Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann looked at the coarse hand that gripped the smoking pipe bowl, and nodded. The moment when the door clicked shut took an eternity to come.

With the window wide open, Perlmann set about cleaning the rest of the text. Tomorrow morning, when he saw Leskov stepping into the veranda and sitting down at the front, he wanted to be able to think that the manuscript was upstairs in the room – ready to be given back at any moment. But all of a sudden all the dexterity that he had acquired over the past few hours seemed to vanish. He rubbed either too gently or too hard, and in his patience he forgot that dry-looking crumbs of earth could still be damp inside. More and more often the cleaning became a smudging, and now he also discovered that moisture had entrenched itself at the top of the bristles of the toothbrush; it must have come from the bathroom floor, and was now increasingly forcing its way to the tips of the bristles and into the proximity of the paper. At the bottom of page 57 he gave up, and when he set the page aside he saw that his hand was trembling.

Now it was the turn of the problematic page 58, which he had previously put back between fresh blotters, and set on the radiator again. Perlmann went and got it and looked at the remaining traces of the subheading. The mixture of ink and dirt had by now dried completely, and could be wiped away with his handkerchief. Pridumannoe proshloe : the invented past , he thought, was the most likely reading of the pale fragment of the line. He took off his glasses and held the lenses as a magnifying glass over the paper. Now he discovered that before the first word there was a pencil marking for an insertion. Of the insertion, also written in pencil, the only letters that could be made out were n and o , which seemed to belong to the beginning and end of a single word. Nevol’no pridumannoe proshloe : the involuntarily invented past , he thought. In which case Leskov had extended his theme in the second version: apart from the linguistic impression of memories, it was also about truth and volitional control.

Once again Perlmann cast a sober glance at the few clues: nothing that could be made out there really supported this over-hasty assumption. Disgruntled, he covered the page with the blotter. When he pulled it away again and started to read, he felt the trepidation of the addict.

His reading proceeded only slowly, as he had no experience of Russian handwriting. But, eyes stinging, he continued until there were three words in a row that he didn’t know at the bottom of the page. He lit a cigarette and, as his eyes remained focused on the line, his hand reached with mounting impatience for the dictionary. The sensation of emptiness had to be repeated a number of times before it dawned on him that there couldn’t possibly be any dictionaries there now. He gave a start, as if from a forbidden daydream. His face stung. He quickly closed the text in the wardrobe and, shivering, walked to the window.

‘I need to use the computer for a moment,’ he said a few minutes later to Giovanni at reception. ‘Check something about my text. For tomorrow.’ A spasm ran from the back of his neck and down his back, and he had the feeling that he could barely turn his head.

Giovanni reached towards a drawer and then paused. Hesitantly, he raised his head and looked uncertainly at Perlmann. ‘The office… no one… I have instructions…’ He lowered his eye and rubbed awkwardly at the handle of the drawer.

‘I understand,’ said Perlmann and prepared to go.

Then Giovanni suddenly looked at him with a grin. ‘Oh, come on, I’ll make an exception for you.’ He took a key from the drawer, walked ahead of him and opened the door. ‘I’m sure you know how to use the computer already,’ he said as he turned on the light, ‘because I…’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘thanks very much.’

He hoped Giovanni would retreat into the back room. But he stayed standing at the counter, nodded and smiled and raised his hand slightly. Perlmann cursed the glass door of the office. Now he would have to do it right in front of Giovanni’s eyes. He straightened the chair in front of the screen and reached for the switch at the back of the computer. Nothing happened. He rocked the switch back and forth several times. No effect of any kind. He walked around the table and took a look at the switch. It was the right one. Giovanni raised quizzical eyebrows and made as if to come over. Perlmann hastily gestured to him to stay where he was: Tutto bene! Perlmann’s hands were damp, and the spasm at the back of his neck was becoming stronger and stronger. He stared blankly straight ahead. The plug . He slowly rolled his chair back and looked under the table. All the plugs were in their sockets. He avoided glancing over at the counter. Only now did he notice the round lock without a key. Finished. Of course, the business documents. He turned to the side table with the drawers and screened his hands from Giovanni’s eyes with his back. The open drawers contained only office material, he could see that as soon as he opened them a crack. The key for the computer would be in the narrow top drawer, from whose lock the key had also been removed. In the only box on the desk there were just paperclips.

Perlmann breathed in twice, slowly. His back relaxed. Relief was mixed with tiredness. The fact that he noticed the transparent box of disks when he stood up had something to do with the fact that the plexiglass reflected the fluorescent light from the ceiling. He slid the chair to the tray at the side and opened the box. The disk with his name on it was the second from the front. Under the name it said on the label: personal past. mestre.

Perlmann took care that his movements were easy for Giovanni to make out as he rolled himself back to the computer and put the disk in the drive. Then he sat down in a pose of concentration in front of the dark screen and simulated typing movements. He could at least remove the disk. Perhaps Maria had only worked with it, and the text wasn’t even on the hard drive. He grew calmer. With a pen from the desk he tapped the edge of his nose a few times and then stuck the tip between his lips while, leaning back with legs outstretched, he pretended to gaze into an imaginary distance. Then he made a few more typing motions, took the disk from the drive and pressed the switch. With his back to Giovanni he stuck the disk in the belt under his pullover, ostentatiously snapped the box shut and left.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Many thanks.’

Giovanni caught up with him in the portico.

‘You were asking about Baggio yesterday.’

‘Yes?’

‘He scored another goal tonight. Against Bayern Munich!’

‘He’s plainly a great striker,’ said Perlmann, and an emotion that was hard to distinguish from pure tiredness brought tears to his eyes.

‘ E come! ’ said Giovanni.

‘ Ciao ,’ said Perlmann and touched him fleetingly on the shoulder.

‘ Ciao ,’ Giovanni said, too. He said it hesitantly and slowly, and it sounded like an incredulous echo.

When Perlmann looked down at the beach jetty by the Regina Elena, a group of young people stood applauding because a lanky boy was kissing a girl who, in spite of her piled-up hair, barely came up to his chest. That wasn’t his jetty, not the one that led out into the black water. It was as if the jetty of two days ago had been extinguished by the young people, or rather: expelled from the world.

He went on walking beyond the rocky spur until it was quite dark. Then he slung the disk far out into the sea. The movement came from his wrist and shoulder at the same time, the little disk turned quickly on its own axis, rose for a while in a low curve, then fell spinning and chipped almost vertically into the water. Perlmann heard quiet applause, but couldn’t tell if it was only his imagination.