slender hand with a smile, there was a sceptical sharpness in her eye, further emphasized by the fact that she always held her head tilted slightly to the side. For a moment he compared her face with that of Signora Morelli, who was just taking charge of her Australian passport: the Italian face now looked merely like a pleasant but pale background.
Laura Sand laid her black leather suitcase, which was scattered with faded, battered and torn stickers of foreign cities and rare animals, flat on the floor, opened the zip and dragged from a tangle of underwear, books and rolls of films, an olive-green travelling typewriter. She’d been writing on it for almost twenty years, she said, not least in the Steppes and the jungle. Twice the machine had been taken apart completely and reassembled. Only yesterday her daughter had swept it from the table during one of her fits of aerobics, and now the carriage didn’t work properly. It urgently needed to be repaired.
‘I can’t think without that damned thing,’ she said in a broad Australian accent, and with a strange fury that looked almost comical because it wasn’t aimed at anyone and seemed to be her second nature.
‘No problem,’ said Giovanni, when Signora Morelli had translated. He had just arrived to join the nightshift, and had put even more pomade in his hair than the previous evening, when he had got badly on Perlmann’s nerves with his slow-wittedness commentaries. He knew someone who could fix it in the blink of an eye, Giovanni said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Laura Sand’s face, and instead of ringing for the porter, still wearing his coat he picked up her suitcase and walked ahead of her to the elevator.
When the chambermaid who had opened his door for him had gone, Perlmann picked up Leskov’s text again. Now that it would be an hour at most till Brian Millar arrived, it was particularly important to build a protective wall of understood Russian sentences around him. The more sentences he could pile up, the less the man with the red shimmer in his dark hair could do to him.
But Perlmann couldn’t manage to translate even a single sentence. Like yesterday on the plane he was paralyzed by a kind of seeing blindness, and when finally he managed to read the words correctly, his memory played one trick on him after another. He felt anxiety welling up within him like a poison, which, released in the depths, was forcing its way relentlessly to the surface. While he stood by the window in the dark and smoked, he called Evelyn Mistral’s laughter to his aid, and then Laura Sand’s furious gaze. But he was unsure whether those two faces would be any use against Millar, and his anxiety wouldn’t go away.
And, in fact, there wasn’t the slightest reason to be anxious. All right, they hadn’t liked each other from the start. But that episode in Boston had been really quite trivial; practically childish, and not something to explain hostility.
Millar had travelled with his girlfriend Sheila, a beauty with long blonde hair and a very short skirt. He was extremely proud of her and treated her like a jealously protected property. The colleagues bowed and scraped around her and wooed with her in the most ludicrous fashion. Perlmann didn’t do a thing. During breaks in the conference and sometimes even during the lectures he withdrew into a quiet corner of the building and read a paperback of short stories. Sheila often strolled, bored, down the corridors, smoking. When she approached Perlmann she cast him a curious glance and went on walking. On the third day of the conference she sat down next to him and asked him what he was always reading. Wouldn’t she much rather have been somewhere else? he asked her after a while. The question caught her off guard, they started laughing, and suddenly there was a familiarity between them whose charm lay in the fact that it was gauzy and without any history. They walked together to the caféteria, still joking, because
Laura Sand laid her black leather suitcase, which was scattered with faded, battered and torn stickers of foreign cities and rare animals, flat on the floor, opened the zip and dragged from a tangle of underwear, books and rolls of films, an olive-green travelling typewriter. She’d been writing on it for almost twenty years, she said, not least in the Steppes and the jungle. Twice the machine had been taken apart completely and reassembled. Only yesterday her daughter had swept it from the table during one of her fits of aerobics, and now the carriage didn’t work properly. It urgently needed to be repaired.
‘I can’t think without that damned thing,’ she said in a broad Australian accent, and with a strange fury that looked almost comical because it wasn’t aimed at anyone and seemed to be her second nature.
‘No problem,’ said Giovanni, when Signora Morelli had translated. He had just arrived to join the nightshift, and had put even more pomade in his hair than the previous evening, when he had got badly on Perlmann’s nerves with his slow-wittedness commentaries. He knew someone who could fix it in the blink of an eye, Giovanni said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Laura Sand’s face, and instead of ringing for the porter, still wearing his coat he picked up her suitcase and walked ahead of her to the elevator.
When the chambermaid who had opened his door for him had gone, Perlmann picked up Leskov’s text again. Now that it would be an hour at most till Brian Millar arrived, it was particularly important to build a protective wall of understood Russian sentences around him. The more sentences he could pile up, the less the man with the red shimmer in his dark hair could do to him.
But Perlmann couldn’t manage to translate even a single sentence. Like yesterday on the plane he was paralyzed by a kind of seeing blindness, and when finally he managed to read the words correctly, his memory played one trick on him after another. He felt anxiety welling up within him like a poison, which, released in the depths, was forcing its way relentlessly to the surface. While he stood by the window in the dark and smoked, he called Evelyn Mistral’s laughter to his aid, and then Laura Sand’s furious gaze. But he was unsure whether those two faces would be any use against Millar, and his anxiety wouldn’t go away.
And, in fact, there wasn’t the slightest reason to be anxious. All right, they hadn’t liked each other from the start. But that episode in Boston had been really quite trivial; practically childish, and not something to explain hostility.
Millar had travelled with his girlfriend Sheila, a beauty with long blonde hair and a very short skirt. He was extremely proud of her and treated her like a jealously protected property. The colleagues bowed and scraped around her and wooed with her in the most ludicrous fashion. Perlmann didn’t do a thing. During breaks in the conference and sometimes even during the lectures he withdrew into a quiet corner of the building and read a paperback of short stories. Sheila often strolled, bored, down the corridors, smoking. When she approached Perlmann she cast him a curious glance and went on walking. On the third day of the conference she sat down next to him and asked him what he was always reading. Wouldn’t she much rather have been somewhere else? he asked her after a while. The question caught her off guard, they started laughing, and suddenly there was a familiarity between them whose charm lay in the fact that it was gauzy and without any history. They walked together to the caféteria, still joking, because
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