Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

There was still no letter from Leskov on Friday. No wonder, in fact, because it must have taken him the past weekend to recover, and a letter could – as that veteran postal clerk had estimated – be en route for a whole week. Leaving from his mailbox, Perlmann finally put away the new handkerchiefs, saving one for his pocket. Then he wrote a letter to Olivetti turning down their offer, and a second letter to Angelini. He cited his reason as unforeseen family difficulties that would keep him in Frankfurt for the time being. He wrote both letters quickly and effortlessly. He tried to exploit that momentum, and started on the letter to Princeton. But he couldn’t get beyond the salutation, and then took a long walk through the familiar city, which seemed alien to him in the gloomy December light.

Laura Sand’s photographs, which arrived on Saturday, disappointed him. He didn’t know why. They were dreamy landscape shots. Some of them must have been taken on the misty morning when he had completed the translation of Leskov’s text. In a separate envelope were several shots of colleagues, which, to judge by the unselfconsciousness of posture and expression, must have been taken unnoticed. On the accompanying slip of paper were the words: There are exceptions to every rule! The pictures showing him with Leskov he immediately threw away, and the other shots of colleagues ended up in the waste-paper basket as well. He kept only a single snapshot of Evelyn Mistral. Her laugh, her skewed T-shirt, her red shoes. He put the landscape shots in a drawer, then walked through the rooms for a while and looked at Agnes’s photographs.

He should really, in fact, have chosen her best shots, not the most personal. He swapped them round.

After the Sunday night concert on television he sat down at the grand piano. He played the Nocturnes that he had chosen in the lounge. There was a vacuum between him and the notes, a thin hiatus, which didn’t even disappear the second time. He couldn’t understand what was wrong, and played the A flat minor Polonaise. It didn’t matter at all that he got snarled up in the frightening passage. What was worse was that everything, even the liberating chords, sounded as if it had been dunked in fine sand.

There was no point even thinking about sleep. In the middle of the night he sat down at the piano in his pyjamas and played other Nocturnes. They sounded as they had before, and now he understood: what he had played in the lounge had shifted away from him because he had abused it, abused it as a weapon in his battle with Millar. That was an abuse different from the one that Szabo had meant. Music couldn’t be used as an instrument like that, or you lost it.

Towards morning Perlmann took a sleeping pill. When it started to take effect, a thought passed through his head, even though he hadn’t been thinking about the tunnel: Leskov had never asked him why he hadn’t just stopped in the passing bay to let the bulldozer through. Why not? It would have been a quite simple question, the most natural, in fact. And Perlmann couldn’t have told him the answer.

The bundle that the postman held in his hand on Tuesday contained Leskov’s letter. Perlmann could tell from the brownish paper of the envelope, which he knew from his earlier letter. Still in the hall, he tore open the envelope and looked, with thumping heart and feverish brain, for sentences that could immediately reassure him… there was no text there when I entered the apartment… I slipped, without really noticing, into a state of apathy… a state of dull endurance, of wordless resignation… desire to end it all… And then came the words that let him breathe again for the first time: … if the text hadn’t turned up after all … He closed his eyes and hung on to the chest of drawers for a moment before he went on reading, his eyes still burning:… the envelope just lying by the front door… the two yellow stickers… The state of the text was a shock… Seventeen pages! Perlmann had to skip through five endless paragraphs until it came at last: … I had, contrary to my custom, written my home address, that’s all… He pressed his hand to his stomach and breathed out, before dashing on to the next bit of redemption: … typing errors. But just after eight o’clock on Friday morning the thing was finished… And, at last, in the next paragraph but one, came the sentence that his eye really devoured: … the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post .

Perlmann leaned against the door frame, the sheets slipped from his hand, he started silently sobbing and went on sobbing, on and on, for several minutes. He only paused to blow his nose. With trembling hands he collected the sheets, sat on the sofa and started from the beginning:

St Petersburg, December

Dear Philipp.

I feel very guilty about writing to you only now. I had promised to tell you about the text straight away. But if I tell you how it all came about, you will, I hope, understand.

I reached home very late, because Moscow Airport was chaotic as well, and the plane here set off only after an hour’s delay, it was already the middle of the night. The passengers were delighted that there was still a bus into the city, even if its heating didn’t work and it was an icy-cold journey. The deepest winter had set in here in the meantime, in fact, and even though I somehow like the curiously cold, almost unearthly light that a fall of snow emanates even in the darkest night, I found myself longing for the glowing, yet transparent light of the south, from which I was coming. I will never forget how that light overwhelmed me when I stepped out of the airport with you and then stood next to the parking cabin (with that stubborn man in the red cap!). I feel as if months have passed since then!

And it’s just two weeks. They were, however, a nightmare. Because there was no text there when I entered the apartment. Throughout the whole journey it was as if I was sitting on coals, and I was so furious about the delay in Moscow that I snapped at everyone I came across. When the plane prepared to land here, something strange and almost paradoxical happened to me: out of pure fear that the text mightn’t be there, suddenly I didn’t want to go home. The state of uncertainty that spoiled some aspects of my stay with you all, and which became all the more unbearable the closer we got to St Petersburg (which is somehow strange in itself), that state suddenly seemed the lesser evil, compared with the feared discovery. But of course I then walked from the bus stop to the flat as quickly as my suitcase allowed me, and my hands – albeit from cold – were shaking when I opened the door.

As I have said: when I dashed to the desk, the text wasn’t there, I saw it straight away, because I had written that text on yellow paper. Of course I looked around the whole room, and also in the corridor, from where I had phoned before I set off. But fundamentally I was under no illusions. Even less so since now, since now, when I was back where it happened, my memory of packing the text was quite clear and unambiguous. I could actually feel the hasty movements with which I had put the pages in the outside pocket of the suitcase. I knew immediately: you must have taken it out and left it somewhere on the way. Hence the piece of rubber band in the zip.

I had actually expected to be assailed by intense despair, mixed with impotent fury about my scattiness. And that that would stop over the next few days of waiting for a package from Lufthansa. (It was a very good thing, by the way, that you addressed the subject of postal duration, I immediately thought of it and cautioned myself.) But it was quite different, and even now I don’t know whether I should think of it as better or worse than the natural reaction. As soon as I had sat down to rest, without really noticing I slipped into a state of apathy. I was glad of the inner quiet that that involved, because I had feared the agitation, the sleeplessness and everything bound up with it. But soon it became clear to me that I had, quite automatically, let myself fall back into the state into which I had settled in prison – a state of dull endurance, of wordless resignation, which, as you soon learn there, saves your strength. And I’m very shocked by that, because I had thought that that experience was a thing of the past.