Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann felt as if all the strength were suddenly draining from him, so much so that lifting his coffee cup seemed too much. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of pointlessness. Unable to think of an answer, he waited to be asked where he had got hold of the envelope. But the question didn’t come.

The conversation now turned to dinner. Just for once, the others didn’t want to eat at the Miramare. Suddenly, Millar, who had folded his hands behind his head and was looking over towards the hill on the other side of the bay, said, ‘Why don’t we go to that white hotel up there? What’s it called?’

‘Imperiale,’ said von Levetzov. ‘I had a drink there. The restaurant looked good.’

It was agreed that Silvestri and Laura Sand would have to be told, and Signora Morelli as well. Perlmann nodded. On the way to the hotel Leskov joined him and, with a smile, handed him the yellow envelope.

The lamp in the corner of the lounge where Perlmann had sat on Monday night was on again today. On the chair, two children were practising gymnastics, while their grandmother struggled to keep them under control. It made everything look very ordinary, even banal. The viewpoint of eternity , that was what Perlmann had thought about in that corner. The fear that he had been using that idea to defend himself against had been terrible. But it had given the thought a weight and a depth that were now lost. Now, surrounded by his good-humored colleagues, who were studying their menus, the thought seemed shallow and dull; it was little more than a sequence of words.

Perlmann was also generally bothered by the others, and he had to take care that his irritation, which had made him tear off two shirt buttons when he was changing earlier, didn’t intensify still further. This was the place where Kirsten had asked him whether he’d been happy with Agnes. And it was where he had experienced an extreme despair. It was his hotel. The others had no business here.

Through the swing door of the kitchen came the waiter that Perlmann had called an arsehole. He was wearing the same red jacket as on Tuesday, and now he whipped out his order pad and stepped up to their table. Standing at an angle, he didn’t see Perlmann at first, and took Ruge’s and Silvestri’s orders. Then, as Laura Sand was speaking, his eye wandered one chair along. Perlmann waited with his eyes half-closed, annoyed at the pounding of his heart. The waiter wrote something in his pad, then paused. His eyes narrowed and, after a further motionless moment, he turned his head sharply and looked at Perlmann, who was pressing his hands together under the table. The waiter jutted his lower lip, looked slowly away and then it seemed as if he would go on writing. But then he slipped pad and pen into his jacket pocket, turned round abruptly and walked quickly through the swing door.

‘What’s up with him?’ Laura Sand asked irritably, tapping the back of her menu rhythmically against the edge of the table.

‘No idea,’ said Perlmann, when she looked at him quizzically.

The maître d’ in the black tuxedo stood, arms folded, by the swing door and watched furiously as the waiter came back to their table. The waiter turned to Laura Sand.

‘ Scusi, signora ,’ he said tightly, ‘would you please repeat your order?’

Then he turned the page of his pad and, without deigning to glance at Perlmann, looked at Millar. Surprised by the silence, Millar looked up, glanced sideways at Perlmann, who was sitting next to him, and said in a cool voice which Perlmann envied him, ‘You seem to have forgotten someone.’

The waiter didn’t move, but just raised the pad over Millar’s head and looked into the room. The maître d’ was about to move, when Perlmann gave his order, in dry, clipped words. The waiter brought the pen to the pad, but didn’t write. Then he looked again at Millar, who, after a brief hesitation and with raised eyebrows, dictated his wishes.

She had had no idea about his wife’s accident, Laura Sand said. Why hadn’t he said anything? It would have made a lot of things easier to understand.

‘She’s right,’ said Millar, and in his mouth it sounded yet again like a reproof.

‘I don’t know,’ said Perlmann, and was glad that his voice revealed nothing of the anger that was starting to rise up in him. Now, after they had experienced his breakdown, and he had been dropped as a rival and an adversary in the academic game – now they were all speaking so sympathetically, they were full of generosity and didn’t seem to have the faintest sense of how repellent moral complacency could be. Would they have thought and spoken like that if nothing so dramatic had happened to him, nothing that came so close to an illness? Superficiality as an effect and a cause of fear; that was right. On the other hand: how exactly should he have said it? Where were the individual words of which his explanation would have consisted? And when exactly would he have made it? Perlmann was furious at the shallowness of their generosity, at their lack of precise imagination. With each question about details that passed through his head, his fury intensified still further, he became blind and deaf to his environment and didn’t notice that a long piece of his ash was falling on the freshly starched, blossom-white tablecloth.

The others had been served ages before, but Perlmann still had nothing. The waiter, who had treated him as if he didn’t exist when he was serving, let the long minutes pass, and an awkward silence fell in which the others cast puzzled glances at his empty plate. Perlmann had just pushed back his chair to go in search of the maître d’, when the waiter, with a face like ice, brought him a piccata alla Milanese and slammed the dish down on the bottom plate with a loud clatter, ensuring, with deliberate negligence, that it landed at an angle. The others resumed their conversation.

With his first bite, Perlmann knew: after it had been prepared, the dish had been put in the fridge for a while. Inside it was still warm, but its surface was chilled, and the coldness felt artificial to the tongue. The tomato sauce was particularly cold, and the outermost layer by the cheese was like rubber. He kept an eye out for the maître d’, then got up and walked to the swing door. The waiter, as far as one could make out, had stood watching through the little window in the door. Now he kicked the door open and stepped defiantly out towards Perlmann.

‘My dinner is cold,’ Perlmann said, so loudly that the people at the other tables turned round. The waiter chewed on his lip and looked at him with a hate-filled, contemptuous grin. Then he walked at a pointedly sluggish pace to Perlmann’s place, took the plate and disappeared with an eloquent shake of the head, designed to accuse Perlmann of grouchiness, into the kitchen. When the food was put in front of Perlmann again, it tasted warmed-up and stale, and after a few bites he left it.

It wasn’t just that they were making things look far too simple by reproaching him – in what was intended as a friendly way – for having said nothing and for not having made use of their sympathy. Much worse was that he couldn’t count on their sympathy at all if he told them the truth: that the academic world and its lifestyle had long ago slipped away from him and become something quite alien. To keep from drawing attention to himself, every now and again he poked around at his food, which he could only see now as a disgusting orangey paste, and as he did so it became clear to him that the rage that seethed in him was actually directed far more at the simplistic chatter about his missed explanation than it was at his personal situation.

Before, in the café, he had allowed himself to yield for a moment to the thought that his distress had been caused by the commotion that had resulted from Agnes’s death. That could happen , he thought with amazement: you fled into a thought that you had several times exposed as deceptive, and you did so and opted for blindness because you wanted peace, peace from the flickering questions that oppressed you if you admitted the truth. And, of course, what had happened had had something to do with the fact that it was Evelyn Mistral, of all people, who had suggested that old and seductive thought. But now, as he looked with revulsion at his plate and waited to be able to smoke again at last, Perlmann was once again filled with rage at the idea that they were forcing him, through their lack of sympathy, to leave the excuse about Agnes uncontested, and to distort his pain still further with a lie.