Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann didn’t stir from his concentration until he heard the applause and saw Millar putting his blazer over his shoulders, before slumping in the armchair.

‘Liszt?’ asked von Levetzov.

‘Yes,’ smiled Millar, ‘the only two pieces I can play. And I’ve always thought they somehow belong together.’

Perlmann pounced on the last remark as you might pounce on an opponent’s error in chess, if you saw straight away that it could decide the whole game.

‘That’s true,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Liszt cribbed them both. From Chopin. From the same piece, the F minor Étude from Opus 25.’

When Millar heard the word ‘crib’, the blood rushed to his face, as if the word had been applied to him. For a while he sat there numbly.

‘Cribbed?’ asked Leskov. ‘What does that mean?’

‘ Spisyvat’ ,’ said Perlmann without hesitation.

Leskov grinned with surprise and improved his emphasis. ‘There you are. You even know a word like that…’

Perlmann reached for his cigarettes.

In the meantime, Millar had recovered himself. ‘I think, Phil,’ he said with controlled calm, ‘you will agree with me that a man like Franz List didn’t need to copy anything. Certainly not from Chopin, who isn’t a patch on him.’

Perlmann was seething, and he felt that his fingers, which were all painful now, had gone cold. It was, he thought, idiotic to provoke this confrontation now, less than twelve hours before Millar’s departure. And yet there was also something that he enjoyed: his fear of open conflict didn’t – as he had expected – discompose him. He felt a solidity that was new to him.

‘Whether he needed or didn’t need to imitate Chopin all the way down to his individual figures, I don’t know,’ Perlmann said on the way to the piano. ‘The fact is that in this case he did.’

He played in a lighter and more liberated way than he had expected, given his trembling fury, and he managed the brief Étude, which contained no particularly great technical difficulties, flawlessly. It only sounded a little too gentle, as he balked at a harder attack.

‘Encore!’ cried Giovanni, who had sat down a little way off, with Signora Morelli. Perlmann didn’t outwardly respond to the exclamation, and went back to his chair. But inwardly, Giovanni, his fan on the edge of the playing field, had performed a small miracle: the conflict with Millar, which Perlmann had just got so wound up in, suddenly lost its power over him, and assumed a playful tinge. He casually lit a cigarette and, as Silvestri had sometimes done, blew the smoke in the direction of Millar’s armchair. Evelyn Mistral tilted her head and nodded slightly.

‘I can’t hear a trace of plagiarism,’ said Millar, and his East Coast accent sounded even stronger than usual.

Ruge took off his glasses and ran his hand over his head. ‘I’m a terrible philistine. But I did have a sense, Brian, that there’s actually something to Philipp’s assertion.’

‘Me too…,’ von Levetzov began.

‘Nonsense,’ Millar interrupted him irritably, visibly aggrieved that his two allies had left him in the lurch at the last minute. ‘Those two bars of Chopin’s are just thrown down haphazardly. A piece that’s been roughly hand-crafted. Practically ingenuous. Liszt’s things, on the other hand, are always very refined.’

Perlmann felt his face getting hot. Giovanni was forgotten. He looked at Millar. ‘You might also say deliberate or calculated or overblown or stilted or affected.’ It was like a breathless obsession, always adding another or , at the risk of not having another word to hand. He didn’t know he knew all those English words, and he had the strange, spooky feeling that they had come to mind only for this occasion, and that they would soon vanish from his vocabulary again without a trace.

Millar took off his glasses, closed his eyes and rubbed the top of his nose. Then he set his glasses on as carefully as if he were at the opticians, closed his eyes, folded his arms and said: ‘Remarkable vocabulary. But acquired. You can always tell the foreigner. And, of course, the words don’t have the slightest thing to do with Franz Liszt.’

Laura Sand quickly laid her hand on Perlmann’s arm. ‘I liked your Chopin. Particularly those lyrical pieces. It’s a shame you didn’t play them before.’

As he left, Leskov put the money from the bet in his pocket. Then he rested a heavy hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘You are a one. You play like a professional and don’t say a word about it. And you know the most obscure Russian words!’ He laughed. ‘Do you know what your problem is? You keep too much to yourself. But you see: it all comes out in the end!’

Perlmann lay awake for most of the night. The storm clouds had passed. A shimmer of moonlight lay over the bay. It was quieter than usual. For hours he didn’t hear a single car. The five weeks were over; the mountains of time without present had faded at last. They had read his notes and heard his Chopin. Now they knew who he was. He had always thought that could never happen. He was confused that the disaster failed to materialize. He waited. Perhaps it would come after some delay, and all the more violently when it did. But it didn’t just begin like that. Very gradually he started to sense that for decades he had been living with an error. It wasn’t true that delineation meant screening oneself off and walling oneself away, as if in an internal fortress. What it came down to was something quite different: that if the others found out, one should stand calmly and fearlessly by what one was in one’s innermost depths. And Perlmann felt as if this insight was also the key to that present that he so longed for, which had always remained as intangible and fleeting as a mirage.

Now and again he dozed off… Not a trace of plagiarism , he heard Millar saying. In reply he slung unfamiliar English words at him, until he noticed at last that it was always one and the same word: spisyvat’ . It’s all coming out! laughed Leskov, and in his mouth there was just a single tooth stump, because he was the old woman by the tunnel. Like in a film! She said. ‘ As if! ’ And then she threw the chronicle at the others, who were doubled up with laughter.

At one point Perlmann turned on the light and looked in the suitcase to see if the envelope with Leskov’s text was still inside.

The moon had disappeared. A fog bank blurred the silent lights of Sestri Levante. Luckily, he had resisted the temptation to play the Nocturne in D flat minor. Why in the world don’t you want to play that piece? Szabo had asked. Because , Perlmann had replied, staring at the keys. Now he could hear it, bar for bar. Her golden hair with the dark strand.

When the two taxi drivers stepped into the lobby, everything suddenly went so fast that Perlmann, who had been counting the hours, felt quite unprepared.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Ruge, after thanking him for everything. ‘Worse things happen!’

Perlmann felt these words tearing open a wound. They assumed something had happened that someone could take amiss – a failure, a disgrace, even a transgression. And he had merely given a weaker presentation than usual. One time in his glittering career. Accompanied by a fainting fit, certainly. But who can do anything about their body? Otherwise, from the vantage point of the others, nothing had happened. So why this sentence that cut and burned, made even more unbearable by the terribly respectable, Swabian cadence? What , he called inaudibly after Ruge, what am I not supposed to worry about? Von Levetzov was already shaking his hand and saying something about a conference at which they would certainly see one another again, while Perlmann still wrestled with Ruge’s words. Was he referring to his fainting? Or the notes? Or that dreadful text? Why did he have to say that? And why at that precise moment, which gave what was said – whatever it might be – a particular weight? He tried to call to mind Ruge’s face and the tone of his voice when talking about the death of his sister. But the more he struggled to remember those things, the more they eluded him. Had they really existed?