Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann felt his stomach contracting as violently as if he were reacting to a searing poison. He tried to breathe calmly, and very slowly put a cigarette between his lips. When his eye fell on Silvestri, he thought of the doctor on the telephone. He held the cigarette in the flame for much longer than necessary and inwardly rehearsed the tone that the doctor had used – the tone of natural delimitation, the non-subservient tone. He took a deep drag and, leaning back, finished the uncomfortably long pause with the words: ‘I think the work of each of us is deserving of equal interest, so that the sequence in which we get to it is insignificant. Isn’t that right?’

Even before he had finished his sentence he knew that he had got the tone completely wrong. He looked up and looked at von Levetzov with a smile which, he hoped, took something of the edge off the rebuke.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ von Levetzov said, startled, and added sharply, ‘No need to get worked up.’

‘Perhaps everyone should give a short account of what their contribution will be about,’ said Laura Sand, ‘then we’ll be more able to judge a sensible sequence.’

At first Perlmann was grateful to her for having saved the situation like that. But a moment later he was filled with panic. He hid his face behind his clasped hands. That would look like he was concentrating. Cold sweat formed on his palms. He closed his eyes and yielded for a while to leaden exhaustion.

But it had been as clear as day that it would come sooner or later. After all, even yesterday, when he was talking to Evelyn Mistral, that question had made him shiver. So why, in the meantime, had he not come up with a clever answer? He would have had to work it out effectively and then memorize it until, at the moment it was needed, he could summon it up as something to be presented with complete equanimity and even, for the brief span of his presentation, believed – a staged self-deception that was available to him as part of his facade. But now, what I say will be completely random.

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t have said what subject Adrian von Levetzov had sketched. While he himself sought feverishly for formulae which he could later cobble together into the appearance of a subject, only the complacent, mannered tone of von Levetzov’s English got through to him. It was only towards the end, while von Levetzov was preparing for yet another question from Ruge, that Perlmann started distinguishing individual words. But it was strange: instead of receiving the words in their familiar meaning, and slipping through them to the expressed thought, all he heard was that most of them were foreign words, jargon with its roots in Latin or Greek, which, when linked together, produced a kind of Esperanto. He found these words ridiculous, just silly and then that ghostly insecurity suddenly rose up within him again, the sensation that had for some time made him pick up the dictionary with increasing frequency. Each time he did so the feeling fell from a clear sky that he no longer had the faintest idea of the meaning of a technical term that he had read thousands of times; it had an irritating blurriness that made it look like a wobbly photograph. And yet every time he consulted the dictionary he made the same discovery: he had precisely the correct definition in his head; there was nothing more precise to know. Uncertain whether this discovery reassured him, or whether the insecurity grew because it had needed such a discovery, he put the dictionary back on the shelf. And often, a few days later, he looked up the same word again.

Laura Sand had, when it was her turn, a cigarette between her lips, and tried to keep the smoke from getting in her eyes. Her initial sentences were halting as she looked for something in her papers, and anyone who hadn’t known that her books on animal languages were among the very best on the subject would have taken it for a sign of uncertainty. At last she found the piece of paper she had been looking for, let her eyes slide over it, and started talking with great fluency and concentration about the experiments she had performed over the past few months in Kenya. What she said was wonderfully concise and clear, Perlmann thought, and set out in that dark, always slightly irritated voice which, when she wanted to emphasize something, dropped into the broad Australian accent normally concealed behind an unremarkable British English. Like yesterday, when she had arrived, she was entirely dressed in black; the only color about her was the red in the signet ring on the little finger of her right hand.

Again Perlmann hid his face behind his hands and struggled to remember the specialist questions that he had recently examined, when I was still on top of things . But nothing came. Only Leskov suddenly appeared in his inner field of vision, Leskov with his big pipe between his bad, brown, tobacco-stained teeth, his massive body sunk in the worn, dirty grey upholstery of the chair in the foyer of the conference building. Perlmann tried not to listen when the vividly remembered figure spoke about how deeply words intervened in experience. He didn’t need that image, he said to himself. He really didn’t need it at all, because he had the black notebook with his own notes in it. If only he could go quickly upstairs and cast his eye over them.

Giorgio Silvestri held one knee braced against the edge of the table and balanced on the back legs of his chair. He let his left arm dangle backwards, and rested his right on the arm, a cigarette between his long, slender fingers. Un po’ stravagante , Angelini had called him. When he started speaking now, with a voice that was soft but, in spite of its strong accent, very confident, his white hand tirelessly moved with its cigarette, emphasizing certain things, casting others in doubt or making them seem vague. If one listened to schizophrenic patients, he said, the usual expectations with regard to coherence were disappointed. But the shifts in meaning and instances of conceptual incoherence obeyed a logic; there wasn’t mere chaos. He wanted to use his time here to write up his collected clinical material on this thesis. He asked for a late date, as all his work in the hospital had delayed him.

Perlmann picked up the chalk. He has a sound reason. I don’t. And the decent thing would be to offer him the last date. But then I wouldn’t even have a whole three weeks, so it’s quite impossible. He put Silvestri’s name down for Thursday and Friday of the fourth week. Even before he turned back to the others, he felt Brian Millar’s gaze resting on him. Again the American held his arms folded and his head tilted on one side. His thin lips twitched, and Perlmann was sure that the question was about to come. He could have slapped himself for not expecting this.

‘Of course you can take the last two days,’ he said to Silvestri, and drew an arrow across to the fifth week.

‘I’d like to leave it open, if that’s OK,’ Silvestri said.

So for safety’s sake I’ve got to put myself down for the Thursday of the fourth week. The others have to get my text by the previous Tuesday at the latest. That means I’ve still got exactly twenty days. Perlmann put a cigarette between his lips when he had sat down. He was horrified to see the hand that held the match trembling, and immediately brought his arm up and held his wrist with the other hand.

Achim Ruge, who was next in line, took out a huge, red-and-white checked handkerchief, clumsily unfolded it, took off his glasses and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. That suddenly brought the room problem back to Perlmann’s consciousness. The thought of it was the last thing he needed now. He pushed it powerfully away from him, but felt an additional anxiety rise up. Ruge took off his jacket and sat there in his ill-cut shirt, with rubber bands on the upper arms to shorten the sleeves. Stuffy. He’s the stuffiest person I know. And he’s straight, straight to the bone. Maybe it isn’t even the case that I have the most to fear from Millar and von Levetzov. Maybe this Achim Ruge, because of his stuffiness, his straightness, is even more dangerous . It wasn’t unthinkable, Perlmann thought, that von Levetzov would creep away from academia for a while – to a woman, perhaps, or because of an addiction to gambling. Rumours were never entirely a matter of chance. Accordingly, he might not be so hard on Perlmann – at least there would be a certain thoughtfulness about his condemnation. And Millar too had a certain straight quality, but it was the athletic straightness of an American who could sometimes go off the rails. Where Sheila was concerned, for example. In the case of Ruge, on the other hand, who knew nothing but his laboratory and his computer, any dropping off was unimaginable, and for that reason his judgment was likely to be ruthless and devastating.