Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘But yes, Dottore,’ she said gently, ‘it was this text here, this one exactly, and only this one. What have I done wrong?’

‘Wrong? Nothing, nothing,’ he stammered between the sobs that he could no longer control, ‘on the contrary, this is… this is my salvation.’

He turned away and searched in vain for a handkerchief. Then he rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and looked at her again.

‘Many apologies,’ he said quietly and vainly resisted his returning tears. ‘I can’t explain it to you, but I have never felt such relief. It’s… indescribably great. Indescribably so.’

When he took his hand away from his eyes, she was looking at him as if she were seeing him properly for the first time. She smiled and touched his arm. ‘Then you should go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘You look completely exhausted.’

He watched her go until, without turning round, she disappeared down a side street. It was a moment of presence. A redemptive present that he would not have thought possible.

Then, when he walked back very slowly to savor the precious present, he felt as if he were treading on needles each time he set down his ice-cold foot, and a stinging pain in his lungs pierced him from time to time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more apart from his overwhelming relief. No plagiarism. I haven’t committed plagiarism. No plagiarism . It was like slowly, disbelievingly, emerging from a very great, very dark depth, accompanied by a jumpiness that he thought he could feel in every fibre of his body. Again he read Maria’s instruction on the card. And then twice. It was that text that Signora Morelli had copied, exactly this one and only this one. That was what she said. Did she say it?

When he turned the corner and saw the crooked pines, which were no longer illuminated at this hour, but only stood out against the night sky with their milky greyish green, his relief blew apart, and he felt as if he were being pressed down into the depths again by an incredibly heavy weight. Giovanni must have made the copies himself and distributed them. That’s why she doesn’t know anything about Leskov’s text. An iron claw grabbed him by the chest, and each individual twinge in his foot was genuine torture as he hobbled hastily back, slipped into his lost shoe on the steps and walked, breathing heavily, to the reception desk.

‘On Friday night,’ he gasped, ‘when the football match was on television, I brought you a text. What did you do with it?’

Giovanni glanced down. ‘Erm… nothing,’ he said and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then, when he had expelled all the smoke, he looked at Perlmann uncertainly. ‘It was like this… I wasn’t really concentrating, so to speak, because… You see, there was this equalizer in the ninetieth minute, and then the penalty shoot-out… and afterwards I couldn’t remember exactly what you’d said to me, so I just put the text in your pigeonhole. I’m sorry if that meant something went wrong, but it was so exciting that…’

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled in slow motion. Then he rested his hand on Giovanni’s. ‘You’ve done the right thing. Exactly the right thing. I’m very glad. La ringrazio. Mille grazie. Grazie. ’

A stone fell from Giovanni’s heart. ‘Really? I… You know, I had quite a guilty conscience because of it… Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘No, nothing,’ Perlmann said with a smile, ‘and once again, many thanks!’

Giovanni made a clumsy movement with his arm, interrupted halfway, which expressed his admiration better than any word or any facial expression could.

Perlmann walked to the elevator, but didn’t wait for it. Instead he started hobbling up the stairs. He took his time. He was too wound up to have been able to turn it into a sentence. But the feeling was there: he could move freely in the hotel again. He wasn’t a cheat.

When the line started crackling he put the phone down. What had he actually wanted to say to her? And in an alarming call at a quarter to two in the morning. And with that heavy tongue. His hand enclosed the red lighter. Now he didn’t need to explain anything to her. He had nothing to apologize for. He could meet his daughter just as he had before. He was back from no-man’s-land. No plagiarism. No plagiarism, and no murder . He repeated the words again and again, loudly and in his thoughts, who knows how many times, until, hollowed out by fatigue, they were no longer the expression of an emotion, but only a mechanical inner echo that grew increasingly sluggish.

If I hadn’t gained self-confidence by writing in that harbor pub, and the courage to stand by my own notes, I wouldn’t have called Maria, and the text wouldn’t have been finished in time. If I hadn’t taken that tour of the harbor, and hadn’t got worked up about interpreting, I wouldn’t have ended up writing in the harbor bar. So exactly the same inclination that had put him in the greatest danger, had also saved him. Perlmann sighed. That connection made him feel that he didn’t just owe the redeeming turn of events to a concatenation of coincidences, but that they had their origin within him, in his way of thinking and feeling.

He went into the shower and washed his hair. The water stung his scratches. But it was a salutary sting, because it meant that the fog of alcohol and pills was beginning to clear. He showered, hot and cold, and then the same again. New life flowed through him, and now he felt sober and clear again.

It wasn’t at all true that he had saved himself. Precisely the opposite was the case. If I hadn’t phoned Maria, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning. I would have taken Leskov’s text again and wouldn’t have had to live through that whole nightmare with the tunnel. His fanatical obsession with the translation had brought him not only to the brink of plagiarism, but also to the brink of murder and suicide. Back in Genoa, the frantic, desperate search for presence in the familiarity of foreign languages had for a moment given him the courage to stand up for himself, not least in front of the others, and because of that same courage he had ended up spending three endless days and nights in a world of fantasies and terror which had absolutely nothing to do with the real world.

All that saved me was coincidences, banal coincidences and inattentions. A sluice opened up in Perlmann’s head, and he was deluged by a cascade of if-thens. If that equalizer hadn’t been scored, there wouldn’t have been a penalty shoot-out. Giovanni would have been on top of things and would have passed on the instruction to copy Leskov’s text. Then on Saturday morning both texts would have been in the pigeonholes, and that would have allowed me to rectify matters without loss of face. If Giovanni had done what he was supposed to, and if Maria hadn’t finished because of the people from Fiat, only the fatal text would have made it to the pigeonholes; the disaster would have taken place in the real world and not just in my imagination. If Giovanni had just left Leskov’s text on the shelf under the counter, my pigeonhole would have been the only one empty on Saturday morning. I would have checked, learned what had really happened, and there would never have been a murder plan. But perhaps I wouldn’t have checked, paralyzed as I was. If Giovanni had left the text on the shelf, then when Signora Morelli was distributing them she would have noticed that my pigeonhole was the only one that was empty, and then she would have looked for the original by the photocopier. If my pigeonhole had been in a row with the pigeonholes of the others, I wouldn’t have switched rooms; the signora would have hesitated when distributing the texts, then seen that the text in my pigeonhole was a different one; she would have looked for the original by the photocopier, and when I came back from Portofino I would have had two texts in my pigeonhole, and Maria’s card would have resolved the matter. So if I hadn’t had this exaggerated need for empty space, I would have been spared the tunnel. If when I returned from Portofino there hadn’t been all that noise in the next room, I would have taken Silvestri’s copy out of the pigeonhole and discovered the true state of affairs. And if, arriving with Leskov, I had glanced at the feared text in my hand, just a single short glance, I wouldn’t have needed to imagine wading out into the dark water.