Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

As he looked down into the hall from the last landing, for one oppressive moment he had the idea that he would soon stand facing Leskov. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and held the air in his lungs as if its painful pressure might crush the ghostly vision from within. Then he walked to the reception desk, which was unmanned.

Only now did he hear the music coming from the drawing room. Saturday evening: Millar was playing. As always it was Bach, the Overture in the French Style, which Hanna had once played for the sixtieth or seventieth birthday of an adored aunt. Perlmann felt as if he were a quite unreal life-form, a creature from an alien star that had strayed to this world, in which everything was happening as it usually did, and in which no one took note of the internal events that were driving him inexorably towards the abyss. He hiccuped, and the helpless yelp that seemed so loud in the empty hall reinforced the sensation that he was now in the charge of forces over which he no longer had any control.

He didn’t dare strike the silver bell, and he was just about to put an end to this waiting, which felt like an anticipated humiliation, and go back to his room, when Signora Morelli came out of the corridor that led across to the drawing room. After glancing at Perlmann’s face she quickened her steps, and almost ran the rest of the way until she was behind the counter.

‘The music,’ she said apologetically. ‘Signor Millar plays wonderfully.’ In her smile there lay unspoken surprise that he, too, was not over with the others, and at the same time the awareness that she wasn’t keen to know why.

‘I need a map of this area,’ Perlmann said, and because he didn’t respond to her remark in any way, but convulsively concentrated on completing his sentence without yelping, it sounded overbearing, and he was startled by his tone. ‘A large-scale map,’ he added. He wanted the second part to sound friendlier and appropriate to a request, but the last word was distorted by a ridiculous yelp.

Signora Morelli went into the back room, looked in various drawers and at last returned with a road map of Liguria.

‘ Ecco! ’ she said and added, after a pause, during which Perlmann was shaken by another eruption, ‘They say it’s going to be sunny tomorrow.’

Perlmann took the map, thanked her silently and went to the elevator. The sliding door closed on one of Millar’s massive chords.

The coast road, he thought as he sat on the bed with the map spread out in front of him, was out of the question. Certainly, you could tell from the twists and turns that there were sections of steep coast, or at least with sheer drops. But roads like that were generally cut tight into the rock and had no rest areas quite deep enough. They were also generally secured with wide guard rails. And last of all, this was the road that connected the big coastal towns like Recco and Rapallo: on a Monday afternoon between four and five, the rush hour, they would be far too busy.

He would have to take the mountain road and leave Genoa in the direction of Molassana. After that there were several possibilities. Perhaps the loop that started at Bargagli and ended near Lumarzo would be a suitable spot. It was plainly bendy, and marked entirely in green, which meant it was a mountain road with a special view. There were probably viewpoints along it like the one he needed. Unless the guard rails thwarted his plans. But then he could try one of the small roads marked in red, on which one left the main road and drove down along a series of twists and turns towards the coast, via Uscio, for example. And if he found nothing there either, he could try the stretch that branched off just after Molassana and led up via Davagna to the Passo di Scoffera.

When the image of a narrow mountain pass rose up in him, leading past black slate walls gleaming with moisture into dark, low clouds, Perlmann gave a start. While studying the map he had for a while been nothing but head, a cold, calculating intelligence unconnected to the other parts of himself. Now the image of the gloomy mountain pass filled him with horror and despair. His empty stomach convulsed and he sensed the sharp, sour smell that vomit had left in his nose.

He stepped to the closed window and looked out without seeing anything. Could he live with this deed – with the image of the car tipping over the edge, with the memory of Leskov’s scream forcing its way through the open car door, with the noise of the impact and the explosion that would come after it?

He wouldn’t be able to stand the sober, brightly lit awareness of having committed a crime, he was sure of that. What he had to do was this: persuade himself, day by day, that it was an accident; overlay the clear, precise memory of the real crime with fantasy images of an accident, constantly adding new ones, and doing that so stubbornly and for so long that the original, traumatic images would remain for ever in the background and the fantasy images would take root as if they were the true memories. It was a matter of laying one thin layer of self-persuasion on the other until a new, solid conviction came about, whose blind firmness he no longer needed to worry about on a daily basis. Could that be done? Was such a methodical construction of a self-deception, so planned a construction of a life-lie possible? Once more, he thought, a very particular kind of lack of presence would be produced, one with which he was not yet familiar: the lack of presence of the lie – a state in which the presence was absent because a fundamental truth, a defining reality of one’s own life was denied.

The phone rang. Even though Perlmann had set it to the quietest volume, the ring seemed shrill and penetrating; the whole world seemed to be jumping at him through that sound. Kirsten . He walked over to the bedside table, slowly extended his hand and let it rest on the receiver. The desire to listen to her clear voice and carefree tone was overwhelming, like a burning pain. But he drew his hand back, sat down on the edge of the bed and rested his head on his fists. Beside him, he could see through his closed lids, lay the open map with the route of the crime. The ringing wouldn’t stop. Perlmann put his hands over his ears, but in vain, because now he could hear the sound in his imagination.

In the silence that finally fell, he picked up the red lighter. Killing must be based on a personal relationship; otherwise it’s perverse . All of a sudden his trains of thought over the past few hours seemed unreal, practically grotesque. Murdering Leskov was completely out of the question. Because even if he managed to weave himself into an effective self-deception: at his first meeting with Kirsten, at their first exchange of glances, their first touch, the whole structure of lies within him would collapse like a house of cards. Then he would stand before her in the glowing white consciousness of being a murderer.

Involuntarily, he rose to his feet to stifle that unbearable idea with a movement. He took a cigarette and opened the window. He felt boundless relief at the fact that the thoughts of murder fell away from him like a bad dream, and after a while he started to notice the lights outside. He greedily absorbed them with his eyes, each individual one of them. When he had absorbed the night-time scenery and calmed down, he lit the cigarette with Kirsten’s lighter, which gave a quiet click.

During the first few drags he managed to concentrate entirely on the idea that he wasn’t going to be a murderer now, and he experienced a kind of presence, the presence of a great relief. But that whole state, he felt very clearly, had something provisional about it, something of a mere intake of breath, to some extent it took place in a parenthesis that consisted in the oppressive question of what in the world he was to do now that the possibility of murder had been ruled out. When he felt that he couldn’t hold off that question for much longer, he went into the bathroom and swallowed the two still slightly damp sleeping pills. The map that he folded up and laid on the round table was already a prop from a long-forgotten drama of the imagination.