Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘I’ve just got to check the tires for a second,’ he said as the gas station came into view.

He stopped next to the air-pump, opened the trunk from inside the car and quickly walked to the back. The straps of Leskov’s suitcase were already untied when he felt the car rocking and looked up over the lid of the trunk. Leskov was heaving himself, panting, out of the car. He had to hold on to the frame with both hands and pull himself up. The car door banged against the plinth. Perlmann quickly closed the lid and bent to the air-pressure gauge.

‘I’ve been sitting down all day, and the seats on the plane were so cramped,’ Leskov said with a yawn. ‘I just need to have a bit of a stretch for a moment.’

Perlmann unscrewed the cap of the valve on the wheel and pretended to measure the air pressure. His fury at this shapeless Russian, who was unashamedly making the most unappetizing noises as he did his exercises, was turning into hatred. That hatred would be helpful later on, he reflected. He loathed himself for that thought, and that made his hatred still more violent. He switched his attention to the other back wheel. Leskov was just bending forward, and stretching his wide rear end towards him, a grotesque and revolting sight. No, Perlmann couldn’t depend on the exercises taking long enough, particularly since he would now have to go back to the front, to his seat, to open the trunk for a second time. He put the pressure-gauge back on its holder and sat down behind the wheel. There he collapsed and was prepared to drive to the hotel and simply let things take their course. Exhaustedly, he closed his eyes. Sleeping, sleeping for a long time, until everything was over, his unmasking, the shame, everything.

Leskov’s head appeared in the open passenger door. ‘Do you think there’s a toilet here?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘No idea,’ Perlmann said flatly. Leskov seemed to have expected Perlmann to come with him to find out. Now he walked alone to the pump attendant and gesticulated. Perlmann was reaching for the lever that opened the trunk, and was sitting with his feet on the cobbles, ready to move. But the pump attendant shook his head, once, then again.

Leskov came waddling back to the car. He glanced at the back seat. ‘There’s a medal there. With a ribbon. As if someone’s received an honor of some kind. May I know what it means?’

Why didn’t I think of that? I could have put the thing in the suitcase. ‘What? Oh, that. No idea. Someone must have left it behind.’ It hadn’t been hard to give his voice a tone of indifference. Exhaustion had accomplished that all by itself.

‘The roll next to it looks almost like a certificate. Shall we take a look?’

Perlmann gulped. ‘I’d like to get on now,’ he said impatiently.

A shadow flitted across Leskov’s face. ‘Of course.’ He wedged himself on to the seat. One of his suspenders caught on the door handle. ‘How far is it?’

‘Not far now,’ said Perlmann, and his voice had stopped obeying him.

The clock showed six minutes to five when Perlmann drove back to the road with his headlights on. Clouds had rolled in, the last rays of sunlight from the sea giving them a purple sheen. There was a strange, hostile twilight. He drove slowly, at barely forty, and kept to the right.

‘Is something wrong?’ Leskov asked after a while.

Perlmann didn’t reply, but stared straight ahead at the bend, where a huge truck appeared with its headlights on full. He shielded his eyes with his hand and waited until it had passed. Then he stopped the Lancia and pressed the lever that opened the trunk, and it was only by a reflex that he was able to prevent a passing car from brushing his opened door. As he hurried to the back, Perlmann inwardly braced himself for the furious beeping and the flashing headlights, opened the trunk quite high and pulled open the zip of Leskov’s suitcase. It was stuffed full of paper. How was he supposed to fish the crucial, dangerous text out of this jumble? In feverish haste, he rummaged among the papers, all Russian texts, some of them typed, most of them handwritten. What was he supposed to do? He was at his wits’ end. He tore open the zip for the outside pocket. It contained a single manuscript, a fat pile of pale yellow pages, held together with a red rubber band. He pulled it out. The rubber band got stuck on the zip and broke. This was the text, the heading in careful, almost calligraphic letters: o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy . So he hadn’t changed the title. With trembling fingers Perlmann closed both zips and refastened the straps. Then he bent down – ignoring the insults of a driver who couldn’t overtake because of the oncoming traffic – right down to the road and laid the pile of papers under the exhaust. He slammed the trunk shut and got in.

‘Problem with the tires again,’ he said, without turning his head towards the passenger seat. Now it was important that Leskov didn’t look into the side-view mirror. ‘They grow a famous wine over there on the right,’ he said, and set off with a jolt, his eyes on the rear-view mirror.

The text, which existed only in this single copy, the version that Leskov was so proud of, and which was to help him with his professional advancement, the work of months, flew apart, the yellow pages whirled up and gleamed in the headlights of the other cars, then they danced and sailed into the darkness of the side embankment. The cars behind him tried to dodge the flapping pages as if they were heavier than they were, and the next car that came along seemed to have driven precisely over the rest of the stack of papers, because once again there was a cloud of pages. Then they drove round the bend, and the pages disappeared from Perlmann’s field of vision. Leskov had put his thick glasses on his head, and was still looking up the slope on the left.

‘Not much to be seen now,’ he said.

It can only be another three or four bends. All of a sudden Perlmann no longer knew whether to accelerate or change down. It was just turning four minutes past five. Yesterday, outside the tunnel, when he should really have done it straight away, his remaining time had seemed like an obstacle, a medium that he had to wade heavily through, minute after minute. And even in the town hall, every movement had struck him as something that one had to accomplish against the resistance of sluggish time. Then, on the way here, it had been the other way round: time had run ahead of him, the minutes elapsed at a furious pace, it had been a race against the clock, against the figures on the digital display on the dashboard, which were changing far too quickly. Now, just as he was counting the remaining bends, Perlmann felt something changing, moving, shifting in his innermost depths: even now he wanted to stop time, and with all his might; but it wasn’t like before, because at the same time he also wanted to stop the road, which was rolling away backwards behind him, where he would never see it again. He didn’t want to reach the tunnel either in time or in space. The time on the whole journey had been precious already, because after half-past four there wouldn’t be as much traffic – c’è meno . But now that same time was suddenly precious in a quite different, more extended sense. It forced its way into Perlmann’s consciousness as the last brief stretch of his life, as a comprehensible series of minutes ticking ruthlessly and inexorably away, bringing the final darkness and the final silence closer.

Just behind them a huge truck flashed its lights, and now Perlmann heard the hard and threatening noise of its diesel engine. He gave a start, but it was a strange, unfamiliar kind of start, because it immediately opened itself up to the hot, surging, almost pleasant desire that the truck might simply drive over them and extinguish them with its light, its noise and all its tons. He accelerated, took the next bend and saw the sign with the arrows to Piacenza and Chiávari. In the rear-view mirror the high front of the truck came quickly closer. He heard the driver speeding up and changing gear. Now they were on the crossing and could see the tunnel, the truck roared and sped up for the straight stretch through the mountain. Perlmann put his foot on the accelerator, drove far to the right on to the patch of gravel and skidded to a stop.