He went to the bathroom and saw in front of him the long look that the doctor had given him before writing out the prescription for twenty strong sleeping tablets. He’s a decent man and a good doctor, but he can’t understand someone not being able to sleep, he’s not familiar with it. Perlmann took half a tablet, certainly no more than that. Then he set the alarm for seven. The session was due to begin at nine. In the joking banter surrounding this question, Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov had won out over the others, even if it was still, as far as Millar’s biological clock was concerned, the middle of the night.
Perlmann turned out the light and waited for the tablets to take effect. Down on the coast road a motorbike passed at full speed. Otherwise it was silent. Suddenly, Ruge blew his nose in the next room: three trumpet blasts. It was as if there were no wall between them. Ruge seemed to fill even Perlmann’s room with his physical presence. All of a sudden everything was right in front of Perlmann’s eyes again: the mirror-image desk, Ruge sitting at it with his great peasant head and watery grey eyes behind his wired-up glasses, and on the other side Millar with his Bach.
Perlmann got to his feet and put his ear to the wall. Nothing. Back in bed he ran once again through the possible explanations for a change of room: the bed, my back; they couldn’t check that, they would just have to believe me. He relaxed and felt the first hint of numbness in his lips and fingertips.
Now the sentences couldn’t get at him any more. And Ruge could sit at his desk playing the piano as much as he wanted. From tomorrow there would be no one on this side. Ruge shook with laughter, gurgled, burped and had to gasp for air. His grand piano came inexorably closer. It expanded, while Perlmann’s piano shrank like melting cellophane. Now it was Millar who was playing. The Well-Tempered Clavier, I tell you, it’s boring, even if you find that shocking. Millar was standing by the ochre-colored grand piano, and while Evelyn Mistral squeaked with pleasure he bowed uninterruptedly until he was finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.
‘I just wanted to ask you quickly if you got there all right,’ said Kirsten. A thin layer of numbness lay on Perlmann’s face, and his tongue was furry and heavy.
‘Wait a moment,’ he murmured, and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where he let cold water run over his face. His hand tingled as he picked up the receiver again.
‘Sorry if I woke you,’ said Kirsten. ‘I’m just so used to us calling each other at this time of day.’
‘That’s OK,’ he said, and was glad that it didn’t sound too washed-out.
The business with the shared house had sorted itself out nicely, she told him; only one woman was a bit difficult. ‘And just imagine: today I signed up for my first presentation. About Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, the one with the double narrative. And then it turned out that it’s my turn in fourteen days’ time! I feel quite different when I think about it. I hope you don’t have to sit at the front as well!’
Perlmann was monosyllabic, and repeatedly collecting spittle against his dry tongue. Yes, he said at last, everything’s fine; the hotel and the weather, too.
‘And did you bring your Russian things with you?’ she asked.
One half-hour passed after the other, and Perlmann still couldn’t get back to sleep. In the middle of a poisoned weariness there was still an island of dry alertness that wouldn’t go out. At half-past one he phoned reception and for safety’s sake asked to be woken at seven. Then he took the second half of the sleeping pill.
4
He was still enveloped in leaden weariness when his alarm call came, from a long way off, it seemed to him. He mumbled grazie and hung up. Immediately afterwards the alarm clock rang. Sitting on the edge of the bed he bent over and covered his face with both hands. He had the feeling of having slept deeply in the sense that a span of total oblivion lay between the current moment and the events of the previous day. Nonetheless, he felt insecure, as if we were walking on very thin ice, and something was pushing against his eyes as if someone had poured lead into his sinuses. He cursed the sleeping pill.
After he had misdialled and ended up talking to the laundry, he ordered coffee from room service. As he was waiting for the waiter, he stood in the cool air by the open window and watched as the lights went off over by Sestri Levante. Again a sunrise without any presence, the usual transparent blue seeping through the fine morning mist, but all as in a film seen too often, and this time separated from him by a wall of weariness and a throbbing headache.
He didn’t have the strength to protest when the waiter set a tray with a sumptuous breakfast down on the round table. He hastily gulped down three cups of coffee, took an aspirin and lit a cigarette. After the first few puffs he felt slightly dizzy, but the sensation was much weaker than the day before. Now music came out of Millar’s room: Bach. Perlmann went into the shower, where he shivered in spite of the hot water. Afterwards he drank the rest of the coffee. Now the cigarette only tasted bitter. Quarter to eight. From eight the others would be going to breakfast. It was enough if he appeared at about half-past. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to do with the time left to him except to wait for Millar to go to breakfast and the music to stop.
He picked up Leskov’s text. The first sentence after yesterday’s marks was difficult, and Perlmann relied on paper and pencil to make the convoluted construction clear to himself: I shall demonstrate that and in which sense it is by capturing our memories in words that we create these memories and thus our own experienced past in the first place. The music stopped, and a moment later Millar’s door clicked shut. Perlmann slowly drank the orange juice and ate one croissant, then another one. At breakfast down below he would only need to drink something. His headache was subsiding. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Creating the past by narrating memory stories – that seemed to be the idea. He excitedly looked in his suitcase for his black notebook. He no longer knew what, but that thought had something to do with his own notes.
The door to Ruge’s room clicked shut, and a few moments later Perlmann heard the sound of him blowing his nose, much more muted in the hotel corridor. Suddenly, Perlmann was painfully wide awake: he hadn’t prepared a single suggestion for the organization of his work over the coming weeks. He put the black notebook back. He couldn’t understand how he could have forgotten it, when he usually prepared everything in minute detail. If he had got up later and gone down to breakfast straight away, it might have occurred to him only when he stepped into the veranda. It was as if the fear split him deep within, and for one fleeting moment he had an idea what it must be like to lose yourself.
He quickly washed his face with cold water, thought for a moment about whether he should order some more coffee, then took his writing pad and pocket diary and sat down at the desk. No, Ruge wasn’t sitting opposite him now. And anyway, the wall was a wall and not a two-way mirror. His throbbing headache was back, and while he drew columns for the five weeks, with his other hand he gripped his forehead and pressed it as hard as if he wanted to crush it.
Seven blocks of two days in which they would assemble in the veranda to discuss each other’s current work. Three days a week, to have individual conversations or withdraw. That sounded like the correct dosage. Perlmann marked Monday and Tuesday as well as Thursday and Friday. He himself would take the last block. But even so he was left, he was horrified to see, with only three weeks, and not even a whole three, because the others each needed two or three days to read. He had at all costs to see to it that he made it into the last column, the one that had still been left blank, and in the lower half of it, so that he still had four weeks; that was the absolute minimum. That meant using any explanation to keep two half-weeks free. He looked at his watch: twenty-five to nine. He lit his third last cigarette. They’ll walk out on me during the session. The minutes passed inconsequentially. If Leskov had been able to come, the problem would only be half as big. He would have to be careful that he didn’t give himself away with his maneuvering.