Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘It’s basically impossible to capture this light on film,’ said Laura Sand, setting her big camera bag down on the wall next to him. ‘It’s as if a luminous depth is something quite different from the physical radiance to which the film reacts.’

  Perlmann had given such a violent start that she rested her hand on his arm, startled, and apologized. It was always the same, she said. David, her husband, often jumped because she was so quiet.

  ‘That’s balanced by Sarah’s noise! Especially with her bloody aerobics!’

  They stayed together until dusk. She didn’t really like people watching her take photographs, she said at one point. ‘But since it’s you . . .’

  She taught him how to see. Like Agnes. And yet quite different. Agnes had always talked about light, form and shade, brightness and depth, planes and edges. Listening to her, one might have thought she saw the world as a deserted geometrical structure. And her actual theme was human movement. Not just any movement: moments that point beyond themselves, scenes that concealed a story within themselves and forced the viewer to invent that story. Narrative photography she had called it. You understand: colors would only disturb us, distract us from the essential. It’s important for the man on the platform to explode in his movements when he glimpses the woman on the running board. The color of his coat is irrelevant.

  She had had an incredible instinct for the density of moments. And her patience had been incredible, too, when she had waited hours and days for dense scenes, in pubs, at stations, at the beach, once even at a boxing match, which she loathed. When that wait even exceeded her patience, she had been tempted to start smoking again.

  Laura Sand’s thinking was quite different. She thought in colors and moods, and what she said about them in the course of the morning contrasted so blatantly with her love of black clothes that Perlmann came close several times to talking to her about it. She used only color words that he had never heard before, and when she noticed that he couldn’t get over his astonishment, she laughed her throaty laugh and went on: ‘. . . medium flesh, canary, rose madder lake, magenta, true blue, sap green, sanguine . . .’

  No, she wasn’t interested in people – ‘when I’m taking photographs, I mean’. At first, she had only taken landscape shots, and later, in connection with her job, animals had joined them. David had to take the holiday snaps.

  ‘He thinks I’m a misanthrope,’ she smiled. And after a pause she added: ‘He knows me well. “That’s why you leave the monkey talk to other people,” he said again recently, “monkeys are far too much like people.”’

  Impressionist photography, she called her idea.

  ‘Actually impossible. Physical events are far too dense. I’ve become an expert in filtering things out. My theory is, in fact,’ she laughed, ‘that it has much more to do with the gaps – the void – than the rest. David and Sarah have been teasing me about it for years, and at David’s poker game my theory has turned into the monthly running joke: “So from now on let’s build the houses with a load of void, it’ll be cheaper.” Oh, well. It’s a weird theory anyway, and sometimes I don’t even understand it myself.’

  You wouldn’t have to worry, Perlmann thought, about this one delivering the kind of remark that Agnes came out with at the airport that time. Standing on the moving walkway, he had turned round to look at a big poster for Hong Kong, a picture with soft, velvety contours, a dreamy picture. Nice bit of kitsch, Agnes had said, a bit like the way you look at the world. Then, probably startled by her own slipped-out observation, she had laughingly taken his arm and pressed her head against his shoulder. Don’t be cross, she had said quietly as she felt how stiffly he was walking on. At passport control he hadn’t, as he usually did, turned round again. On his return they both made more of an effort; she was particularly attentive, and talked more than normal. They didn’t mention the remark. But for a while he was rather monosyllabic when she showed him her pictures. A thin fissure had remained between them, barely visible and yet never quite forgotten.

  It was night by the time they entered the hotel. After Signora Morelli had given them their keys, Perlmann would have liked to voice his feeling that the past few hours had meant something to him. But the few steps to the elevator didn’t give him enough time, and when Laura Sand looked quizzically at him, it was as if anything that might have developed into a suitable sentence had been extinguished. He raised his hand with the key, it jingled faintly, and then he went upstairs, alone, and was glad that no one had done anything to change the gloomy lighting of his corridor in the meantime.

  It was pure nonsense, he thought under the shower: what was there to make her suspicious? He had asked her whether severing was an apt word for the splitting of a personality; then they had talked for a while about cracking; in the end she had, with a laugh, explained the Australian phrase cracking hardy. Then it had seemed for a moment as if she wanted to ask him the reason for his particular interest in these words, but he had managed to change the subject. No, it really couldn’t be said that he had given himself away.

  Lying on the bed, he thought again of Agnes and what was special about her photographs. Sometimes she had spent months taking pictures only of the faces of ancient people, it had been like an addiction. The series had been a hit. She had had an eye for details, a gaze, it seemed, that could give a detail a stressed and unusually intense presence – as if it were her gaze that had fetched that detail from the blurry distance of a shadowy, temporal existence into the brightly lit present of solidly outlined forms. How he had envied her that gift!

  She had never planned for it, forgetting things, losing her overall vision in her chaotic jumble of notes. Then he was the one who had jumped in to straighten things out. As a result he had become a compulsive planner, a fanatic of the overall vision. That had been the price, the price for her present.

  The dining room looked very different this evening. Most of the circular tables had been replaced by a festively decorated dining table, and garlands of colored paper hung from the garlands. It was a wedding dinner, served by two extra waitresses who had been hired specially, as Adrian von Levetzov was able to report.

  ‘Hungry again?’ Millar asked, looking at Perlmann with his head inclined and a resigned smile on his lips. Perlmann said nothing, and concentrated on the shellfish starter. The jokes being made at the big table were hard to make out; most of the wedding guests spoke a dialect that he didn’t understand.

  Now von Levetzov was telling everybody about a book about Henry Kissinger that had been discussed in the Herald Tribune.

  ‘That war criminal,’ Giorgio Silvestri said tightly. ‘He urged Nixon to bomb Cambodia and Laos. They were neutral countries at the time. That man ought to be up before a court.’ He looked challengingly across at Millar, who was dissecting his fish. ‘Isn’t that right, Brian?’

  Millar slid his fish knife carefully under the spine, then used his fork to release the whole skeleton before setting it down on the edge of the plate. The corners of his mouth were twitching. He savored the moment. At last he took a sip of wine, dabbed his lips with his napkin and returned Silvestri’s impatient gaze with a soft, warm smile that Perlmann had never seen on him before.

  ‘Absolutely correct, Giorgio. That was exactly what I wrote in the college paper at the time. On the first page. After that my parents’ check didn’t come through for a while.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And it never really sorted itself out.’

  It was incredible how quickly Silvestri’s face reacted. Barely had there been a hint of surprise and bemusement than his tense and hostile expression collapsed to make way for a grin, which revealed as clearly as in words that he had underestimated Millar. He raised his glass to him. ‘Scusi. Salute!’

  It took Perlmann much longer to deal with his surprise. Millar as a spokesman for the student movement? He glanced furtively across at Millar, who was now concentrating once more on his fish. Something within him began to move, as slow and creaking as a rusty cog. Perhaps, out of
pure fear, Perlmann had got him wrong. Fear was a feeling that degraded other people into mere screens. He was about to declare him a sign of his altered perception, when that silly remark over dinner occurred to him, and he devoted himself once more to the task of removing the head of his fish. It was only when the waiter had cleared away the plates that his irritation had sufficiently faded.

  ‘One question, Brian,’ he began, and then set out his uncertainty about the various English words for color and shade. Once again Millar surprised him. He tried out the different words, some out loud and some again with mute movements of his lips. He was starting to enjoy himself, and when he took a sip of wine it looked as if he were tasting the words along with the wine.

  Again Perlmann’s feelings pulled and creaked. Millar, the man from Rockefeller, the intellectual interpreter of Bach, as a sensual man. Sheila. And then, as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightning, he was filled once more with hatred for this man Brian Millar, who was, by pleasurably weighing up nuances of meaning, contesting the activity on which he, Perlmann, had spent two weeks up in his room defending himself against the others, not least against Millar himself. And like an idiot I myself have inspired him to do so. Because I thought I had to give him a sign. Solicitous idiot that I am.

  He thanked Millar in the hope of stopping him, but now Laura Sand smilingly reminded Perlmann of their afternoon conversation about other English words. Achim Ruge once again demonstrated his astonishing confidence in English, and all through dessert these things formed the topic of conversation.

  ‘You need this for your paper on language and memory, don’t you?’ Millar asked at last.

  Perlmann felt his hands turning cold. He didn’t want to nod at any cost, and yet he nodded.

  ‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ Millar said, and through the swelling heat in his face Perlmann could see that he was saying it without suspicion or spite.

  ‘One has the sense that you’re working on it day and night. Well, in . . . wait . . . in two weeks we’ll be able to read it.’

  Before Perlmann followed the others into the drawing room, he went to the toilet and held his face in the water that he held in his cupped hands. It’s only another eleven days. By Thursday morning Maria will have to have the paper.

  ‘If I play again today, it will have become a ritual,’ Millar was saying as Perlmann entered the lounge.

  Von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral clapped. Millar grinned, unbuttoned his blazer and sat down on the piano stool after a hint of a bow. He played preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  For several minutes Perlmann sat there with his eyes closed and drove all his strength inwards to keep the panic from welling up in him like a fountain. If I’m inside something I can write very quickly. I know that. And things like that don’t change. I need a day to get into it. Or two. Then there will be nine days left. Seventy, eighty working hours. I can still do it.

  His spasm eased slightly, the music got through to him, and vaguely, as if from a long way away, there arrived the memory of Bela Szabo wiping the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. Perlmann reached for this hazy image as if for a life-saving instrument, and pulled it to him and stared at it until it became clearer and denser and gradually revealed a whole scene which, in its growing vividness, forced back the flickering fear.

  While telling Perlmann the story in a hoarse voice, Szabo had sat doubled up, his elbows propped on his knees, his head in his hands. Shostakovich, who had been sent as a juror to the Bach competition in Leipzig, had spoken to him at the subsequent buffet. Szabo’s composition wasn’t bad, he had said, it was thoroughly pleasant, and even a bit more. But not really a creative idea.

  While trucks thundered by outside the Conservatoire Szabo had repeated that sentence over and over again, and in the bitterness of his voice there had been the certainty that he would never be able to forget it. Perlmann had got up and, in spite of the heat, closed the window.

  And that time in Leipzig Shostakovich had revealed himself as a complete coward, Szabo had said as he wiped his face with his handkerchief. When he was asked about an unsigned article in Pravda, in which Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were branded as obscurantists and lackeys of imperialist capitalism, he had, albeit hesitantly, declared his agreement. He couldn’t believe his ears, Szabo said, and then Perlmann had seen the blood pulsing in the purple vein of fury that had appeared in his pale, alabaster temple. That kind of cowardice, Szabo had squeezed out, was partly responsible for the bloody crushing of the Hungarian uprising, at the end of which his father had been put against the wall. For perhaps a whole minute Szabo had sat there with his fists clenched. Then he had looked at Perlmann with his watery grey eyes, which were not dissimilar to Achim Ruge’s. Why am I telling you all this? Then, in English: Let’s get back to work! When he hated the language.

  This evening once again Bach’s preludes and fugues had become invisible structures of crystalline architecture – fine white lines behind the night. That was the music that had so fascinated Shostakovich in Leipzig at the time that he reacted with his own cycle. Perlmann tried to hear the fugues of both composers side by side. Had he really liked the glass pearling and that special kind of fading that characterized Shostakovich’s pieces at that concert? Or had it been Hanna with her bandaged hand who had transfigured everything?

  ‘You looked as if you were very far away, on a different star,’ Evelyn Mistral said as they went outside. ‘Shall we have another walk tomorrow? Perhaps there’ll be another wedding!’ Perlmann nodded.

  But not really a creative idea. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Perlmann looked up the Russian term for a creative idea and then tried to formulate Shostakovich’s whole remark in Russian. He wasn’t sure whether the way the Russian words lined up obligingly side by side caught the fluid casualness of the German remark – nicht wirklich ein Einfall. And suddenly he felt as if he couldn’t speak Russian at all. He stared at the words for a while to make sure that he really could read the Cyrillic script.

  Had he himself ever had a truly creative idea? The moon shone into the room. He drew the curtains. Now the darkness was stifling. He opened the curtains again. Nine days. Ten. Panic seeped into his agonizing alertness. He went to the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill.

  15

  He slept long into Sunday. The room-service waiter who brought him his late breakfast handed him a piece of paper that had been stuck on the door: So, no ‘wedding walk’? If you want to do anything in the afternoon, let me know! Evelyn.

  He liked her careful, forward-leaning handwriting with its rounded connecting lines, and when the waiter had closed the door behind him, he went to the telephone. In the middle of dialling he hung up. Not with this head, and certainly not in such a jittery state.

  Now, in Leskov’s paper, came the pages in which the memory of sensory experience was interpreted as analogous to the memory of emotions. The rich vocabulary for nuances of smell and taste, but also for qualities of sound, was like a thicket that one had to fight one’s way through, one step at a time, and once again Perlmann became aware how many nooks there were in English into which he had never yet shone a light. Often he had to pick up his English-German dictionary to know what was being talked about, and a good two dozen points remained where he wrote down an English word without knowing what it meant. Millar would know. Then he felt like a machine arranging signs purely according to syntactical rules, without knowing anything about the correspondence of the meanings. That didn’t only produce a sense of blindness and helplessness, but also kept him from really entering the slipstream of translation, which could have protected him against the panic that was – now that the numbness of night had faded – forcing its way ever more powerfully into his consciousness.

  When he became aware that anxiety could spill over and drag him away at any moment, he stretched out his arm and reached for the Russian-Italian dictionary in the back corner of his desk, as if for an anchor. He was l
ucky, a series of the words he had failed to understand were made clear to him via this indirect route, and now he threw himself with all his might into the attempt to translate the next few paragraphs directly into Italian.

  He deleted the first few lines that he had written right after an English paragraph, and took fresh sheets of paper for the Italian text. The prickly feeling that he always had when he jumped back and forth between two foreign languages slowly appeared. The passages that followed dealt with memories in color, and now he discovered how inexperienced he was in Italian when it came to unusual words for colors. Cheerfully excited, he picked up the red dictionary, in which he found many of the words that Laura Sand had explained to him the previous afternoon. He assembled an English-Italian list of these words, and was irritated that the Russian-Italian dictionary was too limited to fill in all the gaps.

  When he looked in his suitcase for new writing paper, he came across the black moleskin notebook with his notes in it. The only text of my own that I have with me. In a mixture of curiosity and dread he sat down in the red armchair and began to read:

  It cannot be stressed often enough: one grows into the world by repeating words parrot-fashion. These words don’t come by themselves; we hear them as parts of judgments, mottos, sentences. For a long time these judgments behave in a similar fashion: we simply parrot them as well. Not unlike the refrain of a children’s song. And one must almost describe it as a stroke of luck if one later manages to recognize these insistent, numbing sequences of words for what they are: blind habits.

  mestre is ugly, says the father whenever the topic turns to Venice. venice is a dream. mestre, on the other hand, is ugly. We hear the sentence over and over again; it comes with the regularity of a machine. It’s sheer repetition, the click of an automatism, nothing else. And then one repeats the sentence. One has not checked it, not a trace of appropriation. All that’s really happening is this: one repeats it; one says it again with increasing routine. That’s all. One understands the sentence; it’s a sentence in one’s mother tongue. Nonetheless, it doesn’t express anything that one could call a thought. It is a blindly understood, literally thoughtless sentence.