Millar sat down and sought Perlmann’s eye. But Adrian von Levetzov had been preparing to spring for a long time, and immediately began to speak. Had he not curried favor with Millar, fifteen years his junior, by giving him an apologetic smile – Perlmann would have admired him. His questions and objections all hit home, and Perlmann wished that they had occurred to him, too. But it wasn’t the case. To think of these things you have to be right inside – as I am no longer inside. He felt a twinge of envy like the ones he had felt often before, as an ambitious student, when someone else was faster at formulating ideas that he should have been capable of producing himself; and for a moment he was annoyed by his former violence towards himself. But then something strange happened: all of a sudden he experienced these sensations as no longer belonging to him, to his present; they were only reminiscences, obsolete emotional reflexes from a time when academic work had not yet become alien to him. He was puzzled to feel the extent to which he had survived himself, and for a while, as silence fell around him, it felt like a great liberation. But then the voices of the others reached him again, and he was horrified to realize how far from them that inner development had taken him, and how menacing it was, particularly in this room, which he had feared since his arrival.
Before Perlmann was able to say something, Achim Ruge intervened in the debate. The contrast with von Levetzov’s exaggeratedly obliging manner could not have been greater. As a critic, there was something surly and blustering about him, and if he accompanied a reservation with his gurgling laugh it sounded almost scornful. He treated Millar, his contemporary, like everyone else, not without respect, but entirely without subservience, and nothing intimidated him. When Millar said rather sharply, in response to one of his objections, ‘Frankly, Achim, I just don’t see that,’ Ruge shot back with a grin, ‘Yes, I know,’ for which he was rewarded with laughter, which Millar endured with a sour smile that was supposed to look sporting.
But it was peculiar, Perlmann thought: coming from Ruge, there was nothing wounding about it at all. One simply couldn’t take umbrage at the style of the man with the bald head and the terrible Swabian accent, because through all his bluster his benevolence was discernible; there was a sense that his aggressiveness lacked the faintest trace of spite. Now that his loud nose-blowing had been evaded, and he would no longer have to imagine him sitting opposite him on the other side of the wall, Perlmann could accept this Achim Ruge. And, in fact, it was absurd to assume that his respectability and rectitude made him dangerous.
Laura Sand had put down her pen and was about to say something. But when she saw that everyone’s eyes were on Perlmann, she leaned back and reached for a cigarette. Perlmann looked across at Silvestri, but instead of finding support there, his gaze bounced off the tense expectation that lay in the darkly glittering eyes. There was no getting away now. The time had come.
What issued from his mouth were unobjectionable sentences, and their dragging tempo barely differed from the natural expression of reflectiveness. But in Perlmann’s head they thundered like hollow, meaningless sequences of sounds that came from somewhere or other and trickled through him like something alien, not unlike the quiet vibrations you feel on a train journey. That perception threatened to silence him before each next syllable, so that he constantly had to give himself a jolt to reach the next sentence – to produce the required minimum of sentences, so to speak. And then, all of a sudden, the internal pressure grew too great, and a quiet explosion followed, giving him a gambler’s courage.
‘Your critique of my work is the most enlightening, the most insightful thing that I have read in a very long time,’ he heard himself saying. ‘I find your objections completely convincing, and think they refute the whole of my proposal.’ He lapsed into laughter shaped by a feverish feeling of vertigo. ‘It’s a fabulous experience, being freed from a wrong idea. I can’t thank you enough for that! And I actually think your criticism is much more penetrating than you assume.’
And now, suddenly in full command of his powers, he conjured one argument after another from his hat, tearing into everything his name stood for, not resting before every last idea that he had ever come up with was finally swept away. He spoke from a sense of ludic inspiration whose bitterness he alone could taste, and accompanied each rhetorical lunge with a motion of his arm which, like the arc of a sower of seeds, had something at once dismissive and generous about it.
Millar was disconcerted, and the others also looked as if they had stepped through a door and fallen unexpectedly into a void. The first to regain his composure was von Levetzov.
‘Remarkable,’ he said, and it was apparent that his usual inner attitude towards Perlmann had suddenly ceased to seem appropriate, although he had not yet had time to construct a new one. ‘But don’t you think you might perhaps be going a little too far?’
And then he began to pick up the pieces and cobble them back together until a large part of Perlmann’s previous position was once more intact. Evelyn helped with this, and all at once Ruge’s chief concern seemed to be to convict Perlmann of reaching over-hasty conclusions. Everyone seemed relieved that a familiar kind of discussion was gradually resuming. Only every now and again did Perlmann feel a furtive glance upon him.
Millar had shaken off his torpor, and was talking about Perlmann almost as if he were absent. He had no evidence, but Perlmann could have sworn that Millar thought of his earlier remarks as revealing particularly foolhardy sarcasm, and felt he was being teased. Nothing could have been further from the truth. And yet: it would be hard to stop hatred arising between them on the basis of this misunderstanding.
Back in his room, Perlmann felt empty and drained, like an actor after a performance. Would they see it as a mere mood, or had he already turned himself irrevocably into an outsider with his orgy of self-criticism? Then there was the business of his supposed topic, and it wouldn’t be long until they discovered that he had switched rooms. What sort of an image would that create in their heads? Perlmann slipped into half-sleep, in which he heard someone knocking at the door, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until it was a hammering that seemed to come from a thousand fists. He pressed himself against the door, barricaded himself in with the wardrobe, and now he could hear the wood splintering under axe-blows. Millar’s teeth were first to appear – big, white teeth bursting with health – then the whole Millar in an admiral’s uniform, behind him Ruge’s giant head, from which his chuckles spilled as though from a doll, and from the darkness of the corridor came Evelyn Mistral’s voice, distorted into shrill, vulgar laughter.
Perlmann gave a start, and on his way to the bathroom he put the chain on the door, ashamed of his action. Later he stood by the open window, two steps behind the balustrade, and gazed out into the pouring rain. Without the southern light, the bay looked like an abandoned stage after a performance, or like a fairground in the early morning, when the lights are turned off – so sobering and shabby that one felt cheated and hungover. All of a sudden, on the public part of the beach, one could see above all the rubbish and the dirt, empty bottles and plastic bags, and now it was also striking that the blue changing rooms urgently needed a lick of paint.