Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘I know the airport,’ said Perlmann. He no longer had the strength to conceal his irritation.

  It was twenty past four when they reached the river and drove through Molassana. Half-past four, that was just an approximate time, it could vary, and besides, it’s the start of the week, perhaps the carriers are more active then.

  When the climb began, Leskov asked, after a pause, when they were going to get to the coast road. ‘There is one, isn’t there?’

  Perlmann took the cigarette lighter, which had just clicked, out of its holder and held it to the tobacco for a long time. As he put it back in, he slowly blew the smoke out through his nose.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a calm that had an underlying vibration, ‘there is a coast road. But it’s closed at the moment because of a serious accident. The report was on the radio. So I’m driving around the back, through the mountains.’

  His words came fluently. They sounded a bit as if he were reading them out. Now he simply summoned them up from his memory after formulating them over and over again on the way to the airport, making sure that they sounded neither noticeably curt nor unnecessarily long.

  ‘Ah,’ said Leskov, disappointed. ‘And the highway? A moment ago we drove past some green signs that said Autostrada.’

  ‘The traffic’s terrible at this time of day,’ Perlmann said and breathed quietly. It was over now. It was twenty-eight minutes past four.

  Trucks were still coming towards them. Perlmann started staring at their bumpers. When they drove past, he quickly turned his head and looked for the gas tank. Unable to resist, he slipped further and further into the state of mind in which he had run his hand along the damp bumpers the previous evening, in the red fog of the harbor, and, after a while, he felt last night’s dream images forcing their way into his consciousness.

  ‘Have you had a chance to take a look at my paper?’ Leskov asked all of a sudden. His voice had changed. It contained a note of anxious expectation, bordering on submissiveness.

  Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question. It was unbearable, absolutely impossible, in fact, to talk to Leskov about that disastrous text, which had destroyed everything, and which would in a few minutes kill them both. It was a thought so unendurable, so far beyond his powers, that Perlmann crouched behind the wheel as if paralyzed, and glared through the red of the fog in his imagination at the bumper of the next truck that was coming towards them, high and white. In a few minutes it will all be over. He clung to that desperate thought as – the truck had passed them – he sat up again in his seat and said, ‘I started it, but couldn’t get beyond the first few sentences. I had to set the paper aside. It’s still too hard for me. Maybe I’ll try again later.’

  ‘But then you won’t be reading that first version, but the new one,’ said Leskov, whose voice seemed to have regained some of its self-confidence. ‘I’ve fundamentally reworked the text over the past few months. It’s much better now. It’s actually a totally new paper. When I cast my eye over the first version recently, it struck me as terribly primitive and confused. I can throw that one away now! I’m just glad I didn’t hand in that text. The new paper is the best, the most self-contained that I’ve ever managed to write. One should be careful with the word original: but I think there are a few things about it that really are original. At any rate I have the feeling that it’s come entirely from myself. I’m really a little bit proud of it. And I also hope that this work will finally get me a post. There is one free at the moment, as a matter of fact.’ He had the text with him, and would report on it to the group. Unfortunately, he had only his hand-written version, which was far too confusing to be copied, and unreadable to anyone else. As soon as he had transcribed it, he would send Perlmann a copy straight away. ‘I’m quite sure,’ he said with playful impudence, touching Perlmann on the arm, ‘that you’ll understand this paper. If you just take the time!’

  Perlmann felt ill, and his stomach cramp had returned. Again he had that sensation of diarrhea. He switched gear. His body had reacted faster than his mind. Only now, in fact, did he begin to grasp the nature of the shock that Leskov’s words had provoked in him: if the car didn’t burn up completely, the text in question, back in the trunk, would survive the collision. It would be found, and then there was the possibility that the deception would be discovered – with all the consequences that that might have, not least for the explanation of the apparent accident. Even the changes in the second version could not keep that from happening. Certainly, he said to himself once again, no one in the hotel spoke Russian. But if the belongings of the deceased were in the hotel after they had been identified, it was quite possible that both texts, the Russian and the English, would end up in the same room, perhaps even on the same table, side by side, page by page. And the mere possibility, the mere thought, that someone with a command of both languages might approach that table brought him out in a cold sweat.

  Before they reached the tunnel there was another gas station. Perlmann would have to get rid of Leskov’s manuscript there; sheltered by the open lid of the trunk he would quickly have to take it out of the suitcase, hide it behind something and drive on straight away.

  ‘I’ve just got to check the tires for a second,’ he said as the gas station came into view.

  He stopped next to the air-pump, opened the trunk from inside the car and quickly walked to the back. The straps of Leskov’s suitcase were already untied when he felt the car rocking and looked up over the lid of the trunk. Leskov was heaving himself, panting, out of the car. He had to hold on to the frame with both hands and pull himself up. The car door banged against the plinth. Perlmann quickly closed the lid and bent to the air-pressure gauge.

  ‘I’ve been sitting down all day, and the seats on the plane were so cramped,’ Leskov said with a yawn. ‘I just need to have a bit of a stretch for a moment.’

  Perlmann unscrewed the cap of the valve on the wheel and pretended to measure the air pressure. His fury at this shapeless Russian, who was unashamedly making the most unappetizing noises as he did his exercises, was turning into hatred. That hatred would be helpful later on, he reflected. He loathed himself for that thought, and that made his hatred still more violent. He switched his attention to the other back wheel. Leskov was just bending forward, and stretching his wide rear end towards him, a grotesque and revolting sight. No, Perlmann couldn’t depend on the exercises taking long enough, particularly since he would now have to go back to the front, to his seat, to open the trunk for a second time. He put the pressure-gauge back on its holder and sat down behind the wheel. There he collapsed and was prepared to drive to the hotel and simply let things take their course. Exhaustedly, he closed his eyes. Sleeping, sleeping for a long time, until everything was over, his unmasking, the shame, everything.

  Leskov’s head appeared in the open passenger door. ‘Do you think there’s a toilet here?’ he asked uncertainly.

  ‘No idea,’ Perlmann said flatly. Leskov seemed to have expected Perlmann to come with him to find out. Now he walked alone to the pump attendant and gesticulated. Perlmann was reaching for the lever that opened the trunk, and was sitting with his feet on the cobbles, ready to move. But the pump attendant shook his head, once, then again.

  Leskov came waddling back to the car. He glanced at the back seat. ‘There’s a medal there. With a ribbon. As if someone’s received an honor of some kind. May I know what it means?’

  Why didn’t I think of that? I could have put the thing in the suitcase. ‘What? Oh, that. No idea. Someone must have left it behind.’ It hadn’t been hard to give his voice a tone of indifference. Exhaustion had accomplished that all by itself.

  ‘The roll next to it looks almost like a certificate. Shall we take a look?’

  Perlmann gulped. ‘I’d like to get on now,’ he said impatiently.

  A shadow flitted across Leskov’s face. ‘Of course.’ He wedged himself on to the seat. One of his suspenders caught on the door handle. ‘How far is it?’

 
; ‘Not far now,’ said Perlmann, and his voice had stopped obeying him.

  37

  The clock showed six minutes to five when Perlmann drove back to the road with his headlights on. Clouds had rolled in, the last rays of sunlight from the sea giving them a purple sheen. There was a strange, hostile twilight. He drove slowly, at barely forty, and kept to the right.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Leskov asked after a while.

  Perlmann didn’t reply, but stared straight ahead at the bend, where a huge truck appeared with its headlights on full. He shielded his eyes with his hand and waited until it had passed. Then he stopped the Lancia and pressed the lever that opened the trunk, and it was only by a reflex that he was able to prevent a passing car from brushing his opened door. As he hurried to the back, Perlmann inwardly braced himself for the furious beeping and the flashing headlights, opened the trunk quite high and pulled open the zip of Leskov’s suitcase. It was stuffed full of paper. How was he supposed to fish the crucial, dangerous text out of this jumble? In feverish haste, he rummaged among the papers, all Russian texts, some of them typed, most of them handwritten. What was he supposed to do? He was at his wits’ end. He tore open the zip for the outside pocket. It contained a single manuscript, a fat pile of pale yellow pages, held together with a red rubber band. He pulled it out. The rubber band got stuck on the zip and broke. This was the text, the heading in careful, almost calligraphic letters: o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy. So he hadn’t changed the title. With trembling fingers Perlmann closed both zips and refastened the straps. Then he bent down – ignoring the insults of a driver who couldn’t overtake because of the oncoming traffic – right down to the road and laid the pile of papers under the exhaust. He slammed the trunk shut and got in.

  ‘Problem with the tires again,’ he said, without turning his head towards the passenger seat. Now it was important that Leskov didn’t look into the side-view mirror. ‘They grow a famous wine over there on the right,’ he said, and set off with a jolt, his eyes on the rear-view mirror.

  The text, which existed only in this single copy, the version that Leskov was so proud of, and which was to help him with his professional advancement, the work of months, flew apart, the yellow pages whirled up and gleamed in the headlights of the other cars, then they danced and sailed into the darkness of the side embankment. The cars behind him tried to dodge the flapping pages as if they were heavier than they were, and the next car that came along seemed to have driven precisely over the rest of the stack of papers, because once again there was a cloud of pages. Then they drove round the bend, and the pages disappeared from Perlmann’s field of vision. Leskov had put his thick glasses on his head, and was still looking up the slope on the left.

  ‘Not much to be seen now,’ he said.

  It can only be another three or four bends. All of a sudden Perlmann no longer knew whether to accelerate or change down. It was just turning four minutes past five. Yesterday, outside the tunnel, when he should really have done it straight away, his remaining time had seemed like an obstacle, a medium that he had to wade heavily through, minute after minute. And even in the town hall, every movement had struck him as something that one had to accomplish against the resistance of sluggish time. Then, on the way here, it had been the other way round: time had run ahead of him, the minutes elapsed at a furious pace, it had been a race against the clock, against the figures on the digital display on the dashboard, which were changing far too quickly. Now, just as he was counting the remaining bends, Perlmann felt something changing, moving, shifting in his innermost depths: even now he wanted to stop time, and with all his might; but it wasn’t like before, because at the same time he also wanted to stop the road, which was rolling away backwards behind him, where he would never see it again. He didn’t want to reach the tunnel either in time or in space. The time on the whole journey had been precious already, because after half-past four there wouldn’t be as much traffic – c’è meno. But now that same time was suddenly precious in a quite different, more extended sense. It forced its way into Perlmann’s consciousness as the last brief stretch of his life, as a comprehensible series of minutes ticking ruthlessly and inexorably away, bringing the final darkness and the final silence closer.

  Just behind them a huge truck flashed its lights, and now Perlmann heard the hard and threatening noise of its diesel engine. He gave a start, but it was a strange, unfamiliar kind of start, because it immediately opened itself up to the hot, surging, almost pleasant desire that the truck might simply drive over them and extinguish them with its light, its noise and all its tons. He accelerated, took the next bend and saw the sign with the arrows to Piacenza and Chiávari. In the rear-view mirror the high front of the truck came quickly closer. He heard the driver speeding up and changing gear. Now they were on the crossing and could see the tunnel, the truck roared and sped up for the straight stretch through the mountain. Perlmann put his foot on the accelerator, drove far to the right on to the patch of gravel and skidded to a stop.

  ‘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 betwee
n 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.