Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

After that remark he felt dazed, and later he remembered only that he had stared at the wall with all the holiday postcards, which looked exactly like the wall in Frau Hartwig’s office.

Yes, he said later in Angelini’s office, his work with the group had been a great success. He would contact him shortly about publication.

‘You know,’ Angelini said as they parted, ‘I still can’t imagine why you would want to give all that up. Well, anyway, you can think about it for a while now that you know more about it. And tell Carla out there what your expenses are. She’ll write you a check. This was a job interview, in a way!’

The secretary was on the phone. Perlmann nodded to her and went outside. On the way to the hotel he accidentally bumped into two people. The man at reception who brought him the envelope containing Leskov’s text, pointed to the address.

‘St Petersburg. Will something like that really arrive? I mean, does the mail to Russia actually work? With all the chaos over there?’

While Perlmann was dozing in the train to Turin, that question pursued him like a stubborn echo. For the whole journey he held the envelope so tightly that there were sweat stains on it afterwards. He kept hearing Signora Medici’s Tyrolean accent, when she had suddenly spoken German.

At the airport check-in desk he pretended not to speak a word of Italian. He bought two German newspapers, even though he was more interested in the Italian headlines. German, that was the language he knew. The only one. To imagine anything else was conceited nonsense.

When the plane rose, he saw the grounds of the Fiat works. The people from Fiat. Santini. He closed his eyes. When flying, he had often noticed, thoughts formed that you forgot later when you stepped inside the airport, as if they had never happened, so that it remained unclear for ever whether they had really been thoughts at all. Finding a perspective outside oneself, to live from there in greater freedom within oneself. It could be a goal, he thought, an ideal. But perhaps it was also a chimera, the expression of his fatigue. He picked up both newspapers and read them from the first page to the last. He immediately forgot every article that he had read. So he didn’t need to think, either about what had been or what was yet to come.

Only once he interrupted his reading and looked down at the snowy mountains. The perspective of eternity . If one did everything from that perspective, wouldn’t that mean losing the present completely – so completely that one wouldn’t even miss it? Was it not, to put it this way, a precondition for the experience of the present that the plane would eventually sink below the clouds and touch the ground?

The rain was pelting down in Frankfurt, and the wind whipped the water so violently against the aeroplane that Perlmann involuntarily flinched behind the window. All the while, Leskov’s text had been in the net on the back of the seat. It was in such a net, Leskov would think, that he had forgotten the text. As he was going, Perlmann clamped the envelope under his left arm and also held it tightly with his right hand.

His calculation was correct. As the counter where he had to ask for his suitcase, there was a stack of Lufthansa stickers. As the man at the desk fetched his case, Perlmann slipped three of them into his pocket. He sat down near the post office counter, opened the envelope and stuck one of the labels on the plastic jacket. He stuck the other two on the envelope, one on the top left, the other on the bottom right. He held the envelope at arm’s length: it looked good, business-like. The home address. An address that no one here could know but me . Perlmann felt the whole mechanism of his tormented reflections beginning to set itself in motion. For a moment he pressed his fingers against his brow, got up and walked to the counter.

As the post office clerk was sticking the stamps and the label for express delivery on the envelope, Perlmann asked him how long, in his view, it would take to arrive. The clerk shrugged.

‘Three days, a week. No idea.’

Why should it take a week? Perlmann asked irritably. The man threw the envelope into a basket, counted the money and then looked at Perlmann in silence for a second or two.

‘As I said: no idea.’

So why are you worrying me, then? Perlmann yelled at him inwardly. Out loud he said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s… so much depends upon it. Do you perhaps know… I mean, can you estimate how great the danger is of the package going missing?’

The expression that now appeared on the clerk’s face reminded Perlmann of the pizza chef in Santa Margherita whom he had asked about rain near the tunnel.

‘Nothing gets lost here. As to the Russian post – no idea.’

Slowly, as if he needed to free himself of another internal obstacle, Perlmann walked towards the exit. He avoided looking over at the book display where, almost three weeks before, Nikolai Leskov’s book had leapt out at him. Just as he stepped through the light barrier and the sliding door slid sideways, it occurred to him. A copy. For safety’s sake I’ve got to copy the text . He practically ran to the post office counter and, at one point, his case, which was on wheels, tipped over. Now there was a line. Perlmann stood on tiptoes: his envelope was covered up by others, but the basket with the blue label was still there.

‘As if we didn’t have anything else to do,’ murmured the clerk as he sought out the envelope a little while later.

Was there a photocopier anywhere in this building? It was already dark outside when Perlmann was finally allowed into the back room of a newsagent’s in a completely different part of the building. The half-closed zip of the plastic jacket could only be opened fully by a violent tug. Now six of the teeth weren’t working, and there was no point even thinking about pulling it closed again. After sixty-five pages the machine ran out of paper, and Perlmann had to wait a quarter of an hour until the staff could take the time to come and fill it up. Two copied pages fell on the dusty floor. When he cleaned them with his handkerchief he had a feeling that he would never, ever be done with Leskov’s text, and he started breathing with difficulty. The metal of the staples on the envelope had become far too soft from all that bending, he thought. He hoped they wouldn’t break on the journey.

As he left, he handed the flustered staff a fifty mark note and then walked the long way back to the post office. He asked the clerk, who stared silently into the distance after recognizing him, whether it was a good idea to register the package, or whether that might slow everything down.

‘What now?’ was the only reaction he got.

And then he won’t be at home, and they’ll take the envelope away again. ‘Don’t register it,’ he said.

The taxi progressed slowly through the city traffic. Perlmann had closed his eyes, and was trying to use his exhaustion to keep all thoughts at bay. The rolled-up copy in his hand was getting sticky. There’s no point in it whatsoever. I could never give it to him without exposing myself. He gave up, and at that moment he had the feeling that he had just relinquished absolutely everything he had, and that it was a more complete surrender than he had ever experienced before. As the wall of rain lashed the taxi, he saw the black lines of the felt-tip pen running and the address on the envelope blurring to illegibility. When the taxi had driven off and he was looking for his front-door key, drips fell, unnoticed by him, on to Leskov’s text.

On the first night Perlmann had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. But the doctor on duty saw no reason to keep him in. All his readings were normal. He diagnosed complete exhaustion, gave Perlmann a tranquillizing injection and signed him off work until the end of the year.