Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann now tried to leap back and forth between the foreign languages that came out of the loudspeaker, and each time he did so he felt clumsy and stupid as he collided against Japanese as if against an impenetrable wall. Then the particular pitch and brightness of the Japanese voice sounded as if the woman were mocking his incomprehension. He liked being able to make the whole effort on the quiet, involving himself only internally, to some extent, without the sound that came when you engaged with the world by speaking. And during a pause from the loudspeaker, when the only sound was the quiet rushing of the water and the puttering of the engine, he knew all of a sudden what he could have been: a long-distance runner through all the languages of the world, with lots of empty space around him, and without the obligation to exchange a single word with people.

He pursued that thought later on, sitting in a shabby bar near the harbor, over a pizza that repelled him. He asked the surprised proprietor for some paper and a pencil and started describing, on a stained waiter’s pad, the kind of presence and freedom that arose when one passed through several languages at brief intervals. At first it was an effort, he was tired by the sun and the loudspeaker, and the excessively loud voices still rang in his head. But then he got going. He managed precise and dense descriptions, and he formulated things that he had previously felt only vaguely, but had never grasped in words. Every now and again he glanced southwards. The hotel was over an hour’s boat journey away. He grew calm. Here at this wobbly table, from which the paint was flaking, amidst men in vests and dungarees, who probably worked in the harbor, he suddenly felt safe. He managed to stand by the idea that he was someone who was far more interested in sentences like the ones on these little bits of paper than the whole flood of linguistic data and theories.

He asked if he could use the telephone on the bar, and phoned Maria in the hotel. Something in his schedule had changed, he said, and asked whether she couldn’t have his paper ready by this evening or at least by tomorrow afternoon.

She would try, she said, but she couldn’t promise anything, and in fact it was rather unlikely, because some people from Fiat had just arrived and, of course, she would now have to see to them as well.

He knew it was childish, but he was hurt that Maria had reminded him that there was something else in the world apart from him and his group. Her reaction hadn’t been unfriendly, but her voice had been quite businesslike, and that was enough to suggest resentment, mingled with irritation that he hadn’t given her his notes to be typed up much sooner.

On the way back clouds rolled in and accumulated quickly, dark mountains with a delicate edge of sunlight. A squally wind announced a storm and soon the sea was like foaming, greenish lead against a dark, slate-grey wall in which flashes of lightning appeared like scribbled lines. When a violent shower began, the people withdrew inside, leaving Perlmann alone outside under the cabin porch.

Again sentences from the notes circled in his head. He tested them, tasted them, attempted a neutral, sober, detached judgment. Instead, he became increasingly insecure, the English language dampened the sentences, made them less brilliant, less pretentious, but in the end it’s all trash anyway . He pulled the stained pieces of paper from his pocket and read them, as gusts of wind lashed the rain across and drenched him to the skin. When it had finished, he paused for a while and stared out into the sheet lightning. Then slowly, almost softly, he crumpled the pieces of paper and pressed them with both hands into a solid ball. He turned them back and forth in his hands a few more times. Then he threw them out into the sea. The second possibility was eliminated, once and for all.

It was so terribly cramped, this prison of the three possibilities, whose bars he rattled with furious frustration. Again and again he attempted to flee by clinging to the idea of bigger connections, of altered proportions. It’s mad to let myself be so tied up by ludicrous issues of respect within a group of colleagues that all that I remain seems to be entirely insignificant and not even present. And besides; there are disasters, wars, hunger and misery in the world out there, and there are real tragedies and real suffering. Why do I not free myself by simply denying the importance of this tiny, laughable problem? Why don’t I just tear down the prison walls by declaring them to be imaginary structures? Who’s actually stopping me from doing that?

But each attempt to take that much-longed-for step into freedom through an altered perspective and a re-evaluation of things proved to be deceptive and without any lasting effect as soon as the image of the loathed hotel re-entered the foreground and, as if it had hypnotic powers, extinguished everything else.

When the Portofino peninsula came into view Perlmann was gripped by panic, a panic that had seemed to have been defeated two hours before in the bar at the harbor. The word plagiarism formed within him; against his will it grew bigger and bigger, it spread within him and filled him with an internal roar. He had never been confronted with the word as he was now, he was discovering it properly now for the first time. It was a terrible word, a word that made him think of the color red, a dark red with a hint of black. It was a gloomy, heavy word with a doom-laden sound; a repellent and unnatural word. It seemed to him like a word that had been deliberately assembled to frighten and torment someone to their very depths by calling up in him the feeling that beneath all the actions of which people were capable there was no crime greater than the one represented by this hateful, angular word.

The only one who could unmask him would be Leskov himself, and he was in St Petersburg, thousands of miles away, without an exit permit and still tied to his sick mother. Better security from the discovery of deception was hard to imagine. But that reflection sounded feeble and papery compared to a mute certainty which made him shiver even more in his wet clothes: committing such a fraud, a theft of thought and writing on that scale would – for someone like himself, to whom words meant so much – inflict a wound that would never heal, a trauma from which he would never be able to recover. In a sense it would be the end of his life. After that the time until death would be something that he could only endure. Occasional forgetfulness and immersion in the everyday would make it a little more bearable, but Perlmann was quite sure that on the whole stretch that still lay before him there wouldn’t be a single day when he could keep from thinking about it, and hearing the word plagiarism inside himself.

On the way to the exit he was once again filled with shame that he had allowed this thought so much space, and at the same time he was glad to have looked it openly in the eye, and to have fought it down once and for all.

When he set foot on dry land and set off towards the hotel, he still had no idea what he was going to do.

Back in his room he took off his wet things, showered for a long time and then walked to the open window. The rain had stopped, the storm had headed southwards, and only in the far distance could one still see the occasional flash and hear a faint rumble of thunder. Night was closing in. Perlmann lay down on the bed. He felt exhausted to his very last fibre. It was a vibrating weariness that flowed through him, and yet at the same time his body was tense, and resisted any attempt at relaxation. He felt only one wish: that the tension might collapse in on itself and make way for sleep. But that state persisted, the yearned-for process of metabolism in his brain didn’t begin, and after a while he went to the bathroom and took a quarter-tablet.