Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘I went outside for a moment,’ said Millar as Perlmann sat down in one of the armchairs in the lounge. ‘Still dry. Now the money can only go to you or Vassily, who guessed it would take an hour.’ He took a 10,000 lire note from his pocket. ‘We could get the jackpot ready now.’ He weighed down the resulting bundle of notes with the ashtray. ‘How long should we keep the bet going on for? Shall we say till midnight?’

  53

  Perlmann hadn’t known he was going to do it. He only realized at the moment when Millar rested his arms on the arms of the chair and pressed himself backwards in preparation for standing up. It was almost as if Perlmann were being pushed by an invisible force that knew more about him than he did about himself. With a single movement he was on his feet, and walked quickly to the grand piano. Before he sat down, he screened his hands with his body and pulled the bandage from his finger. As he lifted up the lid, from the corner of his eye he saw Millar slipping back from the edge of his chair.

  Perlmann didn’t need to think. Nocturnes were the only thing that he thought himself capable of playing after almost a year without playing a single note. Anything apart from Chopin was technically too difficult; the danger of disgrace was too great. And in the Nocturnes there was no problem with memory. He had grown up with these pieces. He had heard and played them hundreds of times.

  If only there weren’t that damned problem with the rhythm. He had a very precise and effortless sense of rhythm. But it was always a while before it settled in and his internal metronome started ticking. He played the first few bars like someone walking after being roughly woken from sleep, Bela Szabo had always said. And he was right. But when his sense of rhythm kicked in it was like an awakening; there was a liberating security in his head and hands, and every time it happened Perlmann had the impression of never having been really awake, as awake as he was now. He had learned to put those brief phases of uncertainty behind him before playing to anyone. But now they would all hear.

  He started Opus 9, Number 1 in B minor. Without a bandage, the ring finger of his left hand felt cooler than the others, and when he touched the keys he didn’t feel, as expected, pain, but a fine, sticky film. Nonetheless, the attack was good, he felt, the feared strangeness of touch had faded after a few notes. He had slipped into the first run, and was concentrating on the strange mixture of protraction and acceleration, when with a deafening crash it began to thunder. The first crack hadn’t yet faded away when the cold light of a flash of lightning lit up the lounge, mixing unpleasantly with the warm, golden light of the chandeliers. Immediately afterwards a new, even louder crash made everything tremble. Perlmann took his hands from the keys. All heads were now turned towards the window, through which a quick succession of lightning flashes could be seen, bright ramifications of spookily brief duration. Perlmann took out his handkerchief, moistened it and cleaned his ring finger. A moment later he felt a sting along the scar.

  When the natural spectacle seemed to be over, and everything was calm but for a distant rumble, Perlmann started over again. Now his sense of rhythm was there immediately. He had the whole piece clearly in front of his eyes and grew calm. Yes, he could still do them, his soft yet glass-clear Chopin notes – the only thing that Szabo had always acknowledged, and even slightly envied him for. It was with a similar touch, Perlmann imagined, that Glenn Gould had played Chopin. Glass clarity with velvet edges. He was also pleased with the pearly runs. But it didn’t sound dreamy. And that wasn’t due to the fact that his left ring finger, now that the accompaniment was growing louder, was really starting to hurt, just as the two fingers of his right hand, which had previously been holding his cigarette, stung when they rubbed against one another. What was that about?

  To prevent any applause, Perlmann seamlessly moved on to the second Nocturne from the same Opus. Again it thundered, but this time the crash was no longer directly over the hotel, and he went on playing.

  ‘Now I’ve got to see if it’s raining,’ Millar said sotto voce and got to his feet. Evelyn Mistral put her finger to her lips. Millar stepped outside.

  That was it, Perlmann thought: he had always compared his sound with Millar’s Bach, and that acted as a block that prevented him from finding his way into the right state of mind. He closed his eyes, yielded more to the notes and tried to forget. The third Nocturne was more successful. Only his sore fingers were gradually becoming a problem.

  Towards the end of the piece Millar came back, unmistakeably clearing his throat.

  Next Perlmann chose Number 1 in F major from Opus 16. He only noticed that this one contained a danger when he was in the middle of a theme. Suddenly, he felt that he had a face. It started to sting behind his closed eyelids. For God’s sake. He involuntarily stretched his back and closed his eyes tight in a violent grimace. Seconds of horrified waiting. No. Once again it had been fine. At the very last moment he had managed to force back the tears. So I can’t play the piece in D flat minor. Under no circumstances.

  A moment before, he had played two wrong notes, but the relief made him forget that, and now came the dramatic, technically difficult passage. He no longer had any time to be afraid of it, and suddenly it exploded in his hands, and he played the passage all the way through without a mistake as if he had been practising it only that morning. A massive feeling of relief, almost of arrogance, took hold of him. The pain in his fingers was unimportant now, and as he played the piece to the end he was suddenly sure of it: then I’ll do the Polonaise as well.

  But before he did that he needed time to gather himself. The best thing for that was the third, technically easy piece from Opus 15, which was also easy on the fingers. He wasn’t quite on top of things. He had started to become agitated. So the first third was a flat, lackluster sequence of notes. But then came the ‘Debussy passages’, as Szabo had called them when they were going through the piece. The melodic structure became weaker, the notes seemed to flow aimlessly, and developed an irresolute, hesitant, almost random quality. Perlmann, Szabo used to say with an irritated sigh, you can’t play that as if it’s Debussy. There’s still a clear melody, a clear logic in it. It sounds almost as if you are advocating a melancholy of dissolution. Gloom, fair enough. But Chopin! Perlmann made the notes sound as vague as possible. To hell with Szabo. It was a declaration of war on Millar and his obsession with structure, and Perlmann had to struggle against the temptation to look across at him. He felt something in him breaking free. He was asserting himself against this man Brian Millar, and standing up for himself in front of everyone else. And now he did something he would have considered unthinkable during his public performance: later in the work he repeated two of the passages in which this self-liberation seemed most successful. He had needed a jolt to get beyond Szabo’s internal presence, and now defiance and a bad conscience held each other in balance.

  To plunge straight into the A flat major Polonaise – no, that was too risky. First he needed something more technically demanding than what he had done so far. Because of his self-confidence. He wasn’t entirely sure. The A flat major Waltz from Opus 34. A piece that he had played on many solemn occasions, almost ad nauseam. Now, once again, it would have to be impeccable. It contained some chord runs like the ones in the Polonaise. And after that he would be attuned to the key.

  At first he made two pedal errors, and once he played one key too many. But otherwise it was impeccable. When it started thundering again and the storm seemed to be approaching once more, he effortlessly stayed in time. He started shivering slightly, but now it wasn’t, as it had been so often over the past few days, an expression of anxiety, but of tense expectation. He could play the Polonaise. He would play it. His arms and hands, which felt very safe and strong, told him that.

  He hadn’t given a thought to the scar, when a needle-sharp pain ran through him. He had to leave out three notes with his left ring finger, lost his concentration and messed up the next run of chords in his right hand. He did regain his equilibrium, but his confidence had gone. The
mighty chords of the Polonaise, on which everything depended, loomed up in front of him like enormous hurdles, and now the sore fingers of his right hand were stinging much more than before. The sharp pains had gone, but his playing was hesitant now, with a ritardando that the waltz couldn’t take. It’s impossible. I’ll stop after this one. When the end of the piece came within sight, he speeded up again. The twinge that came now wasn’t quite as keen as it had been a moment before, but it was enough to spoil the closing run completely, so that he merely slid into the final chord.

  It was shaming, having to stop like that, and Perlmann was full of rage with himself when he reflected that with his murder plan, completely unnecessary as it was, he had also ruined this attempt at self-assertion. Nonetheless, he would have got up and walked over to his armchair had Millar not at that point started waving the cash from the bet. As the rain lashed the windows, he held them up to Leskov with a smile, undeterred by the fact that Leskov irritably waved them away, and by the equally irritable faces of the others. First his attempt to disturb Perlmann’s playing a few moments ago, and now this. It was too much. Amidst the beginning applause Perlmann started in on Opus 53, the A flat major Polonaise that Chopin had called the ‘Heroic’.

  From the first bar he could hear the frightening passage. But there were still almost seven minutes before he got there. Even the first chords and runs required much more pressure than anything that had gone before, and Perlmann bit his lips with pain. But soon the pain could touch him no longer. As ever, he was overwhelmed by this music; it enfolded him and gave him the feeling that he could effortlessly keep the world at a distance. After half a minute the run-up began for the big theme, dressed up in powerful chords that came cascading down from above. The last bars before the first of these expansive chords had to be played at a slightly slower tempo to provide a proper setting for the beginning of the theme. Szabo himself had acknowledged that. But Perlmann – and this had been his constant reproach – overdid it to an unjustifiable extent. He was inclined to delay the entry of the topmost chord by more than a second. That, he found, was what made the tension properly palpable, and intensified the subsequent liberation. And that liberation was what truly counted – the idea that for the moment when one touched the keys with both hands and with one’s full strength, one was master of things. You abuse these passages, Szabo had said. You’re supposed to be playing Chopin, not yourself. Take Alfred Cortot as your model.

  Szabo fell silent, and Perlmann played himself into a genuine state of intoxication. With a sure touch, he hammered the redeeming chords into the keys, rising from his chair with ever greater frequency to launch his attack. Unrestrainedly, he slowed down the introductory beats so that each chord had the significance – more than ever – of a liberation from chains. Then, when the storm broke out again, it fitted what he was doing perfectly. Because right now – three minutes in – came the first of the two passages in which the same dark chord was to be played seven times in a row. Never before, it seemed to him, had he played chords with such force. Trampling over what little remained of his restraint, Perlmann thundered all of his fury into the keys, his fury with Millar and all the others who beleaguered him; his fury with Szabo; his fury with the storm that he had to drown out; and above all his impotent fury with himself, with his insecurity, fear and mendacity, which had driven him into the murderous silence of the tunnel.

  Afterwards, his sore fingers hurt so much it brought tears to his eyes. The thought came to him that if he brought his finger down on the keys the scar on his finger would burst, the blood would run over the white keys and seep into the gaps, and his fingers would lose their hold in the red smear. But the image was too fleeting to survive and, during the next, fourth minute, Perlmann devoted himself entirely to the effort of playing so seamlessly and compellingly as he had at the Conservatoire, when he had reaped such praise. His left hand mostly contributed to the climaxes, and he was glad that the intense pain in his finger had now become something constant that he could adjust to, something that no longer appeared in the form of unpredictable episodes. The whole passage flowed once again into a thundering repeat of a single chord. Then the same thing was repeated once again, but this time it was followed by a surprising dissolve into a sequence of bright, blithe bars. They made way for a lyrical passage, which, as Perlmann played it, was intended to remind the audience of the dreamlike mood of the Nocturnes.

  He was now in the sixth minute of the piece. As the notes grew softer and quieter, Perlmann broke out in a frightened sweat, and his fingers seemed to have grown damp from one second to the next. Soon would come the run-up to the final repetition of the theme and, starting with its first chord – he remembered quite precisely, even today – it was forty seconds to the terrifying passage. Forty-three, perhaps forty-four if, out of panic-fuelled calculation, he slowed down again. The passage itself lasted less than ten seconds. Then came a speeded-up and shortened version of the theme with seven clearly articulated chords, and then it was over.

  Perlmann drew out the last lyrical notes until he could no longer avoid speeding up and descending to the low chords in preparation for the theme. Then, summoning up all his defiance to defeat his anxiety, when he attacked the first chord of the theme he felt like someone who – after a series of devastating losses – has staked everything on a single card, knowing that his chances of winning are vanishingly small. It’s grotesque to hope for a crash of thunder during those crucial seconds. He tried to imagine himself back in the bare practice room at the Conservatoire – he was someone who played entirely for himself. That exercise worked, but he had started it too late, soon the long run from the low notes would be on him, and then the time would have come. Later, he couldn’t remember how he had done it, but suddenly he was back in the middle of the theme, repeating two lengthy passages from the beginning. Confused by his own maneuver, he concentrated again on the idea of playing in the empty room. He couldn’t chicken out again. He heard the two frenzied runs, which darted so rapidly through the structure of the other notes that you only really became aware of them when the last, bright note flashed. The rest of the runs had actually gone flawlessly. So it wasn’t impossible, even though the two critical sequences belonged to a quite different category of difficulty.

  For the very last time, the complete theme. The long run from below, which still had a human tempo. A series of familiar, light chords. Now. Perlmann couldn’t feel a thing any more, as his fingers slid over the keys. His anxiety had subsided, too. For just ten seconds he experienced a present full of numb tension, in which he was nothing but hands and ears. And then, with the bright conclusion of the second run, he knew it, even though he still couldn’t believe it: no mistakes. Not a single one. Not one. The rest was child’s play.

  He sat where he was for a moment, as if completely dazed. A shudder of exhaustion ran through him, and at first his legs refused to obey him when he got up. A precious moment of presence. He would have given anything to be able to capture it for ever.

  The applause, with which even the other hotel guests joined in, was loud and sustained. The loudest clapping came from the corridor, where Perlmann now spotted Giovanni and Signora Morelli. When their eyes met, Giovanni raised his thumb in a sign of congratulations. It was as if he were congratulating Perlmann for successfully scoring a goal. At that moment Giovanni’s gesture meant more than all the applause. But even more important was the expression on Signora Morelli’s face. It was the same one with which she had looked at him on Monday night, when he had spoken of his relief with tears in his eyes. Now she smiled at him, and set the applause off again with her clapping. It was as if that mute encounter across the whole room made him immune to the opinions of the others. It almost didn’t matter what they thought.

  Leskov was the last to stop clapping. ‘I had no idea . . . ,’ he began, and the others nodded in agreement.

  Perlmann was sparing with his information, but savored each item.

  So why hadn’t he . . . ?<
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  ‘I don’t like performing,’ he said, and glanced straight past Millar. ‘I prefer to be alone with music.’

  The way the others looked at him had changed over the past half hour. At any rate that was what Perlmann fervently wanted to believe. And the pause in the conversation that occurred now, which seemed to echo with surprise, seemed to bear it out.

  Millar played with the rolled-up cash. ‘I remembered the Polonaise as being shorter,’ he said, and straightened his glasses so slowly that it looked as if he was doing it in slow motion. ‘But that was a long time ago, and I’m not a Chopin connoisseur.’

  For a moment Perlmann saw only the reflection of the chandelier in Millar’s glasses. The expression that he saw a moment later contained no suspicion. But there was a glittering thoughtfulness in it, which, it seemed, was actually waiting to turn into mistrust. Perlmann gave a non-committal smile.

  ‘I like the insistent way the theme keeps returning,’ he said.

  When Millar immediately got up and sat down at the piano, no one expected anything but Bach. What he played, however, could hardly have been further removed from Bach. It was the Allegro agitato molto from the Études d’exécution transcendante by Franz Liszt. Perlmann didn’t know the piece, but identified it straight away as Liszt. Millar made the occasional mistake as he played, and from time to time he had to bring the tempo back down a little. Nonetheless, his playing was a brilliant achievement for an amateur, and Perlmann felt a stabbing pain when he heard him overcoming technical difficulties that put everything in the A flat major Polonaise in the shade.

  He himself had always steered clear of Liszt. There was something about his particular form of effusiveness that repelled him. And if anyone mentioned Chopin and Liszt in the same breath, it made him furious. Liszt reminded him more clearly than any other composer of the limits of his technical gifts, and his dislike was mixed with fear. But he had never wanted to analyse it in any greater detail.