Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

From the rocky spur he looked across to the Miramare. A letter seemed to be flickering in the middle of the neon writing. Somewhere in the dark hills over there were the garbage bins into which he had thrown the first version of Leskov’s text. Tomorrow, immediately after the session, he would finish cleaning the second version. He certainly couldn’t send it from Italy. Nor from Frankfurt. But the very thought was pointless. He couldn’t possibly send the text to Leskov.

The young people had moved on. The beach jetty was empty. His jetty was back in the world, washed around by black water. Perlmann felt himself beginning to crumble. There were delicate, treacherous cracks within his inner structure. He quickly went back to the hotel.

The air in the room was cold, and it still smelled sickly sweet, even though this time Leskov had only used the ashtray for a match. Perlmann washed out his toothbrush several times. But it was as if the dirt had practically eaten its way into the bristles. The foam when he brushed his teeth had a brownish tint.

In the morning, he thought in the dark, Leskov would be sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, anxiously and with almost nothing in his hands. He didn’t know it, but Perlmann had promised to defend his theme, which he didn’t know in the new version.

It was an antediluvian screen, bright bilious green on dull dark green, and it flickered so wildly that it made the eyes stream straight away. A nauseating, sickly sweet smell flowed from it. That couldn’t be, but it was, and when he sniffed at the ventilation slits smoke was emerging from there as well; a treacherous smoke that couldn’t at first be seen, but then suddenly formed a dense, suffocating cloud. A flood of incomprehensible Italian orders and file names swam across the screen. At last he somehow got hold of the right one, but Leskov’s text simply wouldn’t be erased, he pressed the key over and over again, hundreds of times, until nothing remained of the key, but Leskov’s text with Perlmann’s name went on flickering under the title. At last he clicked the on-off switch, but nothing happened; even pulling out the plug had no effect: Leskov’s text went on flickering and flickering, and now Perlmann’s name was suddenly there in capital letters. Then he gripped the huge sledgehammer in both hands. But it wasn’t so easy. You had to take a run-up with lateral, rhythmically swinging movements before lifting the hammer high above your head to deliver the crucial blow. At last the time had come, the hammer rose up, it passed the apex, but then all of a sudden it had no substance and no weight, and rather than bringing it down with a crash into the computer, as he woke up Perlmann found himself on the bedcover, his hand clenched convulsively into a fist.

Nonetheless, he had the feeling of having had a proper night’s sleep for the first time in ages. As he got dressed he established that he had no fresh underwear, and saw in his mind’s eye the full plastic bag falling on the stinking cabbage. The wound in his finger was no longer damp, the bruise and the swelling had subsided. At the smallest pressure, admittedly, his fingertip still hurt so much that it brought tears to his eyes. He put his last bandage on it.

At exactly eight o’clock he went down to breakfast. If they thought he was finally eating humble pie in the wake of his disgrace, that was their business. Signora Morelli had just stepped out through the portico, and was straightening one of the round tables. Unnoticed, he bent over the reception desk and shoved the stained map, which had been on the radiator all night, between other papers on the shelf.

The dining room was completely empty. Not a single place had been used at the group’s table. The waiter who brought him his coffee and egg was plainly embarrassed. With each minute that passed without anyone appearing, Perlmann felt more and more that he was being ridiculed. Asking the waiter whether the breakfast habits of his – yes, his – group had changed was impossible.

Adrian von Levetzov came at a quarter past eight. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen him without a waistcoat and even without a tie. His pale, wrinkled neck made him look old.

‘Oh, Perlmann, good morning,’ he said more flatly than usual, and rubbed his eyes. ‘We all stayed out very late last night. There’s a feeling that it’s all coming to an end.’

Perlmann nodded and took another roll. And then another. The silence was unbearable. The tablecloth was stained. The waiter’s movements were affected.

‘I didn’t know about your wife’s accident,’ said von Levetzov, holding his coffee cup, ‘until Leskov told us about it on Tuesday. Terrible. That must have brought you very low.’

Leskov: the man who explains my breakdown to other people. ‘Yes,’ said Perlmann, topping up his coffee.

Someone had put a damp spoon in the sugar; there were brown lumps in the bowl. In the fresh ashtray there was a tiny bit of chewing gum, with a drop of water on it.

Perlmann wanted to make an effort with Adrian von Levetzov, but he had no idea how to do it.

‘Yep, it’ll be back to the rat race,’ smiled von Levetzov. ‘What will you be teaching?’

As he gave a vague description of his lecture series, something quiet and dramatic happened in Perlmann: he made the decision to abandon his professorship.

What was happening inside him was not an internal action. There was nothing active about it. It was more like the process of a little gear wheel that has long been moving with his pen, slowly and inexorably towards a lock, finally snapping in place and thus setting in motion something bigger, something revolutionary. He hadn’t known that the time had come. And yet it seemed quite natural that it should have happened right now – at a time when the empty dining room emphasized his alienation from his colleagues and their world quite as self-evidently as if it had been a scene from a film.

Von Levetzov got up with a glance at his watch. ‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said apologetically. ‘See you later.’

Perlmann took in the empty room. He would think back time and again to this room and this moment. It was hazy over the bay, impossible to say whether the sun would part the clouds. He slowly finished his cigarette and ran his hand along the edges of the tables on his way to the door.

Then someone pushed the door open with his shoulder. It was Millar. He had taken off his glasses and was running a hand over his face. After that Ruge came in. ‘A bucket of coffee!’ he called to the waiter. Evelyn Mistral, who was walking behind him, laughed her pearly laugh. She had piled her hair up, and was carrying her writing pad with the shield of Salamanca under her arm.

‘See you later,’ Perlmann said, escaping from their startled stares.

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria had left the office door open, and now came out from behind her desk. ‘Giovanni told me you wanted to use the computer last night. Is something wrong? I always close up in the evening. A safety measure. If I’d known…’

Perlmann looked at her hands – those hands that couldn’t make any mistakes, that couldn’t under any circumstances hit the wrong key.

‘It wasn’t all that important,’ he said with forced equanimity, ‘I just wanted to try something out with my text – something, erm… that you can’t do with the printout.’

‘I know, people always say that.’

She ran her hand through her hair, and again Perlmann wondered mechanically whether her fingers wouldn’t be sticky with hairspray afterwards. You’ve been living under a rock. Like way, way out.

‘Which of the two texts was it, then?’ she asked with a smile. ‘The one about memory?’