Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Two mistakes in the formulae, and now this. And it was always Philipp Perlmann who found fault with him. Millar would be fuming, this man who was now whipping his American ankle-boots back and forth, as he explained the difference between piano and harpsichord music to Evelyn Mistral, who was listening to him with an irritatingly devoted expression. I can’t afford to make a mistake. I must call Hanna. Tonight.

Luckily, the guests from outside – some of them slightly drunk – were so noisy that the group soon dispersed. Angelini, who wanted to go into town with Silvestri, said goodbye. He had been delighted to meet everyone. Had nothing changed about Leskov’s refusal? Shame. And that Perlmann’s session was going to take place on the Monday of the reception – that was still the case? He absolutely wanted to be there.

‘Will you tell me if the date changes?’

Perlmann nodded mutely.

‘ Prometti? ’

Again Perlmann nodded.

Angelini put an arm around Silvestri’s shoulder. ‘He will be the last to give a paper. Don’t you think he’s too modest?’

Perlmann didn’t wait for Silvestri’s reaction.

Back in his room, he didn’t even take the time to remove his jacket, but sat down on the bed straight away and looked up the international enquiries number. When he had lost touch with Hanna, she had been unmarried, and later someone had told him she was now a piano teacher in Hamburg. There were two Johanna Liebigs in Hamburg. Italian enquiries had no information about professions, so he asked for both numbers. As excited as he might have been before a first date, he lit a cigarette.

The first Johanna Liebig was an old woman who was outraged that someone should disturb her so late at night. Perlmann stammered an apology and put the phone down, disappointed, but secretly pleased about the little delay. The second number rang for a very long time. Then Hanna answered. He recognized her voice straight away.

‘Philipp!’ she said, much more quickly than he expected. ‘Philipp Perlmann! My God, how long is it since we heard from one another! Where on earth are you?’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you remember the little Bach Prelude, the one that people don’t know, and that you played so often. You know, the ingenuous birthday piece .’

‘Yes, of course. What about it?’

‘Could you quickly play it down the phone for me?’

‘What – now? I’ve got guests.’

‘Hanna, please, it’ll just take three minutes. I need to know whether I’ve remembered it right. It’s important.’

‘But why in God’s name do you need to know now, in the middle of the night, after… wait a moment… after thirty years?’

‘Please, Hanna. Please.’

‘Like in the old days. OK, then,’ she said, and after a while in which he heard voices, a door closing and the loud sound of the receiver being put on the piano, came the piece that Millar had played.

‘So?’ asked Hanna as soon as the last note had faded away.

‘I wasn’t mistaken. Are you quite sure this is the piece? A hundred per cent? No mistake possible?’

‘Philipp! My pupils have to play it. You know how suitable it is.’

‘And your birthday is the thirtieth of September? And not the second?’

‘It still is. And incidentally that piece, the 902, is in G major.’

‘And the piece is from the Klavierbüchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach?’

‘Yes, Philipp,’ said Hanna as if to a troublesome child, ‘and it isn’t one of the two pieces some people think might have been written by the son, with the father’s help.’

‘Is it true that the piece hasn’t been recorded?’

‘No, that isn’t true. There’s a CD released by CBS. Glenn Gould, in fact.’

‘Hanna, you’re a marvel! But how will I get hold of it?’ Perlmann said out loud.

‘I can lend it to you, if that’s any use.’

‘It’ll arrive too late if you send it to me. I need to try to get it here tomorrow.’

‘So where are you right now?’

‘Near Genoa.’

‘Philipp, what on earth’s going on? You sound so strange, so… stubborn.’

‘I need to prove something to someone, and quickly.’

‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’

‘No, no.’

‘You just need to be right?’

‘Not that exactly, but not far off.’

‘You don’t seem to have changed very much.’

‘It’s a long story, Hanna, I’ll explain later.’

They were both silent for a while, until Perlmann asked in a different voice: ‘Do you remember: glass clarity with velvet edges ?’

‘Of course I remember. The others laughed at us.’

‘Yes. But I’ve never heard a better formula for Glenn Gould.’

‘Neither have I. Do you still play sometimes?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not in a good way, are you?’

‘Not especially.’

Gently, as if it were fragile, Perlmann rested the receiver on its cradle. So that was how Hanna remembered him: as someone who always wanted to be right. That hurt, and he thought it was unfair. And yet after a while he admitted to himself that it probably wasn’t a coincidence. For example, the conversation from a moment ago: he hadn’t asked about her at all; he hadn’t asked a single question about her. He had effectively ambushed her with his urge to get one over on Millar, without giving her anything at all by way of explanation. Still, sitting on the edge of the bed, full of exhausted sobriety, he was shocked by the extent of his self-obsession. In the tiny world of this hotel he threatened to lose all sense of proportion.

So it was true that she had become a piano teacher. She had imagined things differently back then. I’ll visit her when I’m home again. In four weeks and one day.

Hanna had been the only one who had immediately understood his decision and found it correct. She knew the limits of his talent precisely, and she wasn’t, like the teachers, under a self-imposed compulsion to believe the student. Not that she said a single word to that effect. Not a single one. When he visited her that day, after he had closed the lid over the keys, she mutely stirred her coffee cup for a while and then asked simply, ‘So what do you plan to do now?’

That university studies would take the place of musical training was something as fixed as an axiom. He had to concede that he himself had also acknowledged this axiom, at least in the sense that he had never visibly resisted it. And yet, he thought today, it was not a principle that was the natural, undistorted expression of his feelings at the time, and in that sense his own principle. It had had its origin not within himself, but in his parents. Not so much in what they said – one could have defended oneself against that. What had exerted its unassuming, sly power was the whole way they were, the post-office worker and his ambitious, half-educated wife. She, the daughter of a director of studies, had never been able to cope with the fact that her husband wasn’t an academic, so the son had to become what the father was not. And the father, who depended upon her entirely in defiance of his domestic tyranny, had made that ambition her own. The pianist idea had at first made the parents insecure; but then they had started talking about the son as an artist , and of course it was much more than if he had just become one of the many academics who, as his mother said, were often rather respectable people. Then, when that flight of fancy had ended prematurely, a few days after the shock and recriminations, praises began to be sung about a solid academic career.

Perlmann could not remember a single conversation in which the pros and cons of university study had been discussed. Calling something so obvious into question was literally unthinkable. The worst thing, he thought, was that the silent power of this premise had paralyzed the imagination, about the very question of what one could do with one’s life as a whole – the most important question, then, that anyone ever addressed. When his interest in academia – or what he saw as academia – began to crumble, he had begun to investigate what professions other people were pursuing. He was utterly astonished by all the things there were that he didn’t know about, and then he began to irritate Agnes by complaining with childish fury that no one had told him anything about them. At first he fell into romanticizing other professions, above all those that lay far from his own. By now his gaze had become more sober and analytic, and always determined by the same question, namely whether he would have found it easier to experience the present in some other profession.