Perlmann's Silence (43 page)

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.

‘Per
l
mann,’ 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?