Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  It could only be two kilometers, or three at the most. Only a few bends. But it wasn’t behind this one, or the next. Seen from this direction everything looked very different. Suddenly, so quickly that he couldn’t believe it, he was at the gas station where he had made the first attempt to disappear Leskov’s text. Yes, that was the word. He stopped outside the dark cottage and tried to imagine what had happened afterwards. His memory was sluggish; nothing came back of its own accord. It was hot and stuffy in the car. He had been driving the whole time with the heating turned up full. But the air from outside made him cold, and he whirred the window back up. The skin of his face tensed and felt like paper.

  What was he actually doing here? In the end he would be holding a pile of dirty, ragged pages in his hand. Then what? What in the world would he tell Leskov when he handed him the papers? It would, that was clear, have to be the story of an oversight, an ineptitude, an unintended stupidity. And the story would also have to explain why he had discovered his stupidity only today, of all days. Perlmann felt his head emptying, and felt that emptiness filling with a paralysing weariness. With the best will in the world, even calling on the furthest reaches of his wildest imaginings, he couldn’t possibly explain how the text had made it out of the closed suitcase and the closed trunk into the mud, without anyone having had a deliberate hand in it.

  A first shimmer of diffuse, grey light lit up the solid cloud cover. A car passed now every few minutes. If he simply kept on driving to Genoa, he would be at the airport just before eight, and soon after that the Avis counter would open up. But I can’t just let the sheets of paper lie here and rot. That’s out of the question. He has to get his text back. Somehow.

  Perlmann set off slowly, even more slowly than on Monday. It was up there on the bend that the truck with the full-beam headlights had appeared, the one he had allowed to pass him. And, sure enough, the first pale sheet lay there in the roadside ditch. The sight of it electrified him and all of a sudden he was wide awake. Hurriedly, as if the paper might escape his clutches at the last minute, he got out and bent down. It was a piece of half-transparent, crumpled grease-proof paper. He couldn’t halt his hand, he had to touch it. Now he had mayonnaise on his fingers. Disgusted, he rubbed them on his trousers and got back into the car.

  It couldn’t have been the next bend; there was no paper to be seen far and wide. It was the next but one. Perlmann could see all the pale sheets in the ditch from far away, and accelerated as if on a home straight. He came to a standstill with both wheels in the ditch, climbed out of his crookedly parked car and ran breathlessly over. The pages were often far apart, but in two places several had fallen on top of each other and formed irregular little piles. Perlmann laid them on the hood. The sun must have been shining here yesterday, the two top sheets were both dry. The pale yellow had faded almost completely, the sheets were curling, and it looked as if they had blisters. Then came a few that were still damp, and under those several that hadn’t been touched by rain at all, at least in the middle. Only at the edges were they all wet and grey with dirt. The ink on the top sheets had run. The first two were hard to read, but it got better after that.

  So far there were seventeen sheets, including page 77. Now it was the turn of the individual, widely scattered sheets in the ditch. When Perlmann was bending down for the first one, a car drove past and its wake blew three pages down from the hood. He hurried back and gathered them up. One page had fallen under the wheels and been ripped. Annoyed, he laid the whole pile on the mat in front of the passenger seat. Half of them were completely smudged, but Leskov would still be able to reconstitute the text. The others, which had been lying face down, were in a better condition. There, too, the round letters of Leskov’s careful handwriting had often dissolved at the edges, and flowed outwards. At those points the background was no longer yellow, but a washed-out pale blue shimmering into green. But the text was still legible. The sheets that had lain among the trees had been dried by the sun and had warped; the others had softened and were unpleasant to the touch.

  After that, Perlmann often had to climb the steep embankment to fetch the next sheet. Many were sticky with mud, some were crumpled and torn. At one point he slipped on the damp soil, the pain from his ankle shot through him like knives and he nearly fell. At the very last moment he was able to cling to a tuft of grass. Now he had earth under his fingernails. From here he managed to gather fourteen pages together, including page 79, which had a space at the bottom, but which still couldn’t be the last, as there was no address on it. So at least twenty-five pages were still missing. He leaned, exhausted, against the hood and smoked.

  By now it was twenty to eight and broad daylight. The traffic was building up, and now the last truck was coming towards him. Its bumper was far too narrow, its gas tank unprotected. When it had passed, Perlmann, who was standing in the middle of a black cloud of smoke, became aware – to his amazement and relief – that his heart wasn’t pounding. Only his cigarette had fallen into the road without his noticing. It was, he thought, as if a first thin dividing wall had formed between him and the trucks; a first protecting distance which would get bigger and bigger over time until one day he would also be able to forget the red mist. As long as Leskov has his text back.

  Astonishingly, large numbers of sheets had been blown on to the embankment that sloped downwards on the other side of the road. The ground there was soft and damp, and at one point Perlmann sank beyond the edge of his shoes into the quagmire. The sheets had been resting on the tips of the grass, and weren’t very dirty. With two exceptions, they had been lying writing-side down, and were still legible. Now he had rescued a total of sixty-seven pages. He looked around a wider area, methodically, patch by patch, the whole thing three times. The rising sun pierced the cloud cover and Perlmann looked up, blinking. There were sheets in the tops of two tall bushes, one in each. It took a desperately long time before they finally came floating down, and with his furious shaking he must have presented a comical sight, because the school bus drove unusually slowly, and the children laughed and pointed at him.

  One sheet was the first page with the title. There was no name underneath. It was creased and had a hole in it from a branch, but reading it wasn’t a problem. At least eight pages were missing now. Perlmann looked at the wheels of the passing cars and imagined the sheets getting stuck to tires like those and then being pressed rhythmically between rubber and tarmac, before ending up lying in rags somewhere.

  When the road was empty for a little while, his eye fell on a brown rectangle, which hid part of the white marking in the middle of the road. It was a page of Leskov’s text, drenched with rain and dirt and driven over countless times. He lifted it by one corner, but the paper was fragile and tore immediately. A bottom layer. Puzzled, he opened the glove compartment and saw the map that Signora Morelli had lent him on Saturday night. He half-unfolded it and pushed it carefully, centimeter by centimeter, under the soggy sheet. On the lid of the trunk he started carefully dabbing the page down with his handkerchief as if it were an archaeological find.

  It was page 58. In the middle, Leskov had written a subheading. All that could still be made out was that it had consisted of two quite long words, preceded by the number 4. But the ink had run almost completely; it had mixed with the dirt, and all that remained was a smear. Perlmann wiped the words again with another tip of his handkerchief. Perhaps something of the old ink traces that had been put on paper in St Petersburg would be revealed if one dabbed away the diluted and running ink that now lay over it. And some clues did become visible. But they weren’t enough to make out an unambiguous sequence of words. He lit a cigarette. The last word, he was more and more certain of it, must be proshloe: the past. But he could imagine at least three variants: iskazhennoe proshloe: the distorted past; pridiumannoe proshloe: the invented past; obmanchivoe proshloe: the deceptive past. And even a fourth: zastyvshee proshloe: the coagulated past. That he knew zastyvat’, to coagulate, he owed to a viewer of Agnes
’s photographs, who had dared to compare her particular way of capturing the living present in images with the process of coagulation. Her fury had been boundless, because coagulation was her name for the process in which people rigidified into lifeless figures because of their conventions. And to keep from suffocating on her fury, afterwards she had done something that was usually Perlmann’s own habit: she had looked up the word in every available dictionary.

  Smoking hastily, Perlmann repeatedly compared the words he tried out with the thin traces of ink. But the vague lines simply made any decision impossible. He measured his conjectures against what he had of Leskov’s thoughts in his head, and against the vocabulary that he had appropriated from Leskov’s text. But even that didn’t yield complete clarity. The intervention of language in the events of memory could, according to the first version, be characterized in all four ways. And besides, the text that he knew was not a reliable standard, since Leskov, as he had said, had thoroughly reworked it for the second version.

  What was it that he had said about the new version on the drive on Monday? In the middle of traffic that was now becoming increasingly dense, and in which the trucks were beginning to accumulate, Perlmann tried to call Leskov’s words to mind. He had perceived them, he remembered that. And something had passed through his head as he did so. He closed his eyes. On his face he felt the heat of exhaust fumes. A truck’s gears clashed. He saw the beam from its left headlight in front of him, with nothing matching it on the right. Otherwise, he had no memory. And for a short and terrible moment he had the impression that he no longer knew how it was done: remembering. Then he put the card with the sheet on the rest of the pile and got in the car.

  He would have liked to arrange the sheets to see how big the gaps were between the missing pages – whether they were all gaps of one or two pages, which it would be relatively easy for Leskov to fill, or whether there were bigger breaks in the text that would take him weeks, because a whole train of thought would have to be reworked. But in the state in which the pages were, that could not be accomplished without further damage.

  He was sure that 79 was the highest page number he had read. It was the first thing he had paid attention to, and the page lay separately beside the pile. He picked it up and laboriously translated the last line that Leskov had squashed in tiny letters between two crossed-out lines: But that would be a false conclusion. Instead one must . . .

  It wasn’t inconceivable that the text finished on the next page, which meant that there were only ten pages missing. Naming the correct conclusion could be the rhetorical culmination and climax of the work as a whole, and that could easily be done on a single page. But of course, it was equally possible that Leskov had taken a breath here, and introduced a new thought that it would take five or ten or even more pages to develop.

  A great many tires had driven over the bottom-most papers. It hadn’t rained on Monday. Even so, the dirt from tires and the road had acted as glue, with the result that a whole pack of pages had been stuck to a tire all at the same time. Not twenty – some of the ones at the bottom would have come away, and he would have had to find those now. Ten? Five? Three? Perlmann turned and drove to Genoa, slowly and with both hands firmly clutching the wheel.

  44

  In the first big department store he went into the stationery department and demanded 320 sheets of blotting paper. The salesgirl incredulously repeated the number before she went to the store room. Perlmann put the four packs in the car and then walked helplessly, hesitantly, along the street. He imagined a bright library, empty and silent, with long tables on which he could peacefully clean each individual sheet of Leskov’s text and lay it between two sheets of blotting paper. He aimlessly crossed the road and turned down a quieter side street. From the end of it came the break-time cries from a school. Ten o’clock. He stopped for a moment and rocked on his heels. Then he walked on, avoided the scuffling children in the playground and stepped inside the schoolhouse.

  A woman came towards him in the corridor, dressed in white like a doctor. Did she by any chance have a classroom for him? Perlmann asked. Or another room with long tables. Just for about half an hour. He had to dry some important papers. ‘I . . . I know it’s an unusual request,’ he added when he saw her lower lip beginning to jut.

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, as if to dispel a hallucination. Then she studied him from top to bottom, from his bleary-eyed face to his shoes, which were completely covered with mud.

  ‘What do you think this place is?’ she asked coldly. ‘A Salvation Army hostel?’ With that she left him standing there and closed an office door behind her.

  In the next alley but one he passed a little carpenter’s workshop. In the middle of the room there were two long, empty tables. A man in an armchair was reading the newspaper. Perlmann braced himself for a fresh rebuff and went down the two steps. Could he use the two tables for a few minutes to . . . arrange some important papers? He would also pay to . . . rent the tables, so to speak, he added, when the man’s face darkened.

  ‘Chiuso,’ the man said gruffly and held his newspaper up in front of his face.

  The lunatic with the important, wet papers. The madman of Genoa with the thousand sheets of blotting paper. Perlmann went and stood in the hallway of a building and waited until the rain shower had passed.

  He could send Leskov the text anonymously in St Petersburg. Frau Hartwig had the address in the office. But how would the unknown sender know the address, when the last page was missing? That didn’t work. He would bring suspicion on himself. He could neither give him nor send him the text. So what was he doing here with hundreds of sheets of blotting paper? The madman with the blotting paper.

  In a side street not far from the car he came upon a bar with wide shelves along the walls. After ordering a coffee and a sandwich, he asked if they would mind if he spread some papers out on the shelf for a moment.

  ‘As long as you don’t drive my customers away,’ was the reply.

  ‘Mamma mia,’ said the proprietor when he saw Perlmann coming back with the stack of papers, hanging down at the sides, and two packs of blotting paper.

  Perlmann started very carefully separating each sheet from the pile and laying it between two sheets of blotting paper. Now he would need one more sheet of paper to note something down, he said to the proprietor.

  ‘Anything else?’ the landlord replied wryly, and handed him an order pad exactly like the one in the harbor bar on Friday. ‘Would sir like a pen with that?’

  Perlmann grinned and took his own pen from his jacket. He noted down the page numbers and made corresponding piles. The blotting paper turned blue and brown. The proprietor came out from behind the bar and glanced curiously at the yellow papers.

  ‘What language is that?’

  ‘Russian,’ said Perlmann.

  ‘So you can speak Russian?’

  ‘No,’ Perlmann replied.

  ‘Now I don’t understand anything any more,’ said the proprietor. ‘And all the dirt on the pages! Mamma mia!’

  The madman with the dirty Russian text that he can’t read.

  Among the page numbers in the thirties there was a gap of three pages, and towards the end two pages in a row were missing. Otherwise, there were gaps of only one page. On page 3 came the first subheading: 1. Vspomishchesya stseny: Remembered scenes. Subheadings 2 and 3 must be on the missing sheets. And probably towards the end there was also a section called Appropriation or something like it.

  It could have been much worse, thought Perlmann as he laid the packed pages on top of one another. As long as a lengthy and crucial piece wasn’t missing at the end, Leskov would manage.

  ‘Mamma mia!’ cried the proprietor, throwing his hands in the air with ironic staginess, when Perlmann now asked him for a piece of twine. He watched him carefully tying the whole thing up. ‘So what are you going to do with it now?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Perlmann and ate his bread.

  ‘Buona fortu
na!’ the proprietor called after him, and it sounded as if he was releasing some hopelessly confused and extremely vulnerable person into the harsh world outside.

  Perlmann put the bound package in the trunk along with the rest of the blotting paper. Then he drove to the airport. The man with the red cap stood next to his cabin and smoked. Perlmann didn’t know why, but this man – the sight of whom made him feel suddenly hot – reminded him that there was something else he had wanted to do, a secret thing. He turned and drove a little way back until he was behind a hedge. Exhaustion blocked his memory. Only when he glanced at the bandage on his finger did it come back to him. He took the screwdriver and the wrench out of the trunk. Then he looked quickly around and inserted the screwdriver at the exact spot where the two coins touched. With the third powerful blow, the black box creaked, and the coins fell on to the rest of the money. The belt scraped a little, but otherwise it ran impeccably. As he closed the door he noticed the paint that had come off the bottom corner. That hadn’t been from the crash barriers in the tunnel. It must have happened when Leskov had heaved himself out of the car at the gas station, and the door had bumped against the concrete plinth with the air-pressure metre. When he nearly caught me.

  Perlmann took the suitcase off the back seat, locked the car and glanced again at the driver’s seat. The bloodstains on the pale leather looked almost black.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for this car for almost two days, Signore,’ said the lady from Avis. She recognized him now, and her tone turned frosty. ‘Why didn’t you contact us? We have our job to do, too.’