Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

They had arranged to meet for lunch the following day. Perlmann didn’t go. As he heard her playing through a run and explaining something, he slipped a note under the door of her apartment and then took the bus to the Conservatoire. The sound of Mozart came from the room where he had always practiced in the past. After a while he opened the door a crack. At the piano sat a man with curly hair and an oriental face, playing with unimaginable lightness. The room had different wallpaper now, and the painting by Klee was no longer on the wall. He carefully closed the door. He had planned to seek out the street where he had grown up. But when he saw the black iron fences in his mind’s eye, and felt his arm hopping from one fence post to the next, he abandoned the plan and took the next train to Frankfurt.

In his mailbox there was a message from the post office about a package. He could see straight away that it was from Leskov, when the clerk took it from the shelf the following morning. He wished it hadn’t come, whatever it might contain. Leskov’s letter was what he had needed, and he had had to endure it. He had found its thoroughness oppressive, but it was hard to admit this to himself. It had been the most extreme thing he could bear, and it was the last he wanted to hear from Vassily Leskov. Fine, he would have to give him some kind of reply. But that could be done in a conventional tone. There were moods in which Perlmann scribbled down such things without any inner involvement. And then he never wanted to hear from Leskov again. Never again.

Inside the parcel was the promised copy of Leskov’s text. Underneath it, four volumes in Russian, bound in light-brown artificial leather: Maxim Gorky, Zhisn’ Klima Samgina. On the first page of the first volume it said in shaky handwriting: Moemu syno Vasiliyu. The dedication was written in black ink, and the pen had sprayed, there was a sprinkle of black dots around the words. The leather was worn, stained and in two places torn. It was the volumes that Leskov had read in prison – fourteen times.

Perlmann knew that he was supposed to feel touched, but all he felt was fury, a fury that grew every time he looked at the books. Through those brown volumes with their gold inscriptions, Leskov had managed to make contact with his flat, and Leskov was now present in a way that was almost even more oppressive and paralysing than his physical presence. Now Perlmann also smelled the hint of sickly sweet tobacco that lingered between the pages. He felt that he might be about to lose his head and hurl the books outside into the mud, so he put his coat back on and walked slowly to his block.

Later he set the volumes on the shelf in the broom cupboard and covered them with a dishcloth. Then, when he reluctantly flicked through the typed text, he discovered that Leskov thanked him extravagantly at the start of his acknowledgements for his discussion of an earlier version and his constructive criticism in four footnotes. The burden that had been lifted from him by Leskov’s letter seemed to sink down upon him once more, even though he didn’t understand how that could be, now that Leskov had managed to get the position he wanted.

Perlmann defended himself against the books in the broom cupboard by finishing his review and preparing his course of lectures. When Adrian von Levetzov rang and asked about publication, Perlmann sent off a round letter to his colleagues, claiming that some participants in the group had other plans for their contributions, so that he had abandoned the plan of a special publication. The same day he rang the school authorities and asked about the possibility of taking on a job as a teacher. Not without the proper qualifications, the shrill voice at the other end informed him, and not in the current job market. That night he dreamed of Signora Medici, standing in front of an audience in a tartan skirt and hiking boots, reading sentences in an unknown language from light-brown books, as he looked excitedly in his desk for his crib sheet.

Perlmann’s training in slowness was starting to work. Usually, it was no longer necessary to go to the living room to look at the clock; he simply paused and imagined the ticking. He started thinking about that ticking when he was on the phone, as well, and gradually understood that slowness in reacting could be the physical expression of a lack of subservience. He was so happy about this discovery that he overdid it, and had to fight once more against his tendency to fanaticism.

Now and again, when he sat in this living room late at night and heard the clock ticking, he tried to think about why he had taken his hands off the wheel. Because of Leskov? Because of himself? But it was always the same thing: the thoughts dried up before they had really begun. In his mind, he had been ready to die. Out of despair, admittedly, not out of stoical serenity. Nonetheless, the experience of imminent death had changed something within him. Of course, it had been an error to believe that this change, whose contours were still in the dark, would develop all by themselves into greater confidence and a piece of inner freedom. It wasn’t as easy as that. But what exactly was it that he had to do about it?

One evening, while watching a silly comedy on television, Perlmann laughed again for the first time. Then he remembered the man with the long white scarf from the airport bar, and gulped. But by the next joke he had started laughing again.

The next day he bought the German translation of Gorky’s novel and read it until he came to the passage about the hole in the ice. Gleaming red , Gorky called the hands that clutched the edge of the ice, which broke off. Perlmann went into Agnes’s room, to look up the second word. Only when he saw the gap on the shelf did he remember the books he had thrown away. He was startled, as if he had only just found out about it.

Perlmann found the novel heavy going, and the countless philosophical dialogues got on his nerves. He really wanted to put it down. But that day he read another hundred pages, and worked out that he would have to get through at least 120 pages if he was to finish it that year. Often he succumbed to the temptation to ease his attention and just let his eye slip over the pages without really reading. But he never overindulged himself, instead flicking back and reading everything over again with reluctant but embittered precision, knowing that he would immediately forget most of it again. In the first days he told himself that it was a matter of becoming acquainted with part of the mental world in which Leskov had taken refuge in prison. He owed him that, he thought, and each time he did so he stumbled over the vague feeling of not knowing what he thought. Only after a few days did he understand that that wasn’t what drove him to torment himself again by reading it each evening. It was more the vague desire to pay off his debt to Leskov, and atone for his planned murder. After that discovery he felt ridiculous every time he opened the book again. But he kept on with it.

Late in December he rang Maria again. He wished her a Merry Christmas and hoped she would be able to tell him something about the deletion of his text. But nothing more came of it than a friendly exchange of good wishes, which they soon had to bring to an end to avoid embarrassment. He would never find out when the dangerous text was finally destroyed, or whether indeed it had been.

Kirsten came on the second day of the Christmas holidays. As soon as she stepped inside the apartment, she pounced on the new carpet, looked at it from all sides and, finally, lifted it up to look at the label. When she saw the coffee stain, she burst into peals of laughter and gave Perlmann a boisterous kiss. He still didn’t let her wheedle the carpet out of him.