Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Later, when he lay in bed, exhausted and shivering, and imagined Leskov sitting at his desk now and brooding over the gaps in his text, Perlmann’s heart started racing. Neither conscious breathing nor reading did any good; only the tranquil landscape pictures on late-night television helped. He moved the phone still closer to his bed and checked that it was set to the loudest volume.

That night, for the first time, he had the tunnel dream that would haunt him at regular intervals over the coming weeks. He was driving – pressed back into his seat by the acceleration – along the vibrating floor of the tunnel, which described an endlessly long loop to the left, and fell away to the left like a cycle-racing track, so that there was always a danger of slipping into the opposite carriageway. The headlights coming from the opposite direction were like huge waves of dazzling light that sloshed over the car and obliterated his vision. At the start of the journey he was holding a steering wheel, but later his cold hands simply clutched the air, and now he could only wait, with a feeling of boundless impotence, for the impact, his ears full of that terrible whistling that gave way, after a time, to a rattling, ringing noise with regular interruptions, and dragged him from sleep.

‘You registered for a call to St Petersburg?’ asked a dark female voice.

‘Yes,’ he said and looked at his alarm clock: twenty past four.

‘Just a moment, I’ll put you through.’ There were two clicks followed by a hiss, and then, through a filter of background noises, he heard Leskov’s voice.

‘ Da? Ya slushayu… Kto tam? ’

Perlmann put down the phone. He got dressed, packed the stack of Russian books in an old bag and dragged them through deserted streets to the big supermarket garbage bins.

At the weekend Perlmann started his training in slowness. He wouldn’t have imagined that it would be so difficult. Again and again he made hasty movements, abrupt changes of intention. Then he forced himself to repeat the whole thing so slowly that a slow-motion calm was produced. After some time he came up with a ritual: before any lengthy sequence of actions he went into the living room and listened to the ticking of the big clock for half a minute. All that Saturday he waged a stubborn battle against his unfounded haste, and often felt as if he would never learn to do it. But by Sunday he had already managed to slow some things down all by himself, and he felt his nervous exhaustion turning every now and again into a natural, redeeming tiredness. Now each time he spent a good minute listening to the big clock.

Late on Sunday afternoon he sat down at his desk for the first time. He thought of the many books that he had left in Genoa in the airport restroom. Would he buy new ones? He managed to push his tiredness like a buffer between himself and that question and, for a while, he span out that thought still further: the important thing was to take that tiredness, which was too deep-rooted ever to disappear entirely, and turn it into a protecting shell – a substitute for serenity.

The envelope from Frau Hartwig, which he opened now, contained only requests and demands with deadlines that had already passed. He threw everything into the waste-paper basket. He hid the letter from Princeton in his desk drawer. Then he put the chronicle, along with the old wax-cloth notebook, in the kitchen along with the out-of-date newspapers.

Then he sat for a long time at his completely empty desk. From time to time he ran his hand over the gleaming surface. For the next little while the important thing was not to think too much, and even then to think slowly. Above all, he didn’t want to think in sentences, in articulate, properly formulated sentences that he heard internally. For a long, very long time, he didn’t want to look for words, weigh words, compare words. His thoughts should be entirely concerned with doing certain things rather than others, going to the left rather than to the right, into this room rather than that one, taking that path rather than that one. His thoughts should be apparent in the fact that he did things in their logical sequence, that there was order in his movements, a meaning in his behavior. Beyond that, his thoughts should go unnoticed, even by himself, without conscious traces, and above all without an internal linguistic echo. Even if he wrote one sentence rather than another, silence was to prevail inside his head. The pen was to pursue its path across the page, leaving its trace, without the sentence produced by that trace possessing an internal present. In the end Perlmann would send the trace to wherever it was that they were waiting for a text from him.

Something else that he had to carefully avoid was trying to work out what other people were thinking. Henceforth, he didn’t want to think about what other people might think or do if he did one thing or another. He would do what he did, and the others would do what they did. There would be nothing else there. And he also had to silence his obsessively detailed imagination. He would complement his slowness training with lack-of-imagination training.

The first thing he saw later on, when he turned on the television, was a close-up of hands gliding over piano keys. Someone was playing Bach. He immediately switched to another channel. Here, a Russian physicist was being interviewed, and someone was simultaneously translating. Perlmann kept his finger on the button of the remote, he would soon switch this channel, too, but then he stayed with it, one more sentence, and then another. He felt himself being sucked into a vortex that summoned up everything again. Now the interpreter was losing the crucial balance between the old sentence and the new. No, now you’ve got to skip the old sentence and concentrate on the new one! Perlmann silently yelled at him, and slipped to the edge of the sofa. It was only when the tension turned into a stomach-cramp that he tore himself away.

Then he took a long walk through the dark park and paid attention to the emptiness in his head. When he took his glasses off to go to bed, he thought about the tunnel. Perlmann slept better than he had done for the first few days. Only once did he start awake: he had taken on Signora Medici in Russian, and then worked out that he himself didn’t know the words, and had forgotten his own questions like a senile old man.

Perlmann spent the next week waiting for Leskov’s letter. If the text had arrived on Friday, the letter could already be here by Tuesday. But it would arrive by Saturday at the latest. He stood at the window for hours and waited for the postman. Why didn’t Leskov call him? Or send a telegram? Recently, not a single half hour had passed without Perlmann thinking about Leskov and the promised letter. But no letter came. The postal clerk at the airport had probably been right, and it would take a whole week. The post doesn’t usually come on Monday , he heard Leskov saying. So Perlmann couldn’t expect the letter before next Tuesday.

The offer from Olivetti came in the middle of the week. Now they were talking about a three-month probationary period. His tasks: translating business correspondence with German, English and American partners; overseeing the German and English edition of a large advertising brochure that was to be produced next summer; occasional interpreting at trade fairs. Signor Angelini had mentioned that Perlmann also spoke Russian; they would bear that in mind in the future. And, lastly, it would be nice if he could support Signor Angelini in his collaboration with the universities. They offered him four million lire per month – just half of what he currently earned. They would speak about pensions, insurance and the like when he had fundamentally agreed. For those things they would need a raft of documents.