Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

A more difficult case was Adrian von Levetzov, whom Perlmann had come to revere, even with all his affectation. Outwardly, he would join in with the chorus of outrage; that was the game. But Perlmann hoped – and thought it possible – that von Levetzov might secretly bring him a certain understanding and even a certain sympathy. What had von Levetzov said to Millar at the end of that session? I could imagine that he’s not concerned with it at all. Once again, Perlmann imagined von Levetzov’s tall figure, leaving the veranda with that strange posture of his. No, von Levetzov’s judgment was not a matter of indifference to him.

Giorgio Silvestri, Perlmann was quite sure, would not condemn him, and he trusted him to guess at his distress. Laura Sand: in her ironic, defensive way she liked him. And there had been that afternoon of many colors. If he was correct in his impression that she had very quickly seen through him, she would not be terribly surprised, and would receive the news as something that fitted effortlessly into her gloomy picture of human cohabitation. Far from judging him, she would be annoyed that he had allowed the silly academic world to acquire such power over him.

Evelyn Mistral would be terrible. He thought back to the times when she had spoken furiously about Spanish colleagues who didn’t take their work seriously, and as he did so he always saw her with her delicate, matte-silver glasses and her hair piled up. She would inevitably be torn between the undaunted, slightly naive earnestness that sustained her in her work, and the friendly, unphysically affectionate feelings that she brought to him. Now she would inevitably see those feelings as something that he had obtained by false pretences. They would disintegrate and assume the color of contempt and revulsion. In his mind’s eye he saw her again, turning sightlessly away after his snub, as she had done before. He couldn’t think of her face when she found out.

What about Leskov himself? What would you feel about a person who has stolen a text you are proud of? Fury? Contempt? Or would you be capable of some generosity if you learned the price the thief had paid in the end? Perlmann realized how little he knew Leskov the man, how vague a sense he had of his innermost character, as opposed to Leskov the writer. He felt vague relief shading into indifference. Leskov’s judgement was not what mattered in the end.

He didn’t dare to think of Millar’s reaction, half-averting his inner eye. It was unbearable to imagine the complacency that this self-righteous Yank, with his blue, unchangingly alert gaze, would feel. Somehow I’m not terribly surprised , he might say, tilting his head to the left, all the way to the shoulder, with an emphatically diffident smile. A throbbing wave of hatred washed over Perlmann and seemed to force its way into every cell of his body, and for a while he felt nauseous again. Submerged in that hatred he saw, as clearly as in a hallucination, Millar’s hairy hands in front of him, gliding over the keyboard of the grand piano.

But worst of all was the thought of Kirsten. It was a relief to feel how much more important his daughter was to him than anything else, and how even his hatred of Millar paled when she appeared before him. That gave him a feeling that he hadn’t lost his sense of proportion entirely. But it was, then, all the more shocking to imagine what would happen when she found out. Dad was a fraud, using someone else’s words because he could no longer come up with anything himself. She might somehow be able to understand that nothing further had occurred to him. She had sensed something on her visit, and she would explain it with reference to Agnes’s death. But that he hadn’t had the honesty or the courage to admit it openly, that she wouldn’t understand. Like her mother, she didn’t know the milieu, and above all she could have no idea that he wasn’t standing there empty-handed because of Agnes’s death, but because of another loss, one that was in a sense much greater, and which was so difficult to describe and, in fact, impossible to explain. But equally, she couldn’t know that he could not have experienced a confession of his present inability as something which was unpleasant, embarrassing, but still something for which one might seek understanding in view of a personal tragedy such as his own; that he would rather have had to experience it as a public admission of a more substantial bankruptcy which applied to him as a whole person, and that for that reason a declaration of failure had been unthinkable. He thought of her standing outside the door early in the morning in her long black coat. He saw her mocking, embarrassed smile and heard her say Hi, Dad . Once again he felt the warm, dry hand with all the rings on it, the hand that she had stretched out of the train window to him. Gli ho detto che ti voglio bene. Giusto?

He looked over to the window. No. No.

After an exhausted pause, in which he slumped back on his pillow, he sensed with quivering alertness that the thoughts he was about to have were terrifying, and would change him for ever. It seemed to him that they were coming from far away, from somewhere unknown, and that they were coming towards him like waves, getting bigger and bigger until they finally crashed over. He pressed his ice-cold palms against his forehead, as if by doing so he might drive the thoughts away. But they came inexorably nearer. They were stronger than he was, and in his powerlessness he felt that they were going to break his resistance.

He switched on the television. There were films on most of the channels, and right now he wanted nothing to do with made-up stories, conflicts and feelings. He immediately flicked on from talk shows as well; never before had the views of strangers been of so little consequence to him. At last he found a news program. That was what he needed now: objective, real events, excerpts from the world in which something important, something of real significance was happening, ideally dramatic events which, because their scope went far beyond individual lives, could help him escape the prison of his own thoughts, which referred entirely to him. He wanted each news item to be like a bridge by which he could reach the real world, in which the nightmare that held him prisoner in this room would be dispelled, revealed as merely a horrendous hallucination. He stared at the images until his eyes were streaming, he wanted to lose himself entirely in the events out there in the world; the further away the scene of a news item, the easier it seemed to him to remove himself in it all by himself. He envied the people in the news stories, they weren’t him, and with a feeling of shame that he didn’t want to examine any further, he noticed that he particularly envied the disaster victims. He envied them their tangible misfortune. He even wished he could swap places with the soldiers who lay wounded on stretchers.

He turned off the sound and let the images run on mutely. Was it imaginable that Leskov would remain silent – out of gratitude for the invitation, and perhaps also in memory of the Hermitage?

But even then: it would be unbearable to know he was in Leskov’s debt for all time. Leskov wouldn’t blackmail him, Perlmann was sure of that. But the knowledge that he would henceforth be for ever vulnerable to blackmail would be enough to paralyze him completely. Just imagine: him, Perlmann, sitting at the head of the table in the veranda, elucidating and defending the text, while Leskov sat somewhere at the back in his shabby clothes, drawing on his pipe, roguishly contented, possibly asking questions and raising objections for his own macabre entertainment, all with a deadly serious expression. Perlmann felt the cold sweat on his hands when he rested his burning face on them.