‘So, on we go with this strange discipline,’ von Levetzov said cheerfully, and summed up the next text in a few sentences.
Perlmann was winning his battle against tiredness. It was a while before he had pulled what he had read the previous afternoon out from among his memories of the night; but then behind its tiredness his brain ran like a well-oiled mechanism, and he managed some contributions that largely determined the course of the session. Von Levetzov asked him several times to repeat his objection, and then took notes. Only Millar looked, while Perlmann was speaking, with ostentatious boredom through the window into the fog. Evelyn Mistral took off her glasses several times and listened to Perlmann with the expression of someone who is glad about someone else’s recovery from an illness. Every time he noticed that, he ended his contribution sooner than planned.
‘So, Perlmann, still working on your gay science?’ von Levetzov joked as he left.
Perlmann went to sleep as soon as he had crept under the covers. Kitty, holding the bear lispingly, asked him only questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The only thing he knew was that the grand piano wasn’t where it had always been. It wasn’t in Berlin either. There were only auditoriums there with masses of students, and when he came home and looked around the rooms for the grand piano, Agnes nodded incessantly and pulled open boxes of material for her own darkroom.
It was already dark when he woke up drenched in sweat. He would ideally have liked to stay in the shower for ever, and kept turning it back on so that the water ran over his face and distorted his view of the future. At last he sat in his dressing gown by the round table and let his eyes slide over the pages of the translation. He had forgotten that there was a whole series of gaps on the first thirty pages. He contentedly noted that the work on the later parts now made the open questions look quite simple. In the end he crossed out the marginal jotting sensory content? and made sure that it could no longer be deciphered.
Only the title was still missing. Formirovanie was formation. So: on the role of language in the formation of memories. Perlmann hesitated, looked up Rolle in his German-English Langenscheidt, and then replaced role with part. The whole thing sounded wooden, he thought, and also formation was actually too weak for the subject if one considered the radical theses of the texts. Had Leskov become frightened by his own courage? If one looked up formation, one found formirovanie and obrazovanie with the note (creation). Nonetheless, creation was unambiguously sozdanie or tvorenie; those were the words Leskov should have called upon here. The intricate, programmatic sentence that had caused too much trouble also included sozdavat’, after all. Perlmann sat there motionlessly for a while. Then he wrote in capital letters at the top edge: the personal past as linguistic creation. There was no room for his name.
To make further amends for yesterday, he set off for the dining room. Maria was still sitting in front of the screen in the office. When Perlmann saw her he stopped, teetered on his heels a few times and then went back up to his room. He irresolutely held the translation in his hands, half rolled it up and then opened it again. In the end he took it with him.
The others were now standing in the hall. He waved to them with the text and stepped into Maria’s office.
‘I thought you weren’t going to give me the text until Friday morning,’ said Maria.
‘Erm… this is… this isn’t actually it,’ stammered Perlmann, feeling his face burning.
‘Ah, so this is a different one,’ she said. ‘How industrious you all are!’ She flicked through it and suddenly paused. ‘There are a few lines in Italian here! Why did you cross them out?’
‘It… it was a sort of experiment,’ he said quickly with a dismissive gesture.
‘When do you need the text by?’ she asked as he turned to the door. ‘Because of Signor Millar, I mean.’
‘There’s no rush.’
She fastened the text together with a big paperclip, and held it away from herself. ‘Cute title,’ she smiled. ‘Where do you want your name? Over the title, under it, or only at the end of the text?’
‘No name, please.’ His per favore was out of place; not only was it superfluous, but it sounded suspicious to his ears. ‘The text is just for me,’ he added stiffly.
She rocked her head as if to say she didn’t think it was a good reason. ‘Va bene. As you wish. We can always add it. And what about the other text?’ she asked, when his hand was already on the door handle. ‘Will I have it by Friday morning?’
‘Yes,’ he said, without looking at her.
‘By the way, Phil,’ said Millar as Perlmann dipped his spoon into the soup, ‘about Maria: she said she’d have time to type something out for me by Thursday. But I thought it was a misunderstanding. She could hardly have typed your text in two days. And a moment ago I saw you bringing her your text. No problem. Jenny will just have to get down to it as soon as I’m back.’
The soup scalded Perlmann’s tongue and throat. ‘Erm… no, no, you can…’ he began, and then closed his eyes until the peak of pain had passed. He coughed and wiped the water from his eyes. ‘I mean… yes, thank you very much.’
Millar looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You OK?’ Perlmann nodded and had to rub his eyes again.
He was glad that every subsequent mouthful hurt. The pain was something that he could deal with while the others gossiped about a series of colleagues who had recently published something.
‘I noticed again today how precisely you read,’ von Levetzov suddenly said to him.
Perlmann let the ice cream melt on his tongue and swallowed it in small portions. He had been repelled by the way his mother, after his tonsil operation, had enjoyed playing the role of nurse.
‘Yesterday it almost looked as if he hated the whole subject,’ Ruge giggled, unashamedly licking the cream from his upper lip.
Perlmann thought of the cramped nursery with its floral wallpaper, and managed a vague smile.
‘By the way, there really is another wedding in our church on Sunday,’ said Evelyn Mistral when they were going upstairs together afterwards. ‘This time I went in. An unusual space. Just chains of colored lights. There’s something of the fairy tale about it. Shall we go on Sunday? Now you’ve finished your text?’
Perlmann said nothing.
‘Oh, well, let’s see,’ she went on and touched his arm. ‘You look as if you’ve been working solidly for the past few days. Get some sleep!’
She had already turned into her corridor when she suddenly came back. ‘Maria printed out a copy of my text for you this afternoon. It’s in your pigeonhole. Would you tell me what you think of it? Especially the thing we talked about in the café.’
‘Yes… of course,’ said Perlmann and turned round on the stairs.
Only now did he become aware that he hadn’t looked in his pigeonhole for days. Giovanni handed him a big stack of things. Laura Sand’s texts for Thursday were there as well, and two envelopes from Frau Hartwig.
‘A lot to read!’ grinned Giovanni, who had been flicking through a magazine. Perlmann walked in silence to the elevator.
As soon as he had set the papers down on his desk the telephone rang.