Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann, who had understood straight away, responded to his questioning gaze with a shake of the head.

‘ Yes – was there a boy there at all, perhaps there was no boy there? That’s how you would have to translate it,’ said Leskov. ‘And you see: this question, which returns in later passages like a leitmotiv, picks up the theme of invention.’

The lights of Portofino were already coming into view when Leskov started talking about prison. They had locked him up for just three years. No, no torture, and no solitary confinement, either. Quite normal imprisonment. Four of them in a cell at first, later alone. Not being able to read anything, that had initially been the worst thing. After six months they had allowed – it was a miracle – his mother to bring him Gorky’s novel. She had no idea of its content. She had come across it in a junk shop, and had bought it just for its length. Two thousand pages for so little money!

‘What it meant for me back then to hold those volumes in my hands and feel their weight – it’s impossible to capture that in words,’ Leskov said quietly. Throughout his remaining time in prison, he had read it fourteen times. He knew hundreds of scenes off by heart.

‘The theme of invention grabbed me straight away. But it took a long time before it assumed the form that it now has in my text. Gorky is primarily concerned with the invention of objects and events outside in the world or – when Klim Samgin talks about the invention of himself – of episodes in his external life story. And one slightly disappointing aspect of the novel is that Gorky effectively throws the theme down at your feet without really developing it. Although the story with the hole in the ice is ideally suited for that. There is, in fact, a moment, as Gorky says, where Klim enjoys seeing his enemy, normally so arrogant, in that desperate state. And this yields the question of whether he lets go of the belt out of pure fear, or whether hatred is also involved. Because it is a traumatic experience, Klim will have to invent something about it, too, and this time it’s an invention of the inner world. He will narrate his inner past. And there is nothing, nothing at all, that he could cling to when he wonders which of the various stories is the true one.’

Leskov held the flame to his unlit pipe. He was now standing with his back to the water, staring, it seemed, at the numbers on the hull of a lifeboat, and when he went on, it sounded as if he were a long way away.

‘Then something strange happened to me. When week after week passed in this terrible, grey monotony, which is worse than any kind of bullying, I gradually lost all sense of my own internal past. After a certain amount of time you simply no longer know what your experience was like before you came along. It must sound insane to an outsider, but you lose a certainty that was previously so much taken for granted that you knew nothing about it. It’s a silent, creeping, inexorable loss of your inner identity. You fight against it as you have never fought before. You narrate your inner past to yourself over and over again to keep it from slipping away. But the more often you do that, the more intrusive the doubt becomes: is that really true, or am I merely inventing this past experience for myself? And I’m sure you can imagine how Gorky’s theme and his own experience increasingly merged until the name Klim Samgin became a symbol within me for that abyss of lost identity.’

Leskov left the ship as though in a trance and stopped a few steps later. ‘And yet I hadn’t yet got to my crazy thesis. That is only reached when one accepts the thought that experience is not formed by narration, but in a sense created by it – the idea, then, that you know from my earlier text.’

Perlmann noticed too late that he had been nodding. Horrified, he turned his head towards Leskov. But he hadn’t noticed anything, and went on talking.

‘You know, it’s hard to describe, but the inner formulation and defense of my thesis were a great help to me in surviving my remaining time in prison. Why that should have been so I still don’t quite know. But I suspect that it had less to do with the content of the thesis than with the feeling of having made an exciting discovery. That gave me a piece of inner freedom, and made me invulnerable to many things.’

Leskov stopped again on the steps leading up to the hotel. ‘When I was out, and had regained my ability to work, I had lost the courage of my most important thesis, so in my first version I settled for observations about the creative role of language for experience. In that text I touch upon the radical idea only now and again. I think I was afraid of discovering that I had temporarily lost my mind in prison. Only in the course of that summer did I start fumbling around at the subject within myself. And when I then wrote the whole thing up, that was a process in which even imprisonment was addressed and, I hope, dealt with. A kind of healing process.’ By the portico, Leskov took his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s why I’ve got to find the text when I get home. I simply must. It’s not just because of the post. That text – it’s a piece of my soul.’

‘Did you have a good flight?’ asked Signora Morelli.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Perlmann like someone who has just been woken up.

‘She asked you that because of the note yesterday morning, didn’t she?’ Leskov said in the elevator.

Perlmann nodded. ‘A misunderstanding.’

Up in the room he threw himself on the bed. He did it without first setting down the suitcase – as if it had grown onto him. When he did finally let go, he saw that the leather handle was black from the sweat of his hand.

There was nothing more to think about. Now it was just a question of will power. Trembling, he waited for the feelings of guilt and his own shabbiness, with which he was attempting to forge an alliance, to emerge victorious over fear. Only then could time start flowing again and carry him forward, wherever that might be.

Before five minutes had passed, he sat up. He slowly took the envelope out of the suitcase, removed the staples and drew out the plastic jacket. He no longer had to be careful with the teeth of the zip fastener. With one single jerk – into which he put all of his despair – he pulled open the zip. One of the loose teeth was torn out and fell between the pages. Perlmann forced himself to inhale slowly a few times and cautiously pulled out the text. He ran the back of his hand several times over the top, curling page. The hole with the ragged, brownish edges, where the twig had gone through, was bigger than he remembered.

He washed his face and combed away a ridiculously prominent tuft of hair. A fresh shirt. Yes, and the jacket, too. The warm water wouldn’t do much for his cold hands, but he went back into the bathroom anyway. He pulled the door to his room closed behind him as softly as if someone were sleeping in there.

When he turned into the corridor that led to Leskov’s room, Perlmann’s pace slowed. Two doors before Leskov’s he turned round, walked to the elevator and sat in the big wicker chair. There was nothing more to consider. If he gave Leskov the text, then he would have to admit everything. If he didn’t give him the text, then Leskov wouldn’t get the post, and it was Perlmann’s fault. It was all quite clear. Crystal clear. There was no reason to sit here in the wicker chair. No amount of waiting could make it any clearer.

Perlmann waited. He would have liked to smoke. John Smith from Carson City, Nevada, who was coming out of the elevator in his tracksuit, showed Perlmann the headline of a newspaper and shook his head disapprovingly. Two French businessmen with briefcases came out of the corridor and walked, chatting, down the stairs. A chambermaid with bedlinen over her arm slipped past.