Perlmann's Silence (55 page)

He was sure that 79 was the highest page number he had read. It was the first thing he had paid attention to, and the page lay separately beside the pile. He picked it up and laboriously translated the last line that Leskov had squashed in tiny letters between two crossed-out lines:
But that would be a false conclusion. Instead one must . . .

It wasn’t inconceivable that the text finished on the next page, which meant that there were only ten pages missing. Naming the correct conclusion could be the rhetorical culmination and climax of the work as a whole, and that could easily be done on a single page. But of course, it was equally possible that Leskov had taken a breath here, and introduced a new thought that it would take five or ten or even more pages to develop.

A great many tires had driven over the bottom-most papers. It hadn’t rained on Monday. Even so, the dirt from tires and the road had acted as glue, with the result that a whole pack of pages had been stuck to a tire all at the same time. Not twenty – some of the ones at the bottom would have come away, and he would have had to find those now. Ten? Five? Three? Perlmann turned and drove to Genoa, slowly and with both hands firmly clutching the wheel.

44

In the first big department store he went into the stationery department and demanded 320 sheets of blotting paper. The salesgirl incredulously repeated the number before she went to the store room. Perlmann put the four packs in the car and then walked helplessly, hesitantly, along the street. He imagined a bright library, empty and silent, with long tables on which he could peacefully clean each individual sheet of Leskov’s text and lay it between two sheets of blotting paper. He aimlessly crossed the road and turned down a quieter side street. From the end of it came the break-time cries from a school. Ten o’clock. He stopped for a moment and rocked on his heels. Then he walked on, avoided the scuffling children in the playground and stepped inside the schoolhouse.

A woman came towards him in the corridor, dressed in white like a doctor. Did she by any chance have a classroom for him? Perlmann asked. Or another room with long tables. Just for about half an hour. He had to dry some important papers. ‘I . . . I know it’s an unusual request,’ he added when he saw her lower lip beginning to jut.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, as if to dispel a hallucination. Then she studied him from top to bottom, from his bleary-eyed face to his shoes, which were completely covered with mud.

‘What do you think this place is?’ she asked coldly. ‘A Salvation Army hostel?’ With that she left him standing there and closed an office door behind her.

In the next alley but one he passed a little carpenter’s workshop. In the middle of the room there were two long, empty tables. A man in an armchair was reading the newspaper. Perlmann braced himself for a fresh rebuff and went down the two steps. Could he use the two tables for a few minutes to . . . arrange some important papers? He would also pay to . . . rent the tables, so to speak, he added, when the man’s face darkened.

‘
Chiuso
,’ the man said gruffly and held his newspaper up in front of his face.

The lunatic with the important, wet papers.
The madman of Genoa with the thousand sheets of blotting paper.
Perlmann went and stood in the hallway of a building and waited until the rain shower had passed.

He could send Leskov the text anonymously in St Petersburg. Frau Hartwig had the address in the office. But how would the unknown sender know the address, when the last page was missing? That didn’t work. He would bring suspicion on himself. He could neither give him nor send him the text. So what was he doing here with hundreds of sheets of blotting paper?
The madman with the blotting paper.

In a side street not far from the car he came upon a bar with wide shelves along the walls. After ordering a coffee and a sandwich, he asked if they would mind if he spread some papers out on the shelf for a moment.

‘As long as you don’t drive my customers away,’ was the reply.

‘
Mamma mia
,’ said the proprietor when he saw Perlmann coming back with the stack of papers, hanging down at the sides, and two packs of blotting paper.

Perlmann started very carefully separating each sheet from the pile and laying it between two sheets of blotting paper. Now he would need one more sheet of paper to note something down, he said to the proprietor.

‘Anything else?’ the landlord replied wryly, and handed him an order pad exactly like the one in the harbor bar on Friday. ‘Would sir like a pen with that?’

Perlmann grinned and took his own pen from his jacket. He noted down the page numbers and made corresponding piles. The blotting paper turned blue and brown. The proprietor came out from behind the bar and glanced curiously at the yellow papers.

‘What language is that?’

‘Russian,’ said Perlmann.

‘So you can speak Russian?’

‘No,’ Perlmann replied.

‘Now I don’t understand anything any more,’ said the proprietor. ‘And all the dirt on the pages!
Mamma mia!
’

The madman with the dirty Russian text that he can’t read.

Among the page numbers in the thirties there was a gap of three pages, and towards the end two pages in a row were missing. Otherwise, there were gaps of only one page. On page 3 came the first subheading:
1. Vspomishchesya stseny
:
Remembered scenes.
Subheadings 2 and 3 must be on the missing sheets. And probably towards the end there was also a section called
Appropriation
or something like it.

It could have been much worse, thought Perlmann as he laid the packed pages on top of one another. As long as a lengthy and crucial piece wasn’t missing at the end, Leskov would manage.

‘
Mamma mia!
’ cried the proprietor, throwing his hands in the air with ironic staginess, when Perlmann now asked him for a piece of twine. He watched him carefully tying the whole thing up. ‘So what are you going to do with it now?’

‘No idea,’ said Perlmann and ate his bread.

‘
Buona fortuna!
’ the proprietor called after him, and it sounded as if he was releasing some hopelessly confused and extremely vulnerable person into the harsh world outside.

Perlmann put the bound package in the trunk along with the rest of the blotting paper. Then he drove to the airport. The man with the red cap stood next to his cabin and smoked. Perlmann didn’t know why, but this man – the sight of whom made him feel suddenly hot – reminded him that there was something else he had wanted to do, a secret thing. He turned and drove a little way back until he was behind a hedge. Exhaustion blocked his memory. Only when he glanced at the bandage on his finger did it come back to him. He took the screwdriver and the wrench out of the trunk. Then he looked quickly around and inserted the screwdriver at the exact spot where the two coins touched. With the third powerful blow, the black box creaked, and the coins fell on to the rest of the money. The belt scraped a little, but otherwise it ran impeccably. As he closed the door he noticed the paint that had come off the bottom corner. That hadn’t been from the crash barriers in the tunnel. It must have happened when Leskov had heaved himself out of the car at the gas station, and the door had bumped against the concrete plinth with the air-pressure metre.
When he nearly caught me.

Perlmann took the suitcase off the back seat, locked the car and glanced again at the driver’s seat. The bloodstains on the pale leather looked almost black.

‘We’ve been waiting for this car for almost two days, Signore,’ said the lady from Avis. She recognized him now, and her tone turned frosty. ‘Why didn’t you contact us? We have our job to do, too.’

Perlmann hadn’t given his rental period a thought until that moment. He was startled to notice that he was grateful for the reproach. Being reminded of a contract meant being fetched back into the normal world, into normal life, in which things resumed their regular course. It was as if he were being granted permission to leave the private time of his nightmare with its frantic lack of present, and return to public time, which flowed at its normal pace.

‘I couldn’t do anything about it,’ he said and attempted a smile. ‘I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t do anything about it.’

‘Any accidents?’ the woman asked in an unforgiving tone and straightened her fashionable glasses.

Perlmann took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was forced off the road and drove into a crash barrier. The right side of the car is damaged.’

‘Were the police called?’

‘No,’ he said, and quickly cut off her next question, ‘the other car had disappeared even before I stopped.’

‘You should have called the police anyway,’ she said curtly and took a form out of the drawer. ‘Where was that?’

He gave the correct details and signed.

‘Half a million excess,’ she said, glancing at the insurance details. ‘It will come off your card, along with the rest.’

Perlmann picked up the suitcase and went up to the bar. There was a different waiter there today, and otherwise only a girl in sneakers eating an ice-cream sundae and glancing often at her watch. Only gradually did he realize how relieved he was to be rid of the car. The sky had darkened, and the airport hall was bathed in a gloomy November light. He liked the sobriety that lay in that light. He grew calmer and, as he took slow, long drags on his cigarette, he kept thinking:
It’s over. Over.
On Saturday they would all be leaving: Leskov on Sunday morning. In four days’ time, at this hour of day, he himself would be on his flight home, and in the evening he would be in his familiar apartment. Exhaustion made way for quiet confidence. He paid and, hands in his trouser pockets, strolled over to the stairs that led up to the viewing area. He wanted to see the runway by the water and imagine his plane flying in a great loop out over the sea as it rose to ever higher altitudes.

‘Your case, Signore.’ The girl in the sneakers had come running. Perlmann took the suitcase from her, and struggled to hide his feelings.

‘Oh, yes, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you.’

The girl returned to her ice cream. He was filled with helpless fury, and stopped on the stairs with a blank expression on his face. A few moments ago, with his hands in his pockets, he had felt strangely light and free, unreally free, in fact. But he hadn’t tried to know why that should be; with no plan in mind, he had simply, thoughtlessly pursued the impulse of leaving everything that had happened over the last few days, everything that was part of it, behind him along with the car. It had been like the first unimpeded breath of air after a near-suffocation. And now the suitcase holding Leskov’s text, a ludicrous amount of blotting paper, the black notebook and the ridiculous props from the town hall hung leaden from his arm. He felt as if the whole nightmare of the past few days were contained in compact form in that suitcase, engraved with his initials.

He stepped on to the terrace and leaned against the balustrade. A Lufthansa plane was heading for take-off. He looked at his watch.
My plane.
As it roared into the air, just at the moment when the back tires lost contact with the runway he had the feeling that he could bear it no longer. That must be the end of notes and texts and translations and copies and lies and false leads and secrecy. It had to stop now. It had to stop. Right now.
Now.

His foot brushed the suitcase. As if in a trance he stuck both hands in his jacket pockets, lowered his head and strode to the door, trousers flapping. He almost collided with the girl in sneakers.
‘Mio padre!
’ Then she slipped past him through the door and started running to the parapet. Perlmann gave up. Slowly he followed her. When she turned round and, with a laugh, pointed to the case, he raised a hand in thanks. The Lufthansa plane disappeared into the low cloud.

Leskov’s address, which the anonymous sender couldn’t possibly know, wasn’t the only problem, Perlmann thought on the train. There were, for Leskov, only three places where he could have left the text: Moscow, Frankfurt or the plane. And there was simply no way to explain how the sheets might have ended up in that condition in an airport building or an aeroplane. And how so many of them should have vanished without trace.

If you added these two points together, Leskov was left with only a single hypothesis: someone who knew his address independently of the text had done something strange with the pages under the open sky, and was now sending them to him out of a guilty conscience. And on that day there was only one person who had been outside with him, and who could have had access to his suitcase: Philipp Perlmann, who had known his address for a long time. When Leskov ran through the drive in his mind, he would quickly see that there were, in fact, two places where it could have happened: the gas station and the roadside stop shortly afterwards. The shortness of the time in both cases could mean only one thing: Perlmann hadn’t done anything unknown or inexplicable with the text – he had simply thrown it away.