Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It was too dangerous. He would have to take this stack of papers with him and throw them away on the journey. Admittedly, most people who started with a handwritten version had a sentimental attachment to the text, but he also knew others who threw their manuscripts away when the computer printout was available. He also squashed that paper into the suitcase with the laundry. As he did so part of it came away, got caught in the Russian pages, something tore, and the sound of the tearing paper worked like a triggering signal on his emotions, or a catalyst. An impotent fury broke out of him. Blind with tears, he reached into the mass of paper as if into a mass of dough. He crumpled and tore the pages. He thumped them with his fists until he was out of breath and wheezing, with his face bright red and a face twitching like mad.

He washed his face, and after drinking a cup of his now cold coffee in small, slow sips, and smoking a cigarette at the open window, he was able to go on. The other thing he would have to get rid of was the vocabulary notebook. He picked it up and, like an exhausted body dipping briefly in and out of sleep in defiance of the will, even though there was nothing he could do about it, Perlmann’s soul grabbed a breathing space by making him forget his situation and giving free rein to curiosity. With one hand he covered over the English columns and tested how many words he knew by heart; then he did the same thing in the other direction. Only after a few minutes did the awareness of his situation catch up with him. He felt as if he had been caught and, after two vain attempts, tore the vocabulary notebook through the middle before stuffing it in his suitcase along with the other waste paper.

The three dictionaries and the Russian grammar, scattered with crossings-out and cross-references. They would – if they were found here – prompt astonishment, because he wasn’t supposed to speak a word of Russian. But that wasn’t suspicious in itself; it could be seen as modesty, coquetry or simply as a whim. Evelyn Mistral would think back to the time she had surprised him at the swimming pool with the Russian text, and how he had cast her a conspiratorial glance over dinner when he had lied. But without any further knowledge that couldn’t turn into deliberate suspicion; the mere fact that Leskov, the man who had died with him in the accident, was a Russian, would have to remain unconnected with the dictionaries even for her.

On the other hand, why did Perlmann have these dictionaries here – especially when the Russian-English one was such a tome – if there were no Russian texts to be seen far and wide?

Perlmann no longer knew which suspicion was likely and which was not. He stopped surmising and suddenly knew only this: he didn’t want to leave any Cyrillic letters behind, not a single one. No one must associate him with the Russian language, and if there were any memories of that connection, they must fade as quickly as possible. His eye ran back and forth among the four books and the stuffed suitcase – then, on the spur of the moment, he turned the case upside down and tipped its contents on to the bed. The torn and crumpled pages piled up into a mountain on top of the laundry bag, and some of the sheets sailed to the floor. He packed the books into the suitcase, put on his usual jacket and went down to the rear entrance. The door was still locked. With a resoluteness that cancelled out any other feelings, he crossed the hall, nodded to Giovanni, who was on the phone, and went down the steps to the gas station parking lot.

Screened by the open lid of the trunk he stowed the books under the panel that covered the spare wheel. For a moment he was worried that the panel wouldn’t fit properly because of the thick dictionary, and was wobbling slightly; then he interrupted himself abruptly and walked quickly back through the hotel hall to the elevator. As he was waiting, Ruge and von Levetzov came downstairs on their way to breakfast. They were surprised to see him so early, and cast a quizzical glance at the suitcase.

‘See you later,’ Perlmann said firmly, and disappeared into the elevator.

Upstairs he stuffed the laundry and the paper back into his suitcase and fetched the printout of the translation out from under the shirts in the top clothes drawer. Where should he put it? The most natural place would be the desk. But there was a sensation in the way that revealed itself to him only gradually: he didn’t want the eyes of anyone who came in – whether it be his colleagues, the hotel staff or the police – to fall on the fateful text before anything else. It wouldn’t be able to tell them anything, nothing at all; they could read it a thousand times and stare at it for as long as they liked. And yet he didn’t want this pile of pages, which made him a murderer and drove him to his own death, to lie conspicuously on the glass desktop – even though each of the others had identical copies.

He didn’t want that to happen, not least because of Kirsten. The fraudulent text mustn’t be the first thing she found when she came to collect his things. It wouldn’t tell her anything either. Or Martin. But if it was lying on the desk, she would immediately pick it up. The last thing Dad wrote. She would recognize the title and remember the upset there had been a week before, when he had reacted so impatiently to her idea of reading it on the journey. The idea was unbearable. Perlmann looked around the room. At last he put the text in the desk drawer under the phone book.

It would soon be half-past eight. He had stopped calculating. Now he had a keen sense of how much time he still had left. For several minutes he thought of nothing at all, just looked out into the still pale sunlight over the bay. He wished he knew how to do that: take your leave of a place to go to your death. He thought that everything he saw would now have to have a special quality. It would have to be clearer and calmer, because at that moment you no longer projected anything on to things – because you no longer cast an emotional shadow yourself, to darken your view. Because by deciding to die, you had withdrawn completely from the world. Its entanglements had lost their power over you. You stood next to them. You could see them all quite undistorted. That brought you as close as possible to the vantage point of eternity. That was what you gained if you were prepared to put everything at stake.

But after a while he admitted to himself that he experienced nothing of the sort. He stood by the open window, as always two steps back from the balustrade. Outside the bay lay in fine morning mist; the noise of traffic, a ship’s siren, a knot of phlegm in his throat from all the smoking. Nothing else.

He put on his tie, slipped into his blazer and then sat down, his suitcase by his side, in the red armchair, to wait. Leaving a place, but still having to wait, like you did before. At such moments, he thought, it had often seemed as if he, too, could achieve a present. You had a piece of time ahead of you – two hours, perhaps – in which you didn’t need to do anything. You had the excuse of enforced waiting, and could yield entirely to the sensation of inner freedom that unfolded when you simply let that time elapse with full consciousness. In that state he had always imagined what it would be like to live here and experience the present; and he had done exactly that when he had left home by plane. The imagination then effortlessly brought about what seemed otherwise unattainable: by sketching out the image of a lived present, it also gave the very moment of sketching the quality of the present. It was fragile, this present, and it needed practice to deal with it. At the moment, in fact, at which one actually began to live at that place, even if only in the airport, if one then promised to help someone – keeping an eye on their suitcase, for example, or changing money for them – at that moment the present would be over. It was a present beside the suitcase, and everything depended upon not the slightest obligation, not even a conversation, penetrating or even touching the ring of detachedness, of utterly detached waiting. And because that repeatedly threatened to happen through the way in which people approached him, he had restlessly shifted from seat to seat with his suitcase in the departure hall.