Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann was monosyllabic, and repeatedly collecting spittle against his dry tongue. Yes, he said at last, everything’s fine; the hotel and the weather, too.

‘And did you bring your Russian things with you?’ she asked.

One half-hour passed after the other, and Perlmann still couldn’t get back to sleep. In the middle of a poisoned weariness there was still an island of dry alertness that wouldn’t go out. At half-past one he phoned reception and for safety’s sake asked to be woken at seven. Then he took the second half of the sleeping pill.

He was still enveloped in leaden weariness when his alarm call came, from a long way off, it seemed to him. He mumbled grazie and hung up. Immediately afterwards the alarm clock rang. Sitting on the edge of the bed he bent over and covered his face with both hands. He had the feeling of having slept deeply in the sense that a span of total oblivion lay between the current moment and the events of the previous day. Nonetheless, he felt insecure, as if we were walking on very thin ice, and something was pushing against his eyes as if someone had poured lead into his sinuses. He cursed the sleeping pill.

After he had misdialled and ended up talking to the laundry, he ordered coffee from room service. As he was waiting for the waiter, he stood in the cool air by the open window and watched as the lights went off over by Sestri Levante. Again a sunrise without any presence, the usual transparent blue seeping through the fine morning mist, but all as in a film seen too often, and this time separated from him by a wall of weariness and a throbbing headache.

He didn’t have the strength to protest when the waiter set a tray with a sumptuous breakfast down on the round table. He hastily gulped down three cups of coffee, took an aspirin and lit a cigarette. After the first few puffs he felt slightly dizzy, but the sensation was much weaker than the day before. Now music came out of Millar’s room: Bach. Perlmann went into the shower, where he shivered in spite of the hot water. Afterwards he drank the rest of the coffee. Now the cigarette only tasted bitter. Quarter to eight. From eight the others would be going to breakfast. It was enough if he appeared at about half-past. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to do with the time left to him except to wait for Millar to go to breakfast and the music to stop.

He picked up Leskov’s text. The first sentence after yesterday’s marks was difficult, and Perlmann relied on paper and pencil to make the convoluted construction clear to himself: I shall demonstrate that and in which sense it is by capturing our memories in words that we create these memories and thus our own experienced past in the first place. The music stopped, and a moment later Millar’s door clicked shut. Perlmann slowly drank the orange juice and ate one croissant, then another one. At breakfast down below he would only need to drink something. His headache was subsiding. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Creating the past by narrating memory stories – that seemed to be the idea. He excitedly looked in his suitcase for his black notebook. He no longer knew what, but that thought had something to do with his own notes.

The door to Ruge’s room clicked shut, and a few moments later Perlmann heard the sound of him blowing his nose, much more muted in the hotel corridor. Suddenly, Perlmann was painfully wide awake: he hadn’t prepared a single suggestion for the organization of his work over the coming weeks. He put the black notebook back. He couldn’t understand how he could have forgotten it, when he usually prepared everything in minute detail. If he had got up later and gone down to breakfast straight away, it might have occurred to him only when he stepped into the veranda. It was as if the fear split him deep within, and for one fleeting moment he had an idea what it must be like to lose yourself.

He quickly washed his face with cold water, thought for a moment about whether he should order some more coffee, then took his writing pad and pocket diary and sat down at the desk. No, Ruge wasn’t sitting opposite him now. And anyway, the wall was a wall and not a two-way mirror. His throbbing headache was back, and while he drew columns for the five weeks, with his other hand he gripped his forehead and pressed it as hard as if he wanted to crush it.

Seven blocks of two days in which they would assemble in the veranda to discuss each other’s current work. Three days a week, to have individual conversations or withdraw. That sounded like the correct dosage. Perlmann marked Monday and Tuesday as well as Thursday and Friday. He himself would take the last block. But even so he was left, he was horrified to see, with only three weeks, and not even a whole three, because the others each needed two or three days to read. He had at all costs to see to it that he made it into the last column, the one that had still been left blank, and in the lower half of it, so that he still had four weeks; that was the absolute minimum. That meant using any explanation to keep two half-weeks free. He looked at his watch: twenty-five to nine. He lit his third last cigarette. They’ll walk out on me during the session . The minutes passed inconsequentially. If Leskov had been able to come, the problem would only be half as big . He would have to be careful that he didn’t give himself away with his maneuvering.

When he walked over to his suitcase to get a pullover he saw himself in the high mirror on the wall, in the same trousers and the same shirt as yesterday afternoon. He stopped for a moment, then frantically started changing. As he did so, he was filled with furious shame at his insecurity. Battling tears of fury, he slipped back into the clothes he had just been wearing, put his jumper over his shoulders and walked, pencil and paper in hand, to the door. Before he pulled it shut he saw on the carpet a torn-off button of his fresh shirt, which lay on the crumpled bed. When, happy at the absence of pain in his ankle, he hurried down the purple carpet of the wide staircase, it was two minutes past nine.

All the others were already there, with notepads and manuscripts in front of them. Only Silvestri had brought nothing but an untidily folded newspaper. For Perlmann it was impossible not to sit at the front. It would have looked like a ludicrous refusal that gave the carved armchair a far too great, almost magical significance. So he sat down after a brief hesitation, which he alone perceived, at the head. Through the windows on the other side of the room he could see the blue swimming pool, and behind it, beyond the hotel terrace, the top half of a gas station. At this time of day the parasols had not yet been put up, the loungers were still empty. Only the red-haired man from yesterday was already there, tapping out the music from his headphones on his drawn-up knee.

The phrases of greeting and all other introductory words stuck in Perlmann’s throat. He wanted to get straight to business, he said, and immediately started explaining his suggestion for the course of the work. As he spoke he became more secure; what he said sounded practiced and well thought out. Then he went to the board and drew the five columns. The second half of the current and the first half of the fourth week he left blank. Sitting awkwardly, he stiffly wrote his own name beside the Thursday and Friday of the last week. Only three and a half weeks, then. And if you take in the reading time for the others, it’s only three; plus one, two days at most. How am I supposed to do that?

‘Why do you want to keep your contribution from us for so long?’ von Levetzov asked with a smile that was supposed to express appreciative interest, but in which there was also a bit of irritating surprise and, it seemed to Perlmann, a hint of suspicion, so faint that it took his special eyes to see it. ‘You’re one of the main reasons we’re here.’ Evelyn Mistral smiled at Perlmann and nodded emphatically.