Perlmann's Silence (62 page)

With sudden haste he began to translate the page of the chronicle that he had opened at random. In the office, it would have to be done quickly. It was a business operation. There was money at stake. Would his Italian be good enough? In the text in front of him there were several words that he didn’t know. And what about business Italian? He saw himself sitting in an attic room until the small hours, filling the gaps in his vocabulary. At this new image, his high spirits faded to make way for the feeling of trepidation that you feel when relapsing into an experience you thought was firmly in the past. But only later, in the street, did he become aware that the image of the attic room had been modelled on his time as a schoolboy and a student, informed by nothing but the feeling that the present still lay far in the future.

When the proprietors heard that this was his last visit, they refused to take any money for the food. Their extravagant gestures and assurances contrasted starkly with his tense haste to leave. Sandra’s thoughts were plainly still on her muffed dictation. Nonetheless, Perlmann was upset that she only briefly shook his hand and then disappeared again. For a moment he saw her lying on the bed with her knee socks pulled down. His original impulse to give her the chronicle had suddenly been blown away. He took the heavy book under his arm. With his free hand he parted the curtain one last time. He let the cool, smooth glass beads slide slowly over the back of his hand. He felt something break as he did so, something precious and intangible.

Perlmann laid the chronicle on the step in front of the stationery shop to which the proprietor had directed him. He formed a funnel with his hands and stared tensely inside the shop, which was still dark.
But it’s nonsense
, he thought,
of course you can’t tell what selection of envelopes they have just by looking
. Next to the shop there was another, with tablecloths, napkins and that sort of thing in the window. As Perlmann waited for the siesta to come to an end, he looked absently at the display. The third or fourth time he did so, the solution leapt out at him. In the corner, right at the back, packed in a plastic jacket with a zip, was a set of handkerchiefs. Involuntarily, his attention had leapt from the content to the packaging, and now, in his mind, he was excitedly comparing the size of the jacket with the format of Leskov’s text. The yellow pages, he estimated, would slip back and forth a little in transit. But otherwise, this actually was the solution: if the whole thing was also put in a padded envelope, the snow and rain could do nothing to the text.

Unless the water forces its way through the zip
. Perlmann was glad when the shopkeeper appeared, and proved to be so chatty that she kept this troubling thought from taking root. Perlmann bought the handkerchiefs and, next door, the biggest padded envelope into which the plastic jacket would fit. To write the address later on, he chose the most expensive felt-tip pen in the shop. Then, having reached the street corner, he turned round again to ask for a plastic bag. There were thousands of envelopes like his. But he didn’t want anyone to see this one when he entered the hotel.

51

Adrian von Levetzov waved so energetically that Perlmann couldn’t
help crossing the hotel terrace to the table where the others were all sitting.

‘We’re betting on when the first drop will fall,’ von Levetzov said, pointing at the threateningly dark wall of cloud that was piling up
in the mountains and loomed far over the bay. ‘The nearest one gets 10,000 lire from each of us.’ He straightened a chair for Perlmann. ‘Join in!’

Perlmann hesitantly set the chronicle down on the table. There was no room for it anywhere else. He rested the plastic bag against the leg of the chair. He was glad that Leskov was sitting far away. As he waited for his heartbeat to settle, he looked with great concentration at the sky, as if he were carefully considering his contribution to the bet.

‘It isn’t going to rain,’ he said at last, to his own great surprise. He felt as if he had just defied the whole world with that sentence.

Millar tilted his head, and his face twisted into a wide grin. ‘I like that, Phil,’ he said, and his voice expressed regret that he hadn’t thought of this ploy himself.

‘May I?’ asked von Levetzov and picked up the chronicle. He opened a few pages at random and then flicked on until he found some pictures. ‘Aha,’ he said suddenly, straightened the book and held it further away from himself with an appreciative expression. Then he turned the book round and let the others look at the picture. It showed Christine Keeler, the prostitute who had brought about the fall of the British war minister John Profumo in 1963. She was straddling a chair and completely naked. Ruge’s and Leskov’s laughter sounded unself-conscious, while there was something embarrassed about Millar’s grin.

‘The style’s a bit like something out of the
Sun
,’ said Laura Sand, as Levetzov went on flicking through the book. Perlmann felt as if they had just caught him with a copy of
Bild-Zeitung
or a men’s magazine.
Now, on top of everything else, the man who has failed in academia is buying tabloid books.

‘There’s better to come!’ cried von Levetzov, and turned the book round again. A quarter of the big page was taken up by a photograph showing Cicciolina, the Italian porn star, who had been elected to parliament. She was naked and was lolling in a provocative pose. Millar blushed and straightened his glasses. The two other men only looked for a second. Evelyn Mistral, straight-faced, pouted and brushed the hair from her brow.

‘The photographer is only moderately talented,’ Laura Sand said dryly. Grateful for the remark, the others exploded in laughter that was slightly too loud and too long.

In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw Cicciolina entering the polling station in her fur coat and dropping her envelope coquettishly into the ballot box.
Don’t turn it off!
Agnes had said when he reached for the remote control.
I think she’s great. Simply fantastic.
Her face wore an expression he had never seen before.
You’re mouth is hanging open, isn’t it?
she had laughed.

‘At the last elections she founded the Love Party,
Il Partito d’Amore
,’ said Perlmann and knew immediately that he couldn’t have said anything clumsier at that moment. The others looked at him with surprise.
He knows that kind of thing
.

‘I wouldn’t have had you down as an expert in such things,’ said Laura Sand, raising another laugh.

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment.
Agnes’s photographs are better than hers. A lot better.
He picked up the plastic bag and got to his feet. The laughter died under the loud scrape of his chair. The faces that he saw out of the corner of his eye were puzzled. After a few steps he turned round again and nodded to the sky. ‘Still not a drop.’ He attempted a smile. No one returned it. He walked quickly to the entrance and up to his room.

There he immediately walked to the window and looked down on the terrace. Evelyn Mistral had the open chronicle in front of her, and was reading from it with the vague and searching gestures of someone delivering an impromptu translation. The others were doubled up with laughter.

They were laughing at the book with which he had embarked on the search for his present. The book that had seduced him and kept him from his work. But also the book that had kept his head above water. A mass-market, noisy, superficial book entirely alien to his nature. And also a book that had repelled and bored him before, in the trattoria. And yet a book that he was very fond of. An intimate book. His quite personal book. And they were laughing at it.

He went into the shower.

It hadn’t rained, and the others were still sitting outside when he went down to say goodbye to Maria. She was busy tidying the office.

‘Can I help you at all?’ she asked.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. Then he took the Bach CD out of his jacket pocket and gave it to her. ‘You can have this. You helped me find it.’

‘
Mille grazie
,’ she stammered, ‘but don’t you need it any more?’

He just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words he had composed in his head. She looked at him quizzically, and when the pause lasted too long she picked up her cigarettes.

‘Somehow I’m going to miss your group,’ she said, and as always she exhaled the smoke as she spoke.

Now he knew what he was afraid of: that his rage with the others might make him turn this farewell into something unnecessarily emotional and sentimental.
It wouldn’t be the first time
. He gulped and looked at the floor.

‘By the way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I have relatives in Mestre. Of course, you can’t call it a beautiful town. But ugly – no, it isn’t ugly at all. A bit cramped, perhaps. But it’s also a nice place.’

‘Yes, that was my experience,’ said Perlmann, grateful for the subject. ‘I particularly liked Piazza Ferretto. And the little galleria next to it.’

‘So you’ve really been there?’

‘For two days.’

‘Professionally?’

Perlmann just shook his head and looked at her. Her eyes glittered strangely, and her mouth twitched.

‘Not because of that one sentence?’

Perlmann nodded, and now he managed a smile.

‘You mean you travelled specially from Germany to Mestre just because of that one sentence?’

He nodded.

She tilted her head slightly and took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘Of course, if I can put it like this, that’s a bit . . . mad. But knowing your text . . . OK, it isn’t all that surprising. Your fury with that sentence leapt off the page. I couldn’t help laughing when I was typing out that section. So was that sentence eventually . . . defeated?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann. ‘But there are lots of others.’

Laughing, she stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Your texts are stored safely away,’ she added and tapped the computer. ‘Maybe I’ll read them again in peace.’ Then she shook his hand. ‘
Buona fortuna!
’

‘You too,’ said Perlmann, ‘and thanks for everything.’

A few minutes later, from his room, he saw her standing with the others. Leskov hugged her when he said goodbye. Shortly before Perlmann lost sight of her, he saw her running her hand through her shining hair. Passé. So passé.

Leskov’s text fitted even more exactly into the plastic jacket than Perlmann had expected. The pages had only a small amount of clearance from the edge. Perlmann took his ruler and measured: 1.6 cm wide and 1.9 cm high. But the zip was hard to open. It was a cheap one, and two of the teeth seemed already to be a bit loose. At any rate, it couldn’t be opened and shut too often. Why hadn’t he done the water test straight away? Annoyed with himself, Perlmann took the pages back out. As he pulled, he almost had to use force, and was startled when the tab suddenly glided swiftly over the loose teeth before jamming again, and could only be moved to the end stop with great difficulty. Perlmann carefully dipped the top edge of the jacket in the full washbasin. Bubbles formed on the outside of the zip. They were tiny and, in fact, barely visible. But still: the zip wasn’t airtight. Perlmann left it in the water for a good minute before carefully drying it off. As he opened it, one of the loose teeth seemed to have been further damaged, and right at the end one of them was remarkably crooked. Just pull it shut once – the zip wouldn’t take more than that. Perlmann ran his finger along the inside of the zip. Was what he felt only the cool of the metal, or was there moisture in there as well? He looked at his finger and rubbed at it to check: dry. But what if the envelope were left in the rain for hours? The zip wasn’t completely airtight, that much was clear.

Perlmann held his face in the water. After that he felt better. He checked in the suitcase to see if he had forgotten a page. Then he counted the sheets and flattened the particularly worn sheets smooth again. At last he pushed the pile carefully into the jacket and tormented himself with the zip one last time. Leskov would be amazed at the effort Lufthansa had taken with this jacket. He would have to get hold of a Lufthansa sticker for the jacket as well as for the envelope. Then it would look more like a routine package.

Now he laid out the envelope and took out the piece of paper with Leskov’s home address.
I’ve just got to risk it
. Leskov would doubt his memory anyway. If he had indeed put his work address at the end of the text, in his general uncertainty he would mistake his correct memory for another error. Perlmann set the specially purchased felt-tip pen down on the envelope and, horrified, immediately drew it back, as if he had almost set something on fire by accident. He hadn’t practiced disguising his handwriting. It took several pages before he had finally decided on a backwards-sloping, stiff script, which, of all the variants he had tried, seemed the furthest removed from his own. He practically painted the letters on the envelope, so that they ended up looking like a grotesque form of calligraphy. His hand had shaken when writing two of the letters. But the address was clear. The envelope would get there.

Exhausted, he pushed the jacket with the text into the envelope and applied the staples. Then he tore the test pages into little scraps. When he threw them in the waste-paper basket, he felt like a forger clearing his workshop.

It was still dry on the terrace. The only people sitting there now were Leskov and Laura Sand, who had clearly fetched her warm jacket in the meantime. Leskov seemed to be smoking one of her cigarettes. The chronicle lay open on the table.
Before he suspects me, Leskov will doubt his memory.

Perlmann looked at the address. There was something about it that bothered him. That was it: the Latin letters. For the German postal service that was essential, of course. But what about Russian postmen? Could they read it? He turned over the envelope. He could repeat the address in Cyrillic letters on the back. Yes, that was the solution. He took the lid off the felt-tip pen. No disguise was necessary for the Cyrillic letters. But was it really a good idea? They might mistake the address in Russian letters for the sender, since no sender was specified.

Perlmann put the lid back on and stepped to the window. Now Leskov was alone on the terrace, and the chronicle was no longer on the table.
But in that case it would get to him anyway
. He gave a start: it had taken the duration of a whole cigarette to work that out.

Uncertainly, he sat down and picked up the felt-tip pen. How likely was it that a Lufthansa employee dealing with lost objects would be able to write an address in Russian? Again he felt as if his thoughts were having to fight their way through an invisible medium of insidious tenacity. Of course: if someone could read the address on the text and identify it as such, then he was also capable of writing it or, at least, copying it out stroke for stroke. Perlmann began to write.