Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Even as he parted the glass-bead curtain he realized that the trattoria was alien to him now. For a moment he considered whether it might be the unusual light falling through the glass roof of the courtyard. But it wasn’t that. The restaurant was now as strange to him as a place where one had lived so long ago that it’s hard to believe that that life was once one’s own.

‘ Professore! ’ called the proprietress. ‘We thought something had happened to you!’

Perlmann was relieved that she didn’t try to hug him, as she seemed at first to be about to do. With the delighted zeal with which she would have served a long-lost relative, she and her husband, who was wearing the inevitable white apron, set Perlmann’s food in front of him and insisted that he have a second portion.

‘You look so overworked. You must eat!’

Although the pasta lay heavy on his stomach, Perlmann continued eating, glad that chewing excused his silence. The familiar atmosphere that had previously prevailed now struck him as a sentimental, tacky lie, and he feared the coffee, when it would inevitably become clear that he had absolutely nothing to say to these people, whose gabbling cordiality struck him today as inappropriate and actually quite peculiar. The situation was then saved by Sandra, who hurled her schoolbag in the corner when she came in and, weeping, reported on a failed dictation in English.

When the proprietor brought Perlmann the chronicle and, lowering his voice, urged Sandra to stop bothering the professore , one might have imagined it was a sacred book. Today Perlmann felt that the pictures on the gleaming cover were noisy and repellent. Tired, and with a full feeling in his stomach, he sat over the unopened book in such a way that the proprietor, before he disappeared into the kitchen, gave him a concerned look. Perlmann listlessly flicked a few pages. But the history of the world that had accompanied his life story no longer held the slightest interest for him, and the whole idea of appropriating his past present by remembering the course of events in the faraway world struck him as mystical nonsense.

Now the images of the bright office entered the foreground once more and, behind his closed lids, Perlmann drew various silhouettes of the town of Ivrea, which he would look down on from his high window. Interrupting his translation work and looking at this unspectacular, perhaps even ugly Italian town: that, he was quite sure of it, could be his new present – the first one that he had properly achieved.

With sudden haste he began to translate the page of the chronicle that he had opened at random. In the office, it would have to be done quickly. It was a business operation. There was money at stake. Would his Italian be good enough? In the text in front of him there were several words that he didn’t know. And what about business Italian? He saw himself sitting in an attic room until the small hours, filling the gaps in his vocabulary. At this new image, his high spirits faded to make way for the feeling of trepidation that you feel when relapsing into an experience you thought was firmly in the past. But only later, in the street, did he become aware that the image of the attic room had been modelled on his time as a schoolboy and a student, informed by nothing but the feeling that the present still lay far in the future.

When the proprietors heard that this was his last visit, they refused to take any money for the food. Their extravagant gestures and assurances contrasted starkly with his tense haste to leave. Sandra’s thoughts were plainly still on her muffed dictation. Nonetheless, Perlmann was upset that she only briefly shook his hand and then disappeared again. For a moment he saw her lying on the bed with her knee socks pulled down. His original impulse to give her the chronicle had suddenly been blown away. He took the heavy book under his arm. With his free hand he parted the curtain one last time. He let the cool, smooth glass beads slide slowly over the back of his hand. He felt something break as he did so, something precious and intangible.

Perlmann laid the chronicle on the step in front of the stationery shop to which the proprietor had directed him. He formed a funnel with his hands and stared tensely inside the shop, which was still dark. But it’s nonsense , he thought, of course you can’t tell what selection of envelopes they have just by looking . Next to the shop there was another, with tablecloths, napkins and that sort of thing in the window. As Perlmann waited for the siesta to come to an end, he looked absently at the display. The third or fourth time he did so, the solution leapt out at him. In the corner, right at the back, packed in a plastic jacket with a zip, was a set of handkerchiefs. Involuntarily, his attention had leapt from the content to the packaging, and now, in his mind, he was excitedly comparing the size of the jacket with the format of Leskov’s text. The yellow pages, he estimated, would slip back and forth a little in transit. But otherwise, this actually was the solution: if the whole thing was also put in a padded envelope, the snow and rain could do nothing to the text.

Unless the water forces its way through the zip . Perlmann was glad when the shopkeeper appeared, and proved to be so chatty that she kept this troubling thought from taking root. Perlmann bought the handkerchiefs and, next door, the biggest padded envelope into which the plastic jacket would fit. To write the address later on, he chose the most expensive felt-tip pen in the shop. Then, having reached the street corner, he turned round again to ask for a plastic bag. There were thousands of envelopes like his. But he didn’t want anyone to see this one when he entered the hotel.

Adrian von Levetzov waved so energetically that Perlmann couldn’t help crossing the hotel terrace to the table where the others were all sitting.

‘We’re betting on when the first drop will fall,’ von Levetzov said, pointing at the threateningly dark wall of cloud that was piling up in the mountains and loomed far over the bay. ‘The nearest one gets 10,000 lire from each of us.’ He straightened a chair for Perlmann. ‘Join in!’

Perlmann hesitantly set the chronicle down on the table. There was no room for it anywhere else. He rested the plastic bag against the leg of the chair. He was glad that Leskov was sitting far away. As he waited for his heartbeat to settle, he looked with great concentration at the sky, as if he were carefully considering his contribution to the bet.

‘It isn’t going to rain,’ he said at last, to his own great surprise. He felt as if he had just defied the whole world with that sentence.

Millar tilted his head, and his face twisted into a wide grin. ‘I like that, Phil,’ he said, and his voice expressed regret that he hadn’t thought of this ploy himself.

‘May I?’ asked von Levetzov and picked up the chronicle. He opened a few pages at random and then flicked on until he found some pictures. ‘Aha,’ he said suddenly, straightened the book and held it further away from himself with an appreciative expression. Then he turned the book round and let the others look at the picture. It showed Christine Keeler, the prostitute who had brought about the fall of the British war minister John Profumo in 1963. She was straddling a chair and completely naked. Ruge’s and Leskov’s laughter sounded unself-conscious, while there was something embarrassed about Millar’s grin.

‘The style’s a bit like something out of the Sun ,’ said Laura Sand, as Levetzov went on flicking through the book. Perlmann felt as if they had just caught him with a copy of Bild-Zeitung or a men’s magazine. Now, on top of everything else, the man who has failed in academia is buying tabloid books.