Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

When the two men had gone, Perlmann left the stall, checked through a chink in the door that none of his colleagues was in the hall, and hurried back up to his room. Sitting on the edge of the bed he reread the crumpled telegram. Leskov had sent it. He could see on the white strip at the top right: yesterday afternoon just before four o’clock in St Petersburg. The other details, recorded in a code, were not quite clear to him. But plainly the message had been transmitted via Milan and Genoa to Santa Margherita, and had arrived shortly after half-past seven. If the connection had been quicker and the telegram had been brought to me before Signora Morelli started copying this morning, I wouldn’t have become a fraudster, and wouldn’t now face professional annihilation. He took another good look: it was three minutes to four when the message had been dispatched in St Petersburg. Perlmann’s ship had been supposed to set off from Genoa at a quarter past three, but in the end it had been almost half-past. Three minutes to four – the storm had already been raging. By then it was already clear that he would come. It was already clear. It was already a fact.

That Leskov was stuck in St Petersburg because his exit permit had been refused and his mother was sick had been axiomatic in all of Perlmann’s calculations. These two independent obstacles had given him the impression that they were insurmountable, so that he hadn’t even begun to consider the possibility of Leskov’s arrival. And now, through some unexpected concatenation of circumstances, Leskov had been able to free himself after all, and everything was collapsing. And yet the information in Leskov’s letters had sounded so definitive, so immutable.

Perlmann’s emptied stomach convulsed painfully. He went to the bathroom and slowly drank a glass of lukewarm water. As he did so his eye fell on the pack of sleeping pills. He knew precisely how many were left. Nonetheless, he took the box over to the red armchair and checked: seven. That’s not enough, not even with alcohol. If my doctor hadn’t recently been on holiday, I’d have had enough by now and I’d be able to do it. He went to the window, opened it and stopped, as he usually did, two steps behind the balustrade. Slowly and deeply he breathed in the cool night air, and felt his stomach cramp slowly easing as a slight dizziness set in. He heard cars pulling up down below, voices moving across the terrace to the flight of steps, laughter, the Saturday evening outside guests driving off.

He took two paces, held on to the balustrade with both hands and looked down the wall of the house. The only row of windows without the obstacle of a balcony. He would crash against light-brown marble. He wouldn’t do it now, of course, not till after midnight or in the early hours of the morning when everyone was asleep. To be quite sure, he would have to jump head-first, and it would take three or four endless, terrible seconds before his head touched the stone. He closed the window and leaned his head against his hands, which were clamped around the handle of the window. For a moment everything went black.

When he straightened up again, there was a knock at the door. The thought of having to talk to someone now, even just a few words through the door, threw him into a panic. He had never before felt so exposed and defenseless. He had nothing to offer the presence of someone else at that moment, and even that presence, he felt, would crush him. And even so, he was pleased at the knocking, which freed him from the frozen solitude of the last few minutes. Halfway to the door he turned round and fetched the pack of sleeping pills, which he stuffed with cold fingers into his sponge bag in the bathroom before opening the door.

It was Evelyn Mistral, bringing him his cigarettes and the red lighter.

‘We were worried when you didn’t come back,’ she said with an uncertain, inquisitive look. ‘Bad news?’ Then her eyes narrowed a little, and she added more quietly: ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He stared at her straw-colored hair, her oval face, its complexion looking even darker than usual in the faint lighting of the corridor, and at the skewed T-shirt that she wore under her broad-shouldered raw silk jacket. The temptation to ask her in and, in the intimacy of his room, far from the eyes of the others, to confess everything, was as overwhelming and physically tangible as a wave crashing over him. He lowered his head and pressed a hand against his forehead, just above his closed eyes.

‘Everything is all right,’ he said in English when he looked at her again.

He saw immediately that her face assumed a hurt and embarrassed expression. It was the first time since their initial conversation by the pool that he had refused the special intimacy of Spanish, which they had always spoken when they were alone. And even though he hadn’t addressed her directly, it was as if he had now destroyed the closeness and the magic that her Spanish tú had held for him. It hurt like a farewell, and pain mingled with despair that he would never be able to explain to her that it had arisen out of a helpless attempt to protect himself.

‘And thank you,’ he said, pointing at the cigarettes as he reached for the door handle.

‘Yes, all right. Good night, then,’ she said quietly, and left without looking at him again. Perlmann threw himself on the bed, buried his head in the pillow, and after a while he subsided into a series of slow, dry sobs.

When Perlmann sat back up and went to the bathroom to wash his face, he felt the cold, desperate strength of a person who has just burned all his bridges. He lit a cigarette and all of a sudden he was capable of clearly and methodically thinking about his situation. He banished from his consciousness the image of his head smashing on the marble, shattering and being crushed to a pulp as he now, more coolly this time and with a synoptic view, considered putting an end to his life.

What would such a deed look like to the others? From Monday evening onwards – when the truth came to light, after Leskov had seen the text that had been handed out – as far as the others were concerned Perlmann would simply be a craven fraudster lacking the courage to even come clean to them. Dead, Perlmann would no longer have the chance to explain anything, referring to his distress and explaining to one or other of them – perhaps even to Leskov himself – his strong feeling that the text contained so many thoughts that were also his own that in a sense it was also his text. His deception would be subjected to the simplest and most superficial interpretation, and he would no longer be there to mitigate the judgment and make it more sophisticated. No one would take the trouble to pursue it, but the suspicion would spread that Philipp Perlmann, the prize winner with the invitation to Princeton, might have copied the work of others before, although perhaps not so brazenly as he had this final time.

Perlmann tried to adopt the view that this might all be a matter of complete indifference to him: as long as he was in the world and experiencing something, the time had not yet come; and when it did, he would not be there to endure it. He was unable to find an error in his reasoning on this point, but, confusingly, regardless of its simplicity and transparency, it struck him as fallacious, almost insidious, and so unconvincing that it immediately eluded him again as soon as he ceased to grasp it by concentrating on it particularly hard.

The idea that certain people might henceforth see him merely as an audacious trickster, a cheap fraudster, was easy to bear. Angelini’s opinion, for example, left Perlmann cold. And, in fact, he didn’t care too much about Ruge either, he reflected with a certain surprise. Even though Perlmann had by now become quite fond of Ruge, he had for four weeks been afraid of him, this respectable man with the chuckling laugh, in which Perlmann hadn’t been able to keep from hearing a dangerous self-righteousness, often against his better judgment. But now, when fear should have overwhelmed him, the big bald head with the watery grey eyes behind the broken glasses seemed merely alien and distant and had nothing to do with him. The fact that Ruge had defended Laura Sand’s beautiful images of suffering barely did anything to change that.