Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

His face in the mirror had received some color from the boat trip. Philipp Perlmann, tanned on Italian holiday , he thought and didn’t know what to do with all his despair. With a dull, empty head he smoked two cigarettes, then lay back down again and, after a few tormented minutes in which he tossed back and forth, he slipped into shallow, troubled sleep.

It was ten o’clock at night when he woke up. He immediately noticed that the paralysing apprehension which had held him in its grip during his sleep had passed uninterrupted into his waking state. But it was a while before he had overcome his state of disorientation. I’ve got to do something now. It’s the last moment. If I don’t do anything now, that, too, is a decision. All that I’m left with is a declaration of failure.

He felt dully that a complicated process of reflection had taken place over the course of the day, a thick net of serpentine, dead-end thoughts. But his head was too heavy for them now. He remembered the boat trip, but that whole day seemed to be far away and unreal. The only clear thought he was able to have was that he now had to go downstairs and hand in a text that could be copied tomorrow morning, while he was still asleep. Maria. My text isn’t ready yet. The people from Fiat .

As he fumbled with the combination on his suitcase lock, he realized that his fingertips were numb from the sleeping pill. It was by no means a complete numbness. It affected only the outermost layer, and was actually more of a faint tingle, but it gave Perlmann the feeling that contact with the world was being lost; the contact that one needed if one were to maintain control. It was as if a tiny gap had appeared between him and the world, a thin tear through which the world was escaping him. He took his translation of Leskov’s paper from his case and walked towards the door. There he turned round, went into the bathroom and swallowed a whole sleeping pill. He took the elevator downstairs.

There was no one at reception, but in the back room Giovanni sat with the television on. Perlmann saw a floodlit football stadium. Giovanni was leaning forward and hastily smoking. Perlmann rang the bell, but it wasn’t until the second ring that Giovanni turned his head and hesitantly got to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the game. ‘Penalty,’ he said apologetically when he saw Perlmann’s face.

For a moment Perlmann felt as if he wouldn’t be able to open his mouth. Never before had he been so aware that he had a mouth. Giovanni glanced impatiently over his shoulder at the television, where a roar of jubilation was exploding at that moment.

‘Six copies,’ Perlmann said urgently, ‘then please put them in my colleagues’ pigeonholes.’

‘ Va bene, Signor Perlmann ,’ said Giovanni, and accepted the text. As he did so a bit of ash fell from his cigarette on to the immaculate, gleaming white of the title page. It was only by turning away in silence and leaving that Perlmann managed to control himself. When he glanced back he saw Giovanni quickly putting the paper under the counter and disappearing into the back room.

The pills were already taking effect when he hung the do not disturb sign on the door. He was grateful when a gentle wave of numbness washed over the sensations that were forcing their way to the surface; sensations of defeat, shame and anxiety, the feeling of falling without knowing when he would land; the certainty that from now on he would never stop falling. Without turning on the light he lay down in bed and was glad that the gap between himself and the world was rapidly growing.

I must have been crazy. Completely crazy. All of a sudden Perlmann was gripped by a painful feeling of alertness, an alertness behind his closed eyes, which were steeped in physical drowsiness. It was quarter to eight. Quickly, his movements still uncertain, he pulled his trousers and pullover over his pyjamas and slipped into his shoes with no socks on. Perhaps the copies won’t even be ready yet, in which case I’ll simply collect them up again. Nothing has happened yet.

With jerky movements that betrayed his giddiness, he ran downstairs, nearly falling twice. Just before the last step he came to a standstill, clutching on to the banister with both hands. Millar and von Levetzov were standing down by the desk, taking the texts that Signora Morelli was handing them.

‘The paper’s still warm,’ Millar said with a grin, and ran the pages along his thumb like a pack of cards.

The other copies were still in the pigeonholes. Minutes, I just got here minutes late, but now I can’t go over and demand the text back, it would make me look ridiculous. You can’t explain something like that. If only the signora had been less efficient, just this once .

Perlmann hurried back to his room, his breath catching with each step at the idea of bumping into one of his other colleagues. In the bathroom he rinsed out his mouth and then sat down with a cigarette in the red armchair. He felt dizzy. He had crossed a threshold and would never be able to go back. This fraud – its consequences now unfolding inexorably – was something he would have to live with for ever. The day after tomorrow and the day after that he would sit in the Marconi Veranda defending a text he had stolen. The hours, the minutes that he spent sitting there in front of the others as an unacknowledged fraud would last for ever, and once his stay here was over it was as a fraudster that he would enter his apartment in Frankfurt. He would look at Agnes’s picture and talk to Kirsten, always aware of his deception. Nothing would ever be the same. His plagiarism would now stand for ever between him and the world like a thin glass wall, visible only to him. He would touch objects and people without ever being able to reach them.

Perlmann couldn’t stay in this building filled with people who would in the next few hours be following Leskov’s thought processes on the assumption that they were his. And he could no longer bear it in this hotel room, for which almost 300 marks a day had been spent for more than four weeks, and in which he had done not a single thing. Apart from a translation, which was now a fraudulent translation.

He didn’t shower. He no longer felt he could use the luxurious bathroom for longer than was absolutely necessary. After he had got properly dressed, he would have liked to order another coffee to fight the after-effects of the tablet, which could no longer protect him against anything, and only lay on his eyes like a continuous pressure, so that he constantly felt the need to close them. But he didn’t even want to appear in front of the waiter, and room service was one of the things to which he no longer had any right in future.

He left the hotel by the rear entrance and stepped out into a cloudless, radiant autumn day. As quickly as he could, he walked to the spur of rock behind which the road to Portofino disappeared, almost running the last few yards before he was out of view of the hotel. But they have no idea. Nevertheless, I have to disappear from their field of vision . He didn’t dare lean against the railing around the corner. He must have looked like a holidaymaker, a spa patient enjoying a wonderful Italian autumn morning. So he smoked his cigarette upright and stiff, one hand in his trouser pocket. He had to walk, keep on going; walking made it almost bearable. His stomach hurt. He hadn’t eaten a thing since the few mouthfuls of pizza in Genoa yesterday, and now the cigarettes.

He found it hard to remember exactly what it had been like last night. The most difficult thing was the attempt to recall the internal Gestalt of that moment when he had taken Leskov’s paper out of the suitcase and gone to the door. It had happened during those few seconds. Something had been set in motion that could not now be stopped, a sequence of events that dragged him with it to the end, from the fatal motion of the arm with which he had handed the text to Giovanni, to the strenuous movement of his mouth, with which he had given the disastrous instruction to copy and distribute. Now that he thought back to it with his eyes closed, it struck him as less his own action than something that had come over him, that had simply happened to him; or if it were an action, then it was the action of a sleepwalker. For a moment this thought brought him relief, and his step became a little lighter.