So far there were seventeen sheets, including page 77. Now it was the turn of the individual, widely scattered sheets in the ditch. When Perlmann was bending down for the first one, a car drove past and its wake blew three pages down from the hood. He hurried back and gathered them up. One page had fallen under the wheels and been ripped. Annoyed, he laid the whole pile on the mat in front of the passenger seat. Half of them were completely smudged, but Leskov would still be able to reconstitute the text. The others, which had been lying face down, were in a better condition. There, too, the round letters of Leskov’s careful handwriting had often dissolved at the edges, and flowed outwards. At those points the background was no longer yellow, but a washed-out pale blue shimmering into green. But the text was still legible. The sheets that had lain among the trees had been dried by the sun and had warped; the others had softened and were unpleasant to the touch.
After that, Perlmann often had to climb the steep embankment to fetch the next sheet. Many were sticky with mud, some were crumpled and torn. At one point he slipped on the damp soil, the pain from his ankle shot through him like knives and he nearly fell. At the very last moment he was able to cling to a tuft of grass. Now he had earth under his fingernails. From here he managed to gather fourteen pages together, including page 79, which had a space at the bottom, but which still couldn’t be the last, as there was no address on it. So at least twenty-five pages were still missing. He leaned, exhausted, against the hood and smoked.
By now it was twenty to eight and broad daylight. The traffic was building up, and now the last truck was coming towards him. Its bumper was far too narrow, its gas tank unprotected. When it had passed, Perlmann, who was standing in the middle of a black cloud of smoke, became aware – to his amazement and relief – that his heart wasn’t pounding. Only his cigarette had fallen into the road without his noticing. It was, he thought, as if a first thin dividing wall had formed between him and the trucks; a first protecting distance which would get bigger and bigger over time until one day he would also be able to forget the red mist. As long as Leskov has his text back.
Astonishingly, large numbers of sheets had been blown on to the embankment that sloped downwards on the other side of the road. The ground there was soft and damp, and at one point Perlmann sank beyond the edge of his shoes into the quagmire. The sheets had been resting on the tips of the grass, and weren’t very dirty. With two exceptions, they had been lying writing-side down, and were still legible. Now he had rescued a total of sixty-seven pages. He looked around a wider area, methodically, patch by patch, the whole thing three times. The rising sun pierced the cloud cover and Perlmann looked up, blinking. There were sheets in the tops of two tall bushes, one in each. It took a desperately long time before they finally came floating down, and with his furious shaking he must have presented a comical sight, because the school bus drove unusually slowly, and the children laughed and pointed at him.
One sheet was the first page with the title. There was no name underneath. It was creased and had a hole in it from a branch, but reading it wasn’t a problem. At least eight pages were missing now. Perlmann looked at the wheels of the passing cars and imagined the sheets getting stuck to tires like those and then being pressed rhythmically between rubber and tarmac, before ending up lying in rags somewhere.
When the road was empty for a little while, his eye fell on a brown rectangle, which hid part of the white marking in the middle of the road. It was a page of Leskov’s text, drenched with rain and dirt and driven over countless times. He lifted it by one corner, but the paper was fragile and tore immediately. A bottom layer. Puzzled, he opened the glove compartment and saw the map that Signora Morelli had lent him on Saturday night. He half-unfolded it and pushed it carefully, centimeter by centimeter, under the soggy sheet. On the lid of the trunk he started carefully dabbing the page down with his handkerchief as if it were an archaeological find.
It was page 58. In the middle, Leskov had written a subheading. All that could still be made out was that it had consisted of two quite long words, preceded by the number 4. But the ink had run almost completely; it had mixed with the dirt, and all that remained was a smear. Perlmann wiped the words again with another tip of his handkerchief. Perhaps something of the old ink traces that had been put on paper in St Petersburg would be revealed if one dabbed away the diluted and running ink that now lay over it. And some clues did become visible. But they weren’t enough to make out an unambiguous sequence of words. He lit a cigarette. The last word, he was more and more certain of it, must be proshloe: the past. But he could imagine at least three variants: iskazhennoe proshloe: the distorted past; pridiumannoe proshloe: the invented past; obmanchivoe proshloe: the deceptive past. And even a fourth: zastyvshee proshloe: the coagulated past. That he knew zastyvat’, to coagulate, he owed to a viewer of Agnes’s photographs, who had dared to compare her particular way of capturing the living present in images with the process of coagulation. Her fury had been boundless, because coagulation was her name for the process in which people rigidified into lifeless figures because of their conventions. And to keep from suffocating on her fury, afterwards she had done something that was usually Perlmann’s own habit: she had looked up the word in every available dictionary.
Smoking hastily, Perlmann repeatedly compared the words he tried out with the thin traces of ink. But the vague lines simply made any decision impossible. He measured his conjectures against what he had of Leskov’s thoughts in his head, and against the vocabulary that he had appropriated from Leskov’s text. But even that didn’t yield complete clarity. The intervention of language in the events of memory could, according to the first version, be characterized in all four ways. And besides, the text that he knew was not a reliable standard, since Leskov, as he had said, had thoroughly reworked it for the second version.
What was it that he had said about the new version on the drive on Monday? In the middle of traffic that was now becoming increasingly dense, and in which the trucks were beginning to accumulate, Perlmann tried to call Leskov’s words to mind. He had perceived them, he remembered that. And something had passed through his head as he did so. He closed his eyes. On his face he felt the heat of exhaust fumes. A truck’s gears clashed. He saw the beam from its left headlight in front of him, with nothing matching it on the right. Otherwise, he had no memory. And for a short and terrible moment he had the impression that he no longer knew how it was done: remembering. Then he put the card with the sheet on the rest of the pile and got in the car.
He would have liked to arrange the sheets to see how big the gaps were between the missing pages – whether they were all gaps of one or two pages, which it would be relatively easy for Leskov to fill, or whether there were bigger breaks in the text that would take him weeks, because a whole train of thought would have to be reworked. But in the state in which the pages were, that could not be accomplished without further damage.
He was sure that 79 was the highest page number he had read. It was the first thing he had paid attention to, and the page lay separately beside the pile. He picked it up and laboriously translated the last line that Leskov had squashed in tiny letters between two crossed-out lines: But that would be a false conclusion. Instead one must…