Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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…?

‘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.

When the piece was over, Millar took off his blazer and threw it on to the nearest armchair. There was sweat on his face. No one clapped: his energetic movements announced far too clearly that he was about to play an encore. It was La leggierezza that he played now, one of Liszt’s Trois études de Concert. The piece seemed familiar to Perlmann, even though he couldn’t remember the title. Again he felt envious, particularly of certain runs and trills. All the same, it was comforting when Millar stumbled in the incredibly long run that rippled down with glassy brightness, and cursed quietly.

It was shortly after this run that Perlmann noticed. They aren’t waves, Philipp, he heard Hanna saying, they’re ribbons – bright, billowing ribbons like the ones that girls pull behind them when doing floor exercises. From then on, he had always had that image in his head when he heard or played Chopin’s F minor Étude from Opus 25, in which the right hand had to run through an almost uninterrupted sequence of regular quavers, when the charm of the piece lay in the fact that one could imagine no better medium for the theme than in precisely that regularity. And now he was hearing the same kind of ribbons in the piece by Liszt. They weren’t quite so long or quite so regular, and sometimes the left hand was involved as well. But it was the same musical idea. And while Perlmann inwardly made the comparison, he became clearly aware of something that had hitherto only touched him in the form of a vague, fleeting stumble: there was a thematic similarity between the first piece by Liszt that Millar had played and Chopin’s F minor Étude. Even the key was the same. With growing agitation, he tried to lay his memory of Chopin’s Étude over the notes by Liszt that he had just heard, like a pause the precision of which one wants to check. The piece that was being played interfered with that, and he tried to blank it out. Did that thematic kinship really exist? In one second he was quite sure of it; in the next he mistrusted his impression. If only he had a few minutes to hear the two pieces one after the other.