Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘I recently told you about Juan, my brother,’ she said and got up to fetch a letter from her bedside table. ‘Now the lunatic writes that he’s giving up his studies and going into films. He wants to be a cameraman! He hasn’t a hint of training in that direction.’ She narrowed her eyes and held the paper far away from herself. ‘And then this remark here: “And even if I can only carry the cables for the first few months…” Dios mío , he’s so brilliant, he could have studied law standing on his head!’

‘I envy him,’ Perlmann heard himself saying, and then again: ‘I envy him a lot.’

Puzzled, she folded up the letter. ‘That sounds as if you want to run away on the spot.’

Did he see in her smile a willingness to sympathize with such a wish? Or did her reaction to Juan’s letter reveal fixed boundaries of understanding? The red elephant on the suitcase: what did it represent?

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and straightened a flower. ‘It’s just… sometimes I think we don’t try nearly enough things out before we settle on one. Out of fear, probably. A fear that can become a prison. Juan doesn’t seem like the fearful type.’

‘No,’ she laughed, ‘quite the opposite: sometimes I think he has the soul of a gambler. Then I worry for him, and get annoyed about his irrationality. But basically, I think I love him for it.’ She looked at her watch and disappeared into the bathroom to change for dinner.

They were already in the corridor when she stopped and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You are joining us for dinner?’

He hesitated and looked at her uncertainly.

‘It would be better,’ she said quietly. Then she took him by the waist for a brief moment and pushed him slightly. ‘Come on ,’ she laughed, trying to parody Millar’s pronunciation, in which an o sounded like an a .

Her touch a moment ago, he felt, protected him as they entered the dining room, and that protection continued until the waiter cleared away the plates from the starters. Then Millar abruptly turned aside from Laura Sand and looked at him.

‘I’m slowly coming to think you would prefer to forget our appointment about your question. Or am I mistaken?’

‘Yes, you are,’ Perlmann replied, and was glad that he didn’t need to say anything further. His reply had sounded firm, and it had even contained a challenge. But it didn’t correspond to anything inside him. Inside there was suddenly nothing but a vulnerable void, and it didn’t help at all that Evelyn Mistral was sitting next to him.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Millar, stretching the last syllable out until it sounded grotesque.

It was this melodious sarcasm that tipped the balance. Perlmann felt himself getting hot, and he was fleetingly brushed by a warning sensation, and then the attack that seemed to come from nowhere started moving relentlessly within him.

‘By the way, Brian,’ he began, and tilted his head involuntarily to the side, ‘I was reading a newspaper article about that fellow Chessman, who was gassed in your country in 1960. He was on death row for twelve years. The execution was postponed eight times, always a few hours before the appointed day. I’m sure you know about that?’

Millar wiped his mouth so slowly that the movement looked affected. Laura Sand gave Perlmann a penetrating look.

‘Now, Phil,’ Millar said at last, ‘I was eight years old at the time.’

‘But Americans know about these things, don’t they?’

‘So what?’ Millar’s voice had become very quiet.

‘What? You mean…’ Giorgio Silvestri joined in.

‘No. Of course not,’ Millar interrupted irritably, ‘all that toing and froing was impossible.’

For a moment silence fell around the table; the voices of the few other guests and the muted clatter from the kitchen could be heard. Silvestri twirled a Gauloise between his fingers as if he had just rolled it. He looked at Millar with a dark gleam in his eyes.

‘But basically you think it’s all right for people to be gassed? Or strapped into the electric chair?’

Millar’s cheeks suddenly looked hollow, and it was as if he had blanched under his tan.

‘I have no definitive view on the death penalty. But there are points in its favor. And rhetorical tricks won’t help you at all.’

Silvestri violently pushed his chair back and had already half-risen to his feet when he calmed himself, picked up his cigarette from the floor and pretended to be examining a wobbly chair leg. There could have been an explosion between the two men at any moment, and the others all seemed to start breathing again when the waiter came in with the main course.

‘It’s the impersonal, bureaucratic aspect of an execution that makes my blood boil,’ Laura Sand said a moment later. ‘Quite apart from the terrible details of the killing. I always have the same picture in front of my eyes: two uniformed men with doughy official faces dragging this person, who has done nothing to them, along the corridor and strapping him in. When I see the stupid rectitude of their bootsteps, I always think I’d be capable of shooting at those uniforms,’ she said and clenched her fists.

‘The state has a monopoly on violence,’ von Levetzov broke in.

‘Exactly,’ said Perlmann, ‘that’s exactly why you mustn’t give it that power.’

‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ von Levetzov reassured him.

‘Anyone who thinks the death penalty worthy of consideration is suffering from an incurable disease: a lack of imagination,’ said Silvestri, who had regained control of himself and avoided Millar’s eye.

Evelyn Mistral rested her hand on his arm. ‘That’s what we always said at home, too. Our example was the garrotte, which we had right through to the end of Franco.’

‘You probably think you’re the only person with an imagination,’ Millar said to Silvestri. ‘I think that’s presumptuous.’

‘I feel much the same as Laura,’ said Ruge, ‘but we must be honest: there was also Höss.’

‘And Eichmann,’ added von Levetzov.

Perlmann had thought much the same, sitting in the trattoria, and he had felt uncomfortable not knowing what to think about it. Now, when he saw Millar nodding, something within him made up its mind.

‘The victims should have gone to Buenos Aires,’ he heard himself saying, ‘rather than the secret service. And once they got there they should have shot him down. And the same with Höss.’

Millar curled his lips and looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought, Phil, that you were in favor of lynch law.’

Perlmann felt as if he were stumbling. ‘Killing must be based on a personal relationship,’ he said quietly, stirring his coffee. ‘A hatred for one’s tormentor, for example. Otherwise it’s perverse.’

In spite of the sleeping pill, Perlmann woke up twice that night and lay awake for a long time. He thought of the vulnerable void that had spread within him after Millar’s remark, and the inner violence that had suddenly blazed through that void. He kept thinking about those two things, and no longer understood himself.

It was nearly morning when he found himself back in that circular room full of dictionaries. A calm, milky light fell through the conical glass roof. The room didn’t have a door. It didn’t need a door. It was silent. It was unreachable, untouchable. It was wonderful. Then the room began turning around him, and with him at the same time. The revolutions became increasingly swift, the bright spines of the books became colorful smears that grew paler and paler until they merged into a paper-thin wall of the palest grey, which only survived for a short time before collapsing under the merciless glow of noon and revealed the view of the bay, which was full of shouting children. He was high above the bay, but that didn’t matter, he would just step out into the light, everything was very easy and full of hope, and it was quite incomprehensible why his head should have collided with a diamond-hard, invisible wall. It allowed itself to be touched, that strange wall, but then again it didn’t, because the touched resistance could not be distinguished from an unresisting void. He feverishly tried to find a door, but the wall with its unyielding void mercilessly made his damp hands slip, so that he sank to the floor and suddenly felt his pillow growing damp from his tear-wet face.