Once again Perlmann cast a sober glance at the few clues: nothing that could be made out there really supported this over-hasty assumption. Disgruntled, he covered the page with the blotter. When he pulled it away again and started to read, he felt the trepidation of the addict.
His reading proceeded only slowly, as he had no experience of Russian handwriting. But, eyes stinging, he continued until there were three words in a row that he didn’t know at the bottom of the page. He lit a cigarette and, as his eyes remained focused on the line, his hand reached with mounting impatience for the dictionary. The sensation of emptiness had to be repeated a number of times before it dawned on him that there couldn’t possibly be any dictionaries there now. He gave a start, as if from a forbidden daydream. His face stung. He quickly closed the text in the wardrobe and, shivering, walked to the window.
‘I need to use the computer for a moment,’ he said a few minutes later to Giovanni at reception. ‘Check something about my text. For tomorrow.’ A spasm ran from the back of his neck and down his back, and he had the feeling that he could barely turn his head.
Giovanni reached towards a drawer and then paused. Hesitantly, he raised his head and looked uncertainly at Perlmann. ‘The office… no one… I have instructions…’ He lowered his eye and rubbed awkwardly at the handle of the drawer.
‘I understand,’ said Perlmann and prepared to go.
Then Giovanni suddenly looked at him with a grin. ‘Oh, come on, I’ll make an exception for you.’ He took a key from the drawer, walked ahead of him and opened the door. ‘I’m sure you know how to use the computer already,’ he said as he turned on the light, ‘because I…’
‘Of course,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘thanks very much.’
He hoped Giovanni would retreat into the back room. But he stayed standing at the counter, nodded and smiled and raised his hand slightly. Perlmann cursed the glass door of the office. Now he would have to do it right in front of Giovanni’s eyes. He straightened the chair in front of the screen and reached for the switch at the back of the computer. Nothing happened. He rocked the switch back and forth several times. No effect of any kind. He walked around the table and took a look at the switch. It was the right one. Giovanni raised quizzical eyebrows and made as if to come over. Perlmann hastily gestured to him to stay where he was: Tutto bene! Perlmann’s hands were damp, and the spasm at the back of his neck was becoming stronger and stronger. He stared blankly straight ahead. The plug. He slowly rolled his chair back and looked under the table. All the plugs were in their sockets. He avoided glancing over at the counter. Only now did he notice the round lock without a key. Finished. Of course, the business documents. He turned to the side table with the drawers and screened his hands from Giovanni’s eyes with his back. The open drawers contained only office material, he could see that as soon as he opened them a crack. The key for the computer would be in the narrow top drawer, from whose lock the key had also been removed. In the only box on the desk there were just paperclips.
Perlmann breathed in twice, slowly. His back relaxed. Relief was mixed with tiredness. The fact that he noticed the transparent box of disks when he stood up had something to do with the fact that the plexiglass reflected the fluorescent light from the ceiling. He slid the chair to the tray at the side and opened the box. The disk with his name on it was the second from the front. Under the name it said on the labeclass="underline" personal past. mestre.
Perlmann took care that his movements were easy for Giovanni to make out as he rolled himself back to the computer and put the disk in the drive. Then he sat down in a pose of concentration in front of the dark screen and simulated typing movements. He could at least remove the disk. Perhaps Maria had only worked with it, and the text wasn’t even on the hard drive. He grew calmer. With a pen from the desk he tapped the edge of his nose a few times and then stuck the tip between his lips while, leaning back with legs outstretched, he pretended to gaze into an imaginary distance. Then he made a few more typing motions, took the disk from the drive and pressed the switch. With his back to Giovanni he stuck the disk in the belt under his pullover, ostentatiously snapped the box shut and left.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’
Giovanni caught up with him in the portico.
‘You were asking about Baggio yesterday.’
‘Yes?’
‘He scored another goal tonight. Against Bayern Munich!’
‘He’s plainly a great striker,’ said Perlmann, and an emotion that was hard to distinguish from pure tiredness brought tears to his eyes.
‘E come!’ said Giovanni.
‘Ciao,’ said Perlmann and touched him fleetingly on the shoulder.
‘Ciao,’ Giovanni said, too. He said it hesitantly and slowly, and it sounded like an incredulous echo.
When Perlmann looked down at the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, a group of young people stood applauding because a lanky boy was kissing a girl who, in spite of her piled-up hair, barely came up to his chest. That wasn’t his jetty, not the one that led out into the black water. It was as if the jetty of two days ago had been extinguished by the young people, or rather: expelled from the world.
He went on walking beyond the rocky spur until it was quite dark. Then he slung the disk far out into the sea. The movement came from his wrist and shoulder at the same time, the little disk turned quickly on its own axis, rose for a while in a low curve, then fell spinning and chipped almost vertically into the water. Perlmann heard quiet applause, but couldn’t tell if it was only his imagination.
From the rocky spur he looked across to the Miramare. A letter seemed to be flickering in the middle of the neon writing. Somewhere in the dark hills over there were the garbage bins into which he had thrown the first version of Leskov’s text. Tomorrow, immediately after the session, he would finish cleaning the second version. He certainly couldn’t send it from Italy. Nor from Frankfurt. But the very thought was pointless. He couldn’t possibly send the text to Leskov.
The young people had moved on. The beach jetty was empty. His jetty was back in the world, washed around by black water. Perlmann felt himself beginning to crumble. There were delicate, treacherous cracks within his inner structure. He quickly went back to the hotel.
The air in the room was cold, and it still smelled sickly sweet, even though this time Leskov had only used the ashtray for a match. Perlmann washed out his toothbrush several times. But it was as if the dirt had practically eaten its way into the bristles. The foam when he brushed his teeth had a brownish tint.
In the morning, he thought in the dark, Leskov would be sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, anxiously and with almost nothing in his hands. He didn’t know it, but Perlmann had promised to defend his theme, which he didn’t know in the new version.
It was an antediluvian screen, bright bilious green on dull dark green, and it flickered so wildly that it made the eyes stream straight away. A nauseating, sickly sweet smell flowed from it. That couldn’t be, but it was, and when he sniffed at the ventilation slits smoke was emerging from there as well; a treacherous smoke that couldn’t at first be seen, but then suddenly formed a dense, suffocating cloud. A flood of incomprehensible Italian orders and file names swam across the screen. At last he somehow got hold of the right one, but Leskov’s text simply wouldn’t be erased, he pressed the key over and over again, hundreds of times, until nothing remained of the key, but Leskov’s text with Perlmann’s name went on flickering under the title. At last he clicked the on-off switch, but nothing happened; even pulling out the plug had no effect: Leskov’s text went on flickering and flickering, and now Perlmann’s name was suddenly there in capital letters. Then he gripped the huge sledgehammer in both hands. But it wasn’t so easy. You had to take a run-up with lateral, rhythmically swinging movements before lifting the hammer high above your head to deliver the crucial blow. At last the time had come, the hammer rose up, it passed the apex, but then all of a sudden it had no substance and no weight, and rather than bringing it down with a crash into the computer, as he woke up Perlmann found himself on the bedcover, his hand clenched convulsively into a fist.