Pascal Mercier: Perlmann's Silence

Who had told Angelini anything about his Russian? Evelyn Mistral had kept mum, he was sure of that. It must have been Leskov, at the dinner after he arrived, when Angelini was there. He had told him how they had met, how they had walked together through the Hermitage… But why, then, had Adrian von Levetzov been so unsettled in the café, when Leskov had talked about sending his first version to Perlmann? It must have been like this: over dinner Leskov had told only Angelini, who had been sitting next to him… Perlmann struck his knuckles against his forehead. He must stop trying to work out other people!

He had just set the letter aside when Frau Hartwig called him and passed on a message that Brian Millar had sent by email. His publisher was extremely interested in Perlmann’s book. Could he suggest a delivery date? He missed Italy, Millar had added, and: ‘How’s your Chopin?’

Was he still there? Frau Hartwig asked after a long pause.

The book would take a while yet. Perlmann asked her to write and thank Millar for his trouble. And in conclusion: ‘How’s your Bach?’

‘I knew nothing about a book,’ Frau Hartwig said, piqued.

‘Later,’ he replied.

The sun was shining, and everything was thawing as he walked along the river. But he didn’t notice much. He was too busy trying out letters with which he could return the prize he had recently been awarded. At last he had a text with the right tone. But when – his shoes still soaking – he had sat at his desk and written it down, he found it melodramatic and threw it away.

During the night Perlmann had pains in his heart and came close to calling the doctor. Early the next morning he went to see him at the hospital. The doctor, whom he had known for many years, didn’t say much, and made long pauses that Perlmann found uncomfortable. At last he hesitantly prescribed him some new sleeping pills and told him not to smoke.

On the way home Perlmann walked past the familiar bookshop. He wished he knew more about meditation, the technique for reaching inner peace. For a long time he stood by the shelf with the books on the subject. But each excerpt that he read contained something that repelled him, something sectarian or proselytizing, an emotionalism that he didn’t like. He didn’t buy anything.

Friday. Today, Leskov had to hand in his text. And still no letter. Of course, he had had to work day and night, there had been no time left for a letter. And anyway, it probably wouldn’t arrive until the weekend. That meant another week of waiting. But that was actually a good sign: it proved that the text had arrived. Otherwise, Leskov would have had any amount of time for a letter. Unless he was in such a bad condition that it was out of the question.

At the time when she had usually come back from lunch, Perlmann called Maria. She sounded spontaneous and sincere when she said how pleased she was to hear from him. Nonetheless, the conversation was something of a struggle. Those two weeks had been enough to move everything far into the past, and each sentence sounded like a frantic attempt to warm up something obsolete. He had done a lot of preparation for the question of whether she had deleted the files in the meantime; it was supposed to sound quite casual, like a joke at the end of a flirtation. When he asked it now, it seemed to come completely out of nowhere. She had just cleared up her hard drive, said Maria; but right now she couldn’t remember whether his files had been among the deleted ones. Did he want her to check?

‘No, no,’ he said, trying to make it sound light and playful. ‘It really doesn’t matter!’

‘Even if they aren’t in the computer any more, I still remember those texts very clearly!’ said Maria, laughing.

It would be impossible to call her again, he thought as he hung up.

His credit-card bill arrived on Saturday. They had deducted the sums for the rental car, including the excess for the repairs, and for the two dictionaries from the bookshop in Genoa. That day Perlmann had wanted to start on a book that he had been offered for review. Now he just sat around and kept hopping from channel to channel.

He had been worried that he would dream about the tunnel again. Instead, he spent half the night – it seemed to him – battling with a computer, which, when he tried to delete a file produced a back-up copy instead. Brian Millar watched over his shoulder, so closely that Perlmann could feel his breath. All at once Millar’s arm was thrown in front of Perlmann’s face, holding out a plate piled high with ice-cold food. Perlmann turned to him and, when he recognized the waiter, he threw the food so hard in his face that half of it splashed on Evelyn Mistral’s hair and her snow-white blouse.

On Sunday Perlmann started taking down some of Agnes’s photographs and clearing them away. Only a few were to remain – not necessarily the best ones, but the ones with a personal history. For example, the one with little Kirsten in the beach chair on the island of Sylt. It was hard work, and more than once he got chest pains. In the end he had a sense of having gone too far, and hung a series of pictures back up, whereupon the plaster started crumbling as the nail was hammered in for the second time.

Evelyn Mistral rang in the early evening. It was a conversation with a lot of pauses. Perlmann wished she was sitting opposite him. Had he heard anything about Leskov and his text? No, he said, nothing.

‘You know the phone call I suddenly remembered after the reception at the town hall?’ she said towards the end of their conversation. ‘It was a good thing I called. Once again, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And the coast road was closed anyway!’ she laughed.

Over the following week Perlmann sat down to write his review. He saw the author in his mind’s eye, a glittering Berliner with a French wife and a house on the Côte d’Azur. Perlmann had to take a lot of breaks and, sometimes, when his reluctance became too violent, his chest felt like concrete. Then he reached for a cigarette.

The key chapter of the book presented as new discoveries things with which Perlmann had long been familiar from the work of a little-known French writer. He knew exactly where he should have looked: the book was on the top shelf on the right. He waited for a feeling of triumph or at least of calm satisfaction. When it failed to materialize, he was at first disappointed, but then glad. He left the French book on the shelf, and in his review, which was objective, fair and positive on the whole, he didn’t mention the matter at all.

In the middle of the week he sat back down behind the wheel for the first time. He was surprised at how close the handbrake of his car was to the passenger seat. He drove to a carpet dealer he knew and bought a light-colored Tibetan runner to cover up the coffee stain at long last. On the way back, in the early twilight, several trucks came towards him, one of them with its headlights on full beam. Each time a truck appeared, Perlmann braked to a walking pace and drove on to the grass. He decided not to drive in the near future, and wondered whether he should give the car to Kirsten.

As he was taking out the ignition key in the garage, he remembered that moment at the gas station next to the hotel, where he had thought he had understood that the problem of inner delineation from other people and the lack of a presence were one and the same problem deep down. He clearly remembered that this had struck him as the most important insight of his whole life. On the way to his front door Perlmann had rephrased that insight over and over again. But now it was just a sentence. A sentence, admittedly, that sounded right, and one that he agreed with, but only a sentence now, not an experienced insight. At the front door he turned round, opened the garage and sat down at the wheel again with his hand on the ignition. Afterwards it seemed ridiculous to assume that an experienced insight could be poured into a particular physical posture.