For years he had battled against that habit of touching people, particularly when he had just met them, when he addressed a charming joke or a personal remark to them. As he was now doing with Silvestri, he rested his hand on their forearm, and when standing up he would often enough find himself suddenly putting an arm around their shoulders. There were people who saw this simply as evidence of an outgoing, lovable nature, and others who found his behavior disagreeable. His need for physical contact did not differentiate between men and women, and in the case of women there were often misunderstandings. The presence of Agnes had helped, but not always, and when she had witnessed the event, one had been able to tell from her face how puzzling and even weird she found it that he, who preferred to sit on the edge of big, empty squares, had this particular tic. It was no less puzzling to him, and each time it happened he felt the compulsion as a crack running right through him.
It was von Levetzov’s idea to go across, after dinner, to the drawing room where the ochre-colored armchairs stood. Brian Millar, who came last because he had been inspecting the little room with the round, green-baize-covered gaming tables, stopped and then walked over to the grand piano.
‘A Grotrian-Steinweg,’ he said, ‘I would prefer this to any Steinway.’ He played a few notes and then closed the lid again. ‘Another time,’ he smiled when von Levetzov encouraged him to play something.
Perlmann felt his breathing suddenly becoming more difficult. So he can do that too. He asked the waiter who brought the drinks to open a window.
Von Levetzov raised his glass. ‘As no one else is doing so, I would like to greet everyone and raise a toast to our favorable collaboration,’ he said with a sideways glance at Perlmann, who felt the sweat of his hands mixing with the condensation on the glass. ‘So we will be working up there,’ he went on, pointing at the door of the veranda, which was reached by a flight of three steps. ‘A perfect room for our purposes. I took a picture of it before. Veranda Marconi, it is called, after Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of radio technology, as the plaque outside says.’
Perlmann, who hadn’t noticed the plaque, looked down at his new shoes, which hurt him. The painful pinch that would always be associated with confirmation and hard church pews merged with the hot sensation of shame about his forgotten welcome speech and a looming, helpless vexation with von Levetzov’s behavior as travel guide.
‘Now we’re just waiting for Vassily Leskov,’ said Laura Sand, and Perlmann felt as if she had been reading his thoughts and was trying, by changing the subject like this, to prevent the others from rising to their feet to catch sight of the veranda. ‘When’s he coming? And more particularly, who is he?’
He was a linguistic psychologist without tenure at a university, Perlmann said. Teaching commissions only every now and again. How he kept his head financially above water, he couldn’t say. What was impressive was how good Leskov was at describing things, much better than most of the other people working in the field. It made one realize the extent to which, before any kind of theory, the important thing was to describe our experiences very precisely with language. Admittedly, his work was a kind of old-fashioned, introspective psychology, which didn’t get you anywhere these days. But that was precisely what he, Perlmann, had found interesting in their conversation in St Petersburg.
‘So you speak Russian, too?’ von Levetzov asked irritably. Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment.
‘No, no,’ he said, and immediately managed a regretful smile, ‘not a word. But he can speak perfect German. His grandmother was German and only ever spoke to him in her mother tongue when he lived with her after his father’s death. His English was a bit clumsy, he told me; but he would certainly have managed here.’
Perlmann had no idea why he had lied, and he couldn’t quite believe how unerringly he had done it. Evelyn Mistral, to whom he glanced across only hesitantly, was watching him with a face that was thoughtful and roguish by turns. Now we’re accomplices, he thought, and didn’t know whether he was pleased about it or whether his new feeling of vulnerability had predominated.
‘Unfortunately, his exit permit was refused,’ he concluded, and reached for the cigarettes with a relief that surprised him.
‘Let’s take another look at the veranda,’ said Achim Ruge, when the conversation about conditions in the former Soviet Union had run aground and Millar looked at his watch with a yawn.
Perlmann was last to go up the three steps. What will it be like when I come down them that day?
Ruge had sat down at the front in the high-backed chair whose embroidered upholstery looked like Gobelins. ‘If someone sitting here has nothing to say it’s his own fault,’ he said with a gurgling laugh, prompting general laughter. Perlmann pretended to study the tasselled coats of arms that ran along the wall.
‘So what do you have to say about language, Achim?’ he heard Evelyn Mistral asking, trying to imitate a strict teacher. ‘Or have you forgotten to do your homework?’
More laughter. Only Laura Sand didn’t join in, but investigated the old chest in the corner. Now the others were outdoing one another with caricatures of a cross-examination, and with mounting enjoyment Ruge was playing the devious idiot who hides behind a facade of intimidation. Perlmann’s heart thumped in his throat. When Silvestri made a dry remark and then, with a swift movement of his tongue, made his cigarette disappear into his mouth, Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice cracked with laughter. Perlmann didn’t wait to hear what Millar, who was just getting a breath of fresh air, would say. As if anaesthetized he left, asked Giovanni for the key to his room and hobbled hastily, toes aching, upstairs.
He put on the chain, took off his painful shoes in the dark and fell back on the bed. Immediately the sentences started circling in his head, sentences spoken over dinner and on the veranda a moment before, sentences about the prize, about Princeton, about lazy Spanish professors, about forgotten homework. They kept returning, those sentences, as persistent as an echo that refused to die away or come to an end.
Perlmann was all too familiar with these tormenting circles of sentences, that compulsion to cling to sentences that had been uttered, and every time he was sucked into that wake, he felt as if he had spent the bulk of his life listening like this to sentences that had injured or frightened him. Agnes had suffered from the fact that he would sometimes turn up days, even weeks later with such a sentence and lend it a weight, a drama it had never had – just because he had been chewing away at it for so long, on walks or during hours of sleeplessness. Often she could hardly remember having said anything of the kind. That, in turn, struck him as mockery and made him helplessly furious. He was embittered. He had felt abandoned by everybody and crept away. Agnes told him how dangerous this memory for sentences was, how inhibited it could make you, so that you no longer dared to say anything spontaneous, if the thing you had said was then placed on the scales and later held up in front of you like a crime. He had seen that. This time the insight had helped. But the next time he had fallen right into the trap all over again.
He sat up and turned on the light. Tomorrow morning, at the first work session in the veranda, he would have to act as director. He would have to do that with skill and understanding, to see to it that his own contribution was made as late as possible. To do that, he needed a clear and rested mind. But with the darkness the sentences would come back, too.