Perlmann's Silence (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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