Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘You can be glad that you’re down there,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘The first autumn storms have started up here. Some people can’t suppress their envious remarks. You can imagine which.’

As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Perlmann sat down in the red armchair and picked up Leskov’s paper. But he soon lowered it again. You are going to write something for Italy, aren’t you? Frau Hartwig had said at the end of July. Perlmann had only nodded and continued with his business at the shelf. She had, incidentally, postponed her holiday, she explained a few days later. To just before Christmas. After that he had only gone to the office when she wasn’t there, and left her instructions on tape. In late September she had hesitantly asked if she could take two weeks’ holiday, or whether he needed her. ‘Just go,’ he had replied, and by way of disguise he had turned the relief in his voice into enthusiasm for the island of Elba, with which he associated nothing at all apart from Napoleon.

Now there were several pages in Leskov’s paper in which he engaged with the objection that we remember many episodes that we never put in story form. How then could he claim that language played such a key role in the episodic memory?

Leskov’s reply was expressed in eccentric terms, Perlmann thought, but basically the elements of his train of thought were familiar to him, and suddenly the translation started going faster than ever. When he grasped a sentence literally at first glance, he felt as if he had at that moment forgotten it was a Russian sentence – it had yielded its meaning to him with so little resistance. With breathless delight he went on reading. The truth of Leskov’s thesis was irrelevant; the main thing was comprehension. In fact, he noticed, many of the words he had copied out were now in his head. His confidence was growing from one paragraph to the next, and now all of a sudden he also had an incredibly lucky hand when it came to opening the right pages in the dictionary. It bordered on clairvoyance. When he finally had to turn on the light, he was already on page 20.

He could get cigarettes from the place Sandra had bought them from yesterday. Sandra. The promised stamps from Germany . He got Frau Hartwig’s envelope out of the waste-paper basket and tore the stamps from it. Then he left the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.

He was late today, the proprietress joked as she brought him the chronicle. He would have to choose something from the menu. Perlmann opened the book at the year when his father hadn’t awoken from his lunchtime nap. The Decca record company had, after listening to demo tapes, reached the view that The Beatles had no future, and turned down the opportunity to produce them. Antonio Segni became Italian president. It was a name that meant nothing to Perlmann, and he read the biographical outline to the smallest detail. Adolf Eichmann was hanged.

His father had lived to hear that. After the report he had turned off the radio in silence, his mother had told him. ‘He wasn’t a sympathizer, you know that,’ she had added. ‘It’s just that he feels somehow under attack when these things are talked about.’ By the graveside she had surprised Perlmann: she, who otherwise wept easily, didn’t shed a single tear.

She had surprised him for a second time the following autumn, this time with her interest in the Cuban crisis, of which he would not have thought her capable. She had, he had felt all winter, seemed better than ever. And then, sometime in the spring, her startlingly rapid decline began. Her world shrank to magazine articles about kitschy German musicals, Kennedy in Berlin interested her not at all, and when he dragged her to see Irma la Douce , she babbled something about pornography on the way home. When he told her about the death of Édith Piaf, she no longer knew who that was, although she had secretly listened to her chansons for years when his father was sitting in the pub with the other post-office workers. She was unaware of the shooting in Dallas. By day she slept with her mouth open, and from ten o’clock she terrorized the night nurse.

When Perlmann arrived at the hospital on the first day of the New Year someone else was already lying in her bed. No, he didn’t want to see her again, he had explained to the nurse, who was alarmed by the edge in his voice. And there had been another faux pas. The graveside ceremony wasn’t quite finished when he lit a cigarette in front of everyone. Why had he not managed to turn that precious moment of liberation into a permanent distinction from all the others, a calm lack of subservience, a fearlessness that needed no dramatic gestures? He laughed to himself and at the same time bit his lips when he thought about how he had simply left the relatives standing outside the pub. To the baffled question of why he hadn’t stayed at the wake, when he was, after all, paying for it, he had said: ‘Chiefly because the word disgusts me.’ Then he had disappeared around the corner.

The food over at the hotel probably wasn’t as good as its reputation, the proprietor grinned as he walked over to Perlmann’s table during a break. Perlmann looked at his watch. Ten past eight. Still enough time. No, it was fine, he said, snapped the chronicle shut and picked up his briefcase. The stamps nearly fell into what was left of his tomato sauce. They were for Sandra, he said, holding them out to the proprietor. No, no, he said, Perlmann must bring them to Sandra in person, or she would be disappointed. And then he led him up the stairs to Sandra’s room, which, like the whole apartment, was cramped and full of junk.

Sandra’s joy over the stamps was subdued by her difficulties with English. She was in every other respect such a clever child, her mother sobbed, but she just couldn’t get to grips with this funny spelling that had so little to do with the pronunciation. And they, her parents, couldn’t help. Could he stay for a moment and explain one or the other to her? Otherwise her test on Monday threatened to be a disaster. He just had to look at the last exercise in the book. There was more red ink than blue.

Perlmann stayed till eleven. Sitting on an uncomfortable stool, he went through the two last exercises with Sandra and then explained some grammar to her as well. Often she was close to tears, but in the end she smiled bravely, and he stroked her hair.

Then the proprietor brought him almond tart and a grappa. Time didn’t matter any more anyway, and Perlmann read through the year he had begun in the chronicle. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Right, that was the start of the Vietnam War. Khrushchev’s fall from power. The death of Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist. Perlmann knew him, but he hadn’t known that he had only reluctantly condemned the crimes of Stalin. And last of all Sartre, who had refused the Nobel Prize. What exactly had been his explanation? The text in the chronicle was confused, and made Sartre sound like a scatterbrain. Perlmann tried out various explanations as he walked across the deserted Piazza Veneto and along the promenade to the hotel.

Giovanni, who had been sitting watching television in the side-room, handed him a paper by Achim Ruge, almost a hundred pages thick, the text for Monday. The others had asked after him several times in the course of the evening, he said. ‘Because you weren’t at dinner yesterday, either,’ he added. Perlmann’s hand gripped the paper so convulsively that the top page was pulled out of its staple. Again he wanted to slap the pomaded head with the ridiculous sideburns. He turned away in silence and stepped into the open elevator.

In the corridor, all the bulbs were burning in the lamps. For a moment he was tempted to go and get the ladder, but then he walked into his room and sank on to the bed in the dark. After a while his head was filled again with the images of the new patient in his mother’s bed, the startled nurse, the coffin being lowered into the grave.