Perlmann’s Silence
Also by Pascal Mercier
Night Train to Lisbon
Perlmann’s Silence
Pascal Mercier
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2005 by Pascal Mercier
Translation copyright © 2011 by Shaun Whiteside
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First published as Perlmanns Schweigen in German, in Germany, in 1995 by Albrecht Knaus Verlag
First published in English, in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ebook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9486-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
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The others are really others. Others.
I
The Russian Manuscript
1
Philipp Perlmann didn’t know how to live in the present. He never had. That morning, though, it was worse than usual. He reluctantly lowered his Russian grammar and looked across to the high windows of the veranda, in which a crooked-growing pine was reflected. It was in there, among the gleaming mahogany tables, that it would happen. They would look at him expectantly as he sat at the front, and then, after a prolonged, unbearable silence and a breathless halting of time, they would know: he had nothing to say.
Ideally, he would have left again immediately, without giving a destination, without an explanation, without an apology. For a moment the impulse to flee was as violent as a physical pain. He snapped the book shut and looked across the blue changing cabins to the bay, which was flooded with the gleaming light of a cloudless October day. Running away: at first it must be wonderful; he imagined it as a quick bold rush, headlong through all feelings of obligation, out into freedom. But his liberation wouldn’t last long. His telephone at home would ring again and again, and eventually his secretary would be downstairs pressing the doorbell. He wouldn’t be able to go into the street or turn on the light. His apartment would become a prison. Of course, it didn’t have to be Frankfurt. He could go somewhere else – Florence, perhaps, or Rome – where no one would be able to find him. But that would turn those cities into hideouts. He would walk through the streets, blind and dumb, before lying in his hotel room and listening to the ticking of his travel alarm clock. And eventually he would have to give himself up. He couldn’t disappear for the rest of his life. If only because of Kirsten.
He couldn’t come up with a convincing excuse. To give the true reason would be impossible. Even if he could summon the courage, it would sound like a bad joke. It would leave a sense of high-handedness, of wilfulness. The others would feel they were being mocked. Certainly, these people would take control of everything. But I would be finished. There’s no excuse for such things.
The wonderful light which made the still surface of the water beyond the cabins look like white gold was to blame for everything. Agnes had wanted to capture that light, and that was why he had yielded at last to the urgings of Carlo Angelini. And Perlmann found him unlikeable, this wiry, very alert man with the winning smile that was just a little too practiced. They had met on the edge of a conference in Lugano at the beginning of the previous year, when Perlmann was standing by the window in the corridor long after the session had begun. Angelini had spoken to him and Perlmann had welcomed this excuse not to enter the lobby. They had gone to the caféteria, where Angelini had told him about his job with Olivetti. He was thirty-five, a generation younger than Perlmann. He had taken the offer from Olivetti only two years before, after spending some years as a language assistant at the university. His job was to maintain the company’s contacts with the universities, and he was able to do so entirely on his own terms, with a considerable budget at his disposal, because his work fell under the rubric of publicity. They had talked for a while about mechanical translation; it had been a conversation like many others. But all of a sudden Angelini had become very lively and asked him if he felt like setting up a research group on a linguistic theme: a small but intensive matter, a handful of first-class people getting together somewhere nice for a few weeks, all at the company’s expense, of course.
Perlmann had felt at the time that the suggestion had come far too quickly. Certainly, Angelini had made it plain that Perlmann wasn’t a complete stranger to him, but he had known him for little more than an hour. Perhaps one had to risk such bold gestures in Angelini’s line of work. In retrospect, Perlmann felt as if his instincts had been warning him even then. He had reacted to the suggestion without enthusiasm and rather lamely, but he had still observed that, in his view, people from different disciplines ought to be represented in such a group. It had been an offhand remark, not properly thought through, and Perlmann hadn’t seriously imagined the project coming to fruition. His impression was that everything had been left sufficiently vague and noncommittal, when he had suddenly dashed to the lecture hall.
Perlmann had forgotten that conversation until a few weeks later when a letter came from Angelini, followed almost immediately by a phone call from Olivetti’s headquarters in Ivrea. Perlmann’s suggestion, it suddenly appeared, had proved very popular within the company; particularly, of course, with some colleagues from the research department, but it had also been well received by the directors. They were especially charmed by the possibility of being able to promote a project that had something to do with the company’s products, while it also went far beyond it, by taking in questions of general interest, of significance to the whole of society, so to speak. He, Angelini, suggested that the encounter should take place the following year in Santa Margherita Ligure, a spa town not far from Rapallo on the Gulf of Tigullio. They had had meetings there on many previous occasions and everything had always gone very well. The best time for the planned undertaking, he said, would be the months of October and November. It was still mild then, but there were hardly any tourists left. There was a quiet, contemplative atmosphere, precisely what was required for a research group. Where everything else was concerned, as the head of the group Perlmann would have an entirely free hand; particularly, of course, in the selection of participants.
Perlmann bit his lip and felt helpless annoyance rising up within him as he thought back to that conversation. He had allowed himself to be taken unawares by the sonorous, confident voice at the other end, and for no reason whatsoever. He owed this man Carlo Angelini nothing at all. At the time he had been glad that the man had helped him to avoid the conference, but he was also a stranger, and his ambitions meant nothing more to Perlmann than the plans of Olivetti as a whole. Certainly, in the conversation he hadn’t agreed to do anything. Quite soberly, he could still have said no. But he had missed th
e crucial moment, the moment when it would have been quite natural to say, ‘There has been a misunderstanding. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t fit in with my other plans. I’m, sure, however, that I have many colleagues who would be more than happy to put your plan into effect. I will think about names.’ Instead, he had promised to think about the idea. And instead of simply allowing an appropriate period of time to pass and then declining, he had fetched the map. He and Agnes had sat over it and worked out the places that could be easily reached from there: Pisa, for example, and Florence, but also Bologna, of which they were particularly fond. Italy in winter, that was one of Agnes’s pet ideas. She had lots of plans for photographs. She might even try color photography, which she usually considered beneath her. Whatever. At any rate I would like to capture the light of the south, as it is in winter, and this is the opportunity, don’t you think? I’ll make it sound appetizing to the agency. I’ll have to do a bit of persuading, but in the end they’ll let me go. Perhaps I could even make a series out of it: The Wintry Light of the South. What do you think? Admittedly, October and November were not exactly winter, but Perlmann didn’t want to be pedantic, and some of her enthusiasm had rubbed off on him. It was grotesque, he thought, and pressed his fingertips to his eyes, but at the time he had actually seen himself, above all, in the role of the person who would accompany Agnes on her photographic trip, supported and protected by her ability to conquer the present for both of them. It seemed incredible to him now, but that was how it had been: out of that vision, that daydream, he had finally agreed, had applied for leave from his job and written the first invitations. Ten months later, when Agnes died and everything collapsed, it had been too late to call things off.
Agnes had been right: the blue of the sky was strangely transparent here, as if in addition to the sun there were another, invisible background source of light. It gave the space that arched over the bay a veiled, mysterious depth, a depth that contained a promise. He had first encountered that blue and that light when his parents had driven him to Italy. He had only been thirteen, and had no words for it, but the southern colors had sunk deep within him – how deep he really understood only when the train came out of the Gotthard tunnel at Göschenen and the world looked like a picture in tones of grey. Since then the southern light had been holiday light for him, the light that was life as opposed to work. The light of the present. But it was a present that always remained only one possible present, one that one could live if one were not here only on holiday. Each time he saw it he felt as if this light were only being shown to him to make him see that he was not living his real, everyday life in the present. And because it was only ever a holiday light, the sight of it became interwoven with the sensation of something transient, something that could not be captured and that could also be taken away again as soon as it came within reach. Increasingly, he had come to see it as a light of farewell, and sometimes he hated it because it gave him the illusion of a present that perhaps did not exist.
He stared, eyes smarting, at the surface of light now cleaved by a motorboat. The crucial thing, he thought, would be this: to allow the appearance of this light to be everything, the whole of reality, and seek nothing behind it. To experience the light not as a promise, but as the redemption of a promise. As something at which one had arrived, not something that constantly aroused new expectations.
He was further away from that than ever. Against his will, his eyes slipped once more to the veranda. The gleaming red tables with their curved legs were arranged in the shape of a horseshoe, and at its head Signora Morelli had placed a particularly comfortable chair with a high, carved back. ‘Whoever is allowed to sit here must be worthy of it,’ she had said with a smile when showing him the room the previous evening.
For the third time that morning he opened his Russian grammar. But he couldn’t take anything in; it was as if there was no way in from outside – as if he were suddenly blind to signs and meanings. It had been like that the previous day on his journey here, a journey that had become a single tormenting battle against recalcitrance. On the way to the airport he had envied the people on the tram who weren’t carrying luggage, people with pale, sulky, Monday faces who didn’t have to fly to Genoa right now. Later on, he had wanted to swap places with the airport staff, and for a long time he watched the passengers, all of them, who had just landed and who were coming towards him from his plane. They’d put it all behind them. It was a rainy, windy morning, the cars were driving with their lights on, a December mood in mid-October, weather that could have intensified the thrill of anticipation of a flight to the south. But nothing struck him as more desirable than to stay in Frankfurt. He thought of the quiet apartment hung with Agnes’s photographs, and what he really wanted to do was shut himself away in there and remain incommunicado for a very long time.
He had been sitting in the waiting room by the gate for a while, when he suddenly went out again and called his secretary. It was a phone call with no discernible purpose; he was repeating things they had discussed many times: what to do about his mail and how else they would stay in touch. Frau Hartwig didn’t know what to say, her helplessness was clearly audible. ‘Yes, of course, Herr Perlmann, I will do it just as we agreed.’ Then he enquired, with sudden impertinence, after her husband and child. That untimely interest wrong-footed her, and there was a long, embarrassed pause before he said, ‘All right then,’ and she said, ‘Yes, bon voyage.’ He had been last to board.
On the plane he had struggled with himself. He told himself that while this might indeed have been the dreaded day of his arrival, it was still a day that belonged to him alone, and on which he could do something for himself. He set the Russian grammar down on the empty seat next to him. Then he waited for the magical effect of the plane as it started to move – waited for everything to come into flux in the moment of take-off, for everything to seem lighter. On a day like this you would soon be in the clouds, there were moments that were frightening in spite of one’s experience, and then suddenly one emerged into a deep blue, transparent sky, a dome of pure ultramarine, and down below was the dazzlingly bright sea of clouds, from which individual formations loomed, little white mountains with pin-sharp edges, which tended to produce in him the impression of perfect stillness. I have escaped, he usually thought, and enjoyed the feeling that everything that had held him trapped until a few moments before was losing its power and falling away silently behind him, and he didn’t have to do a thing. Yesterday, however, none of those things had happened, the whole thing had struck him as dull and boring. Forward impulsion with roaring engines, nothing else. Yes, outside it was as it always was, but he felt as if he were in an advertisement for the airline, shown a thousand times and without authenticity, without presence. He pulled the shutter down over the window, chose not to have anything to eat and tried to immerse himself in his grammar. But his usual concentration abandoned him. He stared again and again at the little boxes and exercises, but they simply didn’t take. Then, when the plane began its descent, he was as violently startled by the gentle change in the sound of the engine and the feeling in his body as he would have been by the sound of an explosion. So here he was. When someone accidentally bumped into him as they were leaving the plane, he had to close his eyes for a moment and clutch himself before he managed to walk calmly on.
In Genoa the weather had been flat and dead. Grey, dirty-looking cloud banks let through only a dull, uninspiring light. Things were obtrusively only themselves, they had no significance and no lustre. The industrial plants that the airport bus drove past were ugly; there didn’t seem to be a single unbroken windowpane, and he wondered how such a run-down terrain could produce all that bright white smoke, which looked poisonous. The few people in the station, it seemed to him, moved wearily in an alien time that flowed with nightmarish slowness. The smoking staff at the ticket counters showed no sign of serving him. Even the taxi driver didn’t seem to care much about his fare. Only after he had
finished chatting to his colleagues did he bother to ask which way to go. ‘The shortest,’ Perlmann had said furiously.
Before the plane took off for the return journey, four weeks, five days and three-and-a-half hours would pass. Perlmann stared at the reddish stone tiles of the hotel terrace. It was like a huge mountain range of tenseless time that loomed all the higher the more burning his desire was that things were over. And as the desire became even more violent every time he had it clearly before his eyes, and threatened to grow to infinity overall, Perlmann had a sense that that longed-for moment would never come, because there was no possibility of climbing over all the dead time that loomed ahead of him like a menacing wall. The only way out lay in silencing the desire and achieving inner calm. Then the mountain range would remove itself, and once the inner calm was complete, time would seem like a plane that he would be able to cross effortlessly to reach that distant moment.
He finally wanted to memorize the various expressions that existed in Russian for must. He ran through the list and immediately forgot every line. Sitting back in the shade didn’t do any good, and it had nothing to do with the sunglasses, either. And learning foreign languages was something he had mastered. The only thing, in fact. It was also the only thing that could really hold his attention. Studying languages, he had the feeling that his life was advancing and he was developing. And sometimes, when a foreign sentence, a hitherto inaccessible text, suddenly opened itself up to him, he felt as if he had snatched a breath of presence.
It only he could feel that in his academic work as well. It seemed strange to him, but he no longer knew if it had ever been so. If it had, it was a long time ago, in a time when he had not yet known the paralysis that had tormented him for so long. By now he had the feeling that he didn’t really know what it was like: doing academic work. It wasn’t writer’s block, he was sure of that. He had never experienced it, and even now he still had the capacity, he could feel it, for fluent, accurate and sometimes brilliant formulations. It was something else, something fundamentally much simpler and at the same time something that he couldn’t have explained, not to himself and even less to other people, particularly not to his colleagues: he had lost his faith in the importance of academic work – that belief that impelled him in the past, which had made daily discipline possible, and the associated failures appear significant.
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