Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘Not today,’ she grinned, showing her single stump of tooth.

  ‘On working days, I mean.’

  ‘Well, sometimes more, sometimes less.’

  ‘What does it depend on?’ Perlmann put his hands in his pockets so that he could clench his fists.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s more going on in the summer.’

  ‘But are there trucks at this time of day?’

  ‘Of course there are. They make one hell of a noise. And they stink. But why do you want to know?’

  ‘We’re making a film, and it has to have trucks in it,’ Perlmann said. He had no idea where that came from, but the information came without hesitation.

  ‘A film? In our village?’ She gave a croaking laugh and pushed the rolled tip of her tongue between her lips.

  ‘And what about the time of day? When does the traffic ease off in the evening?’

  ‘You want to know very precisely, don’t you?’ she said and now made a curious face as if she were trying to believe the story about the film. ‘Nothing comes down from Piacenza after four. And from Chiávari through the tunnel – well, from half-past four there aren’t as many, c’è meno.’ And then, suddenly quite enraged, she added: ‘Knocking off – these days they knock off at five in the evening!’

  ‘So not many trucks come through after half-past four?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Perlmann was tempted to repeat the question, however pointless it was. But he didn’t dare.

  ‘A real film, eh?’ she said when he was saying goodbye.

  He felt he was about to suffocate in there, and just nodded.

  ‘As if!’ she murmured.

  She watched after him as he walked back to the car. He was glad it was now too dark for her to make out the details of the car. When he turned round and set off towards Genoa she was still standing in the doorway.

  31

  Customs control at Genoa Airport wasn’t much to worry about, he thought, and shifted down, having been an inch away from causing a collision on a tight bend. His calculation had been too generous. If the flight was on time, Leskov could be out by a quarter to three, and then they would arrive when there were still trucks on the road. If his estimate for tomorrow’s journey, which stretched into the rush hour, was remotely accurate, he would have to be careful that Leskov didn’t notice his haste and ask about it.

  And, generally speaking, how was he going to explain to Leskov that they were taking neither the coast road nor the highway, but driving through this bleak, grey valley, in which there was absolutely nothing to see? Perlmann stopped when it struck him as boiling hot. But not a single excuse occurred to him that would have sounded even halfway plausible. No thoughts came at all. The last few hours had leached him out completely. His finger hurt. And how would the others explain the strange route? His colleagues? Kirsten? The police? He drove on. I’ve still got twenty-one hours, after all.

  Even before he could begin to get his bearings, he reached an area at the harbor that was veiled in dense fog, cut through with beams of cold, rust-red light from the high harbor floodlights. It was impossible to see three feet ahead, and his own headlights made everything even worse. He got out of the car. Apart from the sound of the water it was completely silent. He had no idea how to find the parking lot, but in his exhaustion he was grateful for the fog, and went deeper and deeper into it.

  Suddenly, a gap opened up, and between two swathes of fog he saw, a few hundred yards away, the row of trucks that he remembered from the ship. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stamped on, shivering. He only saw the bars when they appeared right in front of his face. They were part of a metal fence that ran on rails and clearly surrounded the whole truck lot. It must have been eight or nine feet high. For a while Perlmann stood there dejectedly and smoked. Then he threw away the fog-damped cigarette, which tasted horrible, and started climbing.

  It was difficult. The meshes of the fence were tight and barely provided purchase for the tips of his feet, and his hands – he could only really use the right one – threatened to slip from the damp wire when he loosened his grip because it was so painful. At last he managed to grasp the top bar, and after a quick pause for breath, in which he hung from the fence like a sack, and felt the wetness penetrating his trousers, he managed to hoist himself up. When he drew up his second leg, his trousers caught on a screw. There was a long tear along his thigh. The sound of the tearing fabric seemed to echo across the whole of the harbor. When he reached the bottom Perlmann had the feeling of having done something completely senseless, and only his sore hands and a desperate defiance kept him from immediately climbing all the way back up again.

  With his arms outstretched like a blind man, he walked slowly towards the trucks. The first thing he touched was a headlight. Then he felt for the bumper and ran his hand along it, from left to right and back again. He took off his fogged glasses and brought his eyes very close to it, felt the metal and the hard rubber covering, tested its height and compared it in his mind with the hood of the Lancia. He gripped the massive metal supports that held the whole thing together, and rattled them in a desperate awareness of how ridiculous he was being. Then he ran his hand along the length of the truck in search of the filler neck for the gas tank. He eventually found it on the other side, after half-creeping under the loading platform. The tank was in the middle, and there was a wide gap between the tank and the driver’s cab. Exhausted, he leaned on the bumper, looked at his hands, smeared with oil and damp rust, and removed the dirty handkerchief from the wound, in mute despair over the bitter thought that such solicitude towards himself had now become superfluous.

  For a while the image of the rickety truck with the loose bumper seemed to have been vanquished, and he was ready to head back. But then he was drawn on towards the next truck, which he examined with the same precision, after he had established that it was of a quite different type. The third truck bore a construction made of two powerful metal bars, making it look like a vehicle that had been designed to crush anything that entered its path. Perlmann saw it driving towards a red-brick wall and, with playful ease, smashing through it as if it were a cardboard film set. He took a few steps back into the reddish fog and then walked slowly to the front of the truck, thinking about the steering wheel, with his foot on the accelerator.

  He was shivering, his clothes were damp, and his leg in his ragged trousers was icy cold. His nose was running, and it didn’t help at all when he cleaned it with the last clean tip of his handkerchief. Afterwards, as he was walking to the next truck, it started running again. The urge to keep on going intensified as his sense of the absurdity of his actions grew. By now he was too tired to search all the trucks for their gas tanks. His examinations became increasingly rudimentary, and at last he was merely feeling his way along the bumpers. At first he did so by bringing his narrowed eyes up to them, his useless glasses in his left hand, and comparing a new type of bumper with the ones he was already familiar with. Later, when he had long since lost count of the trucks, he ran his hand only lightly over the damp metal. More and more rarely he stopped, and at last he fell into a trot with an arm that hopped from bumper to bumper, a bit like on the way to school when he had ran his hands, interrupted by the gaps for the house doorways, over the iron fences of his Hamburg district.

  It was only when he had briefly touched the last truck that he turned around. The fog was now as dense as an enveloping cloth that one might bump one’s face into. He would have liked to touch the truck with the huge metal bar one last time. But the fog had stripped him of all feeling for distance, and when, for a moment, blind behind his misted-up glasses, he seemed to lose the ground beneath his feet, he was no longer sure whether that truck even existed.

  He slipped off twice before – bent double, head down – hanging over the fence again. He had thrown away the repellent handkerchief that repelled him, his injured finger stung, and his nose was running so violently that now, disgustedly, he blew hi
s nose with his bare hand. At last he simply let himself fall, and was glad that it didn’t hurt more than it did.

  He was worried that he wouldn’t find his car. But suddenly, without transition, the foggy cloth was gone. He was standing in a star-bright night, and saw the Lancia straight away. At first he hesitated to sit on the elegant, immaculate upholstery in his damp and dirty clothes. Then he swallowed a few times, slipped, exhausted, behind the wheel and switched the heating to its highest setting. A quarter past seven. In twenty hours he will be waiting for his luggage behind customs control. Or else he will just be stepping out, and he will see me.

  After Santa Margherita, Perlmann took the highway and didn’t worry about speed limits. He wanted to get out of his clothes and into the shower. Physical needs remain the same; they’re stronger than anything else. The high speed helped him to think of nothing. It was ten past eight when he parked the Lancia by the filling station next to the hotel. Before he walked to the steps, he glanced back. The tires were covered with pale mud.

  32

  In the hall he ran straight into his colleagues, who were standing outside the dining room with Angelini. They looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and shock.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’ asked von Levetzov, pointing to Perlmann’s trouser leg, where the frayed triangle of torn fabric hung and flapped each time he moved.

  ‘I was helping someone with a breakdown, and had to creep under the car,’ Perlmann said without hesitating, ‘and I got caught on something.’ He had no idea where the sentence came from; it was as if there were an invisible ventriloquist standing next to him.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do things like that,’ Millar said with his head tilted, and it was clear how reluctant he was to revise his image.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Perlmann smiled, and felt relieved that he was once again master of his utterances. ‘I know a bit about cars.’

  Never before in his life had he lied so unconcernedly, so brazenly. An impetuous feeling of freedom spread within him, a feeling of playful boundlessness in the face of a running clock. Now he was ready to invent everything about himself, any story was fine, the bolder the better.

  ‘I used to be a good rally driver, in fact, and when you do that you pick up a whole lot of technical knowledge,’ he added, and ostentatiously set off upstairs, two steps at a time.

  The artificial high spirits that he had managed to preserve while hastily showering and changing were further reinforced when he elaborated his story about the breakdown over dinner and, as the driver of the car in question, invented a woman to whom he attributed the qualities of a local television presenter. Casually, as if it were barely worth mentioning, he wove in the rental car and a trip into the mountains. His story, backed up with dramatic hand movements that were quite alien to him, also prompted the others to tell anecdotes. There was a great deal of laughter. Perlmann laughed most of all. He drank glass after glass and plunged himself with all his might into a desperate exuberance. He became aware that his laughter constantly had to overleap the obstacle of the soul when it became something that could be felt as a distinct tug of his facial muscles, a mechanical process that made him feel unpleasantly hot. For a few black and icy minutes he felt like a sophisticated doll, a dead man pretending to the others, by laughing, that he is alive. Then he asked the waiter to top up his glass and went on drinking and laughing until he had found his way back to his old mood, which was a bit like invisibly warped glass that would shatter into a thousand pieces if the play of forces were to get out of kilter.

  Laura Sand seemed to have been watching him for quite a long time when he caught her thoughtful eye. He turned round, waved to the waiter and asked for some more bread. No, she can’t possibly have seen through me. She might find me a bit strange this evening, and perhaps tomorrow evening when it all comes out she’ll think about it. But even she doesn’t know anything that could establish a connection between the two things. Absolutely nothing at all.

  ‘It’s very gratifying that Signor Leskov can come for a few days after all,’ Angelini said beside him, adding, after an expressive pause, ‘I found out from the others.’

  Under normal circumstances Perlmann would have fallen into the trap, and would have solicitously produced an explanation for his omission. Now nothing meant less to him than the fact that he had forgotten to leave Angelini a message.

  ‘Didn’t you get my message?’ he asked in a cool, almost indifferent tone, and took a sip of wine.

  ‘No,’ said Angelini, now very obliging again, ‘but now I know, and I’ll see to it that he gets some cash when he arrives. Things are a bit different for people in his situation. By the way,’ he continued quietly in Italian, resting his hand on Perlmann’s arm, ‘at the reception I was given Giorgio’s copy of your paper, and I had a read of it in my room. I’m very excited to hear what your colleagues will have to say about this unusual work. But, of course, you’ll be able to defend yourself.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Perlmann, turning his head towards the waiter who brought him his coffee. While he thanked him extravagantly, as if he had just received an enormous present, all the ghostly serenity vanished from him, and he no longer knew how he would bear to stay at this table for even a minute longer.

  The questions about Leskov, which came as expected, he answered curtly, hoping no one would notice how often he was drawing on his cigarette and reaching for his empty coffee cup because he feared his voice would fail him.

  As he left he turned round again. So this was where his last supper had taken place. He must have stood there for a long time, because Evelyn Mistral, who held the door open for him, leaned, waiting, against it with arms folded and legs crossed, looking at him as one looks at someone whose thoughts one doesn’t want to disturb.

  ‘Gracias,’ he said hoarsely and walked quickly past.

  The room was spinning as Perlmann slumped fully dressed on to the bed. Against his better judgment, he was seized with fear that the effect of the alcohol might not have faded by tomorrow, when it mattered. And that fear was mixed with a sensation that he didn’t recognize straight away: a guilty conscience. Not because of his planned deed, but because he had got drunk on the last evening of his life. It was a struggle to think about it, because at the same time he had to battle against a lurking feeling of nausea. And when he finally knew what it was, the discovery intensified his despair still further. Because it meant that a perverse shift of values had taken place within him: he found it reprehensible that while awaiting death he hadn’t shown the required sobriety and alertness; he reproached himself like someone awaiting death, who has to remain entirely alert. But he had already separated the monstrous, criminal aspect of his plan so completely from himself – or else he had got so used to it in the course of a day – that it was no longer the object of a suicide attempt, and, even now, as he internally brought it up, it made no waves in his conscience, not even when he reproached himself for this cold and repellent fact and watched with a shudder as the rebuke for his insensitivity slipped silently away.

  When this spiral of self-observation merged with the renewed circling of the room, he could bear it no longer and showered in cold water until his teeth chattered. Then, under the covers, he felt better. He got up again, mechanically put a bandage on his stinging, bloodstained finger and took a fresh handkerchief to bed to staunch the renewed running of his nose once and for all. The room was no longer spinning, and nausea gave way to weariness, which came as a relief. Only his blood pulsed loudly. He listened to it pounding and slipped into half-sleep, from which the ceiling light finally woke him.

  It was half-past eleven. His head was clear again. He sat down at his desk and wrote Kirsten’s phone number in big, emphatic letters on a piece of paper, and beneath it her full name and Konstanz address.

  There was no point in calling her. He didn’t know what he could have said. He couldn’t even think of the usual things they said to one another.

  He sat on the bed
and dialled her number. She answered only with the word ‘Kirsten’. There was still a chuckle in her voice; she clearly had visitors, and had just been enjoying a jocular conversation.

  Perlmann put the phone down. He tried to remember the last thing she had said when she had called three days before. It had been something cheerful and boisterous; that was it, to send her greetings to Silvestri. But don’t be too friendly!

  Her studies were paid for, and the money would last some time afterwards. He knew that without thinking. Nonetheless, Perlmann went through the sums again: the savings books, the few shares, the life insurance on which Agnes had insisted.

  Agnes. He turned out the light. She, whose thinking had always been rather sharper than his, would have advised him to just come clean that he had nothing to say right now. Recently, on the ship, Perlmann had been profoundly convinced that such advice could only come from someone who didn’t know the world of the university, which is why it had struck him as worthless. Now, just before the end, it struck him as the best advice.

  The deception would have stood between them for ever, he thought. But it wasn’t impossible that she might somehow have been able to understand him. She, too, might have been able to see it as a kind of self-defense. And she would have found it idiotic that he had had suicidal thoughts after Leskov’s telegram. She would have seen it as a typically pig-headed male overreaction; but she wouldn’t have condemned him for it. On the other hand, that he was capable of hatching this villainous murder plot – that would have prompted only horror and revulsion in her; she would have flinched from him, and looked at him in disbelief, as if he were a monster.

  He turned on the light. Suddenly, he was far from certain that he knew what Agnes’s response would really be. He took her picture out of his wallet. In his misery, would he have confided in her? Would she have been able to protect him from disaster? How had she actually reacted when he had repeatedly hinted to her that his profession was slipping away from him? Had it ever been clear to her how much he had had to fight to assert himself internally against the expectations of others? He increasingly had the impression of not having known her very well, above all where her perception of him was concerned. At last, when he held the picture out at arm’s length, he had a feeling of complete strangeness, and he thought he was sure that she couldn’t have helped him. He was saying goodbye to her for the second time. It was much worse than it had been by the graveside.