Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

He didn’t really know why, but that seemed above all to apply to reading, to the desire to immerse oneself in a book. What he really wanted to do was open Robert Walser’s novel again. He wished he could touch it at least. But even that was too much. Books were now forbidden objects. He felt as if that bitter thought had severed his last connections with the world. There on the bed, in his uncomfortable posture – in which his back and neck were beginning to hurt – he felt as if he were on an island, cut off from everything, and with nothing left to do but sit still until the time came.

He started recapitulating the route through Genoa. On the right, the industrial plants with the white smoke, then the harbor cranes. On no account turn at the first ironmonger’s shop. But careful: when it appeared, it meant there was less than 300 meters to go. At the columns, don’t follow the tram tracks, but turn left. The place with the dug-up road and the diversion where he had twice got lost, was particularly tricky because the passing street formed such a natural, almost mandatory bend that you saw the turn-off with the diversion sign – which was, furthermore, half-hidden by a protruding building – too late, and then you found yourself in a maze of one-way streets, from which you only found your way out with great difficulty. When you came to the square you had to keep to the right to let the others past, and then what you had to do was catch sight of the bakery in the yellow building in good time and brake, even though it didn’t look at all like a turn-off. And last of all there was the bus collection point. Keep left so that the flow of traffic didn’t force you into the underpass – that was particularly important tomorrow, at the start of the rush hour.

Otherwise not much could happen, he said to himself. Then it occurred to him that he no longer knew whether he was supposed to take the second or third turn-off at the big square with the column. That was something he hadn’t explicitly memorized. Presumably because it seemed unambiguous. But was it? He started sweating, and for a while he thought of driving there straight away and checking. But after three days and nights – in which one anxiety had come in hot pursuit of the other – that last shock, even if it was comparatively mild, was just too much. All emotion was extinguished in Perlmann, and without being aware of it he slipped under the bedcovers.

It was perhaps the hundredth coin that slipped out and fell through the slit into the box. The belt should really have been jammed from below by all the metal ages ago, but it ran as quickly and smoothly as a fan belt, and cut his finger so that he couldn’t use that hand to keep from falling into the red fog from the top of the fence. His leg was stiff and numb with cold, and he limped as, sniffing continuously, he ran his hand over the endless bumpers, which at first felt deceptively solid, before they suddenly buckled as if they were made of damp cardboard. With arms blindly outstretched he touched the radiator grille, which parted silently when he drove at it with the accelerator to the floor. He dashed inside and drove through unresisting red cotton wool, in which the Lancia could no longer be steered at all; it ran as if on rails, and turning the steering wheel had absolutely no effect. But then the cotton wool had disappeared, and the car careened along wavy lines through the tunnel. Like a bumper car at a carnival, it crashed against the planks to left and right and then he heard and felt with horror his own bumper scraping along the tarmac, he saw a rain of sparks getting higher and denser, he wanted to stop, but the car was speeding up all by itself and dashing straight towards the huge, full-beam headlights of all the trucks that came hurtling towards him in a single wide line without the tiniest space between them. He threw his arms in front of his head, waited for the collision and was woken by the deafening silence that came instead.

He just lay there only until his heartbeats had grown fainter. This time waking from a nightmare was quite different from usual, because the relief of the first few seconds was swept away by the intruding certainty that a scene similar to the last one would be repeated in reality in only a few hours. Before that thought could fully develop its paralysing effect, Perlmann turned on the light and got out of bed. The alarm clock said just after six and he mechanically calculated the number of remaining hours. He hesitated outside the shower and stared into the void, then briefly let cold water run over his skin. As he rubbed himself dry he felt his scalp twitching, but then put the shampoo back again. No time for that. In his dressing gown he called down for coffee and insisted to the sleepy kitchen-maid that it was all he wanted for breakfast.

Then he sat down at the desk. Perlmann’s mind was dominated by a numb, glassy alertness that left all inner turmoil behind. He started the last preparations, concentrated and methodical, as if he were planning a course of lectures or a long journey.

He would have to commit the murder in the best clothes he had with him; in his dark grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the gold buttons, and the black shoes that he hadn’t worn since the first evening. Because coming back to the hotel and getting changed after the reception was out of the question. Dress more comfortably for the murder. The thought sent the blood rushing to his face. He violently bit his lip and, filled with revulsion, drove the words from his consciousness. Then he put on his grey trousers and a white shirt, hung his blazer on the wardrobe door and set out his dark blue tie with the red pattern.

It wasn’t just reading, eating and grooming that had become impossible, he thought, as the waiter had pulled the door closed behind him. Even greeting someone, thanking him and responding to a smile were things that now, in the most loathsome way, felt dishonest, cynical, obscene. He pushed the milk and sugar aside when he poured himself a cup of coffee on the desk. Smoking was the only thing that was different: the stinging on his tongue and the occasional tightening in his lungs sat well with fear and destruction.

From the hotel folder he took a business card with the address, wrote his name on it and put it in his wallet with his passport. The gas tank was more than half full, he thought and, by pressing thumb and forefinger on his eyeballs, he dispelled the image of flames. The parking ticket at the airport and possibly in front of the town hall, the highway toll, one or two coffees. Otherwise there was nothing for which he would need money now. He put a few small notes in an inside pocket of his suitcase along with his traveller’s checks. It was a strange discovery that he was making about himself: ideally, he wouldn’t be carrying a single coin on him when he started the car for the last time.

Next he looked all through the case. He stuffed his pyjamas in the plastic bag with the dirty laundry and tied it shut. But the bag wouldn’t leave him in peace. He took his reference books out of his suitcase and stuffed in the bag. He would throw it away on the journey.

For a while he looked down at the reference books that lay scattered on the bed. Then he started piling them up on the desk.

Outside the day was slowly breaking. He’ll already be airborne by now. Perlmann took the Russian text and the handwritten translation out of the bottom laundry drawer. He stuffed the pages with the unfamiliar format and the badly copied Cyrillic letters in with his laundry bag in the suitcase. He held the translation irresolutely in his hand and then sat down on the bed. They assumed that he had written this text, they knew that he preferred to write by hand, so it would be the most natural thing if the handwritten version were found. He flicked through the thick pile of pages. Were corrections made during the translation process not different in kind to those made when actually writing? There were, for example, the many points where several variants of a word or a sentence were separated from one another by slashes, and in the end he had crossed them all out but one. Perhaps they would assume that he had been uncertain about his English in each case; or else they would see him as a fanatical stylist. But if someone looked closely and thought about it, it might seem curious – particularly as there were no intellectual corrections of any kind, which would have revealed themselves in deleted paragraphs, major additions and transpositions.