Read Online Perlmann's Silence by Pascal Mercier - Free Book Online

persuade himself that all that water could make the afternoon’s clumsiness and solicitude disappear. The coming dinner, he said to himself, was the actual beginning. Everything before that was mere chance and didn’t count.
    When he had shaken the water out of his ears and heard the telephone, he immediately thought it must have been ringing for ages. He ran dripping through the room. As he reached for the receiver, he looked at his wet footprints on the pigeon-blue carpet and felt a desperate annoyance with his subservience, which mocked all his good intentions, rising up within him.
    ‘Hi, Phil,’ was all the voice said. Perlmann recognized it immediately. The two syllables were enough to remind him what he had tried without great success to explain to Agnes after he got back from Boston: the voice formed the words in a completely undetached way. Its tone didn’t just show that this was the speaker’s mother tongue; the tone wasn’t only an expression of the self-evidence with which the language was at the speaker’s disposal. There was more at stake: the tone contained – and even Agnes’s frown could not shake his conviction about this – the message that this was the only language that truly deserved to be taken seriously. Self-righteous, you understand, his penetratingly sonorous voice is self-righteous. He speaks as if the others were to blame and very much to be pitied for the fact that they, too, don’t speak East Coast American, this Yankee language. This self-righteousness, this sonorous arrogance, that was what drove me up the wall.
    ‘Hi, Brian,’ said Perlmann, ‘how are you?’
    ‘Oh, fine,’ said the voice, and now Perlmann was once again quite sure that what he had said to Agnes was the precise truth.
    ‘By the way, Phil,’ the voice went on, and now this American mania for shortened first names was getting on Perlmann’s nerves again, ‘apparently my room’s right next to yours.’
    Perlmann saw Ruge’s desk in front of him, right up against his own, and he felt as if the two walls of his room were being pushed closer and closer together until they crushed him.
    ‘How nice,’ he heard himself saying and had a feeling that with those empty words he was sealing his own defeat. He had never, even when standing naked, felt so exposed.
    ‘Me, too,’ he said at last, when Millar stressed how much he was looking forward to seeing him later over dinner.
    Big puddles of water had formed around his feet, and were spreading outwards. He was shivering, and went back into the shower. It was quite clear, he thought, as he let the water run over his face: he couldn’t stay in his room. And the new room had to be far away, on another floor and if possible in the other wing of the hotel.
    But what explanation should he give to Signora Morelli when making his request? And how could he prevent Ruge and Millar from taking it personally when he moved out? He would have to destroy something that would make the room uninhabitable and couldn’t be quickly repaired. Maybe rip the telephone from the wall and claim he had tripped over the wire. But a telephone connection could be quickly mended, far too quickly. Or do something with the television aerial and say he’d accidentally bashed it with the chest of drawers. But even a television socket could be easily changed. There wasn’t anything that could be broken in the bathroom without making it look deliberate. Pouring something on the carpet, like a whole pot of coffee. But you didn’t ask for a different room because of a stain on the carpet, least of all if you’d made it yourself.
    Achim Ruge blew his nose and trumpeted even more loudly than he had in the afternoon. Shortly afterwards the sound of piano music came from Millar’s room. Bach. Trembling with irritation, Perlmann tried to find the station on the bedside-table radio. Nothing. Millar must have brought a radio-cassette recorder with him.
    He listened reluctantly. He didn’t know this