Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann knew it was absurd, this orgy of unreal conditional clauses, but it also devoured his sense of relief, so that he yearned now for the tears he had shed when he first discovered his redemption. But that knowledge didn’t help, the search for more and more connections was like an involuntary addiction. If Larissa hadn’t been plagued by a guilty conscience, she wouldn’t have urged Leskov to make a fresh application; there would have been no telegram and no fear of exposure, and what had appeared the night before would not have been a planned suicide, only a nagging feeling of guilt. If the waiter hadn’t brought me the telegram just as I was about to talk to Evelyn about Leskov’s text, I would have been able to tell by what she said that something was wrong, and even then I would have been spared the bulldozer. If there hadn’t been a wedding party at the Regina Elena tonight, I might have asked them to call for a cab, and then I would have told Kirsten in Konstanz about an act of plagiarism that didn’t even take place. Perlmann stopped.

So for days now they had been holding his notes, headed by an Italian sentence that must have seemed mannered and pretentious. He picked up the computer printout. It was fifty-two pages long. I could have told from the thickness of the pages. Seventy-three pages in my pigeonhole compared to fifty-two in everyone else’s; that’s a difference that could have been spotted from a mile off. And this evening, when I turned up, I could have felt in my hand that it couldn’t be Leskov’s text: that the sheaf of papers was too thin.

He let the pages slip through his fingers and weighed the pile in his hand. He didn’t dare flick through it properly and tentatively read it, and he took care to ensure that his eye didn’t get caught on the top page. Now that he felt like the survivor of a disaster, he didn’t want to alarm himself on top of everything else – with trashy metaphors or a maudlin tone, for example. And he didn’t want to encounter his written English right now, either – English that was seldom exactly wrong, and yet never had the effortless precision that he would have wished for. He slipped the papers into the desk drawer.

Angelini’s remark on Sunday evening, he thought, now appeared in a new light. Un lavoro insolito , he had called the text. And it was no wonder, either, that no one else had wasted a word about the text. That they had basically pretended it had never existed.

In six and a half hours he would have to go up the three steps to the veranda and sit down at the front. All the people sitting there looking at him would have his text in front of them, from the first page to the last. Only I and I alone don’t know what’s in it. That was a plainly incorrect, nonsensical thought, Perlmann knew. Even on Friday, on the ship, he had gone through the notes in his head. But the thought wouldn’t go away. In fact, it swelled still further. They knew more about him than he knew himself. They were waiting, and he couldn’t think of anything to say. They delivered their criticisms, and he had no response to give.

It couldn’t be the case that the unimaginable relief that had filled him even just an hour before was already being stifled by a new anxiety. It just couldn’t be. I didn’t become a fraud and I didn’t become a murderer. What other reason can there be for being anxious now? Perlmann clutched that thought and then tried with a single lurch to wrest away the inner freedom that would make him invulnerable to everything the others might or might not say, to their faces and their stares, and also to the stares which, in the awkward silence, fell on the gleaming table top.

He phoned Giovanni. He could do him a favor right now, and sort him out with two pots of strong coffee. He still had six hours. That wasn’t enough for a complete lecture. But he could write a memo that could be further developed orally. The thing was to develop something in the abstract and draw up the outlines of a conception. Then the discussion would focus on that. He could say, off-handedly, that the distributed text was incidental; he had only wanted to provide a small insight into the observations that he had used as his starting point.

Perlmann’s heart was thumping as he sat down at the desk. Until now, sitting here had meant translating Leskov’s text. Hour after hour, day after day, he had removed himself further and further from reality. Each translated sentence had brought him a little closer to the deadly silence of the tunnel. A quiet feeling of vertigo took hold of him as he carefully straightened the chair, lit a cigarette and reached for his ballpoint pen. For four weeks he had avoided that moment. His hands were sticky, and the stickiness transferred itself to the pen. He got to his feet, washed his hands in the bathroom and wiped the pen. Giovanni brought the coffee. Perlmann put it first on the right of the desk, then the left. He threw the piece of paper with Kirsten’s address into the waste-paper basket. He prepared a back-up pack of cigarettes and fetched the red lighter from the bedside table. Wearing only his dressing gown he would soon start shivering. He dressed completely. His light-colored trousers were too cool by now. But the tear on the other pair bothered him. Then there were the dark flannel trousers, the ones with the bloodstains. And it would be better to put on the lighter pullover. And turn up the heating a bit instead. Again he straightened his chair. He would have to be close to the desk. But not too close.

Why hadn’t he tried it much sooner? The sentences came in spite of everything. They actually came, one after the other. At first he was anxious before each period, for fear that everything might dry up after it. But when the first page was full, this anxiety melted away; feeling in general faded into the background, and the calm logic of the sentences themselves took charge. For months, almost years, he had struggled to force out each individual sentence; it had seemed as if, in future, he would only be able to think in very small units. And now all of a sudden each sentence led quite naturally on to the next. Something started building up. He was writing a text, a real text. So I can still do it after all. Now everything’s fine.

His pen went flying over the pages and the thoughts came one after another so quickly that he could barely capture them on the paper. At last his block had gone. Again he had something to say. He only lifted the pen from the paper to light another cigarette or pour himself the next cup of coffee. He held his cigarette in his left hand, and with the same hand he brought the cup to his mouth – it was unusual, but his right hand must not be interrupted while writing. Not a memo; it’s turning into a lecture, a complete lecture. The unfamiliar way of holding the cigarette meant that smoke kept getting in his eyes; it stung, but his right hand wrote on and on. He was amazed and cheered at how good, how apt were the phrases that flowed so naturally on to the paper; some of them, he thought, practically had a poetic force. He hoped he had enough paper; otherwise he would have to start writing on both sides. Eventually, he would run out of coffee. It was lucky that he had even more cigarettes in the wardrobe. He hoped the lighter wouldn’t suddenly pack up on him. At one point he paused and closed his eyes. The present. This is it. Now I’m experiencing it at last. It took all these traumas to break through to it.

At five o’clock he opened the window. Billows of smoke drifted out into the night. He took a deep breath of the cool air. He felt dizzy, and had to hold on to the window catch. He felt as if he were moving on dangerously thin ice at breakneck speed. The strip of light beyond the bay was quite even, narrow and still. When his eye fell on the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, he quickly shut the window. He wanted to believe that all those things happened a very long time ago.