Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘The style’s a bit like something out of the Sun,’ said Laura Sand, as Levetzov went on flicking through the book. Perlmann felt as if they had just caught him with a copy of Bild-Zeitung or a men’s magazine. Now, on top of everything else, the man who has failed in academia is buying tabloid books.

  ‘There’s better to come!’ cried von Levetzov, and turned the book round again. A quarter of the big page was taken up by a photograph showing Cicciolina, the Italian porn star, who had been elected to parliament. She was naked and was lolling in a provocative pose. Millar blushed and straightened his glasses. The two other men only looked for a second. Evelyn Mistral, straight-faced, pouted and brushed the hair from her brow.

  ‘The photographer is only moderately talented,’ Laura Sand said dryly. Grateful for the remark, the others exploded in laughter that was slightly too loud and too long.

  In his mind’s eye, Perlmann saw Cicciolina entering the polling station in her fur coat and dropping her envelope coquettishly into the ballot box. Don’t turn it off! Agnes had said when he reached for the remote control. I think she’s great. Simply fantastic. Her face wore an expression he had never seen before. You’re mouth is hanging open, isn’t it? she had laughed.

  ‘At the last elections she founded the Love Party, Il Partito d’Amore,’ said Perlmann and knew immediately that he couldn’t have said anything clumsier at that moment. The others looked at him with surprise. He knows that kind of thing.

  ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as an expert in such things,’ said Laura Sand, raising another laugh.

  Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment. Agnes’s photographs are better than hers. A lot better. He picked up the plastic bag and got to his feet. The laughter died under the loud scrape of his chair. The faces that he saw out of the corner of his eye were puzzled. After a few steps he turned round again and nodded to the sky. ‘Still not a drop.’ He attempted a smile. No one returned it. He walked quickly to the entrance and up to his room.

  There he immediately walked to the window and looked down on the terrace. Evelyn Mistral had the open chronicle in front of her, and was reading from it with the vague and searching gestures of someone delivering an impromptu translation. The others were doubled up with laughter.

  They were laughing at the book with which he had embarked on the search for his present. The book that had seduced him and kept him from his work. But also the book that had kept his head above water. A mass-market, noisy, superficial book entirely alien to his nature. And also a book that had repelled and bored him before, in the trattoria. And yet a book that he was very fond of. An intimate book. His quite personal book. And they were laughing at it.

  He went into the shower.

  It hadn’t rained, and the others were still sitting outside when he went down to say goodbye to Maria. She was busy tidying the office.

  ‘Can I help you at all?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said. Then he took the Bach CD out of his jacket pocket and gave it to her. ‘You can have this. You helped me find it.’

  ‘Mille grazie,’ she stammered, ‘but don’t you need it any more?’

  He just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words he had composed in his head. She looked at him quizzically, and when the pause lasted too long she picked up her cigarettes.

  ‘Somehow I’m going to miss your group,’ she said, and as always she exhaled the smoke as she spoke.

  Now he knew what he was afraid of: that his rage with the others might make him turn this farewell into something unnecessarily emotional and sentimental. It wouldn’t be the first time. He gulped and looked at the floor.

  ‘By the way,’ she said with a smile, ‘I have relatives in Mestre. Of course, you can’t call it a beautiful town. But ugly – no, it isn’t ugly at all. A bit cramped, perhaps. But it’s also a nice place.’

  ‘Yes, that was my experience,’ said Perlmann, grateful for the subject. ‘I particularly liked Piazza Ferretto. And the little galleria next to it.’

  ‘So you’ve really been there?’

  ‘For two days.’

  ‘Professionally?’

  Perlmann just shook his head and looked at her. Her eyes glittered strangely, and her mouth twitched.

  ‘Not because of that one sentence?’

  Perlmann nodded, and now he managed a smile.

  ‘You mean you travelled specially from Germany to Mestre just because of that one sentence?’

  He nodded.

  She tilted her head slightly and took a long drag on her cigarette.

  ‘Of course, if I can put it like this, that’s a bit . . . mad. But knowing your text . . . OK, it isn’t all that surprising. Your fury with that sentence leapt off the page. I couldn’t help laughing when I was typing out that section. So was that sentence eventually . . . defeated?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Perlmann. ‘But there are lots of others.’

  Laughing, she stubbed out her cigarette and looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. Your texts are stored safely away,’ she added and tapped the computer. ‘Maybe I’ll read them again in peace.’ Then she shook his hand. ‘Buona fortuna!’

  ‘You too,’ said Perlmann, ‘and thanks for everything.’

  A few minutes later, from his room, he saw her standing with the others. Leskov hugged her when he said goodbye. Shortly before Perlmann lost sight of her, he saw her running her hand through her shining hair. Passé. So passé.

  Leskov’s text fitted even more exactly into the plastic jacket than Perlmann had expected. The pages had only a small amount of clearance from the edge. Perlmann took his ruler and measured: 1.6 cm wide and 1.9 cm high. But the zip was hard to open. It was a cheap one, and two of the teeth seemed already to be a bit loose. At any rate, it couldn’t be opened and shut too often. Why hadn’t he done the water test straight away? Annoyed with himself, Perlmann took the pages back out. As he pulled, he almost had to use force, and was startled when the tab suddenly glided swiftly over the loose teeth before jamming again, and could only be moved to the end stop with great difficulty. Perlmann carefully dipped the top edge of the jacket in the full washbasin. Bubbles formed on the outside of the zip. They were tiny and, in fact, barely visible. But still: the zip wasn’t airtight. Perlmann left it in the water for a good minute before carefully drying it off. As he opened it, one of the loose teeth seemed to have been further damaged, and right at the end one of them was remarkably crooked. Just pull it shut once – the zip wouldn’t take more than that. Perlmann ran his finger along the inside of the zip. Was what he felt only the cool of the metal, or was there moisture in there as well? He looked at his finger and rubbed at it to check: dry. But what if the envelope were left in the rain for hours? The zip wasn’t completely airtight, that much was clear.

  Perlmann held his face in the water. After that he felt better. He checked in the suitcase to see if he had forgotten a page. Then he counted the sheets and flattened the particularly worn sheets smooth again. At last he pushed the pile carefully into the jacket and tormented himself with the zip one last time. Leskov would be amazed at the effort Lufthansa had taken with this jacket. He would have to get hold of a Lufthansa sticker for the jacket as well as for the envelope. Then it would look more like a routine package.

  Now he laid out the envelope and took out the piece of paper with Leskov’s home address. I’ve just got to risk it. Leskov would doubt his memory anyway. If he had indeed put his work address at the end of the text, in his general uncertainty he would mistake his correct memory for another error. Perlmann set the specially purchased felt-tip pen down on the envelope and, horrified, immediately drew it back, as if he had almost set something on fire by accident. He hadn’t practiced disguising his handwriting. It took several pages before he had finally decided on a backwards-sloping, stiff script, which, of all the variants he had tried, seemed the furthest removed from his own. He practically painted the letters on the envelope, so that they ended up looking like a grotesque form of calligraphy. His
hand had shaken when writing two of the letters. But the address was clear. The envelope would get there.

  Exhausted, he pushed the jacket with the text into the envelope and applied the staples. Then he tore the test pages into little scraps. When he threw them in the waste-paper basket, he felt like a forger clearing his workshop.

  It was still dry on the terrace. The only people sitting there now were Leskov and Laura Sand, who had clearly fetched her warm jacket in the meantime. Leskov seemed to be smoking one of her cigarettes. The chronicle lay open on the table. Before he suspects me, Leskov will doubt his memory.

  Perlmann looked at the address. There was something about it that bothered him. That was it: the Latin letters. For the German postal service that was essential, of course. But what about Russian postmen? Could they read it? He turned over the envelope. He could repeat the address in Cyrillic letters on the back. Yes, that was the solution. He took the lid off the felt-tip pen. No disguise was necessary for the Cyrillic letters. But was it really a good idea? They might mistake the address in Russian letters for the sender, since no sender was specified.

  Perlmann put the lid back on and stepped to the window. Now Leskov was alone on the terrace, and the chronicle was no longer on the table. But in that case it would get to him anyway. He gave a start: it had taken the duration of a whole cigarette to work that out.

  Uncertainly, he sat down and picked up the felt-tip pen. How likely was it that a Lufthansa employee dealing with lost objects would be able to write an address in Russian? Again he felt as if his thoughts were having to fight their way through an invisible medium of insidious tenacity. Of course: if someone could read the address on the text and identify it as such, then he was also capable of writing it or, at least, copying it out stroke for stroke. Perlmann began to write.

  In the middle of Leskov’s surname he paused. There were various conventions of transcription. Particularly with the sibilants, with which the address was swarming, and that was particularly aggravating. What system had Leskov used when he had written his address out again for Perlmann on that draughty street corner? If he made a mistake now, he would end up with a sequence of Russian letters that was different from the ones Leskov had written under his text. The postal service would probably manage anyway. But for Leskov it would be one more incongruity: why had the Russian-reading employee in Frankfurt made so many mistakes when all he had to do was copy out the address? And if he thought about it for long enough . . .

  Perlmann wrote over the line with the felt-tip pen until all that could be seen was a block of opaque black. Then he put the envelope in the suitcase and set it out ready for tomorrow.

  52

  Laura Sand was holding the chronicle as she waited for him in the hall. Her face lacked its usual shadow of rage.

  ‘I’m sorry about what I said,’ she said. ‘It was completely superfluous. And that Love Party thing is actually quite witty.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Perlmann, but wished it hadn’t sounded so irritable. You would have to consider someone unstable, even vulnerable, to apologize for such a harmless joke. Without another word, he took the chronicle from her and asked Signora Morelli, who was staring at the envelope with great curiosity, to look after it until afterwards.

  Was he mistaken, or were the others treating him indulgently and attentively as one might treat a convalescent – just as they had two evenings before? It was striking how quickly Evelyn Mistral drew back her hand when they both reached for the salt at the same time. And was there not a new veil of self-consciousness over her smile?

  ‘Maybe it’s not a bad idea to give a chronicle this sort of packaging,’ said von Levetzov as their eyes met. ‘And actually these are the things you really remember.’

  ‘And no one reads serious stuff anyway – far too dry,’ grinned Ruge.

  Again Perlmann saw the others, doubled up with laughter when he wasn’t there. He looked at his plate and choked down his food, even though his lunch from the trattoria still lay heavy in his stomach. Just this one hour. It could be even less. And tomorrow the goodbyes. It will be quite different in Ivrea. Freer. Much freer.

  When the waiter had served dessert, Brian Millar tapped his glass. Perlmann gave a start. A speech to which he would have to react. It caught him entirely unawares. As if he had never before experienced such a thing. He thought back to the first session in the veranda, when he had feverishly thought about what his subject should be.

  They had been wonderful weeks, said Millar. The intense exchange of ideas. The collegial, even friendly atmosphere. The excellent hotel. The magical town.

  ‘On behalf of us all, I would like to thank you, Phil.’ He raised his glass. ‘You did a great job. And we all know how much work it was for you. We hope you got something out of it yourself – in spite of your difficult situation.’

  Just don’t say anything that might sound like an apology, thought Perlmann as he lit a cigarette to occupy his hands during the prolonged applause. He pushed back his chair, crossed his legs and was about to start his answer, when Leskov got to his feet with a groan.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to be here for long, Leskov said solemnly, but they had been unforgettable days for him. He had never made so many friends all at once, or learned so much in such a short time. He was an outsider, not to say an eccentric, he smiled. All the more because of that he wanted to thank them for their kindness and the consideration they had shown him. He looked at Ruge. ‘Even if I have made some assertions that must have sounded quite crazy.’ Ruge grinned. But most of all he would like to thank his friend Philipp. ‘He invited me without knowing much about me. After a conversation in the course of which he – as I have discovered here – understood my train of thought better than anyone else before – almost better than I do myself. It was fantastic to experience this trust and sympathy. I will never forget them.’ He pressed his hands together and made the gesture of thanks.

  He, too, had got a lot out of his stay, Perlmann began. Much more than he had been able to show. A very great deal more. To some people it must sometimes have seemed as if he were engaged in a feud with his subject. But precisely the opposite was the case.

  Perlmann realized with horror that he could no longer stop what was about to come. He spoke very calmly and even slipped into a thoughtful pose. But at the same time he clutched with his left hand, which was threatening to tremble, the wrist of his right, which lay on his knee.

  Recently, in fact, he said, he had been writing a book on the principles of linguistics. Millar and von Levetzov raised their eyebrows at almost the same time, and Ruge reached for the mended arm of his glasses. His work on it had brought him to increasingly fundamental issues such as this: how the central questions of the discipline had come about in the first place; how one could distinguish questions that could open something up from erroneous questions; what it was that linguistics really wanted to understand about language, and in what sense. And so on.

  Leskov’s fist was clamped, unmoving, on his unlit pipe. He smiled conspiratorially. The ice cream in the glass bowl in front of him melted.

  And one question, Perlmann went on, preoccupied him particularly: whether the subject, as it was currently pursued, could do justice to the eminently important role that language played in the diverse and multi-faceted development of experience. Much of what he had said here had concerned that question, he concluded. And he had often played devil’s advocate. To learn from the others.

  ‘It has advanced my own work greatly. And for that I should like to thank you all.’

  It was still too early to light a cigarette. His hand might tremble. It hadn’t sounded too bad. Even quite convincing. But within the heads of each of those sitting at the table, the same question must have been forming: Then why didn’t he deliver anything from that book, rather than inflicting that other, weird stuff on us? With a hasty movement that was supposed to mask the trembling that he feared, Perlmann reached for his cigarettes and then, so that his
hands could keep one another calm, he held his lighter as if a storm were sweeping through the dining room. The smoke tasted unfamiliar, as if it wasn’t his brand. He tried frantically to think of the bright office in Ivrea, and even managed to conjure a precise image of the desk. In spite of this he felt ill.

  When could one expect the publication of this interesting book, asked von Levetzov, thus seeming to take the words out of Millar’s mouth. He wanted to give himself time, Perlmann answered, and let the ash fall past his knee to the carpet so that he didn’t have to bring his hand to the ashtray. Might the publication of the work discussed here not be the ideal place to introduce his first ideas? von Levetzov asked. When he saw Perlmann’s hesitation, a shadow of suspicion flitted across his face.

  ‘That publication is firmly planned, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Perlmann heard himself saying. ‘But you know how these things are: sounding out the publishing companies, negotiating – the usual. And I will have to talk to Angelini about finance. Then you will all be hearing from me.’

  ‘I could imagine my publisher in New York being interested,’ said Millar. ‘Especially in a book like yours. Shall I talk to him?’

  Perlmann nodded silently. He had no idea what else he could have done. His cigarette burned his fingers. He dropped it and trod it out on the pale carpet. Leskov drew lines on the table cloth with the handle of his spoon. He’s thinking about a translation of his text. He’ll ask me again tomorrow.

  Signora Morelli appeared and offered them coffee and cognac in the lounge. ‘L’ultima serata!’ In the hall, Perlmann turned round and went back to the dining room. He picked up his cigarette butt and wiped the spot with his napkin. It had left a big, black stain. There was only one couple left in the room. They were preoccupied with themselves, and only glanced at him fleetingly.