Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

He furtively opened the door and reassured himself that no one was in the corridor. Then he ran, crouching, to the stairs, his suitcases held just above the ground, and hurried to the top floor, taking the steps two at a time in spite of the heavy luggage. Panting, he set the suitcases down in his new room and hurried back again. Together with his grammar and his dictionary, Millar and Leskov’s papers formed a big, shapeless stack, which he covered with his coat. After a searching glance through the room he used the key to avoid the noise of the slamming door.

The ceiling light in the new room cast a cold, diffuse light that recalled a station waiting room. On the other hand, the beam of light from the standard lamp beside the red armchair was warm and clear, an ideal light for reading. Once it was lit, the rest of the expansive room sank into a calming darkness that belonged to him alone. After a while he crossed this darkness to the bathroom and took half a sleeping pill. Until it took effect, he would just manage to scamper through Millar’s first text in bed. It was a difficult text with lots of formulae. But for that reason he’d hardly be able to do it tomorrow. Perlmann set his alarm clock for half-past seven. He would, he thought in his half-sleep, have to simulate an opinion for tomorrow’s session. It wouldn’t be enough to capture it in words; it was a matter of staging the opinion inside oneself as well. Was it possible to do that, fighting against the certainty that one lacked any opinion?

The waiter who brought him his coffee the following morning passed no remark about the new room. As he approached the round table beside the red armchair, Perlmann covered Leskov’s paper with the hotel brochure and pushed it aside to make space for the tray. He did it with a quick, furtive motion which unsettled him vaguely, but which he immediately forgot.

There was no time now for Millar’s first paper, which he hadn’t got round to reading the night before, because the five minutes of snoozing that he had allowed himself after the ringing of the alarm clock had turned into half an hour. Perlmann looked again at the passages that Millar quoted from his own writings. He could hardly believe that he himself should have written them. Not because he thought they were bad. But the author of those lines had a grasp of his subject and a firmness of opinion that Perlmann was so unable to remember that he suspected he had not even been present when they were written. That remote, alien author was not a bit closer to him than Millar’s academic voice, so that he felt like a referee in a dispute between strangers; a referee whose neutrality went so far that he pursued argument and counter-argument without the slightest desire to become involved himself. Afterwards, when he walked through the lobby, turned into the corridor leading to the lounge and approached the steps to the Marconi Veranda, he was still engaged in a vain attempt to stand up for himself.

Millar began by explaining the theoretical motifs and long-term research interests that had guided him in the present work. After a few sentences he got up and started walking back and forth, his arms folded in front of his chest. He wore dark blue trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt with epaulettes, which had clearly been left in a suitcase for a long time. Although his hair was still damp, it looked oddly dull, and there wasn’t a sign of its usual reddish gleam. The manner in which he put his case was like a resolute admiral addressing his men. As he set one well-formed sentence against another in his sonorous voice, he radiated the certainty of someone who knew his own world perfectly and didn’t doubt for a moment that he was in precisely the right place in that world – a world in which – as in an officer’s mess, there were immutable rules like, for example, the rule that one had to appear on time for breakfast. Perlmann had never been to the Rockefeller University at which Millar worked, but somehow it struck him as quite natural that people who went in and out of it were people like Brian Millar. He looked across to Giorgio Silvestri, who, rocking back and forth on his chair, had almost lost his balance a moment ago and had only managed to keep himself from falling by supporting himself on the window behind him. He would have liked to exchange a glance and a smile with Silvestri, but feared that would betray too much of his desire for complicity against Millar.

Millar sat down and sought Perlmann’s eye. But Adrian von Levetzov had been preparing to spring for a long time, and immediately began to speak. Had he not curried favor with Millar, fifteen years his junior, by giving him an apologetic smile – Perlmann would have admired him. His questions and objections all hit home, and Perlmann wished that they had occurred to him, too. But it wasn’t the case. To think of these things you have to be right inside – as I am no longer inside. He felt a twinge of envy like the ones he had felt often before, as an ambitious student, when someone else was faster at formulating ideas that he should have been capable of producing himself; and for a moment he was annoyed by his former violence towards himself. But then something strange happened: all of a sudden he experienced these sensations as no longer belonging to him, to his present; they were only reminiscences, obsolete emotional reflexes from a time when academic work had not yet become alien to him. He was puzzled to feel the extent to which he had survived himself, and for a while, as silence fell around him, it felt like a great liberation. But then the voices of the others reached him again, and he was horrified to realize how far from them that inner development had taken him, and how menacing it was, particularly in this room, which he had feared since his arrival.

Before Perlmann was able to say something, Achim Ruge intervened in the debate. The contrast with von Levetzov’s exaggeratedly obliging manner could not have been greater. As a critic, there was something surly and blustering about him, and if he accompanied a reservation with his gurgling laugh it sounded almost scornful. He treated Millar, his contemporary, like everyone else, not without respect, but entirely without subservience, and nothing intimidated him. When Millar said rather sharply, in response to one of his objections, ‘Frankly, Achim, I just don’t see that,’ Ruge shot back with a grin, ‘Yes, I know,’ for which he was rewarded with laughter, which Millar endured with a sour smile that was supposed to look sporting.

But it was peculiar, Perlmann thought: coming from Ruge, there was nothing wounding about it at all. One simply couldn’t take umbrage at the style of the man with the bald head and the terrible Swabian accent, because through all his bluster his benevolence was discernible; there was a sense that his aggressiveness lacked the faintest trace of spite. Now that his loud nose-blowing had been evaded, and he would no longer have to imagine him sitting opposite him on the other side of the wall, Perlmann could accept this Achim Ruge. And, in fact, it was absurd to assume that his respectability and rectitude made him dangerous.

Laura Sand had put down her pen and was about to say something. But when she saw that everyone’s eyes were on Perlmann, she leaned back and reached for a cigarette. Perlmann looked across at Silvestri, but instead of finding support there, his gaze bounced off the tense expectation that lay in the darkly glittering eyes. There was no getting away now. The time had come.

What issued from his mouth were unobjectionable sentences, and their dragging tempo barely differed from the natural expression of reflectiveness. But in Perlmann’s head they thundered like hollow, meaningless sequences of sounds that came from somewhere or other and trickled through him like something alien, not unlike the quiet vibrations you feel on a train journey. That perception threatened to silence him before each next syllable, so that he constantly had to give himself a jolt to reach the next sentence – to produce the required minimum of sentences, so to speak. And then, all of a sudden, the internal pressure grew too great, and a quiet explosion followed, giving him a gambler’s courage.