Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

While Perlmann was pursuing this thought, he suddenly realized the circumstances under which he had written the lines about present, perfume and smiling. It had been a winter evening, and the galleys of the second edition of his last book had been in the beam of light from his desk lamp. At first it had been the content of the text that he hadn’t been able to deal with. Then that feeling of staleness had spread to everything else – to paper and print as a whole, to desk lamp, desk and bent backs. The questionable line had carried him out for a moment into a brighter, freer space, the comforting enclave of the imagination. His protest had gone no further than that. Why not? Why didn’t I get up and go? Perlmann hesitated. He didn’t know whether the question had arisen within him only now, or whether it, too, was part of the memory of that moment when the sharp beam of lamplight had seemed like torture.

He read the few sentences of the last paragraph with mounting dread, and all of a sudden his eyes seemed to hurt, so that he would ideally have liked to keep them from looking at the lined paper. What separates me from my present is like a fine mist, an intangible veil, an invisible wall. They don’t put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk through it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn’t I take it long ago?

His eye still darting over the words, Perlmann started to close the notebook, and he could only catch the final question by tilting his head on one side. Then he stuffed the notebook back in his suitcase and pulled the strap unnecessarily tight.

When he got up, his eye fell on von Levetzov’s texts, which were stacked up on the desk. Soon he would be thinking another nine days – he felt that extremely clearly, and his heart was already preparing to thump at a faster rate. He hastily reached for a cigarette and stifled the thought with a look of tight concentration at Leskov’s text.

Almost another five pages, he saw quickly, dealt with remembered sense-impressions, before the conclusion about the appropriation of the past began. His notes had kept him from finishing today, and then he had wasted hours on his attempt with the Italian version. A twinge of guilt crept over him, but he resisted its burden by convincing himself it was all about the translation and not the fact that he had read nothing at all in preparation for tomorrow’s session.

What he sought was something quite particular, while afterwards, waiting for the effect of the sleeping pill, he slipped into half-sleep. He would recognize it straight away; but this abstract impression of particularity was still not enough deliberately to push open the door to the right corridor of memory. Only once he had abandoned his strenuous efforts was it suddenly there: back then, on the first trip to Venice, he had not thought once about his father’s sentence concerning Mestre. Amazed, he buried his face in the pillow and let himself slide towards oblivion. At the last moment he gave a start and propped himself up on his elbows, his hands clasped, both thumbs on the base of his nose. Again he struggled with the terrible images from Peking, which made it look like sheer scorn that someone could consider it important whether he had once thought of a particular sentence years before or whether he hadn’t. And again that struggle ended in a defiance that became all the more violent the more opaque the problem appeared from the point of view of justification.

Exhausted, he let his head drop back into the pillow, and soon slipped into a dream which consisted only of him, sweating, as if at an exam, looking for the Chinese name of the big square in Peking. His futile search made him so furious that he repeatedly wrote down the spookily intangible word so many times in a squared exercise book until it turned into sentences uttered by his parents, which, in an attempt to cross them through, he thickly underlined. At last he clapped the open exercise book face down on to the table, and was amazed that, although it was clearly Sandra’s exercise book, it had a black wax cloth cover.

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria stopped him as he dashed through the hall at five past nine the next morning. ‘I just wanted to ask when I can start writing out your text. It’s like this, you see: now that her old typewriter has been fixed, Signora Sand is giving me nothing more to do, and Evelyn – I mean, Signorina Mistral – has her own computer. Giorgio isn’t finished yet, so I thought I would ask you myself. I would have time to do it straight away, and I’ve been told that it’s your turn in ten days from now. Signor Millar has some work for me, too, but, of course, you come first.’

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and brought up his other arm when he felt that the stack of von Levetzov’s texts was threatening to slip out from under his arm.

‘Not for fourteen days,’ he said hoarsely. ‘My session isn’t for fourteen days.’

Maria straightened the yellow silk scarf at the neck of her glittering black pullover and looked at him uncertainly. Perlmann’s heart was beating so violently that he had the impression she must be able to hear it.

‘I would be happy to let Signor Millar go ahead of me,’ he said at last with a smile that felt as alien on his face as he always imagined it must feel when he saw an air steward smiling on a plane.

‘ Va bene ,’ said Maria hesitantly. He heard no clattering heels on the marble floor when he turned into the corridor to the veranda. She would be watching after him thoughtfully.

Von Levetzov was just putting his watch back into his waistcoat pocket when Perlmann sat down. This man with the smooth, black hair and rimless spectacles, who was wearing a new tie yet again and looked more than ever like a senator out of a picture book, looked so right in the high, carved chair, as if the chair had been made specifically for him.

‘We should tell you first of all,’ he said, turning to Perlmann, ‘that we have decided to have another meeting in the second half of this week. It suddenly struck us as nonsensical to waste the little time that we have. Laura will take over the block of Thursday and Friday; Evelyn will do the start of next week; and then you would be in ten days. In that way there would be a few wild-card days at the end, depending on when Giorgio can sort it out. Only, of course, if that’s all right with you,’ he added with an expression that betrayed not the slightest sign of suspicion.

Perlmann looked into the distance. Evelyn Mistral’s feigned panic looked to him like tasteless clowning, and was at the same time as unreal as the scene on a transfer picture.

‘It’s OK,’ he heard himself saying in a hollow voice.

‘Fine,’ said von Levetzov, and began to elucidate his texts.

My text has to be in the pigeonholes by Tuesday at the latest. I have to give Maria two days. Friday morning, then. I have to be ready by Thursday night. Only another four days, of which three half-days are down the drain because of the sessions. Which leaves only two-and-a-half days. And the nights. Once in the silence of a single night I wrote out half an essay. Once. A long time ago. Only when he caught the eyes of his colleagues did Perlmann notice that von Levetzov had clearly asked him a question.

‘Yes,’ he said into the blue, and saw straight away from Ruge’s frown that that made no sense as an answer. Cheeks burning, he started flicking through the texts and waited until von Levetzov went on, saying, ‘Well, then…?’

For a long time – it might have been two hours – Perlmann didn’t hear what was going on around him. He could find only a single way to resist the overwhelming panic. He began to work. Methodically, he began to draw up in his notebook a list of all the themes he had ever worked on. Then he took a new page for each heading and jotted down the associations grouped around it. He marked the relationships of the themes to one another with various kinds of arrows. A structure formed. He slowly grew calmer, and all that remained of his inner tension was a thumping headache. Wrapped up in a cocoon of forced and barely substantial confidence, he suddenly rose to his feet and, ignoring the sudden silence, left the room without looking at anyone.