‘I see,’ Laura Sand said, and leaned back. Millar took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It was the first time Perlmann had seen his face without glasses. It was a surprisingly vulnerable face with eyes that had a boyish, almost childlike expression, and for that brief moment, before Millar put his glasses back on, Perlmann wanted to have nothing more to do with his planned attack, but the flash of Millar’s glasses had closed once more over his face, which had looked so defenseless a moment before, and Perlmann seized his moment.
‘Tell me, Brian,’ he began with deceptive mildness, ‘isn’t there a bracket missing from the fourth formula? Right at the beginning, I mean. Otherwise the domain of quantification is too small.’
Millar darted him a quick glance, pressed his glasses firmly on to his nose and frowned as he flicked through the pages.
‘Jenny, Jenny, baby,’ he muttered with ostentatious irritation, ‘why always the formulae? She’s the best secretary in the world,’ he added, glancing round at everyone, ‘but she has a block with formulae. Many thanks, Phil.’
Perlmann waited for him to make a note. ‘One other small thing,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘As it stands, formula ten makes no sense. The deduction isn’t right either.’
His whole chest becoming a soundbox for his heartbeat was something he had never experienced before. Perlmann gripped his knee, tensed his arms and braced himself against the power of his roaring pulse. Millar’s brief, slightly flickering glance was unmistakeable: this was too much, particularly when it came from someone capable of asking such a simple question.
‘Quite frankly, Phil,’ he began imperiously, ‘I can’t see anything there that isn’t completely in order.’
‘I can,’ said Ruge. He scribbled something on the paper and grinned at Millar. ‘There’s a quantifier missing in the middle.’
Now von Levetzov too picked up his pen. His face twitched with a mixture of delight and malice. Millar ran his biro along the line and faltered.
‘Hang on… oh yes, OK, there it is,’ he murmured. He added the sign and made another note on his piece of paper. ‘Jenny, baby, we’re going to have to have a serious talk,’ he said as he wrote, and then looked at Perlmann. ‘Of course, I’d have spotted it in the galleys. But still, thanks.’
His polite smile was like a contrasting background designed to make his humorless, unforgiving face stand out. It wasn’t Jenny. It wasn’t a typo.
Afterwards, on their way through the drawing room, Millar pushed his way next to Perlmann.
‘That question of yours,’ he said, ‘I have the feeling there was something I didn’t understand. Perhaps we should sit down together.’
‘Absolutely,’ Perlmann replied, and afterwards he had the strange feeling of having said it in a gruff way that was alien to him – almost as if he were Millar.
Was he happy with the new room? Signora Morelli asked him as she handed him the key and the first post from Frau Hartwig.
‘Yes, very much so,’ he replied. He wished her question had sounded less businesslike; he would have liked his sense of complicity with her, which he had felt the previous day, to have lasted a little longer.
In his post there were two lecture invitations and a request for a reference from a student. Perlmann saw the student in front of him, sitting on the edge of his chair with his hands between his knees, looking at him through his thick glasses. The university courtyard was filled with the sluggish, hot silence of an early August afternoon. For more than two hours he had talked through his unsuccessful homework with him. The boy had filled half an exercise book with jagged, frantic handwriting. Then, in the doorway, after stammering an effusive goodbye, he had suddenly bent double, and it had taken Perlmann a moment to work out that this was a deep bow, a minion from another century taking his leave. Leaning against the closed door he had stood there for a long time and considered his office, which he had now been using for seven years: the beautiful desk, the elegant chair behind it, the lamps, the seating area. All of it far too expensive, he had thought, feeling like an interloper in the office of someone who actually did something.
He rang Frau Hartwig and dictated the reference to her, recommending the student for a grant. When she read the text back to him, he was startled by all his unfounded praise. He didn’t dare take it back, and moved on to the letters declining to give the lectures. Yes, he said finally, there was a hint of summer left in the air.
‘You can be glad that you’re down there,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘The first autumn storms have started up here. Some people can’t suppress their envious remarks. You can imagine which.’
As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Perlmann sat down in the red armchair and picked up Leskov’s paper. But he soon lowered it again. You are going to write something for Italy, aren’t you? Frau Hartwig had said at the end of July. Perlmann had only nodded and continued with his business at the shelf. She had, incidentally, postponed her holiday, she explained a few days later. To just before Christmas. After that he had only gone to the office when she wasn’t there, and left her instructions on tape. In late September she had hesitantly asked if she could take two weeks’ holiday, or whether he needed her. ‘Just go,’ he had replied, and by way of disguise he had turned the relief in his voice into enthusiasm for the island of Elba, with which he associated nothing at all apart from Napoleon.
Now there were several pages in Leskov’s paper in which he engaged with the objection that we remember many episodes that we never put in story form. How then could he claim that language played such a key role in the episodic memory?
Leskov’s reply was expressed in eccentric terms, Perlmann thought, but basically the elements of his train of thought were familiar to him, and suddenly the translation started going faster than ever. When he grasped a sentence literally at first glance, he felt as if he had at that moment forgotten it was a Russian sentence – it had yielded its meaning to him with so little resistance. With breathless delight he went on reading. The truth of Leskov’s thesis was irrelevant; the main thing was comprehension. In fact, he noticed, many of the words he had copied out were now in his head. His confidence was growing from one paragraph to the next, and now all of a sudden he also had an incredibly lucky hand when it came to opening the right pages in the dictionary. It bordered on clairvoyance. When he finally had to turn on the light, he was already on page 20.
He could get cigarettes from the place Sandra had bought them from yesterday. Sandra. The promised stamps from Germany. He got Frau Hartwig’s envelope out of the waste-paper basket and tore the stamps from it. Then he left the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.
He was late today, the proprietress joked as she brought him the chronicle. He would have to choose something from the menu. Perlmann opened the book at the year when his father hadn’t awoken from his lunchtime nap. The Decca record company had, after listening to demo tapes, reached the view that The Beatles had no future, and turned down the opportunity to produce them. Antonio Segni became Italian president. It was a name that meant nothing to Perlmann, and he read the biographical outline to the smallest detail. Adolf Eichmann was hanged.