Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The ring of the telephone made him start. He knocked the coffee pot over with his arm, and watched as if paralyzed as the brown liquid seeped into the pale carpet. After a pause the telephone rang again. It rang for a very long time. He counted, for no reason. On the fourteenth ring he suddenly leapt to his feet. When he picked up the receiver, the line was already dead.

He slowly brought the pot and the cup to the kitchen and rinsed them out. It was just before three. The plane didn’t leave until six. He sat down on the edge of the piano stool and lifted the lid of the keyboard. No, it couldn’t be the touch, and it didn’t seem to be a trick of the pedal, either. How did Millar manage to make those sequences of notes achieve that strange simultaneity of experience? When he closed the lid, he saw the traces of his fingers in the dust and wiped them away.

On the windowsill by the desk there stood a photograph of Agnes, a serious picture, in which she rested her chin on her hand. He avoided her eye and got back to his feet. Something had come between them. She hadn’t been ambitious in the conventional sense. Nonetheless, would she have understood what was happening to him down there? And would he have dared to confide in her what he knew about it?

He hesitantly walked across to her room, where it seemed even icier. He let his eye slide over her photographs. It was insane: of course he had always known that they were all black-and-white photographs. He wasn’t blind, after all. But only now, it seemed to him, did it really become clear to him what that meant: there were no colors in them. None at all. No ultramarine , no English red , no magenta or sanguine .

I’ve remembered the names . His stomach hurt.

Now his eye fell on the two-volume German-Russian dictionary that Agnes had one day brought home triumphantly after a long search. He looked it up: crib (homework, answer): spisyvat’. To plagiarize. He quietly pulled the door, which had been open, shut behind him.

He glanced quickly into Kirsten’s room. Only half of her furniture had been there since September. The rest was in Konstanz. She had taken her teddy with her, but not her giraffe. The day she moved out he had gone to the office early, and only come home late at night, after going to the cinema. It wasn’t until the next day that he summoned the courage to open the door to her room.

Perlmann gave the taxi driver the address of his doctor. Without another prescription he wouldn’t have enough sleeping pills. The practice was closed for a holiday, and the locum’s receptionist was adamant: no, no prescription or consultation with the doctor, and he was doing house visits until the evening. Perlmann furiously asked the taxi driver to take him to the airport. As he stepped into the departure lounge all that remained of his fury was a feeling of impotence. I can’t possibly ask Silvestri .

But Nikolai Leskov’s short stories really hadn’t the slightest thing to do with him, Perlmann said to himself over and over again as he waited by the cash register with the book in his hand. Nonetheless, when he reached the waiting room he immediately opened the book and started excitedly reading it as if it were a secret document. On the way to the plane he held the book in front of his nose and, once he was on board, sat down in the wrong seat at first.

Would the shapeless man in the shabby loden coat have been capable of writing such a book? That snuffling man with the fur cap, the pipe and the brown teeth? Perlmann compared the text with sentences from his translation, laboriously and without the slightest sense how one could answer such a question across the boundaries of literary genres. They were already far above the clouds when he finally managed to shake off this compulsive activity. No sooner had he snapped the book shut and stowed it in the pocket in front of him, than he had completely forgotten what the story was about.

‘Not exciting enough?’ the fattish man in the seat next to him, reading an cheap novelette, asked him cheerfully.

A last glow of light lay over the dark sea of clouds. Perlmann turned off the reading light and closed his eyes. Yes, that was it: Agnes had looked at him from the photograph as if she guessed his thoughts – even the ones that he himself didn’t yet know. He tried to banish that gaze by conjuring up her living face, a laughing face, a face in the wind, bathed in flapping hair. But those memories had no endurance, and soon made way for images from the classroom, in which the man sat at his raised desk, always in the same open-necked shirt, and damply yelled the names of the pupils into the room. And all of a sudden there it was, the proverb: Honesty is the best policy. Isn’t that right, Perlmann?

Perlmann asked the stewardess for a glass of water and ignored the curious gaze of his neighbor by closing his eyes again. Perhaps he would have got through his Latin and Greek tests even without that little notebook under his desk? But he wouldn’t have dared. Because in point of fact he had never found foreign languages easy. There was no question of a particular talent. He wasn’t like Luc Sonntag, who would see through the most intricate ablative constructions, even though he was always going around with girls. Perlmann was industrious, and thorough – so thorough that Agnes had often fled from the room because she was afraid of his particular kind of thoroughness. Then he had firmly dug his heels in still further and gone on swotting so that, at some distant point in the future, he could enjoy his new linguistic understanding.

He was good at that, he thought. It was perhaps the only thing he really was good at: with an unimaginable firmness of will, undertaking an effort with a distant goal in mind, for the sake of a future ability that would someday make him happy. He had mastered his renunciation, this deferral of happiness, in a thousand variations, and his gift of invention was inexhaustible when it came to thinking up more and more things that he had to learn in order to be equipped for his future present. And thus he had systematically, and with impeccable thoroughness, cheated himself of his present.

When the plane touched down he had the feeling that a seal was being put on something, even if he couldn’t have said what. The fat man next to him turned down the corner of his page and put his book away. ‘Bad as that?’ he asked with a grin when he saw that Perlmann had deliberately left his book in the seat pocket.

White columns of smoke rose into the night sky from the industrial plants beside the airport. Perlmann trudged heavily across the tarmac towards the red building. When he took his passport from the official’s hand the thought suddenly struck him: I may not get out of here alive . In the taxi he asked the driver to turn up the music. But from time to time the thought flickered up anyway. As he stepped into the hotel he was grateful for Signora Morelli’s crisp ‘ Buona sera ’, and tonight it didn’t bother him that someone had once again fixed the lighting in his corridor.

He sat down, exhausted, on the bed and stared for several minutes at the stack of texts by Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand, and the mail from Frau Hartwig. His exhaustion turned into indifference, and at last all that still interested him was his hunger. He showered quickly and then went down to eat. As quiet as someone who has given up on everything, he shovelled the food into him and answered questions with the mild friendliness of a convalescent.

Later he lay awake for a long time in the darkness without thinking anything. There was nothing left to calculate. He wouldn’t have a text to give Maria on Friday. The tension was over. Everything was over. When the effect of the pill flooded through him, he gave up and dropped off.