It had taken Perlmann some time to work out that for ages this image had shaped his relationship with the outside world, the world of other people. You had to be at the service of that world, you depended on the mercy of its acknowledgement. But at the same time neither he nor his father could have been described as submissive characters. No, that wasn’t it. It was the pure anxiety that this solicitude provoked; a constant fear of the consequences it might have if you let others feel that one had desires of one’s own, which were in contact with theirs, even if it only meant that the others had to wait for a while. The idea of these serious consequences was far from clear; the closer you looked, the more their content evaporated. But that didn’t change anything about the choking, suffocating power that that anxiety held over you. Once Perlmann had heard a doctor making a phone call during hospital hours. He had come out with some quite unremarkable sentences: ‘No, that’s impossible right now. I’m busy… I understand. Then you’ll just have to call again later on.’ The doctor had said these sentences in a friendly but firm tone that clearly delineated him from the person at the other end, and he had said them with an effortless self-evidence that had practically hypnotized Perlmann. It had been like a revelation: saying sentences like that in that tone – that was what you had to be able to do. You had to be able to say them without your heart thumping, without any inner agitation or even just stress, quite calmly and without having to think about them any further. On that occasion, when the door of the hospital had closed behind him and he had gone out into the street, he had known that a lack of solicitude would henceforth be the most important ideal of his life.
When he thought of the veranda, of the gleaming tables and the high, carved armchair at the head, he sensed that he had never been as far from that ideal as he was now. When von Levetzov had spoken to him in his unusual way a little while before, he had felt as if he was at a school desk, as helpless and hopeless as a pupil at the Institute Benjamenta. Every word had been able to penetrate him unhindered, and it seemed to Perlmann that he had no way of preventing words from flourishing inside him like malignant tumours.
Starting more or less with von Levetzov’s reference to that conference the previous year, Perlmann had assumed that he would be an ordinary participant when he had agreed, nothing more. He hadn’t been to conferences for a long time, and had seen this one as a good opportunity to show himself and to secure with a few skilful questions the general opinion that he was quite on top of things. To some extent he wanted to work on his disguise. It was a shock when he received the printed program two weeks before the agreed date and saw that he was presented as the main speaker, alongside a very vague and general title that someone had cobbled together for him out of a superficial knowledge of his work. In a mixture of fury and panic he picked up the phone, but as soon as he heard it ringing at the other end he hung up. He couldn’t give himself away. A man like him, an authority in his field, couldn’t lose face because of such a misunderstanding. However, if the opportunity presented itself he could make a barbed remark on the subject. But someone like Philipp Perlmann actually needed to have a lecture ready at all times. He couldn’t phone up and just say, ‘It’s a misunderstanding. I have nothing to say at the moment. Please pass that on.’ But really, why not? Agnes asked when she saw the way he was sitting at his desk. After that question he felt very alone. For a while he considered phoning in sick at the last moment. In the end he delivered a lecture that summed up what he had published over the last few years. Not a bad text, he thought, reading it through beforehand. But when he left the lectern to polite applause, he would really have liked to take the shortest way to the station, even though the conference lasted another two days. At dinner von Levetzov had sat down next to him. ‘A lecture of familiar clarity,’ he had said with a smile that wasn’t unfriendly or malicious, yet which had had the effect of a pinprick on Perlmann, ‘but it was more of a look back at the past, wasn’t it, or have you simply ignored the new?’
A moment before, down in the lobby, von Levetzov had called that lecture a report. Nothing escaped him, that keen-minded man with his phenomenal memory, and he weighed his words very carefully. He had mastered the game like very few others. It had been almost impossible not to invite von Levetzov. Perlmann stepped to the window and looked out at the bay. The setting sun shone through a fine grey bank of clouds and gave the water the color of platinum. Lights were already going on one by one over by Sestri Levante. Only a few seconds had passed since the first cigarette, and already he was smoking as if he had never stopped. It hurt when he became aware of it. He felt as if he was crossing out the last five years, and he had the feeling that he was betraying Agnes.
He thought of the other four colleagues that he still had to welcome, and planned to be laconic. Not unfriendly, not even cool, but laconic, with a certain terseness in his words. He usually said too much, even though he didn’t feel like talking, and they were explanations that often sounded like explanations, like justifications that no one had asked for. Also, he often expressed too much sympathy with other people, sympathy that wasn’t expected and perhaps not even wished for. Then he came across as intrusive, which was anathema to him. It was like an addiction.
He reached for Leskov’s text. The first sentences in the second paragraph resisted his efforts, and several times he vacillated between the various meanings that the dictionary gave for a word; several appeared possible, yet none seemed really to fit. But afterwards things became more transparent and he understood one sentence or another without inwardly faltering in the slightest. The excitement that he had felt before, when reading the first paragraph, returned. These were not, as they had always been in the past, sentences in an exercise book, which weren’t there because someone wanted to say something particular in precisely this way, but because the reader was to be presented with a new variant of grammar or expression. Here the language was not a subject, but a medium, and the author simply assumed that the reader was a master of that medium. So you were being treated quite differently, as an adult, so to speak, as a Russian-speaker, in fact. It was like joining the real Russian world, like a reward for all that effort with your grammar book.
Perlmann was euphoric. He walked up and down a few times, then leaned far back in the armchair and folded his arms behind his head. For the first time since his arrival he felt secure and sure of himself. He understood Russian. I’m someone of whom you can say: he reads Russian. If only I could share that with Agnes. Then it would be a presence. He dialled Kirsten’s number in Konstanz, but no one picked up. She was probably in a lecture or a seminar.
It wasn’t the first time that Perlmann had crossed this point with a language. But this time it was different. The cheering experience was, it seemed to him, more intense than usual. Perhaps it was down to the fact that it had been so difficult for a long time and he had secretly expected never to get that far. Or else it was something to do with the Cyrillic letters, which still looked mysterious to him even though he had known them for almost two years. He looked at the typescript and repeated a game that he enjoyed afresh every time he played it: he studied the writing first with the eyes of someone who couldn’t read the letters, for whom they were merely an ornament. Then he let his eyes somehow tip over into the gaze of someone who doesn’t stop with the appearance of the script but, guided unnoticeably by his perfect familiarity with them, presses on directly to the meaning of what is written. It’s barely believable, he said to himself then, but I can really do it.