Perlmann's Silence by Mercier Pascal

Author:Mercier, Pascal [Mercier, Pascal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-01-02T20:00:00+00:00

29

When Perlmann awoke, drenched in sweat and still quite dazed, it was half-past eight, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky as it had done on the previous two days, so that behind his numbness he managed to think for a tiny moment that it was only Friday morning and everything was still all right. Once it had slipped away, the illusion could not be repeated, and he walked slowly and unsteadily to the bathroom. Yesterday, showering had seemed to him like something that was no longer the fraudster’s due. This morning, after a night in which quite other things had passed through his mind, that feeling seemed obsolete, almost laughable. Under all that water the numbness fled, and the returning dream images gradually lost their power.

Nothing has happened yet, he thought again and again. I still have thirty hours left. His hunger repelled him. He really didn’t want to eat anything ever again. But that vexatious feeling had to be removed, so he ordered breakfast, even though the idea of meeting a waiter now was disagreeable. As he mechanically stuffed croissants down himself and drank cup after cup of coffee, it slowly dawned on him that there was one additional possibility he hadn’t thought of in the course of the previous night. He could stage a car accident in which he killed himself and dragged Leskov to his death as well.

Initially, he didn’t dare imagine how that might happen in any detail; at first the important thing was to resist the thought in its abstract form. He felt his breath racing, and saw his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette. And yet he was amazed how little resistance that new thought encountered within him. It was, after all, a murder. But that struck him as oddly irrelevant. The main thing was that everything then would be darkness and total silence. He smoked in long, deep drags as he plunged into that idea. The longer he lingered with it, the more drawn into it he became. All the weariness that had grown within him over the past few days seemed quite naturally to have been invested in that imagined silence. And not only that: suddenly he felt as if all he had done during those months since Agnes’s death was wait for that silence to arrive. Certainly, there was a murder bound up with it. But the thought of Leskov remained pallid, the after-effect of the pills paralyzed his imagination, and behind Perlmann’s heavy lids one single thought formed over and over again: I will not have to live with this murder for so much as a second. So not for a second of my life will I be a murderer. He felt that this was a piece of sophistry, an outrageous false conclusion, but he didn’t have the will to disentangle it, and clung to the truth that those two sentences bore on their surface.

He wrote a circular in which he informed his colleagues that Vassily

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.