Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It could only be two kilometers, or three at the most. Only a few bends. But it wasn’t behind this one, or the next. Seen from this direction everything looked very different. Suddenly, so quickly that he couldn’t believe it, he was at the gas station where he had made the first attempt to disappear Leskov’s text. Yes, that was the word. He stopped outside the dark cottage and tried to imagine what had happened afterwards. His memory was sluggish; nothing came back of its own accord. It was hot and stuffy in the car. He had been driving the whole time with the heating turned up full. But the air from outside made him cold, and he whirred the window back up. The skin of his face tensed and felt like paper.

What was he actually doing here? In the end he would be holding a pile of dirty, ragged pages in his hand. Then what? What in the world would he tell Leskov when he handed him the papers? It would, that was clear, have to be the story of an oversight, an ineptitude, an unintended stupidity. And the story would also have to explain why he had discovered his stupidity only today, of all days. Perlmann felt his head emptying, and felt that emptiness filling with a paralysing weariness. With the best will in the world, even calling on the furthest reaches of his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t possibly explain how the text had made it out of the closed suitcase and the closed trunk into the mud, without anyone having had a deliberate hand in it.

A first shimmer of diffuse, grey light lit up the solid cloud cover. A car passed now every few minutes. If he simply kept on driving to Genoa, he would be at the airport just before eight, and soon after that the Avis counter would open up. But I can’t just let the sheets of paper lie here and rot. That’s out of the question. He has to get his text back. Somehow.

Perlmann set off slowly, even more slowly than on Monday. It was up there on the bend that the truck with the full-beam headlights had appeared, the one he had allowed to pass him. And, sure enough, the first pale sheet lay there in the roadside ditch. The sight of it electrified him and all of a sudden he was wide awake. Hurriedly, as if the paper might escape his clutches at the last minute, he got out and bent down. It was a piece of half-transparent, crumpled grease-proof paper. He couldn’t halt his hand, he had to touch it. Now he had mayonnaise on his fingers. Disgusted, he rubbed them on his trousers and got back into the car.

It couldn’t have been the next bend; there was no paper to be seen far and wide. It was the next but one. Perlmann could see all the pale sheets in the ditch from far away, and accelerated as if on a home straight. He came to a standstill with both wheels in the ditch, climbed out of his crookedly parked car and ran breathlessly over. The pages were often far apart, but in two places several had fallen on top of each other and formed irregular little piles. Perlmann laid them on the hood. The sun must have been shining here yesterday, the two top sheets were both dry. The pale yellow had faded almost completely, the sheets were curling, and it looked as if they had blisters. Then came a few that were still damp, and under those several that hadn’t been touched by rain at all, at least in the middle. Only at the edges were they all wet and grey with dirt. The ink on the top sheets had run. The first two were hard to read, but it got better after that.

So far there were seventeen sheets, including page 77. Now it was the turn of the individual, widely scattered sheets in the ditch. When Perlmann was bending down for the first one, a car drove past and its wake blew three pages down from the hood. He hurried back and gathered them up. One page had fallen under the wheels and been ripped. Annoyed, he laid the whole pile on the mat in front of the passenger seat. Half of them were completely smudged, but Leskov would still be able to reconstitute the text. The others, which had been lying face down, were in a better condition. There, too, the round letters of Leskov’s careful handwriting had often dissolved at the edges, and flowed outwards. At those points the background was no longer yellow, but a washed-out pale blue shimmering into green. But the text was still legible. The sheets that had lain among the trees had been dried by the sun and had warped; the others had softened and were unpleasant to the touch.

After that, Perlmann often had to climb the steep embankment to fetch the next sheet. Many were sticky with mud, some were crumpled and torn. At one point he slipped on the damp soil, the pain from his ankle shot through him like knives and he nearly fell. At the very last moment he was able to cling to a tuft of grass. Now he had earth under his fingernails. From here he managed to gather fourteen pages together, including page 79, which had a space at the bottom, but which still couldn’t be the last, as there was no address on it. So at least twenty-five pages were still missing. He leaned, exhausted, against the hood and smoked.

By now it was twenty to eight and broad daylight. The traffic was building up, and now the last truck was coming towards him. Its bumper was far too narrow, its gas tank unprotected. When it had passed, Perlmann, who was standing in the middle of a black cloud of smoke, became aware – to his amazement and relief – that his heart wasn’t pounding. Only his cigarette had fallen into the road without his noticing. It was, he thought, as if a first thin dividing wall had formed between him and the trucks; a first protecting distance which would get bigger and bigger over time until one day he would also be able to forget the red mist. As long as Leskov has his text back.

Astonishingly, large numbers of sheets had been blown on to the embankment that sloped downwards on the other side of the road. The ground there was soft and damp, and at one point Perlmann sank beyond the edge of his shoes into the quagmire. The sheets had been resting on the tips of the grass, and weren’t very dirty. With two exceptions, they had been lying writing-side down, and were still legible. Now he had rescued a total of sixty-seven pages. He looked around a wider area, methodically, patch by patch, the whole thing three times. The rising sun pierced the cloud cover and Perlmann looked up, blinking. There were sheets in the tops of two tall bushes, one in each. It took a desperately long time before they finally came floating down, and with his furious shaking he must have presented a comical sight, because the school bus drove unusually slowly, and the children laughed and pointed at him.

One sheet was the first page with the title. There was no name underneath. It was creased and had a hole in it from a branch, but reading it wasn’t a problem. At least eight pages were missing now. Perlmann looked at the wheels of the passing cars and imagined the sheets getting stuck to tires like those and then being pressed rhythmically between rubber and tarmac, before ending up lying in rags somewhere.

When the road was empty for a little while, his eye fell on a brown rectangle, which hid part of the white marking in the middle of the road. It was a page of Leskov’s text, drenched with rain and dirt and driven over countless times. He lifted it by one corner, but the paper was fragile and tore immediately. A bottom layer. Puzzled, he opened the glove compartment and saw the map that Signora Morelli had lent him on Saturday night. He half-unfolded it and pushed it carefully, centimeter by centimeter, under the soggy sheet. On the lid of the trunk he started carefully dabbing the page down with his handkerchief as if it were an archaeological find.

It was page 58. In the middle, Leskov had written a subheading. All that could still be made out was that it had consisted of two quite long words, preceded by the number 4. But the ink had run almost completely; it had mixed with the dirt, and all that remained was a smear. Perlmann wiped the words again with another tip of his handkerchief. Perhaps something of the old ink traces that had been put on paper in St Petersburg would be revealed if one dabbed away the diluted and running ink that now lay over it. And some clues did become visible. But they weren’t enough to make out an unambiguous sequence of words. He lit a cigarette. The last word, he was more and more certain of it, must be proshloe : the past . But he could imagine at least three variants: iskazhennoe proshloe : the distorted past ; pridiumannoe proshloe : the invented past; obmanchivoe proshloe : the deceptive past . And even a fourth: zastyvshee proshloe : the coagulated past . That he knew zastyvat’ , to coagulate , he owed to a viewer of Agnes’s photographs, who had dared to compare her particular way of capturing the living present in images with the process of coagulation. Her fury had been boundless, because coagulation was her name for the process in which people rigidified into lifeless figures because of their conventions. And to keep from suffocating on her fury, afterwards she had done something that was usually Perlmann’s own habit: she had looked up the word in every available dictionary.