When the chambermaid who had opened his door for him had gone, Perlmann picked up Leskov’s text again. Now that it would be an hour at most till Brian Millar arrived, it was particularly important to build a protective wall of understood Russian sentences around him. The more sentences he could pile up, the less the man with the red shimmer in his dark hair could do to him.
But Perlmann couldn’t manage to translate even a single sentence. Like yesterday on the plane he was paralyzed by a kind of seeing blindness, and when finally he managed to read the words correctly, his memory played one trick on him after another. He felt anxiety welling up within him like a poison, which, released in the depths, was forcing its way relentlessly to the surface. While he stood by the window in the dark and smoked, he called Evelyn Mistral’s laughter to his aid, and then Laura Sand’s furious gaze. But he was unsure whether those two faces would be any use against Millar, and his anxiety wouldn’t go away.
And, in fact, there wasn’t the slightest reason to be anxious. All right, they hadn’t liked each other from the start. But that episode in Boston had been really quite trivial; practically childish, and not something to explain hostility.
Millar had travelled with his girlfriend Sheila, a beauty with long blonde hair and a very short skirt. He was extremely proud of her and treated her like a jealously protected property. The colleagues bowed and scraped around her and wooed with her in the most ludicrous fashion. Perlmann didn’t do a thing. During breaks in the conference and sometimes even during the lectures he withdrew into a quiet corner of the building and read a paperback of short stories. Sheila often strolled, bored, down the corridors, smoking. When she approached Perlmann she cast him a curious glance and went on walking. On the third day of the conference she sat down next to him and asked him what he was always reading. Wouldn’t she much rather have been somewhere else? he asked her after a while. The question caught her off guard, they started laughing, and suddenly there was a familiarity between them whose charm lay in the fact that it was gauzy and without any history. They walked together to the caféteria, still joking, because Sheila liked his dry, melancholy humor. When she found what he said particularly funny, she put her arm around his shoulder. Her head was close to his. Her hair brushed his cheek. He felt her breath and smelled her perfume. He turned his head, and just at that moment Millar, coming from the session with his colleagues, entered the caféteria. He saw them in this attitude of intimacy, Perlmann with his face bright red. Millar left his colleagues standing, came rapidly over and took Sheila by the arm, as if he wanted to confront her and regain possession of her. She defended herself. There was almost a scene. All under the curious eyes of the colleagues who were still streaming in. Perlmann did nothing, just went on holding his tray, and was unable to suppress a smile of amusement that didn’t escape Millar.
In the afternoon it was Perlmann’s turn to deliver his lecture. Millar was sitting in the front row with Sheila. Perlmann saw her gleaming stockings and metal stilettos. He made a stupid mistake in a formula at the board. It was quite a trivial mistake, and basically it was of no importance whatsoever for the rest of his thought process. Millar’s hand shot up in the air, even before the chairman had finished his introductory words to the discussion. With understatement bolstered by sarcasm, he pointed out the mistake. Perlmann panicked, improved things for the worse and wiped out the correct part of the formula. Millar crossed his legs, folded his arms in front of his chest and tilted his head to one side. ‘No, you see, you should have left that part as it was,’ he said with slow complacency and a malicious smile. At last the grey-haired chairman, an authority in his subject, intervened in a calm voice. Perlmann regained his sense of security, steadily wiped the whole formula out and without hesitation wrote down the right one. Then he walked slowly back to the lectern, drew the microphone to him with theatrical care and asked, looking down at Millar, ‘Happy now?’ He managed a tone and a facial expression that turned the mood in the lobby in his favor, because quiet laughter could be heard. Sheila turned her head towards Millar and looked at him with curious and malicious glee. He darted her a poisonous glare in return.
The next morning, when Perlmann entered the hotel foyer with the case in his hand, Millar and Sheila had just gone out through the revolving door. Sheila glanced back and saw him. Millar was already opening the door of the taxi and turning impatiently towards Sheila when she called something out to him, turned round and slipped back into the revolving door. For a few moments she was trapped in it, because on the other side an elderly couple – she with a thick fur coat and a hatbox – were wedged in the door, and only with some pushing and shoving did it start moving again. Sheila tottered up to Perlmann and pressed a kiss on his cheek with comically parted lips. Then she was back at the door, turned round and waved with ironic daintiness. The others watched and laughed. One of his colleagues pointed to his cheek, which must have borne the impression of Sheila’s violet lips. Sheila saw it through the glass of the door and smiled, her tongue between her teeth. Millar still stood icy-faced, holding the taxi door. Sheila got in and pulled down her short skirt.
Ruge and von Levetzov, at the first letter of enquiry, had immediately asked whether Millar was to be invited. Maybe they would have come even without him. But Perlmann simply couldn’t think of an excuse not to invite this man, Brian Millar, whose name was on everyone’s lips.
He turned the light on and went into the shower. At home he never showered during the day. But now everything was to be rinsed away so that he could meet the man with the alert expression afresh and without embarrassment. Like yesterday evening and that morning, he showered for a very long time. You’d almost think I had a cleanliness fixation. He tried to persuade himself that all that water could make the afternoon’s clumsiness and solicitude disappear. The coming dinner, he said to himself, was the actual beginning. Everything before that was mere chance and didn’t count.
When he had shaken the water out of his ears and heard the telephone, he immediately thought it must have been ringing for ages. He ran dripping through the room. As he reached for the receiver, he looked at his wet footprints on the pigeon-blue carpet and felt a desperate annoyance with his subservience, which mocked all his good intentions, rising up within him.
‘Hi, Phil,’ was all the voice said. Perlmann recognized it immediately. The two syllables were enough to remind him what he had tried without great success to explain to Agnes after he got back from Boston: the voice formed the words in a completely undetached way. Its tone didn’t just show that this was the speaker’s mother tongue; the tone wasn’t only an expression of the self-evidence with which the language was at the speaker’s disposal. There was more at stake: the tone contained – and even Agnes’s frown could not shake his conviction about this – the message that this was the only language that truly deserved to be taken seriously. Self-righteous, you understand, his penetratingly sonorous voice is self-righteous. He speaks as if the others were to blame and very much to be pitied for the fact that they, too, don’t speak East Coast American, this Yankee language. This self-righteousness, this sonorous arrogance, that was what drove me up the wall.
‘Hi, Brian,’ said Perlmann, ‘how are you?’
‘Oh, fine,’ said the voice, and now Perlmann was once again quite sure that what he had said to Agnes was the precise truth.