Could one go on living with such ostracism? Really live and inwardly develop, so that you weren’t merely crouching and creeping, enduring and surviving, vegetating? You would have to find a possible way of making yourself independent of the judgment of others and of the need for recognition. A way of becoming free, truly free. All of a sudden Perlmann felt calmer. The surge of panic and despair subsided, and he seemed to be standing very close to a crucial, redeeming insight, the most important of his whole life. Why, then, should it not be possible to withdraw entirely from his professional role, his public identity, into his private, authentic person, the identity that was the only thing that counted?
Basically, it had been simply the pleasure of translating – his old love of jumping back and forth between linguistic worlds, his dream of being an interpreter – that had brought him back repeatedly to Leskov’s text. That was how he was. There was nothing wrong with it. He could stand by it. No intention to deceive had been involved, either consciously or as a hidden undercurrent. He was absolutely sure of that. It was just how things were. He didn’t need to persuade himself. And the rest – the rest had been self-defense. He had held Leskov’s text up in front of him as a shield protecting him against the intrusive eyes of the others, against their unchanging, monotonously updated expectations, which they treated as if people developed in an uninterrupted, linear fashion – as if the successful life consisted in making those professional decisions that were taken early, too early, and that hardly ever merited the name in any case, in total identification, with a complete lack of emotional detachment, decade after decade. What do you want to be? You have to be something. Whatever would become of him? Those were the principles his parents expressed over lunch and dinner. He had heard them countless times, and they had sunk into his deepest depths, and deeper still. They were sentences that had never been up for discussion. They came along hypnotically, as if they were completely natural, and in their monotonous, thoughtless repetition they became a background noise, so vast and all-consuming in its diabolical self-evidence that afterwards one couldn’t imagine what a life without it might be like.
You have to be something, or you’re nothing. That was the axiom, in all its perfidious simplicity and obviousness. He would take it, that iron axiom, Perlmann thought, he would summon all his powers, even those at the hindmost corner of his soul, and then use those concentrated powers to bend it until it broke. What he had become – a respected professor with prizes and an invitation to Princeton – he was as of tonight no longer. That was destroyed. But that was a long way from saying he was nothing now. There was a great deal left in him, a very great deal, and the others had no idea about it. He would lodge himself in there, and then it would be a question of making his soul quite spherical and coating it with wax so that everything would slide off it, even the hostile glances of the others. He would walk along the streets quite upright, with his head held high.
It was a liberating train of thought. But it was still new, so it threatened, as soon as it had concluded, to slip away again. He would have to repeat it often and, so to speak, internally perform it, until it was solidly rooted within him. Perlmann took the second half of the pill out of the box and swallowed it, along with what remained of the whisky. His finger didn’t hurt any more, and the itch in his scalp had faded away. He ate the sandwich. He had a future again. He felt comfortable in the deep armchair and was pleased that he immediately recognized the melody that reached him from across the bar. The crucial thing was not to lose one’s sense of proportion. What did it matter, from the point of view of eternity, whether the thirty-seven pages which were, in the end, quite unimportant, came from his pen or from Leskov’s? Who really cared seriously about that? There were milky ways and beyond them more milky ways, without end, and here, on this tiny clump of earth, imprisoned in their insignificant little lives, which would be completely forgotten after a few decades, they made a hell of their lives for a handful of letters. It was laughable, quite simply laughable. Perlmann tried to imagine what people’s coexistence would look like if everyone always considered himself and others from the point of view of eternity. But he couldn’t quite do it. The question was hard to grasp and kept slipping away again. But that didn’t matter. The main thing was not to lose sight of the correct proportions. The corrected proportions. Proportions.
When he – addressed by the waiter – started from his half-sleep, it was five to eleven and the room was empty. He was going to stop serving soon, the waiter said, and asked if Perlmann wanted anything else. Perlmann ordered a mineral water. He had a dry mouth and a thick, furry tongue. He no longer had the faintest idea of what had happened for the past hour. He was shivering. He didn’t know where to go from here. Not a single step. He still had four pills. That wasn’t enough. He took the text and went outside, without waiting for the waiter and without paying.
The cool night air made him dizzy, but it also felt good. On the way down to the big square he saw a garbage bin in a side street. It seemed to belong to a hotel or a restaurant, because kitchen smells came from the extractor fan above it, and he could hear the clatter of cutlery. Apart from a layer of potato peelings the bin was empty. That was the third time today that Perlmann had got rid of a text. He was good at it, and he felt as if he had been busy doing nothing else for weeks. But this time it was something special. Because this time it was completely pointless. It was as if he were destroying his copy of a newspaper in order to impose a news blackout.
Perlmann rested both arms on the edge of the bin and started laughing quietly. In the hope of relief he tried to keep that laughter going and to spur it on from within, but it was hysterical laughter that soon dried up and turned to retching. The papers fell on top of the rubbish.
At Piazza Vittorio Veneto he caught a taxi to the Regina Elena. He asked the driver to stop in a dark spot near the hotel. He flicked through his banknotes and gave him the biggest one, a 100,000 lire note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said.
‘Ma no, Signore,’ the driver stammered, ‘I can’t take that. Can’t you see what you’ve given me?’ He held the bill right under the ceiling light.
‘It’s fine,’ Perlmann said irritably and got out.
He sat right at the end of the little beach jetty reserved for hotel guests and set the pills down next to him. Walking into the water with his clothes on and swimming out further and further until his strength gave out. Since that day at the public baths it had always been a drama if his head went under water when he was swimming. But the pills helped. He wouldn’t feel much, and soon he would lose consciousness.
A wave of pill-weariness washed over him, and then there was a void. He was glad the beach was unlit. He could only think very slowly, and often lost the thread.
It was an undramatic, quiet way of saying goodbye to life. No onlookers, no excitement after a bombshell. Tomorrow a police boat would pull him from the water. That was all. It accorded with his desire to disappear unnoticed from the world. He wished he could also magically ensure that all the traces that he had left in the minds of the others would be erased. As if he had never existed.
A textbook suicide, he thought, practically classic: a man who can see no way of escaping his shame. Forty-eight hours ago, after looking down the hotel facade, he had rejected that way out. It had been the thought of the judgment of the others that had put him off. But back then there had still seemed to be some leeway, a set of other possibilities. He could still plan things that might have prevented his exposure. And that had created a perspective from which something could be pondered and rejected. Now that the only possibility left to him was the black water out there, when he thought about the others he had a new, strange experience. It was actually too complicated for his heavy head, and everything was intermittently suspended as if he were having a blackout. Then he shivered all the more violently in his thin trousers on the cold stone. Nonetheless, he kept returning to that experience. He homed in on it and, in the end, he managed to grasp it more precisely and dependably.