Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘Incidentally, how long did it take my letter to get there?’ Perlmann asked.

Leskov doesn’t understand at first. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about what will happen if Lufthansa send it. I can’t remember exactly; about a week, I think.’ He poked around absently at his salad. ‘Good that you ask. That means, in fact, that the text might still be on its way if I don’t find it tomorrow evening. It could even take one or two days before the business about the Russian address is sorted out. So I can’t give up hope straight away. Particularly as the post doesn’t usually come on Monday. But if there’s still nothing there by Wednesday or even Thursday… Oh, it’s all nonsense,’ he said with a forced smile, filling his fork. ‘The text is there on my desk, in the middle of all that chaos, I can see the yellow sheets right in front of me.’

That year’s harbor tours had stopped the previous day. They wouldn’t start again until the beginning of March. Leskov read the English text of the notice three times under his breath. Suddenly, his enthusiasm for his surroundings and the southern light seemed to collapse in on itself, and all his confidence vanished.

‘Now I myself have destroyed my only hope of a secure post and a bit of calm,’ he said as a taxi took them to the upper edge of the city, to get as good a view as possible. And then, on a terrace with a heavenly vista, Leskov talked about the power struggles and intrigues at the institute, and about his insecure position. It wasn’t true to say that the others didn’t think much of him. Quite the reverse, in fact: they feared and envied his independent mind. And then there was his time in prison, he said with bitter mockery. It gave him a degree of moral authority that he didn’t like because it created a circle of grudging and uneasy respect around him, so that certain conversations regularly stopped when he entered the room.

And then this new post had recently become available.

‘I’m the logical candidate. But you can imagine that for all these reasons they don’t want me.’ And there was an argument: he hadn’t published very much. Leskov rested one leg against the edge of the railing, gripped his knee with both hands and looked down at the sea, where the light had already lost some of its glow. His face twitched and trembled. ‘First you’re thrown in prison, then you’re accused of not having published enough. You see, that’s why the text is so important. Would have been so important. The argument they advanced against me would have lost validity. “If only we had a longer, more recent text!” I’ve heard that often. And now the text is on a garbage dump somewhere. Gone. If only I had been able to make a copy of it! But after waiting around in the travel agent’s and at the telegram office it was too late: having photocopies made in Russia is still terribly difficult.’

Perlmann turned sideways, and touched the suitcase with his foot. He covered his face with his hand. I just need to take it out. But no, it’s impossible. There simply isn’t an innocent explanation. At some point he would bump into the truth. Inevitably.

Leskov touched him on the arm. ‘Let’s walk down a little way. And now let’s stop talking about me!’

The sea was the color of copper when they stood side by side by the railing on the way back. They hadn’t spoken for a while, and it seemed to Perlmann that every further moment of silence, as in the tunnel, would produce an undesirable intimacy. Soon Leskov would start talking about Agnes.

‘At the end of the session,’ Perlmann said, when Leskov turned towards him, ‘you made the surprising assertion that there is no true story about our experienced past.’

Leskov grinned. ‘The assertion that cost Achim a pencil.’

‘And then you added two words – Russian, I think – that I didn’t understand. What was that about?’

‘So someone noticed,’ Leskov laughed. ‘I thought everyone would have thought it was simply Russian babbling. But you, of course, noticed.’

Perlmann felt as if he were being presented as a prize pupil in a school class.

‘The two words were Klim Samgin . It’s the name of the central character in Maxim Gorky’s last novel, a four-volume work, over two thousand pages long, with the title: Zhizn’ Klima Samgina : The Life of Klim Samgin . With this character Gorky creates a narrative perspective for the description of forty years of Russian history. One important motif is that Samgin has a self-conscious, one might say a broken relationship with reality, into which radical doubts about the narratives of others, as well as his own perceptions, often creep. In this way Gorky allowed the little boy Klim to discover that the invention of things is an important component of life, something without which we cannot exist. There are wonderful sentences like… wait… yes: I vsegda nuzhno chto-nibut’ vydumyvat’, inache nikto iz vzroslych ne budet zamechat’ tebya i budesh zhit’ tak, kak budto tebya net ili kak budto ty ne Klim . Did you understand?

‘One moment,’ said Leskov. He closed his eyes and murmured the Russian sentence to himself again. ‘In English it would be something like: You must always be inventing something, otherwise the adults won’t pay attention to you, and you will live as if you aren’t there, or as if you aren’t Klim. Or another sentence…’ As he said the words to himself, Leskov mutely moved his lips. ‘Something like this: Klim couldn’t remember when he had actually noticed that he was invented, and he himself had begun to invent himself. Gorky always uses the same word: vydumyvat’ : to invent or fabricate. And in the subheading of my new text, which I mentioned in the session, I use this word in the special sense that it has in Gorky.’

In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw the sheet covered with road dirt, lying on the map that now peeped from Leskov’s jacket pocket.

‘A hint of plagiarism,’ Leskov smiled, ‘but really only a hint.’

Perlmann experimentally took the hand holding the cigarette off the railing: no, outwardly it wasn’t shaking; it only felt as if it was. He inhaled deeply, and from the bottom of his burning lungs he wished he had the power suddenly to extinguish that most terrible of all words – plagiarism – from the minds of all human beings, so that he would never, never again, have to hear it. To do so, he thought, he would be prepared to enter any – really any – pact with the devil.

‘The theme associated with this word,’ Leskov continued, ‘assumes a particularly dramatic form in Gorky’s work when it is linked with the idea of a trauma.’ He saw Perlmann turning his head away. ‘Am I boring you?’

Perlmann glanced at him and shook his head.

‘One day Klim Samgin sees another boy, a boy he hates, falling into the river while skating, and disappearing into a hole in the ice along with his female companion, whereupon the girl clings to him and drags him down. He sees the boy’s red hands clinging to the edge of the ice, and his glistening head with its bloody face emerging every now and again from the black water and shouting for help. Klim, who is lying on the ice, throws him one end of his belt. But when he feels himself being pulled closer and closer to the water, he lets the belt slip from his hand, and shrinks away from the red hands which are breaking off more and more ice as they come towards him. And all of a sudden there’s just the boy’s cap floating on the water.’

Leskov paused and sought Perlmann’s eye. The red hands coming closer and closer: wasn’t that an image that could be pursued?

Perlmann nodded. He was glad it was quickly darkening.

‘Gorky doesn’t just call the hands red . He uses an expression that is stronger, more insistent. But I can’t think of it right now,’ said Leskov. ‘Anyway, at the end of that scene he has someone say: Da – byl li mal’chik-to, mozhet, mal’chika-to i ne bylo? ’