He was glad when an elderly, dwarfish man asked him for a light. For a moment he was tempted to escape into a conversation with him, but then he was repelled by the man’s permanently open mouth with its swelling, protruding tongue. Perlmann pulled his face into a painful smile and walked back to the front, where he stepped up slowly, almost in slow motion, to the railing, supporting himself on outstretched arms and closed his eyes.
The third possibility was one that he had not, until that moment, dared to capture in an explicit thought. Hitherto it had been present to him only in the form of a dark, impenetrable sensation, from which he had turned hastily away whenever it had appeared on the edge of his consciousness. Because it was a sensation – he felt that very clearly whenever it touched him – that emanated a terrible sense of menace, and merely to pursue its precise content was a sense of danger. And so it seemed to him a tremendous effort. It was a summoning of courage that he thought he felt physically now that he looked this possibility in the face for the first time: the possibility of presenting the translation of Leskov’s text as his own.
It was as if a treacherous poison were spreading through him when he allowed this desperate thought to unfold before him in all its clarity. It hurt to experience himself as someone who could in all seriousness consider such a thought. It was a dry pain, free of self-pity, and all the more horrific for that reason. What happened there, he sensed with an alertness in which all self-reassurance burned away, was a deep incision in his life, an irrevocable, incurable break with the past and the start of a new computation of time.
None of his colleagues would be able to discover the deception, even if the Russian text were by some improbable coincidence to fall into their hands. For them a Russian text was nothing more than a closed typeface, an ornament. And besides, none of them knew Leskov. No one knew his address. All they had heard was the name ‘St Petersburg’. And last of all, none of them had the slightest reason to make contact with this unknown, obscure Russian, who was a nobody in professional circles, and thus provoke the threat of discovery by Leskov himself. Later, if the works were to be published, Perlmann could withdraw the paper and replace it with one of his own. If necessary he could also delay the printing. He would publish the volume. Aside from his own printout there would be only seven copies of the bogus text, and it would be respected when he expressly asked that the text should not be distributed further, as it was only the first, provisional version, an experiment. If they then heard nothing more about its further development, saw no further versions and instead read an entirely new text by him, the others would at last set the paper aside. It would be forgotten, and grow yellow and dusty on a shelf or in a cupboard, until eventually it fell victim to a clearing operation like the one that everyone undertook sooner or later in their own flood of paper, and was destroyed.
So he could risk it. And from the point of view of scholarly esteem he would be in a much better position than in the two other cases. Admittedly, Leskov’s text was wayward and in some places bold; one could even call it eccentric. But in the discussion Perlmann could refer to the literature of memory research which had not been accessible to Leskov himself, and one could also characterize the paper as a conceptual one, a broad-brushstroke outline, and thus basically precisely appropriate to this occasion. Millar and Ruge, this was fairly clear, would screw up their noses at so much speculation. But it was certainly possible that the others would find the text interesting. That much was certainly true of Evelyn Mistral. But even a man like von Levetzov had recently taken notice of the subject. Perlmann, it might appear, was trying something new, something that perhaps was no longer linguistics, but which was imaginative and provocative. Something was happening, developing in Perlmann’s work, and secretly they might even be a bit envious of his courage.
Perlmann felt ill, and he threw the cigarette he had just lit into the water. He was relieved that they were now entering Genoa harbor and there were some things to look at: the crew throwing the ropes, the steaming water spraying from the bow and, further away, the big ships and the cranes whose arms glided over the tall stacks of colorful containers. When the family from before was suddenly standing next to him and the children were loudly calling out the things they could see, Perlmann wasn’t bothered, quite the contrary. He fled his thoughts and wished he could step outside his innermost depths and lose himself in things, dissolve himself entirely in the stones of the quay wall, in the wooden poles against which the ship was rubbing, in the cobbles of the street, in all the things that were simply just there and entire unto themselves.
There was nothing to keep him on dry land. The lack of any rocking movement gave him a feeling of imprisonment, even though he had the chance of going wherever he wanted in this city on the slope, which in the noon autumn light had something about it of a desert city, something oriental. The ship didn’t get back until a quarter past three, but there was a tour of the harbor every hour, and the people for the one o’clock trip were just boarding. Perlmann was glad that it was late in the year and the two seats next to him were free. When he let his arm dangle over the side, he could almost touch the dark green, almost black water. Pools of oil and rubbish drifted past, at the clearer spots one could make out seaweed, and sometimes a rusty chain used to moor a ship.
He gave a start when the loudspeaker was turned on with a click, and an unnecessarily loud woman’s voice greeted the passengers, first in Italian, then in English, German, French and Spanish and at last in a language that must have been Japanese. It was idiotic, but he hadn’t thought about that, as if he were on a sightseeing boat for the first time in his life. It was going to be an hour of torture: all that information, all those explanations that interested him not in the slightest, and everything in six languages. And he urgently needed to think. Peace and concentration had never been as important as they were now.
The voice from the loudspeaker, shrill and bored, began with details about the size of the harbor and the volume of its goods shipments, then a tape played the same information in the other languages, all women’s voices, only the Spanish text was spoken by a man. Perlmann covered his ears, the repetitions were unbearable. That he had been so stupid as to take this trip struck him as a sign that there was no way out of his plight. It was like a harbinger of inescapable doom.
They passed by the first big ships, their curved, black bows loomed far into the air, lifeboats were fastened along the railings, and single sailors waved. Hidden behind another vessel, a black ship’s wall suddenly appeared, bearing the word leningrad in white, Cyrillic script. Perlmann turned hot and cold. He gulped and felt everything convulsing inside him. At that moment he desperately wished the letters were completely alien to him, just white lines that provided nothing to read and nothing to understand. That they were so familiar and self-evident to him was a source of unhappiness; the actual reason, it seemed to him, for his desperate situation.
Agnes, he was quite sure, would have advised him to take the first path. Of course, she would have understood that it was unpleasant for him; but she would have seen the whole thing in far less dramatic terms than he did. It was, she might have said, as if she had had to tell the agency: ‘Sorry, but over the past few weeks I haven’t come up with any usable shots.’ That was all, a temporary crisis, no reason to speak of a loss of face.
But Agnes had worked for an agency in which everyone was very cooperative, almost chummy. She hadn’t known the academic world, with its atmosphere of competition and mutual suspicion, she had just known it from his stories, and there had often been a bad atmosphere between them when he thought he sensed she was mutely reproaching him for an excessive and disproportionate sensitivity in such matters.