Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The rain had stopped. Perlmann went to the bathroom and leaned his back against the basin. He was shaking, and his head threatened to explode. I’ve got to collect the pages. At all costs. Five past four. If Leskov went soon, he could still do it. You can even make out these pages in the gloom. He flushed the toilet. Then he clenched his fists to keep from shaking and went back into the room.

Leskov was standing up. He would have to do some work. There wasn’t much time until his session on Thursday.

‘The text is probably just at home. There isn’t really any other possibility. Otherwise I’d have some kind of memory. Some kind.’

Perlmann couldn’t stand his questioning stare for long, and walked ahead of him to the door. Before he went out, Leskov stopped just in front of him. Perlmann smelled his tobacco breath.

‘Do you think a translator might be found for my text?’ he asked. ‘I’d love you and the others to be able to read it. Especially since I now know your text. Payment would be a problem, I know that.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Perlmann. It took him an enormous effort to close the door quietly.

A little while later Perlmann left the room and, after some hesitation, set off through the hall. There he was intercepted by Maria, who came sniffing out of her office, holding a handkerchief. Was he feeling better? She had heard from Signora Morelli that he had been surprised to find that the text she had finished on Friday had been distributed.

‘Please forgive me if I’ve done something wrong. But when you told me on the phone on Friday that it was urgent, I automatically assumed it was the text for your session, which is why I attached the copying instruction to it. And I think I even added your name.’

The people from Fiat?

‘Oh, them,’ she laughed, and had to blow her nose. ‘I didn’t have a sense that they got a lot of work done. And when I said something about a research group and an important text, Santini immediately waved it through. He’s very patient. He’s often been with people here.’ She rubbed her reddened eyes. ‘They’d said Saturday afternoon would be fine. But then I got the feeling this cold was on the way, and I finished typing the thing on Friday so that I could spend Saturday in bed. Oh, one moment,’ she said, gestured to him to wait and disappeared into the office.

If she hadn’t had a cold, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning, and I would have noticed Giovanni’s omission. But if he hadn’t made his mistake, her cold would have saved me.

‘Here,’ Maria said, and handed him the black wax-cloth notebook. ‘I like typing your things up. They’re not as technical as the others, and not as dry. That was true of the other text, the one about memory. And this one here has such an original title. I like it. So are you sure nothing’s gone wrong as far as you’re concerned? Should I perhaps have had the other text printed out and copied again?

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said, and had to fight down the haste in his voice. ‘You did exactly the right thing. Mille grazie .’

In daylight, the damage to the Lancia looked very bad. The dark-blue paint was ripped open in several places all along the car. The scrapes went deep into the metal, and the wing had been powerfully crushed next to the headlight on the right-hand side. Perlmann took the tie, medal and certificate from the back seat and put them along with the black notebook in the empty suitcase. Then he set off.

He hadn’t even reached the big jetty when it was clear to him that he wouldn’t manage to do it now. He was shivering with weakness, and his reactions were grotesquely delayed, as if his brain were working in slow motion. Under the stare of a policeman he stopped in a no-parking zone and wiped the sweat from his cold hands.

Just as he was about to turn and drive back, his eye fell on the Hotel Imperiale on the hill. There was something about it. Again his brain made an eerily long pause. The waiter. I didn’t wait for him. And I didn’t pay. That means bilking on top of everything else. Compared to everything else this was so preposterous that Perlmann pulled his face into a grin. Very slowly he drove up to the hotel and waited for several minutes outside the gate until even the most distant oncoming traffic had passed.

It was the same waiter. He assessed Perlmann with a dismissive glance. The pale, unshaven face. The soiled jacket. The blood-stained trousers. The unpolished shoes.

‘I forgot to pay yesterday,’ Perlmann said and took a handful of cash from his pocket.

‘We aren’t used to guests like that here,’ the waiter said stiffly.

‘And it isn’t a habit of mine,’ Perlmann said with a weary smile. ‘I think it was a sandwich, a whisky and a mineral water.’

‘ Two waters,’ the waiter said abruptly.

‘I’m sorry. Yesterday I was a bit… a bit under the weather.’

‘I can see that. And I’d also say that we could do without a second visit from you,’ the waiter said and simply stuffed the three 10,000 lire notes in the pocket of his red jacket.

The two things – being barred and that movement – assembled themselves in Perlmann’s feelings into something strangely liberating. He looked the waiter in the eyes with undisguised contempt. ‘Do you know what you are? Uno stronzo .’ And because he wasn’t sure whether the insult was strong enough, he added his own translation, ‘An asshole. A great big asshole.’ The waiter’s face colored. ‘ Stronzo ,’ Perlmann said again and went outside.

On the way back he felt more confident and, all of a sudden, he felt properly hungry – a sensation that he had almost forgotten over the past few days. At a stand-up bar he ate several slices of pizza. The five o’clock news was just coming to an end on the television behind the bar, and a weather map appeared. Perlmann stared at the clouds to the east of Genoa. They were white, not grey. But then the clouds on maps like that always were. Weren’t they?

‘Do you know the road from Genoa via Lumarzo to Chiávari?’ he asked the man in the vest who was taking the pizza out of the oven with a long shovel.

‘Of course,’ said the man, without interrupting what he was doing.

‘Do you think it’s going to rain there tonight? Up by the tunnel, I mean.’

The man paused abruptly, left the shovel half inside the oven and turned round.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘I really need to know. It’s very important.’

The man in the vest took a drag on his cigarette and looked at him as if he were someone very simple, perhaps even disturbed.

‘How on earth am I supposed to know that?’ he said mildly.

‘Yes,’ Perlmann said quietly and left far too big a tip.

‘That conversation last night,’ Perlmann said to Signora Morelli when she set Frau Hartwig’s yellow envelope and another little one for him on the reception counter, ‘I…’

She folded her hands and looked at him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tiny twitch in the corner of her mouth.

‘What conversation?’

Perlmann gulped and shifted the two envelopes until they were exactly parallel at the edge of the counter. ‘ Grazie ,’ he said quietly and looked at her.

She gave only the hint of a nod.

The room smelled of Leskov’s sickly tobacco. The haze had escaped, but the open window hadn’t been able to do anything about the penetrating smell. Except it was cold now. Perlmann tipped a mountain of pipe ash and charred tobacco into the toilet and shut the window.

Frau Hartwig’s envelope contained two letters. One was his invitation to Princeton, written on expensive paper that looked like parchment, and signed by the President. The invitation had been issued because of his outstanding academic achievements , it said. And the President assured him that it would be a great honor to have him as a guest for a while. Perlmann didn’t read the letter twice, but immediately put it back in the envelope and threw it in the suitcase.