Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

That afternoon, to his surprise, that passage had gone smoothly for the first time ever. He had been glad, but from experience he had also remained sceptical at first. He hurried to repeat his success, and finally to memorize the correct fingering once and for all. It was fine the second and third times, and the fourth time it almost felt like a firmly fixed routine. He had the feeling that he had finally managed it, and went down to the foyer to allow himself a cigarette.

Then, sitting back down at the grand piano, when he tried to put his new-won confidence to the test, he immediately stumbled. He tried it a few more times, but it wouldn’t work at all. Then, still sitting at the keyboard, he lit another cigarette, which was completely forbidden, and smoked it calmly to the end, using the box as an ashtray. Then he carefully closed the lid and opened the window. Before he went outside, he looked at the little painting by Paul Klee, which, because it was the only painting, merely served to emphasize the bareness of the room. It was right in the player’s eye-line. He would miss it.

It wasn’t, Perlmann thought, as if he had simply run out of patience that time. Quite calmly, with no inner turmoil, he had walked along the corridor to Bela Szabo’s room, and later up the stairs to the Director. It would also have been misleading to say, he thought, that he had given up his training because of his defeat with the A flat major Polonaise. What happened to him that afternoon was simply that a complicated internal play of forces, which had been under way for many months – determined by very different experiences that he had had of himself as a pianist, and by doubts of very different kinds – reached a standstill in his definitive and irrevocable clarity about the boundaries of his talent. If he said to himself that the decision had been made at that moment, it could only, it seemed to him, mean the arrival of that standstill, the end of his internal uncertainty. Apart from that, there had been no further supplementary internal decision that might have communicated between his inner state and the subsequent external actions.

Bela Szabo had seen his decision as a mistake, or at least as premature. In this he had shared the opinion of Perlmann’s parents, who thought it was a shame, and ungrateful of him, too, simply to throw away his artistic future, in which they had invested so much. But he was completely certain and his mind would not be changed. He felt it in his hands, in his arms, and sometimes even as a certainty within his whole body: he would never be anything more than a piano teacher. He was proud of being capable of such a sober insight, and did everything he could not to turn his decision into a drama. Still, a wound had remained, which had never quite healed, and which he perceived as a source of personal insecurity.

For several years after his decision, he had not played a single note or set foot in a concert hall. It was Agnes who had persuaded him to start playing again. They bought a grand piano, and he gradually found his way back into Chopin, who had originally awoken his desire to learn the piano. But he never again attempted the Polonaise in A flat major. After Agnes’s death he had avoided the piano altogether. He was afraid that the notes would break through all the dams and he would start playing sentimentally. That was something he couldn’t have borne, not even when he was alone.

Perlmann gave Sandra a big tip when she brought him the cigarettes that she had bought in the Piazza Veneto. Then he went on flicking through the book. Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations. Perlmann greedily read the article about Khrushchev’s demands and the failure of his trip. And the next two pages, entirely devoted to John F. Kennedy’s election as president, he read as if they contained revelations about his own life.

When the restaurant began filling up, he barely noticed, but just changed irritably to the other side of the table, so that he had the wall in front of him. With great attention he read every single name on the list of Kennedy’s cabinet, and then it continued into the next year: Gagarin in space; Cuban invasion of the Bay of Pigs; building the Berlin Wall.

Letting his life roll out again, along the history of the world: it was, Perlmann thought, like waking up. With every page the need grew to be sure of all the things that had happened throughout all the years in which he had been chiefly preoccupied with himself – trying to use work to banish his fear of failure in life. In the midst of the chatter and laughter from the other tables he felt as if he had, so to speak, been a prisoner of that effort, and as if he were only now coming back. It was like joining the real world. It could have been a liberating, cheering experience, had it not been for the hotel, less than two kilometers away, with the steps, the painted window frames and the crooked pine trees.

Perlmann looked in horror at his watch: ten past nine. He couldn’t turn up to dinner as late as that. Nonetheless, he hurried to pay, and walked quickly back to the hotel, which he entered by the back door for the first time. He had just quietly closed it behind him, when Giovanni came round the corner with a big cardboard box under his arm. ‘ Buona sera ,’ he said genially, and bowed slightly before setting off again. Today Giovanni had his face under control. There was not a hint of yesterday’s grin. But Perlmann thought he sensed behind Giovanni’s expression the laughter of the servant who has caught his master in some unseemly act.

Perlmann had looked forward to turning into the dimly lit corridor upstairs, and in the middle of it, under the unlit lamp, feeling around for the keyhole. So he had been unpleasantly surprised when all the lamps were lit unusually brightly. With his key in his hand, he paced back and forth, before creeping to the cupboard at the end of the corridor and fetching a ladder. With his handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, he half-unscrewed all nine bulbs so that the lighting was just as it had been before.

Tomorrow would be even more about Millar’s first paper than today. Perlmann reluctantly bent down to the round table and flicked through some pages. Then he went to the bathroom and took a sleeping pill from the packet. He broke it in two and, after some hesitation, washed down the biggest part.

When he had given up the Conservatoire, emergency laws had been in place, he thought as he lay in the darkness and listened to the unabated traffic. He had watched the demonstrations from the other side of the street. He felt he should have crossed over. But there were all those people there, and the noisy megaphones, and the rhythmical movement of the crowd, which made one feel one was losing one’s own will. And so, till now, he had never made a political commitment, even though on his internal stage he always advocated very clear and often radical positions. Not even Agnes had known that for a while he had been almost as at home in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism as a historian.

That night he woke up three times, and still he couldn’t escape the leaden power of that accursed word. It was the word masterclass , a word that made both his parents freeze with respect as if it were the name of God. Being accepted into the masterclass run by a big name: in their eyes that was the highest attainment possible, and they had no dearer wish for their own son than such a consecration. In the dream that stayed with him even after he was awake, Perlmann didn’t see his parents, and he didn’t hear them utter the word either. It was more as if his parents were there, and the word as well, and the word was carved into their devout silence in huge letters of trepidation.

Only when he had spent several minutes under the shower did he feel the scorn that was finally able to break the power of the word.