Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

What did that lack of sympathy really mean? At last he could light a cigarette, and his concentration on the question helped him ignore the waiter, who deliberately brushed his sleeve with the plate as he cleared the table. He ran through his colleagues one by one, glancing furtively at each as their turn came. No, in this matter he didn’t underestimate the others out of fear. He couldn’t allow himself to be deceived even by Evelyn Mistral’s face, red with wine and laughter. If he closed her eyes, her head with her piled-up hair and glasses superimposed itself over the image that he had just seen. The only one he thought capable of understanding was Giorgio Silvestri. But he didn’t represent the hated academic world anyway. And besides: could he really understand how someone could have fallen victim to an incurable indifference towards all desire for knowledge? Perlmann doubted it, looking at him now, leaning tensely forward and making the gesture of precision with his thumb and forefinger.

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.

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.