Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

I wasn’t able to free myself from my apathy over the days that followed, and perhaps I didn’t want to, even though the state seemed dangerous to me, because there was also something increasingly self-destructive about it. For example, I started to wonder whether there might be deeper reasons for my oversight: that I didn’t actually want the post, or that I was trying to distance myself from the content of the text. My uncertainty became so great that I couldn’t tell Larissa anything about it, even though she sensed on the telephone that something wasn’t quite right with me.

Every day I went into the institute and waited for the post. And when nothing came, I didn’t know how I would get through the next twenty-four hours. It was impossible to start a letter. It was impossible to start anything, in fact. I spent a lot of time standing on the banks of the Neva. The apathy I’m talking about: it’s shot through with grey, waiting for everything to pass without the slightest idea of what should be good about its passing. Part of this is the – how can I put it – mild desire to end it all. I hadn’t felt that desire for a long time, quite the contrary, now it made its presence felt again and merged with the suddenly resurfacing grief over Mother’s death. Where that would have led if the text hadn’t reappeared, I don’t know.

Of course, I wondered whether I shouldn’t at least present the first version under these circumstances. But after a few attempted readings I rejected the idea. The text is simply too feeble, and so confused as to be repellent to me. How is one supposed to present a text that is far below the level one has attained on the subject in the meantime? It’s an emotional impossibility. Sooner no text at all!

On Wednesday, when still nothing had come, I summoned all my courage, sat down and tried to reconstruct everything from memory. I felt a bit as I had in Santa Margherita when I was preparing myself for my session. I must have spent close to twenty hours sitting tight at my desk, and there was so much smoke in the apartment afterwards that it was too much even for me. Then I gave up, and when I crept half-dead from my bed on Thursday I had buried all hope of the post and started looking around for part-time work. (You do it even if it seems pointless.)

For that reason I called in at the institute again on Friday, since I was in the area anyway. From the way the conversations fell silent as I appeared, I had to conclude that my never-arriving package had already become a talking point. Vassily Sergeevich’s imaginary package! And then it happened: as I got home from the institute, having abandoned all hope, there was the envelope just lying by the front door! Just imagine all the things that could have happened! I concluded from a long way off that it must be my text (quite apart from wishful thinking) from the two yellow stickers, because the Lufthansa address labels that I saw on items of luggage on my journey were the same color. And then I also saw the red express delivery label that looks different to the ones we have here. As I ran the last few meters I nearly fell on the ice, and I opened the envelope while I was still on the doorstep.

The envelope itself was nothing special (not to be compared to the one you had with you that time in the café!), but just imagine: Lufthansa had taken the trouble to put the text in a plastic jacket! When I thought about it later, that struck me as slightly grotesque, as the jacket couldn’t be closed because of a defective zip, so that some feared moisture (if that was what it was for – but what else, if not?) had seeped into the paper anyway. But for the first moment I was quite astonished. Such care. ‘German thoroughness’, I thought at first; but then I remembered the sour face you pulled when Brian used that cliché.

The state of the text was a shock. As if it had been in a ditch for days! First of all, most of the pages were dirty, in places to the point of illegibility. Others are torn, and the first page has a hole in it as if it’s been shot. But that was all fine. What left me completely paralyzed for a while was the discovery that seventeen pages were missing! Seventeen pages! And the last eight, of all things, the ones in which I show what appropriation can mean in my conception of narrating, inventing memory! At first I thought: I’ll never do that in a week. And again I felt that apathy that had all at once dissolved to nothing at the sight of the yellow stickers. But then my memory came into play. I realized that much that was lost was coming back to me, and then I pulled myself together and went to my desk.

You will probably think this mad, but I couldn’t really start work before I had found an explanation for the state of the pages. And that wasn’t easy.

The package had been dispatched from Frankfurt. So I had left the text in the waiting room when changing planes. (Not on the plane – you know my theory about cleaning crews.) Even now I can’t remember taking it out. (Or rather the opposite: I have remembered in the meantime that, hidden by a newspaper that someone had left behind, I spent ages staring at a fantastic-looking woman two rows ahead of me.) But it must simply have been the case. But where did the dirt come from, and the blisters in the paper that seemed to have been caused by water? Only that night in bed did it occur to me: at some point – by being touched by a coat, or a child – the pages fell on the floor; there are lots of things on the floor in waiting rooms like that at the end of the day. I have never seen such a machine myself, but there must be huge vacuum cleaners or at any rate automatic cleaning machines that tidy the place up. And then it’s quite clear: the pages must have ended up in a thing like that. That would explain the dirt and the tears, and since you can’t clean without water, the blisters and waves in the paper can’t come as a surprise.

That no one noticed the many yellow sheets of paper: somehow I imagine two chatting cleaning women, heedlessly running the vacuum cleaner tube along the floor. Then, when the dirt-container is being emptied, they discover the paper. Seventeen pages have been hopelessly destroyed; all you can do is shrug. The rest they pass on to the lost and found, if there is such a thing. You see: this one cleaning crew is the exception to my theory. As befits a deus ex machina!

It was an unsettled night, because every time I was about to fall asleep, another mystery occurred to me. One hard nut was the business with the address. I can’t remember if I told you: I always write the address on the last page. But it was missing! I got as excited as if it were a chess puzzle. In the end I had three hypotheses, which I can’t choose between even today: either the last sheet was so badly damaged that they just copied out the address and then threw it away; or else the person who prepared the envelope kept the last page out to copy down the address and then forgot to put it in the envelope (perhaps he was distracted by something); or finally, as I often use old envelopes as notepaper, an envelope with my address on it had slipped between the pages. That was where they got the address from, not my text.

I got up again and looked at the postmark once more: why had it taken Lufthansa a whole week to send the package? For a while I was furious with those people: how much they could have spared me if they had been a little faster! But then my gratitude prevailed, particularly when I became aware that the address was in Russian on the text. They must have fetched someone specially who could read Russian, and handwritten Russian at that! All right, then, I thought, Lufthansa is Lufthansa. In the meantime, I’ve written a thank you letter, and I will also provide a recommendation. (As if Lufthansa needed my recommendations!)