He went on reading now, breathlessly and always fearing that the first two paragraphs might have been an exception, and he was about to capsize and would have to go back to texts that treated him like a schoolboy again. But although his little Langenscheidt dictionary failed him now and again, he managed, and he was so enthralled that he heard the noises in the next room only after some delay. It sounded as if someone were pushing something heavy against the door; then there came the sound of men’s voices, the rattle of keys, the door snapping shut, footsteps fading away.
Only now did it become clear to Perlmann that he had assumed – had, in fact, taken it as his due – that there should be no one staying in the room next to him. As if the whole world had to know and respect the fact that he was a person who needed a lot of empty space around him. The new guest cleared his throat, then sniffed loudly, and at last he blew his nose with three long trumpet blasts. Perlmann gave a start: the walls were so thin, the building so badly soundproofed. He tried to find his way back to his cheerful excitement of a few moments before, but it had been displaced by a feeling of oppression, almost panic, and when he spent a while looking in vain for an expression in the dictionary, he discovered that the cause had been a simple reading error. His irritation grew from one minute to the next, and when something fell over with a loud crash in the next room, he lost control, stormed out and thundered with his fist on the door of the neighboring room.
The man who opened it was Achim Ruge. Perlmann felt the blood rising to his face.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he stammered and offered him his hand.
Ruge pointed at the open hard-shell suitcase, which had fallen so that the clothes now lay scattered on the floor and the alarm clock was wedged between a pair of shoes.
‘And I took such trouble packing,’ he grinned, ‘much more than usual. And it’s a new suitcase, too.’
He was wearing a brownish suit which was too short in the sleeves, and looked like a farmer’s Sunday suit, and an open white shirt that looked like something left over from the Sixties. But what chiefly captivated the eye was his big round head, which was almost completely bald. A bullet would bounce off his skull, Perlmann thought every time he saw him. The fact that there was something grotesque about Ruge’s head, something of a living death’s head, was down to his glasses, glasses with a yellowish frame of gloomy transparency that was as unmodern, as inelegant as if someone had done everything within their power to create the epitome of an anti-fashion frame. The impression was reinforced by the fact that one earpiece had been repaired with fine wire, the end of which stuck out and threatened to tear open Ruge’s temple at any moment.
The organization of the laboratory had gone faster than expected after all, he reported in his broad Swabian accent. Perlmann had forgotten how close his ä was to his e. Ruge had travelled through the night and hardly slept, because in the full second-class compartment lying down had been unimaginable.
‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he grinned when Perlmann asked him why he hadn’t flown or at least travelled first class.
As Ruge walked over to his suitcase to fetch an offprint that he had brought specially for him, Perlmann saw that the room was arranged as a mirror image of his own. This meant that the two desks stood exactly opposite one another, as in a piece with two pianos, except that there was a wall in between. That idea momentarily unsettled Perlmann. With dry words of thanks he took delivery of the thick offprint, which was actually a small book, and disappeared to his room where, without thinking anything about it, he chained the door.
It was now half-past five, and the dusk was sinking surprisingly quickly, almost headlong, on to the bay. The coast by Sestri Levante had become a flickering strip of light, and now the hotel lamps were coming on, each one four white spheres in an irregular arrangement. At midday Perlmann had cursed the southern light because it promised him a present that could never be reached. Now that it made way for darkness and was overlaid with the glow of artificial light, he could hardly expect to see it again. As clumsy as someone constantly running behind himself, only now did he miss its hypnotic power, which made one forget and which took away the past along with its heaviness, just as the need to plan anything burned away to nothing. With the dusk, the muted colors and the magic of the lamplight, his inner space filled once more with all the images that he feared one minute before feeling nothing but weariness the next, and a longing for the strength that could wipe out everything.
The figure that crept backwards out of the taxi, doing battle with two enormous camera bags, which became caught on the seat and then in the door, could only be Laura Sand. She asked the driver who set her suitcase down on the steps to hold her cigarette while she looked for money in the pocket of her long black coat. Then she heaved the case up one step at a time and, with her other arm, caught the camera bags when they threatened to hit the banisters.
Perlmann rushed out and realized too late that he had left his key in the room. Feeling a sharp pain in his leg, he went over on his ankle and came hobbling, face distorted with pain, into the lobby where Laura Sand was stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray on the reception desk.
He had forgotten the extent to which she could fill a whole room with her white face, her mockingly pouting lips and the shadow of rage in her almost black eyes. He had remembered above all the dense ponytail of deep black hair which fell unevenly to her shoulders on either side of a muddled parting. Even now, as she held out her slender hand with a smile, there was a sceptical sharpness in her eye, further emphasized by the fact that she always held her head tilted slightly to the side. For a moment he compared her face with that of Signora Morelli, who was just taking charge of her Australian passport: the Italian face now looked merely like a pleasant but pale background.
Laura Sand laid her black leather suitcase, which was scattered with faded, battered and torn stickers of foreign cities and rare animals, flat on the floor, opened the zip and dragged from a tangle of underwear, books and rolls of films, an olive-green travelling typewriter. She’d been writing on it for almost twenty years, she said, not least in the Steppes and the jungle. Twice the machine had been taken apart completely and reassembled. Only yesterday her daughter had swept it from the table during one of her fits of aerobics, and now the carriage didn’t work properly. It urgently needed to be repaired.
‘I can’t think without that damned thing,’ she said in a broad Australian accent, and with a strange fury that looked almost comical because it wasn’t aimed at anyone and seemed to be her second nature.
‘No problem,’ said Giovanni, when Signora Morelli had translated. He had just arrived to join the nightshift, and had put even more pomade in his hair than the previous evening, when he had got badly on Perlmann’s nerves with his slow-wittedness commentaries. He knew someone who could fix it in the blink of an eye, Giovanni said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Laura Sand’s face, and instead of ringing for the porter, still wearing his coat he picked up her suitcase and walked ahead of her to the elevator.