Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

He was a linguistic psychologist without tenure at a university, Perlmann said. Teaching commissions only every now and again. How he kept his head financially above water, he couldn’t say. What was impressive was how good Leskov was at describing things, much better than most of the other people working in the field. It made one realize the extent to which, before any kind of theory, the important thing was to describe our experiences very precisely with language. Admittedly, his work was a kind of old-fashioned, introspective psychology, which didn’t get you anywhere these days. But that was precisely what he, Perlmann, had found interesting in their conversation in St Petersburg.

‘So you speak Russian, too?’ von Levetzov asked irritably. Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment.

‘No, no,’ he said, and immediately managed a regretful smile, ‘not a word. But he can speak perfect German. His grandmother was German and only ever spoke to him in her mother tongue when he lived with her after his father’s death. His English was a bit clumsy, he told me; but he would certainly have managed here.’

Perlmann had no idea why he had lied, and he couldn’t quite believe how unerringly he had done it. Evelyn Mistral, to whom he glanced across only hesitantly, was watching him with a face that was thoughtful and roguish by turns. Now we’re accomplices , he thought, and didn’t know whether he was pleased about it or whether his new feeling of vulnerability had predominated.

‘Unfortunately, his exit permit was refused,’ he concluded, and reached for the cigarettes with a relief that surprised him.

‘Let’s take another look at the veranda,’ said Achim Ruge, when the conversation about conditions in the former Soviet Union had run aground and Millar looked at his watch with a yawn.

Perlmann was last to go up the three steps. What will it be like when I come down them that day?

Ruge had sat down at the front in the high-backed chair whose embroidered upholstery looked like Gobelins. ‘If someone sitting here has nothing to say it’s his own fault,’ he said with a gurgling laugh, prompting general laughter. Perlmann pretended to study the tasselled coats of arms that ran along the wall.

‘So what do you have to say about language, Achim?’ he heard Evelyn Mistral asking, trying to imitate a strict teacher. ‘Or have you forgotten to do your homework?’

More laughter. Only Laura Sand didn’t join in, but investigated the old chest in the corner. Now the others were outdoing one another with caricatures of a cross-examination, and with mounting enjoyment Ruge was playing the devious idiot who hides behind a facade of intimidation. Perlmann’s heart thumped in his throat. When Silvestri made a dry remark and then, with a swift movement of his tongue, made his cigarette disappear into his mouth, Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice cracked with laughter. Perlmann didn’t wait to hear what Millar, who was just getting a breath of fresh air, would say. As if anaesthetized he left, asked Giovanni for the key to his room and hobbled hastily, toes aching, upstairs.

He put on the chain, took off his painful shoes in the dark and fell back on the bed. Immediately the sentences started circling in his head, sentences spoken over dinner and on the veranda a moment before, sentences about the prize, about Princeton, about lazy Spanish professors, about forgotten homework. They kept returning, those sentences, as persistent as an echo that refused to die away or come to an end.

Perlmann was all too familiar with these tormenting circles of sentences, that compulsion to cling to sentences that had been uttered, and every time he was sucked into that wake, he felt as if he had spent the bulk of his life listening like this to sentences that had injured or frightened him. Agnes had suffered from the fact that he would sometimes turn up days, even weeks later with such a sentence and lend it a weight, a drama it had never had – just because he had been chewing away at it for so long, on walks or during hours of sleeplessness. Often she could hardly remember having said anything of the kind. That, in turn, struck him as mockery and made him helplessly furious. He was embittered. He had felt abandoned by everybody and crept away. Agnes told him how dangerous this memory for sentences was, how inhibited it could make you, so that you no longer dared to say anything spontaneous, if the thing you had said was then placed on the scales and later held up in front of you like a crime. He had seen that. This time the insight had helped. But the next time he had fallen right into the trap all over again.

He sat up and turned on the light. Tomorrow morning, at the first work session in the veranda, he would have to act as director. He would have to do that with skill and understanding, to see to it that his own contribution was made as late as possible. To do that, he needed a clear and rested mind. But with the darkness the sentences would come back, too.

He went to the bathroom and saw in front of him the long look that the doctor had given him before writing out the prescription for twenty strong sleeping tablets. He’s a decent man and a good doctor, but he can’t understand someone not being able to sleep, he’s not familiar with it. Perlmann took half a tablet, certainly no more than that. Then he set the alarm for seven. The session was due to begin at nine. In the joking banter surrounding this question, Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov had won out over the others, even if it was still, as far as Millar’s biological clock was concerned, the middle of the night.

Perlmann turned out the light and waited for the tablets to take effect. Down on the coast road a motorbike passed at full speed. Otherwise it was silent. Suddenly, Ruge blew his nose in the next room: three trumpet blasts. It was as if there were no wall between them. Ruge seemed to fill even Perlmann’s room with his physical presence. All of a sudden everything was right in front of Perlmann’s eyes again: the mirror-image desk, Ruge sitting at it with his great peasant head and watery grey eyes behind his wired-up glasses, and on the other side Millar with his Bach.

Perlmann got to his feet and put his ear to the wall. Nothing. Back in bed he ran once again through the possible explanations for a change of room: the bed, my back; they couldn’t check that, they would just have to believe me. He relaxed and felt the first hint of numbness in his lips and fingertips.

Now the sentences couldn’t get at him any more. And Ruge could sit at his desk playing the piano as much as he wanted. From tomorrow there would be no one on this side. Ruge shook with laughter, gurgled, burped and had to gasp for air. His grand piano came inexorably closer. It expanded, while Perlmann’s piano shrank like melting cellophane. Now it was Millar who was playing. The Well-Tempered Clavier, I tell you, it’s boring, even if you find that shocking. Millar was standing by the ochre-colored grand piano, and while Evelyn Mistral squeaked with pleasure he bowed uninterruptedly until he was finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

‘I just wanted to ask you quickly if you got there all right,’ said Kirsten. A thin layer of numbness lay on Perlmann’s face, and his tongue was furry and heavy.

‘Wait a moment,’ he murmured, and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where he let cold water run over his face. His hand tingled as he picked up the receiver again.

‘Sorry if I woke you,’ said Kirsten. ‘I’m just so used to us calling each other at this time of day.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said, and was glad that it didn’t sound too washed-out.

The business with the shared house had sorted itself out nicely, she told him; only one woman was a bit difficult. ‘And just imagine: today I signed up for my first presentation. About Faulkner’s The Wild Palms , the one with the double narrative. And then it turned out that it’s my turn in fourteen days’ time! I feel quite different when I think about it. I hope you don’t have to sit at the front as well!’