Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  When Adrian von Levetzov’s name was mentioned, Perlmann gave a start. ‘I’d completely forgotten him,’ he murmured tonelessly, and he could see from Evelyn Mistral’s expression that his face revealed an anxiety that he would gladly have concealed at any cost. He hastily got up from the lounger, went over on one ankle and started hobbling to the entrance. As he passed the waiter, who was clearing a table, he forced himself to walk more calmly, unsure whether it was because of the pain in his ankle or whether it sprang from the desire to battle against anxiety and solicitude.

  Von Levetzov was standing at the reception desk talking insistently, and in terrible tourist Italian, to Signora Morelli, who replied to him with a motionless face and in perfect English.

  ‘If the sun disturbs you, sir,’ she was just saying with a coolness that Perlmann envied, ‘you need only draw the curtains. We cannot easily alter the location of the hotel, now, can we? We do not, I fear, have a larger desk. But I’m sure we can find an additional side table.’

  Von Levetzov’s face was pinched and slightly reddened when he looked over at the door. ‘Ah, Perlmann, at last,’ he said, struggling to rein in his irritation. ‘I thought you weren’t going to welcome me at all.’

  ‘Please do forgive me,’ Perlmann said breathlessly. ‘I was at the pool with Evelyn Mistral, and completely forgot the time.’ Why am I constantly apologizing? And to cap it all that sounded almost like a budding romance. One should meet such a man in a quite different way. One should be much more, obliging, but cool. I’ll never learn.

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ said von Levetzov, and it sounded as if Perlmann were a pupil who had turned up late or a tardy assistant who was being forgiven. ‘I’m just trying to explain to these people that I need more room to work, more surface area. Above all, I need a table for my calculator alone. And then the sun. I tried it out just after I got here. There are problems with the screen. You must have noticed that yourself.’

  Perlmann didn’t look at him as he nodded. Consequently, his lie felt more like an insignificant movement. He turned to Signora Morelli, whom he hadn’t liked at all at first when he had arrived the day before, but whose brittleness had made her more congenial to him each time he had seen her since. An additional table would, as she had said, be found for the signore, and, if he insisted, his room would be rearranged: the desk could be put against the back wall, which the sun didn’t reach. He could even be offered a different room, facing the rear and very shady, but perhaps a bit small for such a long stay.

  Perlmann spoke Italian with her, and he spoke more quickly than his ability actually allowed him to. After the conversation by the pool the Spanish words sometimes came to him rather than the Italian, but he went on and on talking, even when the question of the room had long been resolved, so that Signora Morelli looked embarrassedly across to Adrian von Levetzov, who was irritably waggling a hotel prospectus. She couldn’t tell that Perlmann’s talking was a demonstration, a show for this man in the dark blue, almost black suit with the waistcoat and the gold watch chain. Whatever may happen over the next few weeks, I can do that better than he can.

  ‘I didn’t know your command of Italian was so good,’ von Levetzov said acidly, immediately changing the subject by pointing out of the door to the bay, where the light was already starting to break, producing a reddish glow. ‘I myself prefer the Anglo-Saxon to the Latin world, and, in fact, I prefer English parklands to Mediterranean idylls. But I am forced to admit that it is quite charming here. I am also, of course, looking forward to my academic dispute with you, my dear Perlmann. Recently, sad to say, I have not got around to pursuing your latest works. The last thing I heard was your report at our conference a year ago. My book created quite a considerable stir, discussion forums, lectures, you know all that. But in the coming weeks I can catch up on my Perlmann reading. You know how highly I esteem you, even if we have opposing views. I’m very excited to hear your latest ideas. I shall take my time and I will be all ears.’

  It sounded like a threat to Perlmann, and he froze. For someone like him, who carried a facade around with him, and trembled behind it, waiting to be unmasked, this elegant man with the smooth black hair and the rimless glasses was a great danger. The biggest, leaving Millar aside. He talked like a character out of Thomas Mann, and the first time students heard him there were grins and giggles. But only at the outset. He was feared as an obsessive worker who couldn’t understand that other people needed a break from time to time. When he talked, as he had just been doing, about himself, it sounded like clumsy boasting. But although he was vain and mannered, he was by no means snobbish, but rather a man who lived in a modest apartment full of books and was entirely absorbed in his subject, to which he contributed more than most of the others. From time to time he was seen at the Hamburg Opera, only ever at Mozart and always alone. There were rumours about a brief liaison with an actress, and about alcohol. No one knew anything precise.

  Evelyn Mistral’s hair was tousled from rubbing when she entered the lobby with her swimming towel around her shoulders. For Perlmann, the radiant presence of her laughter had disappeared into the far distance. The presence of Adrian von Levetzov, and his last words above all, had interposed themselves between him and that laughter like frosted glass. The hour by the pool was by now nothing but a lovely deception, a Fata Morgana. He was relieved that she had rolled up Leskov’s text and passed the dictionary up to him with its reverse side up. He took both of them in one hand, which he then hid behind his back.

  Tall von Levetzov bowed down to little Evelyn Mistral, took her hand as if to kiss it and said in exaggerated Oxford English that he very much regretted the fact that her teacher hadn’t been able to come as he was, of course, irreplaceable. He seemed not to notice that her narrow mouth twitched at his tactlessness, and announced with a glance at the clock that he had to make a few phone calls, while his colleagues in Germany were still in the office. Then he hurried upstairs, always taking two steps at a time; as he did so his watch chain bounced up and down, emphasizing the grotesque contrast between the forced youthfulness of his movements and his old-fashioned appearance.

  When Evelyn Mistral had disappeared in the elevator, Perlmann stood motionless for a while and stared at the bright stripe that the afternoon sun cast on the marble floor of the lobby. She was more than twenty years younger than him, and yet the face with which she had watched von Levetzov’s departure had expressed a confidence and an effortless detachment of which he could only dream. It’s unfair, he thought repeatedly, as he hobbled back to his lounger to fetch his cigarettes. And every time that sentence was swamped by a wave of diffuse and directionless resentment, he rejected it as ludicrous nonsense.

  Laura Sand was not due to arrive before five o’clock. Perlmann went up to the room. When he slumped on the bed, he felt as if the whole supply of solitude that he had brought here with him had already been completely used up by these two encounters, and he was assailed by a feeling of defenselessness.

  What bothered him most when he visualized what had happened was the way he had rushed all the way along the terrace to the reception to greet von Levetzov. He could see himself: a gaunt man in a dark blue polo shirt and light-colored trousers, with short, black hair and a pale face behind his black horn-rimmed glasses, a man hurrying to be of service. And alongside that image, another image of solicitude appeared: the memory of his father when he was called to the telephone. It was the picture of a harmless, banal situation, and yet one of the worst mental images that he had brought from home. His father walked with oppressive haste and a facial expression that suggested it was a matter of life and death. On no account could anyone address him when he was walking like this; he walked in a way that caused one involuntarily to catch one’s breath. His face always seemed to have turned red, and to be covered with a film of sweat, glistening. He walked bent forward, at the service of everyone who paid him the honor of calling him on the telephone. The caller must not be kept waiting. By the very fact of
calling, this caller had acquired the right to have him, his father, entirely at his command. As the callee, at that moment his father had no life of his own, no time of his own and no needs of his own that a caller would have had to take into account. He was unconditionally available, all the time, on call.

  It had taken Perlmann some time to work out that for ages this image had shaped his relationship with the outside world, the world of other people. You had to be at the service of that world, you depended on the mercy of its acknowledgement. But at the same time neither he nor his father could have been described as submissive characters. No, that wasn’t it. It was the pure anxiety that this solicitude provoked; a constant fear of the consequences it might have if you let others feel that one had desires of one’s own, which were in contact with theirs, even if it only meant that the others had to wait for a while. The idea of these serious consequences was far from clear; the closer you looked, the more their content evaporated. But that didn’t change anything about the choking, suffocating power that that anxiety held over you. Once Perlmann had heard a doctor making a phone call during hospital hours. He had come out with some quite unremarkable sentences: ‘No, that’s impossible right now. I’m busy . . . I understand. Then you’ll just have to call again later on.’ The doctor had said these sentences in a friendly but firm tone that clearly delineated him from the person at the other end, and he had said them with an effortless self-evidence that had practically hypnotized Perlmann. It had been like a revelation: saying sentences like that in that tone – that was what you had to be able to do. You had to be able to say them without your heart thumping, without any inner agitation or even just stress, quite calmly and without having to think about them any further. On that occasion, when the door of the hospital had closed behind him and he had gone out into the street, he had known that a lack of solicitude would henceforth be the most important ideal of his life.

  When he thought of the veranda, of the gleaming tables and the high, carved armchair at the head, he sensed that he had never been as far from that ideal as he was now. When von Levetzov had spoken to him in his unusual way a little while before, he had felt as if he was at a school desk, as helpless and hopeless as a pupil at the Institute Benjamenta. Every word had been able to penetrate him unhindered, and it seemed to Perlmann that he had no way of preventing words from flourishing inside him like malignant tumours.

  Starting more or less with von Levetzov’s reference to that conference the previous year, Perlmann had assumed that he would be an ordinary participant when he had agreed, nothing more. He hadn’t been to conferences for a long time, and had seen this one as a good opportunity to show himself and to secure with a few skilful questions the general opinion that he was quite on top of things. To some extent he wanted to work on his disguise. It was a shock when he received the printed program two weeks before the agreed date and saw that he was presented as the main speaker, alongside a very vague and general title that someone had cobbled together for him out of a superficial knowledge of his work. In a mixture of fury and panic he picked up the phone, but as soon as he heard it ringing at the other end he hung up. He couldn’t give himself away. A man like him, an authority in his field, couldn’t lose face because of such a misunderstanding. However, if the opportunity presented itself he could make a barbed remark on the subject. But someone like Philipp Perlmann actually needed to have a lecture ready at all times. He couldn’t phone up and just say, ‘It’s a misunderstanding. I have nothing to say at the moment. Please pass that on.’ But really, why not? Agnes asked when she saw the way he was sitting at his desk. After that question he felt very alone. For a while he considered phoning in sick at the last moment. In the end he delivered a lecture that summed up what he had published over the last few years. Not a bad text, he thought, reading it through beforehand. But when he left the lectern to polite applause, he would really have liked to take the shortest way to the station, even though the conference lasted another two days. At dinner von Levetzov had sat down next to him. ‘A lecture of familiar clarity,’ he had said with a smile that wasn’t unfriendly or malicious, yet which had had the effect of a pinprick on Perlmann, ‘but it was more of a look back at the past, wasn’t it, or have you simply ignored the new?’

  A moment before, down in the lobby, von Levetzov had called that lecture a report. Nothing escaped him, that keen-minded man with his phenomenal memory, and he weighed his words very carefully. He had mastered the game like very few others. It had been almost impossible not to invite von Levetzov. Perlmann stepped to the window and looked out at the bay. The setting sun shone through a fine grey bank of clouds and gave the water the color of platinum. Lights were already going on one by one over by Sestri Levante. Only a few seconds had passed since the first cigarette, and already he was smoking as if he had never stopped. It hurt when he became aware of it. He felt as if he was crossing out the last five years, and he had the feeling that he was betraying Agnes.

  He thought of the other four colleagues that he still had to welcome, and planned to be laconic. Not unfriendly, not even cool, but laconic, with a certain terseness in his words. He usually said too much, even though he didn’t feel like talking, and they were explanations that often sounded like explanations, like justifications that no one had asked for. Also, he often expressed too much sympathy with other people, sympathy that wasn’t expected and perhaps not even wished for. Then he came across as intrusive, which was anathema to him. It was like an addiction.

  He reached for Leskov’s text. The first sentences in the second paragraph resisted his efforts, and several times he vacillated between the various meanings that the dictionary gave for a word; several appeared possible, yet none seemed really to fit. But afterwards things became more transparent and he understood one sentence or another without inwardly faltering in the slightest. The excitement that he had felt before, when reading the first paragraph, returned. These were not, as they had always been in the past, sentences in an exercise book, which weren’t there because someone wanted to say something particular in precisely this way, but because the reader was to be presented with a new variant of grammar or expression. Here the language was not a subject, but a medium, and the author simply assumed that the reader was a master of that medium. So you were being treated quite differently, as an adult, so to speak, as a Russian-speaker, in fact. It was like joining the real Russian world, like a reward for all that effort with your grammar book.

  Perlmann was euphoric. He walked up and down a few times, then leaned far back in the armchair and folded his arms behind his head. For the first time since his arrival he felt secure and sure of himself. He understood Russian. I’m someone of whom you can say: he reads Russian. If only I could share that with Agnes. Then it would be a presence. He dialled Kirsten’s number in Konstanz, but no one picked up. She was probably in a lecture or a seminar.

  It wasn’t the first time that Perlmann had crossed this point with a language. But this time it was different. The cheering experience was, it seemed to him, more intense than usual. Perhaps it was down to the fact that it had been so difficult for a long time and he had secretly expected never to get that far. Or else it was something to do with the Cyrillic letters, which still looked mysterious to him even though he had known them for almost two years. He looked at the typescript and repeated a game that he enjoyed afresh every time he played it: he studied the writing first with the eyes of someone who couldn’t read the letters, for whom they were merely an ornament. Then he let his eyes somehow tip over into the gaze of someone who doesn’t stop with the appearance of the script but, guided unnoticeably by his perfect familiarity with them, presses on directly to the meaning of what is written. It’s barely believable, he said to himself then, but I can really do it.

  He went on reading now, breathlessly and always fearing that the first two paragraphs might have been an exception, and he was about to capsize and would have to go back to texts that treated him like a schoolboy again. But alth
ough his little Langenscheidt dictionary failed him now and again, he managed, and he was so enthralled that he heard the noises in the next room only after some delay. It sounded as if someone were pushing something heavy against the door; then there came the sound of men’s voices, the rattle of keys, the door snapping shut, footsteps fading away.

  Only now did it become clear to Perlmann that he had assumed – had, in fact, taken it as his due – that there should be no one staying in the room next to him. As if the whole world had to know and respect the fact that he was a person who needed a lot of empty space around him. The new guest cleared his throat, then sniffed loudly, and at last he blew his nose with three long trumpet blasts. Perlmann gave a start: the walls were so thin, the building so badly soundproofed. He tried to find his way back to his cheerful excitement of a few moments before, but it had been displaced by a feeling of oppression, almost panic, and when he spent a while looking in vain for an expression in the dictionary, he discovered that the cause had been a simple reading error. His irritation grew from one minute to the next, and when something fell over with a loud crash in the next room, he lost control, stormed out and thundered with his fist on the door of the neighboring room.

  The man who opened it was Achim Ruge. Perlmann felt the blood rising to his face.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he stammered and offered him his hand.

  Ruge pointed at the open hard-shell suitcase, which had fallen so that the clothes now lay scattered on the floor and the alarm clock was wedged between a pair of shoes.

  ‘And I took such trouble packing,’ he grinned, ‘much more than usual. And it’s a new suitcase, too.’