Perlmann's Silence (33 page)

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.