Perlmann's Silence (58 page)

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.