Giorgio Silvestri held one knee braced against the edge of the table and balanced on the back legs of his chair. He let his left arm dangle backwards, and rested his right on the arm, a cigarette between his long, slender fingers. Un po’ stravagante, Angelini had called him. When he started speaking now, with a voice that was soft but, in spite of its strong accent, very confident, his white hand tirelessly moved with its cigarette, emphasizing certain things, casting others in doubt or making them seem vague. If one listened to schizophrenic patients, he said, the usual expectations with regard to coherence were disappointed. But the shifts in meaning and instances of conceptual incoherence obeyed a logic; there wasn’t mere chaos. He wanted to use his time here to write up his collected clinical material on this thesis. He asked for a late date, as all his work in the hospital had delayed him.
Perlmann picked up the chalk. He has a sound reason. I don’t. And the decent thing would be to offer him the last date. But then I wouldn’t even have a whole three weeks, so it’s quite impossible. He put Silvestri’s name down for Thursday and Friday of the fourth week. Even before he turned back to the others, he felt Brian Millar’s gaze resting on him. Again the American held his arms folded and his head tilted on one side. His thin lips twitched, and Perlmann was sure that the question was about to come. He could have slapped himself for not expecting this.
‘Of course you can take the last two days,’ he said to Silvestri, and drew an arrow across to the fifth week.
‘I’d like to leave it open, if that’s OK,’ Silvestri said.
So for safety’s sake I’ve got to put myself down for the Thursday of the fourth week. The others have to get my text by the previous Tuesday at the latest. That means I’ve still got exactly twenty days. Perlmann put a cigarette between his lips when he had sat down. He was horrified to see the hand that held the match trembling, and immediately brought his arm up and held his wrist with the other hand.
Achim Ruge, who was next in line, took out a huge, red-and-white checked handkerchief, clumsily unfolded it, took off his glasses and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. That suddenly brought the room problem back to Perlmann’s consciousness. The thought of it was the last thing he needed now. He pushed it powerfully away from him, but felt an additional anxiety rise up. Ruge took off his jacket and sat there in his ill-cut shirt, with rubber bands on the upper arms to shorten the sleeves. Stuffy. He’s the stuffiest person I know. And he’s straight, straight to the bone. Maybe it isn’t even the case that I have the most to fear from Millar and von Levetzov. Maybe this Achim Ruge, because of his stuffiness, his straightness, is even more dangerous. It wasn’t unthinkable, Perlmann thought, that von Levetzov would creep away from academia for a while – to a woman, perhaps, or because of an addiction to gambling. Rumours were never entirely a matter of chance. Accordingly, he might not be so hard on Perlmann – at least there would be a certain thoughtfulness about his condemnation. And Millar too had a certain straight quality, but it was the athletic straightness of an American who could sometimes go off the rails. Where Sheila was concerned, for example. In the case of Ruge, on the other hand, who knew nothing but his laboratory and his computer, any dropping off was unimaginable, and for that reason his judgment was likely to be ruthless and devastating.
Perlmann tried to protect himself with contempt. He stared at the rubber bands and did everything he could to see Ruge as a stiff who was only worth laughing at. And here he was assisted by Ruge’s horrible English accent, which sounded like a caricature. He automatically expected Ruge to make grammatical mistakes. But it didn’t happen. On the contrary, Ruge had a perfect command of English, and used words and phrases which Perlmann understood, certainly, but which were not actively at his disposal. His carefully constructed contempt faltered. Ruge’s presence seemed even more threatening to him than it had before, and again Perlmann used his hands to erect a shield in front of his eyes.
Before she started talking, Evelyn Mistral put on a pair of glasses with a delicate matte silver frame. She had put up her hair, and in spite of the skewed T-shirt under her cinnamon-colored jacket she looked older than yesterday: an academic, the red elephant doesn’t suit her at all today. All of a sudden she was quite alien to him – in fact, as a reader, as a worker, she’s an opponent I have to be wary of. Perlmann tried to hide and made one last desperate attempt to remember a subject that he knew something about. After her it’s my turn. But then he heard her bright voice, which sounded tense and harassed. Her feet under the table slipped out of her red shoes and back in again. She propped herself with her arms on the table, before changing position again a moment later. Instead of merely outlining her theme she constantly justified her work and talked for longer than necessary. After a while Perlmann felt that her tension had passed into his body, as if he could take it away from her. He thought he had to defend her against the faces of the others, even though there wasn’t a hint of criticism to be seen in them, merely a patronizing benevolence.
And then, all of a sudden, she had finished, took her glasses off and leaned back with her arms folded. Perlmann felt as if the veranda were filling up with an intoxicating silence, and time seemed only to want to go on flowing when he had started talking. He felt for his cigarettes, touched the pack and discovered that it was empty. With his hand still on the box his eye drifted above Silvestri’s head and out and beyond to the sea, to check that the world, the real world, was much bigger than this hateful room, where he was now encircled by all the people whom he had assembled here only because he had wanted to accompany Agnes on her photographic journey through Italy in winter.
Silvestri grinned, and he picked up his pack of Gauloises and threw it to Perlmann in a high arc all the way across the room. Still half-immersed in his attempt to hide in his own gaze and escape unnoticed into the light, Perlmann raised his arm and confidently caught the box. Even though that confidence seemed to issue not from himself as such, but only from his body, which he had been trying to leave behind as a decoy, it gave him back a little of his confidence. He thanked Silvestri with a nod and put one of the unfiltered cigarettes between his lips. What I say now will be completely random.
At the first drag the sharp smoke took his breath away, and he couldn’t help coughing. He heard Silvestri laughing. Perlmann hid for a while behind his cough and finally, after wiping his weeping eyes with his handkerchief, looked around.
‘I’m working on a text about the connection between language and memory,’ he said. He was both relieved and shocked by the calm in his voice. It was something, he went on, that had interested him for many years. Too rarely, he thought, did his discipline investigate how language was interwoven with the various forms of experience. And in this respect it was precisely the experience of time that had received special treatment. It was an unorthodox theme for a linguist, he added with a smile that felt like a strenuous piece of facial gymnastics. But he also understood his stay here as an opportunity to go in alternative directions.