Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

When he turned out the light, the tablets were starting to take effect. His left foot pressed on the clutch, his right made cautious braking movements. Over those convulsive motions, against which he fought in vain, he went to sleep.

The handbrake was as firm as if it were cemented in. He had to creep further into the car, supporting himself with one knee on the driver’s seat; but the lever wouldn’t move a millimeter, not even when he tried to pull it up with both hands. The button that was supposed to release it wouldn’t move either, it felt as if it were made of stone. Then suddenly there was no button, and the pressure of his thumb disappeared into the void. It all took seconds, and his pulse was racing. Now sweat-drenched, rough hands grabbed him by the arm. There was a struggle. Leskov was as strong as a bear, but otherwise he was a faceless opponent. Suddenly, the car started rolling – actually it was more of a slide, the horror of which lay in its silence. The battle was done, and they tipped over into blind white, as if in slow motion.

Then again he felt his right hand knocking out the gear. He made that quick, violent movement over and over again. It was as if he were nothing but that arm and that hand. Again the car began to roll, then Leskov pulled up the handbrake; the crunching noise had an endless echo that seemed to fill the whole parking lot and the whole gorge. This time he had a face, a face with wide-open, fearful eyes that turned into a triumphant face with a look of contempt. Leskov’s face jerked close to him and became a close-up; in the end it was a face with a wide, curling moustache that quickly turned into a grimace of scorn.

When Perlmann awoke, drenched in sweat and still quite dazed, it was half-past eight, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky as it had done on the previous two days, so that behind his numbness he managed to think for a tiny moment that it was only Friday morning and everything was still all right. Once it had slipped away, the illusion could not be repeated, and he walked slowly and unsteadily to the bathroom. Yesterday, showering had seemed to him like something that was no longer the fraudster’s due. This morning, after a night in which quite other things had passed through his mind, that feeling seemed obsolete, almost laughable. Under all that water the numbness fled, and the returning dream images gradually lost their power.

Nothing has happened yet , he thought again and again. I still have thirty hours left. His hunger repelled him. He really didn’t want to eat anything ever again. But that vexatious feeling had to be removed, so he ordered breakfast, even though the idea of meeting a waiter now was disagreeable. As he mechanically stuffed croissants down himself and drank cup after cup of coffee, it slowly dawned on him that there was one additional possibility he hadn’t thought of in the course of the previous night. He could stage a car accident in which he killed himself and dragged Leskov to his death as well.

Initially, he didn’t dare imagine how that might happen in any detail; at first the important thing was to resist the thought in its abstract form. He felt his breath racing, and saw his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette. And yet he was amazed how little resistance that new thought encountered within him. It was, after all, a murder. But that struck him as oddly irrelevant. The main thing was that everything then would be darkness and total silence. He smoked in long, deep drags as he plunged into that idea. The longer he lingered with it, the more drawn into it he became. All the weariness that had grown within him over the past few days seemed quite naturally to have been invested in that imagined silence. And not only that: suddenly he felt as if all he had done during those months since Agnes’s death was wait for that silence to arrive. Certainly, there was a murder bound up with it. But the thought of Leskov remained pallid, the after-effect of the pills paralyzed his imagination, and behind Perlmann’s heavy lids one single thought formed over and over again: I will not have to live with this murder for so much as a second. So not for a second of my life will I be a murderer. He felt that this was a piece of sophistry, an outrageous false conclusion, but he didn’t have the will to disentangle it, and clung to the truth that those two sentences bore on their surface.

He wrote a circular in which he informed his colleagues that Vassily had plainly found a way to come here, at least for a few days, and that he would be arriving tomorrow afternoon. So the first session on his, Perlmann’s, text would not, as planned, take place on Monday afternoon after the reception at the town hall, but not until Tuesday morning, as he intended to collect Leskov from the airport on Monday. He wrote quickly and without hesitation, and afterwards, when he put his money and credit cards in his pocket, and the road map in his jacket and went downstairs, he was both pleased and horrified by the businesslike manner, the cold-bloodedness, even, that had taken hold of him.

He asked Signora Morelli to copy the circular and put it in the pigeonholes. Then he told her of Leskov’s imminent arrival and reserved a room for him, spelling out his name. Finally, he asked her to call for a taxi.

On that sunny, warm morning they were all sitting on the terrace. Perlmann put on his sunglasses, greeted them with a curt wave and without slowing his pace, and walked down the steps. He had just – he thought as he waited by the road – felt strangely unassailable when, a bit like a ghost, he had walked like the others. Admittedly, he had avoided looking at Evelyn Mistral. But that, it seemed to him then, had actually been unnecessary; because from now on she was far away from him, in another time. That, in fact, was what made him so calm and unassailable: by deciding to drive to his death he had stepped out of the usual time that one shared with others, and in which one was entwined with them, and was now moving in a private time of his own, in which the clocks moved identically, but which otherwise ran unconnectedly alongside the other time . Only now that I have left the time of the others have I succeeded in delineating myself from them. That is the price.

The new time, he thought in the taxi, was more abstract than the other one, and more static. It didn’t flow, but consisted in an arid succession of moments which one had to live through, or rather, deal with. A lack of present, he was puzzled to note as he looked out through the open car window at the smooth, gleaming water, was suddenly no longer a problem. In the new time, which would last until some point tomorrow afternoon, before disappearing from the world along with his consciousness, present did not exist even as a possibility, so that one couldn’t miss it either. All that existed now was this: coolly calculating and sticking to his schedule in the planning and execution of his intention. Perlmann wound up the window, asked the driver to turn off the radio and leaned back in the tatty seat whose broken springs stuck into his back. He didn’t open his eyes until the taxi stopped under the yellowed plane trees in front of the station.

On Monday evening, when he had waited with Kirsten on the platform, he had been thankful of that meaningless, shrill ringing noise. It had freed them both for a while from the embarrassment of being together in silence. In his mind’s eye Perlmann saw Kirsten’s liberated laughter as she held her hands over her eyes. Today the penetrating, endless sound rendered him defenseless, and he went back outside to the plane trees.

He would leave a piece of paper with Kirsten’s phone number on the desk, so that they didn’t need to rummage for it in his belongings. That was quite natural. After all, Kirsten hadn’t been in Konstanz for as much as three months. Which of his colleagues would call her? In all likelihood von Levetzov would take on the task. Such bad tidings were, if possible, best passed on in the mother tongue, and Ruge would take a backseat. But how would his colleagues find out in the first place?