Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  When the prosecco was handed out, his colleagues came over to study the medal at close quarters. Not a word was said about his trembling hand, and he couldn’t discover anything special in their expressions, either. The ribbon with the medal wandered from neck to neck, the jokes about the whole ceremony became more and more silly and frivolous, and at one point Millar clapped Perlmann on the shoulder with a laugh. Perlmann made an effort not to draw attention to himself, and laughed along. It was a laugh with no inner echo, a laugh with a run-up, a kind of facial gymnastics. He was glad that Ruge outdid a joke that had just been made, turned on his side and pretended to double up with laughter. As he straightened up, he wiped away the tears, interrupting himself with a feigned burst of laughter.

  When the merriment finally faded away, they noticed with some embarrassment that both the Mayor and Angelini had already left. Apart from them, there were only two clerks in the room, talking about something with empty glasses in their hands.

  Perlmann looked at the clock above the door: twenty past twelve. He’ll be in Frankfurt now. His nose started running again. His handkerchief fell on the gleaming parquet, and when he straightened up again, everything went black for a second. He was already at the stairs behind the others when Laura Sand touched his arm and, with a mocking smile, handed him his forgotten certificate. As they went downstairs together, she said abruptly, without looking at him: ‘You’re not terribly well, are you?’

  It was the first time she had said anything so personal to him, and never before had he heard such warmth in her smoky voice. He braced himself against tears, and crushed the certificate in the middle as he did so. He swallowed twice, glanced at her quickly and swallowed again.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said more quietly than he had planned, and added in a louder voice: ‘I slept really badly.’

  ‘See you later,’ she said as they parted in the hall. He watched after her as she opened the heavy door, leaned against it and lit a cigarette with her big lighter before stepping out into the square. He was relieved that he had resisted the massive temptation to confide in her. At the same time, though, he had the feeling that he had just wasted his last chance.

  He hurried into the toilet, which was actually meant only for council employees. It wasn’t diarrhoea, it was, once again, that deceptive sensation in his abdomen. Nonetheless, he sat there for a while with his head in his hands, thinking about nothing. He didn’t get back up until he finally started feeling cold. It was as arduous as if he were made of lead.

  Evelyn Mistral was waiting outside the door.

  ‘You’re going to the airport now, aren’t you?’ she asked in Spanish. There was a hint of shyness in her face, but above all the hope that the last few days’ estrangement was in the past.

  ‘Sí,’ said Perlmann, and felt his throat tightening as he waited for what was to come.

  ‘Would you mind if I came too? The weather’s so lovely! And that fantastic car! I thought we might take the coast road. How long is it until Leskov’s arrival?’

  Perlmann stood there motionless for a moment and gazed into the void, as if the idea that questions needed answers were completely new to him. Then, with the awkwardness of someone intellectually backward, he looked at his watch and said in a monotonous, absent voice, ‘Another two hours at least.’

  As she waited for Perlmann to go, Evelyn Mistral stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket, crossed her legs and slipped one foot half out of her shoe. After a pause that seemed to last an eternity, she looked up from the cobbles.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said, glancing at him through half-closed eyes, and turned to leave.

  ‘No, por favor, no,’ said Perlmann hastily, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her across the road, forcing a beeping car to screech to a halt.

  Once they were on the other side she pulled gently away and looked at him uncertainly.

  ‘¿Seguro?’

  Perlmann just nodded and walked ahead of her into the side street. Even now I’m not capable of drawing a boundary around myself and saying no. Not even now, when everything depends on it.

  He had just opened the door, and Evelyn Mistral was already holding the door handle when she slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

  ‘Oh, damn!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to wait for this stupid phone call from Geneva!’ And then she told Perlmann over the car roof about her annoyance concerning the failed financing of a project.

  Then, when he sat in the car and looked at her in the rear-view mirror, he saw her turning round again before she went around the corner, and brushing the hair out of her face. As soon as she had disappeared his whole body started trembling. This time it was much more violent than it had been when he was signing his name, and he was quite sure that it would never stop.

  35

  Just before the highway access road near Rapallo he found a skip where he didn’t feel he was being watched. It had taken him almost three-quarters of an hour to get there. Because almost as soon as he had left the side street near the town hall, he had got into a series of traffic hold-ups caused by delivery vans, which, as before in Genoa, stopped brazenly in the middle of the street to unload their goods. All of his desperation had turned into a boundless, crazed fury with the drivers of those vans, who, when they had closed the empty van at the back, walked with maddening slowness to the front, often exchanging a few words with an acquaintance before finally driving off. Sweating, Perlmann had lowered the window, but then closed it again straight away, because he couldn’t bear the furious beeping of the cars in the line. He had slung his tie, along with the medal and the certificate, on to the back seat. Again and again he had forced himself to envisage what would have happened if Evelyn had forgotten that phone call. But a paralysing fatigue in his head had made every attempt to imagine it fizzle out.

  Now he set down the suitcase and pushed the heavy lid of the skip back with both hands. He was greeted by a pungent smell of rotting vegetables. The container was half-full of brown, almost black cabbage that gave off warm, stinking fumes. Perlmann opened the case and looked round. He couldn’t have cared less whether the woman at the wheel of the approaching car saw him or not. Nonetheless, he let her drive past before he tipped the laundry bag and the two dangerous texts on to the cabbage. Then, holding his nose, he watched with fascination as the sheets absorbed the dark goo that had formed between the cabbages. It was more or less how he had imagined the future destruction of the fraudulent text when he was lying in bed in Portofino. What had tormented him then now struck him as a mere bagatelle, barely worth mentioning, and he would have given anything to turn back the time of those forty-eight hours.

  He took the four books out of the trunk. First he threw the yellow Langenscheidt on to the stinking cabbage. It landed with a sluggish gurgle. Next, the Russian-Italian dictionary. Perlmann gave a start when the dark juice spurted up. Then came the big red dictionary. It landed half-open on the brown pulp, and the greyish paper immediately began to corrugate. He hesitated longest over the grammar. He opened it up and flicked through it. There were various layers of meticulous marginal notes, progressive residues of ownership, apparent from the various different kinds of ink. Contemplating them from a certain internal distance, with eyes half-closed, it was as if one were looking down a long corridor of memory, far into one’s own past. What he was holding here in his hand, he thought, was one of the most real, the most authentic things that had ever existed in his life. At home, on Agnes’s bookshelves, which were still completely untouched, there was the same grammar. When Perlmann realized how senseless it was to cling to those thoughts, he snapped the book shut with forced determination and threw it in. Even before he heard the dull thud of its impact, he had already turned away.

  He put the empty suitcase back down on the back seat. The medal and the certificate. He was already holding them and stepping towards the skip when he paused. No, of course not. They will have to be found in the car. He sat down at the wheel.

 
; All the tunnels on the stretch of road were torture. He hadn’t felt like that yesterday in the dark, but now in every pair of lights coming out of the tunnel in the opposite lane, he saw a truck. He was glad of the dusty bushes and the two crash barriers between the lanes. Nonetheless, his heart thumped as he entered each tunnel. For a brief moment he wished the two lanes, even up on the mountain where he would be driving along with Leskov, went down two different tunnels. It wasn’t a wish that turned into a thought, and it didn’t leave a trace in his memory.

  As he got out at the airport he noticed that his blazer was soaking and stuck to the leather seat. He locked the car and had already taken a few steps when he turned round and walked back to the car. It would be better to release the handbrake now. Afterwards, Leskov’s leg would be there. It was the last time, he thought, as he pressed the lever down.

  When, stepping into the arrivals hall, his eye fell on the digital clock on the wall, it still showed 14:00. But a brief moment later, before he had even looked away, the display changed to 14:01. The number 01 and the perception of its silent appearance acted on Perlmann like a signal: the time remaining to him now could already be expressed in minutes. He felt his blood thumping, and the cheerful exclamations of the arriving passengers and waiting children now reached him as if from a long way away as he stared at the clock until it was five past two. Then he set his watch. He could do nothing to resist the complete senselessness of the action.

  The flight from Frankfurt had been showing on the monitor for a long time, and also on the black display panel. Perlmann leaned against a pillar, automatically lit the last cigarette from that pack and threw the box into the garbage bin next to him. He would have liked to do more with the passing minutes than stare at the black rubber surface of the floor, but nothing moved in his head now. It was as if his thoughts had dried up, and he even seemed to have lost his capacity to pay attention. Only his body was there, clumsy and repellent. His scalp itched. He scratched himself bloody and then automatically brushed the dandruff from his blazer. The shoes that he had barely worn pinched, and when he bent down to tie them more tightly, his ice-cold nose started running.

  And then, all of a sudden, his thoughts began chasing one another. The others had seen his trembling hand in the town hall, and they would think about it when they found out about the accident. He saw Ruge in front of him, putting his mended glasses on top of his head and thoughtfully studying the empty suitcase at the site of the accident. It would become known that Leskov wasn’t belted in, and then von Levetzov and Millar would look at each other in silence. They would find it strange that Perlmann had practically no money on him, and had left his credit cards in the trunk. And the five mark piece, for God’s sake! It will give me away. The car has barely been driven, and I’m probably the only German who has had it. Perlmann felt the blind impulse to run out to the car, but the next thought was already there: The shovel. Why was there a shovel in the pile of mud? What will I do if someone’s working at that very spot? That thought was swept away by another: Kirsten. She’ll wonder where the Russian books are. Particularly the big one with the nasty paper that Martin doesn’t know. She won’t let the matter lie. She’s wilful and she can be stubborn. She’ll ask the others, each one of them individually , and that mystery will be associated in their minds with other peculiarities, like the curious route. And then one last thought fell within the tension of that flight of thought, and it made Perlmann freeze: The old woman. If she sees a photograph of the dead men in the local press she’ll talk. It was idiotic, simply crazy, to talk to her and draw attention to myself, not least with that half-witted idea of a film. Hopefully, I won’t be recognizable afterwards.

  Perlmann couldn’t bear standing around any longer, and walked towards the departure lounge. Before he stepped onto the moving walkway he glanced at the display panel. in ritardo, it now said by the flight from Frankfurt. From half-past four there’s not so much, c’è meno, he heard the old woman saying and saw her tooth-stump in his mind’s eye. He ran up the steps to the Alitalia counter.

  ‘Only about another quarter of an hour,’ the hostess said in response to his question, startled by his agitation.

  I can catch up. So, another three-quarters of an hour. He walked over to the seats, where he had waited in the early morning nearly fourteen days before, and had felt defenseless without a book. But the memory was unbearable, and at last he went to the bar and ordered an espresso.

  Beside him, someone unfolded a newspaper. Perlmann read the headlines and looked at the photographs. On the front page was a picture showing a blanket of smog over Milan, and on the last page there was a snapshot of a beauty contest. Behind him, a woman with a very clear voice burst into loud laughter and then called, ‘Ancora!’ He turned round and saw her companion, a man with a long, white scarf and the appearance of a film star, going a little way into the room, then turning round and standing still for a moment, as if preparing for the long jump. Then, with a blasé expression on his face, the man took several deliberate shuffling steps and all of a sudden, switching his movements at lightning speed, he turned his feet outwards and walked frantically on the inside of his shoes, sticking his tongue in his cheek to give himself a cockeyed expression. The sight was so funny that all the people at the bar, including the waiter, roared with laughter.

  And then something happened that Perlmann wouldn’t have thought possible: the humorous aspect of it all took hold of him as well; something erupted inside him and he laughed a loud and liberated laugh – not a forced, hysterical laugh like the one last night at dinner, and not a fake laugh like just now at the town hall, but a laugh that brought him deceptively close to the present: it seemed as if he could reach out and touch it with his hands. That laugh acted like a rapid erosion of the cramped and callused framework of emotion, on which the decision to kill and to die had been constructed; the whole internal structure collapsed, and at that moment he saw the whole murderous plan as something very alien and remote, abstruse and practically ridiculous.

  He was hoping for a repeat performance, but by now the man, still wearing an idiot’s expression, was lying in the woman’s arms, leaning against her so heavily, with feigned inertness, that for a moment she lost her balance and knocked Perlmann with her shoulder. He caught her apologetic smile, smelt her perfume and looked past her shiny black hair through the big glass windows of the hall into the distance where, in a rectangle formed of roofs and poles, a plane with gleaming wings was at that moment rising. He hadn’t known that such a thing existed: a will to live that could flow through one as hot and stupefying as a drug. He ordered a second espresso, put in two, three spoons of sugar and let the little sips melt away on his tongue. Then he ate a slice of panettone, then another and, with yet another espresso, a third. He took off his blazer, hung it over his shoulder on a finger, and rested his arm with his cigarette on the counter. He liked the hard, bright e that the woman next to him was using, and as he waited repeatedly for that sound, he began to wonder where he could fly to. When does your next flight leave? Where to? Anywhere.

  When the woman with the comedian had left and the waiter behind the counter snapped at the service staff, everything shattered. It disappeared like a mirage, as if it had never existed, and all that remained was a coffee-induced quiver. Perlmann looked at the clock: ten past three. He walked slowly back to the arrivals hall. These were the last minutes of his life when he could be alone with himself. In spite of the sultry air in the building he was shivering. And what if it wasn’t even this Monday? There hadn’t been a date in the telegram. But he had given Leskov the group’s dates. And today was the last possible Monday.

  The monitor showed Leskov’s flight as having already landed. Perlmann got a stomach cramp. He positioned himself right at the back of the group of waiting people. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. At last he pressed them to his painful stomach and rubbed it. As he did so, he ran through the route once more. Not till the second ironmonger’s shop. Don’t f
ollow the tram tracks. First right at the bakery. Before the underpass keep left. At the square with the column it was the third rather than the fourth turn-off. His hands were ice-cold in spite of the rubbing. His sweat-drenched shirt was cold and sticky, too. If only they hadn’t gone to the Hermitage. He wished Leskov hadn’t suggested, back there on the bank of the Neva, that they call each other by their Christian names.

  He reached for the matches in his jacket pocket and found his parking ticket. And then he realized that he had only a few coins, and not a single bill. He looked at the coins: 600 lire. I can’t get out of here, he thought. I can’t pay the parking fee. Then he saw Leskov.

  36

  He was wearing the same worn-out loden coat as the last time, and looked even broader and more shapeless than Perlmann remembered. In one hand he was carrying a big, antediluvian-looking suitcase of a pallid, stained brown that made it look as if it were made of cardboard. The other hand held a small suitcase with an outside pocket. Leskov stopped and looked uncertainly around through his thick glasses, bent slightly forward because of his heavy case. Perlmann felt as if he were shivering with cold when he saw him standing like that. Over the past few weeks Leskov had been the invisible author of a text, a voice without physical presence, which Perlmann had liked and admired more and more as the translation had progressed, and with whose haunting tone he had temporarily been able to identify. Now he stood there, a lost-looking man with an untidy, sweaty fringe of hair around his bald pate, and greying stubble, and with the tip of his tongue wedged between his teeth in tense expectation. Perlmann found him repellent. There was also something ludicrously dramatic about the sight of him. But those feelings did nothing to mitigate the thought that swept over him, that that physically present man over there who now, rather than putting down his suitcase, was standing there, legs apart, shifting his weight, was the man he was to kill.