Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

There was no question of Perlmann sending the text to St Petersburg. There was only one thing for it: to throw it away a second time. Throw the carefully preserved, ‘restored’ text, into a garbage bin, like before. Or quietly let it somehow lose itself. Perlmann glanced at the initials beside the lock on the suitcase. Then, when Santa Margherita was announced over the loudspeaker, he took out the certificate, the medal and the black notebook. He left the suitcase on the seat in the empty compartment and quickly walked to the front, to the carriage door. The wheels squeaked on the rails. Someone beside him opened the door. You know what this text means to me. The blacklists still exist, and I’m on several of them. Perlmann ran back, picked up the case and got out.

Leskov would be sitting beside Maria in the office, leaning forward and staring, his hands between his knees, at the screen. Perlmann wouldn’t immediately know what it was about this sight that alarmed him. Only in the elevator would he understand: his translation, the fraudulent text, was still stored downstairs in the computer. Certainly, Maria had no reason to put it on the screen in Leskov’s presence. But such a thing could easily happen inadvertently. In all likelihood she’d given the group their own folder. A couple of mistyped keys and Leskov would read: the personal past as linguistic creation. The title would electrify him, and he would lean still further forward to read the first few sentences. Who’s this text by? would be his excited question. Maria might be distracted, or tired, or scattered, and already it would have happened. There would no longer be an innocuous explanation to give Leskov. Now, a full three days after his arrival – not to mention the conversation about the missing text – his mind would start working.

A curse , Perlmann thought. Leskov’s text weighed on him like a curse that he wouldn’t be able to shake off, wherever he went. The suitcase that he hadn’t got rid of. And now the clues in the computer that could give everything away if Maria made just one tiny, innocent slip. He set down the suitcase in the wardrobe, closed the wardrobe and put the key in the bedside table drawer. He had just pulled the heavy curtains closed and lain down on the bed when he got up and took the suitcase out of the wardrobe. Working as carefully as a picture restorer, he replaced the old, stained sheets of blotting paper with new ones. The treatment had helped. The bits of ink had been absorbed where they had run, and the original lines now stood out more clearly. The dirt had dried, and turned paler. Perlmann put the suitcase with the text back in the wardrobe and crept under the covers. If Maria was working with Leskov now, she would have set up a new data file for him. Then there would be no reason to call up another. There was no opportunity for a mistake. When she went home at five or six, she simply turned off the computer.

Later. Sometime later he would gain access to the office and erase the dangerous file himself. It wasn’t impossible. He relaxed.

The girl in sneakers had swung the suitcase over her head as if it were as light as a feather. When he had tried to lift it himself, however, it was like a piece of lead, fastened to the floor by a magnet. Around him, a sea of blotting paper darkened and ended up looking like a huge slab of rust. Did he think this was an ironmonger’s shop? the white teacher had asked him, pulling her Salvation Army hat down over her face. No! he cried, his voice failing, and tugged on the suitcase, which was wedged in the carriage door. On the platform, as he tried to keep pace with the accelerating train, he saw the black tunnel coming ever closer.

It was pitch-dark when Perlmann was finally woken by the stubborn buzz of the telephone. He wanted to apologize for not coming to dinner, Leskov said. Maria had said she was ready to spend some more time working with him at the computer, so that his written submission would be ready for tomorrow’s session.

‘I don’t know what I would do otherwise,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just finished, even though I worked nearly all night. And all because I forgot the damned text like an idiot!’

Perlmann fetched the text from the wardrobe. The fresh sheets of blotting paper were only very slightly stained. Most of the pages were dry by now. The biggest problem was the page from the middle of the road, the one with the fourth subheading. And the one from the ditch was difficult, too, the one that had been so wet that it must have been under a dripping tree. He packed these two between fresh sheets of blotting paper again. He closed the valise in the wardrobe and stuck the key in his blazer pocket when he went down to dinner. For the first time in weeks he was punctual.

How was he to explain the friendliness, the warmth, even, that they all showed him when he stepped to the table? There was nothing fake about it, and nothing obtrusive either, he thought, as he ate his soup. And yet it was hard to bear. Because it had something of the friendliness, the zealous humanity, that you would show towards a patient – someone who was being granted a breathing space, a period of convalescence. For a while lots of otherwise quite natural expectations and demands were put in parentheses. And that meant: temporarily he wasn’t taken entirely seriously. Perlmann was glad when Silvestri asked him across the table, in quite a matter-of-fact manner, whether it would be all right for him to deliver a brief talk on Friday.

The perception that began to preoccupy him when he listened to the conversation at the table took time to assume a clear substance. While he had been enclosed within his delirium and his anxiety, the others had been getting on with their lives. And they had done that together, as a group in which all kinds of relationships had formed. There were constant hints, allusions and shared memories. There was irony, a knowledge of the forgivable weaknesses of the others; there was a playing with criticism and self-assertion, a delight in intellectual and personal banter. And there were shared experiences involving this town, its restaurants, churches, the post office – experiences that the others had been having while he had been sitting in a courtyard with his chronicle, trying to find the present through the past. He felt a pang, and remembered school journeys on which he had often come in last.

Achim Ruge – and Perlmann noticed this with astonishment, as if he had only just got here – had in the meantime plainly become something like the secret star of the group. His chuckle regularly set the others off, and with each new subject it seemed to Perlmann as if they were all waiting for one of his dry remarks. When they had been discussing Laura Sand’s film, a personal aspect of Ruge had come to light. Otherwise, Perlmann didn’t actually know anything at all about this man Achim Ruge.

I never gave the others a chance to get to know me better. Perlmann had never shown anything of himself but his purely professional side. From the very outset, his anxiety had reduced the others to one-dimensional, schematic figures. They were adversaries first and foremost. That applied even, in the end, to Evelyn Mistral. He had been constantly trying to work out the others. Inside, he had delivered harsh judgments about them. At the same time he knew – outward appearances aside – as good as nothing about them. His panic at the idea of being exposed had frozen his perception at a terrifyingly superficial level. Another two days, then they would be leaving. He had found out nothing about them, learned nothing from them, and the only relationship that he had developed with them lay in his attempts to close himself off and protect himself from them.