Perlmann couldn’t bear standing around any longer, and walked towards the departure lounge. Before he stepped onto the moving walkway he glanced at the display panel. in ritardo, it now said by the flight from Frankfurt. From half-past four there’s not so much, c’è meno, he heard the old woman saying and saw her tooth-stump in his mind’s eye. He ran up the steps to the Alitalia counter.
‘Only about another quarter of an hour,’ the hostess said in response to his question, startled by his agitation.
I can catch up. So, another three-quarters of an hour. He walked over to the seats, where he had waited in the early morning nearly fourteen days before, and had felt defenseless without a book. But the memory was unbearable, and at last he went to the bar and ordered an espresso.
Beside him, someone unfolded a newspaper. Perlmann read the headlines and looked at the photographs. On the front page was a picture showing a blanket of smog over Milan, and on the last page there was a snapshot of a beauty contest. Behind him, a woman with a very clear voice burst into loud laughter and then called, ‘Ancora!’ He turned round and saw her companion, a man with a long, white scarf and the appearance of a film star, going a little way into the room, then turning round and standing still for a moment, as if preparing for the long jump. Then, with a blasé expression on his face, the man took several deliberate shuffling steps and all of a sudden, switching his movements at lightning speed, he turned his feet outwards and walked frantically on the inside of his shoes, sticking his tongue in his cheek to give himself a cockeyed expression. The sight was so funny that all the people at the bar, including the waiter, roared with laughter.
And then something happened that Perlmann wouldn’t have thought possible: the humorous aspect of it all took hold of him as well; something erupted inside him and he laughed a loud and liberated laugh – not a forced, hysterical laugh like the one last night at dinner, and not a fake laugh like just now at the town hall, but a laugh that brought him deceptively close to the present: it seemed as if he could reach out and touch it with his hands. That laugh acted like a rapid erosion of the cramped and callused framework of emotion, on which the decision to kill and to die had been constructed; the whole internal structure collapsed, and at that moment he saw the whole murderous plan as something very alien and remote, abstruse and practically ridiculous.
He was hoping for a repeat performance, but by now the man, still wearing an idiot’s expression, was lying in the woman’s arms, leaning against her so heavily, with feigned inertness, that for a moment she lost her balance and knocked Perlmann with her shoulder. He caught her apologetic smile, smelt her perfume and looked past her shiny black hair through the big glass windows of the hall into the distance where, in a rectangle formed of roofs and poles, a plane with gleaming wings was at that moment rising. He hadn’t known that such a thing existed: a will to live that could flow through one as hot and stupefying as a drug. He ordered a second espresso, put in two, three spoons of sugar and let the little sips melt away on his tongue. Then he ate a slice of panettone, then another and, with yet another espresso, a third. He took off his blazer, hung it over his shoulder on a finger, and rested his arm with his cigarette on the counter. He liked the hard, bright e that the woman next to him was using, and as he waited repeatedly for that sound, he began to wonder where he could fly to. When does your next flight leave? Where to? Anywhere.
When the woman with the comedian had left and the waiter behind the counter snapped at the service staff, everything shattered. It disappeared like a mirage, as if it had never existed, and all that remained was a coffee-induced quiver. Perlmann looked at the clock: ten past three. He walked slowly back to the arrivals hall. These were the last minutes of his life when he could be alone with himself. In spite of the sultry air in the building he was shivering. And what if it wasn’t even this Monday? There hadn’t been a date in the telegram. But he had given Leskov the group’s dates. And today was the last possible Monday.
The monitor showed Leskov’s flight as having already landed. Perlmann got a stomach cramp. He positioned himself right at the back of the group of waiting people. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. At last he pressed them to his painful stomach and rubbed it. As he did so, he ran through the route once more. Not till the second ironmonger’s shop. Don’t follow the tram tracks. First right at the bakery. Before the underpass keep left. At the square with the column it was the third rather than the fourth turn-off. His hands were ice-cold in spite of the rubbing. His sweat-drenched shirt was cold and sticky, too. If only they hadn’t gone to the Hermitage. He wished Leskov hadn’t suggested, back there on the bank of the Neva, that they call each other by their Christian names.
He reached for the matches in his jacket pocket and found his parking ticket. And then he realized that he had only a few coins, and not a single bill. He looked at the coins: 600 lire. I can’t get out of here, he thought. I can’t pay the parking fee. Then he saw Leskov.
36
He was wearing the same worn-out loden coat as the last time, and looked even broader and more shapeless than Perlmann remembered. In one hand he was carrying a big, antediluvian-looking suitcase of a pallid, stained brown that made it look as if it were made of cardboard. The other hand held a small suitcase with an outside pocket. Leskov stopped and looked uncertainly around through his thick glasses, bent slightly forward because of his heavy case. Perlmann felt as if he were shivering with cold when he saw him standing like that. Over the past few weeks Leskov had been the invisible author of a text, a voice without physical presence, which Perlmann had liked and admired more and more as the translation had progressed, and with whose haunting tone he had temporarily been able to identify. Now he stood there, a lost-looking man with an untidy, sweaty fringe of hair around his bald pate, and greying stubble, and with the tip of his tongue wedged between his teeth in tense expectation. Perlmann found him repellent. There was also something ludicrously dramatic about the sight of him. But those feelings did nothing to mitigate the thought that swept over him, that that physically present man over there who now, rather than putting down his suitcase, was standing there, legs apart, shifting his weight, was the man he was to kill.
Perlmann pushed his way through the group of waiting people, and then walked stiffly towards Leskov, his hands in his trouser pockets. When Leskov saw him, his whole face lit up. He set down his luggage and spread his arms. Earlier than necessary, Perlmann took his right hand out of his pocket and took his last steps with his arm outstretched. His face was devoid of feeling, and refused to obey him. The only thing he was able to muster was a gaze aimed rigidly at the open collar of Leskov’s red-and-blue checked shirt. Leskov ignored the outstretched hand, grabbed him by the shoulders with both hands and wrapped him silently in his arms, burying Perlmann’s formal ‘Hello’ beneath him.