At that moment the waiter’s black arm appeared with the silver tray, on which there lay a telegram.
‘For you, Dottore,’ said the waiter when Perlmann turned his head towards him. ‘It just arrived.’
Kirsten, he thought suddenly, Kirsten has had an accident, and that thought suddenly filled him so completely that all the things that had preoccupied and tormented him over the last few days and hours seemed to have been erased. With trembling fingers he tore open the telegram and unfolded the sheet. He took in the text with a single glance: Arriving Monday Genoa 15.05 Alitalia 00432. Grateful to be picked up. Vassily Leskov.
For one or two seconds he didn’t understand. The message was too unexpected and too far away from the thought about Kirsten that had wiped everything out for a moment. Then, when the meaning of the words on the glued white strip seeped into his consciousness, the world around him became colorless and quiet, and time froze. All his strength fled, and he felt the weight of his body as never before. So that’s what it feels like when everything’s over, he thought, and after a while a further thought formed in the hollow, dull interior of his mind: I’ve been waiting for this for years.
He must have sat there motionless for a long time, because when Evelyn Mistral pushed an ashtray under his hand and he looked up, he saw a long piece of white ash fall from the cigarette. She was looking at him with an expression of uncertain concern, when she pointed at the telegram and asked, ‘Bad news?’
For a moment Perlmann was tempted to tell that open face, that bright, warm voice everything, regardless of the consequences. And if, when she pushed the ashtray at him, she had touched him with her hand, he thought later, that was actually what would have happened. So unbearable was the feeling of isolation that spread within him like an ice-cold poison.
But then, for the first time since the waiter had held out the silver tray in front of him, he saw the expressions on the faces of the others. They weren’t mistrustful expressions, faces that displayed suspicious feelings. Rather they were mild expressions, with a hint of curiosity. Not unfriendly faces, on the contrary, even Millar’s eyes seemed to hold a willingness to be sympathetic. And yet they were eyes that were all directed at him, as they had been before on that bus. Perlmann felt nausea welling up within him, he got to his feet, stuffed the telegram into his jacket pocket and ran out across the lobby to the toilet, where he closed himself in and threw up in quick, violent spasms.
When his retching ebbed and only trickles of burning gastric acid ran from his mouth and nose, he went out to the wash basin, rinsed his mouth and wiped his face with his handkerchief. The expensive wash basins of gleaming marble, the fashionable faux-antique taps of flashing brass and the huge mirrored wall were at that point unbearable. He avoided catching his own eye, and locked himself in a stall again to have a think.
Going back to the table was unimaginable. Admittedly, it would look very peculiar to the others, and border on impertinence if he didn’t come back after his abrupt departure. The most varied conjectures would be made about the apparently dramatic content of the telegram. But now that complete social ostracism lay ahead this was no longer of any importance. The only unpleasant thing was – and on the edge of his consciousness Perlmann was amazed that such a thing could preoccupy him at such a moment – that his cigarettes and the red lighter that Kirsten had given him in the train were still over there on the table.
His thoughts went no further than these banal reflections. There was an impenetrable grey wall there, and a curious feeling of inanition. Never in his whole life had it been more important to think and plan clearly. But he faced this task like someone who had never come into contact with such intellectual activities; like someone who hadn’t even mastered the ABC of any sort of planning that extended beyond the next moment. Body and emotion had reacted immediately; thought, on the other hand, was sluggish and wouldn’t move from the spot. He felt how hard it was. Sitting on the toilet seat, he stared at the white door in front of his nose and registered that there was no graffiti on it. He felt the burning aftertaste of vomit on his gums and crumpled up the wet handkerchief in his fist. When two men came in and went on talking in Italian at the urinal, he involuntarily made his breathing very shallow and didn’t move. He could only grasp a single thought, and it repeated itself at increasingly short intervals, like an accelerating echo: A day and a half. I have a day and a half left.
28
When the two men had gone, Perlmann left the stall, checked through a chink in the door that none of his colleagues was in the hall, and hurried back up to his room. Sitting on the edge of the bed he reread the crumpled telegram. Leskov had sent it. He could see on the white strip at the top right: yesterday afternoon just before four o’clock in St Petersburg. The other details, recorded in a code, were not quite clear to him. But plainly the message had been transmitted via Milan and Genoa to Santa Margherita, and had arrived shortly after half-past seven. If the connection had been quicker and the telegram had been brought to me before Signora Morelli started copying this morning, I wouldn’t have become a fraudster, and wouldn’t now face professional annihilation. He took another good look: it was three minutes to four when the message had been dispatched in St Petersburg. Perlmann’s ship had been supposed to set off from Genoa at a quarter past three, but in the end it had been almost half-past. Three minutes to four – the storm had already been raging. By then it was already clear that he would come. It was already clear. It was already a fact.
That Leskov was stuck in St Petersburg because his exit permit had been refused and his mother was sick had been axiomatic in all of Perlmann’s calculations. These two independent obstacles had given him the impression that they were insurmountable, so that he hadn’t even begun to consider the possibility of Leskov’s arrival. And now, through some unexpected concatenation of circumstances, Leskov had been able to free himself after all, and everything was collapsing. And yet the information in Leskov’s letters had sounded so definitive, so immutable.
Perlmann’s emptied stomach convulsed painfully. He went to the bathroom and slowly drank a glass of lukewarm water. As he did so his eye fell on the pack of sleeping pills. He knew precisely how many were left. Nonetheless, he took the box over to the red armchair and checked: seven. That’s not enough, not even with alcohol. If my doctor hadn’t recently been on holiday, I’d have had enough by now and I’d be able to do it. He went to the window, opened it and stopped, as he usually did, two steps behind the balustrade. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cool night air, and felt his stomach cramp slowly easing as a slight dizziness set in. He heard cars pulling up down below, voices moving across the terrace to the flight of steps, laughter, the Saturday evening outside guests driving off.