Perlmann leapt up and examined the mattress. It was clean. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked. From time to time he felt the physical echo of a turn to the left. Later he took off his wet pyjamas and went into the shower. It was just after midnight. The coast road was wet. But now it wasn’t raining any more.
Over the next few hours he kept waking from the same dream at brief intervals, before dozing off again. This time it wasn’t a nightmare, but a bothersome and ridiculous combination of things that were completely unconnected as far as the dreamer was concerned. There was the name Pian dei Ratti, which returned with such frequency that it was like a constant background noise, an incessant echo that filled every last corner. And the name smelled. It was enveloped in a smell of sickly tobacco and mist; it was as if that smell stuck to the name, so that without the smell the name had no meaning whatsoever. The fact that the name was always there, ringing out, made one shiver and, sniffing, look for coins, which kept slipping with a painful rub through your fingers. Your shoes tipped over, and women laughed. Then everything was full of yellow sheets, and there was no point making yourself very small in the trunk.
Perlmann changed the bandage on his finger. The inflammation was beginning to ease. Every time he woke up he opened the widow. Only a few drops were falling outside. The dream had the dependability and monotony of a record that always sticks at the same place. At half-past four he showered, shaved and dressed.
‘Buon giorno,’ said Giovanni, rubbing his eyes and looking at his watch.
Perlmann turned round again in the doorway. ‘That equalizer that led to the penalty shoot-out. Who scored it?’
Giovanni was almost struck dumb. ‘Baggio,’ he said at last, with a grin.
‘From which club?’
Giovanni looked at him as if he had asked him what country Rome was the capital of.
‘Juve. Juventus Turin.’
‘Grazie,’ said Perlmann. He felt Giovanni’s startled eyes watching after him.
He had become a weirdo.
43
The coast road was so quiet and deserted that Perlmann instantly forgot the three or four cars that came towards him, in their brief, eerie presence. Rapallo was a night-time silhouette with motionless lights that called to mind paper cuts and engravings. The flashing traffic lights in the dead streets of Recco gave him the feeling of driving through a ghost town, and the two old men who were creeping along close to the houses further intensified that impression. Lots of lights were on already in the farmhouses along the road to Uscio. The crowing of the omnipresent cocks drowned out the quiet sound of the engine. Perlmann tried not to think back to Monday. The main thing was that it plainly hadn’t rained here in the past few hours. Past Lumarzo, however, the gear stick was suddenly damp with sweat, and he had to swallow more and more often. On the climb towards the tunnel he drove with his arms outstretched on the wheel, and decided not to look and to think about nothing.
He braked. Over on the light-grey crash barrier: dark strips. He put his foot down – only to put the car out of gear again straight away. Here, exactly here is where I took my hands off the wheel. He sat up. There was nothing to see. It was idiotic. He furiously screeched his tires and then stepped hard on the brake as if to prevent a pile-up in the empty tunnel.
Most of the pale mud had been covered up with a tarpaulin, which had been weighed down with bricks. By the wall there stood an empty wheelbarrow, with an untidily rolled-up rope underneath it. He had never worked out what happened at this passing-place, and this latest change made no sense to him at all. He knew it was nonsense, bordering on paranoia, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he – he in particular, he alone – was being played for a fool – that someone was constantly rearranging things at this spot, with the sole intention of confusing him, goading his useless thoughts and stoking his apprehension. He bit his lips and drove out of the tunnel. The toothless old woman’s shop was in darkness, and looked like a discarded dream backdrop. It was a quarter past six, and still the darkest night.
It could only be two kilometers, or three at the most. Only a few bends. But it wasn’t behind this one, or the next. Seen from this direction everything looked very different. Suddenly, so quickly that he couldn’t believe it, he was at the gas station where he had made the first attempt to disappear Leskov’s text. Yes, that was the word. He stopped outside the dark cottage and tried to imagine what had happened afterwards. His memory was sluggish; nothing came back of its own accord. It was hot and stuffy in the car. He had been driving the whole time with the heating turned up full. But the air from outside made him cold, and he whirred the window back up. The skin of his face tensed and felt like paper.
What was he actually doing here? In the end he would be holding a pile of dirty, ragged pages in his hand. Then what? What in the world would he tell Leskov when he handed him the papers? It would, that was clear, have to be the story of an oversight, an ineptitude, an unintended stupidity. And the story would also have to explain why he had discovered his stupidity only today, of all days. Perlmann felt his head emptying, and felt that emptiness filling with a paralysing weariness. With the best will in the world, even calling on the furthest reaches of his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t possibly explain how the text had made it out of the closed suitcase and the closed trunk into the mud, without anyone having had a deliberate hand in it.
A first shimmer of diffuse, grey light lit up the solid cloud cover. A car passed now every few minutes. If he simply kept on driving to Genoa, he would be at the airport just before eight, and soon after that the Avis counter would open up. But I can’t just let the sheets of paper lie here and rot. That’s out of the question. He has to get his text back. Somehow.
Perlmann set off slowly, even more slowly than on Monday. It was up there on the bend that the truck with the full-beam headlights had appeared, the one he had allowed to pass him. And, sure enough, the first pale sheet lay there in the roadside ditch. The sight of it electrified him and all of a sudden he was wide awake. Hurriedly, as if the paper might escape his clutches at the last minute, he got out and bent down. It was a piece of half-transparent, crumpled grease-proof paper. He couldn’t halt his hand, he had to touch it. Now he had mayonnaise on his fingers. Disgusted, he rubbed them on his trousers and got back into the car.
It couldn’t have been the next bend; there was no paper to be seen far and wide. It was the next but one. Perlmann could see all the pale sheets in the ditch from far away, and accelerated as if on a home straight. He came to a standstill with both wheels in the ditch, climbed out of his crookedly parked car and ran breathlessly over. The pages were often far apart, but in two places several had fallen on top of each other and formed irregular little piles. Perlmann laid them on the hood. The sun must have been shining here yesterday, the two top sheets were both dry. The pale yellow had faded almost completely, the sheets were curling, and it looked as if they had blisters. Then came a few that were still damp, and under those several that hadn’t been touched by rain at all, at least in the middle. Only at the edges were they all wet and grey with dirt. The ink on the top sheets had run. The first two were hard to read, but it got better after that.