Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

After a lengthy pause, in which he had slipped into a half-sleep, the back of the front seat struck his knees. Leskov had loosened his seatbelt and rolled on to his right side, and was trying, once again in vain, to turn all the way towards Perlmann.

‘I barely dare to broach the subject,’ he said submissively, ‘but I don’t suppose you would be willing to translate my text?’

Perlmann froze and was glad that the driver was suddenly forced to overtake at that point, cursing as he did so.

‘I just thought that because you know my thoughts so well, and have responded to them with such interest,’ Leskov added hesitantly, almost guiltily, when he received no answer.

Only now did Perlmann manage to shake off his torpor. ‘Just from the point of view of time, it’s not going to work,’ he heard himself say in a hollow voice. ‘We’ve got the term coming up…’

‘I know,’ Leskov said quickly, ‘and I’m sure you’re going to want to go on working on your book. Incidentally, I wanted to ask you if I could read what you’ve written already. You can imagine how intensely interested I am.’

Perlmann felt as if a ton weight on his chest was keeping him from breathing. ‘Later,’ he said at last, when Leskov had long since clicked his seatbelt shut again.

‘The man with the cap is working today again,’ Leskov laughed when the taxi drove past the parking cabin to the airport entrance. ‘I won’t forget him again in a hurry. Such stubbornness!’

Then, as they stood in line at check-in, Leskov suddenly said that he hoped the plane wasn’t as full as it had been on the inbound flight, when he hadn’t known where to put his feet because of the suitcase. In the end the stewardess had saved him by stowing it somewhere at the back.

‘At least this way I can be sure that I haven’t left the text somewhere along this route,’ he said with a crooked smile. ‘You must knock on wood very firmly that I find it, when I step into my apartment in… wait… in fifteen hours.’

They slowly walked towards passport control. Another two, three minutes.

Leskov set down his suitcase. ‘When you step into your apartment, I’m sure it seems empty to you, even today. Doesn’t it?’

For one brief moment Perlmann experienced the same rage as he had felt in the silent tunnel; it was as if it had ceased only for a few minutes, not for several days.

‘Kirsten will be there,’ he lied. And then, contrary to his intentions, he asked the question: ‘Klim Samgin – how does he come to terms with his trauma? Or doesn’t he?’

Leskov made the face of someone normally unnoticed who learns, completely unexpectedly, that someone is interested in him, in him personally.

‘I’ve thought a lot about that. But it’s strange: Gorky doesn’t answer the question. On the one hand the memory of the hole in the ice keeps flashing up; on the other hand you don’t learn anything about how Klim feels about it. If you ask me: you can’t really come to terms with a trauma of that kind. It isn’t so much that something terrible happened to him that he couldn’t do anything about. Like me with prison. He lets go of the belt; that is, he does something, he performs an action. And also there’s this hatred within him. If there’s any chance of something that might be a real reconciliation with oneself, and not just a frantic self-reassurance. I doubt it. The red hands will never have let him go again. Or what do you think?’

Perlmann didn’t say anything, and just shrugged. Leskov took a step towards him, and put his arms around him. As stiff as a mannequin, Perlmann let him do it.

‘I’ll write to you straight away about the text!’ called Leskov, as the official flicked through his passport. ‘And, of course, I’ll send you a copy as soon as it’s typed out!’

Incapable of reacting, Perlmann watched Leskov waving his passport before he disappeared. With his head completely empty, Perlmann stood on the same spot. For several minutes he noticed nothing of the bustle going on around him. Only when a running child bumped into his case did he really come to his senses. Over. Again and again he said the word, only inwardly at first, then under his voice. It had no effect. The relief he longed for didn’t materialize. He took a few sluggish steps and leaned against a column. Fifteen hours, then for Leskov days of despair would begin, of impotent fury with himself and his increasingly faint hope of a dispatch from Lufthansa. Perlmann involuntarily hunched his shoulders and folded his arms in front of his chest.

Nothing had changed in the waiting list for the afternoon flight from Frankfurt to Turin. There was still that one man in front of him. Perlmann walked over to the bar. But even before he was served his coffee, he left some money on the bar and went up to the viewing terrace. He set down his luggage as far as possible from the place where, long ago, he would have left the suitcase, had it not been for the girl in sneakers. The pilots were already sitting in the cockpit, and now two cleaning women with big garbage bags were leaving the plane. Do you know what I’m most afraid of? The cleaning crew.

Leskov was one of the first to leave the bus, which had driven out to the plane in a big loop. With his heavy gait he climbed the gangway and, at one point, he seemed to have trodden on a flap of his loden coat. Having reached the top, he looked as if he wanted to turn round, but was forced in by the others.

Perlmann wanted to go. He stayed where he was. Behind which window might Leskov be sitting? The plane rolled painfully slowly to the start of the runway, and time seemed to stretch to tearing point. After it had turned, the plane stood there as if it couldn’t be moved again, waiting in the pale morning light that seeped through a fine veil of clouds. Otherwise, nothing moved on the empty tarmac. Perlmann held his breath and felt his blood thumping. He felt as if this silence and inertia had been staged specifically for him, even though he couldn’t have said why, or what its message might have been. For several minutes the whole world seemed to him to have been frozen in an unintelligible act of waiting. Only the revving of the engine set time in motion once more. Without knowing why, and caught up in his blind tension, Perlmann concentrated on the precise moment when the tires lost contact with the runway. Then, when the plane flew out in a lazy loop over the sea, he saw in his mind’s eye the view that Leskov had now. That’s how I imagined the Riviera, exactly like that , he heard Leskov saying. Perlmann only bent for his luggage when the low cloud had swallowed up the last flash of the wings.

He checked in his case and collected his boarding card for the eleven o’clock flight to Frankfurt. He would – he thought in the bar – have to wait five long hours at Frankfurt Airport for the flight to Turin, not knowing whether he would be able to find a seat. If not, he could always drive to Ivrea. He could get there by ten o’clock tomorrow. Admittedly, that would mean he wouldn’t be at the university before Wednesday. But with the prospect of his new job in the bright office Perlmann was invulnerable to reproachful glances.

In the hall he sat down in a corner and unpacked his books. He picked up each individual one and examined it with puzzled thoroughness, as if it were a document from a very distant, very alien culture. He ran through the contents lists and, although he was familiar with all the topics, he was amazed at all the things that were in there. He opened a few pages at random and read. They were brand-new textbooks, hailed as revolutionary on the blurb, but he had the feeling of reading the same thing as always. The spine of the book snapped when he moved on to the next random sample. The shiny pages with the illustrations and tables smelled particularly intensely of fresh print.