Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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.

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.