‘Guess what – it worked!’ said Kirsten. ‘Admittedly, Lasker frowned at first and fiddled with his bow tie even more than usual. Luckily, Martin was there. But then when I plucked apart one after another of those theses of unity, the old man suddenly looked attentive and flicked through the text. I shifted into gear and got cheekier and cheekier. I even attacked the claim that elements of one story are echoed in the other. And at last, even though it wasn’t in my notes, I went so far as to say that the romanticism in the two stories was very different. I stumbled a bit there. But in the end there was a lot of applause, and then Lasker said in that grouchy tone of his: “Quite clever, Fräulein Perlmann, quite clever.” Incredible: Fräulein Perlmann! He’s the only one in miles who could still get away with something like that. But the comment, I’ve learned in the meantime, was huge praise coming from him. Imagine, the great Lasker! Dad, I’m quite high!’
She was talking like a waterfall, and it was only towards the end that he remembered the presentation had been about Faulkner’s The Wild Palms.
‘Aren’t you glad?’ she asked, when he didn’t reply.
‘Yes, yes, of course I congratulate you on your success,’ he said woodenly, and even before he had finished the sentence he found himself in a strange panic: for the first time in his life he couldn’t find the right tone with his daughter.
‘That sounded very formal,’ she said uncertainly.
‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ he replied and cursed his awkwardness.
She gave an audible jolt and found her way back to her cheerful tone. ‘When will you be ready with your presentation? I mean your lecture?’
‘The middle of next week.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Thursday.’
‘How long do your sessions actually last?’
‘Three or four hours.’
‘God, that’s twice as long as a seminar. And you have to talk all that time?’
‘Well…’ he said so quietly that she couldn’t hear him.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is there anything wrong? You sound so far away.’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing, Kitty.’
‘You haven’t called me that in ages.’
Perlmann felt his face falling. ‘Sleep well,’ he said quickly and hung up. Then he buried his head in the pillow. Only after almost an hour did he get undressed and turn out the light.
Tomorrow. I’ll have to do it tomorrow. The hours of the next day stretched out in his mind until he saw a long, silent expanse of time ahead of him, turning increasingly into a ramrod straight, wonderfully broad and empty road along which one travelled in shimmering heat towards the blurred outlines of an ochre horizon.
18
Shortly after six he woke with the certainty that he had to travel home straight away and convince himself that not everything he had written so far had been fraudulent. Without showering he slipped into his clothes, made sure that he had passport, money and the key to the apartment, and crept out of his room like a fugitive.
Giovanni had been dozing; now he looked at him like a ghost and misdialled twice before he got through to the taxi company. It was only when he was sitting in the back of the car that Perlmann noticed how exhausted he was. He stretched out against the back of the seat, and after a while he remembered the dream that had held him imperceptibly in its clutches. The most prominent and oppressive thing about it was the rubbing of his sweaty thumb on the little slate with the wooden frame – a movement that stuck to him like a physical stain. Again and again he wiped out his incorrect conversions from Réaumur to Fahrenheit and stared at the blackboard which, from the front row, he could almost have touched with his outstretched arm.
‘Who hasn’t got an answer?’ yelled the man with the bulbous nose and the open-necked shirt. Perlmann kept his hand down and stopped breathing, while his heart beat deafeningly – until it suddenly stopped beating when the man’s wrinkled arm entered his field of vision from behind and his short, knobby fingers reached for his empty slate.
Perlmann straightened and asked the driver for a cigarette. What the teacher had drilled into him with a smile of relish had been a proverb. But he couldn’t call it to mind.
When he stepped into the airport departure lounge it was a quarter past seven. The first flight to Frankfurt left at a quarter to nine. He bought cigarettes and drank a coffee. Then, as he waited to buy a ticket, he suddenly felt vulnerable because he had nothing to read.
The plane rose into the bright sky, and if you half-closed your eyes, that brilliance merged with the silver gleam of the wing. When the stewardess brought newspapers, Perlmann suddenly felt as if he had woken from the nightmare of the hotel and returned to the normal world. He greedily read the newspaper, and for a while – behind his reading, in a sense – he managed to pretend that it was all over and he was flying home for good. But as soon as the plane dipped into the blanket of clouds, which he noticed only now, this comforting illusion collapsed, and what remained was the thought that he was now wasting the whole last day that he could have spent writing, and that he was wasting it on a trip that couldn’t have been more pointless.
The landscape that opened up below the clouds was covered with a blanket of snow. He hadn’t expected that, and his first impulse was to want to stop the plane and turn round. He forgot to fasten his seat belt for landing, and was told off by a brusque stewardess. When the engines stopped with a whistle, he would have liked to stay in his seat, as if he had arrived at the tram terminus.
When he passed the shop with the books and magazines in the big hall, his eye fell on the name leskov. He gave a start like someone who is suddenly caught in bright spotlights while carrying out some forbidden operation in the dark. The cover was a detail of a painting showing the Palace Quay in St Petersburg, seen from the Peter and Paul Fortress, with the Neva in the foreground. They had stood at the spot chosen by the painter as the most favorable, he and Leskov, and it seemed to Perlmann as if it really must have been precisely the same place. It was there that Perlmann had, against his will, told Leskov about Agnes, while the cold almost took his breath away.
He excitedly opened the book and read the titles of the short stories. He didn’t say a word about this. Then, holding the book irresolutely in his hand and making his first attempt to get over his surprise, Perlmann finally noticed: the author was, of course, Nikolai Leskov, whose work he had not yet read, but whom he knew as a famous name in Russian literature. Annoyed with himself, he set the book back down. As if someone whose books are translated and sold here would have Vassily Leskov’s material concerns!
But he wasn’t, in fact, annoyed about his thoughtlessness. What enraged him more and more with every step towards the exit was the excitement that he had felt at the sight of the name. As if he had somehow injured Vassily Leskov with his translation. Why had he felt as if he had been caught?
He stepped through the automatic sliding door, out into the bitterly cold air, and almost collided with the dean of his faculty.
‘Herr Perlmann! I thought you were in the warm south! And instead here you are wearing your summer clothes in our premature cold snap, and shivering! Has something happened?’
‘What could have happened?’ Perlmann laughed irritably. ‘I just have a small thing to attend to here. I’ll be back down there this evening.’
‘By the way, there are mutterings about you being invited to Princeton. Allow me to congratulate you. Some of that glory will rub off on the faculty, too!’