Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann spent the rest of the night sleeplessly in an armchair, looking out at the garden, where it started snowing towards morning. Every now and again he wrapped himself up even more tightly in the blanket, and enjoyed the fact that the injection slowed everything down and kept his thoughts away.

Shortly after eight he told Frau Hartwig. His voice sounded so flat that she didn’t ask a single question. Later, he stepped out into the dense snowstorm, and walked slowly to the bank, where he put the copy of Leskov’s text, now blistered and browned by the rain, in a safe deposit box. He bought the barest necessities, put the chain on the door and, after disconnecting the phone, went to bed.

He spent most of that day, and the two next days, sleeping. When he was awake for one or two hours he thought about Leskov waiting for the post. Each time he was unable to bear the idea for long, and was soon glad to feel exhaustion pulling him back into sleep. At four o’clock on Thursday morning he was woken by hunger pangs. He found that he had lost eight kilos, and forced himself to prepare a proper meal. After a few bites he couldn’t go on, and left it. While he stared at an old late-night western without following the plot, he slowly ate half a loaf of bread and drank camomile tea that reminded him of the time of his childhood illnesses. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since Turin, and he didn’t feel like one now.

On Thursday afternoon he stayed awake for longer. As it went on snowing outside, Perlmann sat on the sofa and stared blankly at the coffee stain on the living-room carpet. He felt as if he had, silently and without really noticing, shattered apart, and was now lying around in vague pieces somewhere outside, far removed from himself, and as if all those scattered pieces now had to be drawn together on invisible threads from some imaginary middle point, and carefully reassembled until his inner essence was complete once more, seamless and unbroken.

As he walked from room to room looking at Agnes’s photographs, he moved cautiously and with deliberate slowness, like an invalid. The post office clerk had clearly thought it possible that the text would only take three days to arrive. The information had just been flung out like that. But he had still been given a time limit. If that was so, the text would arrive in St Petersburg today. The courier could bring it to Leskov tonight. At any rate, it would be delivered tomorrow morning. Will something like that really arrive? With all the chaos over there?

That night he dreamed about Signora Medici, who lived in Pian dei Ratti. She spent the whole day leaning in the window, watching him, with Leskov next to him as a driving instructor, practising driving straight ahead in front of the slate-grinder’s, and having to fight against the steering wheel’s constant pull to the left. Don’t worry, you can speak German! she kept shouting. That will make things easier!

Perlmann woke drenched in sweat and made coffee. Six languages. If you included Russian, he had the same number. He lit a cigarette. Wrapped in the feeling of dizziness that began after the first drag, he got to work on the signora. He chased her through all the languages he spoke, and ruthlessly set her up for the most obvious traps. It was already past eight and broad daylight when he was finally able to free himself from that hate-drenched compulsion.

Now the courier could ring Leskov’s doorbell at any moment. The Russian’s despair would be at an end. He could immediately start copying it out and filling in the gaps. He still had exactly a week. Hopefully, when the courier came, he wouldn’t already be on his way to the university to wait. Most letter boxes were too small for an envelope of that size, and who knew what might happen if it were simply left outside the door?

Now the time had come to phone Kirsten. He got her out of bed. She had called every evening at the usual time. Where had he been hiding himself? Perlmann dodged the question, saying something about tedious professional dinners. He didn’t mention the hospital, or the fact that he had been signed off work. Kirsten hemmed and hawed for a while before saying that she probably wouldn’t be coming home before Christmas. She had to deliver two more presentations, and she also wanted to help Martin move house. Perlmann concealed his relief, and said magnanimously that that was all perfectly fine.

In the afternoon he unpacked his case. The phone rang as he was stuffing the blood-stained and the torn trousers into a bag, which he fastened tightly. He suddenly dropped it and ran to the corridor. That might be him! But the ringing had already stopped. Perlmann carried the bag outside and threw it in the bin. He laid out the pale jacket with the strips of dirt ready for dry-cleaning. The blazer, which hung on a hanger from the wardrobe door, had fine, white traces of sweat on the back. He saw that only now. He put it with his jacket. As he did so he discovered a strip of dried tomato sauce on his sleeve. Stronzo .

The chronicle had plainly slipped around in the suitcase, and the cover was torn. He threw the cover away and set the volume down on his empty desk. Next to it were the unopened envelope from Frau Hartwig, the invitation to Princeton, his notes. He opened a page of Jakob von Gunten at random and read a few sentences. Then he put the book back on the shelf. He would never read it again.

He fetched a new bag for the medal and the certificate. It was the first time he had unrolled the certificate. It referred to one filip pereman, who was henceforth an honorary citizen of Santa Margherita Ligure. On the way to the bin Perlmann couldn’t help grinning. The last things he unpacked were the new handkerchiefs from the plastic jacket. He held them indecisively in his hand, then set them down on the chest of drawers in the corridor.

Later he collected his private post from two streets down. While he was still in the post office, he tore Hanna’s letter in two. She had been delighted by his phone call out of the blue, she wrote, but also unsettled. Could he call her when he was home again? And could they see each other again? It would take a few days, he thought, as he stamped through the slush, before he was ready to make that call.

He saw on the television news that the match Giovanni had mentioned – the one between Stuttgart and Juventus Turin – took place today. It was already half an hour in. Roberto Baggio was playing; his name kept being mentioned. If he hadn’t scored, I would have been guilty of plagiarism . Perlmann waited for a throw-in that provided a close-up of Baggio’s face. A strange face, he thought, and turned off the television. But it would only have been a disaster if Maria had finished typing up the text on Friday. If she hadn’t had a cold. Or if Santini had had something that urgently needed typing.

The woman at international directory enquiries was very helpful. They had only a few numbers of major companies in St Petersburg to hand, but they could call information there to ask for a private number. However, that could take a long time – up to a day. Should she call him back? Perlmann gave her Leskov’s name and address and said that the time of day didn’t matter; it could be the middle of the night.

While looking for the piece of paper with Leskov’s address on it, Perlmann had come across the two unused plane tickets: the original one for his flight home, Genoa–Frankfurt, and the horrendously expensive one for the flight to Frankfurt on Saturday. Together they were worth more than 1,000 marks. He tore them up. It was like an expiatory sacrifice.

Then he started cleaning the apartment. He had never cleaned it like that before. He had never cleaned anything like that before, with such furious, fanatical thoroughness. Every last nook and cranny was scoured till it shone. Every now and again, shivering with exhaustion, he sat down on a stool and wiped the cold sweat from his brow with a kitchen towel. When he had finished his study, he stood at the window for a long time and looked out into the night. Then he took Agnes’s picture from the windowsill and put it on the little table in the corner. Last of all came her room, where he still hadn’t changed anything. On a stack of books on the floor he found her copy of the Russian grammar. Her underlinings were rougher, her notes more carelessly scribbled than in his copy, but there weren’t as many. He walked back and forth with the book in his hand. In his mind’s eye he saw the dark-brown cabbage and smelled the warm, stinking fumes that had come out of the container. Breathing with difficulty, he took the Langenscheidt and the two-volume German-Russian dictionary out of the shelf. He put everything on the chest of drawers in the corridor and then assembled the few Russian books that they had both – always with a sense of imposture – brought home from some specialist bookshop or other. It would be hardest for him to part with the volume of Chekhov short stories, a particularly beautiful book bound in black leather, which he had come across in a side street behind the British Museum when he had spent a few days in London with Agnes and Kirsten.