Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  In the dark room, lit only by a faint glow of cold moonlight, Perlmann leaned upright against the wall at the head of the bed. Really lying down, snuggling up and pulling the covers over his ears – with a plan like the one he had in his head, that was impossible. Sleep well, to be fit for your journey into death. He shuddered when those words formed within him, and reached for a cigarette to chase them away. If he wanted to avoid any kind of tastelessness, it was, strictly speaking, impossible, he reflected, to do anything except what the implementation of his terrible plan urgently demanded. Everything else was scorn, cynicism, even if it wasn’t intended that way and he alone could see it.

  He didn’t really know why, but that seemed above all to apply to reading, to the desire to immerse oneself in a book. What he really wanted to do was open Robert Walser’s novel again. He wished he could touch it at least. But even that was too much. Books were now forbidden objects. He felt as if that bitter thought had severed his last connections with the world. There on the bed, in his uncomfortable posture – in which his back and neck were beginning to hurt – he felt as if he were on an island, cut off from everything, and with nothing left to do but sit still until the time came.

  He started recapitulating the route through Genoa. On the right, the industrial plants with the white smoke, then the harbor cranes. On no account turn at the first ironmonger’s shop. But careful: when it appeared, it meant there was less than 300 meters to go. At the columns, don’t follow the tram tracks, but turn left. The place with the dug-up road and the diversion where he had twice got lost, was particularly tricky because the passing street formed such a natural, almost mandatory bend that you saw the turn-off with the diversion sign – which was, furthermore, half-hidden by a protruding building – too late, and then you found yourself in a maze of one-way streets, from which you only found your way out with great difficulty. When you came to the square you had to keep to the right to let the others past, and then what you had to do was catch sight of the bakery in the yellow building in good time and brake, even though it didn’t look at all like a turn-off. And last of all there was the bus collection point. Keep left so that the flow of traffic didn’t force you into the underpass – that was particularly important tomorrow, at the start of the rush hour.

  Otherwise not much could happen, he said to himself. Then it occurred to him that he no longer knew whether he was supposed to take the second or third turn-off at the big square with the column. That was something he hadn’t explicitly memorized. Presumably because it seemed unambiguous. But was it? He started sweating, and for a while he thought of driving there straight away and checking. But after three days and nights – in which one anxiety had come in hot pursuit of the other – that last shock, even if it was comparatively mild, was just too much. All emotion was extinguished in Perlmann, and without being aware of it he slipped under the bedcovers.

  It was perhaps the hundredth coin that slipped out and fell through the slit into the box. The belt should really have been jammed from below by all the metal ages ago, but it ran as quickly and smoothly as a fan belt, and cut his finger so that he couldn’t use that hand to keep from falling into the red fog from the top of the fence. His leg was stiff and numb with cold, and he limped as, sniffing continuously, he ran his hand over the endless bumpers, which at first felt deceptively solid, before they suddenly buckled as if they were made of damp cardboard. With arms blindly outstretched he touched the radiator grille, which parted silently when he drove at it with the accelerator to the floor. He dashed inside and drove through unresisting red cotton wool, in which the Lancia could no longer be steered at all; it ran as if on rails, and turning the steering wheel had absolutely no effect. But then the cotton wool had disappeared, and the car careened along wavy lines through the tunnel. Like a bumper car at a carnival, it crashed against the planks to left and right and then he heard and felt with horror his own bumper scraping along the tarmac, he saw a rain of sparks getting higher and denser, he wanted to stop, but the car was speeding up all by itself and dashing straight towards the huge, full-beam headlights of all the trucks that came hurtling towards him in a single wide line without the tiniest space between them. He threw his arms in front of his head, waited for the collision and was woken by the deafening silence that came instead.

  33

  He just lay there only until his heartbeats had grown fainter. This time waking from a nightmare was quite different from usual, because the relief of the first few seconds was swept away by the intruding certainty that a scene similar to the last one would be repeated in reality in only a few hours. Before that thought could fully develop its paralysing effect, Perlmann turned on the light and got out of bed. The alarm clock said just after six and he mechanically calculated the number of remaining hours. He hesitated outside the shower and stared into the void, then briefly let cold water run over his skin. As he rubbed himself dry he felt his scalp twitching, but then put the shampoo back again. No time for that. In his dressing gown he called down for coffee and insisted to the sleepy kitchen-maid that it was all he wanted for breakfast.

  Then he sat down at the desk. Perlmann’s mind was dominated by a numb, glassy alertness that left all inner turmoil behind. He started the last preparations, concentrated and methodical, as if he were planning a course of lectures or a long journey.

  He would have to commit the murder in the best clothes he had with him; in his dark grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the gold buttons, and the black shoes that he hadn’t worn since the first evening. Because coming back to the hotel and getting changed after the reception was out of the question. Dress more comfortably for the murder. The thought sent the blood rushing to his face. He violently bit his lip and, filled with revulsion, drove the words from his consciousness. Then he put on his grey trousers and a white shirt, hung his blazer on the wardrobe door and set out his dark blue tie with the red pattern.

  It wasn’t just reading, eating and grooming that had become impossible, he thought, as the waiter had pulled the door closed behind him. Even greeting someone, thanking him and responding to a smile were things that now, in the most loathsome way, felt dishonest, cynical, obscene. He pushed the milk and sugar aside when he poured himself a cup of coffee on the desk. Smoking was the only thing that was different: the stinging on his tongue and the occasional tightening in his lungs sat well with fear and destruction.

  From the hotel folder he took a business card with the address, wrote his name on it and put it in his wallet with his passport. The gas tank was more than half full, he thought and, by pressing thumb and forefinger on his eyeballs, he dispelled the image of flames. The parking ticket at the airport and possibly in front of the town hall, the highway toll, one or two coffees. Otherwise there was nothing for which he would need money now. He put a few small notes in an inside pocket of his suitcase along with his traveller’s checks. It was a strange discovery that he was making about himself: ideally, he wouldn’t be carrying a single coin on him when he started the car for the last time.

  Next he looked all through the case. He stuffed his pyjamas in the plastic bag with the dirty laundry and tied it shut. But the bag wouldn’t leave him in peace. He took his reference books out of his suitcase and stuffed in the bag. He would throw it away on the journey.

  For a while he looked down at the reference books that lay scattered on the bed. Then he started piling them up on the desk.

  Outside the day was slowly breaking. He’ll already be airborne by now. Perlmann took the Russian text and the handwritten translation out of the bottom laundry drawer. He stuffed the pages with the unfamiliar format and the badly copied Cyrillic letters in with his laundry bag in the suitcase. He held the translation irresolutely in his hand and then sat down on the bed. They assumed that he had written this text, they knew that he preferred to write by hand, so it would be the most natural thing if the handwritten version were found. He flicked through the thick pile of pages. Were corrections made during the translati
on process not different in kind to those made when actually writing? There were, for example, the many points where several variants of a word or a sentence were separated from one another by slashes, and in the end he had crossed them all out but one. Perhaps they would assume that he had been uncertain about his English in each case; or else they would see him as a fanatical stylist. But if someone looked closely and thought about it, it might seem curious – particularly as there were no intellectual corrections of any kind, which would have revealed themselves in deleted paragraphs, major additions and transpositions.

  It was too dangerous. He would have to take this stack of papers with him and throw them away on the journey. Admittedly, most people who started with a handwritten version had a sentimental attachment to the text, but he also knew others who threw their manuscripts away when the computer printout was available. He also squashed that paper into the suitcase with the laundry. As he did so part of it came away, got caught in the Russian pages, something tore, and the sound of the tearing paper worked like a triggering signal on his emotions, or a catalyst. An impotent fury broke out of him. Blind with tears, he reached into the mass of paper as if into a mass of dough. He crumpled and tore the pages. He thumped them with his fists until he was out of breath and wheezing, with his face bright red and a face twitching like mad.

  He washed his face, and after drinking a cup of his now cold coffee in small, slow sips, and smoking a cigarette at the open window, he was able to go on. The other thing he would have to get rid of was the vocabulary notebook. He picked it up and, like an exhausted body dipping briefly in and out of sleep in defiance of the will, even though there was nothing he could do about it, Perlmann’s soul grabbed a breathing space by making him forget his situation and giving free rein to curiosity. With one hand he covered over the English columns and tested how many words he knew by heart; then he did the same thing in the other direction. Only after a few minutes did the awareness of his situation catch up with him. He felt as if he had been caught and, after two vain attempts, tore the vocabulary notebook through the middle before stuffing it in his suitcase along with the other waste paper.

  The three dictionaries and the Russian grammar, scattered with

  crossings-out and cross-references. They would – if they were found here – prompt astonishment, because he wasn’t supposed to speak a word of Russian. But that wasn’t suspicious in itself; it could be seen as modesty, coquetry or simply as a whim. Evelyn Mistral would think back to the time she had surprised him at the swimming pool with the Russian text, and how he had cast her a conspiratorial glance over dinner when he had lied. But without any further knowledge that couldn’t turn into deliberate suspicion; the mere fact that Leskov, the man who had died with him in the accident, was a Russian, would have to remain unconnected with the dictionaries even for her.

  On the other hand, why did Perlmann have these dictionaries here – especially when the Russian-English one was such a tome – if there were no Russian texts to be seen far and wide?

  Perlmann no longer knew which suspicion was likely and which was not. He stopped surmising and suddenly knew only this: he didn’t want to leave any Cyrillic letters behind, not a single one. No one must associate him with the Russian language, and if there were any memories of that connection, they must fade as quickly as possible. His eye ran back and forth among the four books and the stuffed suitcase – then, on the spur of the moment, he turned the case upside down and tipped its contents on to the bed. The torn and crumpled pages piled up into a mountain on top of the laundry bag, and some of the sheets sailed to the floor. He packed the books into the suitcase, put on his usual jacket and went down to the rear entrance. The door was still locked. With a resoluteness that cancelled out any other feelings, he crossed the hall, nodded to Giovanni, who was on the phone, and went down the steps to the gas station parking lot.

  Screened by the open lid of the trunk he stowed the books under the panel that covered the spare wheel. For a moment he was worried that the panel wouldn’t fit properly because of the thick dictionary, and was wobbling slightly; then he interrupted himself abruptly and walked quickly back through the hotel hall to the elevator. As he was waiting, Ruge and von Levetzov came downstairs on their way to breakfast. They were surprised to see him so early, and cast a quizzical glance at the suitcase.

  ‘See you later,’ Perlmann said firmly, and disappeared into the elevator.

  Upstairs he stuffed the laundry and the paper back into his suitcase and fetched the printout of the translation out from under the shirts in the top clothes drawer. Where should he put it? The most natural place would be the desk. But there was a sensation in the way that revealed itself to him only gradually: he didn’t want the eyes of anyone who came in – whether it be his colleagues, the hotel staff or the police – to fall on the fateful text before anything else. It wouldn’t be able to tell them anything, nothing at all; they could read it a thousand times and stare at it for as long as they liked. And yet he didn’t want this pile of pages, which made him a murderer and drove him to his own death, to lie conspicuously on the glass desktop – even though each of the others had identical copies.

  He didn’t want that to happen, not least because of Kirsten. The fraudulent text mustn’t be the first thing she found when she came to collect his things. It wouldn’t tell her anything either. Or Martin. But if it was lying on the desk, she would immediately pick it up. The last thing Dad wrote. She would recognize the title and remember the upset there had been a week before, when he had reacted so impatiently to her idea of reading it on the journey. The idea was unbearable. Perlmann looked around the room. At last he put the text in the desk drawer under the phone book.

  It would soon be half-past eight. He had stopped calculating. Now he had a keen sense of how much time he still had left. For several minutes he thought of nothing at all, just looked out into the still pale sunlight over the bay. He wished he knew how to do that: take your leave of a place to go to your death. He thought that everything he saw would now have to have a special quality. It would have to be clearer and calmer, because at that moment you no longer projected anything on to things – because you no longer cast an emotional shadow yourself, to darken your view. Because by deciding to die, you had withdrawn completely from the world. Its entanglements had lost their power over you. You stood next to them. You could see them all quite undistorted. That brought you as close as possible to the vantage point of eternity. That was what you gained if you were prepared to put everything at stake.

  But after a while he admitted to himself that he experienced nothing of the sort. He stood by the open window, as always two steps back from the balustrade. Outside the bay lay in fine morning mist; the noise of traffic, a ship’s siren, a knot of phlegm in his throat from all the smoking. Nothing else.

  He put on his tie, slipped into his blazer and then sat down, his suitcase by his side, in the red armchair, to wait. Leaving a place, but still having to wait, like you did before. At such moments, he thought, it had often seemed as if he, too, could achieve a present. You had a piece of time ahead of you – two hours, perhaps – in which you didn’t need to do anything. You had the excuse of enforced waiting, and could yield entirely to the sensation of inner freedom that unfolded when you simply let that time elapse with full consciousness. In that state he had always imagined what it would be like to live here and experience the present; and he had done exactly that when he had left home by plane. The imagination then effortlessly brought about what seemed otherwise unattainable: by sketching out the image of a lived present, it also gave the very moment of sketching the quality of the present. It was fragile, this present, and it needed practice to deal with it. At the moment, in fact, at which one actually began to live at that place, even if only in the airport, if one then promised to help someone – keeping an eye on their suitcase, for example, or changing money for them – at that moment the present would be over. It was a present beside the suitcase, and everyth
ing depended upon not the slightest obligation, not even a conversation, penetrating or even touching the ring of detachedness, of utterly detached waiting. And because that repeatedly threatened to happen through the way in which people approached him, he had restlessly shifted from seat to seat with his suitcase in the departure hall.

  Now that he had only a few hours left to live, everything was different. The delicate operation of finding one’s way through an imagined present into the real one could only happen if one had an open future ahead of one, into which one could recast oneself. But he knew all about a stiflingly cramped and inexorably shrinking future. He could have written down the whole sequence of events still to come, to the smallest detail, so the hour left until his departure was nothing but an abstract, pallid piece of time, marked by an unshakeable, unswayable dimension of the physical world in which one could observe how the sun rose, and in which one could count how often someone beeped their horn down on the coast road.

  It isn’t boredom, for God’s sake; no, it can’t be boredom. And it wasn’t, he thought with relief. It was quite different from being in bed, back then, with camomile tea, poultices and yet again the same picture book. Because what made this waiting here so terribly lifeless wasn’t a hindrance, a limitation, a lack of opportunity. It was an inner rigidity that he was trying without success to loosen, until he understood at last that it was the only thing that protected him from the horror which was – silent, high and blinding – hurtling towards him from the tunnel.