Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  He sat down, exhausted, on the bed and stared for several minutes at the stack of texts by Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand, and the mail from Frau Hartwig. His exhaustion turned into indifference, and at last all that still interested him was his hunger. He showered quickly and then went down to eat. As quiet as someone who has given up on everything, he shovelled the food into him and answered questions with the mild friendliness of a convalescent.

  Later he lay awake for a long time in the darkness without thinking anything. There was nothing left to calculate. He wouldn’t have a text to give Maria on Friday. The tension was over. Everything was over. When the effect of the pill flooded through him, he gave up and dropped off.

  19

  Right from the start, Laura Sand’s session went better than all the others. The veranda was in darkness and the projector cast film images on a screen that stood at a slightly crooked angle on a stand. There were quite long sequences of images, in which animals showed behavior that would be hard to see as anything other than symbolic. At short intervals, clouds of cigarette smoke passed through the beam of the projector. Laura Sand’s voice was strangely soft, and sometimes that made her seem bashful, so that she threw in the occasional brash remark. There was nothing – that much was quite clear – that she loved as much as these animals. Often she showed a sequence several times to stress an observation or enlarge upon an explanation. But she also repeated sections in which the movements of the animals were simply comical. ‘Again!’ Ruge cried out at one such point, and to Perlmann’s surprise Millar joined in, too: ‘Yes! Where’s the slow-motion button?’

  Perlmann was glad to be able to sit in the dark. After the third aspirin that he put in his mouth with the most economical movements possible, and washed down with coffee, the headaches slowly faded, and he escaped into the wide Steppe landscapes that formed the background of many of the animal scenes. Often Laura Sand hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and had played expertly with the light, until the animals’ bodies moved against the light like figures in a shadow play. And sometimes the camera escaped the research discipline, and crept over the empty landscape, which glimmered in boiling midday light. Then Perlmann managed to forget that in exactly a week he would be the one sitting up there at the front.

  When the blinds went up and everyone rubbed their eyes in the murky light of a rainy day, it was already past twelve. A debate immediately broke out about the fundamental concepts with which Laura Sand tried to capture what she had observed. Perlmann got involved, too, and defended them even more resolutely than Evelyn Mistral. What he said contradicted everything that he usually claimed in publications, and more than once Millar raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Barely a quarter of Laura Sand’s texts had been discussed when it was time for lunch.

  ‘So you had a film show today!’ laughed Maria when Perlmann ran into her outside the office. ‘By the way, I explicitly told Signor Millar again that your text, as you told me, can wait. But then he didn’t want me to type out his things anyway. I didn’t understand why.’ She smiled coquettishly and glanced at her reflection in the glass door. ‘So first of all I went to the hairdresser, and then started on your text, which I some how like – if I may say that. I’ll just interrupt it if you bring me the other, urgent text tomorrow. Va bene?’ Perlmann nodded, and was glad when von Levetzov appeared and dragged him along into the dining room.

  ‘Have you been able to take a look at my synopsis?’ Evelyn Mistral asked him over dessert.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Perlmann said, and scraped the last bit of pudding out of the bowl as he racked his brains as to how she had described her problem to him.

  ‘So? You can just tell me if you think it’s stupid,’ she said with a forced smile.

  ‘No, no, absolutely not. I think the idea of producing the connection through the concept of the ground is a good one.’ Even before he had finished the sentence he realized that he was really talking about Leskov’s argument, which was contained in those four recalcitrant sentences.

  Evelyn Mistral’s spoon circled aimlessly in the bowl. ‘Oh, right, yes. That could be a thought,’ she said at last, glancing at him bashfully.

  ‘I . . . I’ll sit down to it again this afternoon,’ Perlmann said. ‘Time is . . . time is a bit short.’

  Something in his quiet voice made her sit up and listen. Her face relaxed.

  ‘Fine,’ she said and laid her hand on his arm for a moment.

  Afterwards, in the room, Perlmann tried in vain to concentrate on Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand’s papers. He felt obliged to try. If he could have shown tomorrow that he had at least been working in that sense, it would have been some small protection against everything else that was now heading inexorably towards him. But faced with that writing he felt as he had done on his outward-bound flight: as if he were suddenly blind to meanings; the texts couldn’t get through to him and flattened out before his eyes into pedantic ornaments.

  Over the next few hours he walked slowly and aimlessly through the town. At the stationery shop where he had bought the chronicle the window display had been completely changed. Perlmann was annoyed that this made him lose his sense of equilibrium; but only several streets further on did he manage to shake the whole thing off.

  Complete nonsense, he said to himself repeatedly as he became aware of something inside him stubbornly trying to make the chronicle responsible for the dilemma he was in. At the bar of a café, where he drank a coffee, the internal struggle finally stopped. The clouds had parted, the sun glittered in the puddles, and suddenly life seemed to gain pace and color. Perlmann held his face in the dusty beam of sunlight that fell through the narrow glass door. For a moment he felt a forbidden happiness like the one that comes from skipping school, and when the sun disappeared again he clung with all his might to that feeling, although it grew more and more hollow from one moment to the next, and made way for a dull and barely restrained anxiety which suited the gloomy light that now filled the bar again.

  For the time being it was only Maria that he would have to say anything to. His colleagues’ questions would only start on Monday, and the situation would only come to a definitive head on Wednesday. His anxiety was somewhat assuaged by this thought, and Perlmann continued his aimless walk through little side streets.

  He got to the trattoria early. The proprietress brought him the chronicle and told him with delight that Sandra’s drawings had been singled out for special praise by the art teacher that morning. Then he had allowed Sandra to travel across to Rapallo with some other children. Perlmann forced out a smile and struggled to stuff into his mouth the spaghetti that he thought was overcooked today. The proprietor’s question of where he had been for the past two days annoyed him, and he pretended not to have heard it.

  His interest in the chronicle was over now, once and for all, he established as he flicked through its pages. Just as he was about to snap it shut, his eye fell on a painting by Marc Chagall. In the cheap, miniaturized reproduction the blue had lost much of its luminous power. Nonetheless, Perlmann had immediately recognized that it must be Chagall’s blue. He fully opened the book again and read the text. There was something about that date; but it escaped his remembering gaze and remained far outside on the periphery of his consciousness, as intangible as the mere memory of a memory. It had had nothing to do with Chagall’s colors, of that he was sure. He had avoided that subject for many years, so as not to have to hear Agnes’s harsh judgment about it. And, in fact, it seemed to him, it hadn’t really been about Chagall at all. Something else was to blame for the fact that he had suddenly felt quite alone. But behind his closed lids nothing appeared that might have explained why his disappointment then seemed so closely connected with his anxiety now.

  The memory only came later, when he was sitting in front of the television at the hotel, just as alone and desperate as he had been in the living room after he had called off the lecture. If you think so, was the first thing Agnes had said when he had asked her, even thoug
h there was no longer any possibility. And when she saw the wounded expression on his face: Oh, all right then, why not. It can happen to anyone. But her relaxed tone and dismissive gesture hadn’t been able to conceal her disappointment: her husband, a rising star in his subject, hadn’t managed to write the lecture that he had been supposed to deliver in the Auditorium Maximum, even though for days he had been sitting over it until late into the night.

  But the worst thing was that twelve-year-old Kirsten heard him cancelling down the lecture with a reference to illness. But you aren’t ill at all, Dad. Why did you lie? That was the only time that he had wished his daughter was far away, and had even hated her for a moment. He had gone into the living room and had, contrary to his custom, closed the door. And then Chagall’s death had been announced on the television news. He had stared at the stained-glass window shown in the report with a fervour which was, when he noticed it, so embarrassing to him that he swiftly changed channels.

  Perlmann had lost the thread of the film that was playing out in front of him, and turned off the television. That was seven years ago now. And throughout all that time he hadn’t thought once about that cancelled lecture. In the nights leading up to his capitulation he had for the first time the very same experience that had paralyzed and frozen him for weeks: the experience of having absolutely nothing to say. It had been such a shock, this sudden experience, that he had had to banish it from his mind. And in that he had been very successful, because he had gone on to write dozens of lectures which had flowed easily and naturally from his pen. And throughout all that time not a single trace of a memory of that failure had crossed his path. Until today, from which perspective that late-March evening appeared as the first, menacing premonition of his present catastrophe.

  He took half a sleeping pill, hopped through all the television channels again and then turned out the light. It was not quite true to say that the experience that had been banished back then had never again announced its presence. He thought once more of that moment a year ago, when he had suddenly found himself presented as a main speaker. From the panic that had flared up then there was – it now appeared to him – a hidden experience arc leading six years back to the day of Chagall’s death. And why not? Agnes had said when he irritably explained to her that he couldn’t simply tell the organizers of the conference that he had nothing to say.

  Perlmann’s thoughts began to blur at the edges. How did Agnes’s two reactions – the one a year ago and the one seven years ago – fit together? He tried to imagine the face that had accompanied the two remarks. But the only face that came was the one in the photograph in Frankfurt, which he had fled yesterday because it knew too much.

  Whenever all thinking and wanting began to dissolve and silence could have begun at any moment, he gave a start, and then everything behind his forehead convulsed. The fourth time he turned the light on and washed his face in the bathroom. Then he dialled Kirsten’s number. Her drowsy voice sounded annoyed.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I woke you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Dad. Just a second.’ He heard a wiping sound, then for a while nothing more. Only now did he look at his watch: a quarter to one.

  ‘So, here I am again.’ Now her voice sounded fresher. ‘Is anything up? Or are you just calling?’

  ‘Erm . . . just calling. That is . . . I wanted to ask you why Agnes . . . why Mum didn’t like Chagall’s colors.’ He cursed himself for ringing her up with a heavy, furry tongue and not at least testing out his voice beforehand.

  ‘What colors?’

  He clenched his fist and was tempted simply to hang up. ‘The colors in Marc Chagall’s paintings.’

  ‘Oh, right. Chagall. You’re speaking so indistinctly. Well . . . I don’t know . . . funny question. Did she really not like them?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. But there’s something else, too: do you think she would have understood if I’d had nothing to say?’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing to say?’

  ‘If . . . I mean, simply if nothing had occurred to me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About . . . just like that. Nothing had occurred to me. And the others were all waiting.’

  ‘Dad, you’re speaking in riddles. What others?’

  ‘Just the others.’ He had said it so quietly that he was unsure whether she had heard.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Dad, what’s up with you?’

  He quickly tried to produce some spit, and let it run over his tongue. ‘Nothing, Kirsten. It’s nothing. I just wanted to talk to you a bit. Good night now.’

  ‘Erm . . . yes. So, ah . . . good night.’

  He went into the bathroom and took another quarter tablet. Luckily, he hadn’t asked her if she remembered his cancelled lecture back then. It had been a close thing. He turned on to his belly and pressed his face into the pillow, as if by doing so he could force sleep to come.

  20

  Laura Sand’s second session also started with film images. It was quite different material from the previous day, and in the first half-hour there were occasional sequences in which she’d got the aperture wrong. She cursed at the poor quality of the film, but Perlmann saw immediately that that wasn’t the problem. Almost as clearly as if they were images edited in, he saw Agnes coming out of the darkroom in her white apron, furious with herself and as much in need of comfort as a child. Instead of returning to the real film, he stayed with these images and slipped back through the night to the conversation with Kirsten. He had mumbled something about Chagall, and asked her some absurd question about Agnes. The damned pill had immediately obliterated the details. I’ve got to give them up. Give them up. He reached for his mineral water, and when his glass clinked against the coffee pot the others turned their heads. Luckily, Maria had been sitting in front of her screen before. As a result he hadn’t had to spool out the prepared sentences, which had sounded even more wooden with each internal run-through.

  ‘¡Dios mío!’ Evelyn Mistral murmured quietly. Perlmann looked straight ahead. The images that were being shown now were, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful. The glassy light of an early morning over the Steppe turned the contours of the meagre shrubs into mysterious, poetic forms that made the imagination pounce upon them immediately, and the faded yellow of the Steppe, run through with pale grey, lost itself against the rising sun in an apparently endless white depth. The view had so captivated even Laura Sand herself that she had lingered on the same shot until her arms had been trembling with exhaustion.

  Now the camera swung slowly to the side, and all of a sudden the Steppe was scattered with the ribcages of dead animals. ‘¡Jesús María!’ cried Evelyn Mistral, and then she could be heard gasping, open-mouthed. The camera moved further to the left, then came a cut, and now one saw the edge of a settlement, still in the same dreamy light. The people barely moved. They looked suspiciously or apathetically into the camera. The swollen bellies of children, fully grown bodies so gaunt that their wrists looked like grotesque enlargements. Flies everywhere, which the people had given up resisting long ago. The camera slowly crept over the settlement. The pictures were all the same. The camera glided on until the people had disappeared from the picture. For a few seconds once again the beauty of the deserted Steppe, now already in a light that gave a sense of the searing midday heat. Then the film stopped.

  For a few moments no one stirred in the dark, the only sound was Laura Sand’s chair shifting. Then Evelyn Mistral and Silvestri walked to the window and released the blinds, which snapped up.

  ‘Well,’ said Millar in the tone of someone who has just heard something very dubious.

  Laura Sand jerked her head up. ‘Something wrong?’ A lurking harshness quivered in her voice.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Millar. ‘Hunger and death as a poetic backdrop – I don’t know.’

  Laura Sand’s face looked even whiter than usual above her black polo neck.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said
, squeezing the word out so violently that only the first syllable could really be heard.

  ‘That,’ Millar said slowly, lowering his head, ‘I can’t find.’

  Adrian von Levetzov’s nervous hand revealed that he couldn’t bear the coming argument. ‘In which area was it filmed?’ he asked with the cheerful interestedness of a member of the educated classes, something to which he would not normally have succumbed.

  ‘The Sahel,’ Laura Sand snapped back.

  ‘Indeed,’ Millar murmured, ‘indeed.’

  Giorgio Silvestri blew out his smoke more loudly than necessary. ‘The pictures at the end were very impressive,’ he said. ‘Even if that light – come dire – seduces one into oblivion. Or obfuscation. But I would actually like to come back to the subject: the interpretation of the interesting looks that the animals gave each other.’

  His voice had had a strange, unassuming authority, Perlmann thought afterwards when the specialist discussion had once again got under way. It was the voice of someone who was used to intervening at the right moment and giving an awkward situation in a conversation a particular turn. That intervention had not been even slightly boss-like, and now the Italian had once again pulled up one knee, and was lolling in his chair like a teenager.

  In the rest of her contributions Laura Sand remained cool, and one could sense her restrained fury even when its first explosion had passed. Millar made an effort and disguised his objections in the form of questions. Today, luckily, the words just poured out of Evelyn Mistral any old how, and when she said that the animals were, in her view, exchanging a boisterous linguistic form, which also contained some funny grammatical errors, even Laura Sand couldn’t help laughing.