Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Agnes had been right: the blue of the sky was strangely transparent here, as if in addition to the sun there were another, invisible background source of light. It gave the space that arched over the bay a veiled, mysterious depth, a depth that contained a promise. He had first encountered that blue and that light when his parents had driven him to Italy. He had only been thirteen, and had no words for it, but the southern colors had sunk deep within him – how deep he really understood only when the train came out of the Gotthard tunnel at Göschenen and the world looked like a picture in tones of grey. Since then the southern light had been holiday light for him, the light that was life as opposed to work. The light of the present. But it was a present that always remained only one possible present, one that one could live if one were not here only on holiday. Each time he saw it he felt as if this light were only being shown to him to make him see that he was not living his real, everyday life in the present. And because it was only ever a holiday light, the sight of it became interwoven with the sensation of something transient, something that could not be captured and that could also be taken away again as soon as it came within reach. Increasingly, he had come to see it as a light of farewell, and sometimes he hated it because it gave him the illusion of a present that perhaps did not exist.

He stared, eyes smarting, at the surface of light now cleaved by a motorboat. The crucial thing , he thought, would be this: to allow the appearance of this light to be everything, the whole of reality, and seek nothing behind it. To experience the light not as a promise, but as the redemption of a promise. As something at which one had arrived, not something that constantly aroused new expectations.

He was further away from that than ever. Against his will, his eyes slipped once more to the veranda. The gleaming red tables with their curved legs were arranged in the shape of a horseshoe, and at its head Signora Morelli had placed a particularly comfortable chair with a high, carved back. ‘Whoever is allowed to sit here must be worthy of it,’ she had said with a smile when showing him the room the previous evening.

For the third time that morning he opened his Russian grammar. But he couldn’t take anything in; it was as if there was no way in from outside – as if he were suddenly blind to signs and meanings. It had been like that the previous day on his journey here, a journey that had become a single tormenting battle against recalcitrance. On the way to the airport he had envied the people on the tram who weren’t carrying luggage, people with pale, sulky, Monday faces who didn’t have to fly to Genoa right now. Later on, he had wanted to swap places with the airport staff, and for a long time he watched the passengers, all of them, who had just landed and who were coming towards him from his plane. They’d put it all behind them. It was a rainy, windy morning, the cars were driving with their lights on, a December mood in mid-October, weather that could have intensified the thrill of anticipation of a flight to the south. But nothing struck him as more desirable than to stay in Frankfurt. He thought of the quiet apartment hung with Agnes’s photographs, and what he really wanted to do was shut himself away in there and remain incommunicado for a very long time.

He had been sitting in the waiting room by the gate for a while, when he suddenly went out again and called his secretary. It was a phone call with no discernible purpose; he was repeating things they had discussed many times: what to do about his mail and how else they would stay in touch. Frau Hartwig didn’t know what to say, her helplessness was clearly audible. ‘Yes, of course, Herr Perlmann, I will do it just as we agreed.’ Then he enquired, with sudden impertinence, after her husband and child. That untimely interest wrong-footed her, and there was a long, embarrassed pause before he said, ‘All right then,’ and she said, ‘Yes, bon voyage.’ He had been last to board.

On the plane he had struggled with himself. He told himself that while this might indeed have been the dreaded day of his arrival, it was still a day that belonged to him alone, and on which he could do something for himself. He set the Russian grammar down on the empty seat next to him. Then he waited for the magical effect of the plane as it started to move – waited for everything to come into flux in the moment of take-off, for everything to seem lighter. On a day like this you would soon be in the clouds, there were moments that were frightening in spite of one’s experience, and then suddenly one emerged into a deep blue, transparent sky, a dome of pure ultramarine, and down below was the dazzlingly bright sea of clouds, from which individual formations loomed, little white mountains with pin-sharp edges, which tended to produce in him the impression of perfect stillness. I have escaped , he usually thought, and enjoyed the feeling that everything that had held him trapped until a few moments before was losing its power and falling away silently behind him, and he didn’t have to do a thing. Yesterday, however, none of those things had happened, the whole thing had struck him as dull and boring. Forward impulsion with roaring engines, nothing else. Yes, outside it was as it always was, but he felt as if he were in an advertisement for the airline, shown a thousand times and without authenticity, without presence. He pulled the shutter down over the window, chose not to have anything to eat and tried to immerse himself in his grammar. But his usual concentration abandoned him. He stared again and again at the little boxes and exercises, but they simply didn’t take. Then, when the plane began its descent, he was as violently startled by the gentle change in the sound of the engine and the feeling in his body as he would have been by the sound of an explosion. So here he was. When someone accidentally bumped into him as they were leaving the plane, he had to close his eyes for a moment and clutch himself before he managed to walk calmly on.

In Genoa the weather had been flat and dead. Grey, dirty-looking cloud banks let through only a dull, uninspiring light. Things were obtrusively only themselves, they had no significance and no lustre. The industrial plants that the airport bus drove past were ugly; there didn’t seem to be a single unbroken windowpane, and he wondered how such a run-down terrain could produce all that bright white smoke, which looked poisonous. The few people in the station, it seemed to him, moved wearily in an alien time that flowed with nightmarish slowness. The smoking staff at the ticket counters showed no sign of serving him. Even the taxi driver didn’t seem to care much about his fare. Only after he had finished chatting to his colleagues did he bother to ask which way to go. ‘The shortest,’ Perlmann had said furiously.

Before the plane took off for the return journey, four weeks, five days and three-and-a-half hours would pass. Perlmann stared at the reddish stone tiles of the hotel terrace. It was like a huge mountain range of tenseless time that loomed all the higher the more burning his desire was that things were over. And as the desire became even more violent every time he had it clearly before his eyes, and threatened to grow to infinity overall, Perlmann had a sense that that longed-for moment would never come, because there was no possibility of climbing over all the dead time that loomed ahead of him like a menacing wall. The only way out lay in silencing the desire and achieving inner calm. Then the mountain range would remove itself, and once the inner calm was complete, time would seem like a plane that he would be able to cross effortlessly to reach that distant moment.

He finally wanted to memorize the various expressions that existed in Russian for must . He ran through the list and immediately forgot every line. Sitting back in the shade didn’t do any good, and it had nothing to do with the sunglasses, either. And learning foreign languages was something he had mastered. The only thing, in fact. It was also the only thing that could really hold his attention. Studying languages, he had the feeling that his life was advancing and he was developing. And sometimes, when a foreign sentence, a hitherto inaccessible text, suddenly opened itself up to him, he felt as if he had snatched a breath of presence.