Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Tomorrow. I’ll have to do it tomorrow. The hours of the next day stretched out in his mind until he saw a long, silent expanse of time ahead of him, turning increasingly into a ramrod straight, wonderfully broad and empty road along which one travelled in shimmering heat towards the blurred outlines of an ochre horizon.

Shortly after six he woke with the certainty that he had to travel home straight away and convince himself that not everything he had written so far had been fraudulent. Without showering he slipped into his clothes, made sure that he had passport, money and the key to the apartment, and crept out of his room like a fugitive.

Giovanni had been dozing; now he looked at him like a ghost and misdialled twice before he got through to the taxi company. It was only when he was sitting in the back of the car that Perlmann noticed how exhausted he was. He stretched out against the back of the seat, and after a while he remembered the dream that had held him imperceptibly in its clutches. The most prominent and oppressive thing about it was the rubbing of his sweaty thumb on the little slate with the wooden frame – a movement that stuck to him like a physical stain. Again and again he wiped out his incorrect conversions from Réaumur to Fahrenheit and stared at the blackboard which, from the front row, he could almost have touched with his outstretched arm.

‘Who hasn’t got an answer?’ yelled the man with the bulbous nose and the open-necked shirt. Perlmann kept his hand down and stopped breathing, while his heart beat deafeningly – until it suddenly stopped beating when the man’s wrinkled arm entered his field of vision from behind and his short, knobby fingers reached for his empty slate.

Perlmann straightened and asked the driver for a cigarette. What the teacher had drilled into him with a smile of relish had been a proverb. But he couldn’t call it to mind.

When he stepped into the airport departure lounge it was a quarter past seven. The first flight to Frankfurt left at a quarter to nine. He bought cigarettes and drank a coffee. Then, as he waited to buy a ticket, he suddenly felt vulnerable because he had nothing to read.

The plane rose into the bright sky, and if you half-closed your eyes, that brilliance merged with the silver gleam of the wing. When the stewardess brought newspapers, Perlmann suddenly felt as if he had woken from the nightmare of the hotel and returned to the normal world. He greedily read the newspaper, and for a while – behind his reading, in a sense – he managed to pretend that it was all over and he was flying home for good. But as soon as the plane dipped into the blanket of clouds, which he noticed only now, this comforting illusion collapsed, and what remained was the thought that he was now wasting the whole last day that he could have spent writing, and that he was wasting it on a trip that couldn’t have been more pointless.

The landscape that opened up below the clouds was covered with a blanket of snow. He hadn’t expected that, and his first impulse was to want to stop the plane and turn round. He forgot to fasten his seat belt for landing, and was told off by a brusque stewardess. When the engines stopped with a whistle, he would have liked to stay in his seat, as if he had arrived at the tram terminus.

When he passed the shop with the books and magazines in the big hall, his eye fell on the name leskov. He gave a start like someone who is suddenly caught in bright spotlights while carrying out some forbidden operation in the dark. The cover was a detail of a painting showing the Palace Quay in St Petersburg, seen from the Peter and Paul Fortress, with the Neva in the foreground. They had stood at the spot chosen by the painter as the most favorable, he and Leskov, and it seemed to Perlmann as if it really must have been precisely the same place. It was there that Perlmann had, against his will, told Leskov about Agnes, while the cold almost took his breath away.

He excitedly opened the book and read the titles of the short stories. He didn’t say a word about this. Then, holding the book irresolutely in his hand and making his first attempt to get over his surprise, Perlmann finally noticed: the author was, of course, Nikolai Leskov, whose work he had not yet read, but whom he knew as a famous name in Russian literature. Annoyed with himself, he set the book back down. As if someone whose books are translated and sold here would have Vassily Leskov’s material concerns!

But he wasn’t, in fact, annoyed about his thoughtlessness. What enraged him more and more with every step towards the exit was the excitement that he had felt at the sight of the name. As if he had somehow injured Vassily Leskov with his translation. Why had he felt as if he had been caught?

He stepped through the automatic sliding door, out into the bitterly cold air, and almost collided with the dean of his faculty.

‘Herr Perlmann! I thought you were in the warm south! And instead here you are wearing your summer clothes in our premature cold snap, and shivering! Has something happened?’

‘What could have happened?’ Perlmann laughed irritably. ‘I just have a small thing to attend to here. I’ll be back down there this evening.’

‘By the way, there are mutterings about you being invited to Princeton. Allow me to congratulate you. Some of that glory will rub off on the faculty, too!’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Perlmann, and the firmness in his voice gave him back some of his confidence. He shivered.

‘You’re shivering,’ said the dean, ‘so I won’t keep you. After Christmas I’m sure you’ll deliver a full report to the faculty – given that we let you go off in the middle of term. Not everyone looked kindly on that – understandably enough.’

Twice on the journey home the taxi stopped at the lights near a bookshop window. Each time Perlmann’s eye was caught by Nikolai Leskov’s book, and he boiled with rage as he discovered that he reacted to it as if to a wanted poster of himself. To the driver’s annoyance he rolled down the window and deeply inhaled the cold air.

His letterbox was full of junk mail, his freezing apartment smelled musty and strange. For a moment he felt like an intruder who could not touch anything. Then he opened the balcony door and, in his light shoes, took two crunching steps in the snow.

He put on a thick pullover. He didn’t turn on the radiators. He couldn’t live here now.

He lay on his belly by the open chest and read his writings. He had last lain there on the floor like that as a boy and, through all his trepidation, he enjoyed the unfamiliar posture.

He was amazed at what he read. Boundlessly amazed. Not just by all the things he had once known, thought, discussed. Even his language surprised him, his style, which he liked for a moment and then didn’t like at all, and which struck him as strangely alien. He didn’t read any single text all the way through, but dug his way frantically through the mountain of his offprints, reading a beginning here, there a conclusion, and sometimes just a few sentences in the middle. What was he looking for? Why had he come here? But it was ludicrous to imagine that he would be able to find out in this way whether he had copied anything. And why that suspicion, which he had previously only felt in a dream? Everything was cited meticulously enough, the bibliographies filled many pages.

He hesitantly lit a cigarette and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. The bread in the bread bin was as hard as a rock. He took the coffee pot into the sitting room. From the sofa, he looked out into the driving snow. The white backdrop was so strange that it was impossible to think it coexisted in time with the bay in front of the hotel. He braced himself against the white wall outside and escaped to the hotel terrace, the crooked pines, the red armchair by the window, the strip of lights at Sestri Levante. But over these images there lay a murky film of anxiety and trepidation, so he cleansed them of everything until they made way for a world full of silent, southern light, in which there was only Evelyn Mistral’s radiant laughter, Silvestri’s slender white hand with its cigarette, Ruge’s cheerful face and Millar’s firm handshake. And countless colors, with countless names of colors.