Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

As he turned on the ignition the clock lit up: twenty to four. Puffing, Leskov sank into his seat and rested his hands in his lap. He showed no intention of fastening his seatbelt, but sat on the elegant, light-grey leather upholstery as if in an armchair in a club. Perlmann felt himself looking at him, and couldn’t help turning his head as well. It would have been the moment to say how lovely it was that he had been able to come after all, before adding, ‘Tell me!’ Instead, Perlmann turned his eyes away again. For a fraction of a second he felt an impulse to reach for the seatbelt, but stayed his hand, which had been moving to the left instead of forwards to the ignition, just in time. Don’t do that now, or he’ll try it as well . Relieved that he had noticed in time, Perlmann gripped the ignition key and turned it. Immediately a high, penetrating sound rang out, which acted on Perlmann like an electric shock and for a moment disconcerted him completely. The unfastened belt signal. Of course, they have that in cars like this. Oh my God, I’ll have to do it with this terrible noise going on. His sleeve caught on the light-switch before he finally turned off the ignition again. Moving as economically as he could muster, he pulled the belt across his body and very carefully snapped it shut. He did so with the gentleness of someone who doesn’t want to wake a child. For one terrified moment he waited.

‘Incredible, this light,’ said Leskov.

Perlmann set off as if they were sitting in a porcelain box. After a while he really put his foot down.

Yes, said Leskov, it had all come as quite a surprise. His mother had died ten days before, not entirely unexpectedly after her illness, but much more quickly than might have been supposed. Larissa, his sister, who had come from Moscow, had urged him, when he had mentioned Perlmann’s invitation, to reapply for his exit permit. That urging, he added, probably had something to do with Larissa’s bad conscience: since she had moved to Moscow after her marriage, he had had to look after his mother all by himself.

In Perlmann’s imagination, the man next to him had been someone who looked after his mother, but who otherwise stood all on his own and had no one else who would miss him. Everything that Leskov said about his sister now, awkwardly and in a loving voice, tightened Perlmann’s throat. With each new character trait that became visible in Larissa, the invisible rope tightened further. Slowly and inconspicuously, he took a deep breath and tried to free himself by directing his attention at objects by the side of the road which had no significance for his driving.

The traffic grew denser, and two motorcycles that overtook him dangerously, and which he had to avoid, helped him to ignore the words beside him. Leskov had no sense whatsoever that someone behind a steering wheel had to pay attention to the traffic, and talked nineteen to the dozen. And then the rusty shutters of the first ironmonger’s shop had come into view. Perlmann felt his back and neck tensing up. Absolutely not the first one. With cold hands he strengthened his grip on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead with great concentration so as not to miss the second.

Something was wrong. He didn’t remember the long red building ahead of him. He broke into a sweat. He looked over to the shutters, then turned round and looked back. For one breathless moment he didn’t know what was going on. Then he understood: he’d been waiting for lowered shutters. The image of the rusty surfaces was fixed in his expectation, and had been uninfluenced by the fact that the other shops were open today. But the first ironmonger’s was also open; there were no shutters; the whole street corner looked completely different as a result, so, without noticing anything, he had driven to the second shop, whose shutters were still lowered.

He thrust his foot down on the brake, pulled the wheel round and turned off before the shutters. Tires screeched behind him and in the opposite lane, and the driver of the car he had narrowly missed tapped his forehead. Perlmann stopped and reached for a cigarette. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and closed his eyes as he filled his lungs.

Now Leskov moved with a groan and looked for the seatbelt. Perlmann froze.

‘That belt is broken,’ he said blankly, and then, when Leskov started tugging on the strap, he repeated more loudly than necessary, ‘The belt on your side is broken.’

Leskov turned heavily back towards him and looked at him calmly. ‘You’re pale,’ he said in a paternal voice. ‘I noticed that before. Is something wrong?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said hastily and turned the engine back on. ‘I just don’t feel that great today. But let’s change the subject: what was the story with your exit permit?’

In spite of the political upheavals at the very top of the country, everything was pretty much as it had always been in large parts of the administration, Leskov reported, falling back into his seat as Perlmann went on driving slowly and felt his pulse calming down.

‘You’ve still got the same people sitting at the same desks. And there are still blacklists,’ he said with a sobriety that expressed both experience and suffering. It would be a while before the new laws guaranteeing the freedom to travel came into force. So he had reapplied with no illusions. This time he had done so via the dean of the university, and that seemed to have worked, even though he had not previously thought of him as a powerful man. At any rate, a phone call had come early on Friday morning: he could collect his passport along with the permit. Leskov took out an army-grey oilcloth wallet, pulled his passport from it and looked at the permit stamp.

‘They’ve given me exactly a week,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not a day longer. I have to be back in Moscow on Sunday evening.’ He took out a pipe and tamped it laboriously.

By now they had passed the spot where the car had to leave the tram rails. Perlmann had done it right. Things had only got awkward when a tram coming in the opposite direction, obstructed by a turning car, had meant that he had had to stop all the traffic behind him for a few moments.

Now came the first diversion sign. Perlmann was relieved that the traffic was flowing here, too. He thought about the bakery in the yellow building, followed the column of cars around the bend by the big hotel, and suddenly found himself in the middle of a traffic jam; there was lots of hooting, and some drivers had already got out and were drumming impatiently on the roofs of their cars. According to Perlmann’s watch it was one minute after four. She didn’t say there weren’t any trucks at all after half-past four, just that there weren’t as many: c’è meno . There could still be a few.

Leskov had discovered the electric window winder, and was as delighted as a child. All in all, he said, this was a dream of a car. Perlmann abruptly changed the subject and asked him about his flight.

Organizing it had been a bit of a drama, Leskov said with a laugh, and while Perlmann stared ahead at the dashboard, where the minutes were ticking away, Leskov told him how he had to borrow money from friends, how it had taken hours, and how he had flown to Moscow yesterday, where he had spent the night with Larissa’s family.

‘I’ve hardly slept,’ he said, ‘I was so excited. It’s my first trip to the West.’ And after a pause. ‘I can’t actually remember what happened on Saturday. Oh yes, of course, Yuri came by. You know, with the fifty dollars. Years ago he was allowed to visit his dying father in America. He was the one who welcomed me outside the prison gate that time. And now… how can I put it? You know, he just wholeheartedly granted me this trip. Really granted it to me. People just say that kind of thing. But with Yuri it’s something else. He’s the only person who really knows what it means to me to be able to come here. Here, to the Mediterranean. The Riviera.’