Perlmann's Silence

25

He woke with a headache and a film of sweat on his face. It was a quarter to ten, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky on the mirror-smooth water of the bay. Today I have to make a decision. Any decision.

Here in this room, under the eyes of the others, so to speak, he couldn’t reach a decision, he thought in the shower. He left the hotel by the rear entrance and had a coffee in a bar on the Piazza Veneto. His headache gradually eased, and he was better able to bear looking out into the radiant autumn day.

There was no point hushing up Silvestri’s departure from the others. Over the course of the day they would find out from Signora Morelli, certainly by the time they asked for the texts for the Monday session. And then they would inevitably assume that he, Perlmann, would be giving the next two sessions. Where are his papers? he could hear Millar asking. By dinner time Perlmann would have to be able to say that copies were being made. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show his face.

Down at the jetty, where the liners docked, people were gathering: locals with baskets and bicycles, but also a few tourists with cameras. All of a sudden it seemed to Perlmann that a long boat trip would help him more than anything else to gain clarity, and he put as much emphasis as possible on that thought to drown out his mounting panic.

A boat left for Genoa at eleven. He stood aside from the waiting group. Another quarter of an hour. He smoked impatiently. Now he didn’t think he could bear to stay on dry land a moment longer. He finally wanted to set foot on the boat and watch the stretch of water widening between himself and the jetty. At eleven o’clock the ship had still not come into view. He cursed the Italian lack of punctuality.

When he stood at the railing half an hour later, right at the front of the ship, he made an effort to open his senses wide so that their impressions would penetrate him deeply and powerfully, overwhelming and suffocating his despairing thoughts. He had no sunglasses with him. It hurt to look out into the dazzling light, but he narrowed his eyes and tried to take it all in even so. The light broke on the water. Near the bow it was sparkling points, gleaming little stars, further out calm surfaces of white gold and platinum; above it a layer of gauzy mist, and in the distance the glittering surface passed seamlessly into haze that dissolved at the top in a dome of milky blue. He inhaled the heavy, slightly intoxicating smell of seawater in slow, deep draughts, a smell that had repeatedly drawn him to the harbor in Hamburg, even as a child, because it promised an intense and also a completely effortless present.

I must concentrate. When I pass this spot again on the way back, I’ll have to know what I’m going to do. He sat down in the shade under the cabin porch. There were only three possibilities. One consisted in presenting nothing at all. No text. No session. That would be a declaration of bankruptcy, which would also alienate the others, because it would come unheralded and without a request for understanding. He had missed that. On the contrary, when asking Millar for information about English words, he had inevitably created the impression of working on a paper. It would be a sudden, speechless bankruptcy, without explanation on his part and without understanding from the others, an abyss of mute embarrassment. And that possibility struck Perlmann as completely unbearable, when he considered how he could announce it. He couldn’t simply put a piece of paper in his colleagues’ pigeonholes telling them aridly that he would not be providing a contribution, that the sessions assigned to the purpose had been cancelled. Should he add: because with the best will in the world I haven’t been able to think of anything? They would demand an explanation, either explicitly or through their silence. Or should he admit complete failure over dinner, tap his glass and then, with words upon which the very situation would bestow a dreadful and involuntary solemnity, explain that unfortunately he had absolutely nothing more to say in academic terms? Should he perhaps visit the individual colleagues in their rooms and tell them of his incapacity, six times in a row and then a seventh time on the phone to Angelini, who was so keen to come to his session? Perlmann got a dry mouth and walked quickly back to the bow to let the airstream dispel that thought.

A local family with two children was coming forwards from the rear of the ship. The children threw a ball to each other, and suddenly the peace up here at the front, where only a few tourists had been standing at the railing taking photographs, was over. By the violence of his blazing irritation Perlmann could tell how far off-kilter he was. When the boy missed the ball, which flew overboard, he started screaming as if he were being burned at the stake; his parents could do nothing to calm him down, and Perlmann had to control himself to keep from yelling at him and shaking him till he stopped. He fled to the stern of the ship, but the screaming was even audible there, and the roar of the engine made clear thinking impossible. At last he went to the cabin and drank a lukewarm coffee at the bar.

He could – this was the next possibility – present his notes on language and experience as his contribution. He would have to call Maria from Genoa and ask her to have the paper ready by today, tomorrow lunchtime at the very latest. He could tell her what had happened with Silvestri. And ask her to cross out the heading mestre non è brutta – as the title of a paper that was already extremely questionable, it was an additional and unnecessary provocation.

He went through once more the sentences he had looked at on Monday night; some of them he read out under his voice. This morning he liked them; they struck him as apt and seemed to capture something important that one might easily fail to notice. They were unassuming, precise sentences, he thought. For a while their calm style merged with the peace of the gleaming surface of the water far out, and it didn’t seem impossible to him to approach the others with these sentences. But then a tottering old man bumped into him and knocked him against the bar, and suddenly Perlmann’s sense of security and the confidence that he had felt in his words just a moment before collapsed all around him. Now they struck him as being as treacherous as mirages, or the wishful thinking one has while half-asleep, and as he poured his slopped coffee from the saucer back into the cup, he said to himself with apprehensive sobriety that this solution was also unthinkable. Quite apart from the fact that it was not a coherent paper, these strange notes would be mocked as impressionistic and anecdotal, as unverifiable, often inconsistent, full of contradictions, in short, as unscientific. The paper would leave people like Millar and Ruge speechless. They saw only the possibility of irony. The most charitable thing would be for them to maintain an expressive silence.

That Perlmann would be left standing there as someone who had abandoned academia, and could henceforth not be relied upon, and that now, of all times, when he had received the prize and the invitation to Princeton was approaching – that wasn’t the worst thing about this possibility. What made the thought entirely unbearable was the fact that these notes were far too intimate, and laid him bare before anyone who read them. They had seemed so intimate to him that he had felt more at ease using a foreign language as a protection even from himself. To someone with English as a mother tongue – Millar, for example – that distance did not apply. Perlmann shuddered. And then, suddenly, he had a sense that he understood his dread about his own sentences better than before: many of the notes showed him as a shy and vulnerable child wrestling with experiences it had not understood.

If he presented nothing at all, that would in itself reveal something he would have preferred to keep silent. But it remained global and abstract. It was the confession of an incapacity that remained otherwise in darkness. What he thought and experienced behind it remained unclear, unfamiliar. It was up to him to hide himself away from further insights. His notes, on the other hand, were, it seemed to him, like a window through which one could see right into his innermost depths. To let the others read them would mean obliterating all the boundaries that he had so painstakingly constructed, and it seemed to Perlmann that there was barely any difference between this process and complete annihilation.

The air in the ship’s cabin was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife, and Perlmann felt he was suffocating on his own smoke. He stubbed out his cigarette and went quickly outside. He performed a complete tour of the ship, his eyes seeking something that might hold his attention for a moment, for just a few moments which would mean his last small respite, a last opportunity to catch his breath for what was about to come.

He was glad when an elderly, dwarfish man asked him for a light. For a moment he was tempted to escape into a conversation with him, but then he was repelled by the man’s permanently open mouth with its swelling, protruding tongue. Perlmann pulled his face into a painful smile and walked back to the front, where he stepped up slowly, almost in slow motion, to the railing, supporting himself on outstretched arms and closed his eyes.

The third possibility was one that he had not, until that moment, dared to capture in an explicit thought. Hitherto it had been present to him only in the form of a dark, impenetrable sensation, from which he had turned hastily away whenever it had appeared on the edge of his consciousness. Because it was a sensation – he felt that very clearly whenever it touched him – that emanated a terrible sense of menace, and merely to pursue its precise content was a sense of danger. And so it seemed to him a tremendous effort. It was a summoning of courage that he thought he felt physically now that he looked this possibility in the face for the first time: the possibility of presenting the translation of Leskov’s text as his own.

It was as if a treacherous poison were spreading through him when he allowed this desperate thought to unfold before him in all its clarity. It hurt to experience himself as someone who could in all seriousness consider such a thought. It was a dry pain, free of self-pity, and all the more horrific for that reason. What happened there, he sensed with an alertness in which all self-reassurance burned away, was a deep incision in his life, an irrevocable, incurable break with the past and the start of a new computation of time.

None of his colleagues would be able to discover the deception, even if the Russian text were by some improbable coincidence to fall into their hands. For them a Russian text was nothing more than a closed typeface, an ornament. And besides, none of them knew Leskov. No one knew his address. All they had heard was the name ‘St Petersburg’. And last of all, none of them had the slightest reason to make contact with this unknown, obscure Russian, who was a nobody in professional circles, and thus provoke the threat of discovery by Leskov himself. Later, if the works were to be published, Perlmann could withdraw the paper and replace it with one of his own. If necessary he could also delay the printing. He would publish the volume. Aside from his own printout there would be only seven copies of the bogus text, and it would be respected when he expressly asked that the text should not be distributed further, as it was only the first, provisional version, an experiment. If they then heard nothing more about its further development, saw no further versions and instead read an entirely new text by him, the others would at last set the paper aside. It would be forgotten, and grow yellow and dusty on a shelf or in a cupboard, until eventually it fell victim to a clearing operation like the one that everyone undertook sooner or later in their own flood of paper, and was destroyed.

So he could risk it. And from the point of view of scholarly esteem he would be in a much better position than in the two other cases. Admittedly, Leskov’s text was wayward and in some places bold; one could even call it eccentric. But in the discussion Perlmann could refer to the literature of memory research which had not been accessible to Leskov himself, and one could also characterize the paper as a conceptual one, a broad-brushstroke outline, and thus basically precisely appropriate to this occasion. Millar and Ruge, this was fairly clear, would screw up their noses at so much speculation. But it was certainly possible that the others would find the text interesting. That much was certainly true of Evelyn Mistral. But even a man like von Levetzov had recently taken notice of the subject. Perlmann, it might appear, was trying something new, something that perhaps was no longer linguistics, but which was imaginative and provocative. Something was happening, developing in Perlmann’s work, and secretly they might even be a bit envious of his courage.

Perlmann felt ill, and he threw the cigarette he had just lit into the water. He was relieved that they were now entering Genoa harbor and there were some things to look at: the crew throwing the ropes, the steaming water spraying from the bow and, further away, the big ships and the cranes whose arms glided over the tall stacks of colorful containers. When the family from before was suddenly standing next to him and the children were loudly calling out the things they could see, Perlmann wasn’t bothered, quite the contrary. He fled his thoughts and wished he could step outside his innermost depths and lose himself in things, dissolve himself entirely in the stones of the quay wall, in the wooden poles against which the ship was rubbing, in the cobbles of the street, in all the things that were simply just there and entire unto themselves.

There was nothing to keep him on dry land. The lack of any rocking movement gave him a feeling of imprisonment, even though he had the chance of going wherever he wanted in this city on the slope, which in the noon autumn light had something about it of a desert city, something oriental. The ship didn’t get back until a quarter past three, but there was a tour of the harbor every hour, and the people for the one o’clock trip were just boarding. Perlmann was glad that it was late in the year and the two seats next to him were free. When he let his arm dangle over the side, he could almost touch the dark green, almost black water. Pools of oil and rubbish drifted past, at the clearer spots one could make out seaweed, and sometimes a rusty chain used to moor a ship.

He gave a start when the loudspeaker was turned on with a click, and an unnecessarily loud woman’s voice greeted the passengers, first in Italian, then in English, German, French and Spanish and at last in a language that must have been Japanese. It was idiotic, but he hadn’t thought about that, as if he were on a sightseeing boat for the first time in his life. It was going to be an hour of torture: all that information, all those explanations that interested him not in the slightest, and everything in six languages. And he urgently needed to think. Peace and concentration had never been as important as they were now.

The voice from the loudspeaker, shrill and bored, began with details about the size of the harbor and the volume of its goods shipments, then a tape played the same information in the other languages, all women’s voices, only the Spanish text was spoken by a man. Perlmann covered his ears, the repetitions were unbearable. That he had been so stupid as to take this trip struck him as a sign that there was no way out of his plight. It was like a harbinger of inescapable doom.

They passed by the first big ships, their curved, black bows loomed far into the air, lifeboats were fastened along the railings, and single sailors waved. Hidden behind another vessel, a black ship’s wall suddenly appeared, bearing the word leningrad in white, Cyrillic script. Perlmann turned hot and cold. He gulped and felt everything convulsing inside him. At that moment he desperately wished the letters were completely alien to him, just white lines that provided nothing to read and nothing to understand. That they were so familiar and self-evident to him was a source of unhappiness; the actual reason, it seemed to him, for his desperate situation.

Agnes, he was quite sure, would have advised him to take the first path. Of course, she would have understood that it was unpleasant for him; but she would have seen the whole thing in far less dramatic terms than he did. It was, she might have said, as if she had had to tell the agency: ‘Sorry, but over the past few weeks I haven’t come up with any usable shots.’ That was all, a temporary crisis, no reason to speak of a loss of face.

But Agnes had worked for an agency in which everyone was very cooperative, almost chummy. She hadn’t known the academic world, with its atmosphere of competition and mutual suspicion, she had just known it from his stories, and there had often been a bad atmosphere between them when he thought he sensed she was mutely reproaching him for an excessive and disproportionate sensitivity in such matters.

The trip now continued along the quay where the big freighters lay. Between the individual ships one could see the long row of trucks that picked up the goods. This was where the freight was discharged. Discharged, he thought to himself, and for a moment he stopped resisting the loudspeaker and concentrated instead on the vocabulary of harbors and ships. He lost himself entirely in the shrill Italian voice and then the others, the taped voices with their sterile tones which, it seemed to him, had not the slightest thing to do with the colorful backdrop outside.

Without really noticing, he began translating from one language to another in his mind. At first he tested how well he could keep up when he translated into German. It became increasingly clear to him that it was a matter of keeping a very particular balance of concentration. One had to look back at the sentence that had just come to an end, and could only begin to form the German sentence when the point of syntactical clarity had been reached in the foreign sentence – no earlier, because otherwise one could find oneself starting on the wrong foot, and end up stumbling. That meant that you inevitably concluded the German sentence after a certain time lag, with a powerful need to put it behind you to have your head free for the next one. So in the second half of the sentence you automatically speeded up, exploiting the routine and self-evidence with which your mother tongue was available to you. That phase could barely hold the attention, because it already had to be deployed entirely upon the new sentence. During that second it was a tightrope act, from which one could fall either of two ways. First of all, it could happen that you had to think for a moment too long about the old sentence, perhaps even that an unfamiliar word would put you in a panic; then you started too late into the process in which you should have been constructing your trained expectations concerning the new sentence, and had to admit that you had missed the new sentence. Or else you were pursued by the fear that that was precisely what could happen; then you risked the danger of letting your eye dart just a bit too far forward, even before the German version of the old sentence had found the point at which it sounded most natural and could be left up to the unconscious concluding process, so then you couldn’t conclude the old sentence. The worst case was a combination of the two. Then a kind of paralysis set in: you sensed that you should actually take a quick look back to finish the old sentence correctly, but it was plain that you had arrived too late for the new sentence. You didn’t know which was more important, and that doubt meant you lost time, and then you lost control of both sentences, the old one and the new one, and you had to shake off your irritation with your own failure very quickly to catch up with the next sequence of sentences.

That seemed to Perlmann to be the hardest thing: not to succumb to irritation over occasional and inevitable errors. Part of the training of an interpreter, he thought, would be to show no irritation, to reach in a flash and unemotionally the decision that the current sentence was beyond saving, a normal breakdown that should be forgotten straight away. Above all it was a matter of confidence: the certainty that one could depend completely upon one’s capacity for concentration. And as long as one maintained and experienced that difficult balance, remaining master of the situation, it was a wonderful feeling that could be quite intoxicating. That feeling would intensify still further, he thought, if one were capable of translating between two foreign languages, two that were as exotic as possible, far removed from the natural self-evidence of one’s mother tongue. A diversity in the languages you had mastered, that was freedom, and being able to push your own boundaries far out into the realm of the exotic, that must be a massive intensification of the sense of life, a real rush of freedom.

Perlmann now tried to leap back and forth between the foreign languages that came out of the loudspeaker, and each time he did so he felt clumsy and stupid as he collided against Japanese as if against an impenetrable wall. Then the particular pitch and brightness of the Japanese voice sounded as if the woman were mocking his incomprehension. He liked being able to make the whole effort on the quiet, involving himself only internally, to some extent, without the sound that came when you engaged with the world by speaking. And during a pause from the loudspeaker, when the only sound was the quiet rushing of the water and the puttering of the engine, he knew all of a sudden what he could have been: a long-distance runner through all the languages of the world, with lots of empty space around him, and without the obligation to exchange a single word with people.

He pursued that thought later on, sitting in a shabby bar near the harbor, over a pizza that repelled him. He asked the surprised proprietor for some paper and a pencil and started describing, on a stained waiter’s pad, the kind of presence and freedom that arose when one passed through several languages at brief intervals. At first it was an effort, he was tired by the sun and the loudspeaker, and the excessively loud voices still rang in his head. But then he got going. He managed precise and dense descriptions, and he formulated things that he had previously felt only vaguely, but had never grasped in words. Every now and again he glanced southwards. The hotel was over an hour’s boat journey away. He grew calm. Here at this wobbly table, from which the paint was flaking, amidst men in vests and dungarees, who probably worked in the harbor, he suddenly felt safe. He managed to stand by the idea that he was someone who was far more interested in sentences like the ones on these little bits of paper than the whole flood of linguistic data and theories.

He asked if he could use the telephone on the bar, and phoned Maria in the hotel. Something in his schedule had changed, he said, and asked whether she couldn’t have his paper ready by this evening or at least by tomorrow afternoon.

She would try, she said, but she couldn’t promise anything, and in fact it was rather unlikely, because some people from Fiat had just arrived and, of course, she would now have to see to them as well.

He knew it was childish, but he was hurt that Maria had reminded him that there was something else in the world apart from him and his group. Her reaction hadn’t been unfriendly, but her voice had been quite businesslike, and that was enough to suggest resentment, mingled with irritation that he hadn’t given her his notes to be typed up much sooner.

On the way back clouds rolled in and accumulated quickly, dark mountains with a delicate edge of sunlight. A squally wind announced a storm and soon the sea was like foaming, greenish lead against a dark, slate-grey wall in which flashes of lightning appeared like scribbled lines. When a violent shower began, the people withdrew inside, leaving Perlmann alone outside under the cabin porch.

Again sentences from the notes circled in his head. He tested them, tasted them, attempted a neutral, sober, detached judgment. Instead, he became increasingly insecure, the English language dampened the sentences, made them less brilliant, less pretentious, but in the end it’s all trash anyway. He pulled the stained pieces of paper from his pocket and read them, as gusts of wind lashed the rain across and drenched him to the skin. When it had finished, he paused for a while and stared out into the sheet lightning. Then slowly, almost softly, he crumpled the pieces of paper and pressed them with both hands into a solid ball. He turned them back and forth in his hands a few more times. Then he threw them out into the sea. The second possibility was eliminated, once and for all.

It was so terribly cramped, this prison of the three possibilities, whose bars he rattled with furious frustration. Again and again he attempted to flee by clinging to the idea of bigger connections, of altered proportions. It’s mad to let myself be so tied up by ludicrous issues of respect within a group of colleagues that all that I remain seems to be entirely insignificant and not even present. And besides; there are disasters, wars, hunger and misery in the world out there, and there are real tragedies and real suffering. Why do I not free myself by simply denying the importance of this tiny, laughable problem? Why don’t I just tear down the prison walls by declaring them to be imaginary structures? Who’s actually stopping me from doing that?

But each attempt to take that much-longed-for step into freedom through an altered perspective and a re-evaluation of things proved to be deceptive and without any lasting effect as soon as the image of the loathed hotel re-entered the foreground and, as if it had hypnotic powers, extinguished everything else.

When the Portofino peninsula came into view Perlmann was gripped by panic, a panic that had seemed to have been defeated two hours before in the bar at the harbor. The word plagiarism formed within him; against his will it grew bigger and bigger, it spread within him and filled him with an internal roar. He had never been confronted with the word as he was now, he was discovering it properly now for the first time. It was a terrible word, a word that made him think of the color red, a dark red with a hint of black. It was a gloomy, heavy word with a doom-laden sound; a repellent and unnatural word. It seemed to him like a word that had been deliberately assembled to frighten and torment someone to their very depths by calling up in him the feeling that beneath all the actions of which people were capable there was no crime greater than the one represented by this hateful, angular word.

The only one who could unmask him would be Leskov himself, and he was in St Petersburg, thousands of miles away, without an exit permit and still tied to his sick mother. Better security from the discovery of deception was hard to imagine. But that reflection sounded feeble and papery compared to a mute certainty which made him shiver even more in his wet clothes: committing such a fraud, a theft of thought and writing on that scale would – for someone like himself, to whom words meant so much – inflict a wound that would never heal, a trauma from which he would never be able to recover. In a sense it would be the end of his life. After that the time until death would be something that he could only endure. Occasional forgetfulness and immersion in the everyday would make it a little more bearable, but Perlmann was quite sure that on the whole stretch that still lay before him there wouldn’t be a single day when he could keep from thinking about it, and hearing the word plagiarism inside himself.

On the way to the exit he was once again filled with shame that he had allowed this thought so much space, and at the same time he was glad to have looked it openly in the eye, and to have fought it down once and for all.

When he set foot on dry land and set off towards the hotel, he still had no idea what he was going to do.

Back in his room he took off his wet things, showered for a long time and then walked to the open window. The rain had stopped, the storm had headed southwards, and only in the far distance could one still see the occasional flash and hear a faint rumble of thunder. Night was closing in. Perlmann lay down on the bed. He felt exhausted to his very last fibre. It was a vibrating weariness that flowed through him, and yet at the same time his body was tense, and resisted any attempt at relaxation. He felt only one wish: that the tension might collapse in on itself and make way for sleep. But that state persisted, the yearned-for process of metabolism in his brain didn’t begin, and after a while he went to the bathroom and took a quarter-tablet.

His face in the mirror had received some color from the boat trip. Philipp Perlmann, tanned on Italian holiday, he thought and didn’t know what to do with all his despair. With a dull, empty head he smoked two cigarettes, then lay back down again and, after a few tormented minutes in which he tossed back and forth, he slipped into shallow, troubled sleep.

It was ten o’clock at night when he woke up. He immediately noticed that the paralysing apprehension which had held him in its grip during his sleep had passed uninterrupted into his waking state. But it was a while before he had overcome his state of disorientation. I’ve got to do something now. It’s the last moment. If I don’t do anything now, that, too, is a decision. All that I’m left with is a declaration of failure.

He felt dully that a complicated process of reflection had taken place over the course of the day, a thick net of serpentine, dead-end thoughts. But his head was too heavy for them now. He remembered the boat trip, but that whole day seemed to be far away and unreal. The only clear thought he was able to have was that he now had to go downstairs and hand in a text that could be copied tomorrow morning, while he was still asleep. Maria. My text isn’t ready yet. The people from Fiat.

As he fumbled with the combination on his suitcase lock, he realized that his fingertips were numb from the sleeping pill. It was by no means a complete numbness. It affected only the outermost layer, and was actually more of a faint tingle, but it gave Perlmann the feeling that contact with the world was being lost; the contact that one needed if one were to maintain control. It was as if a tiny gap had appeared between him and the world, a thin tear through which the world was escaping him. He took his translation of Leskov’s paper from his case and walked towards the door. There he turned round, went into the bathroom and swallowed a whole sleeping pill. He took the elevator downstairs.

There was no one at reception, but in the back room Giovanni sat with the television on. Perlmann saw a floodlit football stadium. Giovanni was leaning forward and hastily smoking. Perlmann rang the bell, but it wasn’t until the second ring that Giovanni turned his head and hesitantly got to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the game. ‘Penalty,’ he said apologetically when he saw Perlmann’s face.

For a moment Perlmann felt as if he wouldn’t be able to open his mouth. Never before had he been so aware that he had a mouth. Giovanni glanced impatiently over his shoulder at the television, where a roar of jubilation was exploding at that moment.

‘Six copies,’ Perlmann said urgently, ‘then please put them in my colleagues’ pigeonholes.’

‘Va bene, Signor Perlmann,’ said Giovanni, and accepted the text. As he did so a bit of ash fell from his cigarette on to the immaculate, gleaming white of the title page. It was only by turning away in silence and leaving that Perlmann managed to control himself. When he glanced back he saw Giovanni quickly putting the paper under the counter and disappearing into the back room.

The pills were already taking effect when he hung the do not disturb sign on the door. He was grateful when a gentle wave of numbness washed over the sensations that were forcing their way to the surface; sensations of defeat, shame and anxiety, the feeling of falling without knowing when he would land; the certainty that from now on he would never stop falling. Without turning on the light he lay down in bed and was glad that the gap between himself and the world was rapidly growing.

26

I must have been crazy. Completely crazy. All of a sudden Perlmann was gripped by a painful feeling of alertness, an alertness behind his closed eyes, which were steeped in physical drowsiness. It was quarter to eight. Quickly, his movements still uncertain, he pulled his trousers and pullover over his pyjamas and slipped into his shoes with no socks on. Perhaps the copies won’t even be ready yet, in which case I’ll simply collect them up again. Nothing has happened yet.

With jerky movements that betrayed his giddiness, he ran downstairs, nearly falling twice. Just before the last step he came to a standstill, clutching on to the banister with both hands. Millar and von Levetzov were standing down by the desk, taking the texts that Signora Morelli was handing them.

‘The paper’s still warm,’ Millar said with a grin, and ran the pages along his thumb like a pack of cards.

The other copies were still in the pigeonholes. Minutes, I just got here minutes late, but now I can’t go over and demand the text back, it would make me look ridiculous. You can’t explain something like that. If only the signora had been less efficient, just this once.

Perlmann hurried back to his room, his breath catching with each step at the idea of bumping into one of his other colleagues. In the bathroom he rinsed out his mouth and then sat down with a cigarette in the red armchair. He felt dizzy. He had crossed a threshold and would never be able to go back. This fraud – its consequences now unfolding inexorably – was something he would have to live with for ever. The day after tomorrow and the day after that he would sit in the Marconi Veranda defending a text he had stolen. The hours, the minutes that he spent sitting there in front of the others as an unacknowledged fraud would last for ever, and once his stay here was over it was as a fraudster that he would enter his apartment in Frankfurt. He would look at Agnes’s picture and talk to Kirsten, always aware of his deception. Nothing would ever be the same. His plagiarism would now stand for ever between him and the world like a thin glass wall, visible only to him. He would touch objects and people without ever being able to reach them.

Perlmann couldn’t stay in this building filled with people who would in the next few hours be following Leskov’s thought processes on the assumption that they were his. And he could no longer bear it in this hotel room, for which almost 300 marks a day had been spent for more than four weeks, and in which he had done not a single thing. Apart from a translation, which was now a fraudulent translation.

He didn’t shower. He no longer felt he could use the luxurious bathroom for longer than was absolutely necessary. After he had got properly dressed, he would have liked to order another coffee to fight the after-effects of the tablet, which could no longer protect him against anything, and only lay on his eyes like a continuous pressure, so that he constantly felt the need to close them. But he didn’t even want to appear in front of the waiter, and room service was one of the things to which he no longer had any right in future.

He left the hotel by the rear entrance and stepped out into a cloudless, radiant autumn day. As quickly as he could, he walked to the spur of rock behind which the road to Portofino disappeared, almost running the last few yards before he was out of view of the hotel. But they have no idea. Nevertheless, I have to disappear from their field of vision. He didn’t dare lean against the railing around the corner. He must have looked like a holidaymaker, a spa patient enjoying a wonderful Italian autumn morning. So he smoked his cigarette upright and stiff, one hand in his trouser pocket. He had to walk, keep on going; walking made it almost bearable. His stomach hurt. He hadn’t eaten a thing since the few mouthfuls of pizza in Genoa yesterday, and now the cigarettes.

He found it hard to remember exactly what it had been like last night. The most difficult thing was the attempt to recall the internal Gestalt of that moment when he had taken Leskov’s paper out of the suitcase and gone to the door. It had happened during those few seconds. Something had been set in motion that could not now be stopped, a sequence of events that dragged him with it to the end, from the fatal motion of the arm with which he had handed the text to Giovanni, to the strenuous movement of his mouth, with which he had given the disastrous instruction to copy and distribute. Now that he thought back to it with his eyes closed, it struck him as less his own action than something that had come over him, that had simply happened to him; or if it were an action, then it was the action of a sleepwalker. For a moment this thought brought him relief, and his step became a little lighter.

But that didn’t last for long. There was – and there was no getting around it – something in the structure of his own thoughts and feelings that had activated this quite particular sequence of movements, and not another. On the ship yesterday it had looked like a balance of reasons. The three possibilities of action had balanced one another out precisely; all three seemed equally inconceivable, and that was where the agony had lain. During his troubled sleep it must have been working away inside him, a power play must have taken place, and in the end something, perhaps just a tiny preponderance or sensation, must have tipped the scales.

Although the sun shone directly down on him, Perlmann buttoned up his jacket. The thought that he was someone in whom – without his noticing it or being able to do anything about it – fraud had taken the upper hand, chilled him. The only thing he had with which to counter this fact, so that it did not crush him entirely, was an explanation for those internal events. His fear of personal revelation – of standing there without any means of distancing himself from other people – must have been far greater than he had previously assumed, greater even than his conscious awareness. Plainly it was so powerful that the two other possibilities must – somewhere deep within him, and without his assistance – have vanished, and no option remained but to hide behind Leskov’s text, which was to protect him against the other two alternatives. In this way, without his being aware of it, the paradoxical will had arisen in him to achieve his delineation, his defense against others, through an instrument that did not belong to him, something that was not his.

That explanation couldn’t mitigate anything, or prettify it. But it did represent an insight that gave him back a scrap of inner freedom, the freedom of the perceiver.

Over the mirror-smooth, dazzling water lay a film of delicate mist, just like yesterday, when he had stood at the front of the ship and tried to open up his senses to this gleaming present. But eons lay between yesterday and today. Yesterday his gaze upon the surfaces of the purest brilliance had still been a gaze into an open future. Its openness had tormented him, because each of the possible paths upon which he could enter it had seemed threatening. But in spite of everything it had been an open future, there had been ramifications of action and, consequently, there had still been hope, or at least the freedom of uncertainty. Now everything, uncertainty and hope, was destroyed, the future was no longer a space of possibilities, but just a cramped, undeviating stretch of time on which he would have to live through the unalterable consequences of his deception. In that all-deciding moment, when he handed Leskov’s text across the counter and uttered those doom-laden words, he had robbed himself for ever of an open future and thus, perhaps, of any hope that he might find his way back to his present.

The gleaming surface of the water, the white depth of the horizon, the vault of translucent azure, cut through by the silver trail of a rising aeroplane – it had all retreated to an unattainable distance, inaccessible to his experience. When one had done the kind of thing that he had done, one could no longer look outside. Joy and beauty, even a moment of happiness, were no longer possible. The price of deception was blindness. What you were left with was the option of huddling up inside and letting the maelstrom of guilt and lack of present wash over you. The outside world was nothing now but a backdrop, a backdrop tormenting in its beauty, a torture.

Perlmann was glad that it was a long way to Portofino. He had found a rhythm of walking through which pain and despair held one another in suspension. It was an unstable equilibrium, and when he had at one point to stop and let a group of scouts pass him in single file, the sensations tumbled in upon him; he was defenselessly delivered over to them, and only after a few minutes of renewed walking had he managed to detach himself from them to any extent. The rhythmical movement and the after-effect of the sleeping pills merged into a state in which, with half-closed eyes directed at the tarmac, he occasionally managed to think nothing at all.

Into such a phase of inner emptiness fell the sudden suspicion that his earlier explanation for his nocturnal action was not at all true. The truth is that I wanted to put it behind me as quickly as possible, whatever it might be, so that I could go on sleeping. Waking at ten, he hadn’t so much as thought about the possibility of handing in nothing at all and standing there empty-handed in front of everyone, and that was, of course, no accident. To that extent there was a degree of truth in the explanation that assumed a decision-making process, however unconscious it might be. But there could be no question of making a decision between his own notes and Leskov’s paper. What had happened was something far simpler, more banal: he had picked up Leskov’s text because it was to hand, because all he had to do was open the suitcase. Finding out whether Maria, contrary to expectation, had finished typing out his own paper had been too much for him at that point. He had wanted nothing else but to lie down as soon as possible and yield to the persistent effect of the pills. There might also have been the fact, he thought, biting his lip, that he had avoided a question concerning Maria, because a childish sense of hurt at her businesslike remark on the phone still lingered. At any rate, he said to himself with embittered, self-destructive violence, he had basically been quite glad that the arrival of the people from Fiat had effectively removed that possibility.

Perlmann was startled by the banality of this explanation; by the fact that in a matter upon which so much depended he had allowed himself to be motivated by something so primitive as a need for sleep – and self-induced sleep at that. The pills. They made the decision. He wasn’t sure whether that wasn’t, in the end, even worse than if it had been an unconscious but still genuine decision to commit fraud. Because what struck him now, while he blindly walked, as the truth, meant only that he had in that unhappy moment lost himself as a decision-maker, as a subject of his actions.

Perlmann only became aware that he had arrived in Portofino when he found himself in the square where the buses turned to make the journey back. He was puzzled to be here now. He had no business here in Portofino, where he was stuck as if in a cul-de-sac. He wanted above all to stay in motion, to hold his inner misery in check, he was afraid of coming to a standstill and being delivered over to his tormenting sensations with no possibility of defending himself. He took the street along which the tourists would stream down to the water during the holiday season. At this time of year most of the shops were closed. The radiant weather and the dead impression that the place created did not suit one another. Most of the restaurants around the little marina were shut as well. Outside the last café down at the quay he sat down at a bistro table and ordered coffee and cigarettes from an old and sulky waiter who didn’t deign to look at him.

It was his first coffee that morning, and he greedily drank two cups. Again he became aware of his stomach and choked down two dried-up rolls that he had fetched from the counter inside. With his eyes closed, he listened to the quiet sound of the boats bumping gently against one another. For a few minutes, in a state between half-sleep and voluntary activity of the imagination, he managed to create the illusion of being on holiday: a man who could afford to drink coffee on a beautiful November morning in the famous town of Portofino; unattached, a free man who was able to go off travelling while others had to work; someone who could make his own choices and wasn’t accountable to anyone. But then he suddenly became aware once more of his actual situation. He was a fraud – an undiscovered fraud, admittedly, but a fraud nonetheless. And now Portofino seemed like a trap.

He could no longer bear it. He called for the waiter, looked in vain for him in the empty bar, and then, because he couldn’t find anything smaller, left far too large a bill beside his cup and walked quickly back to the main street. He bought a ticket from the driver of the waiting bus, who was standing outside and smoking, and took a seat at the back. He was the only passenger. When the driver stamped out his cigarette and sat down at the steering wheel, Perlmann jumped out at the last moment. Astonished, the driver watched him in the rear-view mirror, then set off.

Perlmann didn’t want to go back, and he wanted to sleep. He was tempted just to lie down on the bench by the bus stop, but that was too public. A hotel. He counted his money. It would only be enough, if at all, for a very cheap room. He was relieved to have a goal for a moment, and walked through the narrow alleyways of the town. Many hotels had closed for the winter, and of the ones that were open, even the shabbiest-looking dives were more than he could afford.

At last he found a room in an albergo that opened up on to a narrow alley full of garbage bins. The landlord – a squat, fat man with a moustache and suspenders – studied him with a suspicious and contemptuous look: a man without luggage and without much money, wanting a room at half-past eleven in the morning. Perlmann had to haggle. He only wanted the room for a few hours. OK, until five o’clock, discount, cash in advance.

He took off the grubby cover and lay down on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. The ceiling, its plaster crumbling, was covered with yellow and brown water stains; cobwebs had formed in the corners, and in the middle hung an ugly lamp of yellow plastic that was supposed to imitate amber.

Self-defense, he thought: couldn’t one regard what he had done as a form of self-defense? Powerless to do anything about it, he had lost his academic discipline, which had won him respect and a social position, and now he had been pushed against the wall by the expectations of others, demanding constant new achievements and threatening to withdraw their respect, and he had been forced to defend himself. And the only way he had managed to do that was through Leskov’s text. You could see that as a defense of his own life. It had not happened casually or for the sake of some cheap advantage, but simply in order to avert something that would have amounted to his professional and, in the end, his personal annihilation. Self-defense, in fact.

OK, if you were going to be literal about it, you might describe what he was doing as plagiarism. At that moment the others were holding in their hands a text which, even though his name wasn’t on it, they assumed was his text, even though he had only translated it and not written it himself. But that way of looking at things was fundamentally superficial, and didn’t do justice to the real process. Because he hadn’t translated the text just like that, without any internal involvement or intellectual engagement, as a professional translator in an agency might have done. Piece by piece he had allowed Leskov’s thought-processes to pass through his mind. He had repeatedly measured it against examples from his own memory, and in the end, to mention only this, he had actually spent many hours, whole days, in fact, on his attempt to structure Leskov’s fragmentary reflections into a consistent theory of appropriation. So one couldn’t really say that the text that had been distributed contained nothing of his own thoughts.

And that wasn’t all – it wasn’t even the crucial thing, he thought. There was something else, too, which made it seem unfair and actually incorrect to speak in terms of a theft of ideas. It was the fact that he had always immediately – once linguistic problems had been swept aside – recognized Leskov’s thoughts as his own. As he thought this, Perlmann saw before him Millar’s face with its flashing spectacles, and he heard his scornful voice; no words, just his scornful voice. The face and the voice came closer and closer. They oppressed him. They threatened to crush him. He had to defend himself. He got up, sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. You couldn’t prove something like that to anybody, and you wouldn’t ever be able to express it to anyone without making yourself ridiculous. Nonetheless, it remained the case: Leskov described experiences with language and memory all of which he, Perlmann, had had himself, and the intellectual outline that he came up with was such that with each individual step Perlmann had once again had the impression: I have often had that thought myself, really precisely the same one. Admittedly, he hadn’t sat down and written it out; the corresponding sentences from his pen did not exist. But he certainly could have done. He saw himself at his desk in Frankfurt, writing out, word for word, the text with which Leskov, to some extent by chance, had anticipated his own ideas. Nobody could say that he had passed off as his own thoughts that were alien to him.

He walked to the window and gave a start. On the other side of the narrow alley, exactly opposite his window and no more than six feet away from him, an old woman with a black headscarf and a toothless mouth leaned out of the window and grinned at him from a wrinkled face with a protruding chin. Next to her on the window-ledge there cowered a scrawny cat, the dividing-line between its orange and white fur running crookedly down its whole face and giving it an ugly, malevolent expression. Perlmann quickly drew the heavy, greasy curtains and lay back down on the bed. The hint of self-respect that he had managed to regain in his internal monologue a few moments before had been destroyed by the sight of the old woman and the cat, which now seemed to him like sly and menacing grotesques. Once again he felt like a cheap fraudster, lying in a shabby, dark hotel room in a trashy and abandoned tourist flophouse.

Only gradually did he find his way back to the two thought processes that he had begun to work out yesterday on the ship, still shocked at the time, and filled with shame to have found himself thinking any such thing. First of all, it was more or less impossible that one of his colleagues here could ever establish a connection with the unknown Leskov in faraway St Petersburg that might constitute a threat to him. And secondly, the seven copies of the translation, the seven manifestations and material proofs of his deception that existed would eventually be forgotten and finally destroyed. And with the disappearance of the paper from the world, his deception would also be extirpated and removed from the world – it would be just as if it had never happened.

Perlmann sensed that there was a daring leap somewhere in that thought, a transition that wasn’t quite flawless. But he didn’t want to look any closer. He wanted to look forward to the point in the future when the world, as far as his integrity was concerned, would be exactly as it had been before his deception. Once again he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked hastily, his body tensed, as if by doing so he could impel time to reach that far off point of innocence more quickly.

Perlmann imagined how the destruction of the paper and the writing might come about. It seemed to him that his thoughts became more correct and compelling the more he succeeded in imagining the process down to its smallest details. Millar’s copy, for example, would one day end up in one of the gleaming black garbage bags on a street in New York. The text might even be destroyed inside the bag, by some sort of leaking liquid, for example, but certainly by rain on a garbage dump, Perlmann could actually hear the pattering sound. The idea that appealed to him most was the inky letters running, undoing the baleful, guilt-ridden arrangement of the lines. Or else the text would go up in flames in a refuse incinerating plant. One day – in a few months, a year, perhaps, or two – this unfortunate text, this sequence of signs, this pattern of molecules would no longer exist in the world. All that would remain would be traces of memory in his colleagues’ heads. But they would become increasingly vague. All that would be left in the end would be a rough idea of the subject. The memory would fade especially quickly in the heads of his most dangerous opponents, Millar and Ruge, because they would regard it as overblown anyway, a piece of writing without sharp intellectual outlines that didn’t deserve to be remembered with any precision.

Perlmann grew calmer and lay down again. Now his earlier reflections regained their effect, and he drew up a little list in his mind, a crib sheet containing the points that he could always run his eyes over to ease his sensations of anxiety and guilt: (1) it was self-defense; (2) Leskov’s thoughts were also his own; and (3) after some time everything would be just as it had been before. Perlmann repeatedly ran through these points in alternating sequence; at first he thought about the order of priority, but then the inner list became increasingly mechanical, a mere ritual of self-reassurance, and in the end he finally fell asleep over it.

It was a long time before he heard fists on the door and the unpleasant, barking voice of the landlord calling to him that it was time to go. He put his glasses on and looked at his watch. Just after four. His rage was as violent as an exploding flame. He opened the door a chink and yelled in the landlord’s face that he had paid until five o’clock. Later, in the cramped bathroom, which was only lit by a gloomy bulb, and which smelled of chlorine and drains, the hysterical sound in his voice a moment before struck him as unpleasant, and when he saw his hands trembling under the tap he looked away.

Nonetheless, he was glad to have been so furious. Being furious meant experiencing oneself as someone who had the right to take offence at someone, to accuse someone else of something, and that, in turn, meant granting oneself a right to existence, a right that had seemed to him this morning, when he had gone running straight for the cliff, to have been deleted or erased. He showered. Here in this hole, where the shower produced only a few thin streams of water, because most of the holes in the shower-rose were furred up, that was fine, particularly because it gave out only cold water. He rubbed himself for a long time with a tatty, threadbare towel, and then reluctantly pulled his sweat-drenched shirt back on.

The window opposite was closed now. He opened the curtains and aired the smoky room. The narrow strip of sky that could be seen from this alley was dark grey and dominated by a light that recalled an early December twilight. He stood with his back to the window, smoking, and enjoyed insisting on his right to stay in the room until five o’clock. At five on the dot he went down and, without bothering to glance at the landlord, he threw the key on the counter so violently that it fell on the other side.

Perlmann was hungry – for the first time in ages, it seemed to him. The next bus back didn’t leave until half-past six. He didn’t have enough money for a taxi. He didn’t even have enough for the stall where he could eat a pizza standing up. After some searching he managed to buy half a loaf and a piece of cheese. He walked past the unlit, deserted souvenir shops to the harbor and sat down on a cold stone on the jetty. The grey of the water passed uninterrupted into the grey of the sky. That morning’s café was lit, but empty.

He collected all his forces into a single inner point and imagined himself stepping into the dining room over at the hotel in two hours’ time, sitting down and, over dinner, reacting to the first comments on Leskov’s text. For the sake of caution he immediately forced himself to think about the list of exculpating perspectives that he had worked upon in his gloomy hotel room, and to his great relief he found that panic didn’t come. Instead, he was filled with apprehension, the apprehension of someone who had a long and unpleasant journey ahead of him, which would require all his strength and all his alertness. He would get through it, he thought, if he bore this one thing in mind: They didn’t know. They would never find out.

The worst thing was the sessions on the veranda, where his text – Leskov’s text – would be discussed. But those meetings consisted of a limited number of hours and minutes. They would pass, however, and then there would only be another three days before it was all over and the others left.

Most of the bread and the cheese Perlmann threw into a rubbish bin as he walked down the main street, which was like a ghost town, to the bus. It was lucky that he had crossed out the names of Luria’s pupils, he thought as the bus set off. They could have made people suspicious. Luria himself was a different matter. Everyone knew him.

In the middle of the journey, where the coast road was particularly narrow, the other bus came towards them. There was a slight crunching sound. The driver cursed, and then the two buses stood side by side for several minutes, only inches apart. Neither of the drivers seemed to want to accept responsibility for what happened next.

Perlmann was sitting by a window towards the middle of the bus. The people on the other bus gaped across. From the dim interior they all seemed to be staring at him. With every passing moment their faces grew more scornful. He felt as if he were in a pillory: a fraudster being displayed to others as a warning. A little boy pointed at him, his index finger flattened against the window. He laughed, revealing a big gap in his teeth that looked diabolical to Perlmann. But I’m not a criminal. He didn’t know how he would survive the next second, and was afraid he would succumb to a fit of hysteria. He closed his eyes, but he could still feel the eyes of the others all focused on him. He saw the image of people who had been arrested, pulling their jackets over their heads when they had to run the gauntlet of photographers. He thought convulsively of his list, and imagined it as a white sheet of paper on which the three headings stood in printed letters, one above the other: self-defense; own thoughts; annihilation. He didn’t open his eyes again until the driver put his foot down.

On the rest of the journey he sat quite still, quite motionless, as if that was what he had to do to keep from panicking.

27

He was relieved that no one was standing behind the reception desk when he stepped into the hotel lobby. Sticking from his pigeonhole was Leskov’s text, the fatal stack of papers that he had at this very spot, twenty-one hours ago, handed to a distracted, impatient Giovanni. The others had collected their copies, but there was still one in Silvestri’s box. Perlmann quickly went round the counter and took the sheets from his own pigeonhole. He was tempted to take Silvestri’s copy as well, and had already begun to stretch out his arm out when he heard a noise in the next room and quickly withdrew.

On the stairs, walking ahead of a group of people in evening dress, von Levetzov was coming towards him. Before von Levetzov could say anything, Perlmann raised his rolled-up manuscript a little bit high, said hello and slipped past the people, taking two steps at a time, relieved that the group which was now once again occupying the whole width of the stairs, was between them. It wouldn’t have done any good if I had taken Silvestri’s copy away, he thought as he turned into his corridor. It would probably only have led to confusion. Perhaps even provoked suspicion. You can make copies of copies. And more from those. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands.

In his room he went first to his cupboard and shoved the text in the top laundry drawer among his shirts. Then he looked round. The contrast between the cramped room that afternoon and this great space was overwhelming. He felt as if he had spent days in that gloomy, musty den. He waited anxiously for the luxury of the room to seem once more like something forbidden, something he was no longer permitted. But that feeling didn’t come, and after a while he turned on the gleaming, decorated brass tap and ran a bath.

It was nearly eight o’clock, and he was amazed at how calmly he was approaching the moment in which he would confront his colleagues for the first time as an undiscovered fraudster. It was only when he was sitting in the marble tub that he understood that this peace was the indifference of complete mental exhaustion. After two days of wandering around, of hopelessness and despair, all that remained within him was a dull void.

That void, which bordered on insensitivity, persisted as he slowly went down the stairs, and he carried it before him like a protective shield as he stepped into the full dining room with the Saturday evening guests, and sat down at the table next to Evelyn Mistral, grateful that the other chair next to him was free because of Silvestri’s absence.

The others were already at work on their starters. The conversation in which Millar, Ruge and Laura Sand had plainly been involved broke off, and the subsequent silence, broken by the sounds of cutlery and laughter from the next table, sounded to Perlmann’s ears like amazed startled observation: he’s come to dinner again for the first time in four days, and even then he’s late. Without looking at anyone Perlmann started to eat his avocado. It tasted of nothing; the white, floury flesh was just like any random substance in his mouth. He prepared himself to look at them, and each time he dug his spoon into the pale-green flesh with a twist of his hand, it was as if that moment were being delayed for ever.

At last he raised his head and looked at the others, one after the other, trying not to make the sequence seem too mechanical. Their eyes, which must have been resting on him for quite some time, seemed to reach him only now, and the important thing was to resist their gaze, protected by the certainty that they couldn’t read his thoughts. They don’t know. They will never find out. He felt his pulse quickening when he looked at Millar, who raised his eyebrows in ironic resignation; he had to meet his gaze for a moment, lest he avert his eyes too early, like an admission of guilt.

But overall it was easier than he had expected, and after a jokey remark from Laura Sand about his long absence, conversation resumed. The everyday nature of the topics gave Perlmann the sense of being safe with his dangerous secret; but it also clearly showed him how alone he was with the drama of his experiences over the past few days, and the degree of isolation he would have to maintain if his deception was to remain undiscovered.

No one said a word about the text they had received from him. He didn’t need to invoke a single one of the reactions that he had assembled on the jetty at Portofino and later on the bus. He must be mad after all, but there was no denying that even though he was pleased about it, he was somehow hurt as well. They can’t have been painfully touched by Leskov’s text either. What hurt him most – and again he was aware of the absurdity of the sensation – was that even Evelyn Mistral, sitting next to him, didn’t make a single remark about the text, even though it had many points in common with her own subject. When their eyes met he could discern no disapproval, but her smile was fainter than usual, as if she were afraid of hurting him.

During the main course, which he shovelled mechanically into himself with his eye focused on his plate, he defended Leskov’s text in his mind. He tried himself out as a particularly strict reader and as a mocking critic. But even then, he thought, one could not ignore the substance and originality of this outline, and by the time dessert arrived he was so absorbed in the defense of the text that he almost regretted having to wait until Monday morning to defend it publicly. A faint feeling of dizziness and a heat in his face warned him not to be driven any further in that direction. But then his furious doggedness passed. He lit a cigarette and turned to Evelyn Mistral to talk to her about the text.

At that moment the waiter’s black arm appeared with the silver tray, on which there lay a telegram.

‘For you, Dottore,’ said the waiter when Perlmann turned his head towards him. ‘It just arrived.’

Kirsten, he thought suddenly, Kirsten has had an accident, and that thought suddenly filled him so completely that all the things that had preoccupied and tormented him over the last few days and hours seemed to have been erased. With trembling fingers he tore open the telegram and unfolded the sheet. He took in the text with a single glance: Arriving Monday Genoa 15.05 Alitalia 00432. Grateful to be picked up. Vassily Leskov.

For one or two seconds he didn’t understand. The message was too unexpected and too far away from the thought about Kirsten that had wiped everything out for a moment. Then, when the meaning of the words on the glued white strip seeped into his consciousness, the world around him became colorless and quiet, and time froze. All his strength fled, and he felt the weight of his body as never before. So that’s what it feels like when everything’s over, he thought, and after a while a further thought formed in the hollow, dull interior of his mind: I’ve been waiting for this for years.

He must have sat there motionless for a long time, because when Evelyn Mistral pushed an ashtray under his hand and he looked up, he saw a long piece of white ash fall from the cigarette. She was looking at him with an expression of uncertain concern, when she pointed at the telegram and asked, ‘Bad news?’

For a moment Perlmann was tempted to tell that open face, that bright, warm voice everything, regardless of the consequences. And if, when she pushed the ashtray at him, she had touched him with her hand, he thought later, that was actually what would have happened. So unbearable was the feeling of isolation that spread within him like an ice-cold poison.

But then, for the first time since the waiter had held out the silver tray in front of him, he saw the expressions on the faces of the others. They weren’t mistrustful expressions, faces that displayed suspicious feelings. Rather they were mild expressions, with a hint of curiosity. Not unfriendly faces, on the contrary, even Millar’s eyes seemed to hold a willingness to be sympathetic. And yet they were eyes that were all directed at him, as they had been before on that bus. Perlmann felt nausea welling up within him, he got to his feet, stuffed the telegram into his jacket pocket and ran out across the lobby to the toilet, where he closed himself in and threw up in quick, violent spasms.

When his retching ebbed and only trickles of burning gastric acid ran from his mouth and nose, he went out to the wash basin, rinsed his mouth and wiped his face with his handkerchief. The expensive wash basins of gleaming marble, the fashionable faux-antique taps of flashing brass and the huge mirrored wall were at that point unbearable. He avoided catching his own eye, and locked himself in a stall again to have a think.

Going back to the table was unimaginable. Admittedly, it would look very peculiar to the others, and border on impertinence if he didn’t come back after his abrupt departure. The most varied conjectures would be made about the apparently dramatic content of the telegram. But now that complete social ostracism lay ahead this was no longer of any importance. The only unpleasant thing was – and on the edge of his consciousness Perlmann was amazed that such a thing could preoccupy him at such a moment – that his cigarettes and the red lighter that Kirsten had given him in the train were still over there on the table.

His thoughts went no further than these banal reflections. There was an impenetrable grey wall there, and a curious feeling of inanition. Never in his whole life had it been more important to think and plan clearly. But he faced this task like someone who had never come into contact with such intellectual activities; like someone who hadn’t even mastered the ABC of any sort of planning that extended beyond the next moment. Body and emotion had reacted immediately; thought, on the other hand, was sluggish and wouldn’t move from the spot. He felt how hard it was. Sitting on the toilet seat, he stared at the white door in front of his nose and registered that there was no graffiti on it. He felt the burning aftertaste of vomit on his gums and crumpled up the wet handkerchief in his fist. When two men came in and went on talking in Italian at the urinal, he involuntarily made his breathing very shallow and didn’t move. He could only grasp a single thought, and it repeated itself at increasingly short intervals, like an accelerating echo: A day and a half. I have a day and a half left.

28

When the two men had gone, Perlmann left the stall, checked through a chink in the door that none of his colleagues was in the hall, and hurried back up to his room. Sitting on the edge of the bed he reread the crumpled telegram. Leskov had sent it. He could see on the white strip at the top right: yesterday afternoon just before four o’clock in St Petersburg. The other details, recorded in a code, were not quite clear to him. But plainly the message had been transmitted via Milan and Genoa to Santa Margherita, and had arrived shortly after half-past seven. If the connection had been quicker and the telegram had been brought to me before Signora Morelli started copying this morning, I wouldn’t have become a fraudster, and wouldn’t now face professional annihilation. He took another good look: it was three minutes to four when the message had been dispatched in St Petersburg. Perlmann’s ship had been supposed to set off from Genoa at a quarter past three, but in the end it had been almost half-past. Three minutes to four – the storm had already been raging. By then it was already clear that he would come. It was already clear. It was already a fact.

That Leskov was stuck in St Petersburg because his exit permit had been refused and his mother was sick had been axiomatic in all of Perlmann’s calculations. These two independent obstacles had given him the impression that they were insurmountable, so that he hadn’t even begun to consider the possibility of Leskov’s arrival. And now, through some unexpected concatenation of circumstances, Leskov had been able to free himself after all, and everything was collapsing. And yet the information in Leskov’s letters had sounded so definitive, so immutable.

Perlmann’s emptied stomach convulsed painfully. He went to the bathroom and slowly drank a glass of lukewarm water. As he did so his eye fell on the pack of sleeping pills. He knew precisely how many were left. Nonetheless, he took the box over to the red armchair and checked: seven. That’s not enough, not even with alcohol. If my doctor hadn’t recently been on holiday, I’d have had enough by now and I’d be able to do it. He went to the window, opened it and stopped, as he usually did, two steps behind the balustrade. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cool night air, and felt his stomach cramp slowly easing as a slight dizziness set in. He heard cars pulling up down below, voices moving across the terrace to the flight of steps, laughter, the Saturday evening outside guests driving off.

He took two paces, held on to the balustrade with both hands and looked down the wall of the house. The only row of windows without the obstacle of a balcony. He would crash against light-brown marble. He wouldn’t do it now, of course, not till after midnight or in the early hours of the morning when everyone was asleep. To be quite sure, he would have to jump head-first, and it would take three or four endless, terrible seconds before his head touched the stone. He closed the window and leaned his head against his hands, which were clamped around the handle of the window. For a moment everything went black.

When he straightened up again, there was a knock at the door. The thought of having to talk to someone now, even just a few words through the door, threw him into a panic. He had never before felt so exposed and defenseless. He had nothing to offer the presence of someone else at that moment, and even that presence, he felt, would crush him. And even so, he was pleased at the knocking, which freed him from the frozen solitude of the last few minutes. Halfway to the door he turned round and fetched the pack of sleeping pills, which he stuffed with cold fingers into his sponge bag in the bathroom before opening the door.

It was Evelyn Mistral, bringing him his cigarettes and the red lighter.

‘We were worried when you didn’t come back,’ she said with an uncertain, inquisitive look. ‘Bad news?’ Then her eyes narrowed a little, and she added more quietly: ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He stared at her straw-colored hair, her oval face, its complexion looking even darker than usual in the faint lighting of the corridor, and at the skewed T-shirt that she wore under her broad-shouldered raw silk jacket. The temptation to ask her in and, in the intimacy of his room, far from the eyes of the others, to confess everything, was as overwhelming and physically tangible as a wave crashing over him. He lowered his head and pressed a hand against his forehead, just above his closed eyes.

‘Everything is all right,’ he said in English when he looked at her again.

He saw immediately that her face assumed a hurt and embarrassed expression. It was the first time since their initial conversation by the pool that he had refused the special intimacy of Spanish, which they had always spoken when they were alone. And even though he hadn’t addressed her directly, it was as if he had now destroyed the closeness and the magic that her Spanish tú had held for him. It hurt like a farewell, and pain mingled with despair that he would never be able to explain to her that it had arisen out of a helpless attempt to protect himself.

‘And thank you,’ he said, pointing at the cigarettes as he reached for the door handle.

‘Yes, all right. Good night, then,’ she said quietly, and left without looking at him again. Perlmann threw himself on the bed, buried his head in the pillow, and after a while he subsided into a series of slow, dry sobs.

When Perlmann sat back up and went to the bathroom to wash his face, he felt the cold, desperate strength of a person who has just burned all his bridges. He lit a cigarette and all of a sudden he was capable of clearly and methodically thinking about his situation. He banished from his consciousness the image of his head smashing on the marble, shattering and being crushed to a pulp as he now, more coolly this time and with a synoptic view, considered putting an end to his life.

What would such a deed look like to the others? From Monday evening onwards – when the truth came to light, after Leskov had seen the text that had been handed out – as far as the others were concerned Perlmann would simply be a craven fraudster lacking the courage to even come clean to them. Dead, Perlmann would no longer have the chance to explain anything, referring to his distress and explaining to one or other of them – perhaps even to Leskov himself – his strong feeling that the text contained so many thoughts that were also his own that in a sense it was also his text. His deception would be subjected to the simplest and most superficial interpretation, and he would no longer be there to mitigate the judgment and make it more sophisticated. No one would take the trouble to pursue it, but the suspicion would spread that Philipp Perlmann, the prize winner with the invitation to Princeton, might have copied the work of others before, although perhaps not so brazenly as he had this final time.

Perlmann tried to adopt the view that this might all be a matter of complete indifference to him: as long as he was in the world and experiencing something, the time had not yet come; and when it did, he would not be there to endure it. He was unable to find an error in his reasoning on this point, but, confusingly, regardless of its simplicity and transparency, it struck him as fallacious, almost insidious, and so unconvincing that it immediately eluded him again as soon as he ceased to grasp it by concentrating on it particularly hard.

The idea that certain people might henceforth see him merely as an audacious trickster, a cheap fraudster, was easy to bear. Angelini’s opinion, for example, left Perlmann cold. And, in fact, he didn’t care too much about Ruge either, he reflected with a certain surprise. Even though Perlmann had by now become quite fond of Ruge, he had for four weeks been afraid of him, this respectable man with the chuckling laugh, in which Perlmann hadn’t been able to keep from hearing a dangerous self-righteousness, often against his better judgment. But now, when fear should have overwhelmed him, the big bald head with the watery grey eyes behind the broken glasses seemed merely alien and distant and had nothing to do with him. The fact that Ruge had defended Laura Sand’s beautiful images of suffering barely did anything to change that.

A more difficult case was Adrian von Levetzov, whom Perlmann had come to revere, even with all his affectation. Outwardly, he would join in with the chorus of outrage; that was the game. But Perlmann hoped – and thought it possible – that von Levetzov might secretly bring him a certain understanding and even a certain sympathy. What had von Levetzov said to Millar at the end of that session? I could imagine that he’s not concerned with it at all. Once again, Perlmann imagined von Levetzov’s tall figure, leaving the veranda with that strange posture of his. No, von Levetzov’s judgment was not a matter of indifference to him.

Giorgio Silvestri, Perlmann was quite sure, would not condemn him, and he trusted him to guess at his distress. Laura Sand: in her ironic, defensive way she liked him. And there had been that afternoon of many colors. If he was correct in his impression that she had very quickly seen through him, she would not be terribly surprised, and would receive the news as something that fitted effortlessly into her gloomy picture of human cohabitation. Far from judging him, she would be annoyed that he had allowed the silly academic world to acquire such power over him.

Evelyn Mistral would be terrible. He thought back to the times when she had spoken furiously about Spanish colleagues who didn’t take their work seriously, and as he did so he always saw her with her delicate, matte-silver glasses and her hair piled up. She would inevitably be torn between the undaunted, slightly naive earnestness that sustained her in her work, and the friendly, unphysically affectionate feelings that she brought to him. Now she would inevitably see those feelings as something that he had obtained by false pretences. They would disintegrate and assume the color of contempt and revulsion. In his mind’s eye he saw her again, turning sightlessly away after his snub, as she had done before. He couldn’t think of her face when she found out.

What about Leskov himself? What would you feel about a person who has stolen a text you are proud of? Fury? Contempt? Or would you be capable of some generosity if you learned the price the thief had paid in the end? Perlmann realized how little he knew Leskov the man, how vague a sense he had of his innermost character, as opposed to Leskov the writer. He felt vague relief shading into indifference. Leskov’s judgement was not what mattered in the end.

He didn’t dare to think of Millar’s reaction, half-averting his inner eye. It was unbearable to imagine the complacency that this self-righteous Yank, with his blue, unchangingly alert gaze, would feel. Somehow I’m not terribly surprised, he might say, tilting his head to the left, all the way to the shoulder, with an emphatically diffident smile. A throbbing wave of hatred washed over Perlmann and seemed to force its way into every cell of his body, and for a while he felt nauseous again. Submerged in that hatred he saw, as clearly as in a hallucination, Millar’s hairy hands in front of him, gliding over the keyboard of the grand piano.

But worst of all was the thought of Kirsten. It was a relief to feel how much more important his daughter was to him than anything else, and how even his hatred of Millar paled when she appeared before him. That gave him a feeling that he hadn’t lost his sense of proportion entirely. But it was, then, all the more shocking to imagine what would happen when she found out. Dad was a fraud, using someone else’s words because he could no longer come up with anything himself. She might somehow be able to understand that nothing further had occurred to him. She had sensed something on her visit, and she would explain it with reference to Agnes’s death. But that he hadn’t had the honesty or the courage to admit it openly, that she wouldn’t understand. Like her mother, she didn’t know the milieu, and above all she could have no idea that he wasn’t standing there empty-handed because of Agnes’s death, but because of another loss, one that was in a sense much greater, and which was so difficult to describe and, in fact, impossible to explain. But equally, she couldn’t know that he could not have experienced a confession of his present inability as something which was unpleasant, embarrassing, but still something for which one might seek understanding in view of a personal tragedy such as his own; that he would rather have had to experience it as a public admission of a more substantial bankruptcy which applied to him as a whole person, and that for that reason a declaration of failure had been unthinkable. He thought of her standing outside the door early in the morning in her long black coat. He saw her mocking, embarrassed smile and heard her say Hi, Dad. Once again he felt the warm, dry hand with all the rings on it, the hand that she had stretched out of the train window to him. Gli ho detto che ti voglio bene. Giusto?

He looked over to the window. No. No.

After an exhausted pause, in which he slumped back on his pillow, he sensed with quivering alertness that the thoughts he was about to have were terrifying, and would change him for ever. It seemed to him that they were coming from far away, from somewhere unknown, and that they were coming towards him like waves, getting bigger and bigger until they finally crashed over. He pressed his ice-cold palms against his forehead, as if by doing so he might drive the thoughts away. But they came inexorably nearer. They were stronger than he was, and in his powerlessness he felt that they were going to break his resistance.

He switched on the television. There were films on most of the channels, and right now he wanted nothing to do with made-up stories, conflicts and feelings. He immediately flicked on from talk shows as well; never before had the views of strangers been of so little consequence to him. At last he found a news program. That was what he needed now: objective, real events, excerpts from the world in which something important, something of real significance was happening, ideally dramatic events which, because their scope went far beyond individual lives, could help him escape the prison of his own thoughts, which referred entirely to him. He wanted each news item to be like a bridge by which he could reach the real world, in which the nightmare that held him prisoner in this room would be dispelled, revealed as merely a horrendous hallucination. He stared at the images until his eyes were streaming, he wanted to lose himself entirely in the events out there in the world; the further away the scene of a news item, the easier it seemed to him to remove himself in it all by himself. He envied the people in the news stories, they weren’t him, and with a feeling of shame that he didn’t want to examine any further, he noticed that he particularly envied the disaster victims. He envied them their tangible misfortune. He even wished he could swap places with the soldiers who lay wounded on stretchers.

He turned off the sound and let the images run on mutely. Was it imaginable that Leskov would remain silent – out of gratitude for the invitation, and perhaps also in memory of the Hermitage?

But even then: it would be unbearable to know he was in Leskov’s debt for all time. Leskov wouldn’t blackmail him, Perlmann was sure of that. But the knowledge that he would henceforth be for ever vulnerable to blackmail would be enough to paralyze him completely. Just imagine: him, Perlmann, sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, elucidating and defending the text, while Leskov sat somewhere at the back in his shabby clothes, drawing on his pipe, roguishly contented, possibly asking questions and raising objections for his own macabre entertainment, all with a deadly serious expression. Perlmann felt the cold sweat on his hands when he rested his burning face on them.

And then their intimate relationship: Leskov’s paternal tone might not, objectively speaking, change at all. But from now on he, Perlmann, would always hear a menacing undertone, a nuance that stripped him of every possibility of defending himself. He would have to remain silent. He would be like a lackey if so much as a single word on the subject were mentioned.

Perlmann started to hate this man Vassily Leskov. It was a quite different hatred from his hatred of Millar. His hatred of Millar had to do with what Millar had said and done. It had its origin in things that had happened between them. Millar was actively involved in its genesis and, as a result, Perlmann’s hatred was rooted in the man himself. He hated Leskov, on the other hand, even though this Russian, at that moment innocently packing his suitcase, hadn’t done the slightest thing. So, on closer inspection, the feeling of hatred which seemed to be targeted at Leskov in fact slipped off him and fell back on Perlmann, who was aware of the shabbiness of his feeling, but was unable to resist it.

He turned the sound back up on the television, annoyed that the report on an earthquake was coming to an end. Sport and fashion – those weren’t images capable of freeing him; rather they seemed to mock him. He could have slapped the bright and cheerful faces of the presenters and gave a start when he became aware of his absurd hysteria. He was relieved when the weather-map appeared; the detached perspective of the satellite image did him good. He had never studied a weather report with such keen attention. He eagerly studied the tip of the pointer as it went from place to place – all places that he contemplated with yearning simply because they were somewhere else.

When the forecast for the following day began, he found himself in a state of rapidly mounting panic. The broadcast would soon be over, and then he would be overpowered by thoughts that would turn him into a different, ugly person, cold and alien to himself. He clung to the forecast for Italy. When the camera pulled back and the presenters’ desk became smaller and smaller, he stayed there, eyes straining, to the very last picture and the last note of the signature tune.

The advertisements leapt out shrilly at him, and he immediately turned off the television. But the empty, dark screen, his bedside lamp reflected in it, left him defenseless against himself, and he turned it back on. He hopped desperately from channel to channel, trying frantically to numb himself with erotic images, and even the attempt to slip into the excitement of a car chase with wailing sirens and gunfire was doomed to failure. His flight from his own thoughts was over. They had caught up with him, and forced their way violently into his consciousness. He tapped the keys of the remote control ever more quickly and desperately, the individual channels pursued one another and flashed up only briefly, then at last he turned off the television.

He went into the bathroom and took the pack of sleeping pills from his sponge bag. Two of those tablets would be enough to erase all thoughts for a while. He already had the pills on his tongue and could taste their bitterness, promising oblivion, when he lowered his glass of water. It was mad, now of all times, when everything was at stake, to yield to anaesthesia, not knowing how long it would be until his head was clear enough again to think in practical terms. He set the damp pills down on the shelf, drank the glass dry and then walked very slowly, head lowered, back to the red armchair, like someone whose time has run out once and for all, and who must at last give himself up. He set the red lighter, which he was already holding, carefully back down on the table and lit the cigarette with a hotel match. He inhaled the smoke more deeply than usual and breathed it very slowly out. He waited until the very last moment before breathing in. Then he began.

It would have to look like an accident. An accident that had happened somewhere between the airport and the hotel. An accident that happened in Perlmann’s presence, and one to which he could testify. There was basically only a single possibility: it would have to be an accident in a car that he rented at the airport.

A rental car just for Leskov? Someone might ask if that was necessary, whether a taxi wouldn’t have done. After all, everyone else had arrived by normal means of transport. But there were possible explanations: Perlmann held this man, Leskov, in even greater esteem than they had previously supposed, clearly in a personal sense as well. Or: he wanted to make a special gesture to a Russian who was travelling from St Petersburg and who had never been in the West before. Or: the expenses budget that Angelini had set aside was so generous that it was easily affordable. And besides, after a fatal accident no one would utter such a question. By no means, he could be sure of this, was the rental car on its own a cause for suspicion.

But how would he do it, from the technical point of view? Stage an accident in such a way that Leskov would be killed while he himself was unharmed – that was practically impossible. Other people must on no account be drawn into sympathy with him, that much was clear. He didn’t need to think about it for a second. And driving into a tree at the roadside, a lamppost or a rock – the outcome could never be calculated with any certainty. Only one thing came into question, in fact, and Perlmann found it very strange how quickly, almost automatically he hit upon the idea: he would have to stop right above a steep cliff – in the mountains or on a rocky bit of coastline – get out and send the car rolling over the edge with Leskov inside. In his mind’s eye he saw the slowly rolling car, inside it Leskov’s massive form, his horrified face, his mouth widening to a scream; the car would tip over and plunge into the depths before going up in flames or sinking into the sea. Perlmann pressed his thumb and forefinger to his eyes to banish the details of the picture, and it was a while before he could go on thinking.

It would have to happen in a rest area, a spot where the ground fell away in a rocky plunge. How would he stop? He could change to neutral and put on the handbrake. After getting out he would have to bend and reach inside, press in the button on the handbrake, pull up the lever and let it go. To pull it up, he thought, he would have to hold his arm, or his forearm at least, more or less parallel with the lever, or else it wouldn’t release, and that would mean that he would have to lean very far in towards Leskov, his victim. Perhaps he could do it if he supported himself on the driver’s seat with his left hand; but perhaps he would also have to use his right knee as well. It depended how wide the car was. At any rate, and this was the worst thing about the idea, he would come very close to Leskov’s body again, and if he bent his arm clumsily or lost his balance as he supported himself, he might even touch him. He didn’t need to look at him, he could violently narrow his field of vision and stare hard at the handbrake. Once he had the lever in his hand he could close his eyes. But that moment of unseeing physical closeness, which would be so entirely different from physical closeness on the journey, would be terrible. And absolutely unbearable was the idea that Leskov might see through his intention, and that there would be a fight, in the course of which they might plunge together.

He had to do it without the handbrake, just with the gears. Leave him in the car when he stopped it, get out and then, in a flash, lean in to knock it out. It would take one or two seconds. And to do that he wouldn’t have to support himself, or only on the steering wheel, in which case he wouldn’t go near the passenger seat. Would Leskov pull up the handbrake when he felt the car rolling? He couldn’t drive: Perlmann now remembered him saying dryly that his income would never stretch to a car. But actually, every passenger knew that there was a handbrake and where it was. On the other hand, Perlmann’s attack would strike like lightning from a clear sky. And even if Leskov wasn’t looking out of the window at that moment, and saw Perlmann’s movement quite clearly, he wouldn’t be able to grasp the situation quickly enough; the truth would be too unexpected and too monstrous. He would be confused by the rapid movement and horrified by the rolling, and probably paralyzed by both. But Perlmann couldn’t rely on it. He would have to prevent Leskov from defending himself in any way by driving close to the cliff edge, so close that the front wheels protruded beyond it as they pulled up, and the car’s center of gravity lay irrevocably beyond the edge in the air. Leskov might say something anxious as they drove so close to the abyss. But Perlmann would no longer need to react to it. He would concentrate entirely on what he needed to do, and a few seconds later it would all be over.

Police. He would have to call the carabinieri. He hadn’t thought about that for a moment until now. In the world of Perlmann’s thoughts over the past hour only Leskov had existed, and his colleagues in the background, and the dawning awareness that the planned accident also affected the rest of the world to some extent, the public world of laws and courts, and newspapers, bathed everything in a harsh, icy light. Perlmann took off his shoes, sat down at the head of the bed with his knees drawn up, and pulled the blanket up to his chin. That position was something unfamiliar, something alien that made him realize how far removed he was from himself already.

Whether he hadn’t left the car in gear when he stopped, that would be the first question. Of course he had, he would reply. How else could he have got out? Besides, after thirty years of driving experience, you would do that automatically at such a spot. It would have to sound irritable, cranky. Leskov must accidentally have knocked it into neutral when, wide as he was, he bent over to reach for something. At the very same moment as he, Perlmann, turned round and, with his hand still on the zip of his trousers, noted that the car was rolling forwards, Leskov’s head had appeared behind the glass. Perlmann, of course, had started running, although with a feeling that it was all in vain, but the car had tipped over before he could reach the spot.

They wouldn’t be able to prove anything, nothing at all. They could reproach him for not having pulled on the handbrake, because such clumsiness on the part of the passenger was always a possibility. But that was a rebuke for lack of care. It couldn’t be turned into an accusation of murder by negligence. Criminal prosecution would only be a possibility if someone stood up and said: ‘Signor Perlmann, you are a liar. The truth is that you reached into the car again after you got out and took the car out of gear yourself, and that means murder.’ But that would remain an unfounded accusation that no examining magistrate and no state prosecutor could put into effect. Because it mustn’t be forgotten: There wasn’t a single visible motive. If questioned, his colleagues would be able to report nothing but the great regard – reverence, in fact – with which Perlmann had always spoken of Leskov.

Or would suspicion sprout within the group? Would the telegram and Perlmann’s rather striking reaction to it become connected with the accident? Would Evelyn Mistral remember his corpse-white face?

But even if one put the two things side by side in one’s mind: even discreetly one couldn’t make anything of them. Because once again it was true that there wasn’t the merest hint of a motive as far as the others were concerned. They couldn’t know anything about the poison of deception that pulsed within him.

Even so, at the scene of the crime he would have to avoid anything that could give rise to suspicion. Perlmann became aware of his stomach and, shivering, pulled the blanket still further up. First of all, the place in question would have to look like a spot where it would seem natural to stop in order, as he would say, to step outside for a moment. But it couldn’t just be any old lay-by where one didn’t obstruct the traffic. It would have to be a place that invited one to park facing the abyss; ideally a place with a beautiful view. ‘I parked like that quite automatically,’ he would say. ‘It was the best way of viewing the panorama.’

And then there was the question of terrain. If it were tarmac, brake marks wouldn’t be an issue. With soil, gravel or sand, on the other hand, he would have to be careful. Just by the edge of the cliff, where he would really stop, there could be no skid marks, because that was where the car, according to his story, had started rolling without a driver. A little way back from there, on the other hand, at the place where he had supposedly been standing, there would have to be the usual brake marks. That made the sequence of movements clear: he would have to leave the road and drive in a circle until the hood was at right angles to the edge of the cliff. Then, at a natural distance from the edge, he would brake until the car was at a standstill and turn off the engine, before rolling very gently to the abyss, quickly tapping the brake pedal in such a way that no skid marks were produced.

Under the blanket, Perlmann involuntarily made the corresponding movements: putting down the clutch with his left foot, pumping quickly and very, very gently with his right – it could really only be the hint of a push – and at last, along with the last touch on the brake, carefully letting off the clutch, so that it too didn’t produce a skid mark. Perlmann, who had leaned forward as he concentrated on these delicate movements, sank back again. He was as exhausted as if he had just made a gigantic physical exertion, and for a while there was nothing inside him but an oppressive, baleful void.

He gave a start. Witnesses. Of course there must be no witnesses. Before he made the crucial, fatal movement and knocked the car out of gear, he would have to straighten up and make sure by looking along the road in both directions that no one was coming. If a car was in view, he would have to wait. They would be agonizingly slow, those last seconds of Vassily Leskov’s life. Perlmann would have to assume an innocuous pose. He could put a cigarette in his mouth and then throw it away as soon as the car was out of view. He didn’t dare to think that Leskov might get out while this was happening, or that another car might stop next to them. What happened then would be almost unbearable: sequences of movements and an exchange of words, whole scenes, in fact, with a ghostly lack of presence, because in his eyes the only reason for them to take place was so that they would, in a sense, clear themselves out of the way and thus free up a segment of time in which the murder could actually take place.

The road would have to be remote; a quiet stretch that hardly anyone would be driving along on a November day. There would be a certain degree of surprise that he had not driven Leskov – who had already travelled from St Petersburg – to the hotel by the quickest route to the hotel, along the highway. But Perlmann could say that Leskov was more excited than tired from his journey, and had suggested a detour. No one could accuse Perlmann of lying and, without any other causes for suspicion, nor would anyone want to.

He needed a map. They would have one at reception. Perlmann looked at his watch: a quarter to eleven. Giovanni would be on duty again, and that was fine by him: the more unsympathetic and indifferent the person he asked (indirectly) to help him with his murder plan, the better. He threw back the blanket, slipped into his shoes and was almost at the door when he stopped, then hesitantly came back and sat down on the arm of the red armchair. So far he had only developed his plan in his mind, silently, under the blanket. Now he was about to take the first step to implementing it. A murderer preparing for his deed. The icy feeling of self-alienation that surrounded this thought was numbing, and for a while Perlmann lingered motionlessly in nameless despair.

Then, when he put a cigarette between his lips, he avoided looking at the red lighter and picked up the hotel matchbook again. He needed to recall to mind the reasons that compelled him to this terrible plan, and assure himself of their constraining character. But every attempt at concentration ran immediately aground, and all that remained was the dull, rather abstract conviction that there was no going back – a conviction that had the aftertaste of being forced, but which was nonetheless firm for that. At last he stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and walked to the door with movements that felt lumbering and mechanical.

As he looked down into the hall from the last landing, for one oppressive moment he had the idea that he would soon stand facing Leskov. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and held the air in his lungs as if its painful pressure might crush the ghostly vision from within. Then he walked to the reception desk, which was unmanned.

Only now did he hear the music coming from the drawing room. Saturday evening: Millar was playing. As always it was Bach, the Overture in the French Style, which Hanna had once played for the sixtieth or seventieth birthday of an adored aunt. Perlmann felt as if he were a quite unreal life-form, a creature from an alien star that had strayed to this world, in which everything was happening as it usually did, and in which no one took note of the internal events that were driving him inexorably towards the abyss. He hiccuped, and the helpless yelp that seemed so loud in the empty hall reinforced the sensation that he was now in the charge of forces over which he no longer had any control.

He didn’t dare strike the silver bell, and he was just about to put an end to this waiting, which felt like an anticipated humiliation, and go back to his room, when Signora Morelli came out of the corridor that led across to the drawing room. After glancing at Perlmann’s face she quickened her steps, and almost ran the rest of the way until she was behind the counter.

‘The music,’ she said apologetically. ‘Signor Millar plays wonderfully.’ In her smile there lay unspoken surprise that he, too, was not over with the others, and at the same time the awareness that she wasn’t keen to know why.

‘I need a map of this area,’ Perlmann said, and because he didn’t respond to her remark in any way, but convulsively concentrated on completing his sentence without yelping, it sounded overbearing, and he was startled by his tone. ‘A large-scale map,’ he added. He wanted the second part to sound friendlier and appropriate to a request, but the last word was distorted by a ridiculous yelp.

Signora Morelli went into the back room, looked in various drawers and at last returned with a road map of Liguria.

‘Ecco!’ she said and added, after a pause, during which Perlmann was shaken by another eruption, ‘They say it’s going to be sunny tomorrow.’

Perlmann took the map, thanked her silently and went to the elevator. The sliding door closed on one of Millar’s massive chords.

The coast road, he thought as he sat on the bed with the map spread out in front of him, was out of the question. Certainly, you could tell from the twists and turns that there were sections of steep coast, or at least with sheer drops. But roads like that were generally cut tight into the rock and had no rest areas quite deep enough. They were also generally secured with wide guard rails. And last of all, this was the road that connected the big coastal towns like Recco and Rapallo: on a Monday afternoon between four and five, the rush hour, they would be far too busy.

He would have to take the mountain road and leave Genoa in the direction of Molassana. After that there were several possibilities. Perhaps the loop that started at Bargagli and ended near Lumarzo would be a suitable spot. It was plainly bendy, and marked entirely in green, which meant it was a mountain road with a special view. There were probably viewpoints along it like the one he needed. Unless the guard rails thwarted his plans. But then he could try one of the small roads marked in red, on which one left the main road and drove down along a series of twists and turns towards the coast, via Uscio, for example. And if he found nothing there either, he could try the stretch that branched off just after Molassana and led up via Davagna to the Passo di Scoffera.

When the image of a narrow mountain pass rose up in him, leading past black slate walls gleaming with moisture into dark, low clouds, Perlmann gave a start. While studying the map he had for a while been nothing but head, a cold, calculating intelligence unconnected to the other parts of himself. Now the image of the gloomy mountain pass filled him with horror and despair. His empty stomach convulsed and he sensed the sharp, sour smell that vomit had left in his nose.

He stepped to the closed window and looked out without seeing anything. Could he live with this deed – with the image of the car tipping over the edge, with the memory of Leskov’s scream forcing its way through the open car door, with the noise of the impact and the explosion that would come after it?

He wouldn’t be able to stand the sober, brightly lit awareness of having committed a crime, he was sure of that. What he had to do was this: persuade himself, day by day, that it was an accident; overlay the clear, precise memory of the real crime with fantasy images of an accident, constantly adding new ones, and doing that so stubbornly and for so long that the original, traumatic images would remain for ever in the background and the fantasy images would take root as if they were the true memories. It was a matter of laying one thin layer of self-persuasion on the other until a new, solid conviction came about, whose blind firmness he no longer needed to worry about on a daily basis. Could that be done? Was such a methodical construction of a self-deception, so planned a construction of a life-lie possible? Once more, he thought, a very particular kind of lack of presence would be produced, one with which he was not yet familiar: the lack of presence of the lie – a state in which the presence was absent because a fundamental truth, a defining reality of one’s own life was denied.

The phone rang. Even though Perlmann had set it to the quietest volume, the ring seemed shrill and penetrating; the whole world seemed to be jumping at him through that sound. Kirsten. He walked over to the bedside table, slowly extended his hand and let it rest on the receiver. The desire to listen to her clear voice and carefree tone was overwhelming, like a burning pain. But he drew his hand back, sat down on the edge of the bed and rested his head on his fists. Beside him, he could see through his closed lids, lay the open map with the route of the crime. The ringing wouldn’t stop. Perlmann put his hands over his ears, but in vain, because now he could hear the sound in his imagination.

In the silence that finally fell, he picked up the red lighter. Killing must be based on a personal relationship; otherwise it’s perverse. All of a sudden his trains of thought over the past few hours seemed unreal, practically grotesque. Murdering Leskov was completely out of the question. Because even if he managed to weave himself into an effective self-deception: at his first meeting with Kirsten, at their first exchange of glances, their first touch, the whole structure of lies within him would collapse like a house of cards. Then he would stand before her in the glowing white consciousness of being a murderer.

Involuntarily, he rose to his feet to stifle that unbearable idea with a movement. He took a cigarette and opened the window. He felt boundless relief at the fact that the thoughts of murder fell away from him like a bad dream, and after a while he started to notice the lights outside. He greedily absorbed them with his eyes, each individual one of them. When he had absorbed the night-time scenery and calmed down, he lit the cigarette with Kirsten’s lighter, which gave a quiet click.

During the first few drags he managed to concentrate entirely on the idea that he wasn’t going to be a murderer now, and he experienced a kind of presence, the presence of a great relief. But that whole state, he felt very clearly, had something provisional about it, something of a mere intake of breath, to some extent it took place in a parenthesis that consisted in the oppressive question of what in the world he was to do now that the possibility of murder had been ruled out. When he felt that he couldn’t hold off that question for much longer, he went into the bathroom and swallowed the two still slightly damp sleeping pills. The map that he folded up and laid on the round table was already a prop from a long-forgotten drama of the imagination.

When he turned out the light, the tablets were starting to take effect. His left foot pressed on the clutch, his right made cautious braking movements. Over those convulsive motions, against which he fought in vain, he went to sleep.

The handbrake was as firm as if it were cemented in. He had to creep further into the car, supporting himself with one knee on the driver’s seat; but the lever wouldn’t move a millimeter, not even when he tried to pull it up with both hands. The button that was supposed to release it wouldn’t move either, it felt as if it were made of stone. Then suddenly there was no button, and the pressure of his thumb disappeared into the void. It all took seconds, and his pulse was racing. Now sweat-drenched, rough hands grabbed him by the arm. There was a struggle. Leskov was as strong as a bear, but otherwise he was a faceless opponent. Suddenly, the car started rolling – actually it was more of a slide, the horror of which lay in its silence. The battle was done, and they tipped over into blind white, as if in slow motion.

Then again he felt his right hand knocking out the gear. He made that quick, violent movement over and over again. It was as if he were nothing but that arm and that hand. Again the car began to roll, then Leskov pulled up the handbrake; the crunching noise had an endless echo that seemed to fill the whole parking lot and the whole gorge. This time he had a face, a face with wide-open, fearful eyes that turned into a triumphant face with a look of contempt. Leskov’s face jerked close to him and became a close-up; in the end it was a face with a wide, curling moustache that quickly turned into a grimace of scorn.

29

When Perlmann awoke, drenched in sweat and still quite dazed, it was half-past eight, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky as it had done on the previous two days, so that behind his numbness he managed to think for a tiny moment that it was only Friday morning and everything was still all right. Once it had slipped away, the illusion could not be repeated, and he walked slowly and unsteadily to the bathroom. Yesterday, showering had seemed to him like something that was no longer the fraudster’s due. This morning, after a night in which quite other things had passed through his mind, that feeling seemed obsolete, almost laughable. Under all that water the numbness fled, and the returning dream images gradually lost their power.

Nothing has happened yet, he thought again and again. I still have thirty hours left. His hunger repelled him. He really didn’t want to eat anything ever again. But that vexatious feeling had to be removed, so he ordered breakfast, even though the idea of meeting a waiter now was disagreeable. As he mechanically stuffed croissants down himself and drank cup after cup of coffee, it slowly dawned on him that there was one additional possibility he hadn’t thought of in the course of the previous night. He could stage a car accident in which he killed himself and dragged Leskov to his death as well.

Initially, he didn’t dare imagine how that might happen in any detail; at first the important thing was to resist the thought in its abstract form. He felt his breath racing, and saw his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette. And yet he was amazed how little resistance that new thought encountered within him. It was, after all, a murder. But that struck him as oddly irrelevant. The main thing was that everything then would be darkness and total silence. He smoked in long, deep drags as he plunged into that idea. The longer he lingered with it, the more drawn into it he became. All the weariness that had grown within him over the past few days seemed quite naturally to have been invested in that imagined silence. And not only that: suddenly he felt as if all he had done during those months since Agnes’s death was wait for that silence to arrive. Certainly, there was a murder bound up with it. But the thought of Leskov remained pallid, the after-effect of the pills paralyzed his imagination, and behind Perlmann’s heavy lids one single thought formed over and over again: I will not have to live with this murder for so much as a second. So not for a second of my life will I be a murderer. He felt that this was a piece of sophistry, an outrageous false conclusion, but he didn’t have the will to disentangle it, and clung to the truth that those two sentences bore on their surface.

He wrote a circular in which he informed his colleagues that Vassily had plainly found a way to come here, at least for a few days, and that he would be arriving tomorrow afternoon. So the first session on his, Perlmann’s, text would not, as planned, take place on Monday afternoon after the reception at the town hall, but not until Tuesday morning, as he intended to collect Leskov from the airport on Monday. He wrote quickly and without hesitation, and afterwards, when he put his money and credit cards in his pocket, and the road map in his jacket and went downstairs, he was both pleased and horrified by the businesslike manner, the cold-bloodedness, even, that had taken hold of him.

He asked Signora Morelli to copy the circular and put it in the pigeonholes. Then he told her of Leskov’s imminent arrival and reserved a room for him, spelling out his name. Finally, he asked her to call for a taxi.

On that sunny, warm morning they were all sitting on the terrace. Perlmann put on his sunglasses, greeted them with a curt wave and without slowing his pace, and walked down the steps. He had just – he thought as he waited by the road – felt strangely unassailable when, a bit like a ghost, he had walked like the others. Admittedly, he had avoided looking at Evelyn Mistral. But that, it seemed to him then, had actually been unnecessary; because from now on she was far away from him, in another time. That, in fact, was what made him so calm and unassailable: by deciding to drive to his death he had stepped out of the usual time that one shared with others, and in which one was entwined with them, and was now moving in a private time of his own, in which the clocks moved identically, but which otherwise ran unconnectedly alongside the other time. Only now that I have left the time of the others have I succeeded in delineating myself from them. That is the price.

The new time, he thought in the taxi, was more abstract than the other one, and more static. It didn’t flow, but consisted in an arid succession of moments which one had to live through, or rather, deal with. A lack of present, he was puzzled to note as he looked out through the open car window at the smooth, gleaming water, was suddenly no longer a problem. In the new time, which would last until some point tomorrow afternoon, before disappearing from the world along with his consciousness, present did not exist even as a possibility, so that one couldn’t miss it either. All that existed now was this: coolly calculating and sticking to his schedule in the planning and execution of his intention. Perlmann wound up the window, asked the driver to turn off the radio and leaned back in the tatty seat whose broken springs stuck into his back. He didn’t open his eyes until the taxi stopped under the yellowed plane trees in front of the station.

On Monday evening, when he had waited with Kirsten on the platform, he had been thankful of that meaningless, shrill ringing noise. It had freed them both for a while from the embarrassment of being together in silence. In his mind’s eye Perlmann saw Kirsten’s liberated laughter as she held her hands over her eyes. Today the penetrating, endless sound rendered him defenseless, and he went back outside to the plane trees.

He would leave a piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number on the desk, so that they didn’t need to rummage for it in his belongings. That was quite natural. After all, Kirsten hadn’t been in Konstanz for as much as three months. Which of his colleagues would call her? In all likelihood von Levetzov would take on the task. Such bad tidings were, if possible, best passed on in the mother tongue, and Ruge would take a backseat. But how would his colleagues find out in the first place?

The carabinieri would have to find something in Perlmann’s wallet to show that he had been staying at the Miramare. Unless the car went up in flames. It was the first time that Perlmann thought of the possibility of burning to death at the wheel, and he started perspiring with terror at the idea that the flames might engulf him when he wasn’t even dead, perhaps only unconscious. He was relieved that the sound of the arriving train tore him away from that idea.

The rhythmical knocking of the wheels did him good; it gave him the feeling that everything was still in suspension. He was free and could at any time revoke his desperate decision. He would have loved to be carried along by that knocking for ever, and was annoyed that he had taken a slow train that stopped at every station. When the knocking started again after a halt, and grew faster again, he managed to escape for a few minutes into the thought that things weren’t that bad, it was just a text, after all, a few written pages – that couldn’t possibly be a reason to put a violent end to everything. But then, when the train stopped again, he was seized once more with horror at the idea of having to live through the discovery of his plagiarism and the ostracism that it would entail, minute by minute, hour by hour, until the end of his life. When an old woman in a black crocheted headscarf sat down opposite him in Nervi, made a friendly remark and gave him a maternal smile, he got up without a word and went to another compartment where the seats were free.

The worst of it was that because it was supposed to look like an accident he couldn’t sort anything out before his death. There were people he would have liked to say something to. Kirsten above all, even though the right sentences wouldn’t come to mind. He would have liked to see Hanna again, too. He owed her an explanation for that sudden ghostly phone call in which he hadn’t asked her a single thing about her own life. He tried to imagine what she must look like now. He saw that flat face in front of him, framed in her blonde hair with the single dark strand, but her face remained frozen in the past, and refused to develop through the three decades that had passed in the meantime.

He would have liked to walk through his bright Frankfurt apartment again, sit down at his desk for one last time and look, for one last time, at Agnes’s photographs. And then his diaries. He wished he still had the chance to destroy them. This way, Kirsten would find them now. He tried in vain to remember what was actually in them. He fervently hoped he was mistaken, but when he stepped on to the platform in Genoa, he had the oppressive feeling that he was leaving behind a big pile of kitsch.

He went out into the station portico, had to put off a number of taxi drivers and finally found a quiet corner. He would take the smallest car they had, one with a short hood and no crumple zones. So that it would happen quickly and he could be sure that it would work. Suddenly, he felt he was having an attack of diarrhea and ran to the toilet. It was a false alarm. His heart was pounding in his throat when he went back to the car rental company’s counter. He stopped in a corner and forced himself to breathe calmly. Renting the car, in itself, didn’t force him into anything. He could always bring it back as if nothing had happened. He had to utter that thought out loud to himself a few times, slowly and with great concentration, before he managed to contain his excitement, and he had a sense that he could be sure of his voice.

The counters of all three companies were closed. He hadn’t expected that, and he hadn’t noticed before, even though they were all right in front of his nose as he stepped out. For a few minutes he just stood there, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed into the void. Then he slowly walked over to the timetable and checked when the next train left for Santa Margherita. On the way to the platform he paused abruptly, bit his lip and then walked back to the taxis.

‘Here you are, after all,’ grinned the driver he had turned away before.

Perlmann slammed the car door shut. ‘To the airport,’ he said in a tone that made the driver turn round and look at him in amazement before he drove off.

‘I’m sorry, Signore,’ said the Avis lady, with bright make-up and a red dress, ‘but we just have one car free, a big Lancia. All the others are out until the middle of the week. There’s a big industrial fair in the city.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Perlmann said irritably, fighting down his mounting hysteria, ‘then why is your counter at the station closed, and why are the other companies here closed as well?’

‘That, Signore, I can’t tell you,’ the hostess snapped back and turned her attention to her computer.

Perlmann looked at his watch: half-past eleven. In five hours it would be dusk, and it could take a long time before he had found a suitable location.

‘All right, I’ll take it,’ he said.

The hostess took her time before starting to fill in the form. How long did he want to rent the car for?

The question took Perlmann aback, as if he had been asked something obscene. That he was being asked for information that extended beyond his death and was hence without any significance for him once again made him keenly aware how deep the gulf had become between his private time, which was about to come to an end, and public time, the time of contracts and money, that would go on for ever.

‘For two days,’ he said hoarsely.

Would he be bringing it back tomorrow evening?

It was far too long before he finally, without any reason and with the feeling of saying something completely random, opted for a ‘yes’, and the hostess was visibly surprised at how little this customer, who had seemed so arrogant only a few moments before, seemed to know about his own plans.

What insurance did he want to take out? Did he want to include fully comprehensive cover?

‘The usual,’ Perlmann said tonelessly.

‘I’m sorry?’ the hostess asked, not trying to conceal her impatience.

‘The usual,’ Perlmann repeated with forced firmness, and had the feeling that she must be able to see how his face was burning. In the worst case, then, the police would be able to get to the hotel via his licence and Avis, he thought, when the hostess finally entered his local address.

As he walked towards the exit he stopped in front of the monitor showing the arriving flights. The last one currently on the list was coming from Paris and was supposed to be landing at five to three. It didn’t matter in the slightest, he said to himself, where Leskov’s flight came from. There was, of course, no direct flight to here, but it really couldn’t have mattered less where Leskov changed. And the plane that he took tomorrow wouldn’t necessarily be a daily flight. Nonetheless, Perlmann stopped, smoked, and stared fixedly at the flickering screen. And when he had stamped out his second cigarette and looked up again, the flight was there: AZ 00423, 15.05 from Frankfurt.

For a moment Perlmann saw Leskov flailing and snorting his way through Frankfurt Airport in the threadbare loden coat that he had worn before. It was childish and, in his situation, grotesque, Perlmann thought, but the possibility of Leskov changing at his, Perlmann’s, airport enraged him, and he felt as if Leskov were violating his personal sphere. Irritated, he dismissed the image and went outside to the parking lot.

30

As he got into the long, dark-blue limousine, his eye immediately fell on the handbrake. In this car it was unusually far over towards the passenger seat. So, he would inevitably have to touch Leskov’s broad body when he freed the lever over the abyss. It gave him a feeling of helplessness that this idea held him prisoner for a moment, even though it was obsolete and no longer had any practical significance. In the end he managed to shake it off, and he unfolded the map.

For a frontal collision with a truck in which no one else would come to any harm, the coast road was out of the question. Heavy trucks would be unlikely to drive there, and it was also true that at the time in question there would be far too much traffic. For this plan the only possible road was the one via Molassana to Chiávari. He would have to assume that trucks drove there on Monday afternoons. It was disagreeable to him that his terrible scheme depended on other people and their temporal plans. Immediately, before it disappeared in darkness and silence, his own time would have to cross the time of others. When he set the map down on the seat beside him and lit a cigarette, Perlmann was overcome with nausea at the unbridled self-involvement expressed in such thoughts.

The handbrake was pulled up tight, and was only released the third time he pushed the button. As if in a dream, he thought, as he steered the car uncertainly out of the car park. He drove like a beginner, and very soon he had hit the curb and cut off someone’s right of way.

Judging by the map, the turn-off to Molassana was to the east of the center, so he drove first along the industrial plants and then the harbor, down a deserted road with dilapidated houses, dead construction sites and mountains of rubble. In spite of the radiant weather it was an oppressive backdrop, and he drove so quickly over the uneven cobbles and the many potholes that several times the steering wheel was knocked out of his hand. He saw no signs for the center, and when it was all becoming impossible he discovered that he was already on the way to Genova Nervi. He started sweating and took off his jacket. It wasn’t that bad, after all. He had just lost a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at most. He turned and took the next road that led into a residential district. ‘Straight ahead,’ said the sulky gas station attendant when Perlmann asked the way.

Immediately, it seemed to him, he found himself in one of the squares that he had passed – it was an eternity ago – on the way to the record shop. He hesitantly drove on, turned at random into the next street, had to do a loop because of the one-way system and ended up in the same square. The city center was curiously quiet this Sunday, there was no sign of the industrial fair, and he had to chase after the few passers-by to ask them the way.

‘Keep going along the river,’ an old man told him at last, dressed in his Sunday best and creeping past the dark shop windows with his walking stick. Only now did Perlmann see the river on the map. Annoyed with himself, he drove in the direction indicated. At a bus terminal he asked a driver.

‘Molassana is a well-known part of Genoa, a suburb; nobody needs a road sign,’ the driver replied to Perlmann’s reproachful remark, looking at him as if he had lost his marbles.

Behind the wheel, Perlmann cursed the misleading representation on the map, and only calmed down when he crossed the river, where there was in fact a road sign. He had just put his foot down on the accelerator when he braked and turned off to the right. I can’t get lost tomorrow. That would be hell. For a while he tried to reconstruct the direct route here in his head, cutting out the various diversions. But it didn’t work. The toing and froing had been too confusing. Five past one. He’ll be landing in exactly twenty-six hours. He took a few hasty drags, threw the cigarette out the window and drove back to the port road.

Driving back to Molassana, he stopped repeatedly and memorized the crucial spots. First of all there were the two ironmongers’ shops, which were precisely identical: the same size, both on a corner, both with rusty shutters. If you turned by the first, the one-way system forced you back to the port, while a similarly inconspicuous turning near the second led towards the center. On no account turn at the first. Next he had to be careful that at the square where the building with the portico stood he didn’t – as he had before – follow the tram tracks to the right, but take the bend to the left. At the construction site with the diversion he got lost twice: you had to turn off immediately past the bakery to get back to the main road. And finally, the place with all the bus stops was critical: you couldn’t follow the three-lane road into the underpass; you had to keep to the left and keep going along the cobbles at a sharp angle to the main arterial road. It was still a rather roundabout route, he thought. Probably there was a simpler one, but he couldn’t lose any more time.

At two o’clock he was back at the river, where he had turned. On the almost empty street he drove far too quickly. He was afraid of reaching a spot where it could be done, but even worse was the uncertainty, and it became more unbearable with every kilometer that didn’t match his requirements. He might have to wait longer for a truck. At the spot in question there had to be a rest area where he could park beside the road. He would have to be able to see the truck coming from a long way off, so that there was enough time to drive off, speed up and pull the car over to the left at the last moment. And it would have to be impossible for the driver to swerve. Ideally, there would be a cliff on his side of the road.

On the steep piece of road before the tunnel which cut off the loop into the mountains and formed the apex of the stretch, there was just such a point. Perlmann stopped, his heart thumping. No, this wouldn’t do, he thought, as he dried his moist hands with the towel. Having the long, stable hood between himself and the truck, everything depended on high speed, and even with this car he couldn’t achieve that on the mountain. Besides, the truck’s brakes could be damaged by the impact, and then, with the wreck of the Lancia in front of it, it would roll down with mounting speed and unforeseeable consequences.

After the tunnel there were a few spots which might have been possible in terms of the course of the road. But in those there were houses with people who leaned, gawking, in the windows. There would also be people like that tomorrow, and it would be impossible to do it in front of them. There were too many houses generally; one village followed on from the other. And everywhere there were people in the windows, hundreds of them, it seemed to Perlmann. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. On the map there was no sign of these hamlets.

He had already covered far more than half of the stretch when a piece of road that was the right length appeared: straight and at a slight slope, with a supporting wall on the other side. At the exact spot where he expected the collision to occur there was a road sign, black on white: pian dei ratti. At the end, where the truck would appear around the bend, there was a house, but the shutters were closed and it looked uninhabited. At the bend around which he came himself, there was a workshop for the cutting and grinding of slate slabs. People would be working there tomorrow. Perlmann drove to the spot where the trees meant that he couldn’t be seen from the workshop. The rest of the stretch was still long enough. Only stopping was a problem. On the right there was a sheer drop to the river, and in spite of the damaged crash barrier he could only get about half of the big car on to the narrow strip of grass. Nonetheless, he thought, it could be done here. But he would have to fix in his mind the features leading up to that spot so that he didn’t miss it tomorrow.

He turned and drove to the next road sign: so the name of the village was piana. After the road sign came a biggish, abandoned-looking factory building, then two well-tended houses and behind them, at the start of the bend, three pines with a big poster for Renault customer services. When he passed the poster, he was already in the bend with the workshop. He could see the sign that said pian dei ratti, and then it was only another fifty meters.

He wanted to drive down that stretch of road very slowly to etch it in his memory as sharply and in as detailed a way as possible. But a car with a bridal couple and a tail of rattling tins was hooting behind him like crazy, so that afterwards he had the impression that he couldn’t rely on his memory. He drove back, turned in the factory yard and repeated the whole thing. But it felt as if his memory was simply refusing to absorb the images. It was as if he was jinxed: every time he read the words pian dei ratti again, it was as if what he had just seen had been erased.

He needed more advance warning time and more pointers. Sweating, he drove two villages back, staring at the signs until his eyes hurt: tomorrow he would pass first monleone and then pianezza, which turned directly into piana. Then the pines and the poster, and finally pian dei ratti.

He stopped at the spot in question, exhausted, and lit a cigarette. When he looked forwards to gauge the distance again, he saw that a shutter had been pulled up at the house on the bend. Again he began to sweat. Had he ignored that before? Or had someone come home in the meantime? He put his glasses on his head, but still couldn’t make out whether someone was standing at the window. Perhaps the people were just away today, and tomorrow, when he came round the bend with Leskov, they would be leaning in the window. They would see the Lancia stopping at this unnatural spot, for who knows how long, and dashing off exactly as a truck came from down below. And they would see the car suddenly being pulled off the road. In his mind, Perlmann took up position there at the window: to any observer it would look intentional. There was no doubt about it.

It was hard to keep in check his annoyance with the futility of the last half hour. But he made an effort and went on driving with calm control. Twenty minutes later the elegant villas of Chiávari came into view, and he hadn’t seen a single suitable spot: either the road had too many twists and turns or you couldn’t stop; or there were houses, time and again there were houses. Perlmann drove to the first parking lot on the edge of Chiávari and got out. Half-past three. His stomach was cramped with hunger and tension. He took the few steps to the nearest bar, ate a sandwich and asked the surprised waitress for a large glass of lukewarm water.

The tunnel. I’ve got to do it in the tunnel. The thought came to him after he had stood there for a while with his head completely empty, and had plainly even ignored the request for a light that had been uttered right next to him. He hastily laid some money on the counter, ran to the car and drove off. I didn’t notice, but the tunnel must have passing places where you can stop; all tunnels have them, it’s the law, he thought again and again as he drove back at breakneck speed. pian dei ratti. He slowed down, turned round and looked up at the house: everything unchanged, a single shutter pulled up. At the last ascent, where the road widened, he drove at over seventy and only stopped at the entrance to the tunnel. Yes, there were several passing places on both sides, he saw that straight away.

Back outside, he drove on another stretch, and only turned then. Here, too, he wanted to memorize the things that announced the spot. But it was actually quite easy: first of all there was a sign showing that the road climbed towards Piacenza on the left, and on the right on to Chiávari and then, just before the tunnel, came the crossing with the individual arrows. Perlmann drove on to the patch of gravel to the right before the tunnel entrance and turned off the engine.

At the touch of a button the tinted window slid down with a quiet hum. He rested his elbow on the frame and lit a cigarette. When he had quite recovered after a brief pause for exhaustion, he stubbed out the cigarette and took his arm off the window frame. Here, outside the tunnel of death, his comfortable, sloppy attitude struck him as obscene. It was a feeling like the one yesterday morning on the handrail behind the rocky spur. Except now everything’s worse, much worse. Now all of a sudden he no longer knew what to do with his hands. Finally, he pressed them between his knees and, crouching there, stared for a moment beyond the steering wheel, into the tunnel.

It was long enough, perhaps two kilometers. Of course, he couldn’t begin his approach out there. If you stood on this patch of gravel, you couldn’t see far enough in, and if you wanted to improve your view, you had to adopt an unnatural and conspicuous position, halfway into the road. It could take quite a long time tomorrow, and hereabouts there were also houses where people would lean out their windows and watch the expensive limousine. Perlmann felt generally drawn to the tunnel because it meant that everything – the waiting as well as the collision – could happen in secret.

He drove in and stopped on the bright mud with which the first passing place was covered. Now he could see to the end of the tunnel, and in the side-view mirror, without conspicuously having to turn his head, establish whether the road was clear behind him. There was comfortable room here for a second car. Tomorrow he would have to stop in such a way that no one would think of stopping and offering him help. The best thing to do would be to park at an angle to the mud-pile with the shovel sticking in it. He could only hope that the police didn’t come by. At that thought he gave a start and went on driving. He didn’t dare turn into the tunnel, but drove out and then back to the patch of gravel. As before, he crouched down and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

The first thing he would see of the truck would be its lights, bigger than those of a passenger vehicle, and fixed higher up. He wouldn’t set off until the driver’s cab was clearly visible, so that he could be sure that it was a big, stable vehicle. Ideally, it would one of those American trucks that were proper great fortresses. What he would have to do, down to the individual movements, was much less clear than he had previously assumed. In order to ensure that they were both killed, he would have to hit the truck head-on. In order to do that, he would have to switch to the opposite lane early and completely, as if he were trying to overtake. But that would make it clear to anyone who saw it – at least to the truck driver – that it was intentional. And, of course, during those horrifying seconds in which the front of the truck came hurtling towards them, Leskov would recognize that he had a murderer beside him, a murderer and a suicide. He might grab the wheel, and there would be a struggle, a struggle with an uncertain outcome. Again, as if in a dream.

On the other hand, if he pulled the wheel round just before the collision, if he did it a moment too late the truck’s bumper would only hit the left-hand side of the Lancia. He might be killed, but Leskov would stay alive, and perhaps be able to testify to attempted murder. If, on the other hand, Perlmann did it a bit sooner, so that the whole length of the Lancia ended up in the opposite lane, diagonally in front of the truck, the right fender and then the right door would be crushed. Leskov would be killed and pressed against him. His fat body would be the protective shield that saved his life and so, buried under Leskov’s corpse, he would feel the truck shoving the crumpled Lancia in front of it for a while, before coming to a standstill with a snort of its hydraulic brakes.

Perlmann was shocked by the macabre precision of his fantasy. He tried to resist the pull of the imagined details and turned on the radio to break the power of his visions. When that didn’t help, he got out and walked mechanically up and down on the gravel, sometimes stopping at the edge, staring blankly at the rubble and blowing his cold hands.

If only he knew what the traffic here was like on working days. The fact that there were only a few cars on the road today – and so far not a single truck – didn’t mean anything. What if there were traffic jams tomorrow, so that it couldn’t be accomplished without putting other people’s lives at risk? But this is the only possibility. And I can’t give it all up. I can’t walk into the university every day as an unmasked fraudster, an ostracized man.

Twenty to five. It was still light down at the coast, but here in the valley it was already starting to darken. They would be here tomorrow around about now. By the time Leskov had got through customs with his luggage it could easily be as late as half-past three. They could drive more briskly than today; there was nothing more to be sought and memorized, and in Genoa there would be far more traffic than today. He had seen that when he was buying his CDs. It would hardly be possible to get here in less than an hour. A shocking, endless hour, during which he would have to talk to Leskov as if everything was fine and he was delighted by his arrival. Before pelting, foot to the floor, into the glowing white headlights of a truck.

More traffic could also be a help, he thought, back behind the wheel. Rather than just driving along the line that you make when overtaking, he could make it look as if he had really been overtaking. That often happened: someone swerving and colliding head-on with the vehicle coming in the opposite direction. To make it believable, the driver of the swerving car would have to have his vision of the oncoming traffic obscured. As the traffic in this instance was a big truck, there couldn’t be a car in front of him. He would have to be driving behind another truck or a bus, then pull out of its wake and on to the other side, at full speed and at precisely the moment when the truck in question appeared. The whole thing would have to be calculated in such a way that the truck or bus driving ahead, if it were to remain unaffected, was already past the oncoming vehicle when the collision took place. No, it couldn’t be a bus, at least not one with passengers. So that’s the last thing I’m going to do in my life: gauge the speed of physical bodies moving towards one another.

He rejected this plan as well. Too many things had to come together: a suitable oncoming truck; another one that he could drive behind for a moment; and an otherwise empty tunnel. This arrangement was far too unlikely; he couldn’t rely on it. There was also the fact that no one actually overtook in a tunnel with oncoming traffic; the double line in the middle of a tunnel was respected even by people who otherwise drove recklessly. It wouldn’t prove anything, but people would still be amazed that Perlmann had been driving like a hooligan.

As at the station three hours previously, he was overpowered for a moment by a numbing indifference. He was tempted simply to drive to the hotel and – without thinking about anything any more – go to bed. In the middle of this weary indifference, which made the world retreat by a few steps and covered it in dull grey, a truck emerged from the tunnel. In an instant Perlmann was wide awake, got out of the car and, resting on the open door, stared spellbound at the vehicle; it was carrying a load of gravel, water trickling from its platform. The front bumper hung down on one side and was fastened provisionally with a piece of rope. It was as if he were hypnotized by the sight of it, and didn’t see the driver waving to him as he drove past. Then he watched after the damp trail and tried to become aware of the perception that was beginning to torment him. The gas tank. On this rickety old truck it was right at the front – the filler neck was just past the front wheel – and it had looked as if the tank behind the wheel was even further forwards. A vehicle like that would immediately go up in flames; it would be certain death for the driver.

It had been at the harbor, on Friday, when he had seen all the trucks waiting for the unloaded goods. It must have been around the spot where he had seen the freshly laid tarmac leading to the harbor area. There he could check that in modern vehicles the tank was set further back and better protected. But he couldn’t leave this place before he was completely clear about the whole progress of the faked accident, the last movements that he would execute in his life. He got back into the car, slid the window closed and switched on the air heater. He quickly turned off the music on the radio when he felt the tears coming. Someone planning the things that he was had forfeited the right to music, and also to tears.

He stared out into the dusk, where the contrast in light between the inside of the tunnel and the world outside was slowly weakening. Yes, that was it: at first he would drive quite normally towards the approaching truck and then, still two or three hundred meters away from it, start to careen inside the empty tunnel, so that the driver and the police would have to assume there was suddenly something wrong with his steering wheel. Regardless of whether the driver tried to avoid him, or whether he simply braked: with a last swerve he would aim the Lancia straight at the truck’s radiator. The autopsy would eliminate a suspicion of alcohol.

But in this variant, too, wouldn’t Leskov grab the wheel? Was that something a person who didn’t drive himself would do? He would do it when he recognized Perlmann’s intention; it would be like a reflex. But he wouldn’t do it if Perlmann acted as if the steering had failed – if he behaved as if he were convulsively trying to bring the car under control. He would have to underline it with a desperate remark, with a curse. He ran through a few in his mind. So the last scene of my life will be theater, a cheap deception, a farce. At this thought he had the impression for a moment that the worst thing about his plan was not its recklessness and its cold ruthlessness, not even its brutality, but the terrible shabbiness of its treatment of a man who had been in prison, who had had to live in much harsher conditions than he did, and who was now, for the first time and with great expectations, travelling to meet admiring colleagues in the West.

Perlmann wished he could do it right now and get the whole thing over with. But first of all there was dinner to get through, and this time it wouldn’t be enough just to let it wash over him in silence. Because of the reception tomorrow, Angelini would be there, too. They would talk about Leskov, and now that his arrival was imminent the others would want to know more than they had before, when the only issue was his refusal. Perlmann would have to provide information in a natural, unforced way, because this was a conversation that the others would remember when news of the accident came in. The impression he left behind would have to be such that every individual, if he were to secretly suspect, would say to himself: No, that’s impossible. He couldn’t have talked about Leskov like that yesterday evening.

And then the ceremony in the town hall at which Perlmann – on his way to a terrible deed – would be made an honorary citizen of the town. He would be deluged with quivering rage, mixed with nausea, a rage directed at Carlo Angelini, who had caught him unawares and thus brought him to a state of fatal affliction, and who had now, to crown it all, organized this ludicrous ritual, this empty shell of exaggerated politeness, this conventional nothingness. Perlmann saw him in his mind’s eye, the slim Italian in the tailored jacket, his tie in a skilfully loose knot. Angelini’s whole manner and appearance, which Perlmann had secretly envied, now struck him as smarmy, pomaded and repellent. He gripped the steering wheel hard and banged his forehead against it until his own hooting brought him back to his senses.

The click of the seatbelt as it shut was already a memory, and he already had his hand on the ignition key when it occurred to him. The seatbelt. I must make Leskov’s belt unusable. He released his own belt, turned on the light in the car and leaned over the passenger seat to get a look at the little box containing the roll of the belt. The only inconspicuous manipulation would be to block the narrow slit through which the strap ran. He took a handful of Italian coins out of his jacket pocket. The 100 lire pieces were the most suitable. But they only seemed to jam between the belt and the side of the box; if you pulled on the belt, they either came out at the same time or, more often, slipped into the box. Perlmann’s movements became increasingly frantic. He wasted coin after coin and at last, helplessly and slipping away from himself like an addict, he pushed in all the coins that had seemed unsuitable from the outset. All the coins in the box made it rattle a bit when he tugged on the belt: but the strap still passed unobstructed through the slit.

Perlmann sat up, rested his head on the headrest and forced himself to be calm by breathing slowly. In his seat pocket he felt the wallet in which he still carried around his German money, even though he had often planned to leave it behind. He took it out. The two five mark pieces felt fatter and more massive than the Italian money, and when he tried one of them out it fitted more firmly, and resisted an initial pull. But at the second, rather more energetic tug it, too, fell into the box on to the other coins with a quiet chink.

When Perlmann reached into his jacket pocket for the lighter, he felt one last remaining coin. It was a thin 200 lire piece. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and set the half-blackened brass coin on top of the second five mark piece. The two coins couldn’t be pressed into the slit at the same time by hand, but it was a close thing. Perlmann got out and searched through the tools in the belt. Then he opened the passenger door, set the two coins on the slit with his right thumb and ring finger, and with his index and middle fingers held the tip of a screwdriver over them, carefully tapping it in with an adjustable wrench. Light blows had no effect, but when he tapped harder the screwdriver slipped off, and at one point the brass coin almost fell into the slit. Once, when he sat up and stretched his aching back, Perlmann was passed by a cyclist in worker’s clothes and a peaked cap, holding a pick over his shoulder. ‘Buona sera,’ he said with a curious expression. ‘Buona sera,’ Perlmann wanted to reply, but afterwards he wasn’t sure if he had actually uttered it, or only thought it.

A moment later, when the screwdriver slipped again and scratched the black plastic box, he lost his nerve and the next time he struck it with all his might. When the screwdriver squashed the tip of his ring finger and slit it open, he dropped everything, stuck his finger in his mouth and hopped up and down with pain. After a while he wrapped his handkerchief around his finger and gave it one last try. The two coins caught, and now, carefully, millimeter by millimeter, he hammered them in. Once there was a groaning sound as if the box were about to explode. But it held and, at last, the belt was blocked. Perlmann sat down and tried it out. The curves of the two coins remained visible. He couldn’t get them any further in. Otherwise they would slide in with the others. If Leskov looked carefully when he noticed that the belt was jammed, he could, with a shake of his head, say something about vandalism.

First he had borrowed the map, then rented the car, and now this. He was getting deeper and deeper into the realization of his plan. His actions were gradually becoming more deliberate, his reflections more ingenious, his traces clearer. And even so, he thought as he packed the tools away, it all felt like an inward-rotating spiral that was constricting itself around him all by itself and without his help, and would in the end strangle him with his own crime.

With his hand still on the lid of the trunk, he saw a woman on the other side of the crossing opening a grocer’s shop and turning on the light. He ran over and walked into the shop. The old woman’s white hair was so fine and sparse that she looked almost bald. Her in-turned lips and jutting chin reminded him of the toothless old woman at the window in Portofino.

‘Closed,’ she said, pushing her pointed chin even further forward.

‘Just one question,’ Perlmann said.

She looked at him suspiciously.

‘Do lots of trucks come along here?’

‘What?’

‘Lots of trucks. Is there a lot of traffic? Through the tunnel, I mean.’

‘Not today,’ she grinned, showing her single stump of tooth.

‘On working days, I mean.’

‘Well, sometimes more, sometimes less.’

‘What does it depend on?’ Perlmann put his hands in his pockets so that he could clench his fists.

‘I don’t know. There’s more going on in the summer.’

‘But are there trucks at this time of day?’

‘Of course there are. They make one hell of a noise. And they stink. But why do you want to know?’

‘We’re making a film, and it has to have trucks in it,’ Perlmann said. He had no idea where that came from, but the information came without hesitation.

‘A film? In our village?’ She gave a croaking laugh and pushed the rolled tip of her tongue between her lips.

‘And what about the time of day? When does the traffic ease off in the evening?’

‘You want to know very precisely, don’t you?’ she said and now made a curious face as if she were trying to believe the story about the film. ‘Nothing comes down from Piacenza after four. And from Chiávari through the tunnel – well, from half-past four there aren’t as many, c’è meno.’ And then, suddenly quite enraged, she added: ‘Knocking off – these days they knock off at five in the evening!’

‘So not many trucks come through after half-past four?’

‘That’s what I said.’

Perlmann was tempted to repeat the question, however pointless it was. But he didn’t dare.

‘A real film, eh?’ she said when he was saying goodbye.

He felt he was about to suffocate in there, and just nodded.

‘As if!’ she murmured.

She watched after him as he walked back to the car. He was glad it was now too dark for her to make out the details of the car. When he turned round and set off towards Genoa she was still standing in the doorway.

31

Customs control at Genoa Airport wasn’t much to worry about, he thought, and shifted down, having been an inch away from causing a collision on a tight bend. His calculation had been too generous. If the flight was on time, Leskov could be out by a quarter to three, and then they would arrive when there were still trucks on the road. If his estimate for tomorrow’s journey, which stretched into the rush hour, was remotely accurate, he would have to be careful that Leskov didn’t notice his haste and ask about it.

And, generally speaking, how was he going to explain to Leskov that they were taking neither the coast road nor the highway, but driving through this bleak, grey valley, in which there was absolutely nothing to see? Perlmann stopped when it struck him as boiling hot. But not a single excuse occurred to him that would have sounded even halfway plausible. No thoughts came at all. The last few hours had leached him out completely. His finger hurt. And how would the others explain the strange route? His colleagues? Kirsten? The police? He drove on. I’ve still got twenty-one hours, after all.

Even before he could begin to get his bearings, he reached an area at the harbor that was veiled in dense fog, cut through with beams of cold, rust-red light from the high harbor floodlights. It was impossible to see three feet ahead, and his own headlights made everything even worse. He got out of the car. Apart from the sound of the water it was completely silent. He had no idea how to find the parking lot, but in his exhaustion he was grateful for the fog, and went deeper and deeper into it.

Suddenly, a gap opened up, and between two swathes of fog he saw, a few hundred yards away, the row of trucks that he remembered from the ship. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stamped on, shivering. He only saw the bars when they appeared right in front of his face. They were part of a metal fence that ran on rails and clearly surrounded the whole truck lot. It must have been eight or nine feet high. For a while Perlmann stood there dejectedly and smoked. Then he threw away the fog-damped cigarette, which tasted horrible, and started climbing.

It was difficult. The meshes of the fence were tight and barely provided purchase for the tips of his feet, and his hands – he could only really use the right one – threatened to slip from the damp wire when he loosened his grip because it was so painful. At last he managed to grasp the top bar, and after a quick pause for breath, in which he hung from the fence like a sack, and felt the wetness penetrating his trousers, he managed to hoist himself up. When he drew up his second leg, his trousers caught on a screw. There was a long tear along his thigh. The sound of the tearing fabric seemed to echo across the whole of the harbor. When he reached the bottom Perlmann had the feeling of having done something completely senseless, and only his sore hands and a desperate defiance kept him from immediately climbing all the way back up again.

With his arms outstretched like a blind man, he walked slowly towards the trucks. The first thing he touched was a headlight. Then he felt for the bumper and ran his hand along it, from left to right and back again. He took off his fogged glasses and brought his eyes very close to it, felt the metal and the hard rubber covering, tested its height and compared it in his mind with the hood of the Lancia. He gripped the massive metal supports that held the whole thing together, and rattled them in a desperate awareness of how ridiculous he was being. Then he ran his hand along the length of the truck in search of the filler neck for the gas tank. He eventually found it on the other side, after half-creeping under the loading platform. The tank was in the middle, and there was a wide gap between the tank and the driver’s cab. Exhausted, he leaned on the bumper, looked at his hands, smeared with oil and damp rust, and removed the dirty handkerchief from the wound, in mute despair over the bitter thought that such solicitude towards himself had now become superfluous.

For a while the image of the rickety truck with the loose bumper seemed to have been vanquished, and he was ready to head back. But then he was drawn on towards the next truck, which he examined with the same precision, after he had established that it was of a quite different type. The third truck bore a construction made of two powerful metal bars, making it look like a vehicle that had been designed to crush anything that entered its path. Perlmann saw it driving towards a red-brick wall and, with playful ease, smashing through it as if it were a cardboard film set. He took a few steps back into the reddish fog and then walked slowly to the front of the truck, thinking about the steering wheel, with his foot on the accelerator.

He was shivering, his clothes were damp, and his leg in his ragged trousers was icy cold. His nose was running, and it didn’t help at all when he cleaned it with the last clean tip of his handkerchief. Afterwards, as he was walking to the next truck, it started running again. The urge to keep on going intensified as his sense of the absurdity of his actions grew. By now he was too tired to search all the trucks for their gas tanks. His examinations became increasingly rudimentary, and at last he was merely feeling his way along the bumpers. At first he did so by bringing his narrowed eyes up to them, his useless glasses in his left hand, and comparing a new type of bumper with the ones he was already familiar with. Later, when he had long since lost count of the trucks, he ran his hand only lightly over the damp metal. More and more rarely he stopped, and at last he fell into a trot with an arm that hopped from bumper to bumper, a bit like on the way to school when he had ran his hands, interrupted by the gaps for the house doorways, over the iron fences of his Hamburg district.

It was only when he had briefly touched the last truck that he turned around. The fog was now as dense as an enveloping cloth that one might bump one’s face into. He would have liked to touch the truck with the huge metal bar one last time. But the fog had stripped him of all feeling for distance, and when, for a moment, blind behind his misted-up glasses, he seemed to lose the ground beneath his feet, he was no longer sure whether that truck even existed.

He slipped off twice before – bent double, head down – hanging over the fence again. He had thrown away the repellent handkerchief that repelled him, his injured finger stung, and his nose was running so violently that now, disgustedly, he blew his nose with his bare hand. At last he simply let himself fall, and was glad that it didn’t hurt more than it did.

He was worried that he wouldn’t find his car. But suddenly, without transition, the foggy cloth was gone. He was standing in a star-bright night, and saw the Lancia straight away. At first he hesitated to sit on the elegant, immaculate upholstery in his damp and dirty clothes. Then he swallowed a few times, slipped, exhausted, behind the wheel and switched the heating to its highest setting. A quarter past seven. In twenty hours he will be waiting for his luggage behind customs control. Or else he will just be stepping out, and he will see me.

After Santa Margherita, Perlmann took the highway and didn’t worry about speed limits. He wanted to get out of his clothes and into the shower. Physical needs remain the same; they’re stronger than anything else. The high speed helped him to think of nothing. It was ten past eight when he parked the Lancia by the filling station next to the hotel. Before he walked to the steps, he glanced back. The tires were covered with pale mud.

32

In the hall he ran straight into his colleagues, who were standing outside the dining room with Angelini. They looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and shock.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ asked von Levetzov, pointing to Perlmann’s trouser leg, where the frayed triangle of torn fabric hung and flapped each time he moved.

‘I was helping someone with a breakdown, and had to creep under the car,’ Perlmann said without hesitating, ‘and I got caught on something.’ He had no idea where the sentence came from; it was as if there were an invisible ventriloquist standing next to him.

‘I didn’t know you could do things like that,’ Millar said with his head tilted, and it was clear how reluctant he was to revise his image.

‘Oh, sure,’ Perlmann smiled, and felt relieved that he was once again master of his utterances. ‘I know a bit about cars.’

Never before in his life had he lied so unconcernedly, so brazenly. An impetuous feeling of freedom spread within him, a feeling of playful boundlessness in the face of a running clock. Now he was ready to invent everything about himself, any story was fine, the bolder the better.

‘I used to be a good rally driver, in fact, and when you do that you pick up a whole lot of technical knowledge,’ he added, and ostentatiously set off upstairs, two steps at a time.

The artificial high spirits that he had managed to preserve while hastily showering and changing were further reinforced when he elaborated his story about the breakdown over dinner and, as the driver of the car in question, invented a woman to whom he attributed the qualities of a local television presenter. Casually, as if it were barely worth mentioning, he wove in the rental car and a trip into the mountains. His story, backed up with dramatic hand movements that were quite alien to him, also prompted the others to tell anecdotes. There was a great deal of laughter. Perlmann laughed most of all. He drank glass after glass and plunged himself with all his might into a desperate exuberance. He became aware that his laughter constantly had to overleap the obstacle of the soul when it became something that could be felt as a distinct tug of his facial muscles, a mechanical process that made him feel unpleasantly hot. For a few black and icy minutes he felt like a sophisticated doll, a dead man pretending to the others, by laughing, that he is alive. Then he asked the waiter to top up his glass and went on drinking and laughing until he had found his way back to his old mood, which was a bit like invisibly warped glass that would shatter into a thousand pieces if the play of forces were to get out of kilter.

Laura Sand seemed to have been watching him for quite a long time when he caught her thoughtful eye. He turned round, waved to the waiter and asked for some more bread. No, she can’t possibly have seen through me. She might find me a bit strange this evening, and perhaps tomorrow evening when it all comes out she’ll think about it. But even she doesn’t know anything that could establish a connection between the two things. Absolutely nothing at all.

‘It’s very gratifying that Signor Leskov can come for a few days after all,’ Angelini said beside him, adding, after an expressive pause, ‘I found out from the others.’

Under normal circumstances Perlmann would have fallen into the trap, and would have solicitously produced an explanation for his omission. Now nothing meant less to him than the fact that he had forgotten to leave Angelini a message.

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ he asked in a cool, almost indifferent tone, and took a sip of wine.

‘No,’ said Angelini, now very obliging again, ‘but now I know, and I’ll see to it that he gets some cash when he arrives. Things are a bit different for people in his situation. By the way,’ he continued quietly in Italian, resting his hand on Perlmann’s arm, ‘at the reception I was given Giorgio’s copy of your paper, and I had a read of it in my room. I’m very excited to hear what your colleagues will have to say about this unusual work. But, of course, you’ll be able to defend yourself.’

‘Of course,’ said Perlmann, turning his head towards the waiter who brought him his coffee. While he thanked him extravagantly, as if he had just received an enormous present, all the ghostly serenity vanished from him, and he no longer knew how he would bear to stay at this table for even a minute longer.

The questions about Leskov, which came as expected, he answered curtly, hoping no one would notice how often he was drawing on his cigarette and reaching for his empty coffee cup because he feared his voice would fail him.

As he left he turned round again. So this was where his last supper had taken place. He must have stood there for a long time, because Evelyn Mistral, who held the door open for him, leaned, waiting, against it with arms folded and legs crossed, looking at him as one looks at someone whose thoughts one doesn’t want to disturb.

‘Gracias,’ he said hoarsely and walked quickly past.

The room was spinning as Perlmann slumped fully dressed on to the bed. Against his better judgment, he was seized with fear that the effect of the alcohol might not have faded by tomorrow, when it mattered. And that fear was mixed with a sensation that he didn’t recognize straight away: a guilty conscience. Not because of his planned deed, but because he had got drunk on the last evening of his life. It was a struggle to think about it, because at the same time he had to battle against a lurking feeling of nausea. And when he finally knew what it was, the discovery intensified his despair still further. Because it meant that a perverse shift of values had taken place within him: he found it reprehensible that while awaiting death he hadn’t shown the required sobriety and alertness; he reproached himself like someone awaiting death, who has to remain entirely alert. But he had already separated the monstrous, criminal aspect of his plan so completely from himself – or else he had got so used to it in the course of a day – that it was no longer the object of a suicide attempt, and, even now, as he internally brought it up, it made no waves in his conscience, not even when he reproached himself for this cold and repellent fact and watched with a shudder as the rebuke for his insensitivity slipped silently away.

When this spiral of self-observation merged with the renewed circling of the room, he could bear it no longer and showered in cold water until his teeth chattered. Then, under the covers, he felt better. He got up again, mechanically put a bandage on his stinging, bloodstained finger and took a fresh handkerchief to bed to staunch the renewed running of his nose once and for all. The room was no longer spinning, and nausea gave way to weariness, which came as a relief. Only his blood pulsed loudly. He listened to it pounding and slipped into half-sleep, from which the ceiling light finally woke him.

It was half-past eleven. His head was clear again. He sat down at his desk and wrote Kirsten’s phone number in big, emphatic letters on a piece of paper, and beneath it her full name and Konstanz address.

There was no point in calling her. He didn’t know what he could have said. He couldn’t even think of the usual things they said to one another.

He sat on the bed and dialled her number. She answered only with the word ‘Kirsten’. There was still a chuckle in her voice; she clearly had visitors, and had just been enjoying a jocular conversation.

Perlmann put the phone down. He tried to remember the last thing she had said when she had called three days before. It had been something cheerful and boisterous; that was it, to send her greetings to Silvestri. But don’t be too friendly!

Her studies were paid for, and the money would last some time afterwards. He knew that without thinking. Nonetheless, Perlmann went through the sums again: the savings books, the few shares, the life insurance on which Agnes had insisted.

Agnes. He turned out the light. She, whose thinking had always been rather sharper than his, would have advised him to just come clean that he had nothing to say right now. Recently, on the ship, Perlmann had been profoundly convinced that such advice could only come from someone who didn’t know the world of the university, which is why it had struck him as worthless. Now, just before the end, it struck him as the best advice.

The deception would have stood between them for ever, he thought. But it wasn’t impossible that she might somehow have been able to understand him. She, too, might have been able to see it as a kind of self-defense. And she would have found it idiotic that he had had suicidal thoughts after Leskov’s telegram. She would have seen it as a typically pig-headed male overreaction; but she wouldn’t have condemned him for it. On the other hand, that he was capable of hatching this villainous murder plot – that would have prompted only horror and revulsion in her; she would have flinched from him, and looked at him in disbelief, as if he were a monster.

He turned on the light. Suddenly, he was far from certain that he knew what Agnes’s response would really be. He took her picture out of his wallet. In his misery, would he have confided in her? Would she have been able to protect him from disaster? How had she actually reacted when he had repeatedly hinted to her that his profession was slipping away from him? Had it ever been clear to her how much he had had to fight to assert himself internally against the expectations of others? He increasingly had the impression of not having known her very well, above all where her perception of him was concerned. At last, when he held the picture out at arm’s length, he had a feeling of complete strangeness, and he thought he was sure that she couldn’t have helped him. He was saying goodbye to her for the second time. It was much worse than it had been by the graveside.

In the dark room, lit only by a faint glow of cold moonlight, Perlmann leaned upright against the wall at the head of the bed. Really lying down, snuggling up and pulling the covers over his ears – with a plan like the one he had in his head, that was impossible. Sleep well, to be fit for your journey into death. He shuddered when those words formed within him, and reached for a cigarette to chase them away. If he wanted to avoid any kind of tastelessness, it was, strictly speaking, impossible, he reflected, to do anything except what the implementation of his terrible plan urgently demanded. Everything else was scorn, cynicism, even if it wasn’t intended that way and he alone could see it.

He didn’t really know why, but that seemed above all to apply to reading, to the desire to immerse oneself in a book. What he really wanted to do was open Robert Walser’s novel again. He wished he could touch it at least. But even that was too much. Books were now forbidden objects. He felt as if that bitter thought had severed his last connections with the world. There on the bed, in his uncomfortable posture – in which his back and neck were beginning to hurt – he felt as if he were on an island, cut off from everything, and with nothing left to do but sit still until the time came.

He started recapitulating the route through Genoa. On the right, the industrial plants with the white smoke, then the harbor cranes. On no account turn at the first ironmonger’s shop. But careful: when it appeared, it meant there was less than 300 meters to go. At the columns, don’t follow the tram tracks, but turn left. The place with the dug-up road and the diversion where he had twice got lost, was particularly tricky because the passing street formed such a natural, almost mandatory bend that you saw the turn-off with the diversion sign – which was, furthermore, half-hidden by a protruding building – too late, and then you found yourself in a maze of one-way streets, from which you only found your way out with great difficulty. When you came to the square you had to keep to the right to let the others past, and then what you had to do was catch sight of the bakery in the yellow building in good time and brake, even though it didn’t look at all like a turn-off. And last of all there was the bus collection point. Keep left so that the flow of traffic didn’t force you into the underpass – that was particularly important tomorrow, at the start of the rush hour.

Otherwise not much could happen, he said to himself. Then it occurred to him that he no longer knew whether he was supposed to take the second or third turn-off at the big square with the column. That was something he hadn’t explicitly memorized. Presumably because it seemed unambiguous. But was it? He started sweating, and for a while he thought of driving there straight away and checking. But after three days and nights – in which one anxiety had come in hot pursuit of the other – that last shock, even if it was comparatively mild, was just too much. All emotion was extinguished in Perlmann, and without being aware of it he slipped under the bedcovers.

It was perhaps the hundredth coin that slipped out and fell through the slit into the box. The belt should really have been jammed from below by all the metal ages ago, but it ran as quickly and smoothly as a fan belt, and cut his finger so that he couldn’t use that hand to keep from falling into the red fog from the top of the fence. His leg was stiff and numb with cold, and he limped as, sniffing continuously, he ran his hand over the endless bumpers, which at first felt deceptively solid, before they suddenly buckled as if they were made of damp cardboard. With arms blindly outstretched he touched the radiator grille, which parted silently when he drove at it with the accelerator to the floor. He dashed inside and drove through unresisting red cotton wool, in which the Lancia could no longer be steered at all; it ran as if on rails, and turning the steering wheel had absolutely no effect. But then the cotton wool had disappeared, and the car careened along wavy lines through the tunnel. Like a bumper car at a carnival, it crashed against the planks to left and right and then he heard and felt with horror his own bumper scraping along the tarmac, he saw a rain of sparks getting higher and denser, he wanted to stop, but the car was speeding up all by itself and dashing straight towards the huge, full-beam headlights of all the trucks that came hurtling towards him in a single wide line without the tiniest space between them. He threw his arms in front of his head, waited for the collision and was woken by the deafening silence that came instead.

33

He just lay there only until his heartbeats had grown fainter. This time waking from a nightmare was quite different from usual, because the relief of the first few seconds was swept away by the intruding certainty that a scene similar to the last one would be repeated in reality in only a few hours. Before that thought could fully develop its paralysing effect, Perlmann turned on the light and got out of bed. The alarm clock said just after six and he mechanically calculated the number of remaining hours. He hesitated outside the shower and stared into the void, then briefly let cold water run over his skin. As he rubbed himself dry he felt his scalp twitching, but then put the shampoo back again. No time for that. In his dressing gown he called down for coffee and insisted to the sleepy kitchen-maid that it was all he wanted for breakfast.

Then he sat down at the desk. Perlmann’s mind was dominated by a numb, glassy alertness that left all inner turmoil behind. He started the last preparations, concentrated and methodical, as if he were planning a course of lectures or a long journey.

He would have to commit the murder in the best clothes he had with him; in his dark grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the gold buttons, and the black shoes that he hadn’t worn since the first evening. Because coming back to the hotel and getting changed after the reception was out of the question. Dress more comfortably for the murder. The thought sent the blood rushing to his face. He violently bit his lip and, filled with revulsion, drove the words from his consciousness. Then he put on his grey trousers and a white shirt, hung his blazer on the wardrobe door and set out his dark blue tie with the red pattern.

It wasn’t just reading, eating and grooming that had become impossible, he thought, as the waiter had pulled the door closed behind him. Even greeting someone, thanking him and responding to a smile were things that now, in the most loathsome way, felt dishonest, cynical, obscene. He pushed the milk and sugar aside when he poured himself a cup of coffee on the desk. Smoking was the only thing that was different: the stinging on his tongue and the occasional tightening in his lungs sat well with fear and destruction.

From the hotel folder he took a business card with the address, wrote his name on it and put it in his wallet with his passport. The gas tank was more than half full, he thought and, by pressing thumb and forefinger on his eyeballs, he dispelled the image of flames. The parking ticket at the airport and possibly in front of the town hall, the highway toll, one or two coffees. Otherwise there was nothing for which he would need money now. He put a few small notes in an inside pocket of his suitcase along with his traveller’s checks. It was a strange discovery that he was making about himself: ideally, he wouldn’t be carrying a single coin on him when he started the car for the last time.

Next he looked all through the case. He stuffed his pyjamas in the plastic bag with the dirty laundry and tied it shut. But the bag wouldn’t leave him in peace. He took his reference books out of his suitcase and stuffed in the bag. He would throw it away on the journey.

For a while he looked down at the reference books that lay scattered on the bed. Then he started piling them up on the desk.

Outside the day was slowly breaking. He’ll already be airborne by now. Perlmann took the Russian text and the handwritten translation out of the bottom laundry drawer. He stuffed the pages with the unfamiliar format and the badly copied Cyrillic letters in with his laundry bag in the suitcase. He held the translation irresolutely in his hand and then sat down on the bed. They assumed that he had written this text, they knew that he preferred to write by hand, so it would be the most natural thing if the handwritten version were found. He flicked through the thick pile of pages. Were corrections made during the translation process not different in kind to those made when actually writing? There were, for example, the many points where several variants of a word or a sentence were separated from one another by slashes, and in the end he had crossed them all out but one. Perhaps they would assume that he had been uncertain about his English in each case; or else they would see him as a fanatical stylist. But if someone looked closely and thought about it, it might seem curious – particularly as there were no intellectual corrections of any kind, which would have revealed themselves in deleted paragraphs, major additions and transpositions.

It was too dangerous. He would have to take this stack of papers with him and throw them away on the journey. Admittedly, most people who started with a handwritten version had a sentimental attachment to the text, but he also knew others who threw their manuscripts away when the computer printout was available. He also squashed that paper into the suitcase with the laundry. As he did so part of it came away, got caught in the Russian pages, something tore, and the sound of the tearing paper worked like a triggering signal on his emotions, or a catalyst. An impotent fury broke out of him. Blind with tears, he reached into the mass of paper as if into a mass of dough. He crumpled and tore the pages. He thumped them with his fists until he was out of breath and wheezing, with his face bright red and a face twitching like mad.

He washed his face, and after drinking a cup of his now cold coffee in small, slow sips, and smoking a cigarette at the open window, he was able to go on. The other thing he would have to get rid of was the vocabulary notebook. He picked it up and, like an exhausted body dipping briefly in and out of sleep in defiance of the will, even though there was nothing he could do about it, Perlmann’s soul grabbed a breathing space by making him forget his situation and giving free rein to curiosity. With one hand he covered over the English columns and tested how many words he knew by heart; then he did the same thing in the other direction. Only after a few minutes did the awareness of his situation catch up with him. He felt as if he had been caught and, after two vain attempts, tore the vocabulary notebook through the middle before stuffing it in his suitcase along with the other waste paper.

The three dictionaries and the Russian grammar, scattered with crossings-out and cross-references. They would – if they were found here – prompt astonishment, because he wasn’t supposed to speak a word of Russian. But that wasn’t suspicious in itself; it could be seen as modesty, coquetry or simply as a whim. Evelyn Mistral would think back to the time she had surprised him at the swimming pool with the Russian text, and how he had cast her a conspiratorial glance over dinner when he had lied. But without any further knowledge that couldn’t turn into deliberate suspicion; the mere fact that Leskov, the man who had died with him in the accident, was a Russian, would have to remain unconnected with the dictionaries even for her.

On the other hand, why did Perlmann have these dictionaries here – especially when the Russian-English one was such a tome – if there were no Russian texts to be seen far and wide?

Perlmann no longer knew which suspicion was likely and which was not. He stopped surmising and suddenly knew only this: he didn’t want to leave any Cyrillic letters behind, not a single one. No one must associate him with the Russian language, and if there were any memories of that connection, they must fade as quickly as possible. His eye ran back and forth among the four books and the stuffed suitcase – then, on the spur of the moment, he turned the case upside down and tipped its contents on to the bed. The torn and crumpled pages piled up into a mountain on top of the laundry bag, and some of the sheets sailed to the floor. He packed the books into the suitcase, put on his usual jacket and went down to the rear entrance. The door was still locked. With a resoluteness that cancelled out any other feelings, he crossed the hall, nodded to Giovanni, who was on the phone, and went down the steps to the gas station parking lot.

Screened by the open lid of the trunk he stowed the books under the panel that covered the spare wheel. For a moment he was worried that the panel wouldn’t fit properly because of the thick dictionary, and was wobbling slightly; then he interrupted himself abruptly and walked quickly back through the hotel hall to the elevator. As he was waiting, Ruge and von Levetzov came downstairs on their way to breakfast. They were surprised to see him so early, and cast a quizzical glance at the suitcase.

‘See you later,’ Perlmann said firmly, and disappeared into the elevator.

Upstairs he stuffed the laundry and the paper back into his suitcase and fetched the printout of the translation out from under the shirts in the top clothes drawer. Where should he put it? The most natural place would be the desk. But there was a sensation in the way that revealed itself to him only gradually: he didn’t want the eyes of anyone who came in – whether it be his colleagues, the hotel staff or the police – to fall on the fateful text before anything else. It wouldn’t be able to tell them anything, nothing at all; they could read it a thousand times and stare at it for as long as they liked. And yet he didn’t want this pile of pages, which made him a murderer and drove him to his own death, to lie conspicuously on the glass desktop – even though each of the others had identical copies.

He didn’t want that to happen, not least because of Kirsten. The fraudulent text mustn’t be the first thing she found when she came to collect his things. It wouldn’t tell her anything either. Or Martin. But if it was lying on the desk, she would immediately pick it up. The last thing Dad wrote. She would recognize the title and remember the upset there had been a week before, when he had reacted so impatiently to her idea of reading it on the journey. The idea was unbearable. Perlmann looked around the room. At last he put the text in the desk drawer under the phone book.

It would soon be half-past eight. He had stopped calculating. Now he had a keen sense of how much time he still had left. For several minutes he thought of nothing at all, just looked out into the still pale sunlight over the bay. He wished he knew how to do that: take your leave of a place to go to your death. He thought that everything he saw would now have to have a special quality. It would have to be clearer and calmer, because at that moment you no longer projected anything on to things – because you no longer cast an emotional shadow yourself, to darken your view. Because by deciding to die, you had withdrawn completely from the world. Its entanglements had lost their power over you. You stood next to them. You could see them all quite undistorted. That brought you as close as possible to the vantage point of eternity. That was what you gained if you were prepared to put everything at stake.

But after a while he admitted to himself that he experienced nothing of the sort. He stood by the open window, as always two steps back from the balustrade. Outside the bay lay in fine morning mist; the noise of traffic, a ship’s siren, a knot of phlegm in his throat from all the smoking. Nothing else.

He put on his tie, slipped into his blazer and then sat down, his suitcase by his side, in the red armchair, to wait. Leaving a place, but still having to wait, like you did before. At such moments, he thought, it had often seemed as if he, too, could achieve a present. You had a piece of time ahead of you – two hours, perhaps – in which you didn’t need to do anything. You had the excuse of enforced waiting, and could yield entirely to the sensation of inner freedom that unfolded when you simply let that time elapse with full consciousness. In that state he had always imagined what it would be like to live here and experience the present; and he had done exactly that when he had left home by plane. The imagination then effortlessly brought about what seemed otherwise unattainable: by sketching out the image of a lived present, it also gave the very moment of sketching the quality of the present. It was fragile, this present, and it needed practice to deal with it. At the moment, in fact, at which one actually began to live at that place, even if only in the airport, if one then promised to help someone – keeping an eye on their suitcase, for example, or changing money for them – at that moment the present would be over. It was a present beside the suitcase, and everything depended upon not the slightest obligation, not even a conversation, penetrating or even touching the ring of detachedness, of utterly detached waiting. And because that repeatedly threatened to happen through the way in which people approached him, he had restlessly shifted from seat to seat with his suitcase in the departure hall.

Now that he had only a few hours left to live, everything was different. The delicate operation of finding one’s way through an imagined present into the real one could only happen if one had an open future ahead of one, into which one could recast oneself. But he knew all about a stiflingly cramped and inexorably shrinking future. He could have written down the whole sequence of events still to come, to the smallest detail, so the hour left until his departure was nothing but an abstract, pallid piece of time, marked by an unshakeable, unswayable dimension of the physical world in which one could observe how the sun rose, and in which one could count how often someone beeped their horn down on the coast road.

It isn’t boredom, for God’s sake; no, it can’t be boredom. And it wasn’t, he thought with relief. It was quite different from being in bed, back then, with camomile tea, poultices and yet again the same picture book. Because what made this waiting here so terribly lifeless wasn’t a hindrance, a limitation, a lack of opportunity. It was an inner rigidity that he was trying without success to loosen, until he understood at last that it was the only thing that protected him from the horror which was – silent, high and blinding – hurtling towards him from the tunnel.

Eventually, he got up, fetched two packs of cigarettes from the cupboard and put them in his pocket. Later he went into the bathroom and washed his hands. As he dried them, he paused all of a sudden, and began to pull his wedding ring from his right hand. In spite of the soap that he used, it was difficult and painful. He turned the ring irresolutely around between his fingers, then put it in the suitcase with his valuables. Kirsten would find it, and he was sure her thoughts would turn to Evelyn Mistral. That wasn’t something he didn’t care about; but he felt the thought of others losing its influence hour by hour, and now he was plainly freeing himself from his daughter as well.

Just before half-past ten he carried the suitcase to the door. Then he went slowly through the room. He stopped before the desk and shifted the piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number to the middle of the glass plate. After scrutinizing it for a moment he pushed it into the lower right, then the top corner. He fetched the red lighter from the round table and set it down next to it. He had already turned to the door, when he turned round, put the lighter back on the round table and shoved it with a finger until its position looked random enough.

From the door he glanced once again through the room. Only then did he notice the white paper edge peeping out from under the overhanging bedcover. It was a torn and crumpled page of the Russian text. Perlmann threw up the cover, fell on his knees and checked everything. Again and again his eye ran over the whole surface under the bed, as if a new sheet might suddenly materialize. At last he pulled the cover over, stuffed the sheet into the suitcase and waited until his pulse had calmed down. Then he went out without looking back.

34

In the hall Brian Millar came up to him, having just finished a conversation with Signora Morelli. He was wearing his dark blue double-breasted suit and the tie with the embroidered anchor. His face and movements bore an organizer’s zeal.

‘Have you thought of leaving a copy of your text in Leskov’s pigeonhole?’ he asked, with his eyebrows raised, and in the reproachful tone of someone who is sure of getting a negative reply.

Perlmann was bracing himself, as usual, to struggle against his fear of Millar. But now, all of a sudden, there was something of the detachment from things for which he had previously waited in vain. For three or four seconds he managed not to react at all, and to stare past Millar to the door. He enjoyed the absence of any kind of fear and any temptation to solicitude. Then he looked into those blue eyes, which already contained a hint of irritation, waited for another two or three seconds and then said with cool indifference, ‘No, that hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Millar, in a voice in which Perlmann thought he heard a trace of puzzlement and even uncertainty. Perlmann had never responded to him like that in the whole four weeks.

‘I gave Signora Morelli my own copy of the text so that she could do it. It’ll be nicer if Leskov has the text given to him as soon as he arrives. A question of style.’

‘OK,’ said Perlmann. He left Millar standing there and walked to the counter, where he handed Signora Morelli the key to his room. He was the only one who noticed that the gesture was performed more slowly and deliberately than usual, because before it was concluded the phone rang.

He stopped on the terrace of the steps and put on his sunglasses. No more fear of Millar, and a lack of the subservience that he usually struggled to conquer – so that was what he had gained by deciding to die. He lit a cigarette and walked slowly over to the Lancia. He wanted to savor the experience he had just had. He set the suitcase down on the back seat and then sat still behind the wheel for a while.

It was a moment of presence – or it could have been if it had belonged to a life with a future, a life with expectations, hopes and plans. Here at this gas station, with his hand on the ignition, with which he would later carry out his crime, Perlmann understood for the first time how completely the capacity for internal delineation from other people was dependent upon the experience of presence. With an exaggerated sense of clarity that almost made him dizzy, he understood that his repeatedly failed attempts at delineation and the constantly retreating present were two facets of a single difficulty which ran like a thread through his life and had turned him into a person who, even in the quietest phases of his life – and even without his really noticing – was always out of breath. And with the same clarity he saw that the thought of imminent death made delineation possible and thus created the precondition for an experienced present, but at the same time robbed him of the future and created the awareness of a guilt in which all experience was frozen.

As he drove out into the coast road, the others were all coming down the steps. Only Angelini was not among them.

‘Perlmann!’ called von Levetzov, who was wearing, with his dark suit, a grey waistcoat that gave him a distinguished appearance.

Perlmann had automatically looked over at him, and now it was impossible simply to go on driving. He stopped.

‘Nice car,’ said Millar, running his fingertips over the gleaming fender. Ignoring the honking cars, he walked around the car with the face of an expert, and then looked at Perlmann with an expression in which surprise, curiosity and acknowledgement flowed into one another. Now this murder weapon, which was forced upon me because of the industrial fair, also turns me into a man of style.

‘The dirt on the tires doesn’t fit, though,’ grinned Ruge, who was wearing his brown suit with an open shirt even for this occasion. He got into the back.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, as Perlmann prepared to move the suitcase and put it in the trunk. ‘It’s even quite comfortable,’ he added, and rested his elbow on it. Nothing would happen, even if he looked in. He can’t speak Russian. No one here can speak Russian.

When Millar and von Levetzov had got in as well, Perlmann automatically fastened his seatbelt and started the engine. The click of the belt as it fastened made Millar, who was sitting next to him, reach for his own. He tugged twice, and when the belt didn’t yield, he half-turned on his seat and tugged with both hands. Perlmann held his breath. He became aware of his injured finger and noticed that his other hand, which was moving the gearstick back and forth in neutral, was drenched in sweat.

‘It’s just for this short journey,’ von Levetzov said behind him, as Millar was about to rest on his knee to take a better look.

Before Perlmann turned the corner, he cast one last glance in the rear-view mirror at the hated hotel, and the crooked pine that loomed out over the road. Then he drove past the two women, who had chosen to go on foot. Evelyn Mistral was wearing a white pleated skirt that swung with each step she took, and a red jacket whose collar she had turned up, making her blonde hair curve outwards. When she waved to him with a radiant smile, Perlmann closed his eyes and almost knocked down a cyclist who had suddenly darted from the pavement on to the road. In the few minutes since the gas station all his detachment and clarity, which had seemed so stable, so definitive, had fled, and he felt claustrophobic in the full car, his body convulsed, and he drove as awkwardly as a learner.

Millar and Ruge talked about the safety standards of cars, about crumple zones, yielding steering-columns that broke in a head-on collision, and about the airbag system. Ruge drove a Volvo, Millar a Saab.

‘I’ve just been reading a report on this car,’ said Millar, giving Perlmann a sideways look. ‘It seems to be the safest Italian thing on the market.’

‘Really?’ Perlmann murmured hoarsely, and returned Millar’s glance slightly too late.

Outside the town house he drove past several parking spaces that the others pointed out, because he was afraid they might be just too tight for the Lancia. He didn’t want to embarrass himself when parking this unusually large car. As if that still mattered. Amidst the baffled silence of the others, he turned into a side street, where all the parking spaces were free. He had already got out when von Levetzov looked again through the half-closed car door.

‘That’s odd,’ he said, ‘the box for the belt is all scratched.’ Then he pushed the door shut.

Millar, who had jauntily slammed the door already, and was walking towards a shop window, turned round. But before his hand reached the handle, Perlmann had already activated the central locking and slipped the key into his trouser pocket.

In the square in front of the town hall, Angelini, who had picked up the two women on the way, was just getting out of his red Alfa Romeo. He was wearing a respectable grey suit with wide lapels and a little badge, and a pink shirt with a blue tie. He took the cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and said something about the figure on the ivy-covered monument, a man with folded arms, his head thoughtfully inclined and a scroll in his hand. Perlmann didn’t hear a single word that was said. He just glanced towards Angelini when he noticed the Italian repeatedly trying to catch his eye.

He had thought he knew everything there was to know about the torment of the lack of presence. Now he noticed that it had intensified still further. While Angelini’s voice reached him as if from a long way away, the present withdrew from everything that surrounded him. It fled from things, leaving behind a world that seemed to him like a lifeless papier mâché backdrop in which all movements seemed as aimless and artificial as those of figures on a church tower clock. He was glad at last to walk towards the building with the faded yellow facade, the green shutters and the two palm trees outside the door, and regain a little reality by virtue of his own movements.

There was no one there to welcome them. The doors to the council hall and the mayor’s office were locked. In the first-floor corridor, from which one could look down into the dusty stairwell and the hall with the flaking plaster, clerks walked past, smoking and chatting, paying the waiting group not the slightest attention, and disappeared into various rooms.

While the others rocked embarrassedly on their heels, or walked over to the glass display case, Laura Sand enjoyed the situation. Her face bore an expression of mocking contentment. She strolled along the corridor in her black corduroy trousers and elegant light-grey jacket, and at last said with amusement to Perlmann that they were all slightly too elegantly dressed. Angelini, who had looked as if he were sitting on hot coals the whole time, jerked his head round when he heard her remark. With the icy face of a superior, he stubbed out the cigarette that he had just lit on the tiled floor, and stepped into the nearest office without knocking.

When he came out, he was followed by a slim, pale man with black horn-rimmed glasses, who looked and behaved like the caricature of a subservient office worker in a film. After trying out two wrong keys, he finally opened the door of the mayor’s office and let them in.

The room was dominated by a black, carved desk and a chair which, with its decorations and high back, looked like a church pew. Behind it, stretched between two engraved silver staffs, was the flag of Santa Margherita, two yellow lions on a green-and-white background. Beside the Italian flag in the corner was the picture of the President of the Republic. With a tortured smile that couldn’t conceal his annoyance, Perlmann made a host’s gesture and invited them to sit down on the red leather benches with the gold knobs. Then he went outside.

Everyone was laughing at a remark that Ruge had made about the thick layer of dust on the desk, when the Mayor came bursting in. With his belly, his greasy hair and his moustache, he reminded Perlmann of the landlord in Portofino. Puffing, he apologized for his lateness and darted Angelini, who was closing the door, an embarrassed glance. Then he set down the shallow box and a roll of paper on the desk, and as the swirled-up dust settled, he awkwardly pulled some sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

It was a great honor and a special joy, he began, to welcome Professore Philipp Peremann and his group to the town.

‘Perlmann,’ hissed Angelini from the bench, ‘con l.’

‘Scusi,’ said the Mayor and shook his head as he looked at his text, which plainly contained a typo. He asked Perlmann to join him by the desk, shook hands with him and then went on reading out the prepared English text, his free hand repeatedly pulling up his trousers, which constantly threatened to slip beneath his belly.

Perlmann looked sideways at the Mayor’s sweaty face, his badly shaven throat and his dirty shirt collar. Before, when he had entered the hall and accidentally touched Evelyn Mistral’s hand as she held the door out to him, he had thought he would need all his remaining strength of will to resist the overwhelming urge to flee from one second to the next. Meanwhile, the odd, even grotesque course of the reception had put him in a state of cheerful, almost exuberant indifference, which he wanted to maintain for as long as possible, even though it felt unpleasantly artificial, as if a drug were responsible for it. He had to be careful, he thought, not to do anything impossible right now, like this, for example: walking right up to the Mayor and, with a loud ‘Permesso!’, straightening his crooked tie.

He kept his eyes lowered to the desk, on which, as in a church, beams of dusty sunlight fell through the high windows. Only once did he raise his head. Then his eye fell on Millar, who had turned away slightly and was looking out of the window. At first Perlmann couldn’t believe it. He examined his feelings again, but his hatred of Brian Millar had vanished. It was simply no longer there. It had vanished like a nightmare. And when he followed his eye-line and saw that Millar was looking at a huge balloon painted with a pouting woman’s mouth in gaudy purple, which was drifting sluggishly over the monument, he thought of Sheila’s kiss, and all of a sudden he liked the handsome American with his naive self-confidence and the unusual red shimmer in his dark hair.

When their eyes met, Perlmann smiled at him. Millar hesitated, then his face darkened, and he irritably raised his eyebrows. He seemed to think Perlmann was making fun of him. But then he saw that Perlmann’s persistent smile was a different smile, not an ironic or a hostile one. He blinked two or three times, reached for his glasses and made a first, still cautious attempt to smile back. As he did so there was still scepticism in his face, and only after a further hesitation did his features fall into a relaxed, casual smile that turned into a broad, warm grin that Perlmann had never seen on his face before. He’s glad, too, just as glad as I am. Was that hatred necessary?

Perlmann only noticed that the Mayor had stopped talking when he pointedly cleared his throat. From the box he had taken a gold medal that hung from a strip of fabric in the colors of the town’s coat of arms. Now, with an expression of ridiculous solemnity, he stepped up to Perlmann, who bent far forwards to avoid contact with his belly. The Mayor put the strip of fabric over Perlmann’s head and then handed him the unrolled certificate declaring him to be a freeman of the town. Then he shook his hand endlessly, coming out with the usual phrases in Italian. To Perlmann’s annoyance, Angelini now started clapping and went on sedulously clapping until the others joined in, timidly and plainly embarrassed by so much empty convention. But for a while Perlmann maintained his feeling of relief at having shed his hatred of Millar. He delivered a brief speech of thanks, and even managed a joke. That sense of relief, and the hint of presence that it contained washed everything else away. He swapped a smile with Evelyn Mistral, and for a moment it seemed as if everything was fine again. As incredible as it seemed to him later in the car, he quite simply forgot that in less than four hours he would murder somebody and end his own life.

The town’s visitor’s book was bound in red leather, and the two lions from the coat of arms were stamped on it in fine black lines. The Mayor had taken it out of his desk, and now asked them all to approach and write in it. Perlmann was the first to sit on the high-backed chair, shifted it closer to the desk and drew the open book to him. He automatically reached into the left side of his blazer, but he had no pen. He tried again on the right, and was about to voice his request, when he was handed a fountain pen from above. When he looked up along his arm, the only person he could see at first was von Levetzov; but then he suddenly became aware that they were all standing around the desk in a semi-circle, looking down at him. And as he unscrewed the pen, he discovered that some clerks had now come into the room as well, and were watching him from the second row.

At that moment everything that he had been able to maintain since the beginning of the reception collapsed within him. He felt himself freezing at the focus of all those eyes. His nose started running. The hand holding the pen felt numb with cold, and when he was about to start writing he saw to his indescribable horror that it was trembling as if he had a violent case of the shivers. For two or three seconds he tried in vain to calm his hand by pressing his forearm against the edge of the table. Then he set the quivering fountain pen down next to the book with a quiet clatter and took his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket. As he blew his nose he closed his eyes and tried to relax while breathing out. As he did so, he felt as if his nose-blowing, which was subject only to his own will, after all, would never stop, it was like the beginning of an endless nose-blowing compulsion through which time stretched until it seemed almost to stand still.

Doggedly, as if wresting the movement from alien powers, at last he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, where he clenched his hand into a fist to check that it belonged to him again. Then he braced himself, picked up the pen with a flying motion and guided it as quickly as he could over the paper, only writing the P out properly, just hinting at the e and levelling out the remaining letters in a single line which, from pressure on the nib, showed a fine white line in the middle. It wasn’t his signature. It wasn’t even like it. In fact, it wasn’t actually a possible signature for his name, because it didn’t even contain the suggestion of an elevation for the l. He also saw, as he automatically screwed the top of the fountain pen back on, that it was curiously crooked and began far too low on the fresh page. And on such an occasion, he thought as he got up, of course one signed one’s full name. He forgot to give the pen back to von Levetzov, but just left it there and, without looking at anyone, withdrew to the corner beside the door where, under the surprised eyes of the clerks, he lit a cigarette.

When the prosecco was handed out, his colleagues came over to study the medal at close quarters. Not a word was said about his trembling hand, and he couldn’t discover anything special in their expressions, either. The ribbon with the medal wandered from neck to neck, the jokes about the whole ceremony became more and more silly and frivolous, and at one point Millar clapped Perlmann on the shoulder with a laugh. Perlmann made an effort not to draw attention to himself, and laughed along. It was a laugh with no inner echo, a laugh with a run-up, a kind of facial gymnastics. He was glad that Ruge outdid a joke that had just been made, turned on his side and pretended to double up with laughter. As he straightened up, he wiped away the tears, interrupting himself with a feigned burst of laughter.

When the merriment finally faded away, they noticed with some embarrassment that both the Mayor and Angelini had already left. Apart from them, there were only two clerks in the room, talking about something with empty glasses in their hands.

Perlmann looked at the clock above the door: twenty past twelve. He’ll be in Frankfurt now. His nose started running again. His handkerchief fell on the gleaming parquet, and when he straightened up again, everything went black for a second. He was already at the stairs behind the others when Laura Sand touched his arm and, with a mocking smile, handed him his forgotten certificate. As they went downstairs together, she said abruptly, without looking at him: ‘You’re not terribly well, are you?’

It was the first time she had said anything so personal to him, and never before had he heard such warmth in her smoky voice. He braced himself against tears, and crushed the certificate in the middle as he did so. He swallowed twice, glanced at her quickly and swallowed again.

‘I’m OK,’ he said more quietly than he had planned, and added in a louder voice: ‘I slept really badly.’

‘See you later,’ she said as they parted in the hall. He watched after her as she opened the heavy door, leaned against it and lit a cigarette with her big lighter before stepping out into the square. He was relieved that he had resisted the massive temptation to confide in her. At the same time, though, he had the feeling that he had just wasted his last chance.

He hurried into the toilet, which was actually meant only for council employees. It wasn’t diarrhoea, it was, once again, that deceptive sensation in his abdomen. Nonetheless, he sat there for a while with his head in his hands, thinking about nothing. He didn’t get back up until he finally started feeling cold. It was as arduous as if he were made of lead.

Evelyn Mistral was waiting outside the door.

‘You’re going to the airport now, aren’t you?’ she asked in Spanish. There was a hint of shyness in her face, but above all the hope that the last few days’ estrangement was in the past.

‘Sí,’ said Perlmann, and felt his throat tightening as he waited for what was to come.

‘Would you mind if I came too? The weather’s so lovely! And that fantastic car! I thought we might take the coast road. How long is it until Leskov’s arrival?’

Perlmann stood there motionless for a moment and gazed into the void, as if the idea that questions needed answers were completely new to him. Then, with the awkwardness of someone intellectually backward, he looked at his watch and said in a monotonous, absent voice, ‘Another two hours at least.’

As she waited for Perlmann to go, Evelyn Mistral stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket, crossed her legs and slipped one foot half out of her shoe. After a pause that seemed to last an eternity, she looked up from the cobbles.

‘Forget it,’ she said, glancing at him through half-closed eyes, and turned to leave.

‘No, por favor, no,’ said Perlmann hastily, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her across the road, forcing a beeping car to screech to a halt.

Once they were on the other side she pulled gently away and looked at him uncertainly.

‘¿Seguro?’

Perlmann just nodded and walked ahead of her into the side street. Even now I’m not capable of drawing a boundary around myself and saying no. Not even now, when everything depends on it.

He had just opened the door, and Evelyn Mistral was already holding the door handle when she slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

‘Oh, damn!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to wait for this stupid phone call from Geneva!’ And then she told Perlmann over the car roof about her annoyance concerning the failed financing of a project.

Then, when he sat in the car and looked at her in the rear-view mirror, he saw her turning round again before she went around the corner, and brushing the hair out of her face. As soon as she had disappeared his whole body started trembling. This time it was much more violent than it had been when he was signing his name, and he was quite sure that it would never stop.

35

Just before the highway access road near Rapallo he found a skip where he didn’t feel he was being watched. It had taken him almost three-quarters of an hour to get there. Because almost as soon as he had left the side street near the town hall, he had got into a series of traffic hold-ups caused by delivery vans, which, as before in Genoa, stopped brazenly in the middle of the street to unload their goods. All of his desperation had turned into a boundless, crazed fury with the drivers of those vans, who, when they had closed the empty van at the back, walked with maddening slowness to the front, often exchanging a few words with an acquaintance before finally driving off. Sweating, Perlmann had lowered the window, but then closed it again straight away, because he couldn’t bear the furious beeping of the cars in the line. He had slung his tie, along with the medal and the certificate, on to the back seat. Again and again he had forced himself to envisage what would have happened if Evelyn had forgotten that phone call. But a paralysing fatigue in his head had made every attempt to imagine it fizzle out.

Now he set down the suitcase and pushed the heavy lid of the skip back with both hands. He was greeted by a pungent smell of rotting vegetables. The container was half-full of brown, almost black cabbage that gave off warm, stinking fumes. Perlmann opened the case and looked round. He couldn’t have cared less whether the woman at the wheel of the approaching car saw him or not. Nonetheless, he let her drive past before he tipped the laundry bag and the two dangerous texts on to the cabbage. Then, holding his nose, he watched with fascination as the sheets absorbed the dark goo that had formed between the cabbages. It was more or less how he had imagined the future destruction of the fraudulent text when he was lying in bed in Portofino. What had tormented him then now struck him as a mere bagatelle, barely worth mentioning, and he would have given anything to turn back the time of those forty-eight hours.

He took the four books out of the trunk. First he threw the yellow Langenscheidt on to the stinking cabbage. It landed with a sluggish gurgle. Next, the Russian-Italian dictionary. Perlmann gave a start when the dark juice spurted up. Then came the big red dictionary. It landed half-open on the brown pulp, and the greyish paper immediately began to corrugate. He hesitated longest over the grammar. He opened it up and flicked through it. There were various layers of meticulous marginal notes, progressive residues of ownership, apparent from the various different kinds of ink. Contemplating them from a certain internal distance, with eyes half-closed, it was as if one were looking down a long corridor of memory, far into one’s own past. What he was holding here in his hand, he thought, was one of the most real, the most authentic things that had ever existed in his life. At home, on Agnes’s bookshelves, which were still completely untouched, there was the same grammar. When Perlmann realized how senseless it was to cling to those thoughts, he snapped the book shut with forced determination and threw it in. Even before he heard the dull thud of its impact, he had already turned away.

He put the empty suitcase back down on the back seat. The medal and the certificate. He was already holding them and stepping towards the skip when he paused. No, of course not. They will have to be found in the car. He sat down at the wheel.

All the tunnels on the stretch of road were torture. He hadn’t felt like that yesterday in the dark, but now in every pair of lights coming out of the tunnel in the opposite lane, he saw a truck. He was glad of the dusty bushes and the two crash barriers between the lanes. Nonetheless, his heart thumped as he entered each tunnel. For a brief moment he wished the two lanes, even up on the mountain where he would be driving along with Leskov, went down two different tunnels. It wasn’t a wish that turned into a thought, and it didn’t leave a trace in his memory.

As he got out at the airport he noticed that his blazer was soaking and stuck to the leather seat. He locked the car and had already taken a few steps when he turned round and walked back to the car. It would be better to release the handbrake now. Afterwards, Leskov’s leg would be there. It was the last time, he thought, as he pressed the lever down.

When, stepping into the arrivals hall, his eye fell on the digital clock on the wall, it still showed 14:00. But a brief moment later, before he had even looked away, the display changed to 14:01. The number 01 and the perception of its silent appearance acted on Perlmann like a signal: the time remaining to him now could already be expressed in minutes. He felt his blood thumping, and the cheerful exclamations of the arriving passengers and waiting children now reached him as if from a long way away as he stared at the clock until it was five past two. Then he set his watch. He could do nothing to resist the complete senselessness of the action.

The flight from Frankfurt had been showing on the monitor for a long time, and also on the black display panel. Perlmann leaned against a pillar, automatically lit the last cigarette from that pack and threw the box into the garbage bin next to him. He would have liked to do more with the passing minutes than stare at the black rubber surface of the floor, but nothing moved in his head now. It was as if his thoughts had dried up, and he even seemed to have lost his capacity to pay attention. Only his body was there, clumsy and repellent. His scalp itched. He scratched himself bloody and then automatically brushed the dandruff from his blazer. The shoes that he had barely worn pinched, and when he bent down to tie them more tightly, his ice-cold nose started running.

And then, all of a sudden, his thoughts began chasing one another. The others had seen his trembling hand in the town hall, and they would think about it when they found out about the accident. He saw Ruge in front of him, putting his mended glasses on top of his head and thoughtfully studying the empty suitcase at the site of the accident. It would become known that Leskov wasn’t belted in, and then von Levetzov and Millar would look at each other in silence. They would find it strange that Perlmann had practically no money on him, and had left his credit cards in the trunk. And the five mark piece, for God’s sake! It will give me away. The car has barely been driven, and I’m probably the only German who has had it. Perlmann felt the blind impulse to run out to the car, but the next thought was already there: The shovel. Why was there a shovel in the pile of mud? What will I do if someone’s working at that very spot? That thought was swept away by another: Kirsten. She’ll wonder where the Russian books are. Particularly the big one with the nasty paper that Martin doesn’t know. She won’t let the matter lie. She’s wilful and she can be stubborn. She’ll ask the others, each one of them individually, and that mystery will be associated in their minds with other peculiarities, like the curious route. And then one last thought fell within the tension of that flight of thought, and it made Perlmann freeze: The old woman. If she sees a photograph of the dead men in the local press she’ll talk. It was idiotic, simply crazy, to talk to her and draw attention to myself, not least with that half-witted idea of a film. Hopefully, I won’t be recognizable afterwards.

Perlmann couldn’t bear standing around any longer, and walked towards the departure lounge. Before he stepped onto the moving walkway he glanced at the display panel. in ritardo, it now said by the flight from Frankfurt. From half-past four there’s not so much, c’è meno, he heard the old woman saying and saw her tooth-stump in his mind’s eye. He ran up the steps to the Alitalia counter.

‘Only about another quarter of an hour,’ the hostess said in response to his question, startled by his agitation.

I can catch up. So, another three-quarters of an hour. He walked over to the seats, where he had waited in the early morning nearly fourteen days before, and had felt defenseless without a book. But the memory was unbearable, and at last he went to the bar and ordered an espresso.

Beside him, someone unfolded a newspaper. Perlmann read the headlines and looked at the photographs. On the front page was a picture showing a blanket of smog over Milan, and on the last page there was a snapshot of a beauty contest. Behind him, a woman with a very clear voice burst into loud laughter and then called, ‘Ancora!’ He turned round and saw her companion, a man with a long, white scarf and the appearance of a film star, going a little way into the room, then turning round and standing still for a moment, as if preparing for the long jump. Then, with a blasé expression on his face, the man took several deliberate shuffling steps and all of a sudden, switching his movements at lightning speed, he turned his feet outwards and walked frantically on the inside of his shoes, sticking his tongue in his cheek to give himself a cockeyed expression. The sight was so funny that all the people at the bar, including the waiter, roared with laughter.

And then something happened that Perlmann wouldn’t have thought possible: the humorous aspect of it all took hold of him as well; something erupted inside him and he laughed a loud and liberated laugh – not a forced, hysterical laugh like the one last night at dinner, and not a fake laugh like just now at the town hall, but a laugh that brought him deceptively close to the present: it seemed as if he could reach out and touch it with his hands. That laugh acted like a rapid erosion of the cramped and callused framework of emotion, on which the decision to kill and to die had been constructed; the whole internal structure collapsed, and at that moment he saw the whole murderous plan as something very alien and remote, abstruse and practically ridiculous.

He was hoping for a repeat performance, but by now the man, still wearing an idiot’s expression, was lying in the woman’s arms, leaning against her so heavily, with feigned inertness, that for a moment she lost her balance and knocked Perlmann with her shoulder. He caught her apologetic smile, smelt her perfume and looked past her shiny black hair through the big glass windows of the hall into the distance where, in a rectangle formed of roofs and poles, a plane with gleaming wings was at that moment rising. He hadn’t known that such a thing existed: a will to live that could flow through one as hot and stupefying as a drug. He ordered a second espresso, put in two, three spoons of sugar and let the little sips melt away on his tongue. Then he ate a slice of panettone, then another and, with yet another espresso, a third. He took off his blazer, hung it over his shoulder on a finger, and rested his arm with his cigarette on the counter. He liked the hard, bright e that the woman next to him was using, and as he waited repeatedly for that sound, he began to wonder where he could fly to. When does your next flight leave? Where to? Anywhere.

When the woman with the comedian had left and the waiter behind the counter snapped at the service staff, everything shattered. It disappeared like a mirage, as if it had never existed, and all that remained was a coffee-induced quiver. Perlmann looked at the clock: ten past three. He walked slowly back to the arrivals hall. These were the last minutes of his life when he could be alone with himself. In spite of the sultry air in the building he was shivering. And what if it wasn’t even this Monday? There hadn’t been a date in the telegram. But he had given Leskov the group’s dates. And today was the last possible Monday.

The monitor showed Leskov’s flight as having already landed. Perlmann got a stomach cramp. He positioned himself right at the back of the group of waiting people. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. At last he pressed them to his painful stomach and rubbed it. As he did so, he ran through the route once more. Not till the second ironmonger’s shop. Don’t follow the tram tracks. First right at the bakery. Before the underpass keep left. At the square with the column it was the third rather than the fourth turn-off. His hands were ice-cold in spite of the rubbing. His sweat-drenched shirt was cold and sticky, too. If only they hadn’t gone to the Hermitage. He wished Leskov hadn’t suggested, back there on the bank of the Neva, that they call each other by their Christian names.

He reached for the matches in his jacket pocket and found his parking ticket. And then he realized that he had only a few coins, and not a single bill. He looked at the coins: 600 lire. I can’t get out of here, he thought. I can’t pay the parking fee. Then he saw Leskov.

36

He was wearing the same worn-out loden coat as the last time, and looked even broader and more shapeless than Perlmann remembered. In one hand he was carrying a big, antediluvian-looking suitcase of a pallid, stained brown that made it look as if it were made of cardboard. The other hand held a small suitcase with an outside pocket. Leskov stopped and looked uncertainly around through his thick glasses, bent slightly forward because of his heavy case. Perlmann felt as if he were shivering with cold when he saw him standing like that. Over the past few weeks Leskov had been the invisible author of a text, a voice without physical presence, which Perlmann had liked and admired more and more as the translation had progressed, and with whose haunting tone he had temporarily been able to identify. Now he stood there, a lost-looking man with an untidy, sweaty fringe of hair around his bald pate, and greying stubble, and with the tip of his tongue wedged between his teeth in tense expectation. Perlmann found him repellent. There was also something ludicrously dramatic about the sight of him. But those feelings did nothing to mitigate the thought that swept over him, that that physically present man over there who now, rather than putting down his suitcase, was standing there, legs apart, shifting his weight, was the man he was to kill.

Perlmann pushed his way through the group of waiting people, and then walked stiffly towards Leskov, his hands in his trouser pockets. When Leskov saw him, his whole face lit up. He set down his luggage and spread his arms. Earlier than necessary, Perlmann took his right hand out of his pocket and took his last steps with his arm outstretched. His face was devoid of feeling, and refused to obey him. The only thing he was able to muster was a gaze aimed rigidly at the open collar of Leskov’s red-and-blue checked shirt. Leskov ignored the outstretched hand, grabbed him by the shoulders with both hands and wrapped him silently in his arms, burying Perlmann’s formal ‘Hello’ beneath him.

He smelled of sickly sweet tobacco and sweat. Perlmann stiffened when Leskov pressed him firmly to him, and wished he could shrink away quite quickly. But Leskov mustn’t notice that he was disgusted by him, so Perlmann hesitantly put his arms around him and hugged him briefly and lightly. When he tried to break away from the embrace, Leskov went on holding him tight, and Perlmann felt like shoving him away with all his strength. At last Leskov let go, too, and now, with a guilty conscience, Perlmann gripped him by the upper arms and moved his hands up and down, as if stroking him. It was a mechanical gesture, hollow and empty, and yet it was a mockery, Perlmann felt, and wanted to sink into the ground.

‘Philipp,’ said Leskov, pausing dramatically, ‘it’s wonderful to see you again! Fantastic! You can’t imagine how glad I am!’

‘Yes,’ was all that Perlmann could force out. He could only endure Leskov’s gaze for one or two seconds, then he bent industriously for the suitcase and, in his nameless trepidation, it all seemed entirely unreal to him, as if it were not really happening; as if it were just a possibility, a scene in his imagination.

‘Wait, please,’ said Leskov when Perlmann hurried ahead with the suitcase as if they had to catch a waiting train. ‘I would like to change some money.’ He awkwardly took his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a fifty dollar note. ‘I haven’t got much,’ he said with an embarrassed smile, ‘but I quickly managed to rustle this together and would like to change it straight away.’

In his obsessively detailed fantasy, Perlmann had imagined everything in the tiniest detail. He had tried to calculate every individual step, to master every factor so as to leave as little as possible to chance. There was only one thing he hadn’t thought about: that Leskov was a flesh-and-blood human being with his own will and pride. In Perlmann’s fantasy, Leskov had been a figure with a particular appearance, with a past and, of course, with a scholarly voice; also a figure which, in quite general and abstract terms, behaved like a human being in such a way that it could broadly be predicted – but again, merely a figure that could be shoved back and forth by the imagination, a creature without the particular, surprising and stubborn desires and preferences that constituted the resistance, independence and autonomy of a human being.

Very slowly Perlmann set the suitcase down, breathed out and stayed bent for longer than usual, his eyes closed. It was a good thing that he was facing the door and Leskov couldn’t see his face. By the time he stood up and turned round, Perlmann had regained his composure. Over by the bureau de change the fourth traveller was about to join the line. But it wasn’t just a waste of time. Much worse was the fact that the changing of money was preparation for an open, expectant future, which, for Leskov, who had followed Perlmann’s eye and was already taking his first step, would last no more than a single hour.

‘That isn’t necessary,’ said Perlmann, and he was relieved that only the first word had sounded hoarse. ‘There are expenses waiting at the hotel.’

Leskov hesitated and looked down at the bill. ‘I like to have my own money,’ he said with an apologetic smile that also contained a hint of firmness. ‘And it won’t take long,’ he added, pointing to the first of the four travellers, who was just leaving the counter.

‘But it really isn’t necessary,’ Perlmann repeated with uncontrolled sharpness. ‘And anyway, they can change money at exactly the same rate in the hotel,’ he added in a conciliatory voice and made a gesture that dismissed everything as barely worth mentioning. Then, without waiting for any further reaction from Leskov, he took the case and went through the door, which, without turning round, he held open for Leskov until he had no option but to follow him.

Only now, when he saw the kiosk with the cash desk, did Perlmann remember his parking fee. What an idiot I am. Then at least he would have had some money. He walked to the counter and pushed the parking ticket under the sliding window. Inside, deafening rock music came from a transistor radio. A man with a red peaked cap looked at him vacantly and waited.

‘How much?’ yelled Perlmann and bent down to the opening.

Without turning his head, the man pointed to the display: 1000 L. Perlmann pretended to look for his wallet, reached into both sides of his blazer, then tapped his pockets and finally pulled out the 600 lire note, which he pushed at the man.

‘That’s all I have on me,’ he shouted, his lips right next to the glass. ‘I’ve forgotten my wallet.

The man with the red cap had now half-closed his eyes, and pointed again at the display, no longer moving his whole arm, just making an infuriatingly abrupt, jerky motion from the wrist.

When Perlmann felt his face turning red with annoyance, and he sat up without having the faintest idea what to do now, Leskov touched his arm and held out, with a grin that revealed a small triumph, a 2,000 lire note in front of his nose, mended in the middle with Sellotape. ‘A souvenir that my brother-in-law gave me.’

Without a word, Perlmann took the note and waited, bobbing impatiently up and down, until the man with the cap, who was now whistling along with the tune, pushed his change towards him. He held the 1,600 lire out to Leskov. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said stiffly, ‘the rest later.’ He had been late this afternoon, and in his haste he had left his wallet in the hotel.

But Leskov waved the money away. Plainly it was hardly worth anything, he laughed.

As Perlmann put the bags in the trunk and straightened the panel that covered the spare wheel, which had slipped a little from where the books had been taken out, Leskov took off his coat and looked round. The light, he said, holding his hand as a screen over his eyes, he had never seen such a light before. ‘Kakoi svet!’ As a student he had once been in the south, in Gruzia, but that was a long time ago, and he didn’t think the light had been as intense there.

‘Not as siyayushcy. It hadn’t illuminated itself so powerfully as it does here. But at the same time this light here isn’t… what do you say, harsh?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann, turning the two cases round again for no reason.

Now Leskov stared across to the purple mountains and the brown haze, which looked like a sandstorm.

‘As it lies there in this light,’ he said dreamily, ‘Genuya has something about it of an oriental city, a city in the desert.’

Perlmann had known that the coming hour would be difficult. Terribly difficult. More difficult than anything ever before. And that it would seem endless to him. He had told himself that repeatedly yesterday, and had tried to arm himself. And yet, he now thought as he got in, he had had no idea how great the pain would be. First the macabre irony that he was dependent on Leskov’s money to be able to embark on the fatal, murderous journey. Then Leskov’s precise perception of the southern light and his joy. And now this statement about the city, which was exactly what he had thought himself when he had seen Genoa from the ship on Friday. The harmony of their perceptions abolished the distance that Leskov’s repellent appearance had helped to create, and when he stuck the key in the ignition Perlmann had to tell himself inwardly to be able to continue: He alone would unmask me. Through him I would become an ostracized man, an outcast. There is no other solution. I’ve thought about it long enough.

As he turned on the ignition the clock lit up: twenty to four. Puffing, Leskov sank into his seat and rested his hands in his lap. He showed no intention of fastening his seatbelt, but sat on the elegant, light-grey leather upholstery as if in an armchair in a club. Perlmann felt himself looking at him, and couldn’t help turning his head as well. It would have been the moment to say how lovely it was that he had been able to come after all, before adding, ‘Tell me!’ Instead, Perlmann turned his eyes away again. For a fraction of a second he felt an impulse to reach for the seatbelt, but stayed his hand, which had been moving to the left instead of forwards to the ignition, just in time. Don’t do that now, or he’ll try it as well. Relieved that he had noticed in time, Perlmann gripped the ignition key and turned it. Immediately a high, penetrating sound rang out, which acted on Perlmann like an electric shock and for a moment disconcerted him completely. The unfastened belt signal. Of course, they have that in cars like this. Oh my God, I’ll have to do it with this terrible noise going on. His sleeve caught on the light-switch before he finally turned off the ignition again. Moving as economically as he could muster, he pulled the belt across his body and very carefully snapped it shut. He did so with the gentleness of someone who doesn’t want to wake a child. For one terrified moment he waited.

‘Incredible, this light,’ said Leskov.

Perlmann set off as if they were sitting in a porcelain box. After a while he really put his foot down.

Yes, said Leskov, it had all come as quite a surprise. His mother had died ten days before, not entirely unexpectedly after her illness, but much more quickly than might have been supposed. Larissa, his sister, who had come from Moscow, had urged him, when he had mentioned Perlmann’s invitation, to reapply for his exit permit. That urging, he added, probably had something to do with Larissa’s bad conscience: since she had moved to Moscow after her marriage, he had had to look after his mother all by himself.

In Perlmann’s imagination, the man next to him had been someone who looked after his mother, but who otherwise stood all on his own and had no one else who would miss him. Everything that Leskov said about his sister now, awkwardly and in a loving voice, tightened Perlmann’s throat. With each new character trait that became visible in Larissa, the invisible rope tightened further. Slowly and inconspicuously, he took a deep breath and tried to free himself by directing his attention at objects by the side of the road which had no significance for his driving.

The traffic grew denser, and two motorcycles that overtook him dangerously, and which he had to avoid, helped him to ignore the words beside him. Leskov had no sense whatsoever that someone behind a steering wheel had to pay attention to the traffic, and talked nineteen to the dozen. And then the rusty shutters of the first ironmonger’s shop had come into view. Perlmann felt his back and neck tensing up. Absolutely not the first one. With cold hands he strengthened his grip on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead with great concentration so as not to miss the second.

Something was wrong. He didn’t remember the long red building ahead of him. He broke into a sweat. He looked over to the shutters, then turned round and looked back. For one breathless moment he didn’t know what was going on. Then he understood: he’d been waiting for lowered shutters. The image of the rusty surfaces was fixed in his expectation, and had been uninfluenced by the fact that the other shops were open today. But the first ironmonger’s was also open; there were no shutters; the whole street corner looked completely different as a result, so, without noticing anything, he had driven to the second shop, whose shutters were still lowered.

He thrust his foot down on the brake, pulled the wheel round and turned off before the shutters. Tires screeched behind him and in the opposite lane, and the driver of the car he had narrowly missed tapped his forehead. Perlmann stopped and reached for a cigarette. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and closed his eyes as he filled his lungs.

Now Leskov moved with a groan and looked for the seatbelt. Perlmann froze.

‘That belt is broken,’ he said blankly, and then, when Leskov started tugging on the strap, he repeated more loudly than necessary, ‘The belt on your side is broken.’

Leskov turned heavily back towards him and looked at him calmly. ‘You’re pale,’ he said in a paternal voice. ‘I noticed that before. Is something wrong?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said hastily and turned the engine back on. ‘I just don’t feel that great today. But let’s change the subject: what was the story with your exit permit?’

In spite of the political upheavals at the very top of the country, everything was pretty much as it had always been in large parts of the administration, Leskov reported, falling back into his seat as Perlmann went on driving slowly and felt his pulse calming down.

‘You’ve still got the same people sitting at the same desks. And there are still blacklists,’ he said with a sobriety that expressed both experience and suffering. It would be a while before the new laws guaranteeing the freedom to travel came into force. So he had reapplied with no illusions. This time he had done so via the dean of the university, and that seemed to have worked, even though he had not previously thought of him as a powerful man. At any rate, a phone call had come early on Friday morning: he could collect his passport along with the permit. Leskov took out an army-grey oilcloth wallet, pulled his passport from it and looked at the permit stamp.

‘They’ve given me exactly a week,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not a day longer. I have to be back in Moscow on Sunday evening.’ He took out a pipe and tamped it laboriously.

By now they had passed the spot where the car had to leave the tram rails. Perlmann had done it right. Things had only got awkward when a tram coming in the opposite direction, obstructed by a turning car, had meant that he had had to stop all the traffic behind him for a few moments.

Now came the first diversion sign. Perlmann was relieved that the traffic was flowing here, too. He thought about the bakery in the yellow building, followed the column of cars around the bend by the big hotel, and suddenly found himself in the middle of a traffic jam; there was lots of hooting, and some drivers had already got out and were drumming impatiently on the roofs of their cars. According to Perlmann’s watch it was one minute after four. She didn’t say there weren’t any trucks at all after half-past four, just that there weren’t as many: c’è meno. There could still be a few.

Leskov had discovered the electric window winder, and was as delighted as a child. All in all, he said, this was a dream of a car. Perlmann abruptly changed the subject and asked him about his flight.

Organizing it had been a bit of a drama, Leskov said with a laugh, and while Perlmann stared ahead at the dashboard, where the minutes were ticking away, Leskov told him how he had to borrow money from friends, how it had taken hours, and how he had flown to Moscow yesterday, where he had spent the night with Larissa’s family.

‘I’ve hardly slept,’ he said, ‘I was so excited. It’s my first trip to the West.’ And after a pause. ‘I can’t actually remember what happened on Saturday. Oh yes, of course, Yuri came by. You know, with the fifty dollars. Years ago he was allowed to visit his dying father in America. He was the one who welcomed me outside the prison gate that time. And now… how can I put it? You know, he just wholeheartedly granted me this trip. Really granted it to me. People just say that kind of thing. But with Yuri it’s something else. He’s the only person who really knows what it means to me to be able to come here. Here, to the Mediterranean. The Riviera.’

A policeman with a radio came around the corner and walked along the queue of cars that was moving at a walking pace. Perlmann gave a start, and when the policeman, a giant with long sideburns, suddenly stopped, looked at the Lancia and then walked straight over to him, his heart pounded and his mouth turned dry. The giant gestured to him to lower his window. Twice Perlmann pressed the wrong button with his damp fingers, and he felt that as long as he had lived, no face had ever come as close to him as this big, dark face behind the glass.

‘Your lights are on,’ the giant said in a friendly voice.

‘Oh, yes, mille grazie,’ Perlmann stammered solicitously.

A moment later the traffic started flowing again. The turn-off by the bakery wasn’t a problem, because another policeman was pointing the way to the line of traffic, and, of course, the third turn-off was at the big square with the column.

Perlmann relaxed. For a few moments he enjoyed the feeling, and leaned back in his seat. Then he started. It was a sensation like twitching awake from half-sleep from no outward cause: how could he relax, when he was driving to his death?

While Leskov was talking about the delays and the chaos at Moscow Airport and blowing clouds of his sickly sweet tobacco towards the windscreen, the underpass came into view. Perlmann was about to get into the left-hand lane, when a Jaguar came hurtling up from behind and forced him back. He came very close to losing his nerve. Suddenly, all his anxiety and despair discharged themselves, flowing into a boiling-hot, overwhelming desire to pull the steering wheel round and crash with all his might into that dark-red, gleaming bodywork. For God’s sake, let’s not have an accident now. The warning came from a long way away, and its power seemed to be hampered by that distance, but Perlmann clung firmly to it with what remained of his will and braked hard, so that Leskov tipped forward again, and when the Jaguar was past, just before the concrete plinth that marked the start of the underpass, Perlmann slipped across on to the cobblestones. He immediately put his foot on the accelerator again and asked Leskov, whose hand was now on the door handle, what changing at Frankfurt had been like.

Difficult, he said. And he’d got lost. ‘There are these endless corridors. You have the feeling you’re never going to arrive.’

‘I know the airport,’ said Perlmann. He no longer had the strength to conceal his irritation.

It was twenty past four when they reached the river and drove through Molassana. Half-past four, that was just an approximate time, it could vary, and besides, it’s the start of the week, perhaps the carriers are more active then.

When the climb began, Leskov asked, after a pause, when they were going to get to the coast road. ‘There is one, isn’t there?’

Perlmann took the cigarette lighter, which had just clicked, out of its holder and held it to the tobacco for a long time. As he put it back in, he slowly blew the smoke out through his nose.

‘Yes,’ he said with a calm that had an underlying vibration, ‘there is a coast road. But it’s closed at the moment because of a serious accident. The report was on the radio. So I’m driving around the back, through the mountains.’

His words came fluently. They sounded a bit as if he were reading them out. Now he simply summoned them up from his memory after formulating them over and over again on the way to the airport, making sure that they sounded neither noticeably curt nor unnecessarily long.

‘Ah,’ said Leskov, disappointed. ‘And the highway? A moment ago we drove past some green signs that said Autostrada.’

‘The traffic’s terrible at this time of day,’ Perlmann said and breathed quietly. It was over now. It was twenty-eight minutes past four.

Trucks were still coming towards them. Perlmann started staring at their bumpers. When they drove past, he quickly turned his head and looked for the gas tank. Unable to resist, he slipped further and further into the state of mind in which he had run his hand along the damp bumpers the previous evening, in the red fog of the harbor, and, after a while, he felt last night’s dream images forcing their way into his consciousness.

‘Have you had a chance to take a look at my paper?’ Leskov asked all of a sudden. His voice had changed. It contained a note of anxious expectation, bordering on submissiveness.

Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question. It was unbearable, absolutely impossible, in fact, to talk to Leskov about that disastrous text, which had destroyed everything, and which would in a few minutes kill them both. It was a thought so unendurable, so far beyond his powers, that Perlmann crouched behind the wheel as if paralyzed, and glared through the red of the fog in his imagination at the bumper of the next truck that was coming towards them, high and white. In a few minutes it will all be over. He clung to that desperate thought as – the truck had passed them – he sat up again in his seat and said, ‘I started it, but couldn’t get beyond the first few sentences. I had to set the paper aside. It’s still too hard for me. Maybe I’ll try again later.’

‘But then you won’t be reading that first version, but the new one,’ said Leskov, whose voice seemed to have regained some of its self-confidence. ‘I’ve fundamentally reworked the text over the past few months. It’s much better now. It’s actually a totally new paper. When I cast my eye over the first version recently, it struck me as terribly primitive and confused. I can throw that one away now! I’m just glad I didn’t hand in that text. The new paper is the best, the most self-contained that I’ve ever managed to write. One should be careful with the word original: but I think there are a few things about it that really are original. At any rate I have the feeling that it’s come entirely from myself. I’m really a little bit proud of it. And I also hope that this work will finally get me a post. There is one free at the moment, as a matter of fact.’ He had the text with him, and would report on it to the group. Unfortunately, he had only his hand-written version, which was far too confusing to be copied, and unreadable to anyone else. As soon as he had transcribed it, he would send Perlmann a copy straight away. ‘I’m quite sure,’ he said with playful impudence, touching Perlmann on the arm, ‘that you’ll understand this paper. If you just take the time!’

Perlmann felt ill, and his stomach cramp had returned. Again he had that sensation of diarrhea. He switched gear. His body had reacted faster than his mind. Only now, in fact, did he begin to grasp the nature of the shock that Leskov’s words had provoked in him: if the car didn’t burn up completely, the text in question, back in the trunk, would survive the collision. It would be found, and then there was the possibility that the deception would be discovered – with all the consequences that that might have, not least for the explanation of the apparent accident. Even the changes in the second version could not keep that from happening. Certainly, he said to himself once again, no one in the hotel spoke Russian. But if the belongings of the deceased were in the hotel after they had been identified, it was quite possible that both texts, the Russian and the English, would end up in the same room, perhaps even on the same table, side by side, page by page. And the mere possibility, the mere thought, that someone with a command of both languages might approach that table brought him out in a cold sweat.

Before they reached the tunnel there was another gas station. Perlmann would have to get rid of Leskov’s manuscript there; sheltered by the open lid of the trunk he would quickly have to take it out of the suitcase, hide it behind something and drive on straight away.

‘I’ve just got to check the tires for a second,’ he said as the gas station came into view.

He stopped next to the air-pump, opened the trunk from inside the car and quickly walked to the back. The straps of Leskov’s suitcase were already untied when he felt the car rocking and looked up over the lid of the trunk. Leskov was heaving himself, panting, out of the car. He had to hold on to the frame with both hands and pull himself up. The car door banged against the plinth. Perlmann quickly closed the lid and bent to the air-pressure gauge.

‘I’ve been sitting down all day, and the seats on the plane were so cramped,’ Leskov said with a yawn. ‘I just need to have a bit of a stretch for a moment.’

Perlmann unscrewed the cap of the valve on the wheel and pretended to measure the air pressure. His fury at this shapeless Russian, who was unashamedly making the most unappetizing noises as he did his exercises, was turning into hatred. That hatred would be helpful later on, he reflected. He loathed himself for that thought, and that made his hatred still more violent. He switched his attention to the other back wheel. Leskov was just bending forward, and stretching his wide rear end towards him, a grotesque and revolting sight. No, Perlmann couldn’t depend on the exercises taking long enough, particularly since he would now have to go back to the front, to his seat, to open the trunk for a second time. He put the pressure-gauge back on its holder and sat down behind the wheel. There he collapsed and was prepared to drive to the hotel and simply let things take their course. Exhaustedly, he closed his eyes. Sleeping, sleeping for a long time, until everything was over, his unmasking, the shame, everything.

Leskov’s head appeared in the open passenger door. ‘Do you think there’s a toilet here?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘No idea,’ Perlmann said flatly. Leskov seemed to have expected Perlmann to come with him to find out. Now he walked alone to the pump attendant and gesticulated. Perlmann was reaching for the lever that opened the trunk, and was sitting with his feet on the cobbles, ready to move. But the pump attendant shook his head, once, then again.

Leskov came waddling back to the car. He glanced at the back seat. ‘There’s a medal there. With a ribbon. As if someone’s received an honor of some kind. May I know what it means?’

Why didn’t I think of that? I could have put the thing in the suitcase. ‘What? Oh, that. No idea. Someone must have left it behind.’ It hadn’t been hard to give his voice a tone of indifference. Exhaustion had accomplished that all by itself.

‘The roll next to it looks almost like a certificate. Shall we take a look?’

Perlmann gulped. ‘I’d like to get on now,’ he said impatiently.

A shadow flitted across Leskov’s face. ‘Of course.’ He wedged himself on to the seat. One of his suspenders caught on the door handle. ‘How far is it?’

‘Not far now,’ said Perlmann, and his voice had stopped obeying him.

37

The clock showed six minutes to five when Perlmann drove back to the road with his headlights on. Clouds had rolled in, the last rays of sunlight from the sea giving them a purple sheen. There was a strange, hostile twilight. He drove slowly, at barely forty, and kept to the right.

‘Is something wrong?’ Leskov asked after a while.

Perlmann didn’t reply, but stared straight ahead at the bend, where a huge truck appeared with its headlights on full. He shielded his eyes with his hand and waited until it had passed. Then he stopped the Lancia and pressed the lever that opened the trunk, and it was only by a reflex that he was able to prevent a passing car from brushing his opened door. As he hurried to the back, Perlmann inwardly braced himself for the furious beeping and the flashing headlights, opened the trunk quite high and pulled open the zip of Leskov’s suitcase. It was stuffed full of paper. How was he supposed to fish the crucial, dangerous text out of this jumble? In feverish haste, he rummaged among the papers, all Russian texts, some of them typed, most of them handwritten. What was he supposed to do? He was at his wits’ end. He tore open the zip for the outside pocket. It contained a single manuscript, a fat pile of pale yellow pages, held together with a red rubber band. He pulled it out. The rubber band got stuck on the zip and broke. This was the text, the heading in careful, almost calligraphic letters: o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy. So he hadn’t changed the title. With trembling fingers Perlmann closed both zips and refastened the straps. Then he bent down – ignoring the insults of a driver who couldn’t overtake because of the oncoming traffic – right down to the road and laid the pile of papers under the exhaust. He slammed the trunk shut and got in.

‘Problem with the tires again,’ he said, without turning his head towards the passenger seat. Now it was important that Leskov didn’t look into the side-view mirror. ‘They grow a famous wine over there on the right,’ he said, and set off with a jolt, his eyes on the rear-view mirror.

The text, which existed only in this single copy, the version that Leskov was so proud of, and which was to help him with his professional advancement, the work of months, flew apart, the yellow pages whirled up and gleamed in the headlights of the other cars, then they danced and sailed into the darkness of the side embankment. The cars behind him tried to dodge the flapping pages as if they were heavier than they were, and the next car that came along seemed to have driven precisely over the rest of the stack of papers, because once again there was a cloud of pages. Then they drove round the bend, and the pages disappeared from Perlmann’s field of vision. Leskov had put his thick glasses on his head, and was still looking up the slope on the left.

‘Not much to be seen now,’ he said.

It can only be another three or four bends. All of a sudden Perlmann no longer knew whether to accelerate or change down. It was just turning four minutes past five. Yesterday, outside the tunnel, when he should really have done it straight away, his remaining time had seemed like an obstacle, a medium that he had to wade heavily through, minute after minute. And even in the town hall, every movement had struck him as something that one had to accomplish against the resistance of sluggish time. Then, on the way here, it had been the other way round: time had run ahead of him, the minutes elapsed at a furious pace, it had been a race against the clock, against the figures on the digital display on the dashboard, which were changing far too quickly. Now, just as he was counting the remaining bends, Perlmann felt something changing, moving, shifting in his innermost depths: even now he wanted to stop time, and with all his might; but it wasn’t like before, because at the same time he also wanted to stop the road, which was rolling away backwards behind him, where he would never see it again. He didn’t want to reach the tunnel either in time or in space. The time on the whole journey had been precious already, because after half-past four there wouldn’t be as much traffic – c’è meno. But now that same time was suddenly precious in a quite different, more extended sense. It forced its way into Perlmann’s consciousness as the last brief stretch of his life, as a comprehensible series of minutes ticking ruthlessly and inexorably away, bringing the final darkness and the final silence closer.

Just behind them a huge truck flashed its lights, and now Perlmann heard the hard and threatening noise of its diesel engine. He gave a start, but it was a strange, unfamiliar kind of start, because it immediately opened itself up to the hot, surging, almost pleasant desire that the truck might simply drive over them and extinguish them with its light, its noise and all its tons. He accelerated, took the next bend and saw the sign with the arrows to Piacenza and Chiávari. In the rear-view mirror the high front of the truck came quickly closer. He heard the driver speeding up and changing gear. Now they were on the crossing and could see the tunnel, the truck roared and sped up for the straight stretch through the mountain. Perlmann put his foot on the accelerator, drove far to the right on to the patch of gravel and skidded to a stop.

‘There really is something up with you,’ Leskov said, bending over and resting his hand on his arm. ‘Are you unwell?’

Perlmann smelled the tobacco and the sweat. ‘I just felt dizzy for a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll be OK soon.’ He put a cigarette between his lips and reached for the matches in his jacket pocket, because he didn’t know how he would survive the idle seconds that the lighter would take.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ said Leskov, who had just put out his pipe with his tobacco-yellowed thumb and lowered the window.

Perlmann paused in the middle of the lighting motion, closed his eyes for a moment and then got silently out of the car. He walked to the side of the road, lit the cigarette and looked into the tunnel. The shovel wasn’t there any more, but the pile of mud still was. Only single cars came from the opposite direction. He looked at his watch: thirteen minutes past five. Nonetheless, there had been that truck before. Why shouldn’t there be others?

Now he had to make up his mind. He had to choose between murder and death, or life as someone experiencing his professional decline, the public shredding of his reputation. If he went on driving through the tunnel now, past the pale mud and out into the other night at the other end, Leskov would find out an hour later. The others would find out at dinner, and he wouldn’t be able to appear in front of them any more, and from them it would spread in circles, wider and wider circles, until the last of his colleagues knew. And Kirsten would have to watch as well. Kirsten, to whom I could never explain it.

Perlmann had been looking at the ground in front of him, and only now did he see the truck coming towards him in the tunnel. He immediately dropped the cigarette and turned towards the car. Leskov had got out, and was standing with his legs spread and his back to him at the edge of the patch of gravel. It wouldn’t have been enough anyway. Again he lit a cigarette. It was the second-to-last. His eyes slowly wandered around. The toothless old woman’s grocer’s shop was lit with a dim light. To the west a last strip of light in the reddish sky. The last light.

Leskov was sitting in the car again, looking across at him. Unusually, Perlmann smoked the cigarette down to the filter. The hot smoke stung his lungs, and now he had a nicotine taste on his tongue that he didn’t like. He felt as if all the strength was about to leave his body. Stiffly, head lowered, he walked over to the car, got in and fastened his belt.

‘Sorry about before,’ said Leskov. ‘I didn’t mean to patronize you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Perlmann said quietly and started the engine. He drove in a big arc on the patch of gravel and then drove the car on to the empty road. For a moment he just let the car freewheel. Then he put his foot down and drove into the tunnel. He looked up at the bright curve of the tunnel entrance, and when it drew over him he felt as if he were leaving the world.

Just before the first rest area he clutched his brow, braked and drove on to the muddy ground. Without pulling up the handbrake he stopped right in the middle between the two ends of the crash barriers. He undid his seatbelt and threw both hands to his face.

‘I’m dizzy again,’ he said through his hands. Leskov touched him gently on the arm and said nothing. Only after a long pause, during which Perlmann stared ahead into the tunnel through his fingers, did Leskov ask, ‘Do you think you can make it to the hotel?’

At that moment the blue, rotating light of a police car appeared in the side-view mirror. The car had already passed him when it braked abruptly and reversed with a screech along a slightly wavy line. The passenger got out, put on his cap and bent down to Perlmann’s window.

‘You can’t park here,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s just for emergencies.’

‘I suddenly felt… ill. I had to stop,’ Perlmann said with a dry mouth. He had forgotten the Italian word for dizzy, and made two mistakes in that single sentence.

‘Foreigner?’ asked the policeman, taking a few steps forward and looking at the numberplate. ‘Rental car?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann and gulped.

‘Do you need help? Shall we call an ambulance?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said hastily. ‘Thank you very much, but it’s fine now.’

‘But then you’ll have to drive on,’ said the policeman, and looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘There’s a parking lot just beyond the tunnel.’ Then he tapped his cap and straightened up.

‘Va bene,’ said Perlmann. Apart from that he did nothing.

In the time it took the policeman to reach his car, Perlmann perceived this event as a salvation. He was very close to throwing up, just so that he wouldn’t have to bear the terrible tension any more. These policemen would keep him from becoming a murderer. All he needed to do now was turn the key in the ignition, put the car in gear and drive to the hotel with Leskov. That was all.

But the image of the hated hotel that now appeared in his mind kept him from doing so. He saw himself next to Leskov, dragging his stained suitcase, going up the steps and stepping up to the reception desk, from which the fraudulent text, which Millar had made him put there, protruded from Leskov’s pigeonhole. Again he hid his face in his hands. Now he could only hope that the carabinieri didn’t do what policemen would do at home: wait until he actually drove on.

‘What did he want?’ asked Leskov.

Perlmann said nothing.

The policeman took off his cap and got into the car. He hadn’t looked back. The car stayed where it was. The driver would now be watching them in the rear-view mirror. Now the passenger lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out of the window, laid his arm on the frame; they both laughed, and then the car lurched off. They will testify that I was feeling ill. That’s good. It was twenty to six.

As long as the policemen were within view, there was somewhere for the eye to rest. When the tail lights disappeared into the night, the tunnel was quiet and deserted. Perlmann would have liked to light his last cigarette. He had a craving for one like never before. But he couldn’t risk it. He didn’t want to do it with a cigarette in his hand. From the corners of his eyes he saw Leskov’s massive legs in their brown trousers, the ankle-high boots with the thick soles and the hands folded in his lap with the yellow thumb and the black under the nails. The span of time in which two people can sit side by side in a stationary car was already long past. Perlmann tried convulsively to do the impossible: the absolute unrelatedness of two people who were sitting a few inches apart. He felt Leskov looking at him, and closed his eyes. His scalp twitched and his nose started running. He was glad to be able to do something, and reached for the handkerchief with his ice-cold hand.

‘You think about Agnes a lot, don’t you?’ Leskov said into the silence.

Through all the coldness and fear a terrible fury flamed up, a rage at the emphatically mild, almost tender tone that Leskov had used; the sort of tone one adopted with children or sick people. But more than that it was a fury at the fact that this fat, repellent person next to him, whose fault it all was, dared to talk about Agnes at all, and took it upon himself to touch that open wound and thus to touch Perlmann in his innermost depths. And it was also a fury with himself, over the fact that he had given that part of himself away for no reason that time, in the icy air of St Petersburg. This fury acted as if he were in the middle of life and not on its outermost edge. It crashed in and flowed through him as if there were no tunnel full of fatal silence and white-hot lights in the high, thundering front of a truck. It was such a violent fury that it left him dazed. Perlmann buried his face in his handkerchief, and now his fury discharged itself into his nose-blowing. He went on blowing his nose even though his whole handkerchief had been damp with snot for ages and repelled him. One pant came more violently than another. The preparation for each was even bigger than the last, but all in vain. His nose went on running. Fresh mucus kept coming from somewhere, and more and more. It flowed. It streamed. Perlmann pressed and pressed and only paused when the moisture in his cold nose suddenly turned warm and his handkerchief turned red. As he held the handkerchief away from him and looked with surprise at the blood, it dripped from his nose, and when he looked down at himself, his white shirt and the light-grey leather upholstery between his legs were covered with bloodstains. He stared, motionless, at those stains, which were still spreading at their edges. It was as if he were hypnotized by them and forgot to keep the handkerchief to his nose, so that the blood went on dripping, fast and constant.

That was the reason he felt it so late. It was a light, choppy vibration of the ground that conveyed itself straight to the car and his body. Still captivated by the sight of the blood, Perlmann glanced quickly forwards over the steering wheel, and then he saw the two bright orange lights flashing at short intervals. A giant bulldozer was already quite a long way into the tunnel, moving towards them rather jerkily on caterpillar tracks as big as tank treads. The two flashing lights were attached to two poles sticking out at the sides, and provided the visual limitation of the machine, which kept quite close to the crash barrier and still extended some way beyond the middle strip. It took two or three seconds before Perlmann had torn himself away from the bloodstains and the sight of the oversized shovel of the bulldozer: a slightly curved, high wall with prongs at the sides. But then he reacted in a flash. He dropped his handkerchief, put his foot on the clutch and turned the key in the ignition. The penetrating whistle assailed him. He had forgotten it, and gave a start just as he had the first time. Again he turned the key, a crunching noise, because of the whistle he hadn’t heard that the quiet engine had already sprung into life.

The Lancia, the safest Italian car, accelerated with silky smoothness, but Perlmann pulled out all the gears so that the engine screamed. The blood flowed warmly down his lips and chin. The whistling was maddening. He looked rigidly straight ahead, his arms outstretched. Just under a kilometer: now he saw, in the narrow, yellow driver’s cab, a lanky man in blue workmen’s overalls with a beret. The curved wall covered with pale earth was high. It’s high enough. Nothing will happen to him. So now the time had come. The last few seconds of his life – and even now no presence. He was driving at over a hundred now – that would be enough. His head emptied completely. All his plans for careening and pretending the steering wheel wasn’t working were forgotten. All he knew now was that he had to pull the steering wheel to the left at the right time, but not too soon because of Leskov. Now he heard the clattering engine of the bulldozer, the vibration of the ground merged with the sensation of speed, and that insane whistling noise and Leskov’s fearful voice, and then all of a sudden it was perfectly silent. It all happened soundlessly as if in cotton wool and snow. Less than 100 meters: the glasses – he pulled them from his face. Now he had to do it – now. He pressed himself into his seat, closed his eyes and took his sweat-drenched hands off the wheel.

Beside him, only inches from the car window, there was a red flash. He opened his eyes. They were past, but everything was blurred. The lines were broken, as if under water. He pushed his hand against the wheel. The car veered to the left. Perlmann pulled it back and oversteered. The right fender crashed against the guard rail. The whole length of the car scraped along the metal. It was a deafening crunch. Now he heard that whistling noise again. He pulled the car to the left, into the middle of the tunnel, but now two headlights came towards him out of the dark, each one of them like a tattered bundle of gleaming crystals, shifting blurrily towards one another. Perlmann pulled to the right: again it crashed and crunched. In the midst of it all was that mad whistling, but he kept the wheel turned firmly to the right. The approaching car was past. Another crunch, then they were outside in the dark. Perlmann drove blindly to the right, put both feet on the pedals. The car slewed round, then only slid and, finally, after an eternity, it came to a standstill by a pile of rubble.

At first Perlmann was merely grateful that the whistling had stopped. He felt his blood thumping from his head all the way down to his feet; his veins seemed to be about to burst. Then, after a delay of almost half a minute, he started shuddering. It wasn’t just trembling or shivering, but an uncontrollable, violent twitching of his limbs the like of which he had never experienced before. To stop his arms from drumming against the steering wheel, he rested them on his thighs. Now he sensed that his trousers, too, were covered with blood, and that his nose was still bleeding, more violently than before. He bent for his handkerchief, which was down by the pedals. The blood on the cloth was mixed with dirt. A drop of blood fell on the lapel of his blazer when he sat up, rested his head against the headrest and pressed the handkerchief under his nose with a trembling hand.

‘Take mine,’ said Leskov, who had turned in his seat and held a crumpled handkerchief in front of his face. It was the first thing he had said since they had come to a halt. Perlmann had no idea what Leskov was thinking at that moment, or what his face was like. But he was astonished by the calm, matter-of-fact tone of his voice. He would not have thought him capable of it, having seen him looking around so anxiously at the airport. Perlmann was revolted by the handkerchief, which smelled of sickly tobacco. ‘No, thanks,’ he said and got out.

He held his head tilted far back as he walked past the old tires and the rubble. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cold night air. His nosebleed was subsiding, and his shivering was gradually easing, only every now and again there was a spasm of twitching. He stopped at the side of the road and put the last cigarette between his lips, but for fear of his nosebleed starting up again he didn’t dare light it. In the windows down at the road that he had pelted up the previous day, a light was burning. He saw shadows moving. I haven’t become a murderer.

‘The right headlight’s broken,’ Leskov said two steps behind him, ‘and there are nasty scrapes.’ Now he rested his hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘But otherwise not much has happened. Just body damage. It was a horrible shock, though. And without a belt.’

Again Perlmann started shuddering, more weakly than before, but unmistakably.

‘You’re trembling like an ashpen-leaf,’ said Leskov. ‘That’s what you say, isn’t it?’

The linguistic mistake and the innocent question that followed it brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes, he didn’t know why.

‘Aspen-leaf,’ he finally managed to say, and attempted a smile. ‘It just came over me when I saw the bulldozer,’ he added after a pause. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Came… over… you?’ asked Leskov, clearly enunciating the individual words and placing them side by side like someone who had never heard them in that sequence before.

Perlmann felt his intestines. He gulped and looked into Leskov’s eyes. No, it wasn’t the biting sarcasm it had sounded like at first. It was merely linguistic curiosity. Perlmann’s alarm gave way to irritation.

‘Panic,’ he said tightly. ‘I panicked when I saw that monster. I had to get past it as quickly as possible.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Perlmann said bluntly. ‘It’s always been like that.’ He lit the cigarette.

‘And what about the glasses?’

No, it didn’t sound suspicious. There was real sympathy in the question, which simply overlooked Perlmann’s coarseness.

‘I felt dizzy again, so I involuntarily grabbed my head and pulled them off by mistake.’

There was nothing new. Over the last few days he had got to know himself as a talented, cold-blooded liar. Not as someone who reached for a necessary lie from time to time, but as someone who lied confidently and as a matter of routine.

Perlmann looked silently and fleetingly at the damage to the car as something that affected him not in the slightest. What bothered him were the bloodstains on the pale leather. He moistened the last clean tip of his handkerchief and rubbed, but it only made it worse. Leskov was fumbling around with his seatbelt when Perlmann sat down at the wheel. At one point Leskov gave it a quick, strong tug. In the dark, Perlmann held his breath until he realized: It doesn’t matter now. The two coins held.

Leskov was silent as they drove on, and when Perlmann at one point glanced at him his eyes were closed. The silent figure in the dark struck him as the embodiment of suspicion. No, he’s not suspicious. Because he doesn’t know the motive. In as little as an hour that could be different. Perlmann would park at the gas station near the hotel, and perhaps have to answer a question about the damaged car, then up the steps, the veranda on the left, greeting from Signora Morelli, who would hand the text to Leskov. Leskov would rest for a bit, then Perlmann would have to introduce him at dinner. There would be the usual ritual greetings, the clichés, the conventional smiles, elegant, smooth words from Angelini, and then, back in the room, Leskov would make his discovery. He would reach into the outside pocket of his suitcase to confirm the monstrous discovery – horror – and then, once the first paralysis was past, it would dawn on him and he would know everything. Or else Leskov would be too tired this evening; then it would happen tomorrow morning when he, Perlmann, was sitting at the front on the veranda. Or else Leskov would be so curious that in spite of the long journey he would start reading immediately, perhaps even in the elevator. They would step towards one another under the chandeliers in the elegant dining room, and then… At that point Perlmann’s imagination failed. The images collapsed, and inside him it turned grey, dark grey, but above all opaque, impenetrable and gloomy, numbingly gloomy.

He knew he didn’t have the strength to endure it. Pian dei Ratti. It ran through his head. Pianezza, Piana, Pian dei Ratti. Those names, black text on a white ground, were bound up with trepidation and haste, and they echoed within him a thousand times over. There was no one at the slate works at that time of day, and in the dark the people were no longer leaning in the windows. And it wouldn’t matter if there were people up in the house by the bend. He hesitated. It was very questionable whether another truck would come along. It was twenty past six by now. But that wasn’t it. Perlmann felt that he no longer had the strength to try again. He could no longer summon the will, and if he tried to force himself to believe that he had it, it felt like a will that was hollow inside and could at any moment, at the slightest resistance, collapse in on itself.

They were now past Lumarzo, and soon the first of the two roads would branch off, leading straight down to the coast and skipping yesterday’s route to Chiávari. Perlmann slowed down when the sign came into view.

‘So has your own contribution been discussed already?’ asked Leskov when Perlmann had turned on the indicator.

At first Perlmann couldn’t find his voice. ‘No,’ he finally managed to say, and it was almost a croak. He slowed down still further until they were rolling only very gently.

‘Oh, then I’m lucky.’

Right by the turn-off, in the middle of the opposite lane, Perlmann tapped on the brake, and for the duration of a breath they stood quite still. Then he turned off the indicator, put his foot on the accelerator and drove on towards Chiávari. He didn’t reply to Leskov’s question. He could assume that Perlmann hadn’t heard it, because he was dealing with the turn-off, or that he was wondering how to describe his subject as simply as possible.

‘Is it something formal, technical?’ Leskov asked.

‘No,’ Perlmann said quietly.

‘I’m glad of that. At least I’m looking forward to it. When’s the session?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘It’s as if you’d just been waiting for me,’ Leskov laughed.

I’ve got to tell him. Now. Here. Perlmann had no idea how Leskov would react to this confession. There was this almost paternal relationship that he had with this man, who was practically his own age. Would those feelings come into it? Of course, the information would shock him. But perhaps he’ll be able to see it as self-defense if I explain to him how it came to this. And clearly he hadn’t forgotten the misfortune with Agnes. What had prompted a blind, intoxicating fury was now suddenly a hope, a straw that Perlmann clung to. Perhaps Leskov could see the deception as the deed of a person who had completely lost his equilibrium as the result of overwhelming grief and was no longer himself.

Perhaps, though, and this was far more likely, Leskov would be so dismayed that Perlmann couldn’t possibly ask him to keep the matter quiet. He would need time to grasp the full significance of the confession; only gradually would it become clear to him how monstrous Perlmann’s revelation was. Perlmann, the one who had issued the invitation, had shamelessly exploited the refusal of an exit permit, Leskov’s lack of political freedom, and his connection with his mother, which was a moral obligation. Perlmann had also exploited his trust, which had led Leskov to hand over his first draft, an unfinished and, to that extent, intimate text, unprotected. His colleagues were now holding in their hands that provisional, rough text, which was unorthodox and might scandalize. It was awkward enough appearing with such a text. Leskov would feel unmasked, even if he conceded to Perlmann’s request and didn’t come forward as the author.

‘Has a time been fixed for the session with my contribution?’ asked Leskov.

‘Thursday,’ said Perlmann, and that day seemed to him to be infinitely far away. It was a day he could no longer imagine reaching, a day that might have appeared on the calendar and might exist theoretically, so to speak, but an unreal day without morning, noon and evening, a day that he would never experience.

Perlmann’s request would mean asking Leskov to stand up and say that he had no lecture to deliver – the clueless Russian who had been invited out of sympathy with his political situation, as development aid. It meant, Leskov would say, that the second version in the trunk, the one he had brought with him, was useless. He couldn’t either. Generally speaking, he couldn’t present any of his ideas, nothing of the whole of his recent work. Otherwise it would seem as if he were the one who was copying Perlmann and simply hanging on to his theme. It would at least be screamingly obvious that the two men were writing about similar questions in a very similar, unorthodox way. Suspicion would be inevitable and, of course, the question of originality would be resolved to the disadvantage of him, the obscure Russian. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that it was the other way round, particularly since Perlmann, as it appeared at the time, was able to present a proper text, while Leskov would at best be able to quote verbally from his work.

‘You know, I’ve got this idea that you can appropriate your own past through narration,’ Leskov said out of the middle of his thoughts. ‘In the new version, this idea in particular has become much clearer. It took me a long time. And at the same time, in fact, I want to say that remembering is in a sense inventing.’ He laughed. ‘That must sound a little bit crazy to you, hearing it out of the blue like this. But in the text I develop it step by step. And just assume, hypothetically, that there’s something in it: then, of course, I’m immediately left with the question of what appropriation could mean with reference to one’s own inventions. In the first version, the one that you have, that’s still quite unclear. But now I think I have the solution. It’s rather a complicated story, and I’m glad that I managed to capture it on paper before I set off.’

Osvaivat’. Appropriation. So that’s true. The thought ran through Perlmann’s head without his intervention. It felt strange, and cut off from everything else. Or rather it didn’t feel like anything at all. It wasn’t really present as a thought of his own. It was more as if he were thinking someone else’s thought. As if someone else were now thinking that thought.

Leskov took out the handkerchief that he had previously offered to Perlmann and laboriously blew his nose. ‘And I had almost forgotten the text. It was still a bit too soon to drive to the airport, and I took another look at it and made a few notes. Then there’s this phone call that I get really excited about, not least because of the post I’m hoping for. It goes on and on, and suddenly I’m short of time. I pick up the two cases and walk to the door, still filled with rage, and it’s only when I see the open outside pocket on the suitcase that it occurs to me. I’d have been left standing there like a bit of an idiot.’

I should tell him about the text on the road. Because if he discovered the loss, he would immediately put two and two together: that strange stop in the middle of the road, and after that the tires had barely been mentioned. His fury would be boundless: once, of course, because of the destruction of his paper, and then over the fact that Perlmann, the coward, hadn’t even had the courage to tell the whole truth. And that rage might loosen his tongue.

Now came the turn-off to Uscio, and then down to the sea at Recco. Perlmann stopped. ‘I’ve got to stretch my legs for a moment,’ he said.

If he took the turn-off, there was no second chance: it wasn’t a road for big trucks. Then he would walk up the steps beside Leskov, and the disaster would take its course. Then there was no longer anything that could stop it. If he drove straight ahead, in ten minutes they would be in Pian dei Ratti. Perlmann stood there motionlessly, his hand on his trouser-zip by way of disguise. He couldn’t deliver his confession, with its lengthy explanation, at the steering wheel. At some point he would have to look Leskov in his bright, grey eyes and tell him that he had destroyed his text. The text he had put everything into. The text that had helped him win his post. That he had simply set it down in the road under the exhaust like a pile of rubbish, of filth.

It was impossible.

Pian dei Ratti. The factory, the pines, the Renault poster. Wait for the front of the truck with the big lights. Sit next to Leskov again, silent and mute. Drive off once more, the whistling noise again and the feeling about the glasses.

It was impossible.

Perlmann got in and drove on towards Uscio and Recco. He drove fast on the almost deserted road, just fast enough for Leskov not to protest. Perlmann didn’t want another thought ever to pass through his head ever again. The Lancia took the many bends effortlessly. Only once, on a sharp curve to the right, did it sound as if the tires were touching the crushed metal.

‘I expected us to get to the hotel more quickly,’ Leskov said at one point. ‘What time is dinner?’

In Recco, when they turned into the alleyway leading to the coast road, it was just before seven. Perlmann stopped at a gas station. ‘Just a moment,’ he said and disappeared into the toilet, where the stench of urine took his breath away. He propped himself on the washbasin and threw up. But hardly anything came, apart from mucus and gastric acid; in the end it was nothing but dry retching. The face in the mirror was as white as a ghost. Under his nose and on his chin there was dried, almost black blood. His hair on his forehead was damp with sweat. He shovelled cold water into his face and then rubbed it dry with the sleeve of his jacket.

He would have to behave towards this Russian, who repelled him and whose paternal tone he found unbearable, as one does towards a father confessor, with the hope of absolution. And Perlmann would be in his thrall for ever, for good or ill. It was inconceivable.

But then there was this calculation: it was no longer possible that his deception would remain undiscovered. There was nothing more, absolutely nothing, that Perlmann could have done to deflect the exposure. So there was only the question of how many people would find out – whether the discovery would stop with Leskov, or reach everyone else. And looking at it quite soberly everything argued for at least making the attempt. He no longer had anything to lose.

A fat man came in. Perlmann gave a start. For a moment he thought it was Leskov. He couldn’t meet him at the moment. He wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t want it to be a confession in a stinking toilet. He locked himself in a stall. He wanted to sit down and rest his head in his hands, but it was a squat toilet, so all he could do was lean against the door, his forehead and nose pressed hard against the greasy plastic.

It wasn’t true that he had nothing to lose. But it was a while before Perlmann could summon the necessary concentration. The crux of it was this: if he didn’t confess to the murder plan straight away – and that was simply unthinkable – he had no plausible explanation for getting rid of the second version. That wouldn’t matter in the slightest if Leskov acknowledged the English text as his own. So what had he imagined he would achieve by getting rid of it? You should have got rid of me at the same time, Leskov could say. The separating wall that might still exist between that remark and the apprehension of the truth would be extremely thin, and could at any moment collapse if Leskov thought again about the tunnel.

And then Perlmann suddenly had the vision of Leskov, now in command of all moral authority, telling him to turn round and collect the crushed and scattered pages. He saw himself creeping around in the dark on the embankment, and scurrying back and forth across the carriageway in front of beeping cars with flashing headlights.

Battling against the sharp stench of urine, he breathed in deeply and then very slowly out. A confession was impossible. It was impossible.

‘This is how I’ve always imagined the Riviera by night,’ said Leskov as he looked down on Recco and later on Rapallo. ‘Exactly like this. It’s fantastic!’

Perlmann didn’t look. He stared at the road, lit by the one-sided beam of light. He drove, and with each passing meter he concentrated only on the fact that he was driving. Although his gums still stung from the gastric acid, he would have given anything for a cigarette. But the 1,600 lire – his money – hadn’t been enough to buy a pack. Right at the back of his consciousness, with dull indifference, he registered that his thinking had been correct: for the first plan – the car rolling over the edge – the coast road would have been out of the question.

‘Who’s going to be presenting the final paper this week?’ asked Leskov as the lights of Santa Margherita came into view.

Once again, one last time on this journey, Perlmann gave a start. Over the last four tormented, breathless hours he had managed not to address Leskov directly, and avoided using the familiar you. It had been difficult at times, and had involved all kinds of linguistic somersaults. There must be a sentence, he thought, that would do it. But his brain couldn’t do it any more, so he said it: ‘You. Du.’

They turned the corner. The crooked pine. The streetlamps. The neon sign. The painted window frames. The flags. There were lights on in Millar’s, Ruge’s and Evelyn Mistral’s rooms. Perlmann drove up to the gas station parking lot. It was closed. So no questions about the body damage. When he lifted Leskov’s suitcase out of the trunk, he saw a bit of the red rubber band that had got stuck in the zip of the outside pocket. ‘Along here,’ he said and, as if he were Leskov’s servant, he picked up a case in each hand.

38

What happened then was something that Perlmann had seen in his mind’s eye so many times that it was more or less exhausted from being imagined. Now that it was actually taking place it was just a scene that had been rehearsed ad nauseam – flat, papery and without the reality of experience; the only real thing was the angular wooden handle on Leskov’s suitcase, which was cutting into his hand. But there was no relief associated with that unreality. On the contrary, the sensation of waste and death that clung to the walk up the steps was, as Perlmann knew, an expression of the utmost horror. His gait was more sluggish than the luggage called for, and his body felt like that of a puppet, each movement of which had to be put individually into action. It took him a huge effort of will to impel that body step by step closer to the front door.

As he entered the portico, he noticed that Leskov was no longer following him. He was standing at the top of the steps, looking up at the illuminated facade of the hotel.

‘Fantastic!’ he called breathlessly to Perlmann and, with his arm, his coat hanging over it, made a gesture that encompassed the whole hotel. Then he turned round, supported himself on the balustrade and looked out on the nocturnal view of the bay.

Perlmann set the luggage down. Waiting for Leskov was unbearable. Admittedly, it meant that the moment of his exposure was momentarily deferred. But this waiting was worse than any other waiting, worse even than the waiting at the airport a short time before. There it had been a waiting at the end of which he himself would assume control – bloody, murderous control, admittedly, but at least he could do something; it was down to him what would happen next and when. Now, on the other hand, there was nothing more he could do. He was no longer an active participant in the events that would follow. Now he was only their victim, their plaything. He had to wait impotently until Leskov condescended to emerge from his absorption to take delivery of the text that spelled the end for Perlmann. And Perlmann had to linger in that waiting, regardless of whether it lasted hours, days or years. His humiliation was his own responsibility, and his alone. But that insight was unbearable. He couldn’t stay on his own with it for more than a brief moment. He would explode if he locked himself away in it entirely, in line with the terrible logic of the matter. He needed some exoneration, someone who could bear at least a portion of the guilt, so this feeling of humiliation struck in blind hatred at Leskov, who came now, at last, a dreamy and enthusiastic expression on his spongy face.

He touched Perlmann on the arm. ‘I’ll never forget,’ he said, ‘that you invited me to this divine place.’

The lobby was empty as they walked across the gleaming marble floor to the reception. Perlmann saw the text from a long way off. There was only a single pigeonhole with a pile of papers sticking out of it. And now his anxiety returned to its usual form of expression: he felt his heart thumping all the way to his throat. There was no one behind the counter. I’ll just go and grab the text. The thought overwhelmed him. It allowed no other thoughts, no reflection and no contradiction. He quickly walked around the counter and took the text from the pigeonhole. He was about to roll it up to hide it from Leskov, when Signora Morelli appeared behind him: ‘Sorry, Signor Perlmann, for keeping you waiting.’

Perlmann froze. The force of the thought that had made him take the text had to fade away before he could react.

‘Oh, I must have given you a start,’ said Signora Morelli. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ And now, as Perlmann turned to face her, she saw the blood on his clothes. ‘Dio mio!’ she exclaimed and threw her hand to her mouth. ‘What’s happened?’

Perlmann looked down at himself, as if trying to recall something long forgotten. ‘Oh, that,’ he said as if Signora Morelli had grotesquely lost all sense of proportion, ‘that was just a bit of a nosebleed.’ He rolled the text up tightly, as if he were about to stuff it into a pneumatic post system. ‘I… I was just about to give Signor Leskov the text.’ Standing next to her, he made a gesture of introduction. ‘This is Professor Vassily Leskov, the man I told you about,’ he said in English.

‘Benvenuto!’ she smiled, blankly shaking the hand that Leskov held out to her across the counter.

As Perlmann, still clutching the text, walked around the counter and back to Leskov, he had the feeling that his alert reaction had used up the very last remnants of his strength. He would never again be capable of an alert reaction, never. And why all that effort at concealment? As soon as he starts reading the text upstairs, it will all be over in a few minutes anyway. And on top of everything, here I am handing him the text myself.

Signora Morelli had pushed a pad of registration forms towards Leskov, and he was now busy filling it in. He became uneasy when she said that she would be keeping his passport for a while, and enquired anxiously when he would get it back, as it still had his travel permit inside it. The signora reassured him that he could have it back after dinner; it was just a matter of routine. When she took his room key down from the board, she paused, fished an envelope out from the back of the drawer and handed it to Leskov. The Olivetti name was printed discreetly in olive green letters in the bottom left-hand corner.

‘Signor Angelini asked me to give you this. You’ll be seeing him later at dinner.’ With the corners of her mouth twitching, she watched Leskov feeling the envelope and then, with the clumsiness that came from embarrassment, putting it in his jacket pocket. She rang the bell for a porter to take his luggage.

The time had come. Perlmann handed the text to Leskov. That movement sealed his fate, and was enfolded in the numbing silence of a nightmare. He didn’t utter a single word and their eyes met only fleetingly.

Leskov received the text rather distractedly, because the porter was loading his luggage on to the cart, which he seemed to consider very strange. He bent down to his suitcase and opened the zip of the outside pocket. The piece of rubber band remained stuck in it. Now he’ll notice. Now.

‘Good evening,’ said Brian Millar, who had joined them along with Adrian von Levetzov. Leskov glanced up and straightened himself, still holding the text in his hand.

‘I assume you’re Vassily Leskov,’ Millar said in his sonorous voice. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He looked at Leskov’s hand. ‘I see you’ve been given the text already.’

‘What in God’s name has happened to you?’ von Levetzov cried, interrupting the greeting, and pointing at Perlmann’s clothes.

‘Philipp had a flow of blood from the nose,’ said Leskov as he saw Perlmann standing there like a sleepwalker. It was the first time Perlmann had heard him speaking English. The ungainliness of the sentence and the tight, nasal pronunciation sounded like mockery. It was as if he had just started running the gauntlet.

They wouldn’t disturb him any longer, von Levetzov said and pointed to the waiting porter. They would be seeing each other over dinner at half-past eight, after all.

By now the suitcase with the open outside pocket was on the cart as well. ‘So, see you very soon,’ said Leskov, waving the text significantly and following the porter to the elevator.

Perlmann watched him go. He had never fainted. Now he wished it would happen, so that he wouldn’t have to experience that sensation any longer, the sensation of endless falling.

‘You’re as white as a sheet,’ said Signora Morelli. ‘Are you not well? Would you like to lie down?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Perlmann, and looked at her for a long time until she became embarrassed and ran her hand searchingly over her hair. I’ve got to tell someone before the others find out. Why not her? But no, that’s impossible. What would she do with such a confession? And it wouldn’t change anything at all.

She handed him the key and made a maternal face that he had never seen before. ‘It must have been a difficult journey from Genoa to here,’ she said. ‘There’s always a lot of traffic on a Monday, especially trucks.’

‘Yes,’ Perlmann said, barely audibly. He took his key and went to the elevator.

He sat on the bed and slumped back. A few moments before, when he had closed the door behind him and seen the spacious room in front of him, he had had a moment of relief: after four full hours spent in such close proximity with Leskov, he was alone again at last. Leaning on the door, he had stood there for a while and yielded to that feeling of respite, knowing that it was a stolen emotion, a lie that could be washed away by anxiety at any moment. It wouldn’t have been washed away exactly. It was more that the desperate consciousness of his situation had seeped up from below, constant and inexorable, and had colored and replaced all other sensations. He had gone to the wardrobe and pulled a yearned-for cigarette from the hastily torn-open pack. But he had stubbed it out again after two drags.

Now he had room for only a single sensation: the feeling of not knowing what to do with himself. In his mind he could relocate to any place imaginable, any corner of the universe – but he always felt the same thing: I have no right to be here. He felt as if he had to wring every last breath from that ruthless, devastating sensation. There was that one point from which all experience emanated and to which everything flowed back, that inner center that he always carried around with him. Again and again Perlmann attempted to withdraw entirely into that center, and find his footing at its midmost point, to put a small bit of difference between him and the overwhelming, overarching feelings of guilt and shame, a distance that would have allowed him to say: So I am something else, too; you can’t judge me in the light of this single offence. But attempt after attempt failed. Guilt and shame remained hot on his heels; wherever he turned, they followed him into the innermost depths like a shadow. He tried to duck away, and to keep taking a step back and inwards, but there was no escape. He said to himself, pressing his fists to his temples, that he, too, had a past, and that there were things in it that he had done properly. But even that was useless, the feelings that held him as if in a stranglehold refused to accept that appeal, that defense, as valid.

Exhausted by all his vain attempts to assert himself, it seemed simply impossible that he would survive even the next second, which appeared to be taking an infinity to come. And that was something quite different from the prolongation of time that took place in the anxiety and uncertainty before making a decision. Then time was extended towards a goal. You knew that the tension would ease sooner or later, even if the outcome was not a good one, and that you would then return to the normal flow of time, its normal pace. Now, however, there was no goal and no uncertainty, which meant there was no longer any hope, either, that he would soon be able to yield to the natural self-evidence and inconspicuousness of temporal flux. His own private time beyond all present, which had emerged the previous morning from his fatal resolution, had dissolved into nothing somewhere beyond the tunnel, and he yearned to return to ordinary, shared time. But that wasn’t possible now, either. Because that ordinary time led into an open future, while his future was no longer open. The discovery of the deception by the others in a sense closed off his time. It walled it up. It brought time to an end as something in the course of which his own experience could develop. Time now was only this: a sequence of weary, extended moments stripped of possibility. Each individual one of those moments was to be awaited in its pure passing, one moment after the other, in all eternity and without any hope. It was hell.

He wished he could fall into a profound unconsciousness that lacked any center of experience, so that there was no longer anyone whose presence was illegitimate. But Leskov could phone him up or knock on his door at any minute. Leskov had been distracted when he had been given the text, but by now he was in his room and no longer had to worry about his luggage. Perhaps he would take a shower first, get changed and then look out on to the bay again. It could also be that he was excited about dinner with all of his colleagues, and would at first simply put aside the text. But it was equally possible that he had immediately unrolled the papers in the elevator and cast a first glance at it. The altered title would have protected Perlmann for an instant, but even then Leskov might not have immediately recognized it as his text. It was in English, after all, and hence estranged from itself. Later, a barrier of disbelief would have formed in Leskov’s mind, and then, gradually, dissolved as he went on reading, until the initially vague sense of familiarity would have condensed into certainty. That could be now. Right now.

On the way back to the hotel Perlmann had imagined Leskov working out the whole truth in an instant. But, he thought now, that was not the obvious thing to assume. Since Perlmann’s name was not on the text, for a moment Leskov would not suspect him of plagiarism. Instead he would assume that Perlmann had arranged the perfect surprise for him: first telling him on the way there that the Russian text had been still far too difficult for him, then handing him, without further comment, the translation that he had, in fact, produced. Leskov could not help but feel flattered – almost overwhelmed, in fact, by the idea that someone like Philipp Perlmann might take all that time to translate such a long text. He would find the work significant, outstanding; there was no other possible explanation. Excited and filled with gratitude, Leskov would pick up the phone or come up to his room. Perlmann could almost hear him knocking at the door already. On the other hand it might have occurred to him what a shame it was that it wasn’t a translation of the second, far superior version. He would reach into the outside pocket of his suitcase, and freeze. He would be flummoxed, then rummage around in the whole case, again and again. But he wouldn’t suspect anything. On the contrary, once again he would be extravagantly grateful for Perlmann’s gift, because now he would at least be able to present this version. And again Perlmann felt as if he could already hear Leskov’s footsteps in the corridor.

He couldn’t stay there. He would have to pretend to be deaf and let each individual ring, every individual knock wash over him. And Leskov would try it for a long time, and again and again, because according to Signora Morelli’s information Perlmann hadn’t left his room. Perlmann got up and, without really noticing, he was glad that for the time being he had a goal, even if only a vague one.

He took off his shoes, and only now, when the pressure eased, did he become aware that his toes had been hurting for many hours, and that the dull pain had turned them into a single, unfeeling lump. But there was no time to rub them. He was quickly slipping into his other trousers when he noticed that they were the ones with the torn leg. Now the only pair he had were the pale trousers, far too light for a November night, even in the south. No time to put on a belt, Leskov was on the way, pullover and jacket – luckily he hadn’t changed the combination lock on the suitcase that morning: money, travellers’ checks and credit cards, the cigarettes, a splash of cold water on his face, the pack of sleeping pills – he slipped them into his trouser pocket without a thought; it was like a reflex. It was only in the doorway that he looked at his watch: eight thirty-two. He closed the door. He would have to wait for at least five minutes, otherwise he risked bumping into the others.

So Leskov hadn’t read it yet. Or else he planned to thank him for the translation over dinner, loudly, impossible for the others to ignore. When Perlmann walked to the window he saw the piece of paper with Kirsten’s address on the desk. It had been moved. And the red lighter was in a different position on the round table from earlier that morning. The chambermaid.

By now they would all be sitting at the table. Leskov would be uneasy and, in spite of his gratitude, a little annoyed that his host hadn’t come down to introduce him to everyone. Millar would be furious at Perlmann’s repeated social solecisms – he could have been punctual today of all days. Millar would have no hesitation in acting as substitute host – Perlmann could hear him using the English word, self-righteous and accusatory. But perhaps Angelini would have anticipated him and taken control of things with all his skill and charm.

Perlmann shifted Kirsten’s lighter slightly, and straightened the piece of paper with her address on it. He had just opened the door when it occurred to him: the text. He had to get rid of the text, which he had put under the telephone book that morning. The thought was not the result of a reflection. It wasn’t deduced from something else. It was just there all of a sudden, and it involved an irresistible need to get rid of that stack of papers. He took the pile out of the desk drawer. His breathing quickened. Where can it go? He couldn’t carry it through the hotel, exposed like that. His suitcase was still in the car. At last he jammed it between the covers of the big hotel folder with the menu, the prospectuses and the writing paper. With his hand on the door handle, he turned round. Whatever happened now, he would never step inside this room again. He had no idea what would become of his things, his clothes, books and papers – where they would be taken to and by whom. He just knew this one thing: here, in this hotel, no one would ever see him again.

When the door shut, the telephone rang inside the room. They’ve started looking for me. Unseen, he made it to the rear entrance.

39

It would soon be very dark behind the rocky outcrop from which the reflection of the city lights could no longer be seen, and the calm, black surface of the water struck Perlmann as quietly menacing. Over by Sestri Levante there flowed an endless stream of light, and far in the distance a ship was just visible, a light blinking rhythmically in its bow. In the long pauses between the cars he listened to the quiet rush of the little waves, and the exhaustion that numbed him helped him to think of nothing. At one point he gave a start, when a young couple walked in a close embrace. And only now, when the hotel folder nearly slipped over the balustrade, did be become aware of how absurd, how utterly nonsensical it had been to smuggle his copy of Leskov’s text out of the hotel, when all the others had a copy already. ‘Now I’m losing my grip on the simplest things,’ he said into the night, and he felt the weird sensation creeping over him that his thoughts were going off the rails and his ability to think was silently disintegrating.

He started shivering. Heading on towards Portofino was out of the question; the cat with the divided face was there, and the landlord in suspenders, knocking at the door. And that way it was dark, dark and cold. Perlmann walked hesitantly back to the rocky outcrop, the folder under his arm, his hands in his pockets. He looked across to the hotels and on to the city and its lights like someone standing on the threshold of a forbidden world.

The Miramare looked like something out of an advertising prospectus, very elegant, the illumination of the porch and the floodlights in the pines made it look mysterious, enticing, seductive, and then there were the white neon letters against a royal blue background – film images, dream images. From here, the front windows of the dining room were concealed by the columns, but through the furthest one back he thought he could make out a chandelier.

He could neither go forwards into that glittering world nor back into the dark. He felt as if he could no longer take a single step in his life, as if he were damned to stand for ever in that one place.

Outside the Regina Elena Hotel a taxi stopped, and the driver helped an old woman out. Perlmann ran as if he had to catch the last taxi in the world. The folder was cumbersome, the covers forced apart by the thickness of the text, he waved and called, and by the time he breathlessly reached it, the driver had already turned on the engine. He got into the back and gave his destination as the Hotel Imperiale. As they drove past the Miramare, he shielded his head with the hotel folder, feeling as if he were in a cheap thriller full of kitsch and clichés. On the hill leading up to the Imperiale it occurred to him that he couldn’t enter the hotel with the folder, on which the word miramare was engraved in big gold letters. He took out the text and quietly slid the folder under the passenger seat.

The chairs by the window, where he had sat with Kirsten, were occupied by a group of elegantly dressed people who were celebrating something, drinking champagne and laughing loudly as Perlmann came in. He sat down in the dark corner, where the light seemed to be broken, and ordered a whisky and a mineral water. Kirsten had been particularly impressed by that: a waiter coming all the way from the bar to serve them. You feel so important, and rich, she had said, and he had seen how her enjoyment of this elegant world was in conflict with other, contrary attitudes that she had expressed for a long time, attitudes typical of her generation.

He set Leskov’s text face down on the low marble table and lit a cigarette. His lungs felt dirty and sticky after the two packs he had already smoked today, and in the taxi a few moments ago his dry cough had been very painful and seemingly endless. But that was no longer of any importance. He wasn’t hungry, but he did feel queasy, and a strange weakness all the way through his body gave him the ridiculous feeling of sitting uncertainly in the high-armed chair. When the waiter brought the drinks, he ordered a sandwich. He would have to force it down. But he did have to eat something.

He had never before found himself in this situation of not having the faintest idea how his thoughts – if he ever had any ever again – might continue. It wasn’t blindness. It wasn’t like trying to stare through a plank. It was a sensation of hopelessness that settled on the imagination like mildew, coated it with a milky and impenetrable whiteness and completely paralyzed it. Nonetheless, now, at the end, making a mistake out of pure physical weakness – that was something he didn’t want to do.

Twenty-five past nine. Now they would all know. Over dinner the conversation would have turned to tomorrow’s session, and Leskov would have asked if there was a written text by Perlmann – he’d forgotten to ask him as they drove to the hotel. Millar had looked up in amazement. He himself had put a copy of Perlmann’s text in Leskov’s pigeonhole, and he, Leskov, had been holding it in his hand when they had greeted him earlier on. No, no, Leskov would have replied, perplexed, that had been something quite different; a surprise that Perlmann had prepared for him: an English translation of a text that he, Leskov, had written. He had been utterly flummoxed to discover how much massive effort Perlmann had taken with it, and he could still scarcely believe it. Such overwhelming kindness! And it seemed to be an excellent translation: it was only with the title that Perlmann had made a curious error. Leskov was also especially grateful for that, because he could now give them all something in writing to hold, particularly since a terrible slip had occurred: he had left another text, which he had planned to talk about here – the new version of the one translated by Perlmann – at home in St Petersburg, although he could have sworn he had packed it. But it wasn’t so bad after all. He could explain the changes orally. Tomorrow morning he would ask for copies to be made for all of them, in preparation for the session that he was, as Perlmann had told him, to hold on Thursday.

At first, thought Perlmann, there would be a pause. Evelyn Mistral understood now why Perlmann had wanted to keep his Russian a secret. He saw her laughing face as she spoke of her complicity. The confusion would only set in later on when she had worked out that his secrecy had been illogical: if it was Leskov that he wanted to surprise, why couldn’t the others know? And if the game of hide-and-seek was supposed to be part of the surprise prepared for Leskov’s arrival, why had he been playing it weeks before the telegram, when he could not have known that Leskov was on his way? But those questions had never been asked.

It would be Achim Ruge, Perlmann imagined, who would ask the crucial, annihilating question. He would pose it quite dryly and – a sign of tense foreboding – savor his Swabian pronunciation: what was the title of Perlmann’s translation that he had got so wrong? the personal past as linguistic creation, Leskov would say. A crass and somehow incomprehensible error of translation, but still a beautiful title, much more so than his own, and apt. He would ask Perlmann’s permission to use it in future, of course with the appropriate reference to him.

It would have gone quiet at the table, Perlmann thought, incredibly quiet. He saw the others pausing as they ate, and staring at their plates. They couldn’t believe their ears; what followed on from this information was too monstrous to contemplate. At first they didn’t look at each other, each one of them wondered whether there mightn’t be another, harmless explanation.

‘So you think,’ Millar asked after a while, speaking dangerously slowly, ‘that the text headed the personal past as linguistic creation is a text that you wrote and Perlmann merely translated?’

‘Erm… yes, that is the case,’ Leskov replied uncertainly, confused and alarmed at Millar’s tone and the jerky, jabbing movements that he made with his knife.

The renewed silence must have been deafening.

‘That is incredible,’ murmured Millar, ‘simply incredible.’ Catching Leskov’s quizzical eye he went on: ‘You see, Vassily, it is a sad fact that we have all, each individual one of us, been given a copy of this very text. Admittedly, Phil’s name isn’t on it, but we were led to believe it was his contribution to tomorrow’s session. He hasn’t handed out any other text, or done anything to rectify the situation. There is also the fact,’ he might have added, ‘that the text was distributed at a point in time when no one knew of your arrival, not even Phil himself. All of this forces us to assume that Perlmann wanted to deceive us by presenting your text as his own. Plagiarism, then. Unimaginable, but there is no other explanation for it. And now we can no longer be surprised that he hasn’t appeared at dinner.’

It took Perlmann for ever to take the first bite of the sandwich. He chewed and chewed; each movement of his jaw was an achievement. The smoked salmon and egg didn’t taste of anything, and the obstruction that had formed in his throat could only be overcome by pushing very hard with his eyes closed. Of course, it was Millar who had voiced the thought. Perlmann’s old hatred flared, and despair made it even darker than usual. He set the bread back down on the table and started taking small sips of his whisky.

He didn’t dare to imagine Leskov’s face after the revelation of the truth, which had started working away in him after his first shock. The many curious features of the journey suddenly returned to his mind, and assembled themselves into a pattern: Perlmann’s irritation at the airport; his agitation at the wheel and his taciturnity; the strange route; the nausea; the insane driving in the tunnel and the lame explanations afterwards. Leskov couldn’t prove anything, even though he had been watching Perlmann like a hawk. There hadn’t been a single false move, nothing that would have clearly and irrefutably revealed an intention to commit murder. That someone, at a moment when a wide car had to be driven through a bottleneck, should have taken his hands off the wheel and closed his eyes, was careless, negligent and even more irresponsible than speeding. It wasn’t even superficially comprehensible, and pointed to a darkness in the driver’s personality. But it wasn’t a trace – not a shadow of proof – of premeditated murder. That much was clear to Leskov, too, so he wouldn’t tell anyone; such an accusation was too monstrous. Even in confidence he wouldn’t be able to accuse him. He couldn’t prove that Perlmann’s story about nausea and a morbid fear of bulldozers were outright lies. And yet Perlmann was quite sure that this evening – now, at this moment – Leskov knew everything. It was completely out of the question for him ever to meet this man, who would regard him as a murderer, ever again.

When Perlmann’s hand accidentally brushed the edge of the table, the bandage on his finger came off. It was only now that he noticed that his finger was very swollen. Around the bruised spot it was yellow and green, the skin was tense and hot. And now his head was itchy again as well. He took out the box of sleeping pills, held them under his jacket, looked furtively around and took one from it. After a moment’s hesitation he broke it in two and washed one half down with mineral water.

They would all be waiting for him in silence when he stepped into the Marconi Veranda tomorrow morning.

‘You’ve all got this text now,’ he would be able to say with a smile. ‘I hope you didn’t mistake it for my own, even though my name isn’t on it. By now I am sure you will know that it is a text by our Russian colleague, which I have translated. I had it distributed because it was to serve as the starting point for an idea I should like to develop now. And it is a happy coincidence that Vassily himself can now be here. I expect a great deal from this.’

It would be an audacious bluff. Perlmann grew quite dizzy at the idea, and that dizziness merged with the start of the effect of the pill. They wouldn’t believe a word he said, not a single word. They knew he was a fraud, a con man, and now they were also getting to know him as an ice-cold liar. He would never summon the strength to return each of their contemptuous stares with harsh defiance, forcing them into a state of uncertainty. They would only be uncertain if he now proceeded to deliver a thoroughly original, brilliant lecture. But he had nothing to say, not a single sentence. He would stand up there at the front like someone mutely gasping for air.

Or should he sit up there and in dry words, stony-faced, tell the truth? What words would he use? How many sentences would he need? Where would he look? And when he had said it, what then? Could one, in fact, apologize for such a thing? Was it not almost mockery simply to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry’ and then get up and go? And where to?

Could one go on living with such ostracism? Really live and inwardly develop, so that you weren’t merely crouching and creeping, enduring and surviving, vegetating? You would have to find a possible way of making yourself independent of the judgment of others and of the need for recognition. A way of becoming free, truly free. All of a sudden Perlmann felt calmer. The surge of panic and despair subsided, and he seemed to be standing very close to a crucial, redeeming insight, the most important of his whole life. Why, then, should it not be possible to withdraw entirely from his professional role, his public identity, into his private, authentic person, the identity that was the only thing that counted?

Basically, it had been simply the pleasure of translating – his old love of jumping back and forth between linguistic worlds, his dream of being an interpreter – that had brought him back repeatedly to Leskov’s text. That was how he was. There was nothing wrong with it. He could stand by it. No intention to deceive had been involved, either consciously or as a hidden undercurrent. He was absolutely sure of that. It was just how things were. He didn’t need to persuade himself. And the rest – the rest had been self-defense. He had held Leskov’s text up in front of him as a shield protecting him against the intrusive eyes of the others, against their unchanging, monotonously updated expectations, which they treated as if people developed in an uninterrupted, linear fashion – as if the successful life consisted in making those professional decisions that were taken early, too early, and that hardly ever merited the name in any case, in total identification, with a complete lack of emotional detachment, decade after decade. What do you want to be? You have to be something. Whatever would become of him? Those were the principles his parents expressed over lunch and dinner. He had heard them countless times, and they had sunk into his deepest depths, and deeper still. They were sentences that had never been up for discussion. They came along hypnotically, as if they were completely natural, and in their monotonous, thoughtless repetition they became a background noise, so vast and all-consuming in its diabolical self-evidence that afterwards one couldn’t imagine what a life without it might be like.

You have to be something, or you’re nothing. That was the axiom, in all its perfidious simplicity and obviousness. He would take it, that iron axiom, Perlmann thought, he would summon all his powers, even those at the hindmost corner of his soul, and then use those concentrated powers to bend it until it broke. What he had become – a respected professor with prizes and an invitation to Princeton – he was as of tonight no longer. That was destroyed. But that was a long way from saying he was nothing now. There was a great deal left in him, a very great deal, and the others had no idea about it. He would lodge himself in there, and then it would be a question of making his soul quite spherical and coating it with wax so that everything would slide off it, even the hostile glances of the others. He would walk along the streets quite upright, with his head held high.

It was a liberating train of thought. But it was still new, so it threatened, as soon as it had concluded, to slip away again. He would have to repeat it often and, so to speak, internally perform it, until it was solidly rooted within him. Perlmann took the second half of the pill out of the box and swallowed it, along with what remained of the whisky. His finger didn’t hurt any more, and the itch in his scalp had faded away. He ate the sandwich. He had a future again. He felt comfortable in the deep armchair and was pleased that he immediately recognized the melody that reached him from across the bar. The crucial thing was not to lose one’s sense of proportion. What did it matter, from the point of view of eternity, whether the thirty-seven pages which were, in the end, quite unimportant, came from his pen or from Leskov’s? Who really cared seriously about that? There were milky ways and beyond them more milky ways, without end, and here, on this tiny clump of earth, imprisoned in their insignificant little lives, which would be completely forgotten after a few decades, they made a hell of their lives for a handful of letters. It was laughable, quite simply laughable. Perlmann tried to imagine what people’s coexistence would look like if everyone always considered himself and others from the point of view of eternity. But he couldn’t quite do it. The question was hard to grasp and kept slipping away again. But that didn’t matter. The main thing was not to lose sight of the correct proportions. The corrected proportions. Proportions.

When he – addressed by the waiter – started from his half-sleep, it was five to eleven and the room was empty. He was going to stop serving soon, the waiter said, and asked if Perlmann wanted anything else. Perlmann ordered a mineral water. He had a dry mouth and a thick, furry tongue. He no longer had the faintest idea of what had happened for the past hour. He was shivering. He didn’t know where to go from here. Not a single step. He still had four pills. That wasn’t enough. He took the text and went outside, without waiting for the waiter and without paying.

The cool night air made him dizzy, but it also felt good. On the way down to the big square he saw a garbage bin in a side street. It seemed to belong to a hotel or a restaurant, because kitchen smells came from the extractor fan above it, and he could hear the clatter of cutlery. Apart from a layer of potato peelings the bin was empty. That was the third time today that Perlmann had got rid of a text. He was good at it, and he felt as if he had been busy doing nothing else for weeks. But this time it was something special. Because this time it was completely pointless. It was as if he were destroying his copy of a newspaper in order to impose a news blackout.

Perlmann rested both arms on the edge of the bin and started laughing quietly. In the hope of relief he tried to keep that laughter going and to spur it on from within, but it was hysterical laughter that soon dried up and turned to retching. The papers fell on top of the rubbish.

At Piazza Vittorio Veneto he caught a taxi to the Regina Elena. He asked the driver to stop in a dark spot near the hotel. He flicked through his banknotes and gave him the biggest one, a 100,000 lire note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said.

‘Ma no, Signore,’ the driver stammered, ‘I can’t take that. Can’t you see what you’ve given me?’ He held the bill right under the ceiling light.

‘It’s fine,’ Perlmann said irritably and got out.

He sat right at the end of the little beach jetty reserved for hotel guests and set the pills down next to him. Walking into the water with his clothes on and swimming out further and further until his strength gave out. Since that day at the public baths it had always been a drama if his head went under water when he was swimming. But the pills helped. He wouldn’t feel much, and soon he would lose consciousness.

A wave of pill-weariness washed over him, and then there was a void. He was glad the beach was unlit. He could only think very slowly, and often lost the thread.

It was an undramatic, quiet way of saying goodbye to life. No onlookers, no excitement after a bombshell. Tomorrow a police boat would pull him from the water. That was all. It accorded with his desire to disappear unnoticed from the world. He wished he could also magically ensure that all the traces that he had left in the minds of the others would be erased. As if he had never existed.

A textbook suicide, he thought, practically classic: a man who can see no way of escaping his shame. Forty-eight hours ago, after looking down the hotel facade, he had rejected that way out. It had been the thought of the judgment of the others that had put him off. But back then there had still seemed to be some leeway, a set of other possibilities. He could still plan things that might have prevented his exposure. And that had created a perspective from which something could be pondered and rejected. Now that the only possibility left to him was the black water out there, when he thought about the others he had a new, strange experience. It was actually too complicated for his heavy head, and everything was intermittently suspended as if he were having a blackout. Then he shivered all the more violently in his thin trousers on the cold stone. Nonetheless, he kept returning to that experience. He homed in on it and, in the end, he managed to grasp it more precisely and dependably.

It was the experience of an unexpected inner disengagement. He had to concentrate on one of those feared people, on that person’s face, but even more on their atmospheric outlines, on the kind of situation that they created through their presence. The important thing was not to avoid the threatening and almost unbearable feelings which arose when he thought of the judgment that that person up there in their illuminated hotel room had by now formed about him, and to which tomorrow they might, once he had been found, add the thought of cowardice. The important thing was to let these feelings get near him without resisting them, and to stand up to them with disciplined calm. After a while, the person in question lost their threatening, oppressive proximity and began to retreat. His dented soul was able to bulge outwards, the tormenting feelings slowly died away, and he was free. It was an ethereal and fragile freedom that was coming into being, a floating present in which one seemed to be balanced on the point of a needle. He was on a narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the life behind him, a life interwoven with the lives of others, and the darkness in front of him, in which life would be no more. Being free like this could have been a form of happiness, had it not been for the black water, which would rise higher with each step he took. And without the water, he sensed with great clarity, that freedom would not exist. If he turned round and returned to the land, it would have fled in a moment, and the others would have buried him beneath their stares.

The one face that refused to go away was Kirsten’s. On the contrary, the longer he saw it in his mind’s eye, the harder it was to let go of it. He had had no opportunity to explain it to her. The news of his suicide, followed by the news of his deception, would fall on her as if from a clear sky. For her they would stand together dry and mute, those two pieces of information: he had perpetrated a deception, and when the matter came to light, he had walked into the water. He would sound like the little clerk who had taken money from the cash register.

It was so shabby, so shockingly shabby, that familiar story, its short version untrue, even for the little clerk. Somehow Kirsten might sense that it wasn’t true for him, either. But she had no way of getting to the true story all by herself, or even getting close to it. He had never talked to her about his profession slipping away. Or about his unsuccessful delimitation from others. Or about the fact that a preoccupation with languages was his attempt to regain a tiny shadow of the fleeting present. Those weren’t things that one could explain to a person of her age. Or at least he had always assumed as much.

But perhaps that was wrong, Perlmann thought, and he started talking to his daughter under his breath. At first the words came out only haltingly. He spoke them into the quiet, dark water, and only occasionally raised his eyes to look into Kirsten’s face for signs of understanding. Later the things he had to say came fluently. He began to sound more convincing, even to himself, and Kirsten started nodding. Admittedly, his tongue remained heavy, his lips didn’t always obey, and some words were blurred. But Kirsten wasn’t repelled. She understood, so he didn’t need to be embarrassed and was able to go on talking, more and more, until everything was completely clear, its every impulse comprehensible. So that he could be forgiven.

He put the pills in his pocket, got up stiffly and uncertainly and went back to the street. He couldn’t drive himself in this state. But he could persuade a taxi driver to fetch his passport and drive him to Konstanz. If he paid a princely sum, one would certainly be found. He could sleep on the back seat, and by the time they arrived tomorrow morning he would have a clear head again, and clear speech. Then he could tell Kirsten everything, explain everything, just as he had just done a moment ago, only much more thoroughly and much better.

40

In the lobby of the Regina Elena, inebriated wedding guests were rowdily forcing a glass of champagne on the night porter, who was trying to conceal his annoyance behind a sour smile. Under these circumstances Perlmann couldn’t possibly ask him to call a cab. He wasn’t even a hotel guest. He had no gettoni, so phone boxes were of no use to him. He went over to the Miramare and leaned against the wall at the foot of the steps. Dart in quickly, say the few words to Giovanni and then immediately come back here to wait, unseen, for the taxi. He wouldn’t be in there for ten seconds. That he would, during that time, meet one of the others, was unlikely. It was already half-past twelve. But it wasn’t impossible. Laura Sand, for example, sometimes took another walk at this time.

Perlmann climbed the first few steps until he could see the entrance beyond the edge of the terrace. His heart was thumping, and his breathing, involuntarily, was quite shallow. Giovanni was propped with one elbow on the counter, reading the paper. Rethink. Again he leaned against the wall. Otherwise he would have to look for a taxi stand in town. He could drag himself as far as the station. But hardly any trains stopped there in the middle of the night. What would taxis be doing there? And he couldn’t remember another rank. He would wander, lead-limbed, through the quiet alleys, each step a form of torture. Again he glanced across to the reception. Giovanni was now leaning against the counter on outstretched arms, reading the page under him. Shadows stirred in the bar, and a moment later a grey-haired man walked through the hall to the elevator. It was too dangerous. Perlmann would have to wait for another hour or two. He closed his eyes. A paralysing irresolution took hold of him.

‘Buona sera, Dottore,’ said Signora Morelli, coming energetically downstairs, her coat flapping behind her. ‘Is… is something wrong? Are you waiting for someone?’

‘No, no… nothing,’ Perlmann replied, startled, and making a special effort with his pronunciation. And because it seemed impossible not to say anything else, he added: ‘You’re still here?’

‘Yes, sadly,’ she said and pulled a face. ‘Taxes, we have nothing but problems with taxes. It gets worse by the year. I was working on it until a moment ago.’ She smiled. ‘Well, yes, and it’s mad to run such a hotel without more managerial staff, almost like a family business.’

It was the first time he had heard anything so personal from her, and if he had still belonged to her world, and the world in general, rather than mutely nodding he would have loved to show an interest.

‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, already turning to go, ‘I put the original of your text in your pigeonhole. In my haste on Saturday I left it by the photocopier. I hope you didn’t miss it.’

Perlmann didn’t understand. And he didn’t want to understand. Never again did he want to have to understand a sentence with words in it like text, original and copy. Never again.

‘Venga,’ the signora said when she saw his blank face, and went back upstairs. It was impossible not to follow her. She shoved aside Giovanni, who looked up in surprise from the newspaper and was saying hello, and took a text out of Perlmann’s pigeonhole. ‘Eccolo,’ she said. ‘But now I really have to go. Buona notte!’

Giovanni looked at him quizzically when she had gone.

‘A taxi,’ he said. ‘I need a taxi.’ Giovanni reached for the receiver.

Perlmann realized then that he was confused by the fact that he stood there, contrary to his plan, as Giovanni made the call. He held the text limply in his dangling hand, and he held it the way you hold something that you’re going to drop in the gutter at the next possible opportunity. Never again did he want to hold a text in his hand. Never again.

The taxi company took its time, and an unpleasant, silent wait began. It was just to do something that Perlmann looked down at his hand that held the text. And it was a moment before he noticed the small, long card stuck under the paperclip that held the pile of papers together. Even before he knew what it said, something in him began to vibrate. He abruptly bent his arm, brought the card up in front of his eyes and read: 6 copie. Per il gruppo di Perlmann. Distribuire, come sempre. He didn’t understand. I threw away the original a little while ago. But his breathing quickened, he read again, lifted the card and saw the title: mestre non è brutta. Underneath, his name.

For a few seconds he stood there motionless, blind and deaf to his surroundings, wrapped in the beating of his blood. Maria. The call from Genoa. She finished typing up my notes. In spite of the people from Fiat.

It lasted until the thought had found its way to his body. Then Perlmann started running. He collided with the door, twisted his ankle on the steps and lost a shoe, but in spite of the pain and in spite of the cold cobbles he ran as he had never run in his whole life, clutching the rolled-up text in his fist like a relay baton. He got a stitch in his side and started coughing. Good God! I hope I’m thinking the right thing! Now he saw the figure of Signora Morelli walking along the marina. He ran with lungs that threatened to burst. There was no breath left to call out and, at last, when his soft knees refused to support him and he began to stumble, he had caught up with her. He couldn’t get a word out, just bent down breathlessly and coughed, his hands pressed to his ribs because of the stitch.

‘This note here,’ he panted at last, and now he no longer cared that his mouth wasn’t properly obeying him, ‘does this mean that you copied the text six times?’

‘Sì, Dottore,’ she said, and on her face her initial surprise made way for an expression of preparation for self-defense.

‘And those were the copies that you put in my colleagues’ pigeonholes on Saturday morning?’

‘Sì.’

‘And you didn’t copy and distribute any other text?’

‘No, Signor Perlmann,’ she said, now visibly annoyed with this breathless questioning, ‘this is the text that Maria gave me. I haven’t had another one.’

He held the papers up as closely in front of Signora Morelli’s face as if she were half-blind.

‘This text here? This one here? No other one?’

Signora Morelli’s tone changed when Perlmann lowered the pages and she recognized the harbingers of tears in his face.

‘But yes, Dottore,’ she said gently, ‘it was this text here, this one exactly, and only this one. What have I done wrong?’

‘Wrong? Nothing, nothing,’ he stammered between the sobs that he could no longer control, ‘on the contrary, this is… this is my salvation.’

He turned away and searched in vain for a handkerchief. Then he rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and looked at her again.

‘Many apologies,’ he said quietly and vainly resisted his returning tears. ‘I can’t explain it to you, but I have never felt such relief. It’s… indescribably great. Indescribably so.’

When he took his hand away from his eyes, she was looking at him as if she were seeing him properly for the first time. She smiled and touched his arm. ‘Then you should go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘You look completely exhausted.’

He watched her go until, without turning round, she disappeared down a side street. It was a moment of presence. A redemptive present that he would not have thought possible.

Then, when he walked back very slowly to savor the precious present, he felt as if he were treading on needles each time he set down his ice-cold foot, and a stinging pain in his lungs pierced him from time to time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more apart from his overwhelming relief. No plagiarism. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism. It was like slowly, disbelievingly, emerging from a very great, very dark depth, accompanied by a jumpiness that he thought he could feel in every fibre of his body. Again he read Maria’s instruction on the card. And then twice. It was that text that Signora Morelli had copied, exactly this one and only this one. That was what she said. Did she say it?

When he turned the corner and saw the crooked pines, which were no longer illuminated at this hour, but only stood out against the night sky with their milky greyish green, his relief blew apart, and he felt as if he were being pressed down into the depths again by an incredibly heavy weight. Giovanni must have made the copies himself and distributed them. That’s why she doesn’t know anything about Leskov’s text. An iron claw grabbed him by the chest, and each individual twinge in his foot was genuine torture as he hobbled hastily back, slipped into his lost shoe on the steps and walked, breathing heavily, to the reception desk.

‘On Friday night,’ he gasped, ‘when the football match was on television, I brought you a text. What did you do with it?’

Giovanni glanced down. ‘Erm… nothing,’ he said and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then, when he had expelled all the smoke, he looked at Perlmann uncertainly. ‘It was like this… I wasn’t really concentrating, so to speak, because… You see, there was this equalizer in the ninetieth minute, and then the penalty shoot-out… and afterwards I couldn’t remember exactly what you’d said to me, so I just put the text in your pigeonhole. I’m sorry if that meant something went wrong, but it was so exciting that…’

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled in slow motion. Then he rested his hand on Giovanni’s. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Exactly the right thing. I’m very glad. La ringrazio. Mille grazie. Grazie.’

A stone fell from Giovanni’s heart. ‘Really? I… You know, I had quite a guilty conscience because of it… Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘No, nothing,’ Perlmann said with a smile, ‘and once again, many thanks!’

Giovanni made a clumsy movement with his arm, interrupted halfway, which expressed his admiration better than any word or any facial expression could.

Perlmann walked to the elevator, but didn’t wait for it. Instead he started hobbling up the stairs. He took his time. He was too wound up to have been able to turn it into a sentence. But the feeling was there: he could move freely in the hotel again. He wasn’t a cheat.

When the line started crackling he put the phone down. What had he actually wanted to say to her? And in an alarming call at a quarter to two in the morning. And with that heavy tongue. His hand enclosed the red lighter. Now he didn’t need to explain anything to her. He had nothing to apologize for. He could meet his daughter just as he had before. He was back from no-man’s-land. No plagiarism. No plagiarism, and no murder. He repeated the words again and again, loudly and in his thoughts, who knows how many times, until, hollowed out by fatigue, they were no longer the expression of an emotion, but only a mechanical inner echo that grew increasingly sluggish.

If I hadn’t gained self-confidence by writing in that harbor pub, and the courage to stand by my own notes, I wouldn’t have called Maria, and the text wouldn’t have been finished in time. If I hadn’t taken that tour of the harbor, and hadn’t got worked up about interpreting, I wouldn’t have ended up writing in the harbor bar. So exactly the same inclination that had put him in the greatest danger, had also saved him. Perlmann sighed. That connection made him feel that he didn’t just owe the redeeming turn of events to a concatenation of coincidences, but that they had their origin within him, in his way of thinking and feeling.

He went into the shower and washed his hair. The water stung his scratches. But it was a salutary sting, because it meant that the fog of alcohol and pills was beginning to clear. He showered, hot and cold, and then the same again. New life flowed through him, and now he felt sober and clear again.

It wasn’t at all true that he had saved himself. Precisely the opposite was the case. If I hadn’t phoned Maria, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning. I would have taken Leskov’s text again and wouldn’t have had to live through that whole nightmare with the tunnel. His fanatical obsession with the translation had brought him not only to the brink of plagiarism, but also to the brink of murder and suicide. Back in Genoa, the frantic, desperate search for presence in the familiarity of foreign languages had for a moment given him the courage to stand up for himself, not least in front of the others, and because of that same courage he had ended up spending three endless days and nights in a world of fantasies and terror which had absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

All that saved me was coincidences, banal coincidences and inattentions. A sluice opened up in Perlmann’s head, and he was deluged by a cascade of if-thens. If that equalizer hadn’t been scored, there wouldn’t have been a penalty shoot-out. Giovanni would have been on top of things and would have passed on the instruction to copy Leskov’s text. Then on Saturday morning both texts would have been in the pigeonholes, and that would have allowed me to rectify matters without loss of face. If Giovanni had done what he was supposed to, and if Maria hadn’t finished because of the people from Fiat, only the fatal text would have made it to the pigeonholes; the disaster would have taken place in the real world and not just in my imagination. If Giovanni had just left Leskov’s text on the shelf under the counter, my pigeonhole would have been the only one empty on Saturday morning. I would have checked, learned what had really happened, and there would never have been a murder plan. But perhaps I wouldn’t have checked, paralyzed as I was. If Giovanni had left the text on the shelf, then when Signora Morelli was distributing them she would have noticed that my pigeonhole was the only one that was empty, and then she would have looked for the original by the photocopier. If my pigeonhole had been in a row with the pigeonholes of the others, I wouldn’t have switched rooms; the signora would have hesitated when distributing the texts, then seen that the text in my pigeonhole was a different one; she would have looked for the original by the photocopier, and when I came back from Portofino I would have had two texts in my pigeonhole, and Maria’s card would have resolved the matter. So if I hadn’t had this exaggerated need for empty space, I would have been spared the tunnel. If when I returned from Portofino there hadn’t been all that noise in the next room, I would have taken Silvestri’s copy out of the pigeonhole and discovered the true state of affairs. And if, arriving with Leskov, I had glanced at the feared text in my hand, just a single short glance, I wouldn’t have needed to imagine wading out into the dark water.

Perlmann knew it was absurd, this orgy of unreal conditional clauses, but it also devoured his sense of relief, so that he yearned now for the tears he had shed when he first discovered his redemption. But that knowledge didn’t help, the search for more and more connections was like an involuntary addiction. If Larissa hadn’t been plagued by a guilty conscience, she wouldn’t have urged Leskov to make a fresh application; there would have been no telegram and no fear of exposure, and what had appeared the night before would not have been a planned suicide, only a nagging feeling of guilt. If the waiter hadn’t brought me the telegram just as I was about to talk to Evelyn about Leskov’s text, I would have been able to tell by what she said that something was wrong, and even then I would have been spared the bulldozer. If there hadn’t been a wedding party at the Regina Elena tonight, I might have asked them to call for a cab, and then I would have told Kirsten in Konstanz about an act of plagiarism that didn’t even take place. Perlmann stopped.

So for days now they had been holding his notes, headed by an Italian sentence that must have seemed mannered and pretentious. He picked up the computer printout. It was fifty-two pages long. I could have told from the thickness of the pages. Seventy-three pages in my pigeonhole compared to fifty-two in everyone else’s; that’s a difference that could have been spotted from a mile off. And this evening, when I turned up, I could have felt in my hand that it couldn’t be Leskov’s text: that the sheaf of papers was too thin.

He let the pages slip through his fingers and weighed the pile in his hand. He didn’t dare flick through it properly and tentatively read it, and he took care to ensure that his eye didn’t get caught on the top page. Now that he felt like the survivor of a disaster, he didn’t want to alarm himself on top of everything else – with trashy metaphors or a maudlin tone, for example. And he didn’t want to encounter his written English right now, either – English that was seldom exactly wrong, and yet never had the effortless precision that he would have wished for. He slipped the papers into the desk drawer.

Angelini’s remark on Sunday evening, he thought, now appeared in a new light. Un lavoro insolito, he had called the text. And it was no wonder, either, that no one else had wasted a word about the text. That they had basically pretended it had never existed.

In six and a half hours he would have to go up the three steps to the veranda and sit down at the front. All the people sitting there looking at him would have his text in front of them, from the first page to the last. Only I and I alone don’t know what’s in it. That was a plainly incorrect, nonsensical thought, Perlmann knew. Even on Friday, on the ship, he had gone through the notes in his head. But the thought wouldn’t go away. In fact, it swelled still further. They knew more about him than he knew himself. They were waiting, and he couldn’t think of anything to say. They delivered their criticisms, and he had no response to give.

It couldn’t be the case that the unimaginable relief that had filled him even just an hour before was already being stifled by a new anxiety. It just couldn’t be. I didn’t become a fraud and I didn’t become a murderer. What other reason can there be for being anxious now? Perlmann clutched that thought and then tried with a single lurch to wrest away the inner freedom that would make him invulnerable to everything the others might or might not say, to their faces and their stares, and also to the stares which, in the awkward silence, fell on the gleaming table top.

He phoned Giovanni. He could do him a favor right now, and sort him out with two pots of strong coffee. He still had six hours. That wasn’t enough for a complete lecture. But he could write a memo that could be further developed orally. The thing was to develop something in the abstract and draw up the outlines of a conception. Then the discussion would focus on that. He could say, off-handedly, that the distributed text was incidental; he had only wanted to provide a small insight into the observations that he had used as his starting point.

Perlmann’s heart was thumping as he sat down at the desk. Until now, sitting here had meant translating Leskov’s text. Hour after hour, day after day, he had removed himself further and further from reality. Each translated sentence had brought him a little closer to the deadly silence of the tunnel. A quiet feeling of vertigo took hold of him as he carefully straightened the chair, lit a cigarette and reached for his ballpoint pen. For four weeks he had avoided that moment. His hands were sticky, and the stickiness transferred itself to the pen. He got to his feet, washed his hands in the bathroom and wiped the pen. Giovanni brought the coffee. Perlmann put it first on the right of the desk, then the left. He threw the piece of paper with Kirsten’s address into the waste-paper basket. He prepared a back-up pack of cigarettes and fetched the red lighter from the bedside table. Wearing only his dressing gown he would soon start shivering. He dressed completely. His light-colored trousers were too cool by now. But the tear on the other pair bothered him. Then there were the dark flannel trousers, the ones with the bloodstains. And it would be better to put on the lighter pullover. And turn up the heating a bit instead. Again he straightened his chair. He would have to be close to the desk. But not too close.

Why hadn’t he tried it much sooner? The sentences came in spite of everything. They actually came, one after the other. At first he was anxious before each period, for fear that everything might dry up after it. But when the first page was full, this anxiety melted away; feeling in general faded into the background, and the calm logic of the sentences themselves took charge. For months, almost years, he had struggled to force out each individual sentence; it had seemed as if, in future, he would only be able to think in very small units. And now all of a sudden each sentence led quite naturally on to the next. Something started building up. He was writing a text, a real text. So I can still do it after all. Now everything’s fine.

His pen went flying over the pages and the thoughts came one after another so quickly that he could barely capture them on the paper. At last his block had gone. Again he had something to say. He only lifted the pen from the paper to light another cigarette or pour himself the next cup of coffee. He held his cigarette in his left hand, and with the same hand he brought the cup to his mouth – it was unusual, but his right hand must not be interrupted while writing. Not a memo; it’s turning into a lecture, a complete lecture. The unfamiliar way of holding the cigarette meant that smoke kept getting in his eyes; it stung, but his right hand wrote on and on. He was amazed and cheered at how good, how apt were the phrases that flowed so naturally on to the paper; some of them, he thought, practically had a poetic force. He hoped he had enough paper; otherwise he would have to start writing on both sides. Eventually, he would run out of coffee. It was lucky that he had even more cigarettes in the wardrobe. He hoped the lighter wouldn’t suddenly pack up on him. At one point he paused and closed his eyes. The present. This is it. Now I’m experiencing it at last. It took all these traumas to break through to it.

At five o’clock he opened the window. Billows of smoke drifted out into the night. He took a deep breath of the cool air. He felt dizzy, and had to hold on to the window catch. He felt as if he were moving on dangerously thin ice at breakneck speed. The strip of light beyond the bay was quite even, narrow and still. When his eye fell on the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, he quickly shut the window. He wanted to believe that all those things happened a very long time ago.

Perlmann didn’t immediately know how the next paragraph should begin, and started to panic. But then he read the last three pages and found his way back into his writing frenzy. After a while, when all the coffee had gone, his tongue felt furry. Annoyed at the interruption, he went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water. He was used to his pale, anxious face; he had seen it often enough over the last few days. But now he gave a start. His features were sunken and skewed. He thought of pictures of people who had been exposed to enhanced gravity. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered were the sentences that had originated behind that face and were flowing into his right hand. It was a complete mystery how it was happening, and for one brief moment Perlmann experienced the fascination of the scholar confronted by a mysterious phenomenon, a fascination that he had lost. Everything’s going to fall back into place. Even though he didn’t have a headache, he took two aspirins from the pack on the mirror shelf and washed them down. Then he walked back to the desk with a glass of water.

Dawn began to break just before seven. Without the darkness of the night Perlmann felt vulnerable and lost his sense of equilibrium. His sentences started to go wrong. He had to cross some of them out, and eventually he reached the last sheet, which he crumpled and threw in the waste-paper basket. The mixture of lamplight and daylight enraged him. As he walked across to turn off the standard lamp, his ankle throbbed violently, and felt as if it could no longer support him. He couldn’t quite manage without electric light, and turned the desk lamp back on. His memory began to fail. The simplest English words stopped coming to mind, and all of a sudden he was uncertain about his spelling, too.

A short break. He could lie down for a moment, until it was really light. Just for a few minutes. After that he still had an hour and a half to finish writing his lecture.

41

A wild honking of car horns on the coast road woke him with a start. Perlmann felt disoriented and immediately sank back into leaden weariness. His eyelids seemed paralyzed, and would only open after he had made an extreme effort of will to sit up on the edge of the bed. His head hurt at the slightest movement, and his veins seemed to be far too cramped for his violently pounding blood. The noise of traffic was unbearable. It was seven minutes to nine.

No time for showering and shaving, nor could he order any more coffee. He was relieved to establish that his tongue, although thick and stinging, was under his command again. He shovelled cold water into his face with both hands, evoking the memory of the gas station toilet in Recco. No murder. No plagiarism. He hurriedly bundled together the sheets of paper on the desk. There were at least twenty pages, he thought. The last half-page was crossed out. I’ll have to improvise at the end.

The elevator was busy. Two minutes past nine. Perlmann gritted his teeth and hobbled downstairs. He had forgotten the printout of his notes, and when he went to check that he was at least carrying a pen, he saw that there were two big stripes of dirt running diagonally across his jacket. The garbage bin by the fan. He looked at his trousers: bloodstains everywhere. Arriving in the hall, through the glass front door he saw the sea glittering in the morning sun. At some point in the night, he remembered, he had thought he had finally found the present. An illusion, woven from relief, alcohol and pills. The present was further off than ever.

The door to the veranda was open. Perlmann felt no more twinges as he walked through the lounge towards it and took the three steps. The anxiety settled on him like a numbing veil. He wasn’t quite in the room before he had seen that they were all there, even Silvestri and Angelini. And at the back, on the right, Leskov with his pipe in his mouth. Perlmann immediately looked away. He didn’t want to be wounded by any of those faces. As he had been during the night. He wanted to stay completely closed away in himself, inaccessible to the others.

As always, there was coffee on the table, a special pot for the speaker. Perlmann sat down without a greeting, poured himself a coffee and concentrated on not shivering. The coffee was hot. One could only drink it slowly. He couldn’t possibly drain the first cup with everyone staring at him. After taking three sips he set it down. He had planned to say some introductory words of explanation, about the distributed text and his relationship to what he was about to say. But he couldn’t have said such words with his eyes lowered, and he couldn’t now bring himself to meet the eyes of the others. Not before they had heard last night’s text, which would rehabilitate him. He took another sip of coffee, lit a cigarette and began to read.

The introductory sentences were too long-winded. Perlmann noticed it immediately, became impatient and rattled them off hastily so that he could finally get to his first thesis, which, in its originality – he was quite sure of it – would immediately grab the attention of everyone present. He set aside the first page and was glad to see that there were only three lines to go before the crucial paragraph. When they were over with, he took two big swigs of coffee, looked up for a moment, and then plunged into his train of thought.

When he read them the words were so unutterably weak that the sentences literally stuck in his throat. It took a special effort – almost a retch – to read each of them to the end. It was pure kitsch, nothing but sentimental nonsense, cobbled together by someone at the end of his powers and also under the influence of alcohol and pills, so that all critical capacity, all self-censorship, had completely closed down. Perlmann wanted to sink into the floor, and when he went on reading, in a voice that grew quieter and quieter, he only did so because he didn’t know how he would bear the silence that would fall if he stopped.

Leskov choked on his pipe smoke and had a coughing fit. His face bright red, he bent double, his coughing so loud that Perlmann’s lecture was interrupted. Perlmann looked over at him, and in that moment a thought forced his way into his consciousness that had until then been suppressed by some power or other: I would have killed him for no good reason whatsoever. It would have been a completely pointless murder. A murder based on an error. Without his really noticing, the sheets slipped from his hand, his mouth half-opened, and his face went blank. He shivered. He heard the penetrating, high-pitched whistle, and saw the huge shovel of the bulldozer with its side prongs coming towards him. It turned quite silent, as if they were surrounded by cotton wool and snow. Perlmann took his ice-cold, sweat-drenched hands from the wheel. Then there was nothing but weakness and darkness. Perlmann’s cigarette fell from his hand and, in a curiously retarded, flowing motion he slipped sideways to the floor.

It was a pleasant, effortless glide up through ever thinner, ever paler layers. At the end there came a faint, quiet start, the world stood quite still, and with a tiny hesitation that he only just noticed, before immediately forgetting it again, it became clear to Perlmann that the impressions forcing their way to him through his open eyes meant that he was awake.

He was lying under the covers in all his clothes except his jacket and shoes. In the red armchair by the open window sat Giorgio Silvestri. His back was turned towards Perlmann and he was reading the newspaper. Perlmann was glad that he was smoking. That made the situation less like a sick-bed visit. He would have liked to look at his watch. But Silvestri would have heard that, and he wanted to be on his own for a little while longer. He closed his eyes and tried to order his thoughts.

His unconsciousness had calmed him, and even if his tiredness slowed everything down, he still had the feeling of being able to think clearly. He could no longer remember the details of what had happened in the veranda. All he remembered was his horror at his embarrassing text, and then the coughing Leskov, who had slipped uninterruptedly into a maelstrom of images from the tunnel. I have disgraced myself for ever. It couldn’t have been more embarrassing. But now it’s over. I didn’t commit fraud and I didn’t commit murder. And never again will I have to sit at the front in the veranda. Never again.

Two men must have carried him upstairs. Perlmann was glad they hadn’t undressed him. Who had it been apart from Silvestri? Apart from those two, had anyone else come into his room? The strong sleeping pills were in his jacket pocket. Had Silvestri found them? Had he seen that he was poisoned, and deliberately looked for them? Or had they perhaps fallen out when he was being carried upstairs?

Leskov’s text. For God’s sake, I hope they didn’t find it here. Perlmann sat up involuntarily. Silvestri turned round, got to his feet and looked at him with a face that strangely combined a warm smile and a professional, medical expression.

‘I came back at just the right time,’ he said.

‘How long was I unconscious for?’ Perlmann asked.

Silvestri looked at his watch. ‘Just a few minutes. Stay calm. There’s no reason to worry.’

Perlmann sank back into the pillow. A few minutes. That could be ten, or twenty. Enough at any rate to find the text. If they hear Leskov saying practically the same thing as in the text on Thursday, they will know that something’s wrong, and put two and two together. It isn’t over yet.

‘Was Leskov in here, too?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘Yes,’ Silvestri said with a smile, ‘he insisted on helping Brian Millar carry you. He started wheezing terribly. A nice guy.’

Then he saw his text here, and now he’ll be thinking back to the tunnel. Perlmann started sweating and asked for a glass of water.

As he drank, Silvestri looked at him thoughtfully. He hesitated at behaving like a doctor, but then he took Perlmann’s pulse. ‘Has that happened to you many times before?’

‘No,’ Perlmann said, ‘that was the first time.’

‘Do you take sleeping pills?’ Silvestri made the question sound innocuous, almost incidental.

Perlmann liked and knew straight away that he was being seen through.

After he had folded up the newspaper and lit a Gauloise, Silvestri leaned against the desk and said nothing for a while. Perlmann was about to tell him everything. Just so as not to be alone with his thoughts any more. To have peace at last.

‘You know,’ Silvestri said slowly, without a hint of an instructive or patronizing tone in his voice. ‘You are in a state of profound exhaustion. Not quite dangerous yet. But you should be a bit careful. Take a rest. Get a lot of sleep. And go and see your doctor at home. He should give you a thorough examination, at any rate. If you need anything, just give me a call.’ He walked to the door.

‘Giorgio,’ said Perlmann.

Silvestri turned round.

‘I… I’m glad you were there. Grazie.’

‘Di niente,’ Silvestri smiled and reached for the door. Then he let go of the handle and came two steps back. ‘By the way, I find a lot of the observations in your text very interesting. Particularly the things about the freezing of experience through language, and the point that sentences can both inspire and paralyze the imagination.’ He grinned. ‘Of course, the others expected something slightly different from you. But I wouldn’t place too much importance on that. And, generally speaking, you shouldn’t take all of this too seriously,’ he said with a gesture that took in the whole hotel.

Perlmann nodded mutely.

When the door clicked shut, he threw back the covers and hobbled hastily over to his case. He saw with horror that the lock was set at the correct combination. No text in there now. The veins at his temples seemed about to burst with each pulse beat. He sat down on the edge of the bed, only to jump up again a moment later. The phone book. Pressing his hand to his head, he pulled open the desk drawer. There was no text under the phone book either. He knew there was no point, but he checked in the bedside table and the wardrobe as well. So they’d discovered it and taken it away as evidence. Leskov would identify the text. Attempted plagiarism. That was the only explanation for Perlmann so carefully keeping the existence of the text a secret. And seen in that light, what happened in the veranda also became comprehensible. They would go easy on him today. To some extent he was unfit to stand trial. But tomorrow they would call him to account.

Perlmann stubbed out his cigarette and was glad that the nausea subsided when he lay down. Now, he couldn’t present the text as a welcome gift. He had learned of Leskov’s arrival less than three days before. And why hadn’t he given him the present ages ago? He had thought the text was so good that he had planned to send the finished translation to St Petersburg and suggest publication in a relevant journal. Then, when he learned that he was coming, he had prepared the text as a surprise. He planned to hand it to him tonight at dinner. That’s OK. That doesn’t sound incredible. At any rate, they can’t refute it. The thumping in his head subsided. It’s over. One or other of them may be left with a feeling of suspicion. Nothing more can happen. It’s over. He turned onto his stomach and let his face sink deep into the pillow.

But the text was no longer here. I threw it away during the night. Perlmann sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. The big garbage bin under the fan had been empty apart from potato peelings. And the open lid had covered the fan. He conjured up as many details of the situation as possible, to assure himself that these were really memories, and not a trick being played on him by his imagination. He heard once again the dull thud when the stack of paper had landed, and smelled again the kitchen fumes that had passed through the fan. It was an effort to call all that to mind, because it was swathed in fine mist that wouldn’t be dissolved even by the utmost effort of concentration, as if it were not merely a veil of the remembered objects, but belonged to their essence. And the images were erratic and hard to hold on to; it was as if the remembered perceptions last night had not really had the opportunity to bury themselves into his brain. Nonetheless, Perlmann’s certainty grew that they were real memories. The imagination would not provide images that were so dense and coherent, in spite of the mist. Yesterday evening – he remembered that, too, now – getting rid of the text had struck him as the epitome of senselessness. Now he was glad of this attack of unreason. Loads of refuse, huge great loads of it, had fallen on the dangerous text in the meantime, and buried it.

When he came out of the bathroom wearing his pyjamas, his eye fell on his light-colored jacket, which they had hung on the back of a chair. It wasn’t only the two strips of dirt above the chest; both sleeves were dirty on the outside, too, just under the elbow. He had propped himself up on the garbage bin. And the hotel folder was missing. Now it was clear once and for all. There was nothing left – nothing – that could still betray him.

At the back of the desk, with one corner under the foot of the lamp, lay a stack of paper. It was the text that he had written in the night. The trashy text. That was where they had put it. In whose hand had it been carried up? Silvestri’s? Millar’s? His handwriting on the pages was bigger than usual, the lines jauntier, more expansive. On the last few pages much of the writing was unreadable. Perlmann tore each sheet in two several times and let the bits fall into the waste-paper basket.

Then he lay down in bed. He would have liked to sleep for a year. Silvestri hadn’t found his notes outrageous. Perlmann saw Silvestri’s smile in his mind’s eye when he had spoken of the expectation of the others. That mocking detachment, which needed no spite – Perlmann had never envied anyone anything so fiercely. He tried to imagine his way entirely into that smile – to be someone who could smile about the matter like this. As he did so he slipped, for the first time in days, into a deep, dreamless sleep.

42

It was just before three when the phone woke him. As if he had never experienced such a sensation before, he flinched from the ringing as from a physical assault. But I don’t need to hide myself away any more. It’s all over. He picked up the phone and heard Leskov’s voice, far too loud. Could he visit him? Only, of course, if it didn’t disturb him. Perlmann’s head started thumping. His face, still hot with sleep, was filled with a dry, stinging sensation, as if he had been hiking for hours in cold winter air.

‘Are you still there?’ asked Leskov.

Perlmann said he would be glad of a visit. He didn’t know what else he could have said.

The sky was overcast, and a light rain fell from the pale grey. The second version. The rain falling on the yellow pages. The journey via Recco and Uscio would take an hour at the most. If he got rid of Leskov quickly, he could be there in time to pick up the pages in daylight. He took the car key out of the pocket of his blazer, and put on his soiled jacket. That way it would be obvious that he was about to leave.

As soon as Leskov had slumped into the red armchair, he took his pipe from his pocket and asked if he could smoke.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Perlmann. He shouldn’t have needed to say it. I’d rather you didn’t, he could have said instead. From the mouth of someone in need of care that would have been enough. A few short words. He hadn’t said them. He hadn’t managed to. Now he smelled the sickly sweet tobacco. It would linger everywhere. He would have to smell it for days. He hated this Russian.

He had given them a real fright there, Leskov said. Of course, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of his nausea on the journey and the excitement in the tunnel. The others didn’t know anything about it, incidentally. Last night he’d just said something vague about him not being very well, to explain why Perlmann wasn’t there at dinner. The details, he said with a smile, were no one’s business but his, were they?

The intimacy that Leskov was forcing on him with that remark could not be the intimacy of blackmail, Perlmann knew that, even though his certainty still felt very fresh and slightly unsteady. Nonetheless, it was an unbearable intimacy, and it made Perlmann so furious that he suddenly didn’t care that the rain seemed to be getting heavier.

‘By the way,’ Leskov said, ‘I was told about the reception at the town hall.’ He smiled. ‘So that was your medal and your certificate on the back seat. And now I understand the tie that was lying around as if you’d furiously thrown it into the back. The whole thing must have been incredibly awkward and distasteful to you! We were doubled up with laughter at lunchtime when Achim described the whole scene.’

Leskov was enthusiastic about Perlmann’s text. He had stayed up for a long time last night to read it all the way through. He hadn’t understood absolutely everything; there were a number of English words and phrases that he didn’t know. But both the subjects and the way of addressing them – it had all been surprisingly close to his own work. It was really a shame that Perlmann had found the Russian text too hard. Otherwise he would have recognized how close it was straight away. But he must have understood the title?

Perlmann nodded.

‘We should write a text together one day!’ said Leskov and touched his knee.

At any rate, Perlmann’s text had given Leskov the courage to talk about his own things here. He’d had the jitters a bit. In such illustrious company. He thought it was great that you could be so open here, and there didn’t seem to be any kind of academic straitjacket. If only that terrible slip with his text hadn’t happened. He hurriedly exhaled great clouds of smoke, which condensed more and more in the room into a solid blanket of blue haze that cleaved the whole room at head height.

‘Oh, of course, you couldn’t know anything about that,’ he interrupted himself and gesticulated animatedly. ‘I told you about the second version of my text, and how I nearly left it at home because of that annoying phone call.’ Leskov waited until Perlmann nodded. ‘And now it seems that that’s exactly what happened. Last night, in fact, when I’m coming back from dinner, I reach into the outside pocket of the suitcase, where the text should have been. But there’s nothing there. Nothing at all. Empty.’ Leskov pressed his fists against his temples. ‘It’s a complete mystery to me. I could swear that I put it in there at the last moment. It was the open outside pocket that reminded me of it.’

Perlmann opened the window, leaned out and looked to the north-west. It was lighter in that direction. Maybe it had stayed dry up there.

‘Does the smoke really not bother you?’ Leskov asked.

‘Not at all,’ Perlmann replied into the rain and glanced furtively at his watch. Twenty-five to four.

He had spent half the night puzzling about it, Leskov went on. And from time to time he had had the feeling that his memory of packing the text had really only been a delusion, whose vividness simply expressed the strong desire to have done so.

‘It’s very unpleasant,’ he said, ‘and not only because of the text. It gives me the feeling of no longer being able to rely on myself. Have you ever known anything like that?’

Yes, said Perlmann, awkwardly lighting a cigarette, he did know that feeling.

He was used to reading something whenever he had to wait around, Leskov said thoughtfully. So he had now been wondering whether he might have taken the text out on the journey and left it somewhere. Not in St Petersburg. It had been too hectic for that at the airport. And not on the flight to Moscow, either, where an inebriated war veteran in the next seat had constantly bothered him. At Larissa and Boris’s he had been monopolized by the children the whole time. At the airport in Moscow, perhaps. Or on the plane. Or in Frankfurt, when he’d been waiting for his connecting flight. It was crazy: because there wasn’t a trace of a memory of such an action. He would now have to think of himself as if he were a stranger, from outside, so to speak. And Leskov ardently hoped that he was wrong. Admittedly, his address was written at the end of the text, he did that quite automatically, even with a manuscript. But he didn’t think anyone would take the trouble. Certainly not at Moscow Airport. And in Frankfurt no one would be able to read it. Perhaps Lufthansa would do something if the text were found on the plane. On the other hand: a cleaning crew would simply throw a pile of unreadable pages out with the rest of the rubbish. ‘Or what do you think?’

‘I… I don’t know,’ Perlmann said tonelessly.

Leskov paused and looked straight ahead with his eyes slightly narrowed. Perlmann knew what was coming next. There was one more small thing, he went on, that he barely dared to mention, however ludicrous it might seem: a little bit of rubber band had got stuck in the zip of the outside pocket. He couldn’t get that out of his head, because it could mean that he had taken the text out and broken the rubber band with which it was held together. He tapped his forehead with his knuckles. ‘If I only had some kind of memory!’ After a while he opened his eyes and looked at Perlmann, who was staring at the floor. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you with this. In your condition. But you know how much this text matters to me. I’ve already tried to phone friends at home to look in my apartment. But I can’t get through.’ He set his pipe down on the round table and hid his face in his hands. ‘I hope to God it’s there. Otherwise… I can’t bring myself to think about it.’

The rain had stopped. Perlmann went to the bathroom and leaned his back against the basin. He was shaking, and his head threatened to explode. I’ve got to collect the pages. At all costs. Five past four. If Leskov went soon, he could still do it. You can even make out these pages in the gloom. He flushed the toilet. Then he clenched his fists to keep from shaking and went back into the room.

Leskov was standing up. He would have to do some work. There wasn’t much time until his session on Thursday.

‘The text is probably just at home. There isn’t really any other possibility. Otherwise I’d have some kind of memory. Some kind.’

Perlmann couldn’t stand his questioning stare for long, and walked ahead of him to the door. Before he went out, Leskov stopped just in front of him. Perlmann smelled his tobacco breath.

‘Do you think a translator might be found for my text?’ he asked. ‘I’d love you and the others to be able to read it. Especially since I now know your text. Payment would be a problem, I know that.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Perlmann. It took him an enormous effort to close the door quietly.

A little while later Perlmann left the room and, after some hesitation, set off through the hall. There he was intercepted by Maria, who came sniffing out of her office, holding a handkerchief. Was he feeling better? She had heard from Signora Morelli that he had been surprised to find that the text she had finished on Friday had been distributed.

‘Please forgive me if I’ve done something wrong. But when you told me on the phone on Friday that it was urgent, I automatically assumed it was the text for your session, which is why I attached the copying instruction to it. And I think I even added your name.’

The people from Fiat?

‘Oh, them,’ she laughed, and had to blow her nose. ‘I didn’t have a sense that they got a lot of work done. And when I said something about a research group and an important text, Santini immediately waved it through. He’s very patient. He’s often been with people here.’ She rubbed her reddened eyes. ‘They’d said Saturday afternoon would be fine. But then I got the feeling this cold was on the way, and I finished typing the thing on Friday so that I could spend Saturday in bed. Oh, one moment,’ she said, gestured to him to wait and disappeared into the office.

If she hadn’t had a cold, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning, and I would have noticed Giovanni’s omission. But if he hadn’t made his mistake, her cold would have saved me.

‘Here,’ Maria said, and handed him the black wax-cloth notebook. ‘I like typing your things up. They’re not as technical as the others, and not as dry. That was true of the other text, the one about memory. And this one here has such an original title. I like it. So are you sure nothing’s gone wrong as far as you’re concerned? Should I perhaps have had the other text printed out and copied again?

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said, and had to fight down the haste in his voice. ‘You did exactly the right thing. Mille grazie.’

In daylight, the damage to the Lancia looked very bad. The dark-blue paint was ripped open in several places all along the car. The scrapes went deep into the metal, and the wing had been powerfully crushed next to the headlight on the right-hand side. Perlmann took the tie, medal and certificate from the back seat and put them along with the black notebook in the empty suitcase. Then he set off.

He hadn’t even reached the big jetty when it was clear to him that he wouldn’t manage to do it now. He was shivering with weakness, and his reactions were grotesquely delayed, as if his brain were working in slow motion. Under the stare of a policeman he stopped in a no-parking zone and wiped the sweat from his cold hands.

Just as he was about to turn and drive back, his eye fell on the Hotel Imperiale on the hill. There was something about it. Again his brain made an eerily long pause. The waiter. I didn’t wait for him. And I didn’t pay. That means bilking on top of everything else. Compared to everything else this was so preposterous that Perlmann pulled his face into a grin. Very slowly he drove up to the hotel and waited for several minutes outside the gate until even the most distant oncoming traffic had passed.

It was the same waiter. He assessed Perlmann with a dismissive glance. The pale, unshaven face. The soiled jacket. The blood-stained trousers. The unpolished shoes.

‘I forgot to pay yesterday,’ Perlmann said and took a handful of cash from his pocket.

‘We aren’t used to guests like that here,’ the waiter said stiffly.

‘And it isn’t a habit of mine,’ Perlmann said with a weary smile. ‘I think it was a sandwich, a whisky and a mineral water.’

‘Two waters,’ the waiter said abruptly.

‘I’m sorry. Yesterday I was a bit… a bit under the weather.’

‘I can see that. And I’d also say that we could do without a second visit from you,’ the waiter said and simply stuffed the three 10,000 lire notes in the pocket of his red jacket.

The two things – being barred and that movement – assembled themselves in Perlmann’s feelings into something strangely liberating. He looked the waiter in the eyes with undisguised contempt. ‘Do you know what you are? Uno stronzo.’ And because he wasn’t sure whether the insult was strong enough, he added his own translation, ‘An asshole. A great big asshole.’ The waiter’s face colored. ‘Stronzo,’ Perlmann said again and went outside.

On the way back he felt more confident and, all of a sudden, he felt properly hungry – a sensation that he had almost forgotten over the past few days. At a stand-up bar he ate several slices of pizza. The five o’clock news was just coming to an end on the television behind the bar, and a weather map appeared. Perlmann stared at the clouds to the east of Genoa. They were white, not grey. But then the clouds on maps like that always were. Weren’t they?

‘Do you know the road from Genoa via Lumarzo to Chiávari?’ he asked the man in the vest who was taking the pizza out of the oven with a long shovel.

‘Of course,’ said the man, without interrupting what he was doing.

‘Do you think it’s going to rain there tonight? Up by the tunnel, I mean.’

The man paused abruptly, left the shovel half inside the oven and turned round.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘I really need to know. It’s very important.’

The man in the vest took a drag on his cigarette and looked at him as if he were someone very simple, perhaps even disturbed.

‘How on earth am I supposed to know that?’ he said mildly.

‘Yes,’ Perlmann said quietly and left far too big a tip.

‘That conversation last night,’ Perlmann said to Signora Morelli when she set Frau Hartwig’s yellow envelope and another little one for him on the reception counter, ‘I…’

She folded her hands and looked at him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tiny twitch in the corner of her mouth.

‘What conversation?’

Perlmann gulped and shifted the two envelopes until they were exactly parallel at the edge of the counter. ‘Grazie,’ he said quietly and looked at her.

She gave only the hint of a nod.

The room smelled of Leskov’s sickly tobacco. The haze had escaped, but the open window hadn’t been able to do anything about the penetrating smell. Except it was cold now. Perlmann tipped a mountain of pipe ash and charred tobacco into the toilet and shut the window.

Frau Hartwig’s envelope contained two letters. One was his invitation to Princeton, written on expensive paper that looked like parchment, and signed by the President. The invitation had been issued because of his outstanding academic achievements, it said. And the President assured him that it would be a great honor to have him as a guest for a while. Perlmann didn’t read the letter twice, but immediately put it back in the envelope and threw it in the suitcase.

The other was an invitation to give a guest lecture. He was to open a series of lectures, and it was very important to the organizer that Perlmann should be the first speaker. The letter talked about works that he had finished three years ago, but which had only appeared in print at the beginning of the year. Back then, he thought, everything had still seemed all right. Except that he had been getting increasingly bored with his things. And every now and again he had woken up in the middle of the night and hadn’t known where to go from here. He hadn’t had long conversations with himself when that had happened; few thoughts came to him on such occasions. He listened to music, and he usually stood at the big window as he did so. Then Agnes was surprised to find him at his desk so early.

In the other envelope there was a note from Angelini. Unfortunately, he had to go back to Ivrea that afternoon. He wished Perlmann a speedy recovery, and hoped it was nothing serious. He would try to come to the last dinner on Friday, although he couldn’t yet promise anything. At the end was his private telephone number.

The words were friendly, if conventional. Perlmann read them several times. He thought back to their first meeting and the enthusiastic phone calls that had followed. You couldn’t say that these words gave off a sense of disappointment. Not at all. And not detachment or coldness. But he sensed them. He, Philipp Perlmann, had revealed himself to be a bad investment.

He turned on the six o’clock news. But on that channel they only had a schematic weather map that was no use to him. No big change to be expected tomorrow. A little while before, the roads had been almost dry again. He walked over to the window. There was no point now in staring up into the starless night sky.

He took a long shower and then lay down in bed. The pillow smelled of Leskov’s tobacco. He fetched another one from the wardrobe. The sheets and the wool blanket smelled too. He pulled off the sheet and covered himself with replacement blankets from the wardrobe. The heating intensified the smell. He turned it off and opened the window. His body was vibrating with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. He didn’t take any pills. On the seven o’clock news the clouds around Genoa looked denser than they had done two hours before. Outside it was still dry. He was shivering, and fetched the last blanket from the wardrobe. It was too noisy on the coast road, and he closed the window. If he set off at half-past five, he would be there by first light. He set his alarm for five. He went to sleep at about eight.

He saw no bulldozer, no tunnel walls. In fact, he saw nothing at all. No seeing took place. It was simply the case that he hadn’t the strength to take his hands off the wheel. He held it tightly and turned it to the left, further and further to the left. It could be that he was the one who turned it. Or else it was something inside him, a force, a will, but it was alien to him and not really his. And perhaps the wheel had gained its autonomy, and was guiding his hand against his will. He no longer knew what was going on; the impressions piled up on top of each other and he didn’t know what – of all of it – he was most afraid of. He was completely paralyzed by fear, and he had the feeling of losing control of his bodily functions, particularly his abdomen. That took half an eternity, in which he expected a collision at every moment, and then he woke up with a twitch of his whole body that had something terrible about it, something uncanny, because it too completely escaped his control; it was an animal, a biological twitch that seemed to come from a very deep region of his brain.

Perlmann leapt up and examined the mattress. It was clean. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked. From time to time he felt the physical echo of a turn to the left. Later he took off his wet pyjamas and went into the shower. It was just after midnight. The coast road was wet. But now it wasn’t raining any more.

Over the next few hours he kept waking from the same dream at brief intervals, before dozing off again. This time it wasn’t a nightmare, but a bothersome and ridiculous combination of things that were completely unconnected as far as the dreamer was concerned. There was the name Pian dei Ratti, which returned with such frequency that it was like a constant background noise, an incessant echo that filled every last corner. And the name smelled. It was enveloped in a smell of sickly tobacco and mist; it was as if that smell stuck to the name, so that without the smell the name had no meaning whatsoever. The fact that the name was always there, ringing out, made one shiver and, sniffing, look for coins, which kept slipping with a painful rub through your fingers. Your shoes tipped over, and women laughed. Then everything was full of yellow sheets, and there was no point making yourself very small in the trunk.

Perlmann changed the bandage on his finger. The inflammation was beginning to ease. Every time he woke up he opened the widow. Only a few drops were falling outside. The dream had the dependability and monotony of a record that always sticks at the same place. At half-past four he showered, shaved and dressed.

‘Buon giorno,’ said Giovanni, rubbing his eyes and looking at his watch.

Perlmann turned round again in the doorway. ‘That equalizer that led to the penalty shoot-out. Who scored it?’

Giovanni was almost struck dumb. ‘Baggio,’ he said at last, with a grin.

‘From which club?’

Giovanni looked at him as if he had asked him what country Rome was the capital of.

‘Juve. Juventus Turin.’

‘Grazie,’ said Perlmann. He felt Giovanni’s startled eyes watching after him.

He had become a weirdo.

43

The coast road was so quiet and deserted that Perlmann instantly forgot the three or four cars that came towards him, in their brief, eerie presence. Rapallo was a night-time silhouette with motionless lights that called to mind paper cuts and engravings. The flashing traffic lights in the dead streets of Recco gave him the feeling of driving through a ghost town, and the two old men who were creeping along close to the houses further intensified that impression. Lots of lights were on already in the farmhouses along the road to Uscio. The crowing of the omnipresent cocks drowned out the quiet sound of the engine. Perlmann tried not to think back to Monday. The main thing was that it plainly hadn’t rained here in the past few hours. Past Lumarzo, however, the gear stick was suddenly damp with sweat, and he had to swallow more and more often. On the climb towards the tunnel he drove with his arms outstretched on the wheel, and decided not to look and to think about nothing.

He braked. Over on the light-grey crash barrier: dark strips. He put his foot down – only to put the car out of gear again straight away. Here, exactly here is where I took my hands off the wheel. He sat up. There was nothing to see. It was idiotic. He furiously screeched his tires and then stepped hard on the brake as if to prevent a pile-up in the empty tunnel.

Most of the pale mud had been covered up with a tarpaulin, which had been weighed down with bricks. By the wall there stood an empty wheelbarrow, with an untidily rolled-up rope underneath it. He had never worked out what happened at this passing-place, and this latest change made no sense to him at all. He knew it was nonsense, bordering on paranoia, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he – he in particular, he alone – was being played for a fool – that someone was constantly rearranging things at this spot, with the sole intention of confusing him, goading his useless thoughts and stoking his apprehension. He bit his lips and drove out of the tunnel. The toothless old woman’s shop was in darkness, and looked like a discarded dream backdrop. It was a quarter past six, and still the darkest night.

It could only be two kilometers, or three at the most. Only a few bends. But it wasn’t behind this one, or the next. Seen from this direction everything looked very different. Suddenly, so quickly that he couldn’t believe it, he was at the gas station where he had made the first attempt to disappear Leskov’s text. Yes, that was the word. He stopped outside the dark cottage and tried to imagine what had happened afterwards. His memory was sluggish; nothing came back of its own accord. It was hot and stuffy in the car. He had been driving the whole time with the heating turned up full. But the air from outside made him cold, and he whirred the window back up. The skin of his face tensed and felt like paper.

What was he actually doing here? In the end he would be holding a pile of dirty, ragged pages in his hand. Then what? What in the world would he tell Leskov when he handed him the papers? It would, that was clear, have to be the story of an oversight, an ineptitude, an unintended stupidity. And the story would also have to explain why he had discovered his stupidity only today, of all days. Perlmann felt his head emptying, and felt that emptiness filling with a paralysing weariness. With the best will in the world, even calling on the furthest reaches of his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t possibly explain how the text had made it out of the closed suitcase and the closed trunk into the mud, without anyone having had a deliberate hand in it.

A first shimmer of diffuse, grey light lit up the solid cloud cover. A car passed now every few minutes. If he simply kept on driving to Genoa, he would be at the airport just before eight, and soon after that the Avis counter would open up. But I can’t just let the sheets of paper lie here and rot. That’s out of the question. He has to get his text back. Somehow.

Perlmann set off slowly, even more slowly than on Monday. It was up there on the bend that the truck with the full-beam headlights had appeared, the one he had allowed to pass him. And, sure enough, the first pale sheet lay there in the roadside ditch. The sight of it electrified him and all of a sudden he was wide awake. Hurriedly, as if the paper might escape his clutches at the last minute, he got out and bent down. It was a piece of half-transparent, crumpled grease-proof paper. He couldn’t halt his hand, he had to touch it. Now he had mayonnaise on his fingers. Disgusted, he rubbed them on his trousers and got back into the car.

It couldn’t have been the next bend; there was no paper to be seen far and wide. It was the next but one. Perlmann could see all the pale sheets in the ditch from far away, and accelerated as if on a home straight. He came to a standstill with both wheels in the ditch, climbed out of his crookedly parked car and ran breathlessly over. The pages were often far apart, but in two places several had fallen on top of each other and formed irregular little piles. Perlmann laid them on the hood. The sun must have been shining here yesterday, the two top sheets were both dry. The pale yellow had faded almost completely, the sheets were curling, and it looked as if they had blisters. Then came a few that were still damp, and under those several that hadn’t been touched by rain at all, at least in the middle. Only at the edges were they all wet and grey with dirt. The ink on the top sheets had run. The first two were hard to read, but it got better after that.

So far there were seventeen sheets, including page 77. Now it was the turn of the individual, widely scattered sheets in the ditch. When Perlmann was bending down for the first one, a car drove past and its wake blew three pages down from the hood. He hurried back and gathered them up. One page had fallen under the wheels and been ripped. Annoyed, he laid the whole pile on the mat in front of the passenger seat. Half of them were completely smudged, but Leskov would still be able to reconstitute the text. The others, which had been lying face down, were in a better condition. There, too, the round letters of Leskov’s careful handwriting had often dissolved at the edges, and flowed outwards. At those points the background was no longer yellow, but a washed-out pale blue shimmering into green. But the text was still legible. The sheets that had lain among the trees had been dried by the sun and had warped; the others had softened and were unpleasant to the touch.

After that, Perlmann often had to climb the steep embankment to fetch the next sheet. Many were sticky with mud, some were crumpled and torn. At one point he slipped on the damp soil, the pain from his ankle shot through him like knives and he nearly fell. At the very last moment he was able to cling to a tuft of grass. Now he had earth under his fingernails. From here he managed to gather fourteen pages together, including page 79, which had a space at the bottom, but which still couldn’t be the last, as there was no address on it. So at least twenty-five pages were still missing. He leaned, exhausted, against the hood and smoked.

By now it was twenty to eight and broad daylight. The traffic was building up, and now the last truck was coming towards him. Its bumper was far too narrow, its gas tank unprotected. When it had passed, Perlmann, who was standing in the middle of a black cloud of smoke, became aware – to his amazement and relief – that his heart wasn’t pounding. Only his cigarette had fallen into the road without his noticing. It was, he thought, as if a first thin dividing wall had formed between him and the trucks; a first protecting distance which would get bigger and bigger over time until one day he would also be able to forget the red mist. As long as Leskov has his text back.

Astonishingly, large numbers of sheets had been blown on to the embankment that sloped downwards on the other side of the road. The ground there was soft and damp, and at one point Perlmann sank beyond the edge of his shoes into the quagmire. The sheets had been resting on the tips of the grass, and weren’t very dirty. With two exceptions, they had been lying writing-side down, and were still legible. Now he had rescued a total of sixty-seven pages. He looked around a wider area, methodically, patch by patch, the whole thing three times. The rising sun pierced the cloud cover and Perlmann looked up, blinking. There were sheets in the tops of two tall bushes, one in each. It took a desperately long time before they finally came floating down, and with his furious shaking he must have presented a comical sight, because the school bus drove unusually slowly, and the children laughed and pointed at him.

One sheet was the first page with the title. There was no name underneath. It was creased and had a hole in it from a branch, but reading it wasn’t a problem. At least eight pages were missing now. Perlmann looked at the wheels of the passing cars and imagined the sheets getting stuck to tires like those and then being pressed rhythmically between rubber and tarmac, before ending up lying in rags somewhere.

When the road was empty for a little while, his eye fell on a brown rectangle, which hid part of the white marking in the middle of the road. It was a page of Leskov’s text, drenched with rain and dirt and driven over countless times. He lifted it by one corner, but the paper was fragile and tore immediately. A bottom layer. Puzzled, he opened the glove compartment and saw the map that Signora Morelli had lent him on Saturday night. He half-unfolded it and pushed it carefully, centimeter by centimeter, under the soggy sheet. On the lid of the trunk he started carefully dabbing the page down with his handkerchief as if it were an archaeological find.

It was page 58. In the middle, Leskov had written a subheading. All that could still be made out was that it had consisted of two quite long words, preceded by the number 4. But the ink had run almost completely; it had mixed with the dirt, and all that remained was a smear. Perlmann wiped the words again with another tip of his handkerchief. Perhaps something of the old ink traces that had been put on paper in St Petersburg would be revealed if one dabbed away the diluted and running ink that now lay over it. And some clues did become visible. But they weren’t enough to make out an unambiguous sequence of words. He lit a cigarette. The last word, he was more and more certain of it, must be proshloe: the past. But he could imagine at least three variants: iskazhennoe proshloe: the distorted past; pridiumannoe proshloe: the invented past; obmanchivoe proshloe: the deceptive past. And even a fourth: zastyvshee proshloe: the coagulated past. That he knew zastyvat’, to coagulate, he owed to a viewer of Agnes’s photographs, who had dared to compare her particular way of capturing the living present in images with the process of coagulation. Her fury had been boundless, because coagulation was her name for the process in which people rigidified into lifeless figures because of their conventions. And to keep from suffocating on her fury, afterwards she had done something that was usually Perlmann’s own habit: she had looked up the word in every available dictionary.

Smoking hastily, Perlmann repeatedly compared the words he tried out with the thin traces of ink. But the vague lines simply made any decision impossible. He measured his conjectures against what he had of Leskov’s thoughts in his head, and against the vocabulary that he had appropriated from Leskov’s text. But even that didn’t yield complete clarity. The intervention of language in the events of memory could, according to the first version, be characterized in all four ways. And besides, the text that he knew was not a reliable standard, since Leskov, as he had said, had thoroughly reworked it for the second version.

What was it that he had said about the new version on the drive on Monday? In the middle of traffic that was now becoming increasingly dense, and in which the trucks were beginning to accumulate, Perlmann tried to call Leskov’s words to mind. He had perceived them, he remembered that. And something had passed through his head as he did so. He closed his eyes. On his face he felt the heat of exhaust fumes. A truck’s gears clashed. He saw the beam from its left headlight in front of him, with nothing matching it on the right. Otherwise, he had no memory. And for a short and terrible moment he had the impression that he no longer knew how it was done: remembering. Then he put the card with the sheet on the rest of the pile and got in the car.

He would have liked to arrange the sheets to see how big the gaps were between the missing pages – whether they were all gaps of one or two pages, which it would be relatively easy for Leskov to fill, or whether there were bigger breaks in the text that would take him weeks, because a whole train of thought would have to be reworked. But in the state in which the pages were, that could not be accomplished without further damage.

He was sure that 79 was the highest page number he had read. It was the first thing he had paid attention to, and the page lay separately beside the pile. He picked it up and laboriously translated the last line that Leskov had squashed in tiny letters between two crossed-out lines: But that would be a false conclusion. Instead one must…

It wasn’t inconceivable that the text finished on the next page, which meant that there were only ten pages missing. Naming the correct conclusion could be the rhetorical culmination and climax of the work as a whole, and that could easily be done on a single page. But of course, it was equally possible that Leskov had taken a breath here, and introduced a new thought that it would take five or ten or even more pages to develop.

A great many tires had driven over the bottom-most papers. It hadn’t rained on Monday. Even so, the dirt from tires and the road had acted as glue, with the result that a whole pack of pages had been stuck to a tire all at the same time. Not twenty – some of the ones at the bottom would have come away, and he would have had to find those now. Ten? Five? Three? Perlmann turned and drove to Genoa, slowly and with both hands firmly clutching the wheel.

44

In the first big department store he went into the stationery department and demanded 320 sheets of blotting paper. The salesgirl incredulously repeated the number before she went to the store room. Perlmann put the four packs in the car and then walked helplessly, hesitantly, along the street. He imagined a bright library, empty and silent, with long tables on which he could peacefully clean each individual sheet of Leskov’s text and lay it between two sheets of blotting paper. He aimlessly crossed the road and turned down a quieter side street. From the end of it came the break-time cries from a school. Ten o’clock. He stopped for a moment and rocked on his heels. Then he walked on, avoided the scuffling children in the playground and stepped inside the schoolhouse.

A woman came towards him in the corridor, dressed in white like a doctor. Did she by any chance have a classroom for him? Perlmann asked. Or another room with long tables. Just for about half an hour. He had to dry some important papers. ‘I… I know it’s an unusual request,’ he added when he saw her lower lip beginning to jut.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, as if to dispel a hallucination. Then she studied him from top to bottom, from his bleary-eyed face to his shoes, which were completely covered with mud.

‘What do you think this place is?’ she asked coldly. ‘A Salvation Army hostel?’ With that she left him standing there and closed an office door behind her.

In the next alley but one he passed a little carpenter’s workshop. In the middle of the room there were two long, empty tables. A man in an armchair was reading the newspaper. Perlmann braced himself for a fresh rebuff and went down the two steps. Could he use the two tables for a few minutes to… arrange some important papers? He would also pay to… rent the tables, so to speak, he added, when the man’s face darkened.

‘Chiuso,’ the man said gruffly and held his newspaper up in front of his face.

The lunatic with the important, wet papers. The madman of Genoa with the thousand sheets of blotting paper. Perlmann went and stood in the hallway of a building and waited until the rain shower had passed.

He could send Leskov the text anonymously in St Petersburg. Frau Hartwig had the address in the office. But how would the unknown sender know the address, when the last page was missing? That didn’t work. He would bring suspicion on himself. He could neither give him nor send him the text. So what was he doing here with hundreds of sheets of blotting paper? The madman with the blotting paper.

In a side street not far from the car he came upon a bar with wide shelves along the walls. After ordering a coffee and a sandwich, he asked if they would mind if he spread some papers out on the shelf for a moment.

‘As long as you don’t drive my customers away,’ was the reply.

‘Mamma mia,’ said the proprietor when he saw Perlmann coming back with the stack of papers, hanging down at the sides, and two packs of blotting paper.

Perlmann started very carefully separating each sheet from the pile and laying it between two sheets of blotting paper. Now he would need one more sheet of paper to note something down, he said to the proprietor.

‘Anything else?’ the landlord replied wryly, and handed him an order pad exactly like the one in the harbor bar on Friday. ‘Would sir like a pen with that?’

Perlmann grinned and took his own pen from his jacket. He noted down the page numbers and made corresponding piles. The blotting paper turned blue and brown. The proprietor came out from behind the bar and glanced curiously at the yellow papers.

‘What language is that?’

‘Russian,’ said Perlmann.

‘So you can speak Russian?’

‘No,’ Perlmann replied.

‘Now I don’t understand anything any more,’ said the proprietor. ‘And all the dirt on the pages! Mamma mia!’

The madman with the dirty Russian text that he can’t read.

Among the page numbers in the thirties there was a gap of three pages, and towards the end two pages in a row were missing. Otherwise, there were gaps of only one page. On page 3 came the first subheading: 1. Vspomishchesya stseny: Remembered scenes. Subheadings 2 and 3 must be on the missing sheets. And probably towards the end there was also a section called Appropriation or something like it.

It could have been much worse, thought Perlmann as he laid the packed pages on top of one another. As long as a lengthy and crucial piece wasn’t missing at the end, Leskov would manage.

‘Mamma mia!’ cried the proprietor, throwing his hands in the air with ironic staginess, when Perlmann now asked him for a piece of twine. He watched him carefully tying the whole thing up. ‘So what are you going to do with it now?’

‘No idea,’ said Perlmann and ate his bread.

‘Buona fortuna!’ the proprietor called after him, and it sounded as if he was releasing some hopelessly confused and extremely vulnerable person into the harsh world outside.

Perlmann put the bound package in the trunk along with the rest of the blotting paper. Then he drove to the airport. The man with the red cap stood next to his cabin and smoked. Perlmann didn’t know why, but this man – the sight of whom made him feel suddenly hot – reminded him that there was something else he had wanted to do, a secret thing. He turned and drove a little way back until he was behind a hedge. Exhaustion blocked his memory. Only when he glanced at the bandage on his finger did it come back to him. He took the screwdriver and the wrench out of the trunk. Then he looked quickly around and inserted the screwdriver at the exact spot where the two coins touched. With the third powerful blow, the black box creaked, and the coins fell on to the rest of the money. The belt scraped a little, but otherwise it ran impeccably. As he closed the door he noticed the paint that had come off the bottom corner. That hadn’t been from the crash barriers in the tunnel. It must have happened when Leskov had heaved himself out of the car at the gas station, and the door had bumped against the concrete plinth with the air-pressure metre. When he nearly caught me.

Perlmann took the suitcase off the back seat, locked the car and glanced again at the driver’s seat. The bloodstains on the pale leather looked almost black.

‘We’ve been waiting for this car for almost two days, Signore,’ said the lady from Avis. She recognized him now, and her tone turned frosty. ‘Why didn’t you contact us? We have our job to do, too.’

Perlmann hadn’t given his rental period a thought until that moment. He was startled to notice that he was grateful for the reproach. Being reminded of a contract meant being fetched back into the normal world, into normal life, in which things resumed their regular course. It was as if he were being granted permission to leave the private time of his nightmare with its frantic lack of present, and return to public time, which flowed at its normal pace.

‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ he said and attempted a smile. ‘I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t do anything about it.’

‘Any accidents?’ the woman asked in an unforgiving tone and straightened her fashionable glasses.

Perlmann took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was forced off the road and drove into a crash barrier. The right side of the car is damaged.’

‘Were the police called?’

‘No,’ he said, and quickly cut off her next question, ‘the other car had disappeared even before I stopped.’

‘You should have called the police anyway,’ she said curtly and took a form out of the drawer. ‘Where was that?’

He gave the correct details and signed.

‘Half a million excess,’ she said, glancing at the insurance details. ‘It will come off your card, along with the rest.’

Perlmann picked up the suitcase and went up to the bar. There was a different waiter there today, and otherwise only a girl in sneakers eating an ice-cream sundae and glancing often at her watch. Only gradually did he realize how relieved he was to be rid of the car. The sky had darkened, and the airport hall was bathed in a gloomy November light. He liked the sobriety that lay in that light. He grew calmer and, as he took slow, long drags on his cigarette, he kept thinking: It’s over. Over. On Saturday they would all be leaving: Leskov on Sunday morning. In four days’ time, at this hour of day, he himself would be on his flight home, and in the evening he would be in his familiar apartment. Exhaustion made way for quiet confidence. He paid and, hands in his trouser pockets, strolled over to the stairs that led up to the viewing area. He wanted to see the runway by the water and imagine his plane flying in a great loop out over the sea as it rose to ever higher altitudes.

‘Your case, Signore.’ The girl in the sneakers had come running. Perlmann took the suitcase from her, and struggled to hide his feelings.

‘Oh, yes, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you.’

The girl returned to her ice cream. He was filled with helpless fury, and stopped on the stairs with a blank expression on his face. A few moments ago, with his hands in his pockets, he had felt strangely light and free, unreally free, in fact. But he hadn’t tried to know why that should be; with no plan in mind, he had simply, thoughtlessly pursued the impulse of leaving everything that had happened over the last few days, everything that was part of it, behind him along with the car. It had been like the first unimpeded breath of air after a near-suffocation. And now the suitcase holding Leskov’s text, a ludicrous amount of blotting paper, the black notebook and the ridiculous props from the town hall hung leaden from his arm. He felt as if the whole nightmare of the past few days were contained in compact form in that suitcase, engraved with his initials.

He stepped on to the terrace and leaned against the balustrade. A Lufthansa plane was heading for take-off. He looked at his watch. My plane. As it roared into the air, just at the moment when the back tires lost contact with the runway he had the feeling that he could bear it no longer. That must be the end of notes and texts and translations and copies and lies and false leads and secrecy. It had to stop now. It had to stop. Right now. Now.

His foot brushed the suitcase. As if in a trance he stuck both hands in his jacket pockets, lowered his head and strode to the door, trousers flapping. He almost collided with the girl in sneakers. ‘Mio padre!’ Then she slipped past him through the door and started running to the parapet. Perlmann gave up. Slowly he followed her. When she turned round and, with a laugh, pointed to the case, he raised a hand in thanks. The Lufthansa plane disappeared into the low cloud.

Leskov’s address, which the anonymous sender couldn’t possibly know, wasn’t the only problem, Perlmann thought on the train. There were, for Leskov, only three places where he could have left the text: Moscow, Frankfurt or the plane. And there was simply no way to explain how the sheets might have ended up in that condition in an airport building or an aeroplane. And how so many of them should have vanished without trace.

If you added these two points together, Leskov was left with only a single hypothesis: someone who knew his address independently of the text had done something strange with the pages under the open sky, and was now sending them to him out of a guilty conscience. And on that day there was only one person who had been outside with him, and who could have had access to his suitcase: Philipp Perlmann, who had known his address for a long time. When Leskov ran through the drive in his mind, he would quickly see that there were, in fact, two places where it could have happened: the gas station and the roadside stop shortly afterwards. The shortness of the time in both cases could mean only one thing: Perlmann hadn’t done anything unknown or inexplicable with the text – he had simply thrown it away.

But why, for God’s sake? What harm could it do him? What did he have to fear from a text that he didn’t even know? He had the first version, and possibly he’d just read it. Then there was… yes, exactly, then there was only one condition under which the second version could have constituted a threat to him: if he had presented the first version, in translated form, of course, as his own text.

At this point Leskov’s thoughts would become very, very wary, and he would ensure that they came slowly. It was irrational to throw away the menacing text, when its author, who could reveal his act of plagiarism much more quickly and directly, was sitting next to him in the car. That was only rational if – the tunnel.

There was no question of Perlmann sending the text to St Petersburg. There was only one thing for it: to throw it away a second time. Throw the carefully preserved, ‘restored’ text, into a garbage bin, like before. Or quietly let it somehow lose itself. Perlmann glanced at the initials beside the lock on the suitcase. Then, when Santa Margherita was announced over the loudspeaker, he took out the certificate, the medal and the black notebook. He left the suitcase on the seat in the empty compartment and quickly walked to the front, to the carriage door. The wheels squeaked on the rails. Someone beside him opened the door. You know what this text means to me. The blacklists still exist, and I’m on several of them. Perlmann ran back, picked up the case and got out.

Leskov would be sitting beside Maria in the office, leaning forward and staring, his hands between his knees, at the screen. Perlmann wouldn’t immediately know what it was about this sight that alarmed him. Only in the elevator would he understand: his translation, the fraudulent text, was still stored downstairs in the computer. Certainly, Maria had no reason to put it on the screen in Leskov’s presence. But such a thing could easily happen inadvertently. In all likelihood she’d given the group their own folder. A couple of mistyped keys and Leskov would read: the personal past as linguistic creation. The title would electrify him, and he would lean still further forward to read the first few sentences. Who’s this text by? would be his excited question. Maria might be distracted, or tired, or scattered, and already it would have happened. There would no longer be an innocuous explanation to give Leskov. Now, a full three days after his arrival – not to mention the conversation about the missing text – his mind would start working.

A curse, Perlmann thought. Leskov’s text weighed on him like a curse that he wouldn’t be able to shake off, wherever he went. The suitcase that he hadn’t got rid of. And now the clues in the computer that could give everything away if Maria made just one tiny, innocent slip. He set down the suitcase in the wardrobe, closed the wardrobe and put the key in the bedside table drawer. He had just pulled the heavy curtains closed and lain down on the bed when he got up and took the suitcase out of the wardrobe. Working as carefully as a picture restorer, he replaced the old, stained sheets of blotting paper with new ones. The treatment had helped. The bits of ink had been absorbed where they had run, and the original lines now stood out more clearly. The dirt had dried, and turned paler. Perlmann put the suitcase with the text back in the wardrobe and crept under the covers. If Maria was working with Leskov now, she would have set up a new data file for him. Then there would be no reason to call up another. There was no opportunity for a mistake. When she went home at five or six, she simply turned off the computer.

Later. Sometime later he would gain access to the office and erase the dangerous file himself. It wasn’t impossible. He relaxed.

The girl in sneakers had swung the suitcase over her head as if it were as light as a feather. When he had tried to lift it himself, however, it was like a piece of lead, fastened to the floor by a magnet. Around him, a sea of blotting paper darkened and ended up looking like a huge slab of rust. Did he think this was an ironmonger’s shop? the white teacher had asked him, pulling her Salvation Army hat down over her face. No! he cried, his voice failing, and tugged on the suitcase, which was wedged in the carriage door. On the platform, as he tried to keep pace with the accelerating train, he saw the black tunnel coming ever closer.

45

It was pitch-dark when Perlmann was finally woken by the stubborn buzz of the telephone. He wanted to apologize for not coming to dinner, Leskov said. Maria had said she was ready to spend some more time working with him at the computer, so that his written submission would be ready for tomorrow’s session.

‘I don’t know what I would do otherwise,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just finished, even though I worked nearly all night. And all because I forgot the damned text like an idiot!’

Perlmann fetched the text from the wardrobe. The fresh sheets of blotting paper were only very slightly stained. Most of the pages were dry by now. The biggest problem was the page from the middle of the road, the one with the fourth subheading. And the one from the ditch was difficult, too, the one that had been so wet that it must have been under a dripping tree. He packed these two between fresh sheets of blotting paper again. He closed the valise in the wardrobe and stuck the key in his blazer pocket when he went down to dinner. For the first time in weeks he was punctual.

How was he to explain the friendliness, the warmth, even, that they all showed him when he stepped to the table? There was nothing fake about it, and nothing obtrusive either, he thought, as he ate his soup. And yet it was hard to bear. Because it had something of the friendliness, the zealous humanity, that you would show towards a patient – someone who was being granted a breathing space, a period of convalescence. For a while lots of otherwise quite natural expectations and demands were put in parentheses. And that meant: temporarily he wasn’t taken entirely seriously. Perlmann was glad when Silvestri asked him across the table, in quite a matter-of-fact manner, whether it would be all right for him to deliver a brief talk on Friday.

The perception that began to preoccupy him when he listened to the conversation at the table took time to assume a clear substance. While he had been enclosed within his delirium and his anxiety, the others had been getting on with their lives. And they had done that together, as a group in which all kinds of relationships had formed. There were constant hints, allusions and shared memories. There was irony, a knowledge of the forgivable weaknesses of the others; there was a playing with criticism and self-assertion, a delight in intellectual and personal banter. And there were shared experiences involving this town, its restaurants, churches, the post office – experiences that the others had been having while he had been sitting in a courtyard with his chronicle, trying to find the present through the past. He felt a pang, and remembered school journeys on which he had often come in last.

Achim Ruge – and Perlmann noticed this with astonishment, as if he had only just got here – had in the meantime plainly become something like the secret star of the group. His chuckle regularly set the others off, and with each new subject it seemed to Perlmann as if they were all waiting for one of his dry remarks. When they had been discussing Laura Sand’s film, a personal aspect of Ruge had come to light. Otherwise, Perlmann didn’t actually know anything at all about this man Achim Ruge.

I never gave the others a chance to get to know me better. Perlmann had never shown anything of himself but his purely professional side. From the very outset, his anxiety had reduced the others to one-dimensional, schematic figures. They were adversaries first and foremost. That applied even, in the end, to Evelyn Mistral. He had been constantly trying to work out the others. Inside, he had delivered harsh judgments about them. At the same time he knew – outward appearances aside – as good as nothing about them. His panic at the idea of being exposed had frozen his perception at a terrifyingly superficial level. Another two days, then they would be leaving. He had found out nothing about them, learned nothing from them, and the only relationship that he had developed with them lay in his attempts to close himself off and protect himself from them.

But Leskov was really unlucky to have left his text behind, von Levetzov said. He’d taken that long journey, it was his first time in the West, and now he’d been sitting nonstop in his room since yesterday afternoon preparing himself. And he had to go back on Sunday.

‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘he seems to be anxious that the text has been lost somewhere en route. He hinted as much to me this afternoon. He looked really distraught. Something professional seems to depend on it, too.’

Perlmann left his dessert and went out to Maria’s office. When Leskov saw him through the glass door, he came up to him with a bleary-eyed face, red with excitement.

‘We’ll be finished soon. Unbelievable what a computer like that can do! Calling a text up to the screen just with a click on a key! Just one click! You just have to move the cursor to the right place!’

Perlmann went out on to the terrace and smoked a cigarette. In his mind’s eye he saw Maria’s hands with the red fingernails and the two silver rings. She would be careful with the name of the file. She wouldn’t be scattered. She would pay attention. Before he turned to the door, he couldn’t help looking up to his room. The only row of windows without a balcony.

Over coffee, Laura Sand asked him if his father was still alive.

‘He was completely mistaken, in fact. There are wonderful corners of Mestre. If you know how to look. I always feel that modest, hard-working town is a relief after spectacular and somehow unreal Venice. I always stay in a hotel in Mestre, never in Venice. David thinks it’s a fad of mine. But I like it. Quite apart from the price.’

‘While I think Mestre is quite dreadful,’ said Millar, looking at Perlmann with a grin that was filled with conciliatory mockery. ‘I had to stay there once because there was something wrong with the causeway to Venice. The evening seemed to go on for ever.’

Perlmann was grateful for the remark: Millar wasn’t condemning him for yesterday. He’s lifted me up. Their eyes met. He, too, seemed to be thinking of the moment in the town hall.

‘I knew a girl in Mestre once,’ said Silvestri, expressionlessly. ‘Great town.’

‘Well,’ said Millar, frowning satirically.

‘Ecco!’ said Silvestri, blowing smoke towards him.

‘I’m going to take my next holiday in Mestre,’ chuckled Ruge as they broke up after dinner, ‘and I’m not going across to Venice once!’

The two most badly damaged pages had once again transferred moisture to the fresh sheets of blotting paper. But they were still far from dry and Perlmann laid them on the radiator along with a few others. Then he cleared the round table, fetched his toothbrush and started removing the dirt from the dry pages.

A lot of brownish stains remained, some of them speckled, which couldn’t be got rid of, and where fat drops of water had fallen, the paper had been warped when it had dried. But even if it was faded, the text was legible again, and Leskov himself would soon know, even with the shapeless ink stains. Perlmann became quite practiced with his toothbrush. He now had a feeling for the correct angle of the bristles, and knew how to remove damp bits of soil. He kept blowing the dust away, and every now and again he fetched a towel from the bathroom to clean the toothbrush. As he worked, he rocked his torso slightly back and forth, and tapped out a rhythmic beat with his foot.

He had just started on page 49, and it was half-past eleven, when there was a knock on the door.

‘It’s me,’ said Leskov. ‘Can I come in for a moment? I need to talk to you.’

I need to talk to you. Perlmann froze, and suddenly felt as if he had been sitting in icy cold for hours. She made a mistake with the file name. He’s seen the text. He knows everything.

‘Philipp?’ Leskov knocked again.

‘Just a moment, please,’ Perlmann called, unable to keep a hysterical squeak out of his voice. ‘I’ve got to get dressed!’

He feverishly packed the finished pile on top of the others and collected the pages on the radiator. As he did so, the problem page with the subheading slipped from the sheets of blotting paper, fell to the floor and ripped as he picked it up. Valuable seconds elapsed. Perlmann looked frantically around, and then shoved the whole stack under the bed. On the way to the door he threw his towel and toothbrush on to the bathroom floor. Before he opened the door, he looked back. The wire waste-paper basket was full of stained blotting paper. The powder-blue carpet covered with pale dust. The table unnaturally empty. Too late. The time has come. He’s caught up with me after all.

‘Sorry for disturbing you so late at night,’ Leskov said, hastily blowing big clouds of smoke into the room. He set a computer printout down on the table. It was his submission for tomorrow. Reading it through, he had suddenly been unsure if it would work – if one could present such a thing at all. He had a sense that it contained some contradictions, some inconsistencies. ‘But I no longer trust my tired mind. Having to do the whole thing in such a short time and without my text: it was simply too much. Would you read it through for me?’

Perlmann picked up the six pages and held them in front of his nose. He wasn’t in a state to read a single word with any understanding. The blood pounded all the way to his cold fingertips. The only sounds in the room were Leskov’s wheezing and the gurgling of the radiator. Perlmann estimated the time for a single page and turned to the next one. When it was time for the third page, he felt he urgently had to go to the toilet. For a moment he looked over the edge of the page. Leskov looked at him uncertainly. Could he quickly use the bathroom?

Perlmann threw the counterpane over the bed and pulled it up until it touched the carpet on the side of the window. Then he leaned back with his eyes closed, Leskov’s pages read in his lap. Maria had been careful with the file name. Maria wasn’t scattered. And Leskov’s text, a summary of which lay in his lap, was under the bed. It was hidden, even if Leskov were to bend down. Nonetheless, his anxiety didn’t go away. Perlmann felt twinges in the region of his heart. Fine smoke rose from Leskov’s pipe in the ashtray. Once again, it would smell sickly sweet all night. He hated Leskov. No, that wasn’t true. He just wanted him to disappear. Everything to disappear: his smell, his text, the man himself. That all of it would disappear without a trace. For ever.

‘So you really think it will be all right?’ In Leskov’s relieved face there were traces of anxiety and doubt.

Perlmann nodded.

‘And the contradictions? You know, the thing that annoys me most is that I can no longer bring together the complicated business of invention and appropriation. And it’s all there, in black and white. In Petersburg. I hope.’

‘These theses here can be defended, I’m sure of it,’ said Perlmann, handing him the sheets with a gesture so resolute that it seemed almost violent. He watched his own movement with astonishment, and was amazed at how loud and firm his voice sounded. It was the voice, he thought a moment later, with which one makes a promise.

The doubts vanished from Leskov’s face, and he held a match vertically to his pipe. Could Perlmann now see the similarity between the two texts?

Perlmann nodded mutely.

Leskov was about to start talking about that similarity when he broke off. ‘I’d better let you sleep now. You still look exhausted.’ At the door, he surprisingly gave Perlmann his hand. ‘That was very important for me,’ he said with a grateful smile. He slowly reached for the door handle behind him. ‘You know, over in my room, at the desk, the thought came to me over and over again: The text is lost. All I have in my hand is these few lines. The more tired I got, the more often that thought got in the way.’ He smiled. ‘High time for me to get a good night’s sleep.’

Perlmann looked at the coarse hand that gripped the smoking pipe bowl, and nodded. The moment when the door clicked shut took an eternity to come.

With the window wide open, Perlmann set about cleaning the rest of the text. Tomorrow morning, when he saw Leskov stepping into the veranda and sitting down at the front, he wanted to be able to think that the manuscript was upstairs in the room – ready to be given back at any moment. But all of a sudden all the dexterity that he had acquired over the past few hours seemed to vanish. He rubbed either too gently or too hard, and in his patience he forgot that dry-looking crumbs of earth could still be damp inside. More and more often the cleaning became a smudging, and now he also discovered that moisture had entrenched itself at the top of the bristles of the toothbrush; it must have come from the bathroom floor, and was now increasingly forcing its way to the tips of the bristles and into the proximity of the paper. At the bottom of page 57 he gave up, and when he set the page aside he saw that his hand was trembling.

Now it was the turn of the problematic page 58, which he had previously put back between fresh blotters, and set on the radiator again. Perlmann went and got it and looked at the remaining traces of the subheading. The mixture of ink and dirt had by now dried completely, and could be wiped away with his handkerchief. Pridumannoe proshloe: the invented past, he thought, was the most likely reading of the pale fragment of the line. He took off his glasses and held the lenses as a magnifying glass over the paper. Now he discovered that before the first word there was a pencil marking for an insertion. Of the insertion, also written in pencil, the only letters that could be made out were n and o, which seemed to belong to the beginning and end of a single word. Nevol’no pridumannoe proshloe: the involuntarily invented past, he thought. In which case Leskov had extended his theme in the second version: apart from the linguistic impression of memories, it was also about truth and volitional control.

Once again Perlmann cast a sober glance at the few clues: nothing that could be made out there really supported this over-hasty assumption. Disgruntled, he covered the page with the blotter. When he pulled it away again and started to read, he felt the trepidation of the addict.

His reading proceeded only slowly, as he had no experience of Russian handwriting. But, eyes stinging, he continued until there were three words in a row that he didn’t know at the bottom of the page. He lit a cigarette and, as his eyes remained focused on the line, his hand reached with mounting impatience for the dictionary. The sensation of emptiness had to be repeated a number of times before it dawned on him that there couldn’t possibly be any dictionaries there now. He gave a start, as if from a forbidden daydream. His face stung. He quickly closed the text in the wardrobe and, shivering, walked to the window.

‘I need to use the computer for a moment,’ he said a few minutes later to Giovanni at reception. ‘Check something about my text. For tomorrow.’ A spasm ran from the back of his neck and down his back, and he had the feeling that he could barely turn his head.

Giovanni reached towards a drawer and then paused. Hesitantly, he raised his head and looked uncertainly at Perlmann. ‘The office… no one… I have instructions…’ He lowered his eye and rubbed awkwardly at the handle of the drawer.

‘I understand,’ said Perlmann and prepared to go.

Then Giovanni suddenly looked at him with a grin. ‘Oh, come on, I’ll make an exception for you.’ He took a key from the drawer, walked ahead of him and opened the door. ‘I’m sure you know how to use the computer already,’ he said as he turned on the light, ‘because I…’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘thanks very much.’

He hoped Giovanni would retreat into the back room. But he stayed standing at the counter, nodded and smiled and raised his hand slightly. Perlmann cursed the glass door of the office. Now he would have to do it right in front of Giovanni’s eyes. He straightened the chair in front of the screen and reached for the switch at the back of the computer. Nothing happened. He rocked the switch back and forth several times. No effect of any kind. He walked around the table and took a look at the switch. It was the right one. Giovanni raised quizzical eyebrows and made as if to come over. Perlmann hastily gestured to him to stay where he was: Tutto bene! Perlmann’s hands were damp, and the spasm at the back of his neck was becoming stronger and stronger. He stared blankly straight ahead. The plug. He slowly rolled his chair back and looked under the table. All the plugs were in their sockets. He avoided glancing over at the counter. Only now did he notice the round lock without a key. Finished. Of course, the business documents. He turned to the side table with the drawers and screened his hands from Giovanni’s eyes with his back. The open drawers contained only office material, he could see that as soon as he opened them a crack. The key for the computer would be in the narrow top drawer, from whose lock the key had also been removed. In the only box on the desk there were just paperclips.

Perlmann breathed in twice, slowly. His back relaxed. Relief was mixed with tiredness. The fact that he noticed the transparent box of disks when he stood up had something to do with the fact that the plexiglass reflected the fluorescent light from the ceiling. He slid the chair to the tray at the side and opened the box. The disk with his name on it was the second from the front. Under the name it said on the label: personal past. mestre.

Perlmann took care that his movements were easy for Giovanni to make out as he rolled himself back to the computer and put the disk in the drive. Then he sat down in a pose of concentration in front of the dark screen and simulated typing movements. He could at least remove the disk. Perhaps Maria had only worked with it, and the text wasn’t even on the hard drive. He grew calmer. With a pen from the desk he tapped the edge of his nose a few times and then stuck the tip between his lips while, leaning back with legs outstretched, he pretended to gaze into an imaginary distance. Then he made a few more typing motions, took the disk from the drive and pressed the switch. With his back to Giovanni he stuck the disk in the belt under his pullover, ostentatiously snapped the box shut and left.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’

Giovanni caught up with him in the portico.

‘You were asking about Baggio yesterday.’

‘Yes?’

‘He scored another goal tonight. Against Bayern Munich!’

‘He’s plainly a great striker,’ said Perlmann, and an emotion that was hard to distinguish from pure tiredness brought tears to his eyes.

‘E come!’ said Giovanni.

‘Ciao,’ said Perlmann and touched him fleetingly on the shoulder.

‘Ciao,’ Giovanni said, too. He said it hesitantly and slowly, and it sounded like an incredulous echo.

When Perlmann looked down at the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, a group of young people stood applauding because a lanky boy was kissing a girl who, in spite of her piled-up hair, barely came up to his chest. That wasn’t his jetty, not the one that led out into the black water. It was as if the jetty of two days ago had been extinguished by the young people, or rather: expelled from the world.

He went on walking beyond the rocky spur until it was quite dark. Then he slung the disk far out into the sea. The movement came from his wrist and shoulder at the same time, the little disk turned quickly on its own axis, rose for a while in a low curve, then fell spinning and chipped almost vertically into the water. Perlmann heard quiet applause, but couldn’t tell if it was only his imagination.

From the rocky spur he looked across to the Miramare. A letter seemed to be flickering in the middle of the neon writing. Somewhere in the dark hills over there were the garbage bins into which he had thrown the first version of Leskov’s text. Tomorrow, immediately after the session, he would finish cleaning the second version. He certainly couldn’t send it from Italy. Nor from Frankfurt. But the very thought was pointless. He couldn’t possibly send the text to Leskov.

The young people had moved on. The beach jetty was empty. His jetty was back in the world, washed around by black water. Perlmann felt himself beginning to crumble. There were delicate, treacherous cracks within his inner structure. He quickly went back to the hotel.

The air in the room was cold, and it still smelled sickly sweet, even though this time Leskov had only used the ashtray for a match. Perlmann washed out his toothbrush several times. But it was as if the dirt had practically eaten its way into the bristles. The foam when he brushed his teeth had a brownish tint.

In the morning, he thought in the dark, Leskov would be sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, anxiously and with almost nothing in his hands. He didn’t know it, but Perlmann had promised to defend his theme, which he didn’t know in the new version.

It was an antediluvian screen, bright bilious green on dull dark green, and it flickered so wildly that it made the eyes stream straight away. A nauseating, sickly sweet smell flowed from it. That couldn’t be, but it was, and when he sniffed at the ventilation slits smoke was emerging from there as well; a treacherous smoke that couldn’t at first be seen, but then suddenly formed a dense, suffocating cloud. A flood of incomprehensible Italian orders and file names swam across the screen. At last he somehow got hold of the right one, but Leskov’s text simply wouldn’t be erased, he pressed the key over and over again, hundreds of times, until nothing remained of the key, but Leskov’s text with Perlmann’s name went on flickering under the title. At last he clicked the on-off switch, but nothing happened; even pulling out the plug had no effect: Leskov’s text went on flickering and flickering, and now Perlmann’s name was suddenly there in capital letters. Then he gripped the huge sledgehammer in both hands. But it wasn’t so easy. You had to take a run-up with lateral, rhythmically swinging movements before lifting the hammer high above your head to deliver the crucial blow. At last the time had come, the hammer rose up, it passed the apex, but then all of a sudden it had no substance and no weight, and rather than bringing it down with a crash into the computer, as he woke up Perlmann found himself on the bedcover, his hand clenched convulsively into a fist.

46

Nonetheless, he had the feeling of having had a proper night’s sleep for the first time in ages. As he got dressed he established that he had no fresh underwear, and saw in his mind’s eye the full plastic bag falling on the stinking cabbage. The wound in his finger was no longer damp, the bruise and the swelling had subsided. At the smallest pressure, admittedly, his fingertip still hurt so much that it brought tears to his eyes. He put his last bandage on it.

At exactly eight o’clock he went down to breakfast. If they thought he was finally eating humble pie in the wake of his disgrace, that was their business. Signora Morelli had just stepped out through the portico, and was straightening one of the round tables. Unnoticed, he bent over the reception desk and shoved the stained map, which had been on the radiator all night, between other papers on the shelf.

The dining room was completely empty. Not a single place had been used at the group’s table. The waiter who brought him his coffee and egg was plainly embarrassed. With each minute that passed without anyone appearing, Perlmann felt more and more that he was being ridiculed. Asking the waiter whether the breakfast habits of his – yes, his – group had changed was impossible.

Adrian von Levetzov came at a quarter past eight. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen him without a waistcoat and even without a tie. His pale, wrinkled neck made him look old.

‘Oh, Perlmann, good morning,’ he said more flatly than usual, and rubbed his eyes. ‘We all stayed out very late last night. There’s a feeling that it’s all coming to an end.’

Perlmann nodded and took another roll. And then another. The silence was unbearable. The tablecloth was stained. The waiter’s movements were affected.

‘I didn’t know about your wife’s accident,’ said von Levetzov, holding his coffee cup, ‘until Leskov told us about it on Tuesday. Terrible. That must have brought you very low.’

Leskov: the man who explains my breakdown to other people. ‘Yes,’ said Perlmann, topping up his coffee.

Someone had put a damp spoon in the sugar; there were brown lumps in the bowl. In the fresh ashtray there was a tiny bit of chewing gum, with a drop of water on it.

Perlmann wanted to make an effort with Adrian von Levetzov, but he had no idea how to do it.

‘Yep, it’ll be back to the rat race,’ smiled von Levetzov. ‘What will you be teaching?’

As he gave a vague description of his lecture series, something quiet and dramatic happened in Perlmann: he made the decision to abandon his professorship.

What was happening inside him was not an internal action. There was nothing active about it. It was more like the process of a little gear wheel that has long been moving with his pen, slowly and inexorably towards a lock, finally snapping in place and thus setting in motion something bigger, something revolutionary. He hadn’t known that the time had come. And yet it seemed quite natural that it should have happened right now – at a time when the empty dining room emphasized his alienation from his colleagues and their world quite as self-evidently as if it had been a scene from a film.

Von Levetzov got up with a glance at his watch. ‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said apologetically. ‘See you later.’

Perlmann took in the empty room. He would think back time and again to this room and this moment. It was hazy over the bay, impossible to say whether the sun would part the clouds. He slowly finished his cigarette and ran his hand along the edges of the tables on his way to the door.

Then someone pushed the door open with his shoulder. It was Millar. He had taken off his glasses and was running a hand over his face. After that Ruge came in. ‘A bucket of coffee!’ he called to the waiter. Evelyn Mistral, who was walking behind him, laughed her pearly laugh. She had piled her hair up, and was carrying her writing pad with the shield of Salamanca under her arm.

‘See you later,’ Perlmann said, escaping from their startled stares.

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria had left the office door open, and now came out from behind her desk. ‘Giovanni told me you wanted to use the computer last night. Is something wrong? I always close up in the evening. A safety measure. If I’d known…’

Perlmann looked at her hands – those hands that couldn’t make any mistakes, that couldn’t under any circumstances hit the wrong key.

‘It wasn’t all that important,’ he said with forced equanimity, ‘I just wanted to try something out with my text – something, erm… that you can’t do with the printout.’

‘I know, people always say that.’

She ran her hand through her hair, and again Perlmann wondered mechanically whether her fingers wouldn’t be sticky with hairspray afterwards. You’ve been living under a rock. Like way, way out.

‘Which of the two texts was it, then?’ she asked with a smile. ‘The one about memory?’

‘No, the other one,’ Perlmann said and gulped.

‘And it occurs to me,’ she exclaimed and turned towards the office, ‘that I still have to give you the disk!’

As she opened up the box and started searching, Perlmann leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded. She’ll never find out.

‘I don’t understand this,’ she murmured, sat down and went through the disks again, slowly, one at a time. ‘It was in here, and now it’s gone.’ She looked through everything on the desk, smiling at him awkwardly from time to time. ‘I’m not usually as scattered as this.’ Distracted and incredulous, she went through the drawers, and you could tell by the wrinkles on her nose that she was battling against irritation with herself.

Suddenly, she made a dismissive gesture. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll just copy both texts for you quickly again.’ She turned on the computer and put a new disk in the drive.

At that moment Perlmann heard Leskov’s voice behind him. ‘Are we starting on time?’ He turned round. Leskov was wearing his bilious green shirt with a brown tie and a grey waistcoat stretched over his belly.

‘Ecco!’ Maria was saying, ‘so first we’ve got the text about memory… what abbreviation did I give it… oh, yes, that’s it.’

He doesn’t understand Italian. The sound of copying began. Perlmann looked at his watch for an unnecessarily long time. ‘Yes, we’ll have to be there in a minute,’ he said.

Leskov walked up to Maria and held out his hand.

‘Un momento,’ she smiled. ‘Now the other one. That was… yes, just Mestre.’ Her fingers flew over the keys. ‘Ecco!’ The sound again. Now she shook hands with Leskov, who was looking at the screen. ‘Good morning,’ she said in English.

‘Incredible how little time it takes,’ Leskov said raptly. Then he showed Maria the stack of copies that he was carrying under his arm. ‘The text from yesterday. Thank you very much, once again.’

As Leskov was leaving, Maria took the disk out of the drive and stuck a label on it.

‘Erm… you don’t need to do that,’ Perlmann said hastily as she reached for her pen. He slipped the disk into his jacket pocket. ‘Now you can delete the texts.’ His hoarseness and the quiver in his voice made it, he thought, the caricature of a casual remark.

‘I will at some point,’ she said and turned off the computer. ‘But there’s no rush. The computer has a huge hard drive!’ She got up and looked down at her folded hands. ‘You know, I hate erasing documents that I’ve typed up. All that work, and then one click of the keys – and poof!’ She threw her hands in the air and looked at him with a shy smile that he had never seen before. ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense really, because nothing happens to the documents in there once the people have gone… It’s just how I am.’

Perlmann nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and tapped his jacket pocket.

Leskov had already distributed his handwritten submission, and was now sitting at the front moving his papers back and forth. He gripped his pipe bowl with both hands as he began to speak. He had already talked about the mishap with his text, he said. His tone revealed the fact that he had firmly resolved not to start talking about it again. But then, from one second to the next, his facial expression went blank, he rubbed his pipe absently with his index finger, and you could actually feel him being sucked into the pool of his attempts at remembering.

As he had done so often in this room, Perlmann hid his face behind his clasped hands as Leskov told parts of his story again. Quickly, and even though he didn’t try fully to understand the reasons why, Perlmann’s sense of guilt turned to fury: it had been a crazy, unforgivable act of recklessness to take such an important text, a text on which Leskov’s advancement depended, on a journey without making a copy beforehand! How could he do such a thing?

Even when Leskov was already some way into his lecture, Perlmann was still quarrelling with him. Until he suddenly stopped abruptly: What would have happened if he had told me about such a copy just before the tunnel? He took his hands from his face and tried to listen.

The others, with their sleepy faces, weren’t taking the Russian seriously. The contrast between the tie cutting into Leskov’s neck and Adrian von Levetzov’s unaccustomedly open collar was so vivid that Perlmann succumbed to fury once more. But this time it was a fury on behalf of Leskov, even going so far as to defend that horrible green shirt. Millar, who had never appeared in the veranda without his blazer, was wearing a windbreaker, and there was a camera on the table in front of him. And Evelyn Mistral, who had always listened to the others with her pen at the ready, was drawing circles with her folded glasses on her unopened pad. The only curious face belonged to Giorgio Silvestri.

In the discussion, Leskov was spared at first, and a patronizing benevolence was apparent. But by now Leskov had shed his self-consciousness, and surprised everyone with his doggedness. He stood by what he had said, and to Perlmann’s alarm he quickly went on the attack. There was nothing now of the anxiety with which he had sat facing Perlmann in his room the previous evening, like a student before his first presentation. Leskov’s attacks, in spite of their factual harshness, were prevented from being insulting or wounding, largely because his flawed English had a unique charm. Many of his turns of phrase, which weren’t quite accurate, had an involuntary comedy about them, which he only noticed when he saw himself reflected in the faces of the others. Then he laughed loudest of all. The victims of his attacks were often uncertain: had he meant it seriously? Or did he perhaps not know exactly what he had just said? Above all Achim Ruge, who seemed to have no sense of humor at all today, seemed bothered by this uncertainty, and when he took out a pack of aspirin, Laura Sand burst out laughing.

Leskov noticed the hesitancy on the part of the others more and more often, and more and more quickly. Then he repeated his reservation in different words, and in most cases the variation in expression showed that he actually had meant exactly what he had said. After some time the doubts of the others fled. His initial phrasing was taken seriously and the fact that linguistic expression as a theme in its own right had disappeared made the discussion more tart and direct. Evelyn Mistral was writing now, and Millar hung his camera over the back of his chair. The sickly sweet tobacco smell filled the whole veranda. Von Levetzov opened a window.

He, Philipp Perlmann, had been prepared, in cold blood, to murder that person up there at the front, who was now, brazenly and without the slightest vanity, keeping to the point. As he scribbled on the back of Leskov’s submission by way of self-disguise, Perlmann desperately sought a posture – an internal maneuver – that might save him from being totally suffocated by the feelings of shame and guilt that engulfed everything else. He tried to see Leskov only externally, as just a body, so to speak, and to concentrate on the things that repelled him: the sweat on his bald head, the bulges of his bull’s neck, his sausage fingers. It was a cheap, vulgar trick, and afterwards Perlmann’s shame was all the greater for it.

He, too, had to say something. And he couldn’t wait much longer. He shivered. The draught from the open window was suddenly icy. An athlete, he thought, must feel rather like that at his first competition after an injury. Over the bay the sun seemed to be falling against the low, milky cloud. The morning light grew softer. John Smith stood irresolutely at the edge of the pool. Millar pulled a mocking face at the sight of him.

What had happened in the empty dining room had left behind a sensation of something crucial and definitive; the impression of a release of tension. The feeling of liberation that he had longed for, however, had not arrived. Perhaps it was only a matter of time. His decision was only about an hour old, after all. But, basically, Perlmann knew better. It was quite different from the time when, coming out of the director’s office, he had stepped into the street outside the Conservatoire. In spite of the rain he had walked through the city for a long time, without an umbrella, his briefcase full of the things from his emptied drawer. Then he had driven to the sea. That time the defining feeling had been one of great liberation. He knew that behind it, still temporarily concealed, there lurked other feelings, more complicated and less pleasant. But for the moment he enjoyed being released from the iron discipline of practising. It was a relief that his battle with self-doubt had come to an end, and at the age of just twenty-one he felt incredibly grown up. Admittedly, a feeling of emptiness had set in soon afterwards, after getting up he didn’t know quite what to do with all the time ahead of him, and was glad that his term at Hamburg University would soon be beginning. But he was left with a mood of liberating insight, of finishing one thing and emerging into something new. Now, a good thirty years later, it was also an insight that guided him. At any rate he hoped so. But it was embedded in a different, darker experience: in alienation, weariness and guilt. The only thing missing was anxiety. He would find something. Something or other. Kirsten is taken care of. Perlmann was amazed that there was no anxiety. He barely dared to trust that perception. Something had changed within him. A development had been set in motion. All of a sudden he felt light, almost cheerful.

There was a moment’s silence. Perlmann gave a start. ‘So that’s my train of thought,’ said Leskov and reached for another pipe.

When Perlmann took the floor he had no idea what he was going to say. He had been far too preoccupied with himself to listen to Leskov elucidating his paper again. Just to have something to talk about, he started by explaining how he had worked out Leskov’s train of thought over all. They listened to him with emphatically benevolent attention. Their determination not to condemn him for Tuesday, and to go on taking him seriously in spite of everything, to be scrupulously fair – he thought he could almost physically hear it, as a particularly intense kind of silence that fell when he started speaking. He deliberately chose sober, plain phrases, and used components of the academic rhetoric that he despised. Just to show that he could do that, too. At first he gave a start when he noticed that he was moving through his translation, section by section. He came close to breaking off and simply falling silent. But he was no longer in control. The text, which he knew almost off by heart from the effort of translating it twice, pulled him along with it and, all of a sudden, he realized that he was enjoying the danger like a gambler. His presentation, which had already extended far beyond the length of a contribution to a discussion, became ever more sophisticated, fluent and engaged. He closed gaps in Leskov’s train of thought, produced additional references, identified possible misunderstandings and swept them aside. Evelyn Mistral’s feet played with her red shoes as she wrote down what he said. Laura Sand slowly rubbed her forehead. Ruge and Millar picked up their pens almost instantaneously. I’m rehabilitated. Thanks to Leskov’s text.

It would have appeared unnatural – revealing, in fact – if he had not looked several times in Leskov’s direction. He helped himself by staring at the ridiculous tassels fixed to the wall, which lay at eye level. As he did so, the image of Kirsten appeared in front of him, tugging on the tassels and laughing at the clouds of dust. He started to falter and only found his thread after he had closed his eyes with a grimace and opened them again, which must have looked to the others like an epileptic twitch. Sometimes, when he couldn’t do anything else, he did look at Leskov, but to a certain extent removed himself from his gaze and soon turned his head away again. Only after Perlmann had finished did he turn to face him and look at him quizzically.

All the while, Leskov had sat leaning back in the armchair, his massive thighs crossed. At regular intervals, little clouds of smoke had escaped from the corners of his mouth. Now, when he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, his face bore an expression that alternated between joy and disbelief. He thanked Perlmann extravagantly for his summary. It was more or less precisely – no, precisely – the way his ideas had originally developed. He paused, looked thoughtfully at Perlmann, and then let his eye linger on the table for a moment as he tamped down the tobacco with his thumb. He’s sure I’ve read the text. Completely sure. But he will never be able to prove it. Meanwhile, of course, his considerations had developed further, he said and pointed to his paper. And he ran through the new points once again, checking that Perlmann, who was taking notes, could keep up with him.

As he drew a thick line under his earlier scribbles, Perlmann started thinking. He was working. It was as if something had just come crashing in; something that had been left unused for a long time and had, in its uselessness, created nothing but friction. He hadn’t been so alert for ages. He and Leskov were the only people in the room. He asked questions, recapitulated, suggested additions, to test his understanding. From the corner of his eye he saw writing hands and surprised, curious faces. They hadn’t seen him like this before. He enjoyed his concentration, his synoptic view and his presence of mind, and every now and again, when he was able to pay attention to himself because Leskov was speaking, Perlmann thought he sensed that now, slowly and inconspicuously, an inner liberation was starting to gleam through, and that his new alertness, so unlike Monday night’s, wasn’t overwrought in the slightest and was connected to that morning’s decision.

And then, when Leskov’s new train of thought was quite clear to him, he started defending the earlier Leskov against the later one. It could have been a game, and at first he suspected himself of playing games, as if he had taken leave of his senses. But soon he worked out that he actually believed what he was defending. In which case there would, in fact, have been no plagiarism. He started getting carried away by his own words. Leskov smiled to himself like someone who is only too familiar with these reflections. From time to time he hesitated, frowned, took his pipe out of his mouth and wrote something down. Evelyn Mistral’s face revealed how pleased she was that Perlmann had obviously recovered. She nodded often, and for the first time Perlmann ceased to be afraid of her glasses.

Once when Leskov said something to defend his new thought, Perlmann forgot himself. ‘But here your earlier argument is much more convincing!’ he explained.

Adrian von Levetzov pushed his glasses back along his nose with his index finger and gave him a questioning look. At first Leskov smiled understandingly, before he suddenly jerked his head and looked at him with his eyes narrowed. He meant the argument they had discussed in St Petersburg, Perlmann said after a second of terror, and assumed an expression that felt opaque and impregnable. For a while Leskov stared, blinking, into the void. Then he started nodding. His face bore a look of astonishment. Never before had anyone remembered something he had said after such a long time. His thought had never been so important to anyone. He almost seemed to be embarrassed in front of the others. Perlmann looked for signs of suspicion. It was impossible to decide whether something was shimmering there, or whether it was only incredulous astonishment that gave Leskov’s face that expression.

Having grown impatient, the others began to express their doubts about Leskov’s method. Perlmann thought that Leskov didn’t put up a good defense on this point. For the first time he became aware that during the weeks that he had spent translating, he had anticipated all of these reservations and even a large number of others, and come up with possible defenses for them. Which means that I have been working the whole time. Then I’m still on top of things after all. He intervened in the discussion. As he did so he argued with a calm lack of agitation, and at one point he even managed an ironic remark. And then, as he coolly – one might even have said icily – fired off a series of rhetorical questions, looking at all the others in turn, the whole liberating effect of his decision finally unfolded. It happened with the momentum of a physically perceptible thrust. Last of all he looked at Silvestri. The unshaven Italian responded with an expression of clinical curiosity. That expression, Perlmann thought, was the only thing he didn’t like about the man.

One thing he hadn’t touched upon, said Leskov, was the idea that one can appropriate one’s past through narrative memory. For someone like him – who liked to stress the inventing, creating character of memory – that was, of course, a problematic thought. And there wasn’t time for more than a hint in that direction. He cast a glance at Perlmann: ‘Above all, one must clearly understand that the narrating self is none other than the narrated stories. Apart from the stories there is nothing. Or rather, no one.’ He smiled. ‘Most people find that a shocking assertion. I’ve never understood why. I find it quite pleasant that that’s how it is. Somehow… liberating.’

‘One question, Vassily,’ said Millar. ‘Do you really mean creating and inventing when you talk about remembering? I assume you mean creative and inventive. I could go along with that.’

Leskov looked over at Perlmann. ‘What would be the difference in German?’

‘Erschaffend and erdichtend as opposed to schöpferisch and erfinderisch,’ said Perlmann.

Leskov smiled. ‘I see. No, Brian, I’m afraid I mean the former.’

Millar looked at his watch. Ruge gathered his papers together and started playing with his pencil. But Laura Sand had another question. Did he mean in the end that that which we take to be an actually experienced past is merely an invention?

Leskov pursed his lips and nodded, his eyes laughing. One of the subheadings of his new text was: Neizbezhno vydumannoe proshloe, the inevitably invented past, he said.

‘One moment.’ Ruge jutted his bottom lip and leaned far over the table on both elbows. ‘In that case is there such a thing as a true story about the experienced past?’

Silvestri audibly inhaled his smoke. Laura Sand playfully pulled a strand of hair over her face. You could see that Leskov would have loved to capture this moment for ever. Never, it appeared, had this man enjoyed a moment so much. Perlmann wouldn’t have thought him capable of that face. It was the unbuttoned face of someone who has shed all anxiety and is now entirely at home with himself. Perlmann liked it.

‘No, there is no such thing as a true story about the experienced past,’ said Leskov with the stem of his pipe to his lips. ‘Of course not. Klim Samgin.’ His grey eyes were very bright and very clear, and their challenge consisted entirely in that brightness and clarity.

The pencil in Ruge’s hands broke in two with a loud crack. Millar took a film from the pocket of his windbreaker and picked up his camera. Von Levetzov smiled appreciatively when he saw that.

As he got to his feet, Silvestri stepped up and invited Leskov for a drink in the bar. Laura Sand wanted to know if she could come, too. She wanted to find out more about this cheeky thesis.

47

The paces that Perlmann later took as he walked up and down in his room were both exaggeratedly cautious and aimless. Often he interrupted his restless walking, folded his arms and lowered his head on his chest. How did one do it? How did one abandon a professorship? What did one write in the requisite letters? They would have to be laconic. He sat down at his desk and wrote some drafts. The texts grew shorter and shorter. Even words that seemed at first to be the bare minimum struck him, on rereading, as superfluous. Ideally, he would just have written: I’ve had enough and request my dismissal. An explanation would be demanded. After a while he noticed that in his thoughts he was sitting opposite the dean, a small, pale man with a crooked mouth, a ramrod-straight head and faultless creases in his trousers. You would like to know why? Very simple: I’ve just discovered my professional incapacity. That was the explanation he liked best. Especially if he managed to deliver it with a laugh. He couldn’t see enough of the dean’s uncomprehending expression. But suddenly the whole scene collapsed, and he felt as exhausted as if he had been talking for hours. He tore the pages with the drafts on them into tiny scraps. All of a sudden he was anxious after all.

He had left the toothbrush unused in the morning. He took Leskov’s text from the wardrobe. In many places, where yesterday there had still been a hint of damp, the dirt could now be blown away after a light touch with the bristles. But that wasn’t the only reason why the work was different today. Suddenly, Perlmann was no longer interested in the yellow sheets. No, of course that wasn’t quite true. He was resolutely determined to give the text back. He just needed to think about how Leskov had savored his punchline a little while before: the man must have his text back, regardless of the matter about the position. No, it was something different. All of a sudden he didn’t care that he didn’t know the Russian words for inevitable and invented, which Leskov had pronounced so quickly and indistinctly, and couldn’t fit them in his mind into the inky traces that remained of the subheading. That it was a Russian text at all – he didn’t even care about that. He didn’t understand the connection, but it had something to do, he thought, with the fact that they had talked about the text in the veranda. It was as if the others had stolen the text from him by learning of its content – but without freeing him of it.

Perlmann rang Frau Hartwig.

‘You are missed,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s asking when you’re coming.’

He asked her to give him Leskov’s home address, the only one she had. He wanted to bring the conversation to an end as quickly as possible, and sensed how hurt Frau Hartwig was that he was so abrupt.

‘When shall I tell the others you’re coming?’

‘Don’t tell them anything.’

‘I’m just saying,’ Frau Hartwig said stiffly.

Perlmann studied the sheet of hotel paper with the jotted address. It had been on a street corner with mountains of swept-up, dirty snow. Leskov had rested on his briefcase and scribbled his address on a piece of paper that fluttered in the wind.

‘I’m sorry, my handwriting’s a disaster,’ he had said when he noticed how much difficulty Perlmann was having in reading it. He took out another, crumpled piece of paper and wrote down the address again, this time in Latin capitals. ‘When you write to me, please use this address,’ he had said. ‘It’s safer.’ Perlmann remembered his embarrassed facial expression, because it was that expression that had kept Perlmann from asking whether it was because of the secret police or because he didn’t have an office at the university.

What use was that address to him? An envelope would arrive at Leskov’s house, containing the text which would turn out to be missing, among other things, the final page with the address. After his first, massive relief Leskov would start brooding. How had the stranger who must have found these sheets somewhere on his travels obtained his address? It had been sent from the West. Who in the West apart from Perlmann knew this address?

Perlmann had thought the same thing yesterday. But was it really inevitable that Leskov should suspect him? It wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. You had to think about it for a while. But there was also another possible explanation: whoever had collected and dispatched the text had been distracted or otherwise diverted, and had – after writing down the address – forgotten to put the last page in the envelope with the rest. An act of carelessness, of negligence. Thoroughly within the realms of the normal; by no means impossible. And was that not much more likely than a monstrous suspicion of Perlmann?

Perhaps Leskov’s embarrassment had been caused by the idea that he would need a home address even for a text like this. But perhaps that wasn’t it. After all, he taught at the university and he would want to signal that, even if he didn’t have his own office there. And the subject was politically neutral, at least in the eyes of the thugs in the secret police. And besides: didn’t colleagues from the East sometimes say that their work address was the politically safer one to use? But if Leskov had written his work address on the last page, it would be a complete mystery to him why the unknown person had used not that address, but his private one, which they couldn’t possibly have known. Now the suspicion could no longer be averted: Perlmann had lost the last page and picked up the only address available to him. Leskov would remember how the two of them had stood on the street corner.

But what was Perlmann supposed to do? He didn’t even know the name of the university in St Petersburg, let alone the name of the institute or the street. And writing something vague on it was too unsafe. Who could say where the text would end up? Let alone the fact that this was incompatible with the innocuous explanation: either the unknown person had the address, in which case he had it exactly. Or else he didn’t have it, in which case he couldn’t even know that it was St Petersburg.

What about simply asking Leskov for his work address? But why would he ask that, when their correspondence had hitherto been sent via his home address, at Leskov’s express wishes? Eventually, when the text arrived, Leskov would remember that question, and he would remember finding it a bit surprising. And if it turned out that his home address had been at the end of the text…

Did he usually write his private or his work address at the end of his academic texts? A casual question among colleagues. It could also be asked in a more generalized form: what was the usual practice in Russia? A question asked out of harmless curiosity about the foreign country that was now edging closer. But Leskov would remember even that when he was puzzling about the envelope with the western stamp. And if Perlmann got the answer that the work address was usually the one given, he would look even more stupid than before: if he asked what that address was, that conversation would be the first thing that sprang to Leskov’s mind when he opened the envelope.

A steadfast will was of no use whatsoever. It was simply impossible to put into practice. Not, at any rate, without giving oneself away.

There was a knock at the door. While he was still bundling the sheets together and blowing the dust from the table top, Perlmann noticed to his surprise that he wasn’t panicking. Without hesitation, almost with a feeling of routine, he pushed the pile of papers under the counterpane and slipped his toothbrush into his trouser pocket.

It was the new chambermaid, bringing him a hotel folder. She had meant to bring one for ages, but it had kept slipping from her mind. Had there never been one? ‘There was,’ Perlmann said and bit his lip. The chambermaid looked at him in surprise for a moment and plucked at the duster in her apron pocket. Then she asked if everything else was all right, and left.

There were another dozen pages to be cleaned. It was surprising that the pages with numbers in the seventies didn’t look worse. Lots of tires must have passed over them. Did that mean that there had been a thicker clump underneath? Or did it mean the opposite?

In the midst of these inconclusive reflections the phone rang.

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you in the evening for ages,’ said Kirsten. ‘So I thought I’d try during the day. Although it’s going to be really, really expensive. Is everything all right?’ And she asked if his turn had come to make a contribution. ‘Did it go well?’

Perlmann sat down on the edge of the bed and gulped convulsively. The receiver grew damp.

‘I’m sorry. What sort of question is that?’ Kirsten said, laughing with embarrassment. ‘Of course it went well. Things like that always go well for you. It’s just, the day before yesterday, Astrid – my friend from the shared apartment, I told you about her – made a complete flop with her presentation. Lasker obviously doesn’t like her, and he really tore her off a strip. Afterwards I had shivers up and down my spine.’

He would be coming home on Sunday, Perlmann said in response to her question.

‘You sound tired. You’re glad it’ll soon be over, aren’t you?’

Perlmann sat down on the edge of the bed until he was dazzled by the sun, which had found a gap in the low cloud. Then he pulled over a corner of curtain and wiped down the last two pages, which were only dirty at the edges. He slowly flicked through the whole pile before at last precisely aligning them. Leskov would manage. When he typed out the whole thing he would be able to fill the gaps from his memory. Unless there was a big chunk missing at the end. The thing that annoys me most, you know, is that I can’t get the complicated business of invention and appropriation to come together. And yet it’s all there, in black and white. In St Petersburg. I hope.

Perlmann picked up the last page. If he fought his way through the battlefield of deletions and additions, he might be able to estimate if there were lots of pages still to come. But at the top on the left there were two words that he couldn’t make out, and he didn’t know the one after that. A paralysing fatigue set in. Never again. He pushed the sheet under the pile.

The envelope in which he sent Leskov the text would have to be especially tough. Practically weatherproof. Perlmann saw it lying on an open mail car. It was at an abandoned Russian station, night was falling, and the snow was coming down in thick flakes. There was no point telling oneself that it was nonsense, because the consignment would go by plane, straight to St Petersburg. All the way to the stationer’s shop and also in the moment when he rested his hand on the shop door handle, he saw the deserted platform and the snow falling on the envelope.

The shop was still shut. Forgetting the siesta and then standing stupidly outside a closed shop – suddenly that felt like the theme of his whole stay. Ashamed, he looked round to see if anyone had noticed him. But apart from one bent old man, who was almost being whirled round by his dog, there was no one to be seen. In the shop window where the chronicle had been, a Christmas crib had been set up. Perlmann slowly began to walk around the block. When someone pushed up the iron shutter of a pharmacy with a pole, he waited and then bought a new toothbrush.

Leskov had said nothing about the deadline by which the text had to be presented if he were to have a chance for the job. But regardless of that, Perlmann really wanted to take the text to the post office that afternoon. It couldn’t possibly be there by Sunday evening, when Leskov excitedly stepped into his apartment. But the thought of the days that Leskov would have to spend assuming that the text was irrevocably lost was unbearable, and Perlmann didn’t want this nightmare to last an hour, a minute longer than necessary.

But sending it from here, with the Santa Margherita postmark, was out of the question. Should he drive to Genoa later on and send it from there? The day before yesterday, when he was listing the places where he might have left the text, Leskov had stopped at Frankfurt. It didn’t seem possible that he could have left it on the Alitalia plane. Or was it just a coincidence that he hadn’t mentioned it? If there was a reason for it, though, and he was sure that it couldn’t have happened on the flight to Genoa, the Genoa postmark would hardly be any more revealing than the postmark from Santa Margherita. No, Perlmann absolutely couldn’t send the text from Italy. He would have to do it in Frankfurt.

But he wouldn’t be there until Sunday lunchtime, and that meant three more days of despair for Leskov.

Perlmann looked at his watch. There was still the evening flight at six. But he wouldn’t get back today, and after everything that had happened he couldn’t possibly miss Silvestri’s session tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon and evening were also out of the question: they were the last few hours that the group was able to spend together, and it would be far too outrageous of him suddenly to disappear. Which left Saturday, if everyone but Leskov had left in the morning. Leskov could spend the afternoon alone, and he would be back so that they could have dinner together. Anyway, it was one less day of despair.

Perlmann quickened his pace and went to the travel agent’s in another part of the town. Here, too, he had to wait another ten minutes, during which he paced uneasily up and down. How long would it take for an airmail package to travel from Frankfurt to St Petersburg? And how secure was the mail? He couldn’t have the text couriered – airline company employees wouldn’t think a manuscript worth sending with any great urgency. Was it possible to imagine them sending it registered post?

The computer for flight reservations was on strike, and he was told to come back later. Perlmann was glad that the stationer’s was quite a long way away; the walking helped to combat his helpless anger. Apart from the fat woman, there was a lanky boy with a pimply face behind the counter. At the woman’s request the boy silently spread out a selection of envelopes. Perlmann immediately discarded the ordinary ones without reinforcement and padding. Then he took the one with the cardboard backing and bent it back and forth until the cardboard nearly snapped. He liked its firmness, but the paper was nothing special, and he wasn’t sure whether the envelope was big enough for the unusual format of the yellow sheets. He moistened his index finger with his tongue and rubbed the saliva on the paper, which turned dark brown and dissolved layer by layer.

‘Don’t worry. Of course I’ll pay for it,’ he said to the woman, who was furiously gasping for air.

The two padded envelopes that struck him as exactly the right size were made of matte paper, less tightly pressed than the other, shiny paper, which his saliva dissolved worryingly quickly. A revolting-looking, grey wadding came out of it; the other one was padded with transparent plastic. The corrugated foil would keep the moisture out. But what happened if the address disappeared under the snow along with the disintegrating paper? Perlmann set this envelope aside as well. As the boy stared at him, mesmerized, the woman sniffed agitatedly and made a face as if he were busy pulling the shop apart.

‘You really don’t need to worry,’ Perlmann reassured her and took some cash out of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll pay for everything.’

The last envelope was made of well-glued, shiny paper, but the padding was much thinner than it was in the others, and it was far too big. The pages would slip back and forth inside it, and be damaged even further. He asked the boy, who was glancing anxiously at the woman and still hadn’t said a word, to give him a pile of typing paper, and tried it out, shaking the envelope wildly back and forth. The result wasn’t quite as bad as he expected, but some of the pages were already slightly crushed. He asked them to show him various staplers, but none of them was capable of producing a line of staples that would have reduced the envelope to the right size. The paper survived the saliva test very well. Perlmann turned the envelope inconclusively back and forth, then suddenly asked for a glass of water.

He had to repeat the request. As the boy was going into the back, the woman resignedly lit a cigarette, and when a man came into the shop on crutches, with his foot in a cast, and greeted her like an old friend, she gave him a significant look. Perlmann walked to the door with his water and poured it over the envelope. For two or three seconds it looked as if the water would drip off the shiny paper without leaving a trace. But then the envelope was covered with dark patches that quickly got bigger and came together to form a single damp patch. Perlmann reached into the envelope and tested the dampness. The image of the Russian station platform appeared, and this time the dripping was melting snow. When he turned round he saw the three faces just behind the window. The madman with the water on the envelopes.

Mutely, and with the face of someone who is pleased to have had a bright idea, the boy gestured to him to wait and went to the back. The man with the crutches put his wallet in his pocket and left the shop, shaking his head. Perlmann paid and wedged the damaged envelopes under his arm. He was reading the chronicle a lot, he said to the woman, who smoked as she stared at the floor in front of her. But she didn’t seem to remember, and Perlmann was glad when the boy broke the awkward silence.

The envelope he handed to him was ideal; Perlmann saw it straight away. It was a used envelope with an address and an American sender. The boy, he read from his gestures, had taken off the stamps. The envelope was made of thick yellow cardboard that felt waxy. It had plastic padding and reinforced corners and it was exactly the right size.

‘Perfetto,’ Perlmann said to the boy, who beamed at him and indignantly waved away his offer of money.

‘Three thousand,’ the woman said, looking up from the floor for one brief moment.

As Perlmann gave her the money, the boy furiously grabbed the envelope, looked in a drawer and finally stuck fresh labels over the address and the sender’s details. Without deigning to look at the woman he handed Perlmann the envelope and gave him a jokey salute.

On the next corner Perlmann threw all the other envelopes into a garbage bin. When he crossed the street, he saw the man with the crutches, who seemed to have been watching him the whole time. The lunatic throwing away envelopes. At a school drinking fountain Perlmann splashed water over the yellow envelope. Spherical droplets formed, and disappeared completely when shaken and blown on. Suddenly, the Russian platform couldn’t have mattered less.

In the travel agent’s they booked Perlmann a flight to Frankfurt for lunchtime on Saturday. For the return flight at five they could only put him on the waiting list. Then Perlmann walked slowly towards the hotel and wondered how he could disguise his handwriting when he wrote Leskov’s address on the label – and which address?

48

A hand grabbed him by the sleeve from below, and when he turned round, startled, he found himself looking into the laughing face of Evelyn Mistral, who was sitting at a café table. She pulled him down on to a chair and waved to the waiter. Perlmann hesitantly laid the yellow envelope on the table. It’s not dangerous. She can’t possibly know what it’s for. As he waited for his coffee and they talked about how warm it still was, even though the sun was setting and the lights were being lit at the tables, he frantically wondered what he could say if she started talking about the envelope. Then, when he was stirring his coffee, she rested her hand on his other arm for a moment. What had been up with him over the past few days? She wanted to know. They’d hardly seen him, and when they did he had been so strange. ‘Reservado,’ she smiled. And then fainting like that. They’d all been rather puzzled, and concerned.

Perlmann took another spoonful of sugar. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and when he put them in his jacket pocket, he touched the disk, which he had forgotten in the meantime. As if he had touched something burning hot or particularly disgusting, he immediately took his hands out of his pockets and lit a cigarette. Then, for a while, he looked across at the moored yachts, rocking on the wake from a motorboat.

‘I don’t even know myself,’ he said at last, and avoided looking at her. ‘I… I’ve just somehow lost my equilibrium.’

‘And you really didn’t want to deliver any kind of lecture, did you?’ she asked softly and brushed the hair out of her face, which rested on her open hand. Perlmann looked at the levelling waves and nodded. He really wanted to leave, but at the same time he wished she would go on asking him questions.

‘Can I say something? But you must promise not to take it amiss.’

Perlmann attempted a smile and nodded.

‘If I may put it this way: I think you’ve made a mistake. You should have explained at the outset that everything’s a bit difficult for you at the moment, and you could also just have said that you didn’t want to give a lecture. Your wife’s death – everyone would have understood straight away. As things stand, everything that happened – dinner and everything – was interpreted as arrogance. Until Vassily put us right. The rest of us were completely in the dark.’

So it was a good idea to tell Leskov about Agnes at the fortress back then. It meant that he was able to provide a redeeming interpretation. The man I was inches away from murdering.

In their seductive simplicity, Evelyn Mistral’s words had been an enticing offer of self-deception, which Perlmann was unable at that moment to resist. He had committed a social solecism. He had made a very simple error. He wanted to enjoy the peace that lay within that insight. It could happen to anyone. You could avoid it in future. And in three days, at this time, he would be at home.

‘You’re completely right,’ he said, ‘it was a mistake. Nothing more to be said.’ It sounded shallow, almost insincere. So, after a pause, he added, ‘Sometimes it’s so hard.’ He hoped he wasn’t overdoing it with his tortured face.

Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov slumped on to their chairs with feigned exhaustion and put their shopping bags full of presents under the empty table next to them. Perlmann had been able to see them coming from a long way off and, with a movement that looked like a reflex, he had taken the envelope off the table and rested it against the leg of the chair.

‘At exactly the usual time,’ Evelyn Mistral smiled, glancing at her watch.

‘Yes,’ said Millar with a nostalgic sigh. ‘The first time we came here, a month ago, it was still light at this time of day. I’ll miss these daily meetings.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘Just a shame you were never there.’

The others nodded. Perlmann felt cold, and when he buttoned up his jacket, the disk bumped, with a quiet, dull sound, against the arm of the chair.

‘But if I imagine,’ Millar went on, ‘the same thing happening to me as happened to you – I don’t think I’d feel like doing anything. Except sailing,’ he added with a grin.

The remark took Perlmann’s breath away for a moment, and he felt himself welling up. Achim Ruge must have seen that something was happening in his face. With an expression and a voice that Perlmann wouldn’t have thought possible, he started talking about his younger sister, whom he had loved very much. He couldn’t even have imagined her taking drugs. Until she was found dead.

‘You know,’ he said to Perlmann in German, and his bright green eyes seemed to be even more watery than usual, ‘I basically dropped out for almost a year after that. Things went up and down in the lab. I had to cancel lectures, and my irritability towards my colleagues became legendary. Nothing seemed to have a point any more.’

Superficial, thought Perlmann, my fear of them has made me terribly superficial. So superficial that he couldn’t even imagine them capable of the most elementary, the most natural impulses and reactions. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so flabbergasted. Fear made other people bigger and stronger than they were, and at the same time they became smaller and more primitive. Couldn’t he have gone to them on Saturday morning and explained his irrational actions? And wouldn’t that still have been possible at a later time?

‘I could imagine,’ von Levetzov said, ‘that your invitation to Princeton hasn’t come at exactly the right time.’

Perlmann nodded, and again he was surprised by the sympathy that he was suddenly encountering. Was it, perhaps, not only fear that had made him superficial, but also that fear had come about because his view of things had been superficial from the outset – because he hadn’t thought the others capable of sympathy, and hence of depth?

‘Things like that can be postponed,’ confirmed Millar, when Perlmann looked at him quizzically.

He was actually considering that, Perlmann said, and tried to look at von Levetzov with a particularly open and personal expression, as a way of apologizing for his abruptness over breakfast. A personal relationship with Adrian von Levetzov would be more easily achieved in the presence of the others than in private. When Perlmann realized that, he became very confused. All of a sudden he had a sense that he didn’t know the slightest thing about people and their relationships with each other.

The others seemed not to see Leskov, who was waddling and flailing his way towards town. Perlmann hadn’t recognized him at first, because tonight he was wearing a peaked cap that lay on the bulges of his neck and, as a result, looked too small. If only he would walk more quickly.

‘Hang on, that’s Vassily!’ called von Levetzov, jumping to his feet and running after him.

Perlmann reached for the envelope beside the leg of the chair. No, it would attract less attention down here than on the next table.

Leskov liked the jokes about his cap. He showed it around and acted the clown. Later, when the conversation turned to the session, he touched Perlmann on the shoulder and said he hadn’t been able to get over his amazement when listening to him.

‘I would have bet my head that you’d read my text,’ he laughed, ‘and very carefully, too. I sent him,’ he said, turning to the others, ‘the earlier version. But he denies it. Apparently, my Russian’s still too hard for him.’

‘Didn’t you say you didn’t speak Russian?’ von Levetzov asked with a face in which irritation and admiration balanced one another.

Perlmann avoided Evelyn Mistral’s eyes, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism. ‘Just a few words,’ he said.

He couldn’t bear the pause that followed for very long, and went inside with an apology. At the end of the corridor where the toilets were, a door was open, leading to the other side of the quay wall. He walked to the water. Kitchen waste floated below him. He took the disk out of his jacket pocket and looked round. When he let go of it, it was caught by a gust of wind and fell with a clatter on the wall. He looked round again, and then kicked it out.

‘We’re just talking about this amazing envelope,’ said Leskov, and rested it on the table. ‘It fell over a moment ago when you stood up. Brian knows this kind from home. I wish we had things like that.’

‘Anything important I send in those envelopes,’ said Millar, ‘especially manuscripts.’ He rubbed the cardboard with his thumb and forefinger. ‘The things are practically watertight.’

Perlmann felt as if all the strength were suddenly draining from him, so much so that lifting his coffee cup seemed too much. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of pointlessness. Unable to think of an answer, he waited to be asked where he had got hold of the envelope. But the question didn’t come.

The conversation now turned to dinner. Just for once, the others didn’t want to eat at the Miramare. Suddenly, Millar, who had folded his hands behind his head and was looking over towards the hill on the other side of the bay, said, ‘Why don’t we go to that white hotel up there? What’s it called?’

‘Imperiale,’ said von Levetzov. ‘I had a drink there. The restaurant looked good.’

It was agreed that Silvestri and Laura Sand would have to be told, and Signora Morelli as well. Perlmann nodded. On the way to the hotel Leskov joined him and, with a smile, handed him the yellow envelope.

The lamp in the corner of the lounge where Perlmann had sat on Monday night was on again today. On the chair, two children were practising gymnastics, while their grandmother struggled to keep them under control. It made everything look very ordinary, even banal. The viewpoint of eternity, that was what Perlmann had thought about in that corner. The fear that he had been using that idea to defend himself against had been terrible. But it had given the thought a weight and a depth that were now lost. Now, surrounded by his good-humored colleagues, who were studying their menus, the thought seemed shallow and dull; it was little more than a sequence of words.

Perlmann was also generally bothered by the others, and he had to take care that his irritation, which had made him tear off two shirt buttons when he was changing earlier, didn’t intensify still further. This was the place where Kirsten had asked him whether he’d been happy with Agnes. And it was where he had experienced an extreme despair. It was his hotel. The others had no business here.

Through the swing door of the kitchen came the waiter that Perlmann had called an arsehole. He was wearing the same red jacket as on Tuesday, and now he whipped out his order pad and stepped up to their table. Standing at an angle, he didn’t see Perlmann at first, and took Ruge’s and Silvestri’s orders. Then, as Laura Sand was speaking, his eye wandered one chair along. Perlmann waited with his eyes half-closed, annoyed at the pounding of his heart. The waiter wrote something in his pad, then paused. His eyes narrowed and, after a further motionless moment, he turned his head sharply and looked at Perlmann, who was pressing his hands together under the table. The waiter jutted his lower lip, looked slowly away and then it seemed as if he would go on writing. But then he slipped pad and pen into his jacket pocket, turned round abruptly and walked quickly through the swing door.

‘What’s up with him?’ Laura Sand asked irritably, tapping the back of her menu rhythmically against the edge of the table.

‘No idea,’ said Perlmann, when she looked at him quizzically.

The maître d’ in the black tuxedo stood, arms folded, by the swing door and watched furiously as the waiter came back to their table. The waiter turned to Laura Sand.

‘Scusi, signora,’ he said tightly, ‘would you please repeat your order?’

Then he turned the page of his pad and, without deigning to glance at Perlmann, looked at Millar. Surprised by the silence, Millar looked up, glanced sideways at Perlmann, who was sitting next to him, and said in a cool voice which Perlmann envied him, ‘You seem to have forgotten someone.’

The waiter didn’t move, but just raised the pad over Millar’s head and looked into the room. The maître d’ was about to move, when Perlmann gave his order, in dry, clipped words. The waiter brought the pen to the pad, but didn’t write. Then he looked again at Millar, who, after a brief hesitation and with raised eyebrows, dictated his wishes.

She had had no idea about his wife’s accident, Laura Sand said. Why hadn’t he said anything? It would have made a lot of things easier to understand.

‘She’s right,’ said Millar, and in his mouth it sounded yet again like a reproof.

‘I don’t know,’ said Perlmann, and was glad that his voice revealed nothing of the anger that was starting to rise up in him. Now, after they had experienced his breakdown, and he had been dropped as a rival and an adversary in the academic game – now they were all speaking so sympathetically, they were full of generosity and didn’t seem to have the faintest sense of how repellent moral complacency could be. Would they have thought and spoken like that if nothing so dramatic had happened to him, nothing that came so close to an illness? Superficiality as an effect and a cause of fear; that was right. On the other hand: how exactly should he have said it? Where were the individual words of which his explanation would have consisted? And when exactly would he have made it? Perlmann was furious at the shallowness of their generosity, at their lack of precise imagination. With each question about details that passed through his head, his fury intensified still further, he became blind and deaf to his environment and didn’t notice that a long piece of his ash was falling on the freshly starched, blossom-white tablecloth.

The others had been served ages before, but Perlmann still had nothing. The waiter, who had treated him as if he didn’t exist when he was serving, let the long minutes pass, and an awkward silence fell in which the others cast puzzled glances at his empty plate. Perlmann had just pushed back his chair to go in search of the maître d’, when the waiter, with a face like ice, brought him a piccata alla Milanese and slammed the dish down on the bottom plate with a loud clatter, ensuring, with deliberate negligence, that it landed at an angle. The others resumed their conversation.

With his first bite, Perlmann knew: after it had been prepared, the dish had been put in the fridge for a while. Inside it was still warm, but its surface was chilled, and the coldness felt artificial to the tongue. The tomato sauce was particularly cold, and the outermost layer by the cheese was like rubber. He kept an eye out for the maître d’, then got up and walked to the swing door. The waiter, as far as one could make out, had stood watching through the little window in the door. Now he kicked the door open and stepped defiantly out towards Perlmann.

‘My dinner is cold,’ Perlmann said, so loudly that the people at the other tables turned round. The waiter chewed on his lip and looked at him with a hate-filled, contemptuous grin. Then he walked at a pointedly sluggish pace to Perlmann’s place, took the plate and disappeared with an eloquent shake of the head, designed to accuse Perlmann of grouchiness, into the kitchen. When the food was put in front of Perlmann again, it tasted warmed-up and stale, and after a few bites he left it.

It wasn’t just that they were making things look far too simple by reproaching him – in what was intended as a friendly way – for having said nothing and for not having made use of their sympathy. Much worse was that he couldn’t count on their sympathy at all if he told them the truth: that the academic world and its lifestyle had long ago slipped away from him and become something quite alien. To keep from drawing attention to himself, every now and again he poked around at his food, which he could only see now as a disgusting orangey paste, and as he did so it became clear to him that the rage that seethed in him was actually directed far more at the simplistic chatter about his missed explanation than it was at his personal situation.

Before, in the café, he had allowed himself to yield for a moment to the thought that his distress had been caused by the commotion that had resulted from Agnes’s death. That could happen, he thought with amazement: you fled into a thought that you had several times exposed as deceptive, and you did so and opted for blindness because you wanted peace, peace from the flickering questions that oppressed you if you admitted the truth. And, of course, what had happened had had something to do with the fact that it was Evelyn Mistral, of all people, who had suggested that old and seductive thought. But now, as he looked with revulsion at his plate and waited to be able to smoke again at last, Perlmann was once again filled with rage at the idea that they were forcing him, through their lack of sympathy, to leave the excuse about Agnes uncontested, and to distort his pain still further with a lie.

What did that lack of sympathy really mean? At last he could light a cigarette, and his concentration on the question helped him ignore the waiter, who deliberately brushed his sleeve with the plate as he cleared the table. He ran through his colleagues one by one, glancing furtively at each as their turn came. No, in this matter he didn’t underestimate the others out of fear. He couldn’t allow himself to be deceived even by Evelyn Mistral’s face, red with wine and laughter. If he closed her eyes, her head with her piled-up hair and glasses superimposed itself over the image that he had just seen. The only one he thought capable of understanding was Giorgio Silvestri. But he didn’t represent the hated academic world anyway. And besides: could he really understand how someone could have fallen victim to an incurable indifference towards all desire for knowledge? Perlmann doubted it, looking at him now, leaning tensely forward and making the gesture of precision with his thumb and forefinger.

Over coffee the talk turned to the teaching duties that awaited his colleagues when they returned home. As he listened, it suddenly occurred to Perlmann that at breakfast that morning, when von Levetzov had asked him, he had described not his impending lecture series but last year’s. And as his smoking grew increasingly frantic, he realized with growing apprehension, almost panic, that the lectures that began next week had been blocked from his memory: he had their subjects on the tip of his tongue; they were present to him in the form of a vague sensation, but every attempt to bring them into the focus of his attention failed; the titles and the precise questions refused and refused to come. When will my resignation take effect? Can I simply stay away? Nothing more can happen to me now. Nothing.

This term, Ruge sighed, it was his turn to give the introductory lecture. As Millar and von Levetzov responded with sympathetic words, Perlmann saw himself at the last session in Frankfurt, at which the teaching program had been discussed. The others had found it extraordinarily collegial of him to give the introductory lecture for the third time in a row. But there had been a momentary pause, and their astonishment was tangible. Was it only thoughtfulness that had appeared in their faces, or was it already suspicion? I find it increasingly important, he had said. I like working with beginners. Their minds are unspoiled. It was an explanation that they could not dispute. And even so, the director of the institute had had to give himself a visible jolt before carrying on.

Perlmann delivered the introductory lecture slightly differently every year, and the new thing was his increasingly unconcealed detachment from the material. More and more often he wove in remarks like: ‘At this point one might ask the question… One doesn’t need to ask it, perhaps, but if one asks it, then…’ or ‘Now there is this distinction…’ and then he made a pause of ostentatious thoughtfulness that would inevitably create the impression in his audience that he thought this distinction unnecessary or even nonsensical. He was in danger of exaggerating and giving the whole thing a comedic note. Particularly on days when he felt out of sorts. The students enjoyed it. But while they laughed, he hated himself for his play-acting. Because he didn’t like play-acting. He was deadly earnest about this detachment from his subject, which affected him like an inexorable process of growth, and which he observed with mounting despair.

Leskov had been busy with his pipe, and had sipped quietly at his coffee. He wished, he said now into a pause in the conversation, he too could complain like that. From one term to the next, he was unsure whether he would receive a teaching job or not. He said it quite matter-of-factly, and without a trace of self-pity.

‘But if I hand in the new text now, that might change,’ he smiled, and glanced across at Perlmann. ‘Provided it turns up again,’ he added with a face in which intense humor imperfectly masked lurking panic.

Perlmann made a helpless gesture with his hand, and had no idea whether what he was trying to do with his facial muscles was leading to a smile or to a grimace. To which address? he thought frantically. To which address? And the envelope. And the waiting list for the flight.

While the others were leaving tips, Perlmann paid the sum precisely, and pushed the notes slightly towards the middle of the table, so that the waiter would have to lean a long way forwards to reach them. But again the waiter treated him as if he wasn’t there, and simply left Perlmann’s money where it was. Laura Sand pointed at it, and touched Perlmann’s arm with a questioning expression. He pretended not to have noticed. He let the others walk ahead and waited in the hall until the waiter, who had now picked up his money, came out of the dining room.

‘You know,’ he said and tried to stare him into the ground, ‘I was right: you really are one. And how.’

‘Stronzo!’ the waiter hissed back, his lips seeming not to move a millimeter.

Perlmann left him standing and walked outside to join the others, who were waiting for taxis.

49

When he woke up at about seven o’clock the next morning, Perlmann’s first thought was that his sore throat came from his furious roaring in the dean’s office. It became clear to him only very gradually that the dry scratching must have come from breathing with his mouth open, as his rage had clearly been directed at a figure in a dream. At the end it had been the dean. But he gradually remembered that that figure had had its original source in the waiter. He had bawled him out in the presence of the others. He had got up, tipped his cold food on the immaculate tablecloth and had, accompanying each word with a slicing movement of his hand, repeated his small and awkward repertoire of Italian insults again and again, the perception of his narrow linguistic boundaries adding to his fury. The longer it lasted, the more formless the waiter became, and the figure had become increasingly similar to Leskov. In a room that was no longer a dining room, Perlmann had reproached him for not having made a copy of his text, his accusations growing louder and louder, while Leskov looked as if he wasn’t even listening. The silent and unreachable Leskov had then become a pale, almost faceless figure, but one which in spite of its vagueness was unambiguously the dean. Perlmann had dealt with him more ruthlessly and thoroughly than he had ever treated a person before. With his heart hammering, he had screamed accusation after accusation until his voice failed. He held the rector responsible for everything papery and dead in the world of the university. He blamed him for the mistrust, the resentment and anxiety that prevailed in that world. He insulted him as the source of all pomposity, and finally held him responsible for the decades of his life that he had lost to his job. Just as he was hurling at him the question of why he had prevented him from being an interpreter, he noticed that there was no one in the room, and that his hoarse words were echoing in a ghostly void. He had finally woken up surrounded by the resultant feeling of impotence.

Perlmann ordered coffee and, after showering, sat down at his desk. If yesterday his letters to the dean had become shorter and shorter, today the opposite happened, although he powerfully resisted the bitterness and agitation that rang out within him even now. He didn’t want his letter of resignation to be defined by such feelings – he didn’t want it to be an epilogue to his dream. He immediately crossed out every harsh word and replaced it with an expression of pointed neutrality and sobriety. In this way he produced increasingly official-sounding texts. And yet he couldn’t prevent them from turning into bills of indictment, long and ever longer explanations in which evidence was piled on evidence for the claim that a life determined by academic study and its pursuit must inevitably become an alienated life, a life missed. Like an addict, he went on writing more and more, and each new outline was even longer and more expansive than the one before.

It was already after half-past eight when he paused, exhausted and trembling. For a while he stood at the window and stared into the streaming rain. Another two days. In fifty hours he was at the airport, waiting for his flight home. And tomorrow he would be travelling for half a day, and time would go much faster. Hitherto he had always been lucky with waiting lists for flights.

He scanned through the last page that he had written. Then he brought all the pages together and threw the whole pile into the waste-paper basket. It wasn’t a general problem of academics, or even of academia generally. It was a problem of his very particular life story. That was all. To turn it into an ideology was mischievous nonsense. Basically, that had always been clear to him. In the end, all his writing that morning had become an extension of the dream. And now he had cheated himself out of his breakfast, to which, he reflected with surprise, he would have liked to go today.

Giorgio Silvestri’s session was sheer chaos. It started with him leaving half of his documents in his room, and having to go back and get them. Then, when he had found his way through the chaos, he began a lecture that had no structure and for a long time also seemed to have no destination. He talked about typical linguistic disturbances among schizophrenics, which were expressive of mental disturbances. His technical vocabulary sounded cobbled-together and eccentric, and he made no effort to introduce it. Admittedly, after some time it was fairly easy to recognize how it could be translated into familiar concepts. But it was irritating that one had to discover them for oneself. There was also the fact that Silvestri’s English pronunciation was much worse than usual that morning; somehow his mouth didn’t really seem to be obeying him. That was particularly unsettling in the case of the example sentences, which Silvestri had only in Italian, and of which he gave impromptu translations. Often one didn’t know how much of their strange sound could really be traced back to the mental patients, what came from Silvestri’s halting delivery, and whether additional distortions were not produced by the translation of difficult linguistic material. Soon his colleagues started drawing decorative doodles in their notebooks, and even Evelyn Mistral, who had at first been smiling with sympathy for Silvestri over the chaotic nature of his lecture, became impatient.

Again the time has come, Perlmann thought: he felt abandoned by someone he had internally clung to. Silvestri – the man with the important and honest profession, which gave him the necessary inner distance to be able to sit on the lounger with a newspaper over his head and rock back and forth on his chair during the sessions; the man who had advised Perlmann not to take the whole thing so seriously; and, in the end, also the man who had been able to get to grips with his notes. And now he was sitting up there at the front, turning over the empty coffee pot for the second time, and darting increasingly insecure glances at the group. All of a sudden his stubble was no longer the expression of independence and incorruptibility; it just looked scruffy. His skin struck Perlmann as even paler than usual, and now for the first time he spotted a small boil on Silvestri’s chin. You do get through your heroes, he heard Agnes saying, and he didn’t know who he should be more annoyed with: her, or this Italian who seemed, once more, to prove her right.

Now Silvestri pushed his papers aside, lit a new cigarette and started explaining the basic points of his investigation. He was no orator, and it wasn’t a fluent, suggestive lecture. Nonetheless, Perlmann noticed with growing relief that the man had something to say. Leskov, who had looked unhappy and had several times sighed quietly, also relaxed, and Laura Sand had begun to take notes. There were many years of work with schizophrenics behind the ideas that Silvestri was developing, and an inexhaustible patience when it came to listening to them. His dark-eyed, white face now showed great concentration, and when he spoke with admiration of Gaetano Benedetti, whom he saw as the most important researcher into schizophrenia, one could tell how much passion he had devoted to his work.

The sounds of tearing paper broke the silence that had fallen when Silvestri looked for a quotation from Benedetti. Millar had torn a page from his notebook. He now wrote something and with a flippant gesture passed it to Ruge, who was today sitting slightly further away from him than usual. At the last moment Millar must have sensed that he was being impolite, because his arm twitched, as if he wanted to undo the gesture, but it was too late: the page slipped to the edge of the table and sailed to the floor, where it stopped in front of Silvestri’s eyes. Perlmann had to crane his neck slightly, and then he could read it: De Benedetti?!

Silvestri, who had found the quotation at last, followed the eyes of the others and read the note. He froze for a moment, his face colored, and he closed his eyes. No one moved. Millar stared at the table top in front of him. In fact, Perlmann thought, it was just chitchat; a piece of schoolboy mischief. But at that particular moment, it must have felt like a slap in the face to Silvestri: recently Carlo De Benedetti, the President of Olivetti, had been in court because of his previous involvement in the bankruptcy of a bank. If one knew that, the reddish sheet of paper on the gleaming parquet called to mind the world of money, power and corruption. It was only a joke, and not remotely malicious. That was certainly apparent to Silvestri as well. But at that moment it was already too much for him that while Gaetano Benedetti’s self-sacrificing labours, his great life’s work, was under discussion, someone else’s thoughts were wandering in another, ugly world, even though the association came about in the simplest, most innocuous way imaginable. Obviously, Silvestri experienced it as practically a personal attack – as if his own commitment were being indirectly disparaged or even ridiculed.

Silvestri hadn’t seen where the piece of paper came from. He must, Perlmann reflected, have recognized Millar’s handwriting, because when he looked up now, Millar was the first person he looked at. He stared at him for a few seconds, and the vertical wrinkles above his nose gave his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face an angry, unforgiving expression. As Silvestri directed his gaze, which now assumed a rather downcast quality, back to the piece of paper, he took out his ballpoint pen and clicked the tip in and out. He did it several times, the rhythm stretching as if on a slow-motion soundtrack, and the individual clicks seemed to whip their apprehensive silence like gunshots. Perlmann involuntarily held his breath. Now Silvestri leaned back, rolled his hands on his head and, as he took a breath, looked Millar full in the face. Although the look was not meant for him, Perlmann shrank from the harshness of his dark stare. Silvestri’s voice would be piercing when it came.

At that moment the door opened, and Signora Morelli stepped inside the veranda with a piece of paper in her hand. The silence in the room must have struck her as strange, because she hesitated and left her hand on the handle before she gave a start, said, ‘Scusatemi’ and walked up to Perlmann.

‘I thought you should know this straight away,’ she said as she bent down to him and gave him a note.

She had said it quietly, and yet the Italian sentence had been audible throughout the whole room. Phone call travel agent: flight Frankfurt–Genoa confirmed tomorrow 5 p.m. the note said.

‘Grazie,’ Perlmann said hoarsely, folded the note and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t dare to look at Leskov beside him, so he didn’t know if it was his imagination or whether Leskov turned his head away only now.

Only when the door clicked shut did Perlmann notice that Silvestri had risen to his feet, and had plainly been walking up and down. Now the Italian stubbed out his cigarette, hesitated for a moment and then, sitting on the table top, swung himself into the middle of the horseshoe. With a jerky movement he lifted the reddish piece of paper, stood in front of Millar and, without looking at him, silently and carefully let the paper float on to the table. Then he swung back over the table, meticulously straightened his chair and went on with his lecture. After a few sentences his breath became normal again. Laura Sand exhaled audibly.

When the discussion began, Millar at first cleaned his glasses for several minutes. Later, as Silvestri was battling with Leskov’s questions, which were much less clear today than they usually were, Millar stared with blank concentration at the swimming pool, where the heavy raindrops were splashing the water high into the air. Now and again Silvestri darted him quick glances from the corner of his eye. But his agitation seemed to have subsided, and here, once again, he proved to be a good listener, who encouraged his interlocutor, with a brief nod and the hint of a smile, to go on spinning out the thought that he had just embarked upon.

What Perlmann particularly envied was the amount of time that Silvestri took before answering a question. He wouldn’t, it seemed, allow any question in the world to put pressure on him. Questions weren’t something he felt coerced by. They were primarily an opportunity to think, regardless of how long it took. No wonder Kirsten took to him immediately. Again Perlmann hid his face between his folded hands and tried inwardly to imagine what it must feel like to be someone with so little fear of other people and their questions. He almost felt dizzy when he concentrated intensely on the notional point of experience that could be achieved were he to succeed in dismantling the structure of his anxiety piece by piece and transfer it into another way of feeling.

It was Ruge’s chuckling laughter that tore him from his reflections. It was plainly inspired by the way in which Silvestri defended himself against doubts about his method. He had dealt at such length and so devotedly with his patients that he had the unshakeable assurance of having achieved a profound understanding of the pattern of their linguistic and mental disturbances. What made Silvestri assailable was his refusal to have anyone look over his shoulder and check what he was doing. There is no theoretical context, Perlmann thought, but somehow that refusal could surprise no one who knew the dangerous gleam that appeared in Silvestri’s eyes when the discussion turned to the issue of bolted asylum doors. The man was a maverick and a fanatical defender of liberty, who must have seemed, in his clinic, like an anarchist, albeit an anarchist in whose office the light still burned even when his team had gone home long ago. Your hero-addicted imagination. Agnes had been proud of her verbal creation.

‘I have listened to many of these people for years,’ Silvestri said with unshakeable calm. ‘I know how they speak and think. I know it precisely. Really precisely.’

Ruge gave up with a sigh, and an uncomfortable pause settled, so that Silvestri began to get his things together. Then Millar ostentatiously sat up in his chair, rested both elbows on the table and waited until Silvestri met his eye.

‘Look, Giorgio… ’ he began, and the use of Silvestri’s first name sounded like mockery. And then he lectured Silvestri on the safeguarding and evaluation of data, about sources of error and the danger of artefacts, about multiple verification procedures, and finally about the idea of objectivity. More and more he slipped into the tone of someone explaining, in a course for first-term freshmen, the ABC of academic work, and assuming no more than an average intelligence among his listeners.

Silvestri looked out over the edge of the table to the parquet – to where the piece of paper had been a few moments before. There was a lot going on in his facial expression. The initial look of anger and indignation gave way to various shades of amusement and arrogance, but also of irony and contempt, which moved into one another uninterruptedly and without any fixed arrangement. Then, when he noticed that Millar had nearly finished, Silvestri withdrew completely from his face, straightened his papers again and sat down on the very edge of the chair. His long, white fingers were trembling slightly when he brought the lighter to his cigarette. Evelyn Mistral threw her hands to her face like someone trying to flee an inescapable disaster.

‘I believe, Professor Millar,’ he said gently, his pronunciation now impeccable, ‘that I have understood you perfectly. You want repeatable experiments. Laboratory conditions with calm, stable objects. Controllable variables. Am I wrong, or would you also really like to strap these people to chairs?’ He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, took his belongings and a few steps later he was outside.

Millar had red patches on his face, and for a moment he looked almost numb. ‘Well,’ he said with artificial cheerfulness, and got to his feet. His rubber soles squeaked loudly on the parquet as he stepped vigorously outside.

Only then did the others stir.

50

The rain had stopped, and the clouds were moving. Perlmann stood at the window and tried to apologize for Silvestri’s gaffe without being unfair to Millar. It didn’t work. He went from one extreme to the other, without finding a resting point. In his memory, Silvestri’s voice had become a hiss, and it wasn’t hard for Perlmann to sense the hatred behind that hiss. It was particularly easy to understand when one remembered Millar’s unbearably didactic tone. And at such a moment no one could have demanded that Silvestri take account of the plain fact that Millar had been trying to erase the memory of his faux pas with the piece of paper by childishly going on the attack. But then Perlmann saw, again and again, Millar’s face with its red patches; the face of someone reeling inwardly from a completely unexpected slap. He had looked very vulnerable, this man Brian Millar, not at all like the monster described by Silvestri’s unfortunate remark. All right, Millar supported the death penalty, which already made him very odd. But that evening, which Silvestri would probably never forget, Millar hadn’t advocated it with any bigoted, missionary zeal. Silvestri was right: there was a certain lack of imagination at play, a kind of naivety. But did not this very lack of imagination, this naivety, mean that one couldn’t possibly attribute to Millar the perverse and inhuman desires that resounded in Silvestri’s perfidious question? Or was it exactly the opposite?

Perlmann tried to remember all of the things he still had to do today. But he couldn’t keep his thoughts together, so he sat down at his desk and made a list. It took ages, and he had to overcome a paralysing reluctance to write down each individual point. Travel agent. It was urgent that he buy his ticket straight away. Stationery shop. Going back to that mute boy was out of the question. There must be another shop that sold envelopes. Trattoria. The bright courtyard now struck him as remote and alien. But he couldn’t bring himself simply to leave the chronicle there and vanish without a word. Not least because of Sandra. Maria. He would have to say goodbye to her today; she wasn’t in the office tomorrow. And then there was something else. That was it: Angelini. Perlmann’s stomach lurched. Should he simply wait and see whether he appeared for dinner? But then if he didn’t come, Perlmann would have to call him on his private number, which was in his recent note. Perlmann bridled at the idea. After all that had happened, he wanted to thank Angelini and say goodbye in a very formal and businesslike fashion.

He was about to ask Olivetti for Angelini’s number when Silvestri came to say goodbye. Instead of a suitcase he was carrying a kind of duffel bag over his shoulder.

‘I’m leaving now,’ he said simply and held out his hand to Perlmann. ‘Thank you for the invitation. Give me a call if you’re ever in Bologna. And if you have a text like that last one again, I’ll read it.’

He had half-turned away when he paused, looked at the floor and described a semi-circle on the carpet with his foot.

‘With that particular subject I always lose control. Old sickness,’ he said in a cautious, muted voice. Then he looked at Perlmann with a smile in which embarrassment, defiant self-assertion and roguery merged, and added, ‘Incurable.’

But, as he absorbed this, Perlmann knew that he would never forget the image of the Italian with the duffel bag, the face turned crookedly upwards and the ambiguous smile, at once vigorous and fragile. It sank inside him like the frozen image at the end of a film.

‘Oh, yes, please pass on my greetings to your daughter,’ Silvestri said in the doorway. ‘Providing that she’s willing to accept them,’ he added with a grin. ‘And really, go to the doctor when you get home. You still look ill.’ Then he raised his free hand slightly and was gone.

When Perlmann saw Silvestri coming out of the hotel down below, Evelyn Mistral was walking beside him and nodding. They walked slowly, as if on a deserted platform. Just before they reached the steps, Silvestri let the duffel bag slide to the ground and stretched out both arms to pull her to him. She took half a step backwards and threw out a hand. He automatically grabbed it and, after a brief hesitation, clumsily laid his other hand on her shoulder. He didn’t seem to be looking at her any more, but bent down, threw the duffel bag over his shoulder with a forceful and possibly angry movement, and quickly walked down the steps. He was already quite far down when Evelyn Mistral’s lips formed a word that must have been Ciao. She grabbed her hair with both hands and pressed it together as if to make a ponytail. Then she let it fall again and, holding her wrist behind her back, turned slowly to the door.

When Perlmann was about to close the window, he saw Silvestri driving past in his old Fiat. He was flicking a cigarette butt out of the sunroof, and then be bent down to turn the knobs of the radio. What would have happened if he had confided to this man, whom he was going to miss, and would never see again?

The phone rang. Angelini said that sadly he wouldn’t be able to come to the farewell dinner. Something unexpected had come up: trouble with a translator whom he had recommended to the firm, and who had revealed himself to be a bit of a dolt. Perlmann gripped the receiver more tightly than necessary, and listened very carefully: no, Angelini wasn’t telling him this in so much detail in order to conceal the fact that it was an excuse. On the contrary, in an almost friendly way he seemed really to want to share his concern with him. Quite as if there had been no trashy text, as if he hadn’t fainted, and as if the whole thing hadn’t been a terrible disappointment.

‘Senti, Carlo,’ Perlmann said, suddenly inspired, and it felt like a liberating leap into the unknown, ‘there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. Something personal. Could I pay you a visit up there in Ivrea?’

He would be delighted, Angelini said immediately. But Sunday… no, Sunday was impossible, with the best will in the world. Either tomorrow afternoon or Monday morning.

Perlmann hesitated. Leskov’s text would have been dispatched long since, and they would have to wait another day for him at the university. That was no longer of any importance.

‘Monday morning,’ he said at last. ‘At nine?’

‘For God’s sake, no,’ laughed Angelini, ‘they’ll faint if I get there as early as that.’ The pause sounded as if he was biting his lip. ‘Shall we say, shortly after ten? And should I book a hotel for you for Sunday night?’

Perlmann said no.

‘Just tell the driver, “Olivetti, main entrance”. They’ll help you at reception,’ said Angelini.

I’ll ask Angelini if I can have this job as a translator. Or something like it. Perlmann puffed away on his cigarette as he walked up and down. Yesterday morning’s decision was one thing, the idea of a concrete alternative something else entirely. A hot, intoxicating feeling of liberation took hold of him. Soon it turned into a feeling that the ground was swaying beneath him. And then, from one moment to the next, he despaired. How would he get a work permit for Italy? And what qualifications did he have? No language exams, no diplomas, nothing. Would Angelini override that? Could he just do it? Even if Perlmann didn’t have to work directly under him, somehow, in the future, he would be dependent on this smartly dressed man with the well-cut suits and loose-fitting ties. Suddenly, Perlmann saw Angelini’s boss-face in front of him, the one he had worn when that business at the town hall had got too lively for him. At the time that face hadn’t permeated through to Perlmann; it had belonged to a world that was edging further away with every minute. Now that Perlmann imagined a life haunted by that face it struck him as hard, brutal and abhorrent. And then there was the age difference, which wouldn’t even be an easy matter on Monday: the older man petitioning the younger. I could still call it all off, Perlmann thought. A phone call would do it. And he would simply leave his flight reservation for Sunday as it was.

At the travel agent’s Perlmann was the last one before lunch. He bought his ticket for the following day and paid a horrendous price, because he was booking at such short notice. For Monday, he booked himself a seat on the afternoon flight from Turin to Frankfurt. Perhaps by the time I’m sitting on that plane I’ll have a new job. And, last of all, that hotel in Ivrea. The young man with the long hair and all those silver rings on his hands began to get impatient with all the phone calls, and kept looking at the clock on the wall. Perlmann didn’t dare to refuse when at last a room was found at an exorbitant price. To get out, Perlmann had to turn a bunch of keys that the other employee had left in the door when he went out.

The wind had got stronger. The clouds drifted across the city from the sea, and every few moments the sun bathed everything in a strangely cold, glassy light. Perlmann felt slight and a little shivery, like someone who has just taken a long-overdue step into a new future. An appointment for a discussion, a hotel reservation, a reserved flight: it was nothing, and at the same time it was a great deal. As he studied the clean, sharp shadow that he cast in this extraordinary light, he felt surprised with himself – at the fact that he had actually begun to turn a decision that was barely thirty hours old into action. He also felt a quiet pride. And after a while it became clear to him that he had never had such an experience before: knowing almost to the minute when he had started really believing in a decision. He immediately saw himself in an office filled with southern light, immersed in the thing he liked doing best since he had stopped playing the piano: immersing himself in words and phrases and circling within himself to test whether the expression in the foreign language precisely captured the nuance required. The images and feelings that rose up in him now were so precise and so powerful that, without really noticing, he kept stopping after a few steps and, motionless, stared blankly into space. Startled again by his unbridled, overheated imagination, which was actually trying to compel a dreamed future into existence, he rubbed his eyes and then walked on with a disciplined step, looking – to distract himself – more closely at the window displays than he usually did.

Even as he parted the glass-bead curtain he realized that the trattoria was alien to him now. For a moment he considered whether it might be the unusual light falling through the glass roof of the courtyard. But it wasn’t that. The restaurant was now as strange to him as a place where one had lived so long ago that it’s hard to believe that that life was once one’s own.

‘Professore!’ called the proprietress. ‘We thought something had happened to you!’

Perlmann was relieved that she didn’t try to hug him, as she seemed at first to be about to do. With the delighted zeal with which she would have served a long-lost relative, she and her husband, who was wearing the inevitable white apron, set Perlmann’s food in front of him and insisted that he have a second portion.

‘You look so overworked. You must eat!’

Although the pasta lay heavy on his stomach, Perlmann continued eating, glad that chewing excused his silence. The familiar atmosphere that had previously prevailed now struck him as a sentimental, tacky lie, and he feared the coffee, when it would inevitably become clear that he had absolutely nothing to say to these people, whose gabbling cordiality struck him today as inappropriate and actually quite peculiar. The situation was then saved by Sandra, who hurled her schoolbag in the corner when she came in and, weeping, reported on a failed dictation in English.

When the proprietor brought Perlmann the chronicle and, lowering his voice, urged Sandra to stop bothering the professore, one might have imagined it was a sacred book. Today Perlmann felt that the pictures on the gleaming cover were noisy and repellent. Tired, and with a full feeling in his stomach, he sat over the unopened book in such a way that the proprietor, before he disappeared into the kitchen, gave him a concerned look. Perlmann listlessly flicked a few pages. But the history of the world that had accompanied his life story no longer held the slightest interest for him, and the whole idea of appropriating his past present by remembering the course of events in the faraway world struck him as mystical nonsense.

Now the images of the bright office entered the foreground once more and, behind his closed lids, Perlmann drew various silhouettes of the town of Ivrea, which he would look down on from his high window. Interrupting his translation work and looking at this unspectacular, perhaps even ugly Italian town: that, he was quite sure of it, could be his new present – the first one that he had properly achieved.

With sudden haste he began to translate the page of the chronicle that he had opened at random. In the office, it would have to be done quickly. It was a business operation. There was money at stake. Would his Italian be good enough? In the text in front of him there were several words that he didn’t know. And what about business Italian? He saw himself sitting in an attic room until the small hours, filling the gaps in his vocabulary. At this new image, his high spirits faded to make way for the feeling of trepidation that you feel when relapsing into an experience you thought was firmly in the past. But only later, in the street, did he become aware that the image of the attic room had been modelled on his time as a schoolboy and a student, informed by nothing but the feeling that the present still lay far in the future.

When the proprietors heard that this was his last visit, they refused to take any money for the food. Their extravagant gestures and assurances contrasted starkly with his tense haste to leave. Sandra’s thoughts were plainly still on her muffed dictation. Nonetheless, Perlmann was upset that she only briefly shook his hand and then disappeared again. For a moment he saw her lying on the bed with her knee socks pulled down. His original impulse to give her the chronicle had suddenly been blown away. He took the heavy book under his arm. With his free hand he parted the curtain one last time. He let the cool, smooth glass beads slide slowly over the back of his hand. He felt something break as he did so, something precious and intangible.

Perlmann laid the chronicle on the step in front of the stationery shop to which the proprietor had directed him. He formed a funnel with his hands and stared tensely inside the shop, which was still dark. But it’s nonsense, he thought, of course you can’t tell what selection of envelopes they have just by looking. Next to the shop there was another, with tablecloths, napkins and that sort of thing in the window. As Perlmann waited for the siesta to come to an end, he looked absently at the display. The third or fourth time he did so, the solution leapt out at him. In the corner, right at the back, packed in a plastic jacket with a zip, was a set of handkerchiefs. Involuntarily, his attention had leapt from the content to the packaging, and now, in his mind, he was excitedly comparing the size of the jacket with the format of Leskov’s text. The yellow pages, he estimated, would slip back and forth a little in transit. But otherwise, this actually was the solution: if the whole thing was also put in a padded envelope, the snow and rain could do nothing to the text.

Unless the water forces its way through the zip. Perlmann was glad when the shopkeeper appeared, and proved to be so chatty that she kept this troubling thought from taking root. Perlmann bought the handkerchiefs and, next door, the biggest padded envelope into which the plastic jacket would fit. To write the address later on, he chose the most expensive felt-tip pen in the shop. Then, having reached the street corner, he turned round again to ask for a plastic bag. There were thousands of envelopes like his. But he didn’t want anyone to see this one when he entered the hotel.

51

Adrian von Levetzov waved so energetically that Perlmann couldn’t help crossing the hotel terrace to the table where the others were all sitting.

‘We’re betting on when the first drop will fall,’ von Levetzov said, pointing at the threateningly dark wall of cloud that was piling up in the mountains and loomed far over the bay. ‘The nearest one gets 10,000 lire from each of us.’ He straightened a chair for Perlmann. ‘Join in!’

Perlmann hesitantly set the chronicle down on the table. There was no room for it anywhere else. He rested the plastic bag against the leg of the chair. He was glad that Leskov was sitting far away. As he waited for his heartbeat to settle, he looked with great concentration at the sky, as if he were carefully considering his contribution to the bet.

‘It isn’t going to rain,’ he said at last, to his own great surprise. He felt as if he had just defied the whole world with that sentence.

Millar tilted his head, and his face twisted into a wide grin. ‘I like that, Phil,’ he said, and his voice expressed regret that he hadn’t thought of this ploy himself.

‘May I?’ asked von Levetzov and picked up the chronicle. He opened a few pages at random and then flicked on until he found some pictures. ‘Aha,’ he said suddenly, straightened the book and held it further away from himself with an appreciative expression. Then he turned the book round and let the others look at the picture. It showed Christine Keeler, the prostitute who had brought about the fall of the British war minister John Profumo in 1963. She was straddling a chair and completely naked. Ruge’s and Leskov’s laughter sounded unself-conscious, while there was something embarrassed about Millar’s grin.

‘The style’s a bit like something out of the Sun,’ said Laura Sand, as Levetzov went on flicking through the book. Perlmann felt as if they had just caught him with a copy of Bild-Zeitung or a men’s magazine. Now, on top of everything else, the man who has failed in academia is buying tabloid books.

‘There’s better to come!’ cried von Levetzov, and turned the book round again. A quarter of the big page was taken up by a photograph showing Cicciolina, the Italian porn star, who had been elected to parliament. She was naked and was lolling in a provocative pose. Millar blushed and straightened his glasses. The two other men only looked for a second. Evelyn Mistral, straight-faced, pouted and brushed the hair from her brow.

‘The photographer is only moderately talented,’ Laura Sand said dryly. Grateful for the remark, the others exploded in laughter that was slightly too loud and too long.

In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw Cicciolina entering the polling station in her fur coat and dropping her envelope coquettishly into the ballot box. Don’t turn it off! Agnes had said when he reached for the remote control. I think she’s great. Simply fantastic. Her face wore an expression he had never seen before. You’re mouth is hanging open, isn’t it? she had laughed.

‘At the last elections she founded the Love Party, Il Partito d’Amore,’ said Perlmann and knew immediately that he couldn’t have said anything clumsier at that moment. The others looked at him with surprise. He knows that kind of thing.

‘I wouldn’t have had you down as an expert in such things,’ said Laura Sand, raising another laugh.

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment. Agnes’s photographs are better than hers. A lot better. He picked up the plastic bag and got to his feet. The laughter died under the loud scrape of his chair. The faces that he saw out of the corner of his eye were puzzled. After a few steps he turned round again and nodded to the sky. ‘Still not a drop.’ He attempted a smile. No one returned it. He walked quickly to the entrance and up to his room.

There he immediately walked to the window and looked down on the terrace. Evelyn Mistral had the open chronicle in front of her, and was reading from it with the vague and searching gestures of someone delivering an impromptu translation. The others were doubled up with laughter.

They were laughing at the book with which he had embarked on the search for his present. The book that had seduced him and kept him from his work. But also the book that had kept his head above water. A mass-market, noisy, superficial book entirely alien to his nature. And also a book that had repelled and bored him before, in the trattoria. And yet a book that he was very fond of. An intimate book. His quite personal book. And they were laughing at it.

He went into the shower.

It hadn’t rained, and the others were still sitting outside when he went down to say goodbye to Maria. She was busy tidying the office.

‘Can I help you at all?’ she asked.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. Then he took the Bach CD out of his jacket pocket and gave it to her. ‘You can have this. You helped me find it.’

‘Mille grazie,’ she stammered, ‘but don’t you need it any more?’

He just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words he had composed in his head. She looked at him quizzically, and when the pause lasted too long she picked up her cigarettes.

‘Somehow I’m going to miss your group,’ she said, and as always she exhaled the smoke as she spoke.

Now he knew what he was afraid of: that his rage with the others might make him turn this farewell into something unnecessarily emotional and sentimental. It wouldn’t be the first time. He gulped and looked at the floor.

‘By the way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I have relatives in Mestre. Of course, you can’t call it a beautiful town. But ugly – no, it isn’t ugly at all. A bit cramped, perhaps. But it’s also a nice place.’

‘Yes, that was my experience,’ said Perlmann, grateful for the subject. ‘I particularly liked Piazza Ferretto. And the little galleria next to it.’

‘So you’ve really been there?’

‘For two days.’

‘Professionally?’

Perlmann just shook his head and looked at her. Her eyes glittered strangely, and her mouth twitched.

‘Not because of that one sentence?’

Perlmann nodded, and now he managed a smile.

‘You mean you travelled specially from Germany to Mestre just because of that one sentence?’

He nodded.

She tilted her head slightly and took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘Of course, if I can put it like this, that’s a bit… mad. But knowing your text… OK, it isn’t all that surprising. Your fury with that sentence leapt off the page. I couldn’t help laughing when I was typing out that section. So was that sentence eventually… defeated?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann. ‘But there are lots of others.’

Laughing, she stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Your texts are stored safely away,’ she added and tapped the computer. ‘Maybe I’ll read them again in peace.’ Then she shook his hand. ‘Buona fortuna!’

‘You too,’ said Perlmann, ‘and thanks for everything.’

A few minutes later, from his room, he saw her standing with the others. Leskov hugged her when he said goodbye. Shortly before Perlmann lost sight of her, he saw her running her hand through her shining hair. Passé. So passé.

Leskov’s text fitted even more exactly into the plastic jacket than Perlmann had expected. The pages had only a small amount of clearance from the edge. Perlmann took his ruler and measured: 1.6 cm wide and 1.9 cm high. But the zip was hard to open. It was a cheap one, and two of the teeth seemed already to be a bit loose. At any rate, it couldn’t be opened and shut too often. Why hadn’t he done the water test straight away? Annoyed with himself, Perlmann took the pages back out. As he pulled, he almost had to use force, and was startled when the tab suddenly glided swiftly over the loose teeth before jamming again, and could only be moved to the end stop with great difficulty. Perlmann carefully dipped the top edge of the jacket in the full washbasin. Bubbles formed on the outside of the zip. They were tiny and, in fact, barely visible. But still: the zip wasn’t airtight. Perlmann left it in the water for a good minute before carefully drying it off. As he opened it, one of the loose teeth seemed to have been further damaged, and right at the end one of them was remarkably crooked. Just pull it shut once – the zip wouldn’t take more than that. Perlmann ran his finger along the inside of the zip. Was what he felt only the cool of the metal, or was there moisture in there as well? He looked at his finger and rubbed at it to check: dry. But what if the envelope were left in the rain for hours? The zip wasn’t completely airtight, that much was clear.

Perlmann held his face in the water. After that he felt better. He checked in the suitcase to see if he had forgotten a page. Then he counted the sheets and flattened the particularly worn sheets smooth again. At last he pushed the pile carefully into the jacket and tormented himself with the zip one last time. Leskov would be amazed at the effort Lufthansa had taken with this jacket. He would have to get hold of a Lufthansa sticker for the jacket as well as for the envelope. Then it would look more like a routine package.

Now he laid out the envelope and took out the piece of paper with Leskov’s home address. I’ve just got to risk it. Leskov would doubt his memory anyway. If he had indeed put his work address at the end of the text, in his general uncertainty he would mistake his correct memory for another error. Perlmann set the specially purchased felt-tip pen down on the envelope and, horrified, immediately drew it back, as if he had almost set something on fire by accident. He hadn’t practiced disguising his handwriting. It took several pages before he had finally decided on a backwards-sloping, stiff script, which, of all the variants he had tried, seemed the furthest removed from his own. He practically painted the letters on the envelope, so that they ended up looking like a grotesque form of calligraphy. His hand had shaken when writing two of the letters. But the address was clear. The envelope would get there.

Exhausted, he pushed the jacket with the text into the envelope and applied the staples. Then he tore the test pages into little scraps. When he threw them in the waste-paper basket, he felt like a forger clearing his workshop.

It was still dry on the terrace. The only people sitting there now were Leskov and Laura Sand, who had clearly fetched her warm jacket in the meantime. Leskov seemed to be smoking one of her cigarettes. The chronicle lay open on the table. Before he suspects me, Leskov will doubt his memory.

Perlmann looked at the address. There was something about it that bothered him. That was it: the Latin letters. For the German postal service that was essential, of course. But what about Russian postmen? Could they read it? He turned over the envelope. He could repeat the address in Cyrillic letters on the back. Yes, that was the solution. He took the lid off the felt-tip pen. No disguise was necessary for the Cyrillic letters. But was it really a good idea? They might mistake the address in Russian letters for the sender, since no sender was specified.

Perlmann put the lid back on and stepped to the window. Now Leskov was alone on the terrace, and the chronicle was no longer on the table. But in that case it would get to him anyway. He gave a start: it had taken the duration of a whole cigarette to work that out.

Uncertainly, he sat down and picked up the felt-tip pen. How likely was it that a Lufthansa employee dealing with lost objects would be able to write an address in Russian? Again he felt as if his thoughts were having to fight their way through an invisible medium of insidious tenacity. Of course: if someone could read the address on the text and identify it as such, then he was also capable of writing it or, at least, copying it out stroke for stroke. Perlmann began to write.

In the middle of Leskov’s surname he paused. There were various conventions of transcription. Particularly with the sibilants, with which the address was swarming, and that was particularly aggravating. What system had Leskov used when he had written his address out again for Perlmann on that draughty street corner? If he made a mistake now, he would end up with a sequence of Russian letters that was different from the ones Leskov had written under his text. The postal service would probably manage anyway. But for Leskov it would be one more incongruity: why had the Russian-reading employee in Frankfurt made so many mistakes when all he had to do was copy out the address? And if he thought about it for long enough…

Perlmann wrote over the line with the felt-tip pen until all that could be seen was a block of opaque black. Then he put the envelope in the suitcase and set it out ready for tomorrow.

52

Laura Sand was holding the chronicle as she waited for him in the hall. Her face lacked its usual shadow of rage.

‘I’m sorry about what I said,’ she said. ‘It was completely superfluous. And that Love Party thing is actually quite witty.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Perlmann, but wished it hadn’t sounded so irritable. You would have to consider someone unstable, even vulnerable, to apologize for such a harmless joke. Without another word, he took the chronicle from her and asked Signora Morelli, who was staring at the envelope with great curiosity, to look after it until afterwards.

Was he mistaken, or were the others treating him indulgently and attentively as one might treat a convalescent – just as they had two evenings before? It was striking how quickly Evelyn Mistral drew back her hand when they both reached for the salt at the same time. And was there not a new veil of self-consciousness over her smile?

‘Maybe it’s not a bad idea to give a chronicle this sort of packaging,’ said von Levetzov as their eyes met. ‘And actually these are the things you really remember.’

‘And no one reads serious stuff anyway – far too dry,’ grinned Ruge.

Again Perlmann saw the others, doubled up with laughter when he wasn’t there. He looked at his plate and choked down his food, even though his lunch from the trattoria still lay heavy in his stomach. Just this one hour. It could be even less. And tomorrow the goodbyes. It will be quite different in Ivrea. Freer. Much freer.

When the waiter had served dessert, Brian Millar tapped his glass. Perlmann gave a start. A speech to which he would have to react. It caught him entirely unawares. As if he had never before experienced such a thing. He thought back to the first session in the veranda, when he had feverishly thought about what his subject should be.

They had been wonderful weeks, said Millar. The intense exchange of ideas. The collegial, even friendly atmosphere. The excellent hotel. The magical town.

‘On behalf of us all, I would like to thank you, Phil.’ He raised his glass. ‘You did a great job. And we all know how much work it was for you. We hope you got something out of it yourself – in spite of your difficult situation.’

Just don’t say anything that might sound like an apology, thought Perlmann as he lit a cigarette to occupy his hands during the prolonged applause. He pushed back his chair, crossed his legs and was about to start his answer, when Leskov got to his feet with a groan.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to be here for long, Leskov said solemnly, but they had been unforgettable days for him. He had never made so many friends all at once, or learned so much in such a short time. He was an outsider, not to say an eccentric, he smiled. All the more because of that he wanted to thank them for their kindness and the consideration they had shown him. He looked at Ruge. ‘Even if I have made some assertions that must have sounded quite crazy.’ Ruge grinned. But most of all he would like to thank his friend Philipp. ‘He invited me without knowing much about me. After a conversation in the course of which he – as I have discovered here – understood my train of thought better than anyone else before – almost better than I do myself. It was fantastic to experience this trust and sympathy. I will never forget them.’ He pressed his hands together and made the gesture of thanks.

He, too, had got a lot out of his stay, Perlmann began. Much more than he had been able to show. A very great deal more. To some people it must sometimes have seemed as if he were engaged in a feud with his subject. But precisely the opposite was the case.

Perlmann realized with horror that he could no longer stop what was about to come. He spoke very calmly and even slipped into a thoughtful pose. But at the same time he clutched with his left hand, which was threatening to tremble, the wrist of his right, which lay on his knee.

Recently, in fact, he said, he had been writing a book on the principles of linguistics. Millar and von Levetzov raised their eyebrows at almost the same time, and Ruge reached for the mended arm of his glasses. His work on it had brought him to increasingly fundamental issues such as this: how the central questions of the discipline had come about in the first place; how one could distinguish questions that could open something up from erroneous questions; what it was that linguistics really wanted to understand about language, and in what sense. And so on.

Leskov’s fist was clamped, unmoving, on his unlit pipe. He smiled conspiratorially. The ice cream in the glass bowl in front of him melted.

And one question, Perlmann went on, preoccupied him particularly: whether the subject, as it was currently pursued, could do justice to the eminently important role that language played in the diverse and multi-faceted development of experience. Much of what he had said here had concerned that question, he concluded. And he had often played devil’s advocate. To learn from the others.

‘It has advanced my own work greatly. And for that I should like to thank you all.’

It was still too early to light a cigarette. His hand might tremble. It hadn’t sounded too bad. Even quite convincing. But within the heads of each of those sitting at the table, the same question must have been forming: Then why didn’t he deliver anything from that book, rather than inflicting that other, weird stuff on us? With a hasty movement that was supposed to mask the trembling that he feared, Perlmann reached for his cigarettes and then, so that his hands could keep one another calm, he held his lighter as if a storm were sweeping through the dining room. The smoke tasted unfamiliar, as if it wasn’t his brand. He tried frantically to think of the bright office in Ivrea, and even managed to conjure a precise image of the desk. In spite of this he felt ill.

When could one expect the publication of this interesting book, asked von Levetzov, thus seeming to take the words out of Millar’s mouth. He wanted to give himself time, Perlmann answered, and let the ash fall past his knee to the carpet so that he didn’t have to bring his hand to the ashtray. Might the publication of the work discussed here not be the ideal place to introduce his first ideas? von Levetzov asked. When he saw Perlmann’s hesitation, a shadow of suspicion flitted across his face.

‘That publication is firmly planned, isn’t it?’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann heard himself saying. ‘But you know how these things are: sounding out the publishing companies, negotiating – the usual. And I will have to talk to Angelini about finance. Then you will all be hearing from me.’

‘I could imagine my publisher in New York being interested,’ said Millar. ‘Especially in a book like yours. Shall I talk to him?’

Perlmann nodded silently. He had no idea what else he could have done. His cigarette burned his fingers. He dropped it and trod it out on the pale carpet. Leskov drew lines on the table cloth with the handle of his spoon. He’s thinking about a translation of his text. He’ll ask me again tomorrow.

Signora Morelli appeared and offered them coffee and cognac in the lounge. ‘L’ultima serata!’ In the hall, Perlmann turned round and went back to the dining room. He picked up his cigarette butt and wiped the spot with his napkin. It had left a big, black stain. There was only one couple left in the room. They were preoccupied with themselves, and only glanced at him fleetingly.

‘I went outside for a moment,’ said Millar as Perlmann sat down in one of the armchairs in the lounge. ‘Still dry. Now the money can only go to you or Vassily, who guessed it would take an hour.’ He took a 10,000 lire note from his pocket. ‘We could get the jackpot ready now.’ He weighed down the resulting bundle of notes with the ashtray. ‘How long should we keep the bet going on for? Shall we say till midnight?’

53

Perlmann hadn’t known he was going to do it. He only realized at the moment when Millar rested his arms on the arms of the chair and pressed himself backwards in preparation for standing up. It was almost as if Perlmann were being pushed by an invisible force that knew more about him than he did about himself. With a single movement he was on his feet, and walked quickly to the grand piano. Before he sat down, he screened his hands with his body and pulled the bandage from his finger. As he lifted up the lid, from the corner of his eye he saw Millar slipping back from the edge of his chair.

Perlmann didn’t need to think. Nocturnes were the only thing that he thought himself capable of playing after almost a year without playing a single note. Anything apart from Chopin was technically too difficult; the danger of disgrace was too great. And in the Nocturnes there was no problem with memory. He had grown up with these pieces. He had heard and played them hundreds of times.

If only there weren’t that damned problem with the rhythm. He had a very precise and effortless sense of rhythm. But it was always a while before it settled in and his internal metronome started ticking. He played the first few bars like someone walking after being roughly woken from sleep, Bela Szabo had always said. And he was right. But when his sense of rhythm kicked in it was like an awakening; there was a liberating security in his head and hands, and every time it happened Perlmann had the impression of never having been really awake, as awake as he was now. He had learned to put those brief phases of uncertainty behind him before playing to anyone. But now they would all hear.

He started Opus 9, Number 1 in B minor. Without a bandage, the ring finger of his left hand felt cooler than the others, and when he touched the keys he didn’t feel, as expected, pain, but a fine, sticky film. Nonetheless, the attack was good, he felt, the feared strangeness of touch had faded after a few notes. He had slipped into the first run, and was concentrating on the strange mixture of protraction and acceleration, when with a deafening crash it began to thunder. The first crack hadn’t yet faded away when the cold light of a flash of lightning lit up the lounge, mixing unpleasantly with the warm, golden light of the chandeliers. Immediately afterwards a new, even louder crash made everything tremble. Perlmann took his hands from the keys. All heads were now turned towards the window, through which a quick succession of lightning flashes could be seen, bright ramifications of spookily brief duration. Perlmann took out his handkerchief, moistened it and cleaned his ring finger. A moment later he felt a sting along the scar.

When the natural spectacle seemed to be over, and everything was calm but for a distant rumble, Perlmann started over again. Now his sense of rhythm was there immediately. He had the whole piece clearly in front of his eyes and grew calm. Yes, he could still do them, his soft yet glass-clear Chopin notes – the only thing that Szabo had always acknowledged, and even slightly envied him for. It was with a similar touch, Perlmann imagined, that Glenn Gould had played Chopin. Glass clarity with velvet edges. He was also pleased with the pearly runs. But it didn’t sound dreamy. And that wasn’t due to the fact that his left ring finger, now that the accompaniment was growing louder, was really starting to hurt, just as the two fingers of his right hand, which had previously been holding his cigarette, stung when they rubbed against one another. What was that about?

To prevent any applause, Perlmann seamlessly moved on to the second Nocturne from the same Opus. Again it thundered, but this time the crash was no longer directly over the hotel, and he went on playing.

‘Now I’ve got to see if it’s raining,’ Millar said sotto voce and got to his feet. Evelyn Mistral put her finger to her lips. Millar stepped outside.

That was it, Perlmann thought: he had always compared his sound with Millar’s Bach, and that acted as a block that prevented him from finding his way into the right state of mind. He closed his eyes, yielded more to the notes and tried to forget. The third Nocturne was more successful. Only his sore fingers were gradually becoming a problem.

Towards the end of the piece Millar came back, unmistakeably clearing his throat.

Next Perlmann chose Number 1 in F major from Opus 16. He only noticed that this one contained a danger when he was in the middle of a theme. Suddenly, he felt that he had a face. It started to sting behind his closed eyelids. For God’s sake. He involuntarily stretched his back and closed his eyes tight in a violent grimace. Seconds of horrified waiting. No. Once again it had been fine. At the very last moment he had managed to force back the tears. So I can’t play the piece in D flat minor. Under no circumstances.

A moment before, he had played two wrong notes, but the relief made him forget that, and now came the dramatic, technically difficult passage. He no longer had any time to be afraid of it, and suddenly it exploded in his hands, and he played the passage all the way through without a mistake as if he had been practising it only that morning. A massive feeling of relief, almost of arrogance, took hold of him. The pain in his fingers was unimportant now, and as he played the piece to the end he was suddenly sure of it: then I’ll do the Polonaise as well.

But before he did that he needed time to gather himself. The best thing for that was the third, technically easy piece from Opus 15, which was also easy on the fingers. He wasn’t quite on top of things. He had started to become agitated. So the first third was a flat, lackluster sequence of notes. But then came the ‘Debussy passages’, as Szabo had called them when they were going through the piece. The melodic structure became weaker, the notes seemed to flow aimlessly, and developed an irresolute, hesitant, almost random quality. Perlmann, Szabo used to say with an irritated sigh, you can’t play that as if it’s Debussy. There’s still a clear melody, a clear logic in it. It sounds almost as if you are advocating a melancholy of dissolution. Gloom, fair enough. But Chopin! Perlmann made the notes sound as vague as possible. To hell with Szabo. It was a declaration of war on Millar and his obsession with structure, and Perlmann had to struggle against the temptation to look across at him. He felt something in him breaking free. He was asserting himself against this man Brian Millar, and standing up for himself in front of everyone else. And now he did something he would have considered unthinkable during his public performance: later in the work he repeated two of the passages in which this self-liberation seemed most successful. He had needed a jolt to get beyond Szabo’s internal presence, and now defiance and a bad conscience held each other in balance.

To plunge straight into the A flat major Polonaise – no, that was too risky. First he needed something more technically demanding than what he had done so far. Because of his self-confidence. He wasn’t entirely sure. The A flat major Waltz from Opus 34. A piece that he had played on many solemn occasions, almost ad nauseam. Now, once again, it would have to be impeccable. It contained some chord runs like the ones in the Polonaise. And after that he would be attuned to the key.

At first he made two pedal errors, and once he played one key too many. But otherwise it was impeccable. When it started thundering again and the storm seemed to be approaching once more, he effortlessly stayed in time. He started shivering slightly, but now it wasn’t, as it had been so often over the past few days, an expression of anxiety, but of tense expectation. He could play the Polonaise. He would play it. His arms and hands, which felt very safe and strong, told him that.

He hadn’t given a thought to the scar, when a needle-sharp pain ran through him. He had to leave out three notes with his left ring finger, lost his concentration and messed up the next run of chords in his right hand. He did regain his equilibrium, but his confidence had gone. The mighty chords of the Polonaise, on which everything depended, loomed up in front of him like enormous hurdles, and now the sore fingers of his right hand were stinging much more than before. The sharp pains had gone, but his playing was hesitant now, with a ritardando that the waltz couldn’t take. It’s impossible. I’ll stop after this one. When the end of the piece came within sight, he speeded up again. The twinge that came now wasn’t quite as keen as it had been a moment before, but it was enough to spoil the closing run completely, so that he merely slid into the final chord.

It was shaming, having to stop like that, and Perlmann was full of rage with himself when he reflected that with his murder plan, completely unnecessary as it was, he had also ruined this attempt at self-assertion. Nonetheless, he would have got up and walked over to his armchair had Millar not at that point started waving the cash from the bet. As the rain lashed the windows, he held them up to Leskov with a smile, undeterred by the fact that Leskov irritably waved them away, and by the equally irritable faces of the others. First his attempt to disturb Perlmann’s playing a few moments ago, and now this. It was too much. Amidst the beginning applause Perlmann started in on Opus 53, the A flat major Polonaise that Chopin had called the ‘Heroic’.

From the first bar he could hear the frightening passage. But there were still almost seven minutes before he got there. Even the first chords and runs required much more pressure than anything that had gone before, and Perlmann bit his lips with pain. But soon the pain could touch him no longer. As ever, he was overwhelmed by this music; it enfolded him and gave him the feeling that he could effortlessly keep the world at a distance. After half a minute the run-up began for the big theme, dressed up in powerful chords that came cascading down from above. The last bars before the first of these expansive chords had to be played at a slightly slower tempo to provide a proper setting for the beginning of the theme. Szabo himself had acknowledged that. But Perlmann – and this had been his constant reproach – overdid it to an unjustifiable extent. He was inclined to delay the entry of the topmost chord by more than a second. That, he found, was what made the tension properly palpable, and intensified the subsequent liberation. And that liberation was what truly counted – the idea that for the moment when one touched the keys with both hands and with one’s full strength, one was master of things. You abuse these passages, Szabo had said. You’re supposed to be playing Chopin, not yourself. Take Alfred Cortot as your model.

Szabo fell silent, and Perlmann played himself into a genuine state of intoxication. With a sure touch, he hammered the redeeming chords into the keys, rising from his chair with ever greater frequency to launch his attack. Unrestrainedly, he slowed down the introductory beats so that each chord had the significance – more than ever – of a liberation from chains. Then, when the storm broke out again, it fitted what he was doing perfectly. Because right now – three minutes in – came the first of the two passages in which the same dark chord was to be played seven times in a row. Never before, it seemed to him, had he played chords with such force. Trampling over what little remained of his restraint, Perlmann thundered all of his fury into the keys, his fury with Millar and all the others who beleaguered him; his fury with Szabo; his fury with the storm that he had to drown out; and above all his impotent fury with himself, with his insecurity, fear and mendacity, which had driven him into the murderous silence of the tunnel.

Afterwards, his sore fingers hurt so much it brought tears to his eyes. The thought came to him that if he brought his finger down on the keys the scar on his finger would burst, the blood would run over the white keys and seep into the gaps, and his fingers would lose their hold in the red smear. But the image was too fleeting to survive and, during the next, fourth minute, Perlmann devoted himself entirely to the effort of playing so seamlessly and compellingly as he had at the Conservatoire, when he had reaped such praise. His left hand mostly contributed to the climaxes, and he was glad that the intense pain in his finger had now become something constant that he could adjust to, something that no longer appeared in the form of unpredictable episodes. The whole passage flowed once again into a thundering repeat of a single chord. Then the same thing was repeated once again, but this time it was followed by a surprising dissolve into a sequence of bright, blithe bars. They made way for a lyrical passage, which, as Perlmann played it, was intended to remind the audience of the dreamlike mood of the Nocturnes.

He was now in the sixth minute of the piece. As the notes grew softer and quieter, Perlmann broke out in a frightened sweat, and his fingers seemed to have grown damp from one second to the next. Soon would come the run-up to the final repetition of the theme and, starting with its first chord – he remembered quite precisely, even today – it was forty seconds to the terrifying passage. Forty-three, perhaps forty-four if, out of panic-fuelled calculation, he slowed down again. The passage itself lasted less than ten seconds. Then came a speeded-up and shortened version of the theme with seven clearly articulated chords, and then it was over.

Perlmann drew out the last lyrical notes until he could no longer avoid speeding up and descending to the low chords in preparation for the theme. Then, summoning up all his defiance to defeat his anxiety, when he attacked the first chord of the theme he felt like someone who – after a series of devastating losses – has staked everything on a single card, knowing that his chances of winning are vanishingly small. It’s grotesque to hope for a crash of thunder during those crucial seconds. He tried to imagine himself back in the bare practice room at the Conservatoire – he was someone who played entirely for himself. That exercise worked, but he had started it too late, soon the long run from the low notes would be on him, and then the time would have come. Later, he couldn’t remember how he had done it, but suddenly he was back in the middle of the theme, repeating two lengthy passages from the beginning. Confused by his own maneuver, he concentrated again on the idea of playing in the empty room. He couldn’t chicken out again. He heard the two frenzied runs, which darted so rapidly through the structure of the other notes that you only really became aware of them when the last, bright note flashed. The rest of the runs had actually gone flawlessly. So it wasn’t impossible, even though the two critical sequences belonged to a quite different category of difficulty.

For the very last time, the complete theme. The long run from below, which still had a human tempo. A series of familiar, light chords. Now. Perlmann couldn’t feel a thing any more, as his fingers slid over the keys. His anxiety had subsided, too. For just ten seconds he experienced a present full of numb tension, in which he was nothing but hands and ears. And then, with the bright conclusion of the second run, he knew it, even though he still couldn’t believe it: no mistakes. Not a single one. Not one. The rest was child’s play.

He sat where he was for a moment, as if completely dazed. A shudder of exhaustion ran through him, and at first his legs refused to obey him when he got up. A precious moment of presence. He would have given anything to be able to capture it for ever.

The applause, with which even the other hotel guests joined in, was loud and sustained. The loudest clapping came from the corridor, where Perlmann now spotted Giovanni and Signora Morelli. When their eyes met, Giovanni raised his thumb in a sign of congratulations. It was as if he were congratulating Perlmann for successfully scoring a goal. At that moment Giovanni’s gesture meant more than all the applause. But even more important was the expression on Signora Morelli’s face. It was the same one with which she had looked at him on Monday night, when he had spoken of his relief with tears in his eyes. Now she smiled at him, and set the applause off again with her clapping. It was as if that mute encounter across the whole room made him immune to the opinions of the others. It almost didn’t matter what they thought.

Leskov was the last to stop clapping. ‘I had no idea…,’ he began, and the others nodded in agreement.

Perlmann was sparing with his information, but savored each item.

So why hadn’t he…?

‘I don’t like performing,’ he said, and glanced straight past Millar. ‘I prefer to be alone with music.’

The way the others looked at him had changed over the past half hour. At any rate that was what Perlmann fervently wanted to believe. And the pause in the conversation that occurred now, which seemed to echo with surprise, seemed to bear it out.

Millar played with the rolled-up cash. ‘I remembered the Polonaise as being shorter,’ he said, and straightened his glasses so slowly that it looked as if he was doing it in slow motion. ‘But that was a long time ago, and I’m not a Chopin connoisseur.’

For a moment Perlmann saw only the reflection of the chandelier in Millar’s glasses. The expression that he saw a moment later contained no suspicion. But there was a glittering thoughtfulness in it, which, it seemed, was actually waiting to turn into mistrust. Perlmann gave a non-committal smile.

‘I like the insistent way the theme keeps returning,’ he said.

When Millar immediately got up and sat down at the piano, no one expected anything but Bach. What he played, however, could hardly have been further removed from Bach. It was the Allegro agitato molto from the Études d’exécution transcendante by Franz Liszt. Perlmann didn’t know the piece, but identified it straight away as Liszt. Millar made the occasional mistake as he played, and from time to time he had to bring the tempo back down a little. Nonetheless, his playing was a brilliant achievement for an amateur, and Perlmann felt a stabbing pain when he heard him overcoming technical difficulties that put everything in the A flat major Polonaise in the shade.

He himself had always steered clear of Liszt. There was something about his particular form of effusiveness that repelled him. And if anyone mentioned Chopin and Liszt in the same breath, it made him furious. Liszt reminded him more clearly than any other composer of the limits of his technical gifts, and his dislike was mixed with fear. But he had never wanted to analyse it in any greater detail.

When the piece was over, Millar took off his blazer and threw it on to the nearest armchair. There was sweat on his face. No one clapped: his energetic movements announced far too clearly that he was about to play an encore. It was La leggierezza that he played now, one of Liszt’s Trois études de Concert. The piece seemed familiar to Perlmann, even though he couldn’t remember the title. Again he felt envious, particularly of certain runs and trills. All the same, it was comforting when Millar stumbled in the incredibly long run that rippled down with glassy brightness, and cursed quietly.

It was shortly after this run that Perlmann noticed. They aren’t waves, Philipp, he heard Hanna saying, they’re ribbons – bright, billowing ribbons like the ones that girls pull behind them when doing floor exercises. From then on, he had always had that image in his head when he heard or played Chopin’s F minor Étude from Opus 25, in which the right hand had to run through an almost uninterrupted sequence of regular quavers, when the charm of the piece lay in the fact that one could imagine no better medium for the theme than in precisely that regularity. And now he was hearing the same kind of ribbons in the piece by Liszt. They weren’t quite so long or quite so regular, and sometimes the left hand was involved as well. But it was the same musical idea. And while Perlmann inwardly made the comparison, he became clearly aware of something that had hitherto only touched him in the form of a vague, fleeting stumble: there was a thematic similarity between the first piece by Liszt that Millar had played and Chopin’s F minor Étude. Even the key was the same. With growing agitation, he tried to lay his memory of Chopin’s Étude over the notes by Liszt that he had just heard, like a pause the precision of which one wants to check. The piece that was being played interfered with that, and he tried to blank it out. Did that thematic kinship really exist? In one second he was quite sure of it; in the next he mistrusted his impression. If only he had a few minutes to hear the two pieces one after the other.

Perlmann didn’t stir from his concentration until he heard the applause and saw Millar putting his blazer over his shoulders, before slumping in the armchair.

‘Liszt?’ asked von Levetzov.

‘Yes,’ smiled Millar, ‘the only two pieces I can play. And I’ve always thought they somehow belong together.’

Perlmann pounced on the last remark as you might pounce on an opponent’s error in chess, if you saw straight away that it could decide the whole game.

‘That’s true,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Liszt cribbed them both. From Chopin. From the same piece, the F minor Étude from Opus 25.’

When Millar heard the word ‘crib’, the blood rushed to his face, as if the word had been applied to him. For a while he sat there numbly.

‘Cribbed?’ asked Leskov. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Spisyvat’,’ said Perlmann without hesitation.

Leskov grinned with surprise and improved his emphasis. ‘There you are. You even know a word like that…’

Perlmann reached for his cigarettes.

In the meantime, Millar had recovered himself. ‘I think, Phil,’ he said with controlled calm, ‘you will agree with me that a man like Franz List didn’t need to copy anything. Certainly not from Chopin, who isn’t a patch on him.’

Perlmann was seething, and he felt that his fingers, which were all painful now, had gone cold. It was, he thought, idiotic to provoke this confrontation now, less than twelve hours before Millar’s departure. And yet there was also something that he enjoyed: his fear of open conflict didn’t – as he had expected – discompose him. He felt a solidity that was new to him.

‘Whether he needed or didn’t need to imitate Chopin all the way down to his individual figures, I don’t know,’ Perlmann said on the way to the piano. ‘The fact is that in this case he did.’

He played in a lighter and more liberated way than he had expected, given his trembling fury, and he managed the brief Étude, which contained no particularly great technical difficulties, flawlessly. It only sounded a little too gentle, as he balked at a harder attack.

‘Encore!’ cried Giovanni, who had sat down a little way off, with Signora Morelli. Perlmann didn’t outwardly respond to the exclamation, and went back to his chair. But inwardly, Giovanni, his fan on the edge of the playing field, had performed a small miracle: the conflict with Millar, which Perlmann had just got so wound up in, suddenly lost its power over him, and assumed a playful tinge. He casually lit a cigarette and, as Silvestri had sometimes done, blew the smoke in the direction of Millar’s armchair. Evelyn Mistral tilted her head and nodded slightly.

‘I can’t hear a trace of plagiarism,’ said Millar, and his East Coast accent sounded even stronger than usual.

Ruge took off his glasses and ran his hand over his head. ‘I’m a terrible philistine. But I did have a sense, Brian, that there’s actually something to Philipp’s assertion.’

‘Me too…,’ von Levetzov began.

‘Nonsense,’ Millar interrupted him irritably, visibly aggrieved that his two allies had left him in the lurch at the last minute. ‘Those two bars of Chopin’s are just thrown down haphazardly. A piece that’s been roughly hand-crafted. Practically ingenuous. Liszt’s things, on the other hand, are always very refined.’

Perlmann felt his face getting hot. Giovanni was forgotten. He looked at Millar. ‘You might also say deliberate or calculated or overblown or stilted or affected.’ It was like a breathless obsession, always adding another or, at the risk of not having another word to hand. He didn’t know he knew all those English words, and he had the strange, spooky feeling that they had come to mind only for this occasion, and that they would soon vanish from his vocabulary again without a trace.

Millar took off his glasses, closed his eyes and rubbed the top of his nose. Then he set his glasses on as carefully as if he were at the opticians, closed his eyes, folded his arms and said: ‘Remarkable vocabulary. But acquired. You can always tell the foreigner. And, of course, the words don’t have the slightest thing to do with Franz Liszt.’

Laura Sand quickly laid her hand on Perlmann’s arm. ‘I liked your Chopin. Particularly those lyrical pieces. It’s a shame you didn’t play them before.’

As he left, Leskov put the money from the bet in his pocket. Then he rested a heavy hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘You are a one. You play like a professional and don’t say a word about it. And you know the most obscure Russian words!’ He laughed. ‘Do you know what your problem is? You keep too much to yourself. But you see: it all comes out in the end!’

Perlmann lay awake for most of the night. The storm clouds had passed. A shimmer of moonlight lay over the bay. It was quieter than usual. For hours he didn’t hear a single car. The five weeks were over; the mountains of time without present had faded at last. They had read his notes and heard his Chopin. Now they knew who he was. He had always thought that could never happen. He was confused that the disaster failed to materialize. He waited. Perhaps it would come after some delay, and all the more violently when it did. But it didn’t just begin like that. Very gradually he started to sense that for decades he had been living with an error. It wasn’t true that delineation meant screening oneself off and walling oneself away, as if in an internal fortress. What it came down to was something quite different: that if the others found out, one should stand calmly and fearlessly by what one was in one’s innermost depths. And Perlmann felt as if this insight was also the key to that present that he so longed for, which had always remained as intangible and fleeting as a mirage.

Now and again he dozed off… Not a trace of plagiarism, he heard Millar saying. In reply he slung unfamiliar English words at him, until he noticed at last that it was always one and the same word: spisyvat’. It’s all coming out! laughed Leskov, and in his mouth there was just a single tooth stump, because he was the old woman by the tunnel. Like in a film! She said. ‘As if!’ And then she threw the chronicle at the others, who were doubled up with laughter.

At one point Perlmann turned on the light and looked in the suitcase to see if the envelope with Leskov’s text was still inside.

The moon had disappeared. A fog bank blurred the silent lights of Sestri Levante. Luckily, he had resisted the temptation to play the Nocturne in D flat minor. Why in the world don’t you want to play that piece? Szabo had asked. Because, Perlmann had replied, staring at the keys. Now he could hear it, bar for bar. Her golden hair with the dark strand.

54

When the two taxi drivers stepped into the lobby, everything suddenly went so fast that Perlmann, who had been counting the hours, felt quite unprepared.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Ruge, after thanking him for everything. ‘Worse things happen!’

Perlmann felt these words tearing open a wound. They assumed something had happened that someone could take amiss – a failure, a disgrace, even a transgression. And he had merely given a weaker presentation than usual. One time in his glittering career. Accompanied by a fainting fit, certainly. But who can do anything about their body? Otherwise, from the vantage point of the others, nothing had happened. So why this sentence that cut and burned, made even more unbearable by the terribly respectable, Swabian cadence? What, he called inaudibly after Ruge, what am I not supposed to worry about? Von Levetzov was already shaking his hand and saying something about a conference at which they would certainly see one another again, while Perlmann still wrestled with Ruge’s words. Was he referring to his fainting? Or the notes? Or that dreadful text? Why did he have to say that? And why at that precise moment, which gave what was said – whatever it might be – a particular weight? He tried to call to mind Ruge’s face and the tone of his voice when talking about the death of his sister. But the more he struggled to remember those things, the more they eluded him. Had they really existed?

Laura Sand didn’t know where to put her cigarette and finally jammed it between her fingers, which were holding her travel bag. ‘I’ll send you a few pictures,’ she said, tapping her camera bag. ‘Pictures that Chopin would have liked,’ she added with her mocking smile. In the doorway she tripped over her long black coat. For a moment Perlmann closed his eyes to make sure that the inner picture of her mocking face would always be available to him.

What came next was something that he had tried several times to imagine during the night, but his fantasies had got him nowhere.

‘Thanks for everything,’ said Millar, shaking his hand firmly. He said it in a workmanlike manner. That was how he would always say goodbye. And yet he wasn’t just acting in line with convention. There had been a twitch in his face, leaving yesterday evening behind. ‘And about your book: I’ll talk to my publisher next week. I’ll entrust it to him quite specifically.’

Perlmann nodded mutely, and felt as if for those whole five weeks he had given the same response to everything anyone had said to him: a silent nod of the head.

Millar pulled up the zip of his windbreaker and picked up his case. Two steps later he set it down again and turned round. ‘By the way: your Chopin – it sounded pretty good. And Liszt isn’t all that better. No comparison with Bach,’ he grinned.

Perlmann thought about Sheila and the balloon. ‘I’ve never heard Bach like yours,’ he said. ‘A very distinct style.’

Millar blushed. ‘Oh, thanks. Many thanks. No one’s ever said that to me before. We should have…’

Perlmann nodded mutely. Before Millar got into the taxi, he looked back up at Perlmann and raised his hand. When the taxi disappeared, Perlmann was filled with a feeling of emptiness and loss.

Leskov was sitting on the terrace in the sun when Perlmann and Evelyn Mistral came outside half an hour later. Her train left Genoa at eleven, she said in reply to Leskov’s question.

‘Then you’ll easily be back here by one,’ said Leskov to Perlmann. ‘Because that’s when our ship sails,’ he added, seeing Perlmann’s incomprehension. On such a beautiful day Leskov wanted to invite him on a boat trip to Genoa, harbor tour included. Especially when the coast road had just been closed. ‘I’ll pay with this!’ he said with a laugh, and pulled his crumpled winnings from his trouser pocket.

Perlmann felt the handle of the suitcase getting damp. Motionless, he looked down at Evelyn Mistral’s red shoes.

‘You can’t possibly refuse him that,’ she said to him in Spanish, lowering her voice.

Two more days of despair for him. Unless he scrubbed the idea of Ivrea. Then it’s just one.

‘Don’t you want to?’ Leskov asked. The disappointment in his voice and his anxious face were unbearable.

‘No, of course I do,’ Perlmann said hoarsely, ‘and I’ll be back by one whatever happens.’ He was glad when the taxi hooted down below.

It was a silent train journey. Perlmann fought unsuccessfully against the trepidation that was choking him. He had to extract each individual word from himself, and didn’t know how to make it clear to Evelyn Mistral that his silence had nothing to do with her. As she began, out of embarrassment, to talk about the book she was just reading, he wondered again and again whether he should give her Leskov’s text, so that she could hand it to him in Geneva. Two days. One, at any rate. No suspicion could fall on her. She had never been anywhere near Leskov’s suitcase. Perhaps Leskov would assume that his plane had flown on from Frankfurt to Geneva, where the text had been found at last. But how in the world was he to explain to her that the envelope had to reach St Petersburg as quickly as possible, when they had both stood facing its recipient half an hour before?

‘You’d rather have had the afternoon to yourself, wouldn’t you?’ she asked as the train arrived at Genoa Station.

Perlmann nodded.

‘But he seemed to be looking forward to the boat trip as excitedly as a child.’

Again he nodded mutely.

The big suitcase with the red elephant on the middle of the lid bumped against the steps of the carriage as she got in. Perlmann took the case from her, and let her hold his suitcase. When they stood facing one another in the empty, musty-smelling compartment, he ran his hand over her freshly washed, straw-like hair. After a brief hesitation, during which she tried to read his face, she put her arms around his neck and leaned playfully back.

‘¡No te pierdas!’

He nodded, picked up the valise and a few steps later he was outside. When he turned round she was standing at the open carriage door.

‘That earlier text of Vassily’s: you read it didn’t you?’

Perlmann took a deep breath and looked at her. ‘Yes. But it would be too long a story.’ He looked at the floor for a moment, and then raised his head again. ‘Our secret?’

Her radiant smile crossed her face.

‘I like secrets like that. And I’m the soul of discretion.’

The conductor walked along the train and closed the doors. She stood at the compartment window. She was plainly thinking away. Her curiosity got the better of her.

‘Was it the text you had with you on the terrace when I arrived?’

Perlmann nodded.

‘And that’s why you didn’t want the others…’

‘Yes,’ he said.

The train set off.

‘You could make up various stories about that,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll try that on my journey. As a way of passing the time!’

Perlmann was glad that instead of talking he was able to wave. He went on mechanically doing so until her carriage was out of sight. Only when he lowered his arm did he notice that he was clutching the handle of the valise so tightly that it cut into his hand.

He ordered a coffee in the station bar. According to the hands of the clock on the wall, behind its cracked glass, it was just after eleven. The plane he had planned to take left at a quarter past twelve. Now Leskov was keeping him from atoning for his action as quickly as possible. It was only with difficulty that Perlmann managed to keep his impotent rage within bounds, and the young woman next to him looked with alarm at his fist with its white knuckles holding the long sugar spoon, rather than putting it back in the bowl. You can’t refuse him that. But she couldn’t have known. Disappointment over a boat trip, as against two more days of despair, that was the calculation. And it wasn’t just despair. Perhaps those were precisely the two days that would cost Leskov his job, because they were the two that would have let him copy out and rephrase the missing pages in time.

Perlmann took the bus to the airport. He closed his mind’s eye to those memories and, without looking round, he immediately went to the check-in counter and on to security control. On the x-ray screen Leskov’s text was only a vague shadow. He sat impatiently in the waiting room and looked out at the plane that was just taking the food container on board. The water beyond the runway lay in gleaming light. What had Leskov called the southern light? Siyayushchy. I’ve hardly seen anything of this area. When the coast road was closed, on top of everything. Perlmann started pacing back and forth. Then he would have to fly tomorrow, as originally planned. His reservation was still valid. Just one more day that Leskov would have to wait for the text. That would mean scrubbing Ivrea. Or at least postponing it. He imagined the bright office. Or else he could fly back here tomorrow afternoon and take a later train to Ivrea. He studied his boarding pass. Yes. He crumpled up the green piece of cardboard, threw it in the bin and pushed his way, amidst cries of protest from the security officials, past the queuing people and out into the hall.

There were no seats on the flight from Frankfurt to Genoa tomorrow afternoon, and the waiting list was already long. Perlmann still felt the pressure of the crumpled boarding pass in the palm of his hand. What about flights from Frankfurt to Turin? The hostess listlessly consulted the computer, and mistyped several times. All flights were booked, but there was just one name on the waiting list. Perlmann asked her to add his to it.

Ten past twelve. With the check that he had planned to cash in Frankfurt, he went to the bank in the arrivals hall. As he waited in the line, Perlmann couldn’t help going through Leskov’s arrival all over again. I like to have my own money. Then he ran, with all his cash in his hand, out to a taxi and asked the driver to take him to Santa Margherita as quickly as possible.

55

Leskov was standing by the edge of the road, opposite the landing stage for the boats, attentively studying the traffic. He had one leg in the road and the other, strangely bent at the knee, lightly touched the pavement. His torso was leaning forwards expectantly, and he tried to hold his head upright, clutching his big glasses with one hand. When the taxi a little way in front of Perlmann’s came towards him, Leskov bent down to get a better view of the passenger. He maintained this posture when he saw Perlmann’s taxi. He jerked his back, tipped his glasses slightly to check what he had seen, and then walked, with swinging arms that crossed above his head, into the middle of the carriageway, as if to stop the only car on a lonely stretch of road at night.

The driver stopped with a cry of alarm. From the moment when he glimpsed Leskov, Perlmann had been unable to think about anything. He had just gripped the handle of the suitcase even tighter. Now he gave the driver a large bill and got out.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ said Leskov, immediately trying to keep the reproachful tone out of his voice. ‘The boat’s here already!’

For the first half hour of the trip it wasn’t especially striking that Perlmann said hardly anything. Leskov enjoyed standing at the front of the almost deserted ship, looking out at the still, dazzling water. After a while he took a map out of his jacket. Signora Morelli had lent it to him. Perlmann recognized the traces of dirt straight away: it was the same map that he had used when planning his crime, and which he had used, when collecting the yellow sheets of paper, as an underlay for the fragile page with the subheading. No, he said, when Leskov pointed to Portofino, he had never been there. And he didn’t know Genoa harbour, either.

Later, when Leskov came back from the toilet, he sat down on the bench next to Perlmann, and as he lit his pipe, he studied the suitcase. Every time he had seen a suitcase over the past few days, he said, he hadn’t been able to keep from thinking of his missing text. And the piece of rubber band in the zip of the outside pocket.

‘Do you think it’s most likely that I left it at home? I mean, after all the things I’ve told you?’

Perlmann nodded and picked up his cigarettes. ‘At any rate, I don’t think the text is simply lost,’ Perlmann said, relieved at the firmness in his voice. ‘Lufthansa is famous for its care with lost objects.’

‘So you really think they’d send my text back?’

Perlmann nodded.

‘But the address is written in Russian, and by hand,’ Leskov said. His eyes were unnaturally large behind their thick glasses, and that made the anxiety behind them seem enlarged as well.

Perlmann glanced quickly away. ‘Lufthansa is one of the biggest international airlines, and they fly to Russia. I’m sure they have people who speak Russian.’

Leskov sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right. If I could only be sure that I really did write the address on it. The night before last I suddenly started having doubts.’

Perlmann closed his eyes. His heart pounded. He braced himself. ‘What address do you usually write at the end of a text like that?’

‘What? Oh, my work address.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘You mean because I asked you only to use my home address? No, because it’s different in cases like that.’

Perlmann excused himself and went inside, where he leaned against the wall next to the toilet. The pounding in his chest subsided only gradually. No, it was too dangerous to ask him for his address, quite apart from the fact that he had no convincing reason to do so. Perlmann would have to ask him to write it down, and the whole thing would thus become an action that would linger vividly in Leskov’s memory. Perlmann slowly walked back, avoiding a sailor on the way, and stepped out on deck.

His heart stopped. Leskov was holding the suitcase on his knees, and was just snapping both locks shut. Now he set the suitcase back on the floor. Perlmann took a few steps to the side. No, Leskov wasn’t holding the envelope, and he stood up now and filled a pipe by the railing. Perlmann walked slowly up to him and touched the back of each individual bench as if seeking reassurance that he could use them to support himself.

‘You people in the West have lovely things,’ said Leskov, indicating the suitcase with the stem of his pipe. ‘That leather. And those refined and elegant locks. It would really make a person envious.’

Perlmann clutched the railing until his knees started obeying him again.

When they stepped out on land in Genoa, Leskov suddenly stopped. ‘Let’s assume I left it on the plane. Do you know what I’m most afraid of? The cleaning crew. If they found something like that, how would those people know it was precious?’

There was no other option. Perlmann had to find out, and this was his chance.

‘Anyone would hesitate if faced with such a thick stack of papers. If they’re typed, they’re going to be important. And it’s half a book. Isn’t it?’

Leskov nodded. ‘You could be right. It’s eighty-seven pages long.’

That means there are seventeen pages that Leskov will have to rewrite. The length of a whole lecture. But he still has it all in his head. You keep things like that in your head for a long time.

Perlmann avoided the harbor bar from which he had called Maria a week before. But it was hard to find anything else nearby, and in the end they sat down at the only table by a snack bar that smelled of fish and burnt oil. Perlmann was glad of the noise in the street and the children sliding right past them on their skateboards. These things would give a casual sound to the question that he couldn’t hold back for much longer.

‘When do you need to hand the text in? For that job, I mean.’

‘Two weeks’ time.’

Perlmann couldn’t stop himself. ‘That gives you exactly fourteen days.’

Leskov looked at him with distracted surprise. ‘Thirteen,’ he said with a smile. ‘Saturday doesn’t count.’

‘What would happen if you didn’t turn up with the text until the following Monday?’

The puzzlement in Leskov’s face was more alert now than it had been a moment before.

‘I just wondered how fussy they are in your country,’ Perlmann said quickly.

‘They would probably acknowledge me anyway,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But you never know. They’re bureaucrats. It’s better not to give them a formal excuse. And the date isn’t a problem either,’ he added calmly as the waiter set their food down in front of them. ‘I really just need to type up the text, and I’m quick at that. For the notes I would need half a day at the most.’

Perlmann choked down his sheep’s cheese and felt his stomach tightening. He won’t have the text before Friday. Then he has a week. That could be enough. But what if he only gets it the following Monday, or even Tuesday?

‘Incidentally, how long did it take my letter to get there?’ Perlmann asked.

Leskov doesn’t understand at first. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about what will happen if Lufthansa send it. I can’t remember exactly; about a week, I think.’ He poked around absently at his salad. ‘Good that you ask. That means, in fact, that the text might still be on its way if I don’t find it tomorrow evening. It could even take one or two days before the business about the Russian address is sorted out. So I can’t give up hope straight away. Particularly as the post doesn’t usually come on Monday. But if there’s still nothing there by Wednesday or even Thursday… Oh, it’s all nonsense,’ he said with a forced smile, filling his fork. ‘The text is there on my desk, in the middle of all that chaos, I can see the yellow sheets right in front of me.’

That year’s harbor tours had stopped the previous day. They wouldn’t start again until the beginning of March. Leskov read the English text of the notice three times under his breath. Suddenly, his enthusiasm for his surroundings and the southern light seemed to collapse in on itself, and all his confidence vanished.

‘Now I myself have destroyed my only hope of a secure post and a bit of calm,’ he said as a taxi took them to the upper edge of the city, to get as good a view as possible. And then, on a terrace with a heavenly vista, Leskov talked about the power struggles and intrigues at the institute, and about his insecure position. It wasn’t true to say that the others didn’t think much of him. Quite the reverse, in fact: they feared and envied his independent mind. And then there was his time in prison, he said with bitter mockery. It gave him a degree of moral authority that he didn’t like because it created a circle of grudging and uneasy respect around him, so that certain conversations regularly stopped when he entered the room.

And then this new post had recently become available.

‘I’m the logical candidate. But you can imagine that for all these reasons they don’t want me.’ And there was an argument: he hadn’t published very much. Leskov rested one leg against the edge of the railing, gripped his knee with both hands and looked down at the sea, where the light had already lost some of its glow. His face twitched and trembled. ‘First you’re thrown in prison, then you’re accused of not having published enough. You see, that’s why the text is so important. Would have been so important. The argument they advanced against me would have lost validity. “If only we had a longer, more recent text!” I’ve heard that often. And now the text is on a garbage dump somewhere. Gone. If only I had been able to make a copy of it! But after waiting around in the travel agent’s and at the telegram office it was too late: having photocopies made in Russia is still terribly difficult.’

Perlmann turned sideways, and touched the suitcase with his foot. He covered his face with his hand. I just need to take it out. But no, it’s impossible. There simply isn’t an innocent explanation. At some point he would bump into the truth. Inevitably.

Leskov touched him on the arm. ‘Let’s walk down a little way. And now let’s stop talking about me!’

The sea was the color of copper when they stood side by side by the railing on the way back. They hadn’t spoken for a while, and it seemed to Perlmann that every further moment of silence, as in the tunnel, would produce an undesirable intimacy. Soon Leskov would start talking about Agnes.

‘At the end of the session,’ Perlmann said, when Leskov turned towards him, ‘you made the surprising assertion that there is no true story about our experienced past.’

Leskov grinned. ‘The assertion that cost Achim a pencil.’

‘And then you added two words – Russian, I think – that I didn’t understand. What was that about?’

‘So someone noticed,’ Leskov laughed. ‘I thought everyone would have thought it was simply Russian babbling. But you, of course, noticed.’

Perlmann felt as if he were being presented as a prize pupil in a school class.

‘The two words were Klim Samgin. It’s the name of the central character in Maxim Gorky’s last novel, a four-volume work, over two thousand pages long, with the title: Zhizn’ Klima Samgina: The Life of Klim Samgin. With this character Gorky creates a narrative perspective for the description of forty years of Russian history. One important motif is that Samgin has a self-conscious, one might say a broken relationship with reality, into which radical doubts about the narratives of others, as well as his own perceptions, often creep. In this way Gorky allowed the little boy Klim to discover that the invention of things is an important component of life, something without which we cannot exist. There are wonderful sentences like… wait… yes: I vsegda nuzhno chto-nibut’ vydumyvat’, inache nikto iz vzroslych ne budet zamechat’ tebya i budesh zhit’ tak, kak budto tebya net ili kak budto ty ne Klim. Did you understand?

‘One moment,’ said Leskov. He closed his eyes and murmured the Russian sentence to himself again. ‘In English it would be something like: You must always be inventing something, otherwise the adults won’t pay attention to you, and you will live as if you aren’t there, or as if you aren’t Klim. Or another sentence…’ As he said the words to himself, Leskov mutely moved his lips. ‘Something like this: Klim couldn’t remember when he had actually noticed that he was invented, and he himself had begun to invent himself. Gorky always uses the same word: vydumyvat’: to invent or fabricate. And in the subheading of my new text, which I mentioned in the session, I use this word in the special sense that it has in Gorky.’

In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw the sheet covered with road dirt, lying on the map that now peeped from Leskov’s jacket pocket.

‘A hint of plagiarism,’ Leskov smiled, ‘but really only a hint.’

Perlmann experimentally took the hand holding the cigarette off the railing: no, outwardly it wasn’t shaking; it only felt as if it was. He inhaled deeply, and from the bottom of his burning lungs he wished he had the power suddenly to extinguish that most terrible of all words – plagiarism – from the minds of all human beings, so that he would never, never again, have to hear it. To do so, he thought, he would be prepared to enter any – really any – pact with the devil.

‘The theme associated with this word,’ Leskov continued, ‘assumes a particularly dramatic form in Gorky’s work when it is linked with the idea of a trauma.’ He saw Perlmann turning his head away. ‘Am I boring you?’

Perlmann glanced at him and shook his head.

‘One day Klim Samgin sees another boy, a boy he hates, falling into the river while skating, and disappearing into a hole in the ice along with his female companion, whereupon the girl clings to him and drags him down. He sees the boy’s red hands clinging to the edge of the ice, and his glistening head with its bloody face emerging every now and again from the black water and shouting for help. Klim, who is lying on the ice, throws him one end of his belt. But when he feels himself being pulled closer and closer to the water, he lets the belt slip from his hand, and shrinks away from the red hands which are breaking off more and more ice as they come towards him. And all of a sudden there’s just the boy’s cap floating on the water.’

Leskov paused and sought Perlmann’s eye. The red hands coming closer and closer: wasn’t that an image that could be pursued?

Perlmann nodded. He was glad it was quickly darkening.

‘Gorky doesn’t just call the hands red. He uses an expression that is stronger, more insistent. But I can’t think of it right now,’ said Leskov. ‘Anyway, at the end of that scene he has someone say: Da – byl li mal’chik-to, mozhet, mal’chika-to i ne bylo?’

Perlmann, who had understood straight away, responded to his questioning gaze with a shake of the head.

‘Yes – was there a boy there at all, perhaps there was no boy there? That’s how you would have to translate it,’ said Leskov. ‘And you see: this question, which returns in later passages like a leitmotiv, picks up the theme of invention.’

The lights of Portofino were already coming into view when Leskov started talking about prison. They had locked him up for just three years. No, no torture, and no solitary confinement, either. Quite normal imprisonment. Four of them in a cell at first, later alone. Not being able to read anything, that had initially been the worst thing. After six months they had allowed – it was a miracle – his mother to bring him Gorky’s novel. She had no idea of its content. She had come across it in a junk shop, and had bought it just for its length. Two thousand pages for so little money!

‘What it meant for me back then to hold those volumes in my hands and feel their weight – it’s impossible to capture that in words,’ Leskov said quietly. Throughout his remaining time in prison, he had read it fourteen times. He knew hundreds of scenes off by heart.

‘The theme of invention grabbed me straight away. But it took a long time before it assumed the form that it now has in my text. Gorky is primarily concerned with the invention of objects and events outside in the world or – when Klim Samgin talks about the invention of himself – of episodes in his external life story. And one slightly disappointing aspect of the novel is that Gorky effectively throws the theme down at your feet without really developing it. Although the story with the hole in the ice is ideally suited for that. There is, in fact, a moment, as Gorky says, where Klim enjoys seeing his enemy, normally so arrogant, in that desperate state. And this yields the question of whether he lets go of the belt out of pure fear, or whether hatred is also involved. Because it is a traumatic experience, Klim will have to invent something about it, too, and this time it’s an invention of the inner world. He will narrate his inner past. And there is nothing, nothing at all, that he could cling to when he wonders which of the various stories is the true one.’

Leskov held the flame to his unlit pipe. He was now standing with his back to the water, staring, it seemed, at the numbers on the hull of a lifeboat, and when he went on, it sounded as if he were a long way away.

‘Then something strange happened to me. When week after week passed in this terrible, grey monotony, which is worse than any kind of bullying, I gradually lost all sense of my own internal past. After a certain amount of time you simply no longer know what your experience was like before you came along. It must sound insane to an outsider, but you lose a certainty that was previously so much taken for granted that you knew nothing about it. It’s a silent, creeping, inexorable loss of your inner identity. You fight against it as you have never fought before. You narrate your inner past to yourself over and over again to keep it from slipping away. But the more often you do that, the more intrusive the doubt becomes: is that really true, or am I merely inventing this past experience for myself? And I’m sure you can imagine how Gorky’s theme and his own experience increasingly merged until the name Klim Samgin became a symbol within me for that abyss of lost identity.’

Leskov left the ship as though in a trance and stopped a few steps later. ‘And yet I hadn’t yet got to my crazy thesis. That is only reached when one accepts the thought that experience is not formed by narration, but in a sense created by it – the idea, then, that you know from my earlier text.’

Perlmann noticed too late that he had been nodding. Horrified, he turned his head towards Leskov. But he hadn’t noticed anything, and went on talking.

‘You know, it’s hard to describe, but the inner formulation and defense of my thesis were a great help to me in surviving my remaining time in prison. Why that should have been so I still don’t quite know. But I suspect that it had less to do with the content of the thesis than with the feeling of having made an exciting discovery. That gave me a piece of inner freedom, and made me invulnerable to many things.’

Leskov stopped again on the steps leading up to the hotel. ‘When I was out, and had regained my ability to work, I had lost the courage of my most important thesis, so in my first version I settled for observations about the creative role of language for experience. In that text I touch upon the radical idea only now and again. I think I was afraid of discovering that I had temporarily lost my mind in prison. Only in the course of that summer did I start fumbling around at the subject within myself. And when I then wrote the whole thing up, that was a process in which even imprisonment was addressed and, I hope, dealt with. A kind of healing process.’ By the portico, Leskov took his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s why I’ve got to find the text when I get home. I simply must. It’s not just because of the post. That text – it’s a piece of my soul.’

‘Did you have a good flight?’ asked Signora Morelli.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Perlmann like someone who has just been woken up.

‘She asked you that because of the note yesterday morning, didn’t she?’ Leskov said in the elevator.

Perlmann nodded. ‘A misunderstanding.’

Up in the room he threw himself on the bed. He did it without first setting down the suitcase – as if it had grown onto him. When he did finally let go, he saw that the leather handle was black from the sweat of his hand.

There was nothing more to think about. Now it was just a question of will power. Trembling, he waited for the feelings of guilt and his own shabbiness, with which he was attempting to forge an alliance, to emerge victorious over fear. Only then could time start flowing again and carry him forward, wherever that might be.

Before five minutes had passed, he sat up. He slowly took the envelope out of the suitcase, removed the staples and drew out the plastic jacket. He no longer had to be careful with the teeth of the zip fastener. With one single jerk – into which he put all of his despair – he pulled open the zip. One of the loose teeth was torn out and fell between the pages. Perlmann forced himself to inhale slowly a few times and cautiously pulled out the text. He ran the back of his hand several times over the top, curling page. The hole with the ragged, brownish edges, where the twig had gone through, was bigger than he remembered.

He washed his face and combed away a ridiculously prominent tuft of hair. A fresh shirt. Yes, and the jacket, too. The warm water wouldn’t do much for his cold hands, but he went back into the bathroom anyway. He pulled the door to his room closed behind him as softly as if someone were sleeping in there.

When he turned into the corridor that led to Leskov’s room, Perlmann’s pace slowed. Two doors before Leskov’s he turned round, walked to the elevator and sat in the big wicker chair. There was nothing more to consider. If he gave Leskov the text, then he would have to admit everything. If he didn’t give him the text, then Leskov wouldn’t get the post, and it was Perlmann’s fault. It was all quite clear. Crystal clear. There was no reason to sit here in the wicker chair. No amount of waiting could make it any clearer.

Perlmann waited. He would have liked to smoke. John Smith from Carson City, Nevada, who was coming out of the elevator in his tracksuit, showed Perlmann the headline of a newspaper and shook his head disapprovingly. Two French businessmen with briefcases came out of the corridor and walked, chatting, down the stairs. A chambermaid with bedlinen over her arm slipped past.

Perlmann walked back along the corridor. The blue nylon carpet was exaggeratedly thick; he felt as if he were wading. Next to Leskov’s door he leaned against the wall. Then he held his ear to the door and heard Leskov coughing. Perlmann rolled up the text and hid it behind his back with his left hand. One last hesitation before his crooked finger, an ugly, repellent finger, touched the wood. He knocked twice. Leskov seemed not to have heard. Perlmann’s nose started running. He took a few steps back, wedged the roll under his arm and blew his nose. After he had knocked again, he heard Leskov coming to the door. A short cough before the door opened.

‘Oh, Philipp, it’s you,’ said Leskov. ‘Come in.’

It was impossible to do it. Impossible. It wasn’t an insight. It wasn’t knowledge or a decision. It wasn’t even a thought. It didn’t even really have anything to do with the will. It wasn’t anything that Perlmann remembered; nothing that he had at his command. Afterwards he felt as if he hadn’t even been there. His body simply couldn’t put the plan into action. The intention was confronted with powerful, unshakeable forces that wouldn’t move. The resolution slipped off those forces like something laughably feeble. The system went on strike. A white, completely emotionless panic overrode everything.

‘Come in, please,’ Leskov repeated with a cordial but slightly puzzled smile.

‘No, no,’ Perlmann heard himself saying. ‘I just wanted to check when your flight leaves tomorrow morning. So that I can tell Angelini.’

‘Oh, I see. Wait, I’ll take a look. But please, do come in for a moment.’

While Leskov fetched his ticket from his suitcase, Perlmann stayed with his back against the door, which he had left ajar. Where his hand gripped the pages, they were wet.

‘At five past nine,’ said Leskov. He pointed to the armchair. ‘Time to have a cigarette?’

‘Not really, no. I promised Angelini I would call him back. He’s waiting.’

Perlmann took a step to the side, pulled the door open with his right hand and walked out backwards. Leskov stopped in the doorway and watched him go. Perlmann took a few more steps backwards. Then he quickly turned left on his own axis and, in a contrary motion, swung the rolled-up text in front of his chest. After a few quick steps he was on the stairs.

In his room he sat motionless on the bed for several minutes, staring straight ahead. Then he fetched his big suitcase. In it, partly telescoped in on itself, was an unopened envelope full of mail from Frau Hartwig, as well as the invitation to Princeton, the black wax-cloth notebook, the little volume of Robert Walser, the certificate and the medal. Perlmann couldn’t remember when he had thrown all these things in. He stared at the chaotic pile. It felt like a sedimentation of failure, guilt and dereliction. He didn’t know what to do with it. He wearily laid his torn and bloodstained pairs of trousers over it, then his dirty, pale jacket. It would look idiotic if he stepped into Olivetti headquarters in a blazer and far too pale trousers.

He put the chronicle in the other drawer. Then he packed the books – none of which he had opened in the course of the whole five weeks – in the suitcase. The zip of the plastic jacket would only close halfway. He no longer had the strength to think about it. He put Leskov’s text back in the envelope and placed it between the books. In the bathroom he got his sponge bag ready and took a whole sleeping pill. From the desk drawer he took the printout of his notes. He tore the sheets in half and threw them in the waste-paper basket.

Before he turned out the light he called Leskov and made his apologies for dinner. When he set the alarm, he felt the effect of the tablet in his fingertips.

56

Leskov’s stained suitcase was standing beside the reception desk when Perlmann came downstairs. On the gleaming marble floor of the elegant hall it looked like a remnant of another era. It was just after seven, and Giovanni was waiting for Signora Morelli so that he could go home.

‘Buona fortuna!’ said Perlmann as he shook his hand.

‘You too!’ replied Giovanni, and went on shaking. ‘And then… erm… I just wanted to say: you play the piano really well. Really brilliant!’

‘Thank you,’ said Perlmann and exchanged an awkward glance with him. ‘Is there a cup competition coming up where I could see Baggio on our television at home?’

‘Juventus are playing Stuttgart soon. I could check…’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Perlmann, ‘I’ll keep an eye out. What’s his first name, by the way?’

‘Roberto.’

Outside the door to the dining room Perlmann turned round again and raised his hand: ‘Ciao.’

Giovanni said the same word back, and it came out of his lips more lightly and surely than it had on Wednesday evening. It sounded almost as natural as if they were two old friends.

Leskov had put his suitcase on a chair next to him. Perlmann flinched when he saw him now, and immediately his eye looked for the little piece of rubber band in the zip of the outside pocket. It had gone.

‘Rather shabby compared to yours, isn’t it?’ said Leskov when he saw Perlmann staring at the case.

Perlmann gestured vaguely and picked up the coffee pot.

‘If I understood correctly the other evening, you’ll be talking to Angelini about the question of publication,’ Leskov said hesitantly as he folded up the napkin.

Perlmann nodded. He had seen it coming. But in a good hour it’ll be over. Once and for all.

‘It’s about a translation of my text… Do you think…?’

‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Perlmann and pushed back the chair. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Perlmann would have liked to say goodbye to Signora Morelli, who was just taking her coat off, on his own. Leskov’s presence disturbed him, and when he heard the Russian’s extravagant words of thanks he went to the toilet.

But Leskov was still standing next to her afterwards. Today she was wearing a black scarf with a fine white edge, and above it her still rather sleepy face looked paler than usual.

Perlmann gave her his hand and was glad that Leskov now bent towards his case. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply, ‘and all the best.’

‘You too,’ she said. Then for a moment she rested her other hand on his. ‘Have a rest. You look completely exhausted.’

Leskov gave the taxi driver a sign and walked laboriously down the stairs. Perlmann set down his luggage and went back into the hall. He looked at Signora Morelli and had no idea what he had wanted to say.

‘Is there anything else?’ she asked with a smile.

‘No, no. I… erm… I just wanted to say it was good to have you here for those few weeks.’ And then, when her hand awkwardly reached for her scarf, he added quickly: ‘Have you sorted out your taxes?’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Thank God.’

‘See you then.’

‘Yes. Have a good trip.’

Perlmann was relieved that Leskov had chosen to sit beside the driver. Behind him, Perlmann leaned into the upholstery and closed his eyes. The after-effect of the sleeping pills pressed against his eyes. Contrary to his habit, when the taxi came round the corner he hadn’t turned back to face the hotel. Now he saw it in his mind’s eye, in all its details, and he even climbed the steps to the Marconi Veranda once more. It was over. Over.

‘For publication I could make a shorter version,’ said Leskov. ‘What do you think?’ In spite of several groaning attempts Leskov hadn’t managed to turn round completely, and now he was looking at the window past the back of the driver’s head.

Perlmann jammed his fists into the seat. He would have to run the whole publication business properly through his mind, he said.

After a lengthy pause, in which he had slipped into a half-sleep, the back of the front seat struck his knees. Leskov had loosened his seatbelt and rolled on to his right side, and was trying, once again in vain, to turn all the way towards Perlmann.

‘I barely dare to broach the subject,’ he said submissively, ‘but I don’t suppose you would be willing to translate my text?’

Perlmann froze and was glad that the driver was suddenly forced to overtake at that point, cursing as he did so.

‘I just thought that because you know my thoughts so well, and have responded to them with such interest,’ Leskov added hesitantly, almost guiltily, when he received no answer.

Only now did Perlmann manage to shake off his torpor. ‘Just from the point of view of time, it’s not going to work,’ he heard himself say in a hollow voice. ‘We’ve got the term coming up…’

‘I know,’ Leskov said quickly, ‘and I’m sure you’re going to want to go on working on your book. Incidentally, I wanted to ask you if I could read what you’ve written already. You can imagine how intensely interested I am.’

Perlmann felt as if a ton weight on his chest was keeping him from breathing. ‘Later,’ he said at last, when Leskov had long since clicked his seatbelt shut again.

‘The man with the cap is working today again,’ Leskov laughed when the taxi drove past the parking cabin to the airport entrance. ‘I won’t forget him again in a hurry. Such stubbornness!’

Then, as they stood in line at check-in, Leskov suddenly said that he hoped the plane wasn’t as full as it had been on the inbound flight, when he hadn’t known where to put his feet because of the suitcase. In the end the stewardess had saved him by stowing it somewhere at the back.

‘At least this way I can be sure that I haven’t left the text somewhere along this route,’ he said with a crooked smile. ‘You must knock on wood very firmly that I find it, when I step into my apartment in… wait… in fifteen hours.’

They slowly walked towards passport control. Another two, three minutes.

Leskov set down his suitcase. ‘When you step into your apartment, I’m sure it seems empty to you, even today. Doesn’t it?’

For one brief moment Perlmann experienced the same rage as he had felt in the silent tunnel; it was as if it had ceased only for a few minutes, not for several days.

‘Kirsten will be there,’ he lied. And then, contrary to his intentions, he asked the question: ‘Klim Samgin – how does he come to terms with his trauma? Or doesn’t he?’

Leskov made the face of someone normally unnoticed who learns, completely unexpectedly, that someone is interested in him, in him personally.

‘I’ve thought a lot about that. But it’s strange: Gorky doesn’t answer the question. On the one hand the memory of the hole in the ice keeps flashing up; on the other hand you don’t learn anything about how Klim feels about it. If you ask me: you can’t really come to terms with a trauma of that kind. It isn’t so much that something terrible happened to him that he couldn’t do anything about. Like me with prison. He lets go of the belt; that is, he does something, he performs an action. And also there’s this hatred within him. If there’s any chance of something that might be a real reconciliation with oneself, and not just a frantic self-reassurance. I doubt it. The red hands will never have let him go again. Or what do you think?’

Perlmann didn’t say anything, and just shrugged. Leskov took a step towards him, and put his arms around him. As stiff as a mannequin, Perlmann let him do it.

‘I’ll write to you straight away about the text!’ called Leskov, as the official flicked through his passport. ‘And, of course, I’ll send you a copy as soon as it’s typed out!’

Incapable of reacting, Perlmann watched Leskov waving his passport before he disappeared. With his head completely empty, Perlmann stood on the same spot. For several minutes he noticed nothing of the bustle going on around him. Only when a running child bumped into his case did he really come to his senses. Over. Again and again he said the word, only inwardly at first, then under his voice. It had no effect. The relief he longed for didn’t materialize. He took a few sluggish steps and leaned against a column. Fifteen hours, then for Leskov days of despair would begin, of impotent fury with himself and his increasingly faint hope of a dispatch from Lufthansa. Perlmann involuntarily hunched his shoulders and folded his arms in front of his chest.

Nothing had changed in the waiting list for the afternoon flight from Frankfurt to Turin. There was still that one man in front of him. Perlmann walked over to the bar. But even before he was served his coffee, he left some money on the bar and went up to the viewing terrace. He set down his luggage as far as possible from the place where, long ago, he would have left the suitcase, had it not been for the girl in sneakers. The pilots were already sitting in the cockpit, and now two cleaning women with big garbage bags were leaving the plane. Do you know what I’m most afraid of? The cleaning crew.

Leskov was one of the first to leave the bus, which had driven out to the plane in a big loop. With his heavy gait he climbed the gangway and, at one point, he seemed to have trodden on a flap of his loden coat. Having reached the top, he looked as if he wanted to turn round, but was forced in by the others.

Perlmann wanted to go. He stayed where he was. Behind which window might Leskov be sitting? The plane rolled painfully slowly to the start of the runway, and time seemed to stretch to tearing point. After it had turned, the plane stood there as if it couldn’t be moved again, waiting in the pale morning light that seeped through a fine veil of clouds. Otherwise, nothing moved on the empty tarmac. Perlmann held his breath and felt his blood thumping. He felt as if this silence and inertia had been staged specifically for him, even though he couldn’t have said why, or what its message might have been. For several minutes the whole world seemed to him to have been frozen in an unintelligible act of waiting. Only the revving of the engine set time in motion once more. Without knowing why, and caught up in his blind tension, Perlmann concentrated on the precise moment when the tires lost contact with the runway. Then, when the plane flew out in a lazy loop over the sea, he saw in his mind’s eye the view that Leskov had now. That’s how I imagined the Riviera, exactly like that, he heard Leskov saying. Perlmann only bent for his luggage when the low cloud had swallowed up the last flash of the wings.

He checked in his case and collected his boarding card for the eleven o’clock flight to Frankfurt. He would – he thought in the bar – have to wait five long hours at Frankfurt Airport for the flight to Turin, not knowing whether he would be able to find a seat. If not, he could always drive to Ivrea. He could get there by ten o’clock tomorrow. Admittedly, that would mean he wouldn’t be at the university before Wednesday. But with the prospect of his new job in the bright office Perlmann was invulnerable to reproachful glances.

In the hall he sat down in a corner and unpacked his books. He picked up each individual one and examined it with puzzled thoroughness, as if it were a document from a very distant, very alien culture. He ran through the contents lists and, although he was familiar with all the topics, he was amazed at all the things that were in there. He opened a few pages at random and read. They were brand-new textbooks, hailed as revolutionary on the blurb, but he had the feeling of reading the same thing as always. The spine of the book snapped when he moved on to the next random sample. The shiny pages with the illustrations and tables smelled particularly intensely of fresh print.

At last he packed them all away again, leaving out only Leskov’s text. No, the engraved initials on the case couldn’t give him away. Suddenly, he was repelled by the dark sweat-stains on the handle. On the way to the restroom he carried the case in his arms like a shapeless package. He hid it behind the garbage bin under the washbasin and then walked quickly to security control, where the envelope containing Leskov’s text was suspiciously examined.

Sven Berghoff was sitting with his back to him when Perlmann stepped into the waiting room. Perlmann recognized Berghoff immediately by his unkempt red hair, the raised collar of his jacket and his long ivory cigarette holder, which protruded from the side of his mouth. Berghoff was the only one who had caused Perlmann any difficulties over his leave. It had been his revenge for the fact that Perlmann, whose lectures were always full to capacity, had recently burst in to one of Berghoff’s lectures in search of chalk and had found only six people listening. Berghoff had turned red, claimed there was no chalk there, when there was a great mountain of the stuff beside the sponge and, even though Perlmann, to keep from embarrassing him, had left without any chalk, Berghoff had cut him ever since.

The sight of Berghoff put Perlmann in a complete panic. All of a sudden there was no Leskov any more, and no text that had to get to the mail. There was only the dark corridor of the institute, the lecture halls and seminar rooms, the grouchy and unctuous remarks of colleagues. He turned round, swung over a barrier and ran – with Leskov’s text pressed firmly to his chest – out to a taxi in which he asked to be driven to the station. Perlmann only calmed down when the train set off for Ivrea.

57

It was cold when Perlmann stepped out on to the station forecourt. An icy wind drove sand from an abandoned building site into his eyes. Even though it was just before four, lots of cars were already driving with their lights on. There didn’t seem to be a taxi stand. Holding the hand with Leskov’s text under his coat, Perlmann walked towards the center.

In the hotel they asked him, perplexed, if he had any luggage. The room he had booked – more expensive than the price originally agreed – seemed shabby after the luxury of the Miramare. When he had showered, he put his clothes back on and went to the window. There was snow on the mountaintops of the Valle d’Aosta. The remaining light in the west was cold and forbidding.

There were lockers at reception, but they were too small for Leskov’s text. They would keep the envelope somewhere else. ‘Nothing’ll happen to it,’ the man behind the counter said with a smile when Perlmann turned round again at the door.

The way to Olivetti headquarters led down a long, straight road leading out of the town. The massive building was dark, and the black glass facade, broken at an obtuse angle, looked menacing. There was a single car in the parking lot. Perlmann walked a little way around the star-shaped complex and tried to make out something inside. Behind a side door, a uniformed watchman sat at a faintly lit desk. When he saw Perlmann, he got up and shone his inspection lamp outside. Perlmann turned round and went back to the hotel. On the way the toast that he had eaten on the train kept repeating on him.

As soon as he had lain down on the bed and covered himself with a blanket from the wardrobe, he fell into a dull sleep, haunted by the priest with the pointed, malevolent face who had sat opposite him on the journey and looked at him disapprovingly every time he smoked a cigarette.

It was half-past eleven when Perlmann woke up, his limbs stiff. It had been half-past eight when Leskov had spoken of the fifteen hours. So now, when it must have been half-past one in Russia, he was entering his apartment in St Petersburg. He would be dashing to the desk and rummaging among the chaos: nothing. He would be looking in every possible and impossible place, still in his loden coat. In the end he would give up, fall silent and stare into the distance. Gradually, Leskov would start hoping that the text would come by post, perhaps even tomorrow, but certainly on Tuesday. By Wednesday at the latest. He would go into the institute every morning at mail delivery time to receive the dispatch. And every morning he would experience the same disappointment.

Perlmann went down to reception and asked the grumpy night porter to fetch him the envelope with Leskov’s text. He put it beside his pillow when he crept into bed afterwards, and also laid his coat on the blankets.

Now Kirsten would be phoning Frankfurt to ask if he had got home all right. He was glad he didn’t have to talk to her. He thought about Giovanni sitting in front of the television. And about Signora Morelli. He didn’t even know what street she lived on. Once again he saw himself standing in the train compartment with Evelyn Mistral, and felt her hands on the back of his neck. She hadn’t said a single word about his notes. Perhaps that was the reason why his thoughts didn’t stay with her any longer than they did. Instead he now kept seeing Brian Millar, just before he got into the taxi, turning towards him once more and raising his hand. No one told me. We should have… Perlmann buried his head in the pillow.

The morning light here was quite different from the light by the sea, harsher and more featureless, without magic and promise. Perlmann showered for a long time and brushed his teeth with the wet corner of his towel. His stubble reminded him of the morning when he had fainted. Before he went to breakfast he checked that Leskov’s text was still in the envelope.

Afterwards, when he sat on the edge of his bed with the receiver in his hand, the number of Frau Hartwig’s office refused to come to him. A strange weakness, like that caused by a rising fever, kept him from remembering. In the end it was his motor memory when dialling that helped.

‘There’s an important meeting at four o’clock today,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘I just wanted to make sure I’d mentioned it.’

It was as if her irritability continued straight on from the end of their last conversation – an irritability that had not existed in the last seven years.

Perlmann held the receiver away from him and exhaled slowly and with great concentration. ‘As I said,’ he said calmly, ‘I’ll be in the office tomorrow morning. At about ten, I would say. And send out those notices as we discussed.’

He handed in Leskov’s text at reception again, for safe keeping. Yes, he had needed it during the night, he said in reply to their puzzled question. Outside the streets were beginning to fill with commuter traffic. In the future he, too, would go to work in the morning in a stream of others. Or stand in a crowded bus and read the paper. A sandwich in a bar at lunchtime, followed by coffee. In the bar he would see the same people every day, and those wonderfully light, floating acquaintanceships would come into being. Home in the evening to a simple, probably noisy apartment. It would be a while before he got used to the noise, the shouting of children through the thin walls. But on the other hand he would be free, and like everyone else he could lean out of the window in the evening or sit in front of the television. Books – he would allow himself some time for those. And then only Italian books, fiction. After a while he might risk translating a novel. If he wasn’t too tired in the evening. Because he would now – for the first time in his life – be a person who had evenings. A person with a proper job. Honest toil. A person with a present.

Perlmann stopped outside a shop selling toiletries and waited for it to open at nine. He imagined Kirsten stepping into his apartment, still inadequately furnished, after walking down a shabby corridor with damp walls. She was already slightly embarrassed, he thought, but also impressed, and eventually she would say she thought it was great to have a father who did something so unusual.

He bought the most basic toiletries. Then he went back to the hotel to shave and brush his teeth. The same underwear for a week. He took his tie out of his blazer pocket and put it on. His shirt collar was dirty, and the bloodstain on the lapel of his blazer was impossible to ignore.

The closer he got to the Olivetti building, the more his confidence faded. After an unfamiliar shave, the wind felt bitter on his cheeks, and that sensation passed into a feeling of general vulnerability. What did he actually want to say to Angelini? How was he to formulate his question? How to explain, so that the whole thing didn’t sound like romantic eccentricity, like a twenty year old’s fantasy of running away? And how could Perlmann avoid revealing a connection with his fainting fit? It would, he thought, have to sound light and undramatic, almost playful. But not capricious. In spite of everything, there would have to be a sense of mature serenity behind the lightness of his words.

The parking lot was almost full, and people were still streaming into the huge building. Perlmann counted seven floors. The windows of the main facade had a coppery sheen. Behind them, in big, neon-bright offices, nothing but men in suits. He imagined they had a wonderful view of the mountains. On sunny days those spaces would be flooded with light from dawn till dusk.

It was a quarter to ten. The door behind which the watchman had been sitting yesterday was the exit, through which the employees left the building. As they did so, they stuck a card in a machine. An electronic time clock. Perlmann gave a start. Maybe it was just some sort of security measure. On the other hand: anyone could stroll in unimpeded through the main entrance. He would find out. He, too, would get a card.

Already in the doorway, he glanced once more across the street. Not a bar to be seen. What he was stepping into now was a kind of ghetto in an open field. On the other hand, he was sure there would be a first-class caféteria. That had its advantages, too.

Angelini’s office was on the fourth floor of a side wing, and had an anteroom with two more doors leading off it. The secretary brushed the long blonde hair from her brow as she looked in the diary. There was no sign of his name, she said, and looked at him with cool regret from her freckly face. The appointment was more of a private one, said Perlmann, and tried not to be intimidated by her pointed nose and narrow mouth. She looked at his pale trousers, and her eye also lingered for a moment on the lapel of his blazer. Then, with a shrug, she pointed to a chair and returned to the screen.

Angelini appeared at about half-past ten. His temple still bore the impressions of the pillow. Unasked, the secretary handed him a cup of coffee, which he took into the office. The way he apologized for his lateness and pointed Perlmann to the armchair next to the desk, was so slick it bordered on caricature. He let a stack of letters slip through his fingers, flicked backwards and fished out an envelope that he slit open with a decorated letter opener. As he scanned the text with a frown, he took the occasional sip of coffee. ‘Just one second,’ he said and disappeared into the anteroom.

The only thing Perlmann liked about the room was the Miró and Matisse prints. But they, too, hung over the conventionally elegant furniture, as if that was just how things were supposed to be. The burgundy leather chair behind the black desk was too flashy and didn’t match it, but it was the only thing that emanated a little individuality. There was no point looking out of the window. It gave a view of a hill with trees and bushes, from which only a few brightly colored leaves still hung. It was only if you stood right off to the left that you could get a view of the mountains.

Angelini apologized again as he leaned back in the armchair and lit a cigarette. His face was relaxed now, and full of friendly curiosity. ‘What can I do for you?’

Perlmann looked at the crossed feet under the desk, dangling just above the floor, and below the ankle of Angelini’s right foot he saw a hole in his sock. All of a sudden he felt safe, and the impulse to laugh, which he struggled to suppress, gave his voice the requisite jauntiness.

‘I wanted to ask you if the company might have a job for me. As a translator, for example. Something like that.’

It was the last thing Angelini had expected. His feet stopped dangling. Without looking at Perlmann he picked up his coffee cup and drank it down in a series of slow sips. He took his time. Yet again he ran his cigarette along the inner rim of the ashtray. Then he looked up.

‘You mean…?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann, ‘I’m giving up my professorship.’

Angelini stubbed out his cigarette. His face now looked as if he didn’t know what expression to decide upon.

‘Can I ask why? Has it got something to do with…?’

‘No, not at all,’ Perlmann said quickly. ‘I’ve been planning it for ages. I’d just like to try something new. In a new country.’

Angelini took a cigarette and walked to the window. When he turned to Perlmann, his face was full of baffled admiration. It was the most personal expression that Perlmann had ever seen him wear.

‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m completely bowled over by this. A man of your academic status, your reputation…’ He walked to the door. ‘It will take a moment. I also want to ask them about the likelihood of a work permit.’

The secretary brought Perlmann coffee. Now, all of a sudden, everything was going far too quickly for him. He felt all a-flutter, as if before an exam. In conversation with Angelini he had not, to his knowledge, made any mistakes in Italian. But they would inevitably come. From one minute to the next, even though nothing had happened, he felt clumsier, slow and dim-witted. He wasn’t really talented, that was as true when it came to languages as it was with music. He had a good memory, and he was a hard worker. That was it. He was no Luc Sonntag.

Angelini was smiling contentedly as he came back. ‘In your case the probationary period would only last a month. Just a question of form. And the legal department sees no problems with your work permit. Where languages are concerned, you’re always at an advantage.’ His expression revealed that he was missing something in Perlmann’s face. ‘And you’re quite sure you want this? Forgive the question. It’s just… it’s simply so unusual.’

‘I know,’ said Perlmann.

Even now, Angelini had expected more of a reaction. But after a brief hesitation he made a special effort. ‘Could you start on the second of January? The company will make you an offer over the next few days. And we’ll try and help you with a apartment as well.’

Perlmann nodded repeatedly.

‘While you’re here,’ said Angelini, ‘I can show you your office.’

It was a cramped office with two desks opposite one another. The window faced backwards, towards the east. It looked down on a low building connected to the main block by a walkway. Beyond it, on the slope, an electricity cabin. In the months when the sun managed to peep over the hill, there might be two or three hours of morning sun.

The woman at the other desk had turned on the light. ‘This is Signora Medici,’ said Angelini. ‘Our chief translator. She comes from Tyrol and speaks five languages. Or how many is it?’

‘Six,’ the woman said, shaking Perlmann’s hand firmly.

The contrast between name and appearance was so great that he could barely keep from laughing. She was a plump matron in knee socks and sandals, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses sat on her nose, with lenses as thick as magnifying glasses.

‘Don’t worry, we can speak German,’ she said as Perlmann made one mistake after another.

After that remark he felt dazed, and later he remembered only that he had stared at the wall with all the holiday postcards, which looked exactly like the wall in Frau Hartwig’s office.

Yes, he said later in Angelini’s office, his work with the group had been a great success. He would contact him shortly about publication.

‘You know,’ Angelini said as they parted, ‘I still can’t imagine why you would want to give all that up. Well, anyway, you can think about it for a while now that you know more about it. And tell Carla out there what your expenses are. She’ll write you a check. This was a job interview, in a way!’

The secretary was on the phone. Perlmann nodded to her and went outside. On the way to the hotel he accidentally bumped into two people. The man at reception who brought him the envelope containing Leskov’s text, pointed to the address.

‘St Petersburg. Will something like that really arrive? I mean, does the mail to Russia actually work? With all the chaos over there?’

While Perlmann was dozing in the train to Turin, that question pursued him like a stubborn echo. For the whole journey he held the envelope so tightly that there were sweat stains on it afterwards. He kept hearing Signora Medici’s Tyrolean accent, when she had suddenly spoken German.

At the airport check-in desk he pretended not to speak a word of Italian. He bought two German newspapers, even though he was more interested in the Italian headlines. German, that was the language he knew. The only one. To imagine anything else was conceited nonsense.

When the plane rose, he saw the grounds of the Fiat works. The people from Fiat. Santini. He closed his eyes. When flying, he had often noticed, thoughts formed that you forgot later when you stepped inside the airport, as if they had never happened, so that it remained unclear for ever whether they had really been thoughts at all. Finding a perspective outside oneself, to live from there in greater freedom within oneself. It could be a goal, he thought, an ideal. But perhaps it was also a chimera, the expression of his fatigue. He picked up both newspapers and read them from the first page to the last. He immediately forgot every article that he had read. So he didn’t need to think, either about what had been or what was yet to come.

Only once he interrupted his reading and looked down at the snowy mountains. The perspective of eternity. If one did everything from that perspective, wouldn’t that mean losing the present completely – so completely that one wouldn’t even miss it? Was it not, to put it this way, a precondition for the experience of the present that the plane would eventually sink below the clouds and touch the ground?

58

The rain was pelting down in Frankfurt, and the wind whipped the water so violently against the aeroplane that Perlmann involuntarily flinched behind the window. All the while, Leskov’s text had been in the net on the back of the seat. It was in such a net, Leskov would think, that he had forgotten the text. As he was going, Perlmann clamped the envelope under his left arm and also held it tightly with his right hand.

His calculation was correct. As the counter where he had to ask for his suitcase, there was a stack of Lufthansa stickers. As the man at the desk fetched his case, Perlmann slipped three of them into his pocket. He sat down near the post office counter, opened the envelope and stuck one of the labels on the plastic jacket. He stuck the other two on the envelope, one on the top left, the other on the bottom right. He held the envelope at arm’s length: it looked good, business-like. The home address. An address that no one here could know but me. Perlmann felt the whole mechanism of his tormented reflections beginning to set itself in motion. For a moment he pressed his fingers against his brow, got up and walked to the counter.

As the post office clerk was sticking the stamps and the label for express delivery on the envelope, Perlmann asked him how long, in his view, it would take to arrive. The clerk shrugged.

‘Three days, a week. No idea.’

Why should it take a week? Perlmann asked irritably. The man threw the envelope into a basket, counted the money and then looked at Perlmann in silence for a second or two.

‘As I said: no idea.’

So why are you worrying me, then? Perlmann yelled at him inwardly. Out loud he said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s… so much depends upon it. Do you perhaps know… I mean, can you estimate how great the danger is of the package going missing?’

The expression that now appeared on the clerk’s face reminded Perlmann of the pizza chef in Santa Margherita whom he had asked about rain near the tunnel.

‘Nothing gets lost here. As to the Russian post – no idea.’

Slowly, as if he needed to free himself of another internal obstacle, Perlmann walked towards the exit. He avoided looking over at the book display where, almost three weeks before, Nikolai Leskov’s book had leapt out at him. Just as he stepped through the light barrier and the sliding door slid sideways, it occurred to him. A copy. For safety’s sake I’ve got to copy the text. He practically ran to the post office counter and, at one point, his case, which was on wheels, tipped over. Now there was a line. Perlmann stood on tiptoes: his envelope was covered up by others, but the basket with the blue label was still there.

‘As if we didn’t have anything else to do,’ murmured the clerk as he sought out the envelope a little while later.

Was there a photocopier anywhere in this building? It was already dark outside when Perlmann was finally allowed into the back room of a newsagent’s in a completely different part of the building. The half-closed zip of the plastic jacket could only be opened fully by a violent tug. Now six of the teeth weren’t working, and there was no point even thinking about pulling it closed again. After sixty-five pages the machine ran out of paper, and Perlmann had to wait a quarter of an hour until the staff could take the time to come and fill it up. Two copied pages fell on the dusty floor. When he cleaned them with his handkerchief he had a feeling that he would never, ever be done with Leskov’s text, and he started breathing with difficulty. The metal of the staples on the envelope had become far too soft from all that bending, he thought. He hoped they wouldn’t break on the journey.

As he left, he handed the flustered staff a fifty mark note and then walked the long way back to the post office. He asked the clerk, who stared silently into the distance after recognizing him, whether it was a good idea to register the package, or whether that might slow everything down.

‘What now?’ was the only reaction he got.

And then he won’t be at home, and they’ll take the envelope away again. ‘Don’t register it,’ he said.

The taxi progressed slowly through the city traffic. Perlmann had closed his eyes, and was trying to use his exhaustion to keep all thoughts at bay. The rolled-up copy in his hand was getting sticky. There’s no point in it whatsoever. I could never give it to him without exposing myself. He gave up, and at that moment he had the feeling that he had just relinquished absolutely everything he had, and that it was a more complete surrender than he had ever experienced before. As the wall of rain lashed the taxi, he saw the black lines of the felt-tip pen running and the address on the envelope blurring to illegibility. When the taxi had driven off and he was looking for his front-door key, drips fell, unnoticed by him, on to Leskov’s text.