Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann sat down in the big worn-out red plush wing chair next to the window. He started assessing the room with his eyes, and even before he had finished he liked it. He lay down on the bed. Suddenly it was very easy to relax. The new room allowed him to forget what had happened at the meeting. The honks of a ship’s horn and the rattle of a motorboat reached him from far away. He thought about the fact that the two adjacent rooms were empty. Their neighboring rooms, in turn, seemed to be unoccupied as well, and his imagination produced endless series of empty, silent rooms. Then he went to sleep.

It was shortly before three when he woke up shivering and dry-mouthed, at first confused by the surroundings, then relieved. On the way down to his old room he clutched the key like an anchor. Millar’s music would no longer trouble him, he thought, as he packed the clothes and books that he would bring upstairs at night when all was quiet.

There was a whole hour before Millar’s texts were due to be in their pigeonholes. Perlmann picked up Leskov’s paper. Once more he ran through the sentence about the linguistic creation of one’s own past. What he had written as a translation in the morning was true. But now the text became very difficult. Leskov introduced the concept of a remembered scene – vspomnishchaya stsena – and then seemed to develop the idea that we inevitably project a self-image – samopredstavlenie – into such scenes. Perlmann had to look up every second word, and the typescript was slowly obscured by his scribbled translations. It was becoming increasingly clear to him: he had to buy a vocabulary book in which he could write all the new words. In this way he would produce a glossary of academic Russian, a sphere of language that was barely touched upon in the books of exercises. He suddenly felt fine: he had a plan that he was able to pursue in his new, quiet room. It was a working project. At last he was a working man again. When he walked along the port into town to find a stationery shop, his steps were firm and confident.

It was his first venture into the town, and for a long time it looked as if there wasn’t a single shop selling writing equipment. At last, in a dark side street, he found a scruffy little shop selling not only stationery but also magazines and trashy novels, as well as cheap toys and sweets. Still annoyed at having had to search for so long, but now also relieved, he turned the handle with brio and pushed against the locked door with his shoulder and head. Still siesta, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He stopped by the shop window and rubbed his aching forehead. After a while his eye was caught by a big book which was set up behind the dirty pane, surrounded by tinsel and paper chains, like a holy book in a shrine. It was a chronicle of the twentieth century. The front cover was divided into four fields showing world-famous photographs, icons of the century: Marilyn Monroe, standing over the ventilating shaft, holding on to her skirt as it blew up; Elvis Presley in a pale blue glittery suit, bent far back as he played; Neil Armstrong’s first footstep on the moon; Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, bending over the assassinated president in the open-topped car. Perlmann felt the pictures drawing him into their spell as if he had never seen them before. The idea of being able to read something about the subjects of these pictures, right now, electrified him, and suddenly nothing seemed more exciting, nothing more important, than to comprehend the century in which he lived from the perspective of pictures like that. Excitedly, he tore open the packet of cigarettes that he had bought on the corner. No, it wasn’t like that: it wasn’t a matter of understanding a century like a historian. What he wanted was to reappropriate his own life by imagining what had happened in the world outside while he was alive. The idea first came to him there in that dark, deserted alley, smelling a bit of fish and rotten vegetables. He was unsure whether he fully understood what he was thinking, but he was impatient to get started, whatever it might be.

The shop’s proprietor, when she finally opened the door to him, was a fat woman with far too many rings on her plump hands. She was at first annoyed by Perlmann’s unconcealed impatience. But when he asked for the chronicle, her grumpy attitude gave way to solicitous friendliness. She was taken aback, as if she had never imagined that anyone might actually want to buy that big, unwieldy book, the centerpiece of her display; certainly not someone with an unmistakeably foreign accent, and during the dead time of the Italian siesta. She fetched the heavy volume from the shop window, dusted it down in the open door and handed it to Perlmann with a theatrical gesture: Ecco! She wouldn’t take anything for the vocabulary notebook – it was gratis. She stuffed the bundle of cash into the pocket of her apron. She was still shaking her head with surprise as she watched him leave from the doorway.

Two streets on, Perlmann saw an unprepossessing sign: trattoria. He parted the glass-bead curtain, walked down the long, gloomy corridor and suddenly found himself in a bright, glass-roofed internal courtyard with dining tables covered by red-and-white checked tablecloths. The room was empty, and Perlmann had to call twice before the proprietor arrived wearing an apron. They themselves had just eaten, he said genially, but Perlmann could still have a minestrone and a plate of pasta. Then, when he brought the food, his wife and daughter appeared as well. Perlmann was itching to read the chronicle, but the family was curious to find out about the man with the big book who plainly lived against the grain of the daily rhythm. In return for their hospitality at such an unusual time, Perlmann told them about the research group. Investigating languages, that was interesting, they thought, and he had to tell them more and more. Sandra in particular, the thirteen-year-old daughter with the long, pitch-black hair, asked question after question, and her parents were visibly proud to have a daughter with such a thirst for knowledge. Talking about these subjects went amazingly well given his poor Italian. Perlmann was pleased with every successful turn of phrase that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of, and this delight at his linguistic success, along with the desire not to disappoint Sandra made him draw a positive, almost enthusiastic picture of what they were doing over at the hotel, which was grotesquely at odds with his internal misery. When the proprietor and his family finally withdrew to leave him to read, in their eyes he was an enviable man who was lucky enough to do exactly what interested him most; the rare case, then, of a man who lived in perfect harmony with himself.

Perlmann opened the book at the year of his high-school graduation. The first controlled nuclear fusion. A come-back for De Gaulle. Boris Pasternak forced to give back the Nobel Prize. There had been elections in Italy. Pope Pius XII had died. The Torre Velasca in Milan had been completed. The Bishop of Prato, who had insulted a couple as pubblici concubini and pubblici peccatori because they had refused a church wedding, was accused of slander before a court, fined and later, after a rebellion of the church, absolved on the grounds of insindacabilità dell’atto .

Perlmann read with his eyes aflame. The texts weren’t demanding, and by and large his Italian was up to the task. The whole thing was written in a sensational style and had a tabloid whiff about it, but that didn’t bother him. He actually enjoyed it, and the fact that the selection of events was made from the Italian perspective gave the affair an exotic charm. He was boundlessly surprised by his fascination, when he read, for example, that the Hungarian uprising, which had been a great embarrassment to the Italian Communists two years previously, had not lost the Party any votes in the elections. He couldn’t understand why he asked Sandra to bring him one espresso after another, while smoking like a chimney. But he enjoyed surprising himself by making an unexpected discovery about himself, which, he felt vaguely, could be the start of something.