Perlmann's Silence (47 page)

‘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.