Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  Perlmann opened the window, leaned out and looked to the north-west. It was lighter in that direction. Maybe it had stayed dry up there.

  ‘Does the smoke really not bother you?’ Leskov asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ Perlmann replied into the rain and glanced furtively at his watch. Twenty-five to four.

  He had spent half the night puzzling about it, Leskov went on. And from time to time he had had the feeling that his memory of packing the text had really only been a delusion, whose vividness simply expressed the strong desire to have done so.

  ‘It’s very unpleasant,’ he said, ‘and not only because of the text. It gives me the feeling of no longer being able to rely on myself. Have you ever known anything like that?’

  Yes, said Perlmann, awkwardly lighting a cigarette, he did know that feeling.

  He was used to reading something whenever he had to wait around, Leskov said thoughtfully. So he had now been wondering whether he might have taken the text out on the journey and left it somewhere. Not in St Petersburg. It had been too hectic for that at the airport. And not on the flight to Moscow, either, where an inebriated war veteran in the next seat had constantly bothered him. At Larissa and Boris’s he had been monopolized by the children the whole time. At the airport in Moscow, perhaps. Or on the plane. Or in Frankfurt, when he’d been waiting for his connecting flight. It was crazy: because there wasn’t a trace of a memory of such an action. He would now have to think of himself as if he were a stranger, from outside, so to speak. And Leskov ardently hoped that he was wrong. Admittedly, his address was written at the end of the text, he did that quite automatically, even with a manuscript. But he didn’t think anyone would take the trouble. Certainly not at Moscow Airport. And in Frankfurt no one would be able to read it. Perhaps Lufthansa would do something if the text were found on the plane. On the other hand: a cleaning crew would simply throw a pile of unreadable pages out with the rest of the rubbish. ‘Or what do you think?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Perlmann said tonelessly.

  Leskov paused and looked straight ahead with his eyes slightly narrowed. Perlmann knew what was coming next. There was one more small thing, he went on, that he barely dared to mention, however ludicrous it might seem: a little bit of rubber band had got stuck in the zip of the outside pocket. He couldn’t get that out of his head, because it could mean that he had taken the text out and broken the rubber band with which it was held together. He tapped his forehead with his knuckles. ‘If I only had some kind of memory!’ After a while he opened his eyes and looked at Perlmann, who was staring at the floor. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you with this. In your condition. But you know how much this text matters to me. I’ve already tried to phone friends at home to look in my apartment. But I can’t get through.’ He set his pipe down on the round table and hid his face in his hands. ‘I hope to God it’s there. Otherwise . . . I can’t bring myself to think about it.’

  The rain had stopped. Perlmann went to the bathroom and leaned his back against the basin. He was shaking, and his head threatened to explode. I’ve got to collect the pages. At all costs. Five past four. If Leskov went soon, he could still do it. You can even make out these pages in the gloom. He flushed the toilet. Then he clenched his fists to keep from shaking and went back into the room.

  Leskov was standing up. He would have to do some work. There wasn’t much time until his session on Thursday.

  ‘The text is probably just at home. There isn’t really any other possibility. Otherwise I’d have some kind of memory. Some kind.’

  Perlmann couldn’t stand his questioning stare for long, and walked ahead of him to the door. Before he went out, Leskov stopped just in front of him. Perlmann smelled his tobacco breath.

  ‘Do you think a translator might be found for my text?’ he asked. ‘I’d love you and the others to be able to read it. Especially since I now know your text. Payment would be a problem, I know that.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Perlmann. It took him an enormous effort to close the door quietly.

  A little while later Perlmann left the room and, after some hesitation, set off through the hall. There he was intercepted by Maria, who came sniffing out of her office, holding a handkerchief. Was he feeling better? She had heard from Signora Morelli that he had been surprised to find that the text she had finished on Friday had been distributed.

  ‘Please forgive me if I’ve done something wrong. But when you told me on the phone on Friday that it was urgent, I automatically assumed it was the text for your session, which is why I attached the copying instruction to it. And I think I even added your name.’

  The people from Fiat?

  ‘Oh, them,’ she laughed, and had to blow her nose. ‘I didn’t have a sense that they got a lot of work done. And when I said something about a research group and an important text, Santini immediately waved it through. He’s very patient. He’s often been with people here.’ She rubbed her reddened eyes. ‘They’d said Saturday afternoon would be fine. But then I got the feeling this cold was on the way, and I finished typing the thing on Friday so that I could spend Saturday in bed. Oh, one moment,’ she said, gestured to him to wait and disappeared into the office.

  If she hadn’t had a cold, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning, and I would have noticed Giovanni’s omission. But if he hadn’t made his mistake, her cold would have saved me.

  ‘Here,’ Maria said, and handed him the black wax-cloth notebook. ‘I like typing your things up. They’re not as technical as the others, and not as dry. That was true of the other text, the one about memory. And this one here has such an original title. I like it. So are you sure nothing’s gone wrong as far as you’re concerned? Should I perhaps have had the other text printed out and copied again?

  ‘No, no,’ Perlmann said, and had to fight down the haste in his voice. ‘You did exactly the right thing. Mille grazie.’

  In daylight, the damage to the Lancia looked very bad. The dark-blue paint was ripped open in several places all along the car. The scrapes went deep into the metal, and the wing had been powerfully crushed next to the headlight on the right-hand side. Perlmann took the tie, medal and certificate from the back seat and put them along with the black notebook in the empty suitcase. Then he set off.

  He hadn’t even reached the big jetty when it was clear to him that he wouldn’t manage to do it now. He was shivering with weakness, and his reactions were grotesquely delayed, as if his brain were working in slow motion. Under the stare of a policeman he stopped in a no-parking zone and wiped the sweat from his cold hands.

  Just as he was about to turn and drive back, his eye fell on the Hotel Imperiale on the hill. There was something about it. Again his brain made an eerily long pause. The waiter. I didn’t wait for him. And I didn’t pay. That means bilking on top of everything else. Compared to everything else this was so preposterous that Perlmann pulled his face into a grin. Very slowly he drove up to the hotel and waited for several minutes outside the gate until even the most distant oncoming traffic had passed.

  It was the same waiter. He assessed Perlmann with a dismissive glance. The pale, unshaven face. The soiled jacket. The blood-stained trousers. The unpolished shoes.

  ‘I forgot to pay yesterday,’ Perlmann said and took a handful of cash from his pocket.

  ‘We aren’t used to guests like that here,’ the waiter said stiffly.

  ‘And it isn’t a habit of mine,’ Perlmann said with a weary smile. ‘I think it was a sandwich, a whisky and a mineral water.’

  ‘Two waters,’ the waiter said abruptly.

  ‘I’m sorry. Yesterday I was a bit . . . a bit under the weather.’

  ‘I can see that. And I’d also say that we could do without a second visit from you,’ the waiter said and simply stuffed the three 10,000 lire notes in the pocket of his red jacket.

  The two things – being barred and that movement – assembled themselves in Perlmann’s feelings into something strang
ely liberating. He looked the waiter in the eyes with undisguised contempt. ‘Do you know what you are? Uno stronzo.’ And because he wasn’t sure whether the insult was strong enough, he added his own translation, ‘An asshole. A great big asshole.’ The waiter’s face colored. ‘Stronzo,’ Perlmann said again and went outside.

  On the way back he felt more confident and, all of a sudden, he felt properly hungry – a sensation that he had almost forgotten over the past few days. At a stand-up bar he ate several slices of pizza. The five o’clock news was just coming to an end on the television behind the bar, and a weather map appeared. Perlmann stared at the clouds to the east of Genoa. They were white, not grey. But then the clouds on maps like that always were. Weren’t they?

  ‘Do you know the road from Genoa via Lumarzo to Chiávari?’ he asked the man in the vest who was taking the pizza out of the oven with a long shovel.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man, without interrupting what he was doing.

  ‘Do you think it’s going to rain there tonight? Up by the tunnel, I mean.’

  The man paused abruptly, left the shovel half inside the oven and turned round.

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘No, no,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘I really need to know. It’s very important.’

  The man in the vest took a drag on his cigarette and looked at him as if he were someone very simple, perhaps even disturbed.

  ‘How on earth am I supposed to know that?’ he said mildly.

  ‘Yes,’ Perlmann said quietly and left far too big a tip.

  *

  ‘That conversation last night,’ Perlmann said to Signora Morelli when she set Frau Hartwig’s yellow envelope and another little one for him on the reception counter, ‘I . . .’

  She folded her hands and looked at him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tiny twitch in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘What conversation?’

  Perlmann gulped and shifted the two envelopes until they were exactly parallel at the edge of the counter. ‘Grazie,’ he said quietly and looked at her.

  She gave only the hint of a nod.

  The room smelled of Leskov’s sickly tobacco. The haze had escaped, but the open window hadn’t been able to do anything about the penetrating smell. Except it was cold now. Perlmann tipped a mountain of pipe ash and charred tobacco into the toilet and shut the window.

  Frau Hartwig’s envelope contained two letters. One was his invitation to Princeton, written on expensive paper that looked like parchment, and signed by the President. The invitation had been issued because of his outstanding academic achievements, it said. And the President assured him that it would be a great honor to have him as a guest for a while. Perlmann didn’t read the letter twice, but immediately put it back in the envelope and threw it in the suitcase.

  The other was an invitation to give a guest lecture. He was to open a series of lectures, and it was very important to the organizer that Perlmann should be the first speaker. The letter talked about works that he had finished three years ago, but which had only appeared in print at the beginning of the year. Back then, he thought, everything had still seemed all right. Except that he had been getting increasingly bored with his things. And every now and again he had woken up in the middle of the night and hadn’t known where to go from here. He hadn’t had long conversations with himself when that had happened; few thoughts came to him on such occasions. He listened to music, and he usually stood at the big window as he did so. Then Agnes was surprised to find him at his desk so early.

  In the other envelope there was a note from Angelini. Unfortunately, he had to go back to Ivrea that afternoon. He wished Perlmann a speedy recovery, and hoped it was nothing serious. He would try to come to the last dinner on Friday, although he couldn’t yet promise anything. At the end was his private telephone number.

  The words were friendly, if conventional. Perlmann read them several times. He thought back to their first meeting and the enthusiastic phone calls that had followed. You couldn’t say that these words gave off a sense of disappointment. Not at all. And not detachment or coldness. But he sensed them. He, Philipp Perlmann, had revealed himself to be a bad investment.

  He turned on the six o’clock news. But on that channel they only had a schematic weather map that was no use to him. No big change to be expected tomorrow. A little while before, the roads had been almost dry again. He walked over to the window. There was no point now in staring up into the starless night sky.

  He took a long shower and then lay down in bed. The pillow smelled of Leskov’s tobacco. He fetched another one from the wardrobe. The sheets and the wool blanket smelled too. He pulled off the sheet and covered himself with replacement blankets from the wardrobe. The heating intensified the smell. He turned it off and opened the window. His body was vibrating with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. He didn’t take any pills. On the seven o’clock news the clouds around Genoa looked denser than they had done two hours before. Outside it was still dry. He was shivering, and fetched the last blanket from the wardrobe. It was too noisy on the coast road, and he closed the window. If he set off at half-past five, he would be there by first light. He set his alarm for five. He went to sleep at about eight.

  He saw no bulldozer, no tunnel walls. In fact, he saw nothing at all. No seeing took place. It was simply the case that he hadn’t the strength to take his hands off the wheel. He held it tightly and turned it to the left, further and further to the left. It could be that he was the one who turned it. Or else it was something inside him, a force, a will, but it was alien to him and not really his. And perhaps the wheel had gained its autonomy, and was guiding his hand against his will. He no longer knew what was going on; the impressions piled up on top of each other and he didn’t know what – of all of it – he was most afraid of. He was completely paralyzed by fear, and he had the feeling of losing control of his bodily functions, particularly his abdomen. That took half an eternity, in which he expected a collision at every moment, and then he woke up with a twitch of his whole body that had something terrible about it, something uncanny, because it too completely escaped his control; it was an animal, a biological twitch that seemed to come from a very deep region of his brain.

  Perlmann leapt up and examined the mattress. It was clean. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked. From time to time he felt the physical echo of a turn to the left. Later he took off his wet pyjamas and went into the shower. It was just after midnight. The coast road was wet. But now it wasn’t raining any more.

  Over the next few hours he kept waking from the same dream at brief intervals, before dozing off again. This time it wasn’t a nightmare, but a bothersome and ridiculous combination of things that were completely unconnected as far as the dreamer was concerned. There was the name Pian dei Ratti, which returned with such frequency that it was like a constant background noise, an incessant echo that filled every last corner. And the name smelled. It was enveloped in a smell of sickly tobacco and mist; it was as if that smell stuck to the name, so that without the smell the name had no meaning whatsoever. The fact that the name was always there, ringing out, made one shiver and, sniffing, look for coins, which kept slipping with a painful rub through your fingers. Your shoes tipped over, and women laughed. Then everything was full of yellow sheets, and there was no point making yourself very small in the trunk.

  Perlmann changed the bandage on his finger. The inflammation was beginning to ease. Every time he woke up he opened the widow. Only a few drops were falling outside. The dream had the dependability and monotony of a record that always sticks at the same place. At half-past four he showered, shaved and dressed.

  ‘Buon giorno,’ said Giovanni, rubbing his eyes and looking at his watch.

  Perlmann turned round again in the doorway. ‘That equalizer that led to the penalty shoot-out. Who scored it?’

  Giovanni was almost struck dumb. ‘Baggio,’ he said at last, with a grin.

  ‘From which club?’
<
br />   Giovanni looked at him as if he had asked him what country Rome was the capital of.

  ‘Juve. Juventus Turin.’

  ‘Grazie,’ said Perlmann. He felt Giovanni’s startled eyes watching after him.

  He had become a weirdo.

  43

  The coast road was so quiet and deserted that Perlmann instantly forgot the three or four cars that came towards him, in their brief, eerie presence. Rapallo was a night-time silhouette with motionless lights that called to mind paper cuts and engravings. The flashing traffic lights in the dead streets of Recco gave him the feeling of driving through a ghost town, and the two old men who were creeping along close to the houses further intensified that impression. Lots of lights were on already in the farmhouses along the road to Uscio. The crowing of the omnipresent cocks drowned out the quiet sound of the engine. Perlmann tried not to think back to Monday. The main thing was that it plainly hadn’t rained here in the past few hours. Past Lumarzo, however, the gear stick was suddenly damp with sweat, and he had to swallow more and more often. On the climb towards the tunnel he drove with his arms outstretched on the wheel, and decided not to look and to think about nothing.

  He braked. Over on the light-grey crash barrier: dark strips. He put his foot down – only to put the car out of gear again straight away. Here, exactly here is where I took my hands off the wheel. He sat up. There was nothing to see. It was idiotic. He furiously screeched his tires and then stepped hard on the brake as if to prevent a pile-up in the empty tunnel.

  Most of the pale mud had been covered up with a tarpaulin, which had been weighed down with bricks. By the wall there stood an empty wheelbarrow, with an untidily rolled-up rope underneath it. He had never worked out what happened at this passing-place, and this latest change made no sense to him at all. He knew it was nonsense, bordering on paranoia, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he – he in particular, he alone – was being played for a fool – that someone was constantly rearranging things at this spot, with the sole intention of confusing him, goading his useless thoughts and stoking his apprehension. He bit his lips and drove out of the tunnel. The toothless old woman’s shop was in darkness, and looked like a discarded dream backdrop. It was a quarter past six, and still the darkest night.