Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  Over coffee the talk turned to the teaching duties that awaited his colleagues when they returned home. As he listened, it suddenly occurred to Perlmann that at breakfast that morning, when von Levetzov had asked him, he had described not his impending lecture series but last year’s. And as his smoking grew increasingly frantic, he realized with growing apprehension, almost panic, that the lectures that began next week had been blocked from his memory: he had their subjects on the tip of his tongue; they were present to him in the form of a vague sensation, but every attempt to bring them into the focus of his attention failed; the titles and the precise questions refused and refused to come. When will my resignation take effect? Can I simply stay away? Nothing more can happen to me now. Nothing.

  This term, Ruge sighed, it was his turn to give the introductory lecture. As Millar and von Levetzov responded with sympathetic words, Perlmann saw himself at the last session in Frankfurt, at which the teaching program had been discussed. The others had found it extraordinarily collegial of him to give the introductory lecture for the third time in a row. But there had been a momentary pause, and their astonishment was tangible. Was it only thoughtfulness that had appeared in their faces, or was it already suspicion? I find it increasingly important, he had said. I like working with beginners. Their minds are unspoiled. It was an explanation that they could not dispute. And even so, the director of the institute had had to give himself a visible jolt before carrying on.

  Perlmann delivered the introductory lecture slightly differently every year, and the new thing was his increasingly unconcealed detachment from the material. More and more often he wove in remarks like: ‘At this point one might ask the question . . . One doesn’t need to ask it, perhaps, but if one asks it, then . . .’ or ‘Now there is this distinction . . .’ and then he made a pause of ostentatious thoughtfulness that would inevitably create the impression in his audience that he thought this distinction unnecessary or even nonsensical. He was in danger of exaggerating and giving the whole thing a comedic note. Particularly on days when he felt out of sorts. The students enjoyed it. But while they laughed, he hated himself for his play-acting. Because he didn’t like play-acting. He was deadly earnest about this detachment from his subject, which affected him like an inexorable process of growth, and which he observed with mounting despair.

  Leskov had been busy with his pipe, and had sipped quietly at his coffee. He wished, he said now into a pause in the conversation, he too could complain like that. From one term to the next, he was unsure whether he would receive a teaching job or not. He said it quite matter-of-factly, and without a trace of self-pity.

  ‘But if I hand in the new text now, that might change,’ he smiled, and glanced across at Perlmann. ‘Provided it turns up again,’ he added with a face in which intense humor imperfectly masked lurking panic.

  Perlmann made a helpless gesture with his hand, and had no idea whether what he was trying to do with his facial muscles was leading to a smile or to a grimace. To which address? he thought frantically. To which address? And the envelope. And the waiting list for the flight.

  While the others were leaving tips, Perlmann paid the sum precisely, and pushed the notes slightly towards the middle of the table, so that the waiter would have to lean a long way forwards to reach them. But again the waiter treated him as if he wasn’t there, and simply left Perlmann’s money where it was. Laura Sand pointed at it, and touched Perlmann’s arm with a questioning expression. He pretended not to have noticed. He let the others walk ahead and waited in the hall until the waiter, who had now picked up his money, came out of the dining room.

  ‘You know,’ he said and tried to stare him into the ground, ‘I was right: you really are one. And how.’

  ‘Stronzo!’ the waiter hissed back, his lips seeming not to move a millimeter.

  Perlmann left him standing and walked outside to join the others, who were waiting for taxis.

  49

  When he woke up at about seven o’clock the next morning, Perlmann’s first thought was that his sore throat came from his furious roaring in the dean’s office. It became clear to him only very gradually that the dry scratching must have come from breathing with his mouth open, as his rage had clearly been directed at a figure in a dream. At the end it had been the dean. But he gradually remembered that that figure had had its original source in the waiter. He had bawled him out in the presence of the others. He had got up, tipped his cold food on the immaculate tablecloth and had, accompanying each word with a slicing movement of his hand, repeated his small and awkward repertoire of Italian insults again and again, the perception of his narrow linguistic boundaries adding to his fury. The longer it lasted, the more formless the waiter became, and the figure had become increasingly similar to Leskov. In a room that was no longer a dining room, Perlmann had reproached him for not having made a copy of his text, his accusations growing louder and louder, while Leskov looked as if he wasn’t even listening. The silent and unreachable Leskov had then become a pale, almost faceless figure, but one which in spite of its vagueness was unambiguously the dean. Perlmann had dealt with him more ruthlessly and thoroughly than he had ever treated a person before. With his heart hammering, he had screamed accusation after accusation until his voice failed. He held the rector responsible for everything papery and dead in the world of the university. He blamed him for the mistrust, the resentment and anxiety that prevailed in that world. He insulted him as the source of all pomposity, and finally held him responsible for the decades of his life that he had lost to his job. Just as he was hurling at him the question of why he had prevented him from being an interpreter, he noticed that there was no one in the room, and that his hoarse words were echoing in a ghostly void. He had finally woken up surrounded by the resultant feeling of impotence.

  Perlmann ordered coffee and, after showering, sat down at his desk. If yesterday his letters to the dean had become shorter and shorter, today the opposite happened, although he powerfully resisted the bitterness and agitation that rang out within him even now. He didn’t want his letter of resignation to be defined by such feelings – he didn’t want it to be an epilogue to his dream. He immediately crossed out every harsh word and replaced it with an expression of pointed neutrality and sobriety. In this way he produced increasingly official-sounding texts. And yet he couldn’t prevent them from turning into bills of indictment, long and ever longer explanations in which evidence was piled on evidence for the claim that a life determined by academic study and its pursuit must inevitably become an alienated life, a life missed. Like an addict, he went on writing more and more, and each new outline was even longer and more expansive than the one before.

  It was already after half-past eight when he paused, exhausted and trembling. For a while he stood at the window and stared into the streaming rain. Another two days. In fifty hours he was at the airport, waiting for his flight home. And tomorrow he would be travelling for half a day, and time would go much faster. Hitherto he had always been lucky with waiting lists for flights.

  He scanned through the last page that he had written. Then he brought all the pages together and threw the whole pile into the waste-paper basket. It wasn’t a general problem of academics, or even of academia generally. It was a problem of his very particular life story. That was all. To turn it into an ideology was mischievous nonsense. Basically, that had always been clear to him. In the end, all his writing that morning had become an extension of the dream. And now he had cheated himself out of his breakfast, to which, he reflected with surprise, he would have liked to go today.

  Giorgio Silvestri’s session was sheer chaos. It started with him leaving half of his documents in his room, and having to go back and get them. Then, when he had found his way through the chaos, he began a lecture that had no structure and for a long time also seemed to have no destination. He talked about typical linguistic disturbances among schizophrenics, which were expressive of mental disturbances. His technical vocabulary sounded cobbled-to
gether and eccentric, and he made no effort to introduce it. Admittedly, after some time it was fairly easy to recognize how it could be translated into familiar concepts. But it was irritating that one had to discover them for oneself. There was also the fact that Silvestri’s English pronunciation was much worse than usual that morning; somehow his mouth didn’t really seem to be obeying him. That was particularly unsettling in the case of the example sentences, which Silvestri had only in Italian, and of which he gave impromptu translations. Often one didn’t know how much of their strange sound could really be traced back to the mental patients, what came from Silvestri’s halting delivery, and whether additional distortions were not produced by the translation of difficult linguistic material. Soon his colleagues started drawing decorative doodles in their notebooks, and even Evelyn Mistral, who had at first been smiling with sympathy for Silvestri over the chaotic nature of his lecture, became impatient.

  Again the time has come, Perlmann thought: he felt abandoned by someone he had internally clung to. Silvestri – the man with the important and honest profession, which gave him the necessary inner distance to be able to sit on the lounger with a newspaper over his head and rock back and forth on his chair during the sessions; the man who had advised Perlmann not to take the whole thing so seriously; and, in the end, also the man who had been able to get to grips with his notes. And now he was sitting up there at the front, turning over the empty coffee pot for the second time, and darting increasingly insecure glances at the group. All of a sudden his stubble was no longer the expression of independence and incorruptibility; it just looked scruffy. His skin struck Perlmann as even paler than usual, and now for the first time he spotted a small boil on Silvestri’s chin. You do get through your heroes, he heard Agnes saying, and he didn’t know who he should be more annoyed with: her, or this Italian who seemed, once more, to prove her right.

  Now Silvestri pushed his papers aside, lit a new cigarette and started explaining the basic points of his investigation. He was no orator, and it wasn’t a fluent, suggestive lecture. Nonetheless, Perlmann noticed with growing relief that the man had something to say. Leskov, who had looked unhappy and had several times sighed quietly, also relaxed, and Laura Sand had begun to take notes. There were many years of work with schizophrenics behind the ideas that Silvestri was developing, and an inexhaustible patience when it came to listening to them. His dark-eyed, white face now showed great concentration, and when he spoke with admiration of Gaetano Benedetti, whom he saw as the most important researcher into schizophrenia, one could tell how much passion he had devoted to his work.

  The sounds of tearing paper broke the silence that had fallen when Silvestri looked for a quotation from Benedetti. Millar had torn a page from his notebook. He now wrote something and with a flippant gesture passed it to Ruge, who was today sitting slightly further away from him than usual. At the last moment Millar must have sensed that he was being impolite, because his arm twitched, as if he wanted to undo the gesture, but it was too late: the page slipped to the edge of the table and sailed to the floor, where it stopped in front of Silvestri’s eyes. Perlmann had to crane his neck slightly, and then he could read it: De Benedetti?!

  Silvestri, who had found the quotation at last, followed the eyes of the others and read the note. He froze for a moment, his face colored, and he closed his eyes. No one moved. Millar stared at the table top in front of him. In fact, Perlmann thought, it was just chitchat; a piece of schoolboy mischief. But at that particular moment, it must have felt like a slap in the face to Silvestri: recently Carlo De Benedetti, the President of Olivetti, had been in court because of his previous involvement in the bankruptcy of a bank. If one knew that, the reddish sheet of paper on the gleaming parquet called to mind the world of money, power and corruption. It was only a joke, and not remotely malicious. That was certainly apparent to Silvestri as well. But at that moment it was already too much for him that while Gaetano Benedetti’s self-sacrificing labours, his great life’s work, was under discussion, someone else’s thoughts were wandering in another, ugly world, even though the association came about in the simplest, most innocuous way imaginable. Obviously, Silvestri experienced it as practically a personal attack – as if his own commitment were being indirectly disparaged or even ridiculed.

  Silvestri hadn’t seen where the piece of paper came from. He must, Perlmann reflected, have recognized Millar’s handwriting, because when he looked up now, Millar was the first person he looked at. He stared at him for a few seconds, and the vertical wrinkles above his nose gave his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face an angry, unforgiving expression. As Silvestri directed his gaze, which now assumed a rather downcast quality, back to the piece of paper, he took out his ballpoint pen and clicked the tip in and out. He did it several times, the rhythm stretching as if on a slow-motion soundtrack, and the individual clicks seemed to whip their apprehensive silence like gunshots. Perlmann involuntarily held his breath. Now Silvestri leaned back, rolled his hands on his head and, as he took a breath, looked Millar full in the face. Although the look was not meant for him, Perlmann shrank from the harshness of his dark stare. Silvestri’s voice would be piercing when it came.

  At that moment the door opened, and Signora Morelli stepped inside the veranda with a piece of paper in her hand. The silence in the room must have struck her as strange, because she hesitated and left her hand on the handle before she gave a start, said, ‘Scusatemi’ and walked up to Perlmann.

  ‘I thought you should know this straight away,’ she said as she bent down to him and gave him a note.

  She had said it quietly, and yet the Italian sentence had been audible throughout the whole room. Phone call travel agent: flight Frankfurt–Genoa confirmed tomorrow 5 p.m. the note said.

  ‘Grazie,’ Perlmann said hoarsely, folded the note and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t dare to look at Leskov beside him, so he didn’t know if it was his imagination or whether Leskov turned his head away only now.

  Only when the door clicked shut did Perlmann notice that Silvestri had risen to his feet, and had plainly been walking up and down. Now the Italian stubbed out his cigarette, hesitated for a moment and then, sitting on the table top, swung himself into the middle of the horseshoe. With a jerky movement he lifted the reddish piece of paper, stood in front of Millar and, without looking at him, silently and carefully let the paper float on to the table. Then he swung back over the table, meticulously straightened his chair and went on with his lecture. After a few sentences his breath became normal again. Laura Sand exhaled audibly.

  When the discussion began, Millar at first cleaned his glasses for several minutes. Later, as Silvestri was battling with Leskov’s questions, which were much less clear today than they usually were, Millar stared with blank concentration at the swimming pool, where the heavy raindrops were splashing the water high into the air. Now and again Silvestri darted him quick glances from the corner of his eye. But his agitation seemed to have subsided, and here, once again, he proved to be a good listener, who encouraged his interlocutor, with a brief nod and the hint of a smile, to go on spinning out the thought that he had just embarked upon.

  What Perlmann particularly envied was the amount of time that Silvestri took before answering a question. He wouldn’t, it seemed, allow any question in the world to put pressure on him. Questions weren’t something he felt coerced by. They were primarily an opportunity to think, regardless of how long it took. No wonder Kirsten took to him immediately. Again Perlmann hid his face between his folded hands and tried inwardly to imagine what it must feel like to be someone with so little fear of other people and their questions. He almost felt dizzy when he concentrated intensely on the notional point of experience that could be achieved were he to succeed in dismantling the structure of his anxiety piece by piece and transfer it into another way of feeling.

  It was Ruge’s chuckling laughter that tore him from his reflections. It was plainly inspired by the way in which Silvestri defended him
self against doubts about his method. He had dealt at such length and so devotedly with his patients that he had the unshakeable assurance of having achieved a profound understanding of the pattern of their linguistic and mental disturbances. What made Silvestri assailable was his refusal to have anyone look over his shoulder and check what he was doing. There is no theoretical context, Perlmann thought, but somehow that refusal could surprise no one who knew the dangerous gleam that appeared in Silvestri’s eyes when the discussion turned to the issue of bolted asylum doors. The man was a maverick and a fanatical defender of liberty, who must have seemed, in his clinic, like an anarchist, albeit an anarchist in whose office the light still burned even when his team had gone home long ago. Your hero-addicted imagination. Agnes had been proud of her verbal creation.

  ‘I have listened to many of these people for years,’ Silvestri said with unshakeable calm. ‘I know how they speak and think. I know it precisely. Really precisely.’

  Ruge gave up with a sigh, and an uncomfortable pause settled, so that Silvestri began to get his things together. Then Millar ostentatiously sat up in his chair, rested both elbows on the table and waited until Silvestri met his eye.

  ‘Look, Giorgio . . . ’ he began, and the use of Silvestri’s first name sounded like mockery. And then he lectured Silvestri on the safeguarding and evaluation of data, about sources of error and the danger of artefacts, about multiple verification procedures, and finally about the idea of objectivity. More and more he slipped into the tone of someone explaining, in a course for first-term freshmen, the ABC of academic work, and assuming no more than an average intelligence among his listeners.

  Silvestri looked out over the edge of the table to the parquet – to where the piece of paper had been a few moments before. There was a lot going on in his facial expression. The initial look of anger and indignation gave way to various shades of amusement and arrogance, but also of irony and contempt, which moved into one another uninterruptedly and without any fixed arrangement. Then, when he noticed that Millar had nearly finished, Silvestri withdrew completely from his face, straightened his papers again and sat down on the very edge of the chair. His long, white fingers were trembling slightly when he brought the lighter to his cigarette. Evelyn Mistral threw her hands to her face like someone trying to flee an inescapable disaster.