Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  Before he went to dinner, he flicked absently through Ruge’s paper. If I start on it on Monday, I’ll still have fifteen days for my own contribution. It was only when he reached the stairs that he realized the idea didn’t throw him into a panic. He paused. It was as if the thought had occurred in the mind of someone else, someone completely uninvolved, and the weird idea crept over him that he was splitting away from himself.

  ‘I knocked on your door several times yesterday and today, Phil. I wanted to talk about the baffling question you asked me at the session,’ Millar said across the length of the table when the waiter had brought the soup. ‘And then, when you weren’t at dinner, I started to get worried. We all did, by the way.’

  Perlmann felt that his fear of Millar was suddenly turning into black humor, accompanied by a pleasing sense of dizziness like the one he always felt when he had his first cigarette of the morning.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. Deadpan was how he would have described his face at that moment.

  ‘I know that now,’ said Millar, and lowered his head. ‘Evelyn’s just told me about the business with the new room.’

  Perlmann looked into the sea-green of her eyes. She had her face under control, but her eyes contained a certain roguish laughter that seemed to have its origins right in the dark yellow particles of the iris.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The bed. My back. Do you get that, too?’

  ‘No,’ replied Millar, ‘I don’t. Not at all.’

  ‘He just couldn’t stand being between us, Brian,’ Ruge grinned.

  Millar picked up his tone. ‘And we’re such nice guys, Phil. But seriously: can we make an appointment for tomorrow?’

  The panic mustn’t show in his voice, and Perlmann ran his fingertips along his forehead, back and forth, and then again.

  ‘I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow,’ he said, and was pleased when he noticed that the quiver in his voice had remained a mere idea. ‘I’ll let you know some time next week.’

  ‘OK,’ Millar drawled, and Perlmann was sure that his drawl expressed a hint of suspicion. Or at least the drawl contained the message that suspicion would be inevitable if the matter were to be postponed again.

  Perlmann lifted his plate and tried to get the last bit of soup into his spoon. With this kind of spoon that was something of a feat, and so it was that he didn’t notice Carlo Angelini until Silvestri got up to hug him. Angelini darted Perlmann an apologetic grin and walked around the table to greet the ladies first. Finally, he fetched a chair from the next table and sat down beside Perlmann. Unfortunately, he would have to leave again tomorrow morning, he said, but he wanted at least to look in this evening. How was it going?

  ‘Benissimo,’ said Evelyn Mistral, when Perlmann hesitated. Everything was perfect, Millar agreed, and before von Levetzov could speak, he thanked Angelini on behalf of the group.

  Angelini listened to the explanation of how the work had been organized, and then asked about the subjects under discussion.

  ‘I know more or less what you’re working on,’ he said to Perlmann, who no longer had the faintest idea what he had told him back in Lugano. And then, with a smile that alternated between pride and irony, Angelini announced that the mayor of Santa Margherita was going to hold a reception for them all.

  From the corners of his eyes, Perlmann saw Laura Sand pretending to blow her nose to keep from exploding with laughter. Only a small party, Angelini said, and the high point would be the appointment of Perlmann, as leader of the project, as an honorary citizen of the town.

  ‘With a certificate and a medal,’ he grinned. ‘It will begin on the Monday of the final week, so three weeks the day after tomorrow,’ he said after glancing at his pocket diary. ‘At eleven o’clock in the morning. Of course, I will be there as well.’

  If Silvestri gives a presentation in the fourth week, I will gain a day because of the reception.

  ‘Then you just give your paper on Monday afternoon,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann.

  ‘And, of course, we expect something very special from a newly fledged freeman of the town,’ Ruge chuckled.

  Angelini invited everyone for a drink in the drawing room. It was puzzling what connected Angelini and Silvestri, Perlmann thought as he walked behind the two of them, and saw them joking like very good friends. Angelini, the Italian yuppie in his elegant suit, who moved in the world of conventions like a fish in water, and Silvestri, this insubordinate, anarchically minded individualist, who happened this evening to be wearing a rumpled black shirt on top of everything. Was it something from their school days? Or because they both came from Florence?

  My hatred of conventions, he thought when he heard the fragments that Angelini addressed, in turn, to his colleagues. That hatred had been in Perlmann long before he met Agnes. But it was only because the feeling had found an echo in her that he had become fully aware of it. What Agnes had been most unable to bear was people who not only thought and acted conventionally but felt conventionally as well. People who felt what they thought they ought to feel. Her attempts to capture the subject in photographs were a failure. He heard her dark, sonorous voice, which could sound so brave before sometimes collapsing into the deepest melancholy: At best you can show what people feel, and not that it would be more authentic to feel differently now. There are no pictures for that. The hatred of conventional feeling had been a strong bond between them. But it had often alienated her from people they liked. It had, against her will, made her shy of people.

  ‘This might be the moment to play something for us,’ von Levetzov said to Millar, pointing to the grand piano with a smile full of flattering respect. He’s treating him like his brilliant star pupil, who has outgrown him through his diverse and towering talents. And he didn’t need that. Not him.

  ‘Oh, yes, that would be super!’ exclaimed Evelyn Mistral.

  Perlmann was irritated by her girlish enthusiasm and the teenage vocabulary that he had liked so much on her arrival, because it matched the red elephant on her suitcase. In defiance of all reason, he was furious about her enthusiasm, and internally reproached her for it – as if she were obliged to know what a nightmare Millar was gradually becoming to him, and as if she owed him making these sensations her own.

  ‘If you insist,’ Millar smiled, and heaved himself out of the deep armchair. On springy steps he walked across to the grand piano, unbuttoned his blazer and straightened the piano stool. He was making, Perlmann thought, the face of someone trying not to look vain, even though he knew that all eyes were upon him.

  The movements of his hands were economical, energetic in the powerful chords, but without any effusive artistic gestures, he never lifted his hands more than a few centimeters above the keys. Reluctantly, Perlmann was forced to admit that he liked that. He himself had tried to play that way.

  And yet he found Millar’s hands repellent. They were, he realized for the first time, hairy all the way down to the joints of his fingers. The thick hair on his arms continued into his hands like fur.

  He compared the playing hands with the hands of the four other men. The only disturbing thing about Silvestri’s slender, white hands was the yellowish shimmer on the right index and middle fingers. Angelini was holding a cigarette, and one couldn’t have seen the nicotine on his tanned fingers in any case. Von Levetzov’s hands were folded on his knee, manicured, smooth hands with the first liver spots, on the little finger of his left hand a signet ring with his artistically intertwined initials. Achim Ruge’s hands lay on the wide arms of the chair, heavy hands that looked more like those of a manual labourer or a peasant than an academic. Perlmann liked them, just as he had found it easy to like Ruge since changing rooms.

  The face that Millar made when playing matched the sober, matter-of-fact movements of his hands. It was an attentive, concentrated face that seemed to show a certain emotion, even though Millar had not made the slightest attempt to comment upon the music or his feelings through facial expressions. I like that, too, in fact. W
hy can’t I simply take this man Brian Millar as he is? Why do I constantly have to chafe at him?

  Millar was playing Bach. It must have been one of the English Suites, Perlmann thought, but he couldn’t have said which one. It was a while before he could identify his strange sensation: it was the absence of any surprise that what Millar was playing was Bach. Fine, the music coming from his room had been Bach as well. But that wasn’t it, he thought. He had the impression that it couldn’t have been anything but Bach; that where Millar was concerned it could only have been Bach. He thought he knew that if he had been asked before what Millar would play, he would have named Bach without hesitation. Bach and perhaps classical jazz, those were the sounds that suited his incredibly blue eyes in his clear, alert face, and his well-articulated, clear way of thinking, talking and writing.

  He played brilliantly, or rather, Perlmann thought after a while, he played competently, even if that was an unusual word in this context. Perlmann was immediately prepared to concede that he would have expected nothing less from Millar. But it was more to do with Millar’s playing. He noticed it only reluctantly, but Millar played his Bach in a quite particular style; a style, besides, that he had never before encountered in such an extreme form. For a long time Perlmann sought words for it, and finally opted for this formula: the melody had been completely dissolved in structure. He tried to identify two features of his experience that were conjured up by Millar’s playing. One perceived the way in which the sequences of notes were spread out over time. The notes, even though they had faded away in the usual sense, in another sense remained where they were, and subsequent notes were added as part of a structure, and thus, from one bar to the next, a kind of architecture came into being, one that was experienced as simultaneity. The leading notes currently sounding were, Perlmann thought, like the moving tip of a piece of chalk writing, the traces of whose past movements were seen as a whole on the board. But isn’t that always the case with melody? Isn’t that actually the essence of musical form? How come it sounds like something new and specific in his playing, something special? How does he do that?

  The other effect of Millar’s playing was that one couldn’t surrender to the heard melody. One couldn’t allow oneself to fall into it for as much as a moment; one was kept outside as if by an invisible wall, and that made listening demanding, even though one wasn’t really aware of it. Perlmann tried out a series of descriptive words: austere, brittle, matter-of-fact, cold, intellectual, gothic. He rejected them all. They were superficial and clichéd. One had to take into account the fact that the special quality of Millar’s playing was not simply the expression of a temperament, a character, but that it represented an actual interpretation, an interpretation of Bach’s music.

  Perlmann hid his right hand under his left and tried to play along with Millar’s right hand. As he did so he moved his feet inconspicuously. It was a long time since he had done that. Back then, as a sixth-former, he had gone to practically every concert in which a pianist was involved, and sometimes he had even hitchhiked to Lübeck and Kiel. His favorite concerts were pure piano evenings, when you could concentrate upon the pianist entirely without distraction. At the back, in the cheap seats, you could brazenly close your eyes and try to imitate the hands that were playing at the front. Most of the works that he had the opportunity to hear in this way he was already familiar with. His musical memory was – apart from Bach – excellent. It hadn’t been that. Does Millar know what that is: a frightening passage?

  By now the guests from outside, who had previously been sitting at the dinner table, had arrived in the lounge. The ochre-colored armchairs were all occupied, the door to the bar was open, and the formal clothes contributed to the impression that a little concert was taking place. Millar had now been playing for half an hour, and all of a sudden Perlmann found his Bach flat and boring. He would have loved to run to the trattoria and read in the chronicle what had been going on in the world when he had heard the grey-haired, bent-backed Clara Haskil at one of her last concerts.

  Millar, who seemed baffled by the size of the audience behind his back, thanked them for their applause with an athletic bow that reminded Perlmann a little of a salute. The loudest and longest applause came from Adrian von Levetzov, who at first looked as if he was going to get up, but then, after glancing around at the others, remained sitting on the edge of his chair.

  ‘¡Un extra!’ cried Evelyn Mistral. ‘How do you say that in English?’

  ‘Encore,’ Millar smiled, and when he saw the others nodding he sat back down at the piano. For a moment he took off his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘What we will have now,’ he then said with complacent thoughtfulness, ‘is a precious little piece that hardly anyone plays. For example, it doesn’t appear on a single record. It’s a little trouvaille of my own.’

  After only a few bars Perlmann felt a sense of familiarity. With increasing clarity he had the impression that he knew this piece, or rather, he had known it well a long time ago. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the past, for a long time in vain, until it was suddenly quite naturally there. Hanna’s piece, of course. It’s Hanna’s piece. The one we called the ‘ingenuous birthday piece’, one of her favorites.

  He immediately saw her before him: Johanna Liebig with the dark strand in her fine, golden hair, which framed an unusually flat face with a very straight nose and a bronzed complexion. You could call it a beautiful face, although you had to be careful not to say it to her. He had always found it a little unapproachable, and had feared the direct gaze from her hazel eyes, which she was able skilfully to deploy. That unapproachability was the reason nothing had ever happened between them. He simply hadn’t dared, and suddenly he had realized that it was too late. At the time he hadn’t known that there was a time for such things, and that you could miss it, and even today he didn’t know whether she’d been waiting for it. Then, after a time when she kept out of his way, they became good friends. They listened to each other’s playing and criticized one another, and sometimes they went to concerts together. She was more talented than him, but in her case he hadn’t minded. There was no competition between them, on the contrary, he didn’t mind her being superior to him, and mothering him slightly, in a mocking way. He only grew furious when she, who was able to take everything more easily, more playfully, accused him of stubbornness. That made him feel helpless, and afterwards he wouldn’t say a word; something that happened later with Agnes, when she tried to rage against his ponderous and often humorless manner.

  ‘What I like so much about it,’ Hanna had said when she played him the piece for the first time, ‘is its simplicity. I would almost say, its touching simplicity.’ He had understood immediately, but hadn’t been contented with the word. ‘Simple is too pallid,’ he had said after a while. ‘Ingenuous would be better, if it didn’t have that dismissive aftertaste.’ Then they had talked about the word for a long time, and to a certain extent rediscovered it for themselves. By the end the aftertaste had gone, and they merely found it a beautiful word. When he glanced at the score and saw that it was number 930 in the catalogue, he had laughed. ‘If you read the number the way the Americans write a date, with the month before the day, you get your birthday!’ And so the name had been born: the ingenuous birthday piece.

  ‘That was all Bach, of course,’ von Levetzov smiled, ‘but I can’t put my finger on that one at the moment. I know my way around Mozart better.’

  ‘Whereas I don’t know my way around anywhere,’ Ruge said with his inimitable dryness, receiving ringing laughter in which some of the other hotel guests joined in.

  ‘It was the second and third of the English Suites,’ Millar said in his explaining admiral’s voice.

  ‘English? Why English?’ Laura Sand asked with the sulky, irritable expression that she always wore when she didn’t understand something.

  The title, Millar explained, crossing his legs, didn’t come from Bach himself. There was a copy
of the score by Johann Christian Bach, who worked in London, and on it was written, without any further commentary, faites pour les Anglais. So people became accustomed to talking about the English Suites.

  While Millar was talking, and extravagantly explaining every detail of the story, Perlmann suddenly had the feeling that he had made a discovery: The will to know something very precisely like that. That’s what I’ve always lacked. I only want to know the outlines of things, and I like it when the lines blur a little. That’s why academic research was always alien to me from the outset.

  She would like to hear the encore again, Laura Sand said. ‘I like it. It’s so . . . ingenuous.’

  As Millar was playing, she closed her eyes. Her face was beautiful; Perlmann hadn’t noticed that until now. Before, her furious expression with its mocking lips had dominated everything else. He had seen her as intelligent and interesting, as filled with a penetrating alertness, but not as beautiful. Now the long lashes and the almost straight eyebrows gave the white face, which the African sun had clearly been unable to affect, a marble calm. She looked exhausted.

  Perlmann held Hanna’s face next to it. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled that this woman had used, in English, the very word that he and Hanna had used for the piece. Did that violate his past intimacy with Hanna, as expressed in their little naming game?