to pursue its path across the page, leaving its trace, without the sentence produced by that trace possessing an internal present. In the end Perlmann would send the trace to wherever it was that they were waiting for a text from him.

Something else that he had to carefully avoid was trying to work out what other people were thinking. Henceforth, he didn’t want to think about what other people might think or do if he did one thing or another. He would do what he did, and the others would do what they did. There would be nothing else there. And he also had to silence his obsessively detailed imagination. He would complement his slowness training with lack-of-imagination training.

The first thing he saw later on, when he turned on the television, was a close-up of hands gliding over piano keys. Someone was playing Bach. He immediately switched to another channel. Here, a Russian physicist was being interviewed, and someone was simultaneously translating. Perlmann kept his finger on the button of the remote, he would soon switch this channel, too, but then he stayed with it, one more sentence, and then another. He felt himself being sucked into a vortex that summoned up everything again. Now the interpreter was losing the crucial balance between the old sentence and the new. No, now you’ve got to skip the old sentence and concentrate on the new one! Perlmann silently yelled at him, and slipped to the edge of the sofa. It was only when the tension turned into a stomach-cramp that he tore himself away.

Then he took a long walk through the dark park and paid attention to the emptiness in his head. When he took his glasses off to go to bed, he thought about the tunnel. Perlmann slept better than he had done for the first few days. Only once did he start awake: he had taken on Signora Medici in Russian, and then worked out that he himself didn’t know the words, and had forgotten his own questions like a senile old man.

60

Perlmann spent the next week waiting for Leskov’s letter. If the text had arrived on Friday, the letter could already be here by Tuesday. But it would arrive by Saturday at the latest. He stood at the window for hours and waited for the postman. Why didn’t Leskov call him? Or send a telegram? Recently, not a single half hour had passed without Perlmann thinking about Leskov and the promised letter. But no letter came. The postal clerk at the airport had probably been right, and it would take a whole week. The post doesn’t usually come on Monday, he heard Leskov saying. So Perlmann couldn’t expect the letter before next Tuesday.

The offer from Olivetti came in the middle of the week. Now they were talking about a three-month probationary period. His tasks: translating business correspondence with German, English and American partners; overseeing the German and English edition of a large advertising brochure that was to be produced next summer; occasional interpreting at trade fairs. Signor Angelini had mentioned that Perlmann also spoke Russian; they would bear that in mind in the future. And, lastly, it would be nice if he could support Signor Angelini in his collaboration with the universities. They offered him four million lire per month – just half of what he currently earned. They would speak about pensions, insurance and the like when he had fundamentally agreed. For those things they would need a raft of documents.

Who had told Angelini anything about his Russian? Evelyn Mistral had kept mum, he was sure of that. It must have been Leskov, at the dinner after he arrived, when Angelini was there. He had told him how they had met, how they had walked together through the Hermitage… But why, then, had Adrian von Levetzov been so unsettled in the café, when Leskov had talked about sending his first version to Perlmann? It must have been like this: over dinner Leskov had told only Angelini, who had been sitting next to him… Perlmann struck his knuckles against his forehead. He must stop trying to work out other people!

He had just set the letter aside when Frau Hartwig called him and passed on a message that Brian Millar had sent by email. His publisher was extremely interested in Perlmann’s book. Could he suggest a delivery date? He missed Italy, Millar had added, and: ‘How’s your Chopin?’

Was he still there? Frau Hartwig asked after a long pause.

The book would take a while yet. Perlmann asked her to write and thank Millar for his trouble. And in conclusion: ‘How’s your Bach?’

‘I knew nothing about a book,’ Frau Hartwig said, piqued.

‘Later,’ he replied.

The sun was shining, and everything was thawing as he walked along the river. But he didn’t notice much. He was too busy trying out letters with which he could return the prize he had recently been awarded. At last he had a text with the right tone. But when – his shoes still soaking – he had sat at his desk and written it down, he found it melodramatic and threw it away.

During the night Perlmann had pains in his heart and came close to calling the doctor. Early the next morning he went to see him at the hospital. The doctor, whom he had known for many years, didn’t say much, and made long pauses that Perlmann found uncomfortable. At last he hesitantly prescribed him some new sleeping pills and told him not to smoke.

On the way home Perlmann walked past the familiar bookshop. He wished he knew more about meditation, the technique for reaching inner peace. For a long time he stood by the shelf with the books on the subject. But each excerpt that he read contained something that repelled him, something sectarian or proselytizing, an emotionalism that he didn’t like. He didn’t buy anything.

Friday. Today, Leskov had to hand in his text. And still no letter. Of course, he had had to work day and night, there had been no time left for a letter. And anyway, it probably wouldn’t arrive until the weekend. That meant another week of waiting. But that was actually a good sign: it proved that the text had arrived. Otherwise, Leskov would have had any amount of time for a letter. Unless he was in such a bad condition that it was out of the question.

At the time when she had usually come back from lunch, Perlmann called Maria. She sounded spontaneous and sincere when she said how pleased she was to hear from him. Nonetheless, the conversation was something of a struggle. Those two weeks had been enough to move everything far into the past, and each sentence sounded like a frantic attempt to warm up something obsolete. He had done a lot of preparation for the question of whether she had deleted the files in the meantime; it was supposed to sound quite casual, like a joke at the end of a flirtation. When he asked it now, it seemed to come completely out of nowhere. She had just cleared up her hard drive, said Maria; but right now she couldn’t remember whether his files had been among the deleted ones. Did he want her to check?

‘No, no,’ he said, trying to make it sound light and playful. ‘It really doesn’t matter!’

‘Even if they aren’t in the computer any more, I still remember those texts very clearly!’ said Maria, laughing.

It would be impossible to call her again, he thought as he hung up.

His credit-card bill arrived on Saturday. They had deducted the sums for the rental car, including the excess for the repairs, and for the two dictionaries from the bookshop in Genoa. That day Perlmann had wanted to start on a book that he had been offered for review. Now he just sat around and kept hopping from channel to channel.

He had been worried that he would dream about the tunnel again. Instead, he spent half the night – it seemed to him – battling with a computer, which, when he tried to delete a file produced a back-up copy instead. Brian Millar watched over his shoulder, so closely that Perlmann could feel his breath. All at once Millar’s arm was thrown in front of Perlmann’s face, holding out a plate piled high with ice-cold food. Perlmann turned to him and, when he recognized the waiter, he threw the food so hard in his face that half of it splashed on Evelyn Mistral’s hair and her snow-white blouse.

On Sunday Perlmann started taking down some of Agnes’s photographs and clearing them away. Only a few were to remain – not necessarily the best ones, but the ones with a personal history. For example, the one with little Kirsten in the beach chair on the island of Sylt. It was hard work, and more than once he got chest pains. In the end he had a sense of having gone too far, and hung a series of pictures back up, whereupon the plaster started crumbling as the nail was hammered in for the second time.

Evelyn Mistral rang in the early evening. It was a conversation with a lot of pauses. Perlmann wished she was sitting opposite him. Had he heard anything about Leskov and his text? No, he said, nothing.

‘You know the phone call I suddenly remembered after the reception at the town hall?’ she said towards the end of their conversation. ‘It was a good thing I called. Once again, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And the coast road was closed anyway!’ she laughed.

Over the following week Perlmann sat down to write his review. He saw the author in his mind’s eye, a glittering Berliner with a French wife and a house on the Côte d’Azur. Perlmann had to take a lot of breaks and, sometimes, when his reluctance became too violent, his chest felt like concrete. Then he reached for a cigarette.

The key chapter of the book presented as new discoveries things with which Perlmann had long been familiar from the work of a little-known French writer. He knew exactly where he should have looked: the book was on the top shelf on the right. He waited for a feeling of triumph or at least of calm satisfaction. When it failed to materialize, he was at first disappointed, but then glad. He left the French book on the shelf, and in his review, which was objective, fair and positive on the whole, he didn’t mention the matter at all.

In the middle of the week he sat back down behind the wheel for the first time. He was surprised at how close the handbrake of his car was to the passenger seat. He drove to a carpet dealer he knew and bought a light-colored Tibetan runner to cover up the coffee stain at long last. On the way back, in the early twilight, several trucks came towards him, one of them with its headlights on full beam. Each time a truck appeared, Perlmann braked to a walking pace and drove on to the grass. He decided not to drive in the near future, and wondered whether he should give the car to Kirsten.

As he was taking out the ignition key in the garage, he remembered that moment at the gas station next to the hotel, where he had thought he had understood that the problem of inner delineation from other people and the lack of a presence were one and the same problem deep down. He clearly remembered that this had struck him as the most important insight of his whole life. On the way to his front door Perlmann had rephrased that insight over and over again. But now it was just a sentence. A sentence, admittedly, that sounded right, and one that he agreed with, but only a sentence now, not an experienced insight. At the front door he turned round, opened the garage and sat down at the wheel again with his hand on the ignition. Afterwards it seemed ridiculous to assume that an experienced insight could be poured into a particular physical posture.

There was still no letter from Leskov on Friday. No wonder, in fact, because it must have taken him the past weekend to recover, and a letter could – as that veteran postal clerk had estimated – be en route for a whole week. Leaving from his mailbox, Perlmann finally put away the new handkerchiefs, saving one for his pocket. Then he wrote a letter to Olivetti turning down their offer, and a second letter to Angelini. He cited his reason as unforeseen family difficulties that would keep him in Frankfurt for the time being. He wrote both letters quickly and effortlessly. He tried to exploit that momentum, and started on the letter to Princeton. But he couldn’t get beyond the salutation, and then took a long walk through the familiar city, which seemed alien to him in the gloomy December light.

Laura Sand’s photographs, which arrived on Saturday, disappointed him. He didn’t know why. They were dreamy landscape shots. Some of them must have been taken on the misty morning when he had completed the translation of Leskov’s text. In a separate envelope were several shots of colleagues, which, to judge by the unselfconsciousness of posture and expression, must have been taken unnoticed. On the accompanying slip of paper were the words: There are exceptions to every rule! The pictures showing him with Leskov he immediately threw away, and the other shots of colleagues ended up in the waste-paper basket as well. He kept only a single snapshot of Evelyn Mistral. Her laugh, her skewed T-shirt, her red shoes. He put the landscape shots in a drawer, then walked through the rooms for a while and looked at Agnes’s photographs.

He should really, in fact, have chosen her best shots, not the most personal. He swapped them round.

After the Sunday night concert on television he sat down at the grand piano. He played the Nocturnes that he had chosen in the lounge. There was a vacuum between him and the notes, a thin hiatus, which didn’t even disappear the second time. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, and played the A flat minor Polonaise. It didn’t matter at all that he got snarled up in the frightening passage. What was worse was that everything, even the liberating chords, sounded as if it had been dunked in fine sand.

There was no point even thinking about sleep. In the middle of the night he sat down at the piano in his pyjamas and played other Nocturnes. They sounded as they had before, and now he understood: what he had played in the lounge had shifted away from him because he had abused it, abused it as a weapon in his battle with Millar. That was an abuse different from the one that Szabo had meant. Music couldn’t be used as an instrument like that, or you lost it.

Towards morning Perlmann took a sleeping pill. When it started to take effect, a thought passed through his head, even though he hadn’t been thinking about the tunnel: Leskov had never asked him why he hadn’t just stopped in the passing bay to let the bulldozer through. Why not? It would have been a quite simple question, the most natural, in fact. And Perlmann couldn’t have told him the answer.

61

The bundle that the postman held in his hand on Tuesday contained Leskov’s letter. Perlmann could tell from the brownish paper of the envelope, which he knew from his earlier letter. Still in the hall, he tore open the envelope and looked, with thumping heart and feverish brain, for sentences that could immediately reassure him… there was no text there when I entered the apartment… I slipped, without really noticing, into a state of apathy… a state of dull endurance, of wordless resignation… desire to end it all… And then came the words that let him breathe again for the first time: …if the text hadn’t turned up after all… He closed his eyes and hung on to the chest of drawers for a moment before he went on reading, his eyes still burning:… the envelope just lying by the front door… the two yellow stickers… The state of the text was a shock… Seventeen pages! Perlmann had to skip through five endless paragraphs until it came at last: …I had, contrary to my custom, written my home address, that’s all… He pressed his hand to his stomach and breathed out, before dashing on to the next bit of redemption: …typing errors. But just after eight o’clock on Friday morning the thing was finished… And, at last, in the next paragraph but one, came the sentence that his eye really devoured: …the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post.

Perlmann leaned against the door frame, the sheets slipped from his hand, he started silently sobbing and went on sobbing, on and on, for several minutes. He only paused to blow his nose. With trembling hands he collected the sheets, sat on the sofa and started from the beginning:

That last paragraph brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes once more. But now they were no longer tears of relief, but of shame, and he hid his face in the cushion. When he went to the bathroom afterwards, to wash his tear-drenched face, he felt a weight lifting from him, one so powerful that he had had to turn his emotions away from it all the time, to be able to bear it at all. He lay down, exhausted, on the sofa, and after a while he read the letter again.

The worst passages, he found, were the ones about the prison and the parenthetical remark about Perlmann’s knowledge of his private address. Then came the passage about the drama and the unknown actors, and it was also unbearable that Leskov, because he had no one to celebrate with, had tried to call him – him, of all people, when he had been a hair’s breadth away from murdering him. Only in the course of the day did Perlmann manage to smile about one passage or an other, which he read several times, and it was always an endangered smile that didn’t dare to go too far for fear of subsiding into tears once more. When evening began to fall, he went to the piano and played the Nocturne in D flat major. Blind with tears, he kept hitting wrong notes.

62

In mid-December Perlmann went to Hamburg to see Hanna Liebig. Her golden hair had developed a silvery sheen, and under the dark strand that she combed emphatically over her forehead there was a long scar, which, as she said with embarrassment, was the result of a car accident. She was still energetic. But there was, he thought, something washed-out and disappointed in her face. He liked her apartment, but an overly ornate clock and some ceramic knick-knacks bothered him, because they struck him as whimsical – as if they were signs that Hanna’s finely honed sense of elegant design was deserting her.

Over dinner he told her about the research group, about Millar and their rivalry. He also mentioned that he had played the A flat minor Polonaise. Afterwards she had some idea of why he had phoned her. But without the tunnel, the fear and the despair the whole thing sounded hollow and childish. When she ran her hand playfully over his hair on the way to the kitchen, as she had done in the past, he was about to start over from the beginning and tell her the whole story. But something in her face, something new that he couldn’t have described, seemed strange to him, and then the feeling was over. They talked again for a while about Liszt, but it was mere shop talk, which soon bored him, because it had no connection with Millar and the ochre-colored armchairs in the lounge. Afterwards in the street he reflected that they had been closer to one another recently on the phone than during the whole of their meeting that evening.

They had arranged to meet for lunch the following day. Perlmann didn’t go. As he heard her playing through a run and explaining something, he slipped a note under the door of her apartment and then took the bus to the Conservatoire. The sound of Mozart came from the room where he had always practiced in the past. After a while he opened the door a crack. At the piano sat a man with curly hair and an oriental face, playing with unimaginable lightness. The room had different wallpaper now, and the painting by Klee was no longer on the wall. He carefully closed the door. He had planned to seek out the street where he had grown up. But when he saw the black iron fences in his mind’s eye, and felt his arm hopping from one fence post to the next, he abandoned the plan and took the next train to Frankfurt.

In his mailbox there was a message from the post office about a package. He could see straight away that it was from Leskov, when the clerk took it from the shelf the following morning. He wished it hadn’t come, whatever it might contain. Leskov’s letter was what he had needed, and he had had to endure it. He had found its thoroughness oppressive, but it was hard to admit this to himself. It had been the most extreme thing he could bear, and it was the last he wanted to hear from Vassily Leskov. Fine, he would have to give him some kind of reply. But that could be done in a conventional tone. There were moods in which Perlmann scribbled down such things without any inner involvement. And then he never wanted to hear from Leskov again. Never again.

Inside the parcel was the promised copy of Leskov’s text. Underneath it, four volumes in Russian, bound in light-brown artificial leather: Maxim Gorky, Zhisn’ Klima Samgina. On the first page of the first volume it said in shaky handwriting: Moemu syno Vasiliyu. The dedication was written in black ink, and the pen had sprayed, there was a sprinkle of black dots around the words. The leather was worn, stained and in two places torn. It was the volumes that Leskov had read in prison – fourteen times.

Perlmann knew that he was supposed to feel touched, but all he felt was fury, a fury that grew every time he looked at the books. Through those brown volumes with their gold inscriptions, Leskov had managed to make contact with his flat, and Leskov was now present in a way that was almost even more oppressive and paralysing than his physical presence. Now Perlmann also smelled the hint of sickly sweet tobacco that lingered between the pages. He felt that he might be about to lose his head and hurl the books outside into the mud, so he put his coat back on and walked slowly to his block.

Later he set the volumes on the shelf in the broom cupboard and covered them with a dishcloth. Then, when he reluctantly flicked through the typed text, he discovered that Leskov thanked him extravagantly at the start of his acknowledgements for his discussion of an earlier version and his constructive criticism in four footnotes. The burden that had been lifted from him by Leskov’s letter seemed to sink down upon him once more, even though he didn’t understand how that could be, now that Leskov had managed to get the position he wanted.

Perlmann defended himself against the books in the broom cupboard by finishing his review and preparing his course of lectures. When Adrian von Levetzov rang and asked about publication, Perlmann sent off a round letter to his colleagues, claiming that some participants in the group had other plans for their contributions, so that he had abandoned the plan of a special publication. The same day he rang the school authorities and asked about the possibility of taking on a job as a teacher. Not without the proper qualifications, the shrill voice at the other end informed him, and not in the current job market. That night he dreamed of Signora Medici, standing in front of an audience in a tartan skirt and hiking boots, reading sentences in an unknown language from light-brown books, as he looked excitedly in his desk for his crib sheet.

Perlmann’s training in slowness was starting to work. Usually, it was no longer necessary to go to the living room to look at the clock; he simply paused and imagined the ticking. He started thinking about that ticking when he was on the phone, as well, and gradually understood that slowness in reacting could be the physical expression of a lack of subservience. He was so happy about this discovery that he overdid it, and had to fight once more against his tendency to fanaticism.

Now and again, when he sat in this living room late at night and heard the clock ticking, he tried to think about why he had taken his hands off the wheel. Because of Leskov? Because of himself? But it was always the same thing: the thoughts dried up before they had really begun. In his mind, he had been ready to die. Out of despair, admittedly, not out of stoical serenity. Nonetheless, the experience of imminent death had changed something within him. Of course, it had been an error to believe that this change, whose contours were still in the dark, would develop all by themselves into greater confidence and a piece of inner freedom. It wasn’t as easy as that. But what exactly was it that he had to do about it?

One evening, while watching a silly comedy on television, Perlmann laughed again for the first time. Then he remembered the man with the long white scarf from the airport bar, and gulped. But by the next joke he had started laughing again.

The next day he bought the German translation of Gorky’s novel and read it until he came to the passage about the hole in the ice. Gleaming red, Gorky called the hands that clutched the edge of the ice, which broke off. Perlmann went into Agnes’s room, to look up the second word. Only when he saw the gap on the shelf did he remember the books he had thrown away. He was startled, as if he had only just found out about it.

Perlmann found the novel heavy going, and the countless philosophical dialogues got on his nerves. He really wanted to put it down. But that day he read another hundred pages, and worked out that he would have to get through at least 120 pages if he was to finish it that year. Often he succumbed to the temptation to ease his attention and just let his eye slip over the pages without really reading. But he never overindulged himself, instead flicking back and reading everything over again with reluctant but embittered precision, knowing that he would immediately forget most of it again. In the first days he told himself that it was a matter of becoming acquainted with part of the mental world in which Leskov had taken refuge in prison. He owed him that, he thought, and each time he did so he stumbled over the vague feeling of not knowing what he thought. Only after a few days did he understand that that wasn’t what drove him to torment himself again by reading it each evening. It was more the vague desire to pay off his debt to Leskov, and atone for his planned murder. After that discovery he felt ridiculous every time he opened the book again. But he kept on with it.

Late in December he rang Maria again. He wished her a Merry Christmas and hoped she would be able to tell him something about the deletion of his text. But nothing more came of it than a friendly exchange of good wishes, which they soon had to bring to an end to avoid embarrassment. He would never find out when the dangerous text was finally destroyed, or whether indeed it had been.

Kirsten came on the second day of the Christmas holidays. As soon as she stepped inside the apartment, she pounced on the new carpet, looked at it from all sides and, finally, lifted it up to look at the label. When she saw the coffee stain, she burst into peals of laughter and gave Perlmann a boisterous kiss. He still didn’t let her wheedle the carpet out of him.

Later she came into the kitchen so quietly that, preoccupied with cooking, he didn’t notice her for a long time.

‘You put away some pictures,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, and looked at her for a moment, the salt cellar in his hand.

‘But you’re leaving these, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘definitely.’

‘Does this Ms. Sand take good pictures?’

‘They’re OK,’ he said.

‘Black and white?’

‘Color.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, relieved, and took a piece of salmon from the plate.

When they were eating, she suddenly lowered her knife and fork, and stared at his hand.

‘You’ve taken off your ring.’

Perlmann blushed intensely. He didn’t say anything.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, ‘of course that’s your business.’

Later, when they were clearing away the plates, she asked in a pointedly casual way, ‘The blonde in the group, what was her name again? Evelyn…’

‘Mistral,’ he said, and put away the coffee cups.

He was standing in his study when Kirsten handed him his Christmas present: a navy blue sailor’s jersey, the kind he had always wanted. Inside the package there was something else, a book. Nikolai Leskov, Short Stories. He was speechless and turned the book around mutely in his hand.

‘A really important writer,’ said Kirsten. ‘Martin’s writing a dissertation on him. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to find a Russian edition. Don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do,’ he said hoarsely, and walked, moist-eyed, to the window.

She wrapped her arms around him from behind. ‘It’s really hard for you right now, isn’t it?’ He nodded.

As always, she walked curiously along his bookshelves. ‘You’ve done some tidying.’

He looked at her questioningly.

‘I don’t see the Russian books.’

Perlmann poked his nose into a desk drawer. ‘I… cleared them away. Temporarily.’

‘And the big dictionary I saw in Italy? The one with the revolting paper?’

He nodded.

‘And the volume of Chekhov? I told Martin about it.’

‘I… I had a kind of impulse.’

For a while she looked in silence at the wall of books. ‘Then perhaps Leskov wasn’t such a great idea.’

Perlmann gave a start when he heard the name in her mouth.

‘No, no,’ he said quickly, ‘that’s completely different.’ It sounded tired and implausible.

They didn’t talk much as they did the washing-up.

‘Dad,’ she asked into the silence, ‘did something happen down there? In Italy, I mean.’

All of a sudden the hands with which he was cleaning the frying pan were quite numb. He ran the dishcloth over the edge. ‘What do you mean – happen?’

‘I don’t know. Since then you’ve been somehow… different.’

He looked at the crumbs floating in the dishwater. An answer was required. ‘I… I lost my equilibrium. But it has nothing to do with Italy.’

When their eyes met he saw that she didn’t believe him.

‘Do you remember,’ she asked in a cheerful voice that was supposed to make him forget the subject, ‘when we sat in that white hotel and the waiter came all that way from the bar with the drinks?’

When Kirsten had gone to bed, Perlmann fetched the suitcase from the wardrobe. The wedding ring had slipped right into the corner of the tie compartment. He locked it in his desk drawer. After that he couldn’t get to sleep. Even so, he didn’t take a pill. Eventually he went to the broom cupboard and took out the key.

In the morning it snowed, so he had an excuse not to get the car out of the garage. He was glad there were lots of practical matters to talk about in the taxi and on the platform. As they were saying goodbye Kirsten looked at him as if she wanted to ask her question again. He pretended not to notice, and lifted her gloved hand. He turned it into a sober farewell that hurt him so much he spent several minutes afterwards wandering aimlessly through the station.

That day he had the feeling that he had to start his slowness training again from the beginning, and spent a lot of time in front of the ticking clock. He wrote half a dozen drafts of his letter to Princeton, with various white lies. He constantly had to fight against his tendency to confess the truth, and only defeated it when he gave it free rein and then threw the text away with revulsion. After that he made a point of being as laconic as possible, until he realized that they would sense his fury, which would betray him in a different way. In the end it was a bland and formal letter of refusal, which he left on the chest of drawers in the corridor.

The tunnel dream, which had left him in peace for a while, now assailed him again, many times, and when he woke up, it was always with the sentence: The red hands will never let him go. He never found out whether these words were being uttered by Leskov, sitting next to him, or whether they only came to mind after the dream ended. He became used to getting up straight away and listening to some music over a cup of tea.

The ring finger on his left hand bore a fine white scar.

Once Perlmann dreamed he was playing the A flat minor Polonaise. Everything went smoothly, even the frightening passage, and he didn’t understand why he awoke as if from a nightmare. Only in the course of the day did it become clear to him: he had been bored while playing. Unsettled, he took a long walk past shops in which the Christmas decorations were being taken down. He felt as if someone had broken a great piece out of him. He heard the chords quite loudly in his head, and now he thought again of Brian Millar. He hated him.

He wrote his letter to Leskov on the last day of the year. That day he couldn’t eat anything, and the letter was stiff. He had, he wrote towards the end, bought himself a copy of Gorky’s novel immediately upon his return. For that reason he was returning his, Leskov’s, copy, because the books were so very precious to him. He fine-tuned those sentences for ages. He wanted to create a sense of distance, without hurting Leskov. It was an insoluble task. At last he decided that the practical tone he had given the whole thing was quite clear enough.

The day after New Year’s Day Perlmann took everything to the post office. When he bought a newspaper on his way back to the kiosk, he met the institute librarian. As they laughed about the latest gossip, Perlmann was tempted to put his arm around her shoulder. He felt the anticipated movement in his arm, but managed inwardly to halt it, and his hand stayed in his pocket.

In the paper he came upon an advertisement looking for a teacher at the German School in Managua. He set off and had the required photograph taken. On the way he reflected that he could have taken the job with Olivetti that very day. When he had finished his application, it occurred to him that he had forgotten to go shopping. Perlmann stepped inside a crowded bar with trashy Christmas decorations on the walls. When he was greeted with the loud laughter of a large group sitting around a table he turned on his heel and walked along deserted streets to the station, where he stood at a snack bar and ate a burnt sausage and a roll that tasted like sawdust.

On Monday morning Perlmann put his application for Managua in the post box opposite the university. On the way to the lecture hall he slipped and fell. After he had brushed the snow from his coat, he stood still for a moment and closed his eyes. He thought about the ticking clock as he stepped inside the hall and slowly walked towards the auditorium.

Nothing had happened.