Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘There really is something up with you,’ Leskov said, bending over and resting his hand on his arm. ‘Are you unwell?’

Perlmann smelled the tobacco and the sweat. ‘I just felt dizzy for a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll be OK soon.’ He put a cigarette between his lips and reached for the matches in his jacket pocket, because he didn’t know how he would survive the idle seconds that the lighter would take.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ said Leskov, who had just put out his pipe with his tobacco-yellowed thumb and lowered the window.

Perlmann paused in the middle of the lighting motion, closed his eyes for a moment and then got silently out of the car. He walked to the side of the road, lit the cigarette and looked into the tunnel. The shovel wasn’t there any more, but the pile of mud still was. Only single cars came from the opposite direction. He looked at his watch: thirteen minutes past five. Nonetheless, there had been that truck before. Why shouldn’t there be others?

Now he had to make up his mind. He had to choose between murder and death, or life as someone experiencing his professional decline, the public shredding of his reputation. If he went on driving through the tunnel now, past the pale mud and out into the other night at the other end, Leskov would find out an hour later. The others would find out at dinner, and he wouldn’t be able to appear in front of them any more, and from them it would spread in circles, wider and wider circles, until the last of his colleagues knew. And Kirsten would have to watch as well. Kirsten, to whom I could never explain it.

Perlmann had been looking at the ground in front of him, and only now did he see the truck coming towards him in the tunnel. He immediately dropped the cigarette and turned towards the car. Leskov had got out, and was standing with his legs spread and his back to him at the edge of the patch of gravel. It wouldn’t have been enough anyway. Again he lit a cigarette. It was the second-to-last. His eyes slowly wandered around. The toothless old woman’s grocer’s shop was lit with a dim light. To the west a last strip of light in the reddish sky. The last light .

Leskov was sitting in the car again, looking across at him. Unusually, Perlmann smoked the cigarette down to the filter. The hot smoke stung his lungs, and now he had a nicotine taste on his tongue that he didn’t like. He felt as if all the strength was about to leave his body. Stiffly, head lowered, he walked over to the car, got in and fastened his belt.

‘Sorry about before,’ said Leskov. ‘I didn’t mean to patronize you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Perlmann said quietly and started the engine. He drove in a big arc on the patch of gravel and then drove the car on to the empty road. For a moment he just let the car freewheel. Then he put his foot down and drove into the tunnel. He looked up at the bright curve of the tunnel entrance, and when it drew over him he felt as if he were leaving the world.

Just before the first rest area he clutched his brow, braked and drove on to the muddy ground. Without pulling up the handbrake he stopped right in the middle between the two ends of the crash barriers. He undid his seatbelt and threw both hands to his face.

‘I’m dizzy again,’ he said through his hands. Leskov touched him gently on the arm and said nothing. Only after a long pause, during which Perlmann stared ahead into the tunnel through his fingers, did Leskov ask, ‘Do you think you can make it to the hotel?’

At that moment the blue, rotating light of a police car appeared in the side-view mirror. The car had already passed him when it braked abruptly and reversed with a screech along a slightly wavy line. The passenger got out, put on his cap and bent down to Perlmann’s window.

‘You can’t park here,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s just for emergencies.’

‘I suddenly felt… ill. I had to stop,’ Perlmann said with a dry mouth. He had forgotten the Italian word for dizzy , and made two mistakes in that single sentence.

‘Foreigner?’ asked the policeman, taking a few steps forward and looking at the numberplate. ‘Rental car?’

‘Yes,’ said Perlmann and gulped.

‘Do you need help? Shall we call an ambulance?’

‘No, no,’ Perlmann said hastily. ‘Thank you very much, but it’s fine now.’

‘But then you’ll have to drive on,’ said the policeman, and looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘There’s a parking lot just beyond the tunnel.’ Then he tapped his cap and straightened up.

‘ Va bene ,’ said Perlmann. Apart from that he did nothing.

In the time it took the policeman to reach his car, Perlmann perceived this event as a salvation. He was very close to throwing up, just so that he wouldn’t have to bear the terrible tension any more. These policemen would keep him from becoming a murderer. All he needed to do now was turn the key in the ignition, put the car in gear and drive to the hotel with Leskov. That was all.

But the image of the hated hotel that now appeared in his mind kept him from doing so. He saw himself next to Leskov, dragging his stained suitcase, going up the steps and stepping up to the reception desk, from which the fraudulent text, which Millar had made him put there, protruded from Leskov’s pigeonhole. Again he hid his face in his hands. Now he could only hope that the carabinieri didn’t do what policemen would do at home: wait until he actually drove on.

‘What did he want?’ asked Leskov.

Perlmann said nothing.

The policeman took off his cap and got into the car. He hadn’t looked back. The car stayed where it was. The driver would now be watching them in the rear-view mirror. Now the passenger lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out of the window, laid his arm on the frame; they both laughed, and then the car lurched off. They will testify that I was feeling ill. That’s good. It was twenty to six.

As long as the policemen were within view, there was somewhere for the eye to rest. When the tail lights disappeared into the night, the tunnel was quiet and deserted. Perlmann would have liked to light his last cigarette. He had a craving for one like never before. But he couldn’t risk it. He didn’t want to do it with a cigarette in his hand. From the corners of his eyes he saw Leskov’s massive legs in their brown trousers, the ankle-high boots with the thick soles and the hands folded in his lap with the yellow thumb and the black under the nails. The span of time in which two people can sit side by side in a stationary car was already long past. Perlmann tried convulsively to do the impossible: the absolute unrelatedness of two people who were sitting a few inches apart. He felt Leskov looking at him, and closed his eyes. His scalp twitched and his nose started running. He was glad to be able to do something, and reached for the handkerchief with his ice-cold hand.

‘You think about Agnes a lot, don’t you?’ Leskov said into the silence.

Through all the coldness and fear a terrible fury flamed up, a rage at the emphatically mild, almost tender tone that Leskov had used; the sort of tone one adopted with children or sick people. But more than that it was a fury at the fact that this fat, repellent person next to him, whose fault it all was, dared to talk about Agnes at all, and took it upon himself to touch that open wound and thus to touch Perlmann in his innermost depths. And it was also a fury with himself, over the fact that he had given that part of himself away for no reason that time, in the icy air of St Petersburg. This fury acted as if he were in the middle of life and not on its outermost edge. It crashed in and flowed through him as if there were no tunnel full of fatal silence and white-hot lights in the high, thundering front of a truck. It was such a violent fury that it left him dazed. Perlmann buried his face in his handkerchief, and now his fury discharged itself into his nose-blowing. He went on blowing his nose even though his whole handkerchief had been damp with snot for ages and repelled him. One pant came more violently than another. The preparation for each was even bigger than the last, but all in vain. His nose went on running. Fresh mucus kept coming from somewhere, and more and more. It flowed. It streamed. Perlmann pressed and pressed and only paused when the moisture in his cold nose suddenly turned warm and his handkerchief turned red. As he held the handkerchief away from him and looked with surprise at the blood, it dripped from his nose, and when he looked down at himself, his white shirt and the light-grey leather upholstery between his legs were covered with bloodstains. He stared, motionless, at those stains, which were still spreading at their edges. It was as if he were hypnotized by them and forgot to keep the handkerchief to his nose, so that the blood went on dripping, fast and constant.