Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann didn’t immediately know how the next paragraph should begin, and started to panic. But then he read the last three pages and found his way back into his writing frenzy. After a while, when all the coffee had gone, his tongue felt furry. Annoyed at the interruption, he went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water. He was used to his pale, anxious face; he had seen it often enough over the last few days. But now he gave a start. His features were sunken and skewed. He thought of pictures of people who had been exposed to enhanced gravity. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered were the sentences that had originated behind that face and were flowing into his right hand. It was a complete mystery how it was happening, and for one brief moment Perlmann experienced the fascination of the scholar confronted by a mysterious phenomenon, a fascination that he had lost. Everything’s going to fall back into place. Even though he didn’t have a headache, he took two aspirins from the pack on the mirror shelf and washed them down. Then he walked back to the desk with a glass of water.

Dawn began to break just before seven. Without the darkness of the night Perlmann felt vulnerable and lost his sense of equilibrium. His sentences started to go wrong. He had to cross some of them out, and eventually he reached the last sheet, which he crumpled and threw in the waste-paper basket. The mixture of lamplight and daylight enraged him. As he walked across to turn off the standard lamp, his ankle throbbed violently, and felt as if it could no longer support him. He couldn’t quite manage without electric light, and turned the desk lamp back on. His memory began to fail. The simplest English words stopped coming to mind, and all of a sudden he was uncertain about his spelling, too.

A short break. He could lie down for a moment, until it was really light. Just for a few minutes. After that he still had an hour and a half to finish writing his lecture.

A wild honking of car horns on the coast road woke him with a start. Perlmann felt disoriented and immediately sank back into leaden weariness. His eyelids seemed paralyzed, and would only open after he had made an extreme effort of will to sit up on the edge of the bed. His head hurt at the slightest movement, and his veins seemed to be far too cramped for his violently pounding blood. The noise of traffic was unbearable. It was seven minutes to nine.

No time for showering and shaving, nor could he order any more coffee. He was relieved to establish that his tongue, although thick and stinging, was under his command again. He shovelled cold water into his face with both hands, evoking the memory of the gas station toilet in Recco. No murder. No plagiarism . He hurriedly bundled together the sheets of paper on the desk. There were at least twenty pages, he thought. The last half-page was crossed out. I’ll have to improvise at the end.

The elevator was busy. Two minutes past nine. Perlmann gritted his teeth and hobbled downstairs. He had forgotten the printout of his notes, and when he went to check that he was at least carrying a pen, he saw that there were two big stripes of dirt running diagonally across his jacket. The garbage bin by the fan . He looked at his trousers: bloodstains everywhere. Arriving in the hall, through the glass front door he saw the sea glittering in the morning sun. At some point in the night, he remembered, he had thought he had finally found the present. An illusion, woven from relief, alcohol and pills. The present was further off than ever.

The door to the veranda was open. Perlmann felt no more twinges as he walked through the lounge towards it and took the three steps. The anxiety settled on him like a numbing veil. He wasn’t quite in the room before he had seen that they were all there, even Silvestri and Angelini. And at the back, on the right, Leskov with his pipe in his mouth. Perlmann immediately looked away. He didn’t want to be wounded by any of those faces. As he had been during the night. He wanted to stay completely closed away in himself, inaccessible to the others.

As always, there was coffee on the table, a special pot for the speaker. Perlmann sat down without a greeting, poured himself a coffee and concentrated on not shivering. The coffee was hot. One could only drink it slowly. He couldn’t possibly drain the first cup with everyone staring at him. After taking three sips he set it down. He had planned to say some introductory words of explanation, about the distributed text and his relationship to what he was about to say. But he couldn’t have said such words with his eyes lowered, and he couldn’t now bring himself to meet the eyes of the others. Not before they had heard last night’s text, which would rehabilitate him. He took another sip of coffee, lit a cigarette and began to read.

The introductory sentences were too long-winded. Perlmann noticed it immediately, became impatient and rattled them off hastily so that he could finally get to his first thesis, which, in its originality – he was quite sure of it – would immediately grab the attention of everyone present. He set aside the first page and was glad to see that there were only three lines to go before the crucial paragraph. When they were over with, he took two big swigs of coffee, looked up for a moment, and then plunged into his train of thought.

When he read them the words were so unutterably weak that the sentences literally stuck in his throat. It took a special effort – almost a retch – to read each of them to the end. It was pure kitsch, nothing but sentimental nonsense, cobbled together by someone at the end of his powers and also under the influence of alcohol and pills, so that all critical capacity, all self-censorship, had completely closed down. Perlmann wanted to sink into the floor, and when he went on reading, in a voice that grew quieter and quieter, he only did so because he didn’t know how he would bear the silence that would fall if he stopped.

Leskov choked on his pipe smoke and had a coughing fit. His face bright red, he bent double, his coughing so loud that Perlmann’s lecture was interrupted. Perlmann looked over at him, and in that moment a thought forced his way into his consciousness that had until then been suppressed by some power or other: I would have killed him for no good reason whatsoever. It would have been a completely pointless murder. A murder based on an error. Without his really noticing, the sheets slipped from his hand, his mouth half-opened, and his face went blank. He shivered. He heard the penetrating, high-pitched whistle, and saw the huge shovel of the bulldozer with its side prongs coming towards him. It turned quite silent, as if they were surrounded by cotton wool and snow. Perlmann took his ice-cold, sweat-drenched hands from the wheel. Then there was nothing but weakness and darkness. Perlmann’s cigarette fell from his hand and, in a curiously retarded, flowing motion he slipped sideways to the floor.

It was a pleasant, effortless glide up through ever thinner, ever paler layers. At the end there came a faint, quiet start, the world stood quite still, and with a tiny hesitation that he only just noticed, before immediately forgetting it again, it became clear to Perlmann that the impressions forcing their way to him through his open eyes meant that he was awake.

He was lying under the covers in all his clothes except his jacket and shoes. In the red armchair by the open window sat Giorgio Silvestri. His back was turned towards Perlmann and he was reading the newspaper. Perlmann was glad that he was smoking. That made the situation less like a sick-bed visit. He would have liked to look at his watch. But Silvestri would have heard that, and he wanted to be on his own for a little while longer. He closed his eyes and tried to order his thoughts.