Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘There’s better to come!’ cried von Levetzov, and turned the book round again. A quarter of the big page was taken up by a photograph showing Cicciolina, the Italian porn star, who had been elected to parliament. She was naked and was lolling in a provocative pose. Millar blushed and straightened his glasses. The two other men only looked for a second. Evelyn Mistral, straight-faced, pouted and brushed the hair from her brow.

‘The photographer is only moderately talented,’ Laura Sand said dryly. Grateful for the remark, the others exploded in laughter that was slightly too loud and too long.

In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw Cicciolina entering the polling station in her fur coat and dropping her envelope coquettishly into the ballot box. Don’t turn it off! Agnes had said when he reached for the remote control. I think she’s great. Simply fantastic. Her face wore an expression he had never seen before. You’re mouth is hanging open, isn’t it? she had laughed.

‘At the last elections she founded the Love Party, Il Partito d’Amore ,’ said Perlmann and knew immediately that he couldn’t have said anything clumsier at that moment. The others looked at him with surprise. He knows that kind of thing .

‘I wouldn’t have had you down as an expert in such things,’ said Laura Sand, raising another laugh.

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment. Agnes’s photographs are better than hers. A lot better. He picked up the plastic bag and got to his feet. The laughter died under the loud scrape of his chair. The faces that he saw out of the corner of his eye were puzzled. After a few steps he turned round again and nodded to the sky. ‘Still not a drop.’ He attempted a smile. No one returned it. He walked quickly to the entrance and up to his room.

There he immediately walked to the window and looked down on the terrace. Evelyn Mistral had the open chronicle in front of her, and was reading from it with the vague and searching gestures of someone delivering an impromptu translation. The others were doubled up with laughter.

They were laughing at the book with which he had embarked on the search for his present. The book that had seduced him and kept him from his work. But also the book that had kept his head above water. A mass-market, noisy, superficial book entirely alien to his nature. And also a book that had repelled and bored him before, in the trattoria. And yet a book that he was very fond of. An intimate book. His quite personal book. And they were laughing at it.

He went into the shower.

It hadn’t rained, and the others were still sitting outside when he went down to say goodbye to Maria. She was busy tidying the office.

‘Can I help you at all?’ she asked.

‘No, thanks,’ he said. Then he took the Bach CD out of his jacket pocket and gave it to her. ‘You can have this. You helped me find it.’

‘ Mille grazie ,’ she stammered, ‘but don’t you need it any more?’

He just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words he had composed in his head. She looked at him quizzically, and when the pause lasted too long she picked up her cigarettes.

‘Somehow I’m going to miss your group,’ she said, and as always she exhaled the smoke as she spoke.

Now he knew what he was afraid of: that his rage with the others might make him turn this farewell into something unnecessarily emotional and sentimental. It wouldn’t be the first time . He gulped and looked at the floor.

‘By the way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I have relatives in Mestre. Of course, you can’t call it a beautiful town. But ugly – no, it isn’t ugly at all. A bit cramped, perhaps. But it’s also a nice place.’

‘Yes, that was my experience,’ said Perlmann, grateful for the subject. ‘I particularly liked Piazza Ferretto. And the little galleria next to it.’

‘So you’ve really been there?’

‘For two days.’

‘Professionally?’

Perlmann just shook his head and looked at her. Her eyes glittered strangely, and her mouth twitched.

‘Not because of that one sentence?’

Perlmann nodded, and now he managed a smile.

‘You mean you travelled specially from Germany to Mestre just because of that one sentence?’

He nodded.

She tilted her head slightly and took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘Of course, if I can put it like this, that’s a bit… mad. But knowing your text… OK, it isn’t all that surprising. Your fury with that sentence leapt off the page. I couldn’t help laughing when I was typing out that section. So was that sentence eventually… defeated?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann. ‘But there are lots of others.’

Laughing, she stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Your texts are stored safely away,’ she added and tapped the computer. ‘Maybe I’ll read them again in peace.’ Then she shook his hand. ‘ Buona fortuna! ’

‘You too,’ said Perlmann, ‘and thanks for everything.’

A few minutes later, from his room, he saw her standing with the others. Leskov hugged her when he said goodbye. Shortly before Perlmann lost sight of her, he saw her running her hand through her shining hair. Passé. So passé.

Leskov’s text fitted even more exactly into the plastic jacket than Perlmann had expected. The pages had only a small amount of clearance from the edge. Perlmann took his ruler and measured: 1.6 cm wide and 1.9 cm high. But the zip was hard to open. It was a cheap one, and two of the teeth seemed already to be a bit loose. At any rate, it couldn’t be opened and shut too often. Why hadn’t he done the water test straight away? Annoyed with himself, Perlmann took the pages back out. As he pulled, he almost had to use force, and was startled when the tab suddenly glided swiftly over the loose teeth before jamming again, and could only be moved to the end stop with great difficulty. Perlmann carefully dipped the top edge of the jacket in the full washbasin. Bubbles formed on the outside of the zip. They were tiny and, in fact, barely visible. But still: the zip wasn’t airtight. Perlmann left it in the water for a good minute before carefully drying it off. As he opened it, one of the loose teeth seemed to have been further damaged, and right at the end one of them was remarkably crooked. Just pull it shut once – the zip wouldn’t take more than that. Perlmann ran his finger along the inside of the zip. Was what he felt only the cool of the metal, or was there moisture in there as well? He looked at his finger and rubbed at it to check: dry. But what if the envelope were left in the rain for hours? The zip wasn’t completely airtight, that much was clear.

Perlmann held his face in the water. After that he felt better. He checked in the suitcase to see if he had forgotten a page. Then he counted the sheets and flattened the particularly worn sheets smooth again. At last he pushed the pile carefully into the jacket and tormented himself with the zip one last time. Leskov would be amazed at the effort Lufthansa had taken with this jacket. He would have to get hold of a Lufthansa sticker for the jacket as well as for the envelope. Then it would look more like a routine package.

Now he laid out the envelope and took out the piece of paper with Leskov’s home address. I’ve just got to risk it . Leskov would doubt his memory anyway. If he had indeed put his work address at the end of the text, in his general uncertainty he would mistake his correct memory for another error. Perlmann set the specially purchased felt-tip pen down on the envelope and, horrified, immediately drew it back, as if he had almost set something on fire by accident. He hadn’t practiced disguising his handwriting. It took several pages before he had finally decided on a backwards-sloping, stiff script, which, of all the variants he had tried, seemed the furthest removed from his own. He practically painted the letters on the envelope, so that they ended up looking like a grotesque form of calligraphy. His hand had shaken when writing two of the letters. But the address was clear. The envelope would get there.