Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  Perlmann was glad that it was a long way to Portofino. He had found a rhythm of walking through which pain and despair held one another in suspension. It was an unstable equilibrium, and when he had at one point to stop and let a group of scouts pass him in single file, the sensations tumbled in upon him; he was defenselessly delivered over to them, and only after a few minutes of renewed walking had he managed to detach himself from them to any extent. The rhythmical movement and the after-effect of the sleeping pills merged into a state in which, with half-closed eyes directed at the tarmac, he occasionally managed to think nothing at all.

  Into such a phase of inner emptiness fell the sudden suspicion that his earlier explanation for his nocturnal action was not at all true. The truth is that I wanted to put it behind me as quickly as possible, whatever it might be, so that I could go on sleeping. Waking at ten, he hadn’t so much as thought about the possibility of handing in nothing at all and standing there empty-handed in front of everyone, and that was, of course, no accident. To that extent there was a degree of truth in the explanation that assumed a decision-making process, however unconscious it might be. But there could be no question of making a decision between his own notes and Leskov’s paper. What had happened was something far simpler, more banal: he had picked up Leskov’s text because it was to hand, because all he had to do was open the suitcase. Finding out whether Maria, contrary to expectation, had finished typing out his own paper had been too much for him at that point. He had wanted nothing else but to lie down as soon as possible and yield to the persistent effect of the pills. There might also have been the fact, he thought, biting his lip, that he had avoided a question concerning Maria, because a childish sense of hurt at her businesslike remark on the phone still lingered. At any rate, he said to himself with embittered, self-destructive violence, he had basically been quite glad that the arrival of the people from Fiat had effectively removed that possibility.

  Perlmann was startled by the banality of this explanation; by the fact that in a matter upon which so much depended he had allowed himself to be motivated by something so primitive as a need for sleep – and self-induced sleep at that. The pills. They made the decision. He wasn’t sure whether that wasn’t, in the end, even worse than if it had been an unconscious but still genuine decision to commit fraud. Because what struck him now, while he blindly walked, as the truth, meant only that he had in that unhappy moment lost himself as a decision-maker, as a subject of his actions.

  Perlmann only became aware that he had arrived in Portofino when he found himself in the square where the buses turned to make the journey back. He was puzzled to be here now. He had no business here in Portofino, where he was stuck as if in a cul-de-sac. He wanted above all to stay in motion, to hold his inner misery in check, he was afraid of coming to a standstill and being delivered over to his tormenting sensations with no possibility of defending himself. He took the street along which the tourists would stream down to the water during the holiday season. At this time of year most of the shops were closed. The radiant weather and the dead impression that the place created did not suit one another. Most of the restaurants around the little marina were shut as well. Outside the last café down at the quay he sat down at a bistro table and ordered coffee and cigarettes from an old and sulky waiter who didn’t deign to look at him.

  It was his first coffee that morning, and he greedily drank two cups. Again he became aware of his stomach and choked down two dried-up rolls that he had fetched from the counter inside. With his eyes closed, he listened to the quiet sound of the boats bumping gently against one another. For a few minutes, in a state between half-sleep and voluntary activity of the imagination, he managed to create the illusion of being on holiday: a man who could afford to drink coffee on a beautiful November morning in the famous town of Portofino; unattached, a free man who was able to go off travelling while others had to work; someone who could make his own choices and wasn’t accountable to anyone. But then he suddenly became aware once more of his actual situation. He was a fraud – an undiscovered fraud, admittedly, but a fraud nonetheless. And now Portofino seemed like a trap.

  He could no longer bear it. He called for the waiter, looked in vain for him in the empty bar, and then, because he couldn’t find anything smaller, left far too large a bill beside his cup and walked quickly back to the main street. He bought a ticket from the driver of the waiting bus, who was standing outside and smoking, and took a seat at the back. He was the only passenger. When the driver stamped out his cigarette and sat down at the steering wheel, Perlmann jumped out at the last moment. Astonished, the driver watched him in the rear-view mirror, then set off.

  Perlmann didn’t want to go back, and he wanted to sleep. He was tempted just to lie down on the bench by the bus stop, but that was too public. A hotel. He counted his money. It would only be enough, if at all, for a very cheap room. He was relieved to have a goal for a moment, and walked through the narrow alleyways of the town. Many hotels had closed for the winter, and of the ones that were open, even the shabbiest-looking dives were more than he could afford.

  At last he found a room in an albergo that opened up on to a narrow alley full of garbage bins. The landlord – a squat, fat man with a moustache and suspenders – studied him with a suspicious and contemptuous look: a man without luggage and without much money, wanting a room at half-past eleven in the morning. Perlmann had to haggle. He only wanted the room for a few hours. OK, until five o’clock, discount, cash in advance.

  He took off the grubby cover and lay down on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. The ceiling, its plaster crumbling, was covered with yellow and brown water stains; cobwebs had formed in the corners, and in the middle hung an ugly lamp of yellow plastic that was supposed to imitate amber.

  Self-defense, he thought: couldn’t one regard what he had done as a form of self-defense? Powerless to do anything about it, he had lost his academic discipline, which had won him respect and a social position, and now he had been pushed against the wall by the expectations of others, demanding constant new achievements and threatening to withdraw their respect, and he had been forced to defend himself. And the only way he had managed to do that was through Leskov’s text. You could see that as a defense of his own life. It had not happened casually or for the sake of some cheap advantage, but simply in order to avert something that would have amounted to his professional and, in the end, his personal annihilation. Self-defense, in fact.

  OK, if you were going to be literal about it, you might describe what he was doing as plagiarism. At that moment the others were holding in their hands a text which, even though his name wasn’t on it, they assumed was his text, even though he had only translated it and not written it himself. But that way of looking at things was fundamentally superficial, and didn’t do justice to the real process. Because he hadn’t translated the text just like that, without any internal involvement or intellectual engagement, as a professional translator in an agency might have done. Piece by piece he had allowed Leskov’s thought-processes to pass through his mind. He had repeatedly measured it against examples from his own memory, and in the end, to mention only this, he had actually spent many hours, whole days, in fact, on his attempt to structure Leskov’s fragmentary reflections into a consistent theory of appropriation. So one couldn’t really say that the text that had been distributed contained nothing of his own thoughts.

  And that wasn’t all – it wasn’t even the crucial thing, he thought. There was something else, too, which made it seem unfair and actually incorrect to speak in terms of a theft of ideas. It was the fact that he had always immediately – once linguistic problems had been swept aside – recognized Leskov’s thoughts as his own. As he thought this, Perlmann saw before him Millar’s face with its flashing spectacles, and he heard his scornful voice; no words, just his scornful voice. The face and the voice came closer and closer. They oppressed him. They threatened to crush him. He had to defend himself. He got up, sat on the
edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. You couldn’t prove something like that to anybody, and you wouldn’t ever be able to express it to anyone without making yourself ridiculous. Nonetheless, it remained the case: Leskov described experiences with language and memory all of which he, Perlmann, had had himself, and the intellectual outline that he came up with was such that with each individual step Perlmann had once again had the impression: I have often had that thought myself, really precisely the same one. Admittedly, he hadn’t sat down and written it out; the corresponding sentences from his pen did not exist. But he certainly could have done. He saw himself at his desk in Frankfurt, writing out, word for word, the text with which Leskov, to some extent by chance, had anticipated his own ideas. Nobody could say that he had passed off as his own thoughts that were alien to him.

  He walked to the window and gave a start. On the other side of the narrow alley, exactly opposite his window and no more than six feet away from him, an old woman with a black headscarf and a toothless mouth leaned out of the window and grinned at him from a wrinkled face with a protruding chin. Next to her on the window-ledge there cowered a scrawny cat, the dividing-line between its orange and white fur running crookedly down its whole face and giving it an ugly, malevolent expression. Perlmann quickly drew the heavy, greasy curtains and lay back down on the bed. The hint of self-respect that he had managed to regain in his internal monologue a few moments before had been destroyed by the sight of the old woman and the cat, which now seemed to him like sly and menacing grotesques. Once again he felt like a cheap fraudster, lying in a shabby, dark hotel room in a trashy and abandoned tourist flophouse.

  Only gradually did he find his way back to the two thought processes that he had begun to work out yesterday on the ship, still shocked at the time, and filled with shame to have found himself thinking any such thing. First of all, it was more or less impossible that one of his colleagues here could ever establish a connection with the unknown Leskov in faraway St Petersburg that might constitute a threat to him. And secondly, the seven copies of the translation, the seven manifestations and material proofs of his deception that existed would eventually be forgotten and finally destroyed. And with the disappearance of the paper from the world, his deception would also be extirpated and removed from the world – it would be just as if it had never happened.

  Perlmann sensed that there was a daring leap somewhere in that thought, a transition that wasn’t quite flawless. But he didn’t want to look any closer. He wanted to look forward to the point in the future when the world, as far as his integrity was concerned, would be exactly as it had been before his deception. Once again he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked hastily, his body tensed, as if by doing so he could impel time to reach that far off point of innocence more quickly.

  Perlmann imagined how the destruction of the paper and the writing might come about. It seemed to him that his thoughts became more correct and compelling the more he succeeded in imagining the process down to its smallest details. Millar’s copy, for example, would one day end up in one of the gleaming black garbage bags on a street in New York. The text might even be destroyed inside the bag, by some sort of leaking liquid, for example, but certainly by rain on a garbage dump, Perlmann could actually hear the pattering sound. The idea that appealed to him most was the inky letters running, undoing the baleful, guilt-ridden arrangement of the lines. Or else the text would go up in flames in a refuse incinerating plant. One day – in a few months, a year, perhaps, or two – this unfortunate text, this sequence of signs, this pattern of molecules would no longer exist in the world. All that would remain would be traces of memory in his colleagues’ heads. But they would become increasingly vague. All that would be left in the end would be a rough idea of the subject. The memory would fade especially quickly in the heads of his most dangerous opponents, Millar and Ruge, because they would regard it as overblown anyway, a piece of writing without sharp intellectual outlines that didn’t deserve to be remembered with any precision.

  Perlmann grew calmer and lay down again. Now his earlier reflections regained their effect, and he drew up a little list in his mind, a crib sheet containing the points that he could always run his eyes over to ease his sensations of anxiety and guilt: (1) it was self-defense; (2) Leskov’s thoughts were also his own; and (3) after some time everything would be just as it had been before. Perlmann repeatedly ran through these points in alternating sequence; at first he thought about the order of priority, but then the inner list became increasingly mechanical, a mere ritual of self-reassurance, and in the end he finally fell asleep over it.

  It was a long time before he heard fists on the door and the unpleasant, barking voice of the landlord calling to him that it was time to go. He put his glasses on and looked at his watch. Just after four. His rage was as violent as an exploding flame. He opened the door a chink and yelled in the landlord’s face that he had paid until five o’clock. Later, in the cramped bathroom, which was only lit by a gloomy bulb, and which smelled of chlorine and drains, the hysterical sound in his voice a moment before struck him as unpleasant, and when he saw his hands trembling under the tap he looked away.

  Nonetheless, he was glad to have been so furious. Being furious meant experiencing oneself as someone who had the right to take offence at someone, to accuse someone else of something, and that, in turn, meant granting oneself a right to existence, a right that had seemed to him this morning, when he had gone running straight for the cliff, to have been deleted or erased. He showered. Here in this hole, where the shower produced only a few thin streams of water, because most of the holes in the shower-rose were furred up, that was fine, particularly because it gave out only cold water. He rubbed himself for a long time with a tatty, threadbare towel, and then reluctantly pulled his sweat-drenched shirt back on.

  The window opposite was closed now. He opened the curtains and aired the smoky room. The narrow strip of sky that could be seen from this alley was dark grey and dominated by a light that recalled an early December twilight. He stood with his back to the window, smoking, and enjoyed insisting on his right to stay in the room until five o’clock. At five on the dot he went down and, without bothering to glance at the landlord, he threw the key on the counter so violently that it fell on the other side.

  Perlmann was hungry – for the first time in ages, it seemed to him. The next bus back didn’t leave until half-past six. He didn’t have enough money for a taxi. He didn’t even have enough for the stall where he could eat a pizza standing up. After some searching he managed to buy half a loaf and a piece of cheese. He walked past the unlit, deserted souvenir shops to the harbor and sat down on a cold stone on the jetty. The grey of the water passed uninterrupted into the grey of the sky. That morning’s café was lit, but empty.

  He collected all his forces into a single inner point and imagined himself stepping into the dining room over at the hotel in two hours’ time, sitting down and, over dinner, reacting to the first comments on Leskov’s text. For the sake of caution he immediately forced himself to think about the list of exculpating perspectives that he had worked upon in his gloomy hotel room, and to his great relief he found that panic didn’t come. Instead, he was filled with apprehension, the apprehension of someone who had a long and unpleasant journey ahead of him, which would require all his strength and all his alertness. He would get through it, he thought, if he bore this one thing in mind: They didn’t know. They would never find out.

  The worst thing was the sessions on the veranda, where his text – Leskov’s text – would be discussed. But those meetings consisted of a limited number of hours and minutes. They would pass, however, and then there would only be another three days before it was all over and the others left.

  Most of the bread and the cheese Perlmann threw into a rubbish bin as he walked down the main street, which was like a ghost town, to the bus. It was lucky that he had crossed out the names of Luria’s pupils, he thought as the bus set off. They could have made people
suspicious. Luria himself was a different matter. Everyone knew him.

  In the middle of the journey, where the coast road was particularly narrow, the other bus came towards them. There was a slight crunching sound. The driver cursed, and then the two buses stood side by side for several minutes, only inches apart. Neither of the drivers seemed to want to accept responsibility for what happened next.

  Perlmann was sitting by a window towards the middle of the bus. The people on the other bus gaped across. From the dim interior they all seemed to be staring at him. With every passing moment their faces grew more scornful. He felt as if he were in a pillory: a fraudster being displayed to others as a warning. A little boy pointed at him, his index finger flattened against the window. He laughed, revealing a big gap in his teeth that looked diabolical to Perlmann. But I’m not a criminal. He didn’t know how he would survive the next second, and was afraid he would succumb to a fit of hysteria. He closed his eyes, but he could still feel the eyes of the others all focused on him. He saw the image of people who had been arrested, pulling their jackets over their heads when they had to run the gauntlet of photographers. He thought convulsively of his list, and imagined it as a white sheet of paper on which the three headings stood in printed letters, one above the other: self-defense; own thoughts; annihilation. He didn’t open his eyes again until the driver put his foot down.

  On the rest of the journey he sat quite still, quite motionless, as if that was what he had to do to keep from panicking.