Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Shortly before eight Perlmann stood at the window in his grey flannel trousers and dark blue blazer, watching people coming up the steps from outside, to eat in the famous restaurant of the Miramare. Break a windowpane. That could be explained by clumsiness, and would be a reason to change rooms, now that the nights were growing rather cool. But even a windowpane was quickly replaced. Run away. Simply run away. Down the steps to the shoreline promenade, around the rocky outcrop over there, out of vision, and then keep going, keep on going. He clenched his fists in his pockets until the nails cut into the palms of his hands. On the way to the door he stopped and repeated the entry for must twice. It took. Now the important thing to be is laconic , he thought as he pulled the door shut, not unfriendly, but laconic.

On the stairs he was horrified to realize that it was already half-past eight, and he was late for the first communal dinner. Still hobbling slightly, he entered the elegant dining room with the glittering candelabras. Now that he saw his colleagues sitting at a big, round table, it was clear to him that he had no idea what official words of greeting he was going to say.

Millar looked at the clock and rose to his feet, although admittedly without coming towards him. He was wearing grey trousers and a dark blue double-breasted jacket, a thin-striped shirt and a navy-blue tie, with a stylized anchor embroidered on it in golden yellow thread. His appearance and his stiff posture recalled those of a naval officer, an impression reinforced by the fact that his angular face with its thrusting chin was as tanned as if he had been at sea for weeks. As he stood there by the table with his broad shoulders, while his colleagues had stayed in their seats, he looked like the man in charge of everything, who had risen to greet a latecomer.

‘Good to see you, Phil,’ he said with a smile that revealed his big, white teeth. His handshake was so brief and powerful that a sensation of complete passivity arose in Perlmann.

‘Yes,’ he murmured, annoyed at his idiotic reaction. As before, in Boston, it was the steel-blue eyes behind the flashing glasses that made him shrink inwardly to a schoolboy, a little squirt who was oppressively aware that he still had to prove himself to the teacher. Millar had just had a night flight and a working session with his Italian colleagues, and those eyes still looked as rested, alert and calm as if he had just got up. Fit , Perlmann thought, and saw the laughing face of Agnes when he gave free rein to his unfounded hatred for the word once again.

While the others were already sitting by their empty plates, Perlmann hastily wolfed down his soup. He was glad that a seat for Giorgio Silvestri had been left free between him and Millar. There was still some unpleasantness with Millar, he suddenly felt quite clearly: some shortcoming that he couldn’t call to mind. Only when he heard von Levetzov thanking Millar for a text he had sent him did he remember the package with the four offprints that had arrived from New York in August, bearing the stamp first class mail, which always made Perlmann think of diplomatic mail that had found its way to him by mistake.

The package had been on his desk when he had visited the office in the afternoon (after Frau Hartwig had gone home), aimlessly, just to check that he still belonged to the university. At home he had immediately stuffed the things in the cupboard, from which a mountain of offprints always stared at him, some of which regularly fell on the floor. At first, as outside lecturer and then as lecturer, he had responded to every offprint with a letter that was often as long as a review. A considerable correspondence had come into being, because he had never known when such an exchange of letters was over, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to make the other person’s letter the last. The others felt that they were being taken seriously, even flattered. It represented an opportunity for them to go on commenting upon their work, and Perlmann often found in a subsequent offprint that this new work could be traced back to a particularly stimulating correspondence with him. A lot of time had passed on each occasion, and he felt like his correspondent’s training partner, both self-appointed and somehow conscripted, while he wasn’t advancing his own career. Then, with his commitments as professor, these extensive exchanges had put too much of a strain on his time. He had not found a middle way, and from one day to the next he had simply stopped replying.

He himself had never sent out offprints; it was only in response to an enquiry that his secretary had ever taken one from the stack. He had never been able to believe – really believe – that other people wanted to read what he wrote. The thought that someone might engage with his work was embarrassing to him. And that sensation was, paradoxically, run through with an indifference that amounted to something like sacrilege, because it called the entire academic world into question. It wasn’t arrogance, he was quite sure of that. And the fact that other people plainly read his things and his reputation was growing did not alter that feeling in the slightest. Every time he opened the cupboard the mountain of unread material that tumbled out at him felt like a time bomb, even if he couldn’t have said what the explosion would consist of.

‘I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your prize,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann when the waiter had cleared the soup plates. It sounded, Perlmann thought, as if he had taken a very long run-up to this remark, a run-up that had begun upstairs in his room, or perhaps even on the journey. Von Levertzov fanned away the smoke that drifted up to him from Laura Sand, and then turned to Evelyn Mistral. ‘You must be aware that our friend here recently won a prize that represents the greatest acknowledgement for academic achievements that exists in our country. It’s almost a little Nobel Prize.’

‘Well…’ Millar interjected.

‘No, no,’ von Levertzov continued, and after he had sought vainly for a sign of confirmation in Ruge’s face, he added with a smug smile. ‘One sometimes wonders a little who is going to get the prize, but I am certain that in this case the decision was justified.’

Perlmann gripped his glass with both hands and studied the ripples in the mineral water with as much concentration as if he had been observing the outcome of an experiment in the laboratory. He had done the same at the award ceremony, when his achievements were being celebrated in a speech. Two weeks after Agnes’s death he had sat under candelabras there, too, emotionally dead and deaf to everything, glad that no speech was expected on his part.

It’s bound to be your turn soon . The sentence had already formed within Perlmann; but then, to his surprise, he managed not to say it out loud. A small, a tiny step in the direction of the ideal of non-subservience. Suddenly he felt better, and his voice sounded almost cheerful as he said to Evelyn Mistral, ‘There’s always something random about such decisions. I’m sure it’s the same in Spain, isn’t it?’

It was exactly the same, she said. To put it mildly. What annoyed her most was that awards were often given to professors who had basically stopped working a long time ago, who lived off their past merits and lazed about in the safeguarding of reputations earned many years ago.

‘You would be horrified, Philipp, if you saw that. These are people who have stopped achieving anything at all!’

On her forehead, right above her nose, a faint red stripe had formed. Perlmann had heard a familiarity in her tone, and the tension between that intimacy and her fury, which cut into him like a big, sharp knife, was almost unbearable. Why did I even think she was different? Because of the red elephant?