Perlmann’s heart was thumping as he sat down at the desk. Until now, sitting here had meant translating Leskov’s text. Hour after hour, day after day, he had removed himself further and further from reality. Each translated sentence had brought him a little closer to the deadly silence of the tunnel. A quiet feeling of vertigo took hold of him as he carefully straightened the chair, lit a cigarette and reached for his ballpoint pen. For four weeks he had avoided that moment. His hands were sticky, and the stickiness transferred itself to the pen. He got to his feet, washed his hands in the bathroom and wiped the pen. Giovanni brought the coffee. Perlmann put it first on the right of the desk, then the left. He threw the piece of paper with Kirsten’s address into the waste-paper basket. He prepared a back-up pack of cigarettes and fetched the red lighter from the bedside table. Wearing only his dressing gown he would soon start shivering. He dressed completely. His light-colored trousers were too cool by now. But the tear on the other pair bothered him. Then there were the dark flannel trousers, the ones with the bloodstains. And it would be better to put on the lighter pullover. And turn up the heating a bit instead. Again he straightened his chair. He would have to be close to the desk. But not too close.
Why hadn’t he tried it much sooner? The sentences came in spite of everything. They actually came, one after the other. At first he was anxious before each period, for fear that everything might dry up after it. But when the first page was full, this anxiety melted away; feeling in general faded into the background, and the calm logic of the sentences themselves took charge. For months, almost years, he had struggled to force out each individual sentence; it had seemed as if, in future, he would only be able to think in very small units. And now all of a sudden each sentence led quite naturally on to the next. Something started building up. He was writing a text, a real text. So I can still do it after all. Now everything’s fine.
His pen went flying over the pages and the thoughts came one after another so quickly that he could barely capture them on the paper. At last his block had gone. Again he had something to say. He only lifted the pen from the paper to light another cigarette or pour himself the next cup of coffee. He held his cigarette in his left hand, and with the same hand he brought the cup to his mouth – it was unusual, but his right hand must not be interrupted while writing. Not a memo; it’s turning into a lecture, a complete lecture. The unfamiliar way of holding the cigarette meant that smoke kept getting in his eyes; it stung, but his right hand wrote on and on. He was amazed and cheered at how good, how apt were the phrases that flowed so naturally on to the paper; some of them, he thought, practically had a poetic force. He hoped he had enough paper; otherwise he would have to start writing on both sides. Eventually, he would run out of coffee. It was lucky that he had even more cigarettes in the wardrobe. He hoped the lighter wouldn’t suddenly pack up on him. At one point he paused and closed his eyes. The present. This is it. Now I’m experiencing it at last. It took all these traumas to break through to it.
At five o’clock he opened the window. Billows of smoke drifted out into the night. He took a deep breath of the cool air. He felt dizzy, and had to hold on to the window catch. He felt as if he were moving on dangerously thin ice at breakneck speed. The strip of light beyond the bay was quite even, narrow and still. When his eye fell on the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, he quickly shut the window. He wanted to believe that all those things happened a very long time ago.
Perlmann didn’t immediately know how the next paragraph should begin, and started to panic. But then he read the last three pages and found his way back into his writing frenzy. After a while, when all the coffee had gone, his tongue felt furry. Annoyed at the interruption, he went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water. He was used to his pale, anxious face; he had seen it often enough over the last few days. But now he gave a start. His features were sunken and skewed. He thought of pictures of people who had been exposed to enhanced gravity. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered were the sentences that had originated behind that face and were flowing into his right hand. It was a complete mystery how it was happening, and for one brief moment Perlmann experienced the fascination of the scholar confronted by a mysterious phenomenon, a fascination that he had lost. Everything’s going to fall back into place. Even though he didn’t have a headache, he took two aspirins from the pack on the mirror shelf and washed them down. Then he walked back to the desk with a glass of water.
Dawn began to break just before seven. Without the darkness of the night Perlmann felt vulnerable and lost his sense of equilibrium. His sentences started to go wrong. He had to cross some of them out, and eventually he reached the last sheet, which he crumpled and threw in the waste-paper basket. The mixture of lamplight and daylight enraged him. As he walked across to turn off the standard lamp, his ankle throbbed violently, and felt as if it could no longer support him. He couldn’t quite manage without electric light, and turned the desk lamp back on. His memory began to fail. The simplest English words stopped coming to mind, and all of a sudden he was uncertain about his spelling, too.
A short break. He could lie down for a moment, until it was really light. Just for a few minutes. After that he still had an hour and a half to finish writing his lecture.
41
A wild honking of car horns on the coast road woke him with a start. Perlmann felt disoriented and immediately sank back into leaden weariness. His eyelids seemed paralyzed, and would only open after he had made an extreme effort of will to sit up on the edge of the bed. His head hurt at the slightest movement, and his veins seemed to be far too cramped for his violently pounding blood. The noise of traffic was unbearable. It was seven minutes to nine.
No time for showering and shaving, nor could he order any more coffee. He was relieved to establish that his tongue, although thick and stinging, was under his command again. He shovelled cold water into his face with both hands, evoking the memory of the gas station toilet in Recco. No murder. No plagiarism. He hurriedly bundled together the sheets of paper on the desk. There were at least twenty pages, he thought. The last half-page was crossed out. I’ll have to improvise at the end.
The elevator was busy. Two minutes past nine. Perlmann gritted his teeth and hobbled downstairs. He had forgotten the printout of his notes, and when he went to check that he was at least carrying a pen, he saw that there were two big stripes of dirt running diagonally across his jacket. The garbage bin by the fan. He looked at his trousers: bloodstains everywhere. Arriving in the hall, through the glass front door he saw the sea glittering in the morning sun. At some point in the night, he remembered, he had thought he had finally found the present. An illusion, woven from relief, alcohol and pills. The present was further off than ever.
The door to the veranda was open. Perlmann felt no more twinges as he walked through the lounge towards it and took the three steps. The anxiety settled on him like a numbing veil. He wasn’t quite in the room before he had seen that they were all there, even Silvestri and Angelini. And at the back, on the right, Leskov with his pipe in his mouth. Perlmann immediately looked away. He didn’t want to be wounded by any of those faces. As he had been during the night. He wanted to stay completely closed away in himself, inaccessible to the others.