29
When Perlmann awoke, drenched in sweat and still quite dazed, it was half-past eight, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky as it had done on the previous two days, so that behind his numbness he managed to think for a tiny moment that it was only Friday morning and everything was still all right. Once it had slipped away, the illusion could not be repeated, and he walked slowly and unsteadily to the bathroom. Yesterday, showering had seemed to him like something that was no longer the fraudster’s due. This morning, after a night in which quite other things had passed through his mind, that feeling seemed obsolete, almost laughable. Under all that water the numbness fled, and the returning dream images gradually lost their power.
Nothing has happened yet, he thought again and again. I still have thirty hours left. His hunger repelled him. He really didn’t want to eat anything ever again. But that vexatious feeling had to be removed, so he ordered breakfast, even though the idea of meeting a waiter now was disagreeable. As he mechanically stuffed croissants down himself and drank cup after cup of coffee, it slowly dawned on him that there was one additional possibility he hadn’t thought of in the course of the previous night. He could stage a car accident in which he killed himself and dragged Leskov to his death as well.
Initially, he didn’t dare imagine how that might happen in any detail; at first the important thing was to resist the thought in its abstract form. He felt his breath racing, and saw his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette. And yet he was amazed how little resistance that new thought encountered within him. It was, after all, a murder. But that struck him as oddly irrelevant. The main thing was that everything then would be darkness and total silence. He smoked in long, deep drags as he plunged into that idea. The longer he lingered with it, the more drawn into it he became. All the weariness that had grown within him over the past few days seemed quite naturally to have been invested in that imagined silence. And not only that: suddenly he felt as if all he had done during those months since Agnes’s death was wait for that silence to arrive. Certainly, there was a murder bound up with it. But the thought of Leskov remained pallid, the after-effect of the pills paralyzed his imagination, and behind Perlmann’s heavy lids one single thought formed over and over again: I will not have to live with this murder for so much as a second. So not for a second of my life will I be a murderer. He felt that this was a piece of sophistry, an outrageous false conclusion, but he didn’t have the will to disentangle it, and clung to the truth that those two sentences bore on their surface.
He wrote a circular in which he informed his colleagues that Vassily had plainly found a way to come here, at least for a few days, and that he would be arriving tomorrow afternoon. So the first session on his, Perlmann’s, text would not, as planned, take place on Monday afternoon after the reception at the town hall, but not until Tuesday morning, as he intended to collect Leskov from the airport on Monday. He wrote quickly and without hesitation, and afterwards, when he put his money and credit cards in his pocket, and the road map in his jacket and went downstairs, he was both pleased and horrified by the businesslike manner, the cold-bloodedness, even, that had taken hold of him.
He asked Signora Morelli to copy the circular and put it in the pigeonholes. Then he told her of Leskov’s imminent arrival and reserved a room for him, spelling out his name. Finally, he asked her to call for a taxi.
On that sunny, warm morning they were all sitting on the terrace. Perlmann put on his sunglasses, greeted them with a curt wave and without slowing his pace, and walked down the steps. He had just – he thought as he waited by the road – felt strangely unassailable when, a bit like a ghost, he had walked like the others. Admittedly, he had avoided looking at Evelyn Mistral. But that, it seemed to him then, had actually been unnecessary; because from now on she was far away from him, in another time. That, in fact, was what made him so calm and unassailable: by deciding to drive to his death he had stepped out of the usual time that one shared with others, and in which one was entwined with them, and was now moving in a private time of his own, in which the clocks moved identically, but which otherwise ran unconnectedly alongside the other time. Only now that I have left the time of the others have I succeeded in delineating myself from them. That is the price.
The new time, he thought in the taxi, was more abstract than the other one, and more static. It didn’t flow, but consisted in an arid succession of moments which one had to live through, or rather, deal with. A lack of present, he was puzzled to note as he looked out through the open car window at the smooth, gleaming water, was suddenly no longer a problem. In the new time, which would last until some point tomorrow afternoon, before disappearing from the world along with his consciousness, present did not exist even as a possibility, so that one couldn’t miss it either. All that existed now was this: coolly calculating and sticking to his schedule in the planning and execution of his intention. Perlmann wound up the window, asked the driver to turn off the radio and leaned back in the tatty seat whose broken springs stuck into his back. He didn’t open his eyes until the taxi stopped under the yellowed plane trees in front of the station.
On Monday evening, when he had waited with Kirsten on the platform, he had been thankful of that meaningless, shrill ringing noise. It had freed them both for a while from the embarrassment of being together in silence. In his mind’s eye Perlmann saw Kirsten’s liberated laughter as she held her hands over her eyes. Today the penetrating, endless sound rendered him defenseless, and he went back outside to the plane trees.
He would leave a piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number on the desk, so that they didn’t need to rummage for it in his belongings. That was quite natural. After all, Kirsten hadn’t been in Konstanz for as much as three months. Which of his colleagues would call her? In all likelihood von Levetzov would take on the task. Such bad tidings were, if possible, best passed on in the mother tongue, and Ruge would take a backseat. But how would his colleagues find out in the first place?
The carabinieri would have to find something in Perlmann’s wallet to show that he had been staying at the Miramare. Unless the car went up in flames. It was the first time that Perlmann thought of the possibility of burning to death at the wheel, and he started perspiring with terror at the idea that the flames might engulf him when he wasn’t even dead, perhaps only unconscious. He was relieved that the sound of the arriving train tore him away from that idea.
The rhythmical knocking of the wheels did him good; it gave him the feeling that everything was still in suspension. He was free and could at any time revoke his desperate decision. He would have loved to be carried along by that knocking for ever, and was annoyed that he had taken a slow train that stopped at every station. When the knocking started again after a halt, and grew faster again, he managed to escape for a few minutes into the thought that things weren’t that bad, it was just a text, after all, a few written pages – that couldn’t possibly be a reason to put a violent end to everything. But then, when the train stopped again, he was seized once more with horror at the idea of having to live through the discovery of his plagiarism and the ostracism that it would entail, minute by minute, hour by hour, until the end of his life. When an old woman in a black crocheted headscarf sat down opposite him in Nervi, made a friendly remark and gave him a maternal smile, he got up without a word and went to another compartment where the seats were free.
The worst of it was that because it was supposed to look like an accident he couldn’t sort anything out before his death. There were people he would have liked to say something to. Kirsten above all, even though the right sentences wouldn’t come to mind. He would have liked to see Hanna again, too. He owed her an explanation for that sudden ghostly phone call in which he hadn’t asked her a single thing about her own life. He tried to imagine what she must look like now. He saw that flat face in front of him, framed in her blonde hair with the single dark strand, but her face remained frozen in the past, and refused to develop through the three decades that had passed in the meantime.