Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘Would you mind if I came too? The weather’s so lovely! And that fantastic car! I thought we might take the coast road. How long is it until Leskov’s arrival?’

Perlmann stood there motionless for a moment and gazed into the void, as if the idea that questions needed answers were completely new to him. Then, with the awkwardness of someone intellectually backward, he looked at his watch and said in a monotonous, absent voice, ‘Another two hours at least.’

As she waited for Perlmann to go, Evelyn Mistral stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket, crossed her legs and slipped one foot half out of her shoe. After a pause that seemed to last an eternity, she looked up from the cobbles.

‘Forget it,’ she said, glancing at him through half-closed eyes, and turned to leave.

‘ No, por favor, no ,’ said Perlmann hastily, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her across the road, forcing a beeping car to screech to a halt.

Once they were on the other side she pulled gently away and looked at him uncertainly.

‘ ¿Seguro? ’

Perlmann just nodded and walked ahead of her into the side street. Even now I’m not capable of drawing a boundary around myself and saying no. Not even now, when everything depends on it.

He had just opened the door, and Evelyn Mistral was already holding the door handle when she slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

‘Oh, damn!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to wait for this stupid phone call from Geneva!’ And then she told Perlmann over the car roof about her annoyance concerning the failed financing of a project.

Then, when he sat in the car and looked at her in the rear-view mirror, he saw her turning round again before she went around the corner, and brushing the hair out of her face. As soon as she had disappeared his whole body started trembling. This time it was much more violent than it had been when he was signing his name, and he was quite sure that it would never stop.

Just before the highway access road near Rapallo he found a skip where he didn’t feel he was being watched. It had taken him almost three-quarters of an hour to get there. Because almost as soon as he had left the side street near the town hall, he had got into a series of traffic hold-ups caused by delivery vans, which, as before in Genoa, stopped brazenly in the middle of the street to unload their goods. All of his desperation had turned into a boundless, crazed fury with the drivers of those vans, who, when they had closed the empty van at the back, walked with maddening slowness to the front, often exchanging a few words with an acquaintance before finally driving off. Sweating, Perlmann had lowered the window, but then closed it again straight away, because he couldn’t bear the furious beeping of the cars in the line. He had slung his tie, along with the medal and the certificate, on to the back seat. Again and again he had forced himself to envisage what would have happened if Evelyn had forgotten that phone call. But a paralysing fatigue in his head had made every attempt to imagine it fizzle out.

Now he set down the suitcase and pushed the heavy lid of the skip back with both hands. He was greeted by a pungent smell of rotting vegetables. The container was half-full of brown, almost black cabbage that gave off warm, stinking fumes. Perlmann opened the case and looked round. He couldn’t have cared less whether the woman at the wheel of the approaching car saw him or not. Nonetheless, he let her drive past before he tipped the laundry bag and the two dangerous texts on to the cabbage. Then, holding his nose, he watched with fascination as the sheets absorbed the dark goo that had formed between the cabbages. It was more or less how he had imagined the future destruction of the fraudulent text when he was lying in bed in Portofino. What had tormented him then now struck him as a mere bagatelle, barely worth mentioning, and he would have given anything to turn back the time of those forty-eight hours.

He took the four books out of the trunk. First he threw the yellow Langenscheidt on to the stinking cabbage. It landed with a sluggish gurgle. Next, the Russian-Italian dictionary. Perlmann gave a start when the dark juice spurted up. Then came the big red dictionary. It landed half-open on the brown pulp, and the greyish paper immediately began to corrugate. He hesitated longest over the grammar. He opened it up and flicked through it. There were various layers of meticulous marginal notes, progressive residues of ownership, apparent from the various different kinds of ink. Contemplating them from a certain internal distance, with eyes half-closed, it was as if one were looking down a long corridor of memory, far into one’s own past. What he was holding here in his hand, he thought, was one of the most real, the most authentic things that had ever existed in his life. At home, on Agnes’s bookshelves, which were still completely untouched, there was the same grammar. When Perlmann realized how senseless it was to cling to those thoughts, he snapped the book shut with forced determination and threw it in. Even before he heard the dull thud of its impact, he had already turned away.

He put the empty suitcase back down on the back seat. The medal and the certificate. He was already holding them and stepping towards the skip when he paused. No, of course not. They will have to be found in the car . He sat down at the wheel.

All the tunnels on the stretch of road were torture. He hadn’t felt like that yesterday in the dark, but now in every pair of lights coming out of the tunnel in the opposite lane, he saw a truck. He was glad of the dusty bushes and the two crash barriers between the lanes. Nonetheless, his heart thumped as he entered each tunnel. For a brief moment he wished the two lanes, even up on the mountain where he would be driving along with Leskov, went down two different tunnels. It wasn’t a wish that turned into a thought, and it didn’t leave a trace in his memory.

As he got out at the airport he noticed that his blazer was soaking and stuck to the leather seat. He locked the car and had already taken a few steps when he turned round and walked back to the car. It would be better to release the handbrake now. Afterwards, Leskov’s leg would be there. It was the last time, he thought, as he pressed the lever down.

When, stepping into the arrivals hall, his eye fell on the digital clock on the wall, it still showed 14:00. But a brief moment later, before he had even looked away, the display changed to 14:01. The number 01 and the perception of its silent appearance acted on Perlmann like a signal: the time remaining to him now could already be expressed in minutes. He felt his blood thumping, and the cheerful exclamations of the arriving passengers and waiting children now reached him as if from a long way away as he stared at the clock until it was five past two. Then he set his watch. He could do nothing to resist the complete senselessness of the action.

The flight from Frankfurt had been showing on the monitor for a long time, and also on the black display panel. Perlmann leaned against a pillar, automatically lit the last cigarette from that pack and threw the box into the garbage bin next to him. He would have liked to do more with the passing minutes than stare at the black rubber surface of the floor, but nothing moved in his head now. It was as if his thoughts had dried up, and he even seemed to have lost his capacity to pay attention. Only his body was there, clumsy and repellent. His scalp itched. He scratched himself bloody and then automatically brushed the dandruff from his blazer. The shoes that he had barely worn pinched, and when he bent down to tie them more tightly, his ice-cold nose started running.