Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann nodded and raised his hand to wave. Through his tears he saw Kirsten making a sieve with her hands and calling out something that he didn’t understand. He stopped until he was quite sure that he could no longer see the red tail light of the train.

Because Kirsten’s ticket had cost more than he had expected, he no longer had enough money for a taxi. He only just caught the last train to Santa Margherita. Now and again on the journey he reached for the red lighter in his pocket and ran through Kirsten’s Italian sentence in his mind. In the hotel he threw himself on the bed and let his tears flow freely.

At the end of the Tuesday session, Millar suggested talking about Evelyn Mistral’s works on Wednesday and Thursday, so that he could travel to Florence on Friday to meet his Italian colleague about the encyclopaedia. For a moment Perlmann felt a helpless fury, because the last free day on which he could have written was being taken from him. But even before Laura Sand gathered her things together and the others got up, that feeling had already collapsed in on itself, making way for a numbing indifference.

It was accompanied by a leaden weariness, which was further diminished by the fact that he was yielding to his compulsive need for sleep more and more often and with increasingly little resistance. If he woke up, the weariness tended to weigh heavier on him than before, and every time he crept under the shower in his clothes, the indifference seemed to become even more encompassing until he felt as if he had, in that short time, forgotten how to feel anything at all. If he ate anything, it happened very mechanically, and where the blindness of sensation was concerned, it was barely distinguishable from the food ingestion of a plant. It was only a matter of time before he ceased that activity, too, he thought, as he slipped once more into a twilight state in which he felt sheltered for a few moments, before the next maelstrom of flitting dream images carried him away.

On Tuesday evening Kirsten rang. He had been right, she said, the compartment had filled up in Milan, and then a real snoring concert had started up, so that she hadn’t had a wink. In Zurich she had had to wait for almost two hours for a connection, but breakfast had been fantastic.

‘I hope,’ she said with anxious hesitation, ‘you didn’t misunderstand my farewell remark. It wasn’t supposed to be an accusation.’

The practice room in the Institute had struck her as even shabbier than usual. ‘And those inevitable paper cups! I couldn’t help thinking about your crystal glasses!’

Martin? ‘Imagine. He was standing at the station just by chance, because he’d worked out the thing with the night train.’ She paused. ‘When I saw him, I had a guilty conscience. Because… well, yeah, because of what I said.’

The seminar session? ‘I slept through it with my eyes open! Once, when Lasker mentioned The Wild Palms , I couldn’t help thinking about my discussion with Millar. God, is that guy pleased with himself! Cocksure doesn’t begin to cover it!’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t get to sleep, and wished his earlier compulsion to rest would return. In the middle of the night he fetched his notes from the suitcase and sat down at the desk. He slowly flicked the pages. No, translating the German examples into English didn’t work; they sounded dull, weird and even ridiculous. Presence: a perfume, a light, a smile… He had already picked up the felt-tip pen to cross out the two lines when he stopped and smoked a cigarette. He left the lines as they were and flicked to the end. What separates me from my present… Without hesitation he crossed out the whole of the last paragraph. But that wasn’t enough for him. He went on blackening the page until the last white dot had disappeared and the whole thing formed a deep black block that left traces on the next page. He waved and blew the page dry, then flicked back to the two indented lines. After a quick look he blackened them out too. For a while he sat motionless in front of the first page. Then, with the felt-tip pen, he drew the heading: mestre non è brutta.

On Wednesday morning on the way to the veranda he went to see Maria in the office and gave her the notes. She laughed at the title. Now the text was ready earlier after all, she said. She still had a whole pile of things to get done today and tomorrow, but she would manage to get it done by Monday, as agreed. Perlmann nodded to everything. He was already in the doorway when he heard her laughing again. She was pointing at the blacked-out closing paragraph. ‘Like something in a secret dossier!’ she said. ‘It really stirs the curiosity!’

It took Evelyn Mistral almost an hour to shake off her nerves. Only then did her frantic play with her glasses stop, and she started sitting comfortably in the big armchair. It was plainly hard for her to believe that Millar and Ruge weren’t just being polite, but that they had really liked her paper. But then, when she felt safe, she became more commanding from one minute to the next, delivered a lot that wasn’t in the text, and reported on a series of exciting experiments of imagination and will that Millar found really inspiring. The feeling of having succeeded in this illustrious circle was making her increasingly excited. Her face was red and she smoked much more than usual, von Levetzov holding out a burning match to her, always at exactly the right time, with the attentiveness of a trainer. Once when, contrary to her usual habits, she tried to inhale and started coughing, there was laughter which unambiguously expressed the fact that the others accepted her in her accomplishment and were glad of her relief.

Perlmann took the greatest trouble to look interested, and on Wednesday afternoon he finally – constantly struggling against exhaustion – caught up with reading her paper. But everything he said sounded wooden, and even as he spoke all the meaning seemed to drain from his words. In the first third of the text came the passage where Evelyn Mistral spoke about why the differentiation of imagination and will occurred in the medium of language. It wasn’t the same reflection as the one in Leskov’s work, he noticed straight away. But when he tried to remember Leskov’s argument, there was nothing but emptiness. That kind of emptiness, which had something definitive about it, and was quite unlike a temporary gap in the memory, chilled him to the core. He only just managed to fight down the idea that he was on the point of losing his mind.

On Thursday evening he went to the trattoria. He saw that it was on the tip of the proprietor and his wife’s tongues to ask him where he had been for the last few days. But after a long, startled look at him they both suppressed their curiosity. Perlmann went to the toilet and looked at his face in the mirror. It wasn’t, he thought, any paler than usual. On the contrary, the boat trip with Kirsten had left a hint of a tan. But the color, he saw now, had not been the cause of his hosts’ shock. It was the lifelessness of his features that had made them start. His face had something of the exhaustion of a shipwreck about it, something forlorn that gave one the strange idea that its owner had run off and simply left it there. Perlmann attempted a smile, but immediately stopped when he saw how cold and mask-like it looked.

When Sandra came skipping into the almost empty restaurant, her parents glanced at Perlmann to tell her to be quiet. Then he asked the girl to sit down with him and enquired about school. She didn’t seem to notice anything special about his face, but was bored by all the questions and relieved when she was allowed to go again. Perlmann left half of his dinner on the plate, mumbled a vague apology and was glad when the glass-bead curtain rattled shut behind him.