Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Suddenly, a gap opened up, and between two swathes of fog he saw, a few hundred yards away, the row of trucks that he remembered from the ship. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stamped on, shivering. He only saw the bars when they appeared right in front of his face. They were part of a metal fence that ran on rails and clearly surrounded the whole truck lot. It must have been eight or nine feet high. For a while Perlmann stood there dejectedly and smoked. Then he threw away the fog-damped cigarette, which tasted horrible, and started climbing.

It was difficult. The meshes of the fence were tight and barely provided purchase for the tips of his feet, and his hands – he could only really use the right one – threatened to slip from the damp wire when he loosened his grip because it was so painful. At last he managed to grasp the top bar, and after a quick pause for breath, in which he hung from the fence like a sack, and felt the wetness penetrating his trousers, he managed to hoist himself up. When he drew up his second leg, his trousers caught on a screw. There was a long tear along his thigh. The sound of the tearing fabric seemed to echo across the whole of the harbor. When he reached the bottom Perlmann had the feeling of having done something completely senseless, and only his sore hands and a desperate defiance kept him from immediately climbing all the way back up again.

With his arms outstretched like a blind man, he walked slowly towards the trucks. The first thing he touched was a headlight. Then he felt for the bumper and ran his hand along it, from left to right and back again. He took off his fogged glasses and brought his eyes very close to it, felt the metal and the hard rubber covering, tested its height and compared it in his mind with the hood of the Lancia. He gripped the massive metal supports that held the whole thing together, and rattled them in a desperate awareness of how ridiculous he was being. Then he ran his hand along the length of the truck in search of the filler neck for the gas tank. He eventually found it on the other side, after half-creeping under the loading platform. The tank was in the middle, and there was a wide gap between the tank and the driver’s cab. Exhausted, he leaned on the bumper, looked at his hands, smeared with oil and damp rust, and removed the dirty handkerchief from the wound, in mute despair over the bitter thought that such solicitude towards himself had now become superfluous.

For a while the image of the rickety truck with the loose bumper seemed to have been vanquished, and he was ready to head back. But then he was drawn on towards the next truck, which he examined with the same precision, after he had established that it was of a quite different type. The third truck bore a construction made of two powerful metal bars, making it look like a vehicle that had been designed to crush anything that entered its path. Perlmann saw it driving towards a red-brick wall and, with playful ease, smashing through it as if it were a cardboard film set. He took a few steps back into the reddish fog and then walked slowly to the front of the truck, thinking about the steering wheel, with his foot on the accelerator.

He was shivering, his clothes were damp, and his leg in his ragged trousers was icy cold. His nose was running, and it didn’t help at all when he cleaned it with the last clean tip of his handkerchief. Afterwards, as he was walking to the next truck, it started running again. The urge to keep on going intensified as his sense of the absurdity of his actions grew. By now he was too tired to search all the trucks for their gas tanks. His examinations became increasingly rudimentary, and at last he was merely feeling his way along the bumpers. At first he did so by bringing his narrowed eyes up to them, his useless glasses in his left hand, and comparing a new type of bumper with the ones he was already familiar with. Later, when he had long since lost count of the trucks, he ran his hand only lightly over the damp metal. More and more rarely he stopped, and at last he fell into a trot with an arm that hopped from bumper to bumper, a bit like on the way to school when he had ran his hands, interrupted by the gaps for the house doorways, over the iron fences of his Hamburg district.

It was only when he had briefly touched the last truck that he turned around. The fog was now as dense as an enveloping cloth that one might bump one’s face into. He would have liked to touch the truck with the huge metal bar one last time. But the fog had stripped him of all feeling for distance, and when, for a moment, blind behind his misted-up glasses, he seemed to lose the ground beneath his feet, he was no longer sure whether that truck even existed.

He slipped off twice before – bent double, head down – hanging over the fence again. He had thrown away the repellent handkerchief that repelled him, his injured finger stung, and his nose was running so violently that now, disgustedly, he blew his nose with his bare hand. At last he simply let himself fall, and was glad that it didn’t hurt more than it did.

He was worried that he wouldn’t find his car. But suddenly, without transition, the foggy cloth was gone. He was standing in a star-bright night, and saw the Lancia straight away. At first he hesitated to sit on the elegant, immaculate upholstery in his damp and dirty clothes. Then he swallowed a few times, slipped, exhausted, behind the wheel and switched the heating to its highest setting. A quarter past seven. In twenty hours he will be waiting for his luggage behind customs control. Or else he will just be stepping out, and he will see me.

After Santa Margherita, Perlmann took the highway and didn’t worry about speed limits. He wanted to get out of his clothes and into the shower. Physical needs remain the same; they’re stronger than anything else. The high speed helped him to think of nothing. It was ten past eight when he parked the Lancia by the filling station next to the hotel. Before he walked to the steps, he glanced back. The tires were covered with pale mud.

In the hall he ran straight into his colleagues, who were standing outside the dining room with Angelini. They looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and shock.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ asked von Levetzov, pointing to Perlmann’s trouser leg, where the frayed triangle of torn fabric hung and flapped each time he moved.

‘I was helping someone with a breakdown, and had to creep under the car,’ Perlmann said without hesitating, ‘and I got caught on something.’ He had no idea where the sentence came from; it was as if there were an invisible ventriloquist standing next to him.

‘I didn’t know you could do things like that,’ Millar said with his head tilted, and it was clear how reluctant he was to revise his image.

‘Oh, sure,’ Perlmann smiled, and felt relieved that he was once again master of his utterances. ‘I know a bit about cars.’

Never before in his life had he lied so unconcernedly, so brazenly. An impetuous feeling of freedom spread within him, a feeling of playful boundlessness in the face of a running clock. Now he was ready to invent everything about himself, any story was fine, the bolder the better.

‘I used to be a good rally driver, in fact, and when you do that you pick up a whole lot of technical knowledge,’ he added, and ostentatiously set off upstairs, two steps at a time.

The artificial high spirits that he had managed to preserve while hastily showering and changing were further reinforced when he elaborated his story about the breakdown over dinner and, as the driver of the car in question, invented a woman to whom he attributed the qualities of a local television presenter. Casually, as if it were barely worth mentioning, he wove in the rental car and a trip into the mountains. His story, backed up with dramatic hand movements that were quite alien to him, also prompted the others to tell anecdotes. There was a great deal of laughter. Perlmann laughed most of all. He drank glass after glass and plunged himself with all his might into a desperate exuberance. He became aware that his laughter constantly had to overleap the obstacle of the soul when it became something that could be felt as a distinct tug of his facial muscles, a mechanical process that made him feel unpleasantly hot. For a few black and icy minutes he felt like a sophisticated doll, a dead man pretending to the others, by laughing, that he is alive. Then he asked the waiter to top up his glass and went on drinking and laughing until he had found his way back to his old mood, which was a bit like invisibly warped glass that would shatter into a thousand pieces if the play of forces were to get out of kilter.