Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It was a liberating train of thought. But it was still new, so it threatened, as soon as it had concluded, to slip away again. He would have to repeat it often and, so to speak, internally perform it, until it was solidly rooted within him. Perlmann took the second half of the pill out of the box and swallowed it, along with what remained of the whisky. His finger didn’t hurt any more, and the itch in his scalp had faded away. He ate the sandwich. He had a future again. He felt comfortable in the deep armchair and was pleased that he immediately recognized the melody that reached him from across the bar. The crucial thing was not to lose one’s sense of proportion. What did it matter, from the point of view of eternity, whether the thirty-seven pages which were, in the end, quite unimportant, came from his pen or from Leskov’s? Who really cared seriously about that? There were milky ways and beyond them more milky ways, without end, and here, on this tiny clump of earth, imprisoned in their insignificant little lives, which would be completely forgotten after a few decades, they made a hell of their lives for a handful of letters. It was laughable, quite simply laughable. Perlmann tried to imagine what people’s coexistence would look like if everyone always considered himself and others from the point of view of eternity. But he couldn’t quite do it. The question was hard to grasp and kept slipping away again. But that didn’t matter. The main thing was not to lose sight of the correct proportions. The corrected proportions. Proportions.

When he – addressed by the waiter – started from his half-sleep, it was five to eleven and the room was empty. He was going to stop serving soon, the waiter said, and asked if Perlmann wanted anything else. Perlmann ordered a mineral water. He had a dry mouth and a thick, furry tongue. He no longer had the faintest idea of what had happened for the past hour. He was shivering. He didn’t know where to go from here. Not a single step. He still had four pills. That wasn’t enough. He took the text and went outside, without waiting for the waiter and without paying.

The cool night air made him dizzy, but it also felt good. On the way down to the big square he saw a garbage bin in a side street. It seemed to belong to a hotel or a restaurant, because kitchen smells came from the extractor fan above it, and he could hear the clatter of cutlery. Apart from a layer of potato peelings the bin was empty. That was the third time today that Perlmann had got rid of a text. He was good at it, and he felt as if he had been busy doing nothing else for weeks. But this time it was something special. Because this time it was completely pointless. It was as if he were destroying his copy of a newspaper in order to impose a news blackout.

Perlmann rested both arms on the edge of the bin and started laughing quietly. In the hope of relief he tried to keep that laughter going and to spur it on from within, but it was hysterical laughter that soon dried up and turned to retching. The papers fell on top of the rubbish.

At Piazza Vittorio Veneto he caught a taxi to the Regina Elena. He asked the driver to stop in a dark spot near the hotel. He flicked through his banknotes and gave him the biggest one, a 100,000 lire note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said.

‘ Ma no, Signore ,’ the driver stammered, ‘I can’t take that. Can’t you see what you’ve given me?’ He held the bill right under the ceiling light.

‘It’s fine,’ Perlmann said irritably and got out.

He sat right at the end of the little beach jetty reserved for hotel guests and set the pills down next to him. Walking into the water with his clothes on and swimming out further and further until his strength gave out. Since that day at the public baths it had always been a drama if his head went under water when he was swimming. But the pills helped. He wouldn’t feel much, and soon he would lose consciousness.

A wave of pill-weariness washed over him, and then there was a void. He was glad the beach was unlit. He could only think very slowly, and often lost the thread.

It was an undramatic, quiet way of saying goodbye to life. No onlookers, no excitement after a bombshell. Tomorrow a police boat would pull him from the water. That was all. It accorded with his desire to disappear unnoticed from the world. He wished he could also magically ensure that all the traces that he had left in the minds of the others would be erased. As if he had never existed.

A textbook suicide, he thought, practically classic: a man who can see no way of escaping his shame. Forty-eight hours ago, after looking down the hotel facade, he had rejected that way out. It had been the thought of the judgment of the others that had put him off. But back then there had still seemed to be some leeway, a set of other possibilities. He could still plan things that might have prevented his exposure. And that had created a perspective from which something could be pondered and rejected. Now that the only possibility left to him was the black water out there, when he thought about the others he had a new, strange experience. It was actually too complicated for his heavy head, and everything was intermittently suspended as if he were having a blackout. Then he shivered all the more violently in his thin trousers on the cold stone. Nonetheless, he kept returning to that experience. He homed in on it and, in the end, he managed to grasp it more precisely and dependably.

It was the experience of an unexpected inner disengagement. He had to concentrate on one of those feared people, on that person’s face, but even more on their atmospheric outlines, on the kind of situation that they created through their presence. The important thing was not to avoid the threatening and almost unbearable feelings which arose when he thought of the judgment that that person up there in their illuminated hotel room had by now formed about him, and to which tomorrow they might, once he had been found, add the thought of cowardice. The important thing was to let these feelings get near him without resisting them, and to stand up to them with disciplined calm. After a while, the person in question lost their threatening, oppressive proximity and began to retreat. His dented soul was able to bulge outwards, the tormenting feelings slowly died away, and he was free. It was an ethereal and fragile freedom that was coming into being, a floating present in which one seemed to be balanced on the point of a needle. He was on a narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the life behind him, a life interwoven with the lives of others, and the darkness in front of him, in which life would be no more. Being free like this could have been a form of happiness, had it not been for the black water, which would rise higher with each step he took. And without the water, he sensed with great clarity, that freedom would not exist. If he turned round and returned to the land, it would have fled in a moment, and the others would have buried him beneath their stares.

The one face that refused to go away was Kirsten’s. On the contrary, the longer he saw it in his mind’s eye, the harder it was to let go of it. He had had no opportunity to explain it to her. The news of his suicide, followed by the news of his deception, would fall on her as if from a clear sky. For her they would stand together dry and mute, those two pieces of information: he had perpetrated a deception, and when the matter came to light, he had walked into the water. He would sound like the little clerk who had taken money from the cash register.

It was so shabby, so shockingly shabby, that familiar story, its short version untrue, even for the little clerk. Somehow Kirsten might sense that it wasn’t true for him, either. But she had no way of getting to the true story all by herself, or even getting close to it. He had never talked to her about his profession slipping away. Or about his unsuccessful delimitation from others. Or about the fact that a preoccupation with languages was his attempt to regain a tiny shadow of the fleeting present. Those weren’t things that one could explain to a person of her age. Or at least he had always assumed as much.