Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

He could no longer bear it. He called for the waiter, looked in vain for him in the empty bar, and then, because he couldn’t find anything smaller, left far too large a bill beside his cup and walked quickly back to the main street. He bought a ticket from the driver of the waiting bus, who was standing outside and smoking, and took a seat at the back. He was the only passenger. When the driver stamped out his cigarette and sat down at the steering wheel, Perlmann jumped out at the last moment. Astonished, the driver watched him in the rear-view mirror, then set off.

Perlmann didn’t want to go back, and he wanted to sleep. He was tempted just to lie down on the bench by the bus stop, but that was too public. A hotel. He counted his money. It would only be enough, if at all, for a very cheap room. He was relieved to have a goal for a moment, and walked through the narrow alleyways of the town. Many hotels had closed for the winter, and of the ones that were open, even the shabbiest-looking dives were more than he could afford.

At last he found a room in an albergo that opened up on to a narrow alley full of garbage bins. The landlord – a squat, fat man with a moustache and suspenders – studied him with a suspicious and contemptuous look: a man without luggage and without much money, wanting a room at half-past eleven in the morning. Perlmann had to haggle. He only wanted the room for a few hours. OK, until five o’clock, discount, cash in advance.

He took off the grubby cover and lay down on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. The ceiling, its plaster crumbling, was covered with yellow and brown water stains; cobwebs had formed in the corners, and in the middle hung an ugly lamp of yellow plastic that was supposed to imitate amber.

Self-defense , he thought: couldn’t one regard what he had done as a form of self-defense? Powerless to do anything about it, he had lost his academic discipline, which had won him respect and a social position, and now he had been pushed against the wall by the expectations of others, demanding constant new achievements and threatening to withdraw their respect, and he had been forced to defend himself. And the only way he had managed to do that was through Leskov’s text. You could see that as a defense of his own life. It had not happened casually or for the sake of some cheap advantage, but simply in order to avert something that would have amounted to his professional and, in the end, his personal annihilation. Self-defense, in fact.

OK, if you were going to be literal about it, you might describe what he was doing as plagiarism. At that moment the others were holding in their hands a text which, even though his name wasn’t on it, they assumed was his text, even though he had only translated it and not written it himself. But that way of looking at things was fundamentally superficial, and didn’t do justice to the real process. Because he hadn’t translated the text just like that, without any internal involvement or intellectual engagement, as a professional translator in an agency might have done. Piece by piece he had allowed Leskov’s thought-processes to pass through his mind. He had repeatedly measured it against examples from his own memory, and in the end, to mention only this, he had actually spent many hours, whole days, in fact, on his attempt to structure Leskov’s fragmentary reflections into a consistent theory of appropriation. So one couldn’t really say that the text that had been distributed contained nothing of his own thoughts.

And that wasn’t all – it wasn’t even the crucial thing, he thought. There was something else, too, which made it seem unfair and actually incorrect to speak in terms of a theft of ideas. It was the fact that he had always immediately – once linguistic problems had been swept aside – recognized Leskov’s thoughts as his own. As he thought this, Perlmann saw before him Millar’s face with its flashing spectacles, and he heard his scornful voice; no words, just his scornful voice. The face and the voice came closer and closer. They oppressed him. They threatened to crush him. He had to defend himself. He got up, sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. You couldn’t prove something like that to anybody, and you wouldn’t ever be able to express it to anyone without making yourself ridiculous. Nonetheless, it remained the case: Leskov described experiences with language and memory all of which he, Perlmann, had had himself, and the intellectual outline that he came up with was such that with each individual step Perlmann had once again had the impression: I have often had that thought myself, really precisely the same one. Admittedly, he hadn’t sat down and written it out; the corresponding sentences from his pen did not exist. But he certainly could have done. He saw himself at his desk in Frankfurt, writing out, word for word, the text with which Leskov, to some extent by chance, had anticipated his own ideas. Nobody could say that he had passed off as his own thoughts that were alien to him.

He walked to the window and gave a start. On the other side of the narrow alley, exactly opposite his window and no more than six feet away from him, an old woman with a black headscarf and a toothless mouth leaned out of the window and grinned at him from a wrinkled face with a protruding chin. Next to her on the window-ledge there cowered a scrawny cat, the dividing-line between its orange and white fur running crookedly down its whole face and giving it an ugly, malevolent expression. Perlmann quickly drew the heavy, greasy curtains and lay back down on the bed. The hint of self-respect that he had managed to regain in his internal monologue a few moments before had been destroyed by the sight of the old woman and the cat, which now seemed to him like sly and menacing grotesques. Once again he felt like a cheap fraudster, lying in a shabby, dark hotel room in a trashy and abandoned tourist flophouse.

Only gradually did he find his way back to the two thought processes that he had begun to work out yesterday on the ship, still shocked at the time, and filled with shame to have found himself thinking any such thing. First of all, it was more or less impossible that one of his colleagues here could ever establish a connection with the unknown Leskov in faraway St Petersburg that might constitute a threat to him. And secondly, the seven copies of the translation, the seven manifestations and material proofs of his deception that existed would eventually be forgotten and finally destroyed. And with the disappearance of the paper from the world, his deception would also be extirpated and removed from the world – it would be just as if it had never happened.

Perlmann sensed that there was a daring leap somewhere in that thought, a transition that wasn’t quite flawless. But he didn’t want to look any closer. He wanted to look forward to the point in the future when the world, as far as his integrity was concerned, would be exactly as it had been before his deception. Once again he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked hastily, his body tensed, as if by doing so he could impel time to reach that far off point of innocence more quickly.

Perlmann imagined how the destruction of the paper and the writing might come about. It seemed to him that his thoughts became more correct and compelling the more he succeeded in imagining the process down to its smallest details. Millar’s copy, for example, would one day end up in one of the gleaming black garbage bags on a street in New York. The text might even be destroyed inside the bag, by some sort of leaking liquid, for example, but certainly by rain on a garbage dump, Perlmann could actually hear the pattering sound. The idea that appealed to him most was the inky letters running, undoing the baleful, guilt-ridden arrangement of the lines. Or else the text would go up in flames in a refuse incinerating plant. One day – in a few months, a year, perhaps, or two – this unfortunate text, this sequence of signs, this pattern of molecules would no longer exist in the world. All that would remain would be traces of memory in his colleagues’ heads. But they would become increasingly vague. All that would be left in the end would be a rough idea of the subject. The memory would fade especially quickly in the heads of his most dangerous opponents, Millar and Ruge, because they would regard it as overblown anyway, a piece of writing without sharp intellectual outlines that didn’t deserve to be remembered with any precision.