Perlmann's Silence by Pascal Mercier

such trouble packing,’ he grinned, ‘much more than usual. And it’s a new suitcase, too.’
    He was wearing a brownish suit which was too short in the sleeves, and looked like a farmer’s Sunday suit, and an open white shirt that looked like something left over from the Sixties. But what chiefly captivated the eye was his big round head, which was almost completely bald. A bullet would bounce off his skull , Perlmann thought every time he saw him. The fact that there was something grotesque about Ruge’s head, something of a living death’s head, was down to his glasses, glasses with a yellowish frame of gloomy transparency that was as unmodern, as inelegant as if someone had done everything within their power to create the epitome of an anti-fashion frame. The impression was reinforced by the fact that one earpiece had been repaired with fine wire, the end of which stuck out and threatened to tear open Ruge’s temple at any moment.
    The organization of the laboratory had gone faster than expected after all, he reported in his broad Swabian accent. Perlmann had forgotten how close his ä was to his e . Ruge had travelled through the night and hardly slept, because in the full second-class compartment lying down had been unimaginable.
    ‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he grinned when Perlmann asked him why he hadn’t flown or at least travelled first class.
    As Ruge walked over to his suitcase to fetch an offprint that he had brought specially for him, Perlmann saw that the room was arranged as a mirror image of his own. This meant that the two desks stood exactly opposite one another, as in a piece with two pianos, except that there was a wall in between. That idea momentarily unsettled Perlmann. With dry words of thanks he took delivery of the thick offprint, which was actually a small book, and disappeared to his room where, without thinking anything about it, he chained the door.
    It was now half-past five, and the dusk was sinking surprisingly quickly, almost headlong, on to the bay. The coast by Sestri Levante had become a flickering strip of light, and now the hotel lamps were coming on, each one four white spheres in an irregular arrangement. At midday Perlmann had cursed the southern light because it promised him a present that could never be reached. Now that it made way for darkness and was overlaid with the glow of artificial light, he could hardly expect to see it again. As clumsy as someone constantly running behind himself, only now did he miss its hypnotic power, which made one forget and which took away the past along with its heaviness, just as the need to plan anything burned away to nothing. With the dusk, the muted colors and the magic of the lamplight, his inner space filled once more with all the images that he feared one minute before feeling nothing but weariness the next, and a longing for the strength that could wipe out everything.
    The figure that crept backwards out of the taxi, doing battle with two enormous camera bags, which became caught on the seat and then in the door, could only be Laura Sand. She asked the driver who set her suitcase down on the steps to hold her cigarette while she looked for money in the pocket of her long black coat. Then she heaved the case up one step at a time and, with her other arm, caught the camera bags when they threatened to hit the banisters.
    Perlmann rushed out and realized too late that he had left his key in the room. Feeling a sharp pain in his leg, he went over on his ankle and came hobbling, face distorted with pain, into the lobby where Laura Sand was stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray on the reception desk.
    He had forgotten the extent to which she could fill a whole room with her white face, her mockingly pouting lips and the shadow of rage in her almost black eyes. He had remembered above all the dense ponytail of deep black hair which fell unevenly to her shoulders on either side of a muddled parting. Even now, as she held out her