The computer for flight reservations was on strike, and he was told to come back later. Perlmann was glad that the stationer’s was quite a long way away; the walking helped to combat his helpless anger. Apart from the fat woman, there was a lanky boy with a pimply face behind the counter. At the woman’s request the boy silently spread out a selection of envelopes. Perlmann immediately discarded the ordinary ones without reinforcement and padding. Then he took the one with the cardboard backing and bent it back and forth until the cardboard nearly snapped. He liked its firmness, but the paper was nothing special, and he wasn’t sure whether the envelope was big enough for the unusual format of the yellow sheets. He moistened his index finger with his tongue and rubbed the saliva on the paper, which turned dark brown and dissolved layer by layer.
‘Don’t worry. Of course I’ll pay for it,’ he said to the woman, who was furiously gasping for air.
The two padded envelopes that struck him as exactly the right size were made of matte paper, less tightly pressed than the other, shiny paper, which his saliva dissolved worryingly quickly. A revolting-looking, grey wadding came out of it; the other one was padded with transparent plastic. The corrugated foil would keep the moisture out. But what happened if the address disappeared under the snow along with the disintegrating paper? Perlmann set this envelope aside as well. As the boy stared at him, mesmerized, the woman sniffed agitatedly and made a face as if he were busy pulling the shop apart.
‘You really don’t need to worry,’ Perlmann reassured her and took some cash out of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll pay for everything.’
The last envelope was made of well-glued, shiny paper, but the padding was much thinner than it was in the others, and it was far too big. The pages would slip back and forth inside it, and be damaged even further. He asked the boy, who was glancing anxiously at the woman and still hadn’t said a word, to give him a pile of typing paper, and tried it out, shaking the envelope wildly back and forth. The result wasn’t quite as bad as he expected, but some of the pages were already slightly crushed. He asked them to show him various staplers, but none of them was capable of producing a line of staples that would have reduced the envelope to the right size. The paper survived the saliva test very well. Perlmann turned the envelope inconclusively back and forth, then suddenly asked for a glass of water.
He had to repeat the request. As the boy was going into the back, the woman resignedly lit a cigarette, and when a man came into the shop on crutches, with his foot in a cast, and greeted her like an old friend, she gave him a significant look. Perlmann walked to the door with his water and poured it over the envelope. For two or three seconds it looked as if the water would drip off the shiny paper without leaving a trace. But then the envelope was covered with dark patches that quickly got bigger and came together to form a single damp patch. Perlmann reached into the envelope and tested the dampness. The image of the Russian station platform appeared, and this time the dripping was melting snow. When he turned round he saw the three faces just behind the window. The madman with the water on the envelopes.
Mutely, and with the face of someone who is pleased to have had a bright idea, the boy gestured to him to wait and went to the back. The man with the crutches put his wallet in his pocket and left the shop, shaking his head. Perlmann paid and wedged the damaged envelopes under his arm. He was reading the chronicle a lot, he said to the woman, who smoked as she stared at the floor in front of her. But she didn’t seem to remember, and Perlmann was glad when the boy broke the awkward silence.
The envelope he handed to him was ideal; Perlmann saw it straight away. It was a used envelope with an address and an American sender. The boy, he read from his gestures, had taken off the stamps. The envelope was made of thick yellow cardboard that felt waxy. It had plastic padding and reinforced corners and it was exactly the right size.
‘Perfetto,’ Perlmann said to the boy, who beamed at him and indignantly waved away his offer of money.
‘Three thousand,’ the woman said, looking up from the floor for one brief moment.
As Perlmann gave her the money, the boy furiously grabbed the envelope, looked in a drawer and finally stuck fresh labels over the address and the sender’s details. Without deigning to look at the woman he handed Perlmann the envelope and gave him a jokey salute.
On the next corner Perlmann threw all the other envelopes into a garbage bin. When he crossed the street, he saw the man with the crutches, who seemed to have been watching him the whole time. The lunatic throwing away envelopes. At a school drinking fountain Perlmann splashed water over the yellow envelope. Spherical droplets formed, and disappeared completely when shaken and blown on. Suddenly, the Russian platform couldn’t have mattered less.
In the travel agent’s they booked Perlmann a flight to Frankfurt for lunchtime on Saturday. For the return flight at five they could only put him on the waiting list. Then Perlmann walked slowly towards the hotel and wondered how he could disguise his handwriting when he wrote Leskov’s address on the label – and which address?
48
A hand grabbed him by the sleeve from below, and when he turned round, startled, he found himself looking into the laughing face of Evelyn Mistral, who was sitting at a café table. She pulled him down on to a chair and waved to the waiter. Perlmann hesitantly laid the yellow envelope on the table. It’s not dangerous. She can’t possibly know what it’s for. As he waited for his coffee and they talked about how warm it still was, even though the sun was setting and the lights were being lit at the tables, he frantically wondered what he could say if she started talking about the envelope. Then, when he was stirring his coffee, she rested her hand on his other arm for a moment. What had been up with him over the past few days? She wanted to know. They’d hardly seen him, and when they did he had been so strange. ‘Reservado,’ she smiled. And then fainting like that. They’d all been rather puzzled, and concerned.
Perlmann took another spoonful of sugar. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and when he put them in his jacket pocket, he touched the disk, which he had forgotten in the meantime. As if he had touched something burning hot or particularly disgusting, he immediately took his hands out of his pockets and lit a cigarette. Then, for a while, he looked across at the moored yachts, rocking on the wake from a motorboat.
‘I don’t even know myself,’ he said at last, and avoided looking at her. ‘I… I’ve just somehow lost my equilibrium.’
‘And you really didn’t want to deliver any kind of lecture, did you?’ she asked softly and brushed the hair out of her face, which rested on her open hand. Perlmann looked at the levelling waves and nodded. He really wanted to leave, but at the same time he wished she would go on asking him questions.
‘Can I say something? But you must promise not to take it amiss.’
Perlmann attempted a smile and nodded.
‘If I may put it this way: I think you’ve made a mistake. You should have explained at the outset that everything’s a bit difficult for you at the moment, and you could also just have said that you didn’t want to give a lecture. Your wife’s death – everyone would have understood straight away. As things stand, everything that happened – dinner and everything – was interpreted as arrogance. Until Vassily put us right. The rest of us were completely in the dark.’