Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

In the end it was Evelyn Mistral who saved it. She asked a critical question, and when she saw the others nodding with relief she went on talking and, speaking more and more freely, developed a long train of thought that made the others reach for their pens after a while. The strip of red appeared on her forehead, and her explanatory hand movements were more vivid and expressive than Perlmann had ever seen them before. The nervousness with which she had previously had to battle in this room fell away from her, and only every now and again did she slip her heel from her right shoe. Later, when she became the center of a lively debate, she often tossed her hair to the left as the answers and interjections formed with her, to free her face from the hair that she was wearing loose today. But rather than swinging back, her hair hung in front of her face like an untidy veil, so that when she looked up from her notes only half of her glasses could be seen. Then she blew upwards from the left-hand corner of her mouth, and as that generally didn’t do the trick, at last she brushed the straw-blonde strands out of her face with her hand. When the coffee had produced a jittery alertness in him, Perlmann feverishly tried to find a possible way of contributing something to the discussion. But his thoughts were always too slow, and the two conclusions that he attempted were so ineffective that he started to feel like an onlooker. Both times Millar simply went on talking, without even turning to look at him, as if there had just been an irritating noise that he had had to let wash over him.

It had stopped raining, but dark clouds still hung over the bay, and drops fell into the gravel from the white tables on the terrace. The young man with the rucksack and the cape who now entered Perlmann’s field of vision had a hesitant gait, and was looking round like someone afraid of being caught doing something forbidden. He looked up at the facade, took a few steps towards the swimming pool, and when he saw that people were sitting on the veranda he walked quickly back to the steps. The gauntness of his build and the way he had held his cigarette reminded Perlmann of something unpleasant, something that had happened during the university holidays, but shortly before he could grasp hold of it, it had disappeared back into his exhaustion.

True, in fact, Millar was saying, this was the ideal opportunity to calmly revisit the various grammatical theories of the past few years and attempt to achieve some kind of balance. Achim and he himself could start work on it tomorrow, and then they could go through things together on Thursday and Friday. Would Adrian mind if his session was moved to the start of next week?

That means everything’s shifting by half a week. That means that my turn isn’t going to come in the fourth week. Which leaves me with fifteen days, assuming that Thursday and Friday are enough for the copying . He thought it was a good idea, Perlmann said when the others looked at him quizzically.

‘Talk about a good idea!’ Evelyn Mistral said to him when they were the last to leave the veranda. ‘It gives me half a week extra! Shall we celebrate in town with a pizza? In spite of the rain?’

He would rather rest for a while, he said; he had slept badly.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said and touched him lightly on the arm.

When he woke up just before four, Perlmann suddenly knew what the young man in the cape had reminded him of. For the third time Frau Hartwig had reminded him to answer a letter about his working with an Israeli colleague; so just before the end of the day he had visited the office and dictated his refusal. After that he had gone through the rest of his mail, and because he was busy hurling a book catalogue into the waste-paper basket, he had almost failed to hear the hesitant, guilty knocking.

It was a student, a gaunt young man with a protruding Adam’s apple and sticking-out ears, holding his hand-rolled cigarette noticeably far away from himself, as if it disgusted him. In the labyrinthine building he had lost his bearings, and actually just wanted a lecture list. Perlmann asked him in and quizzed him for more than half an hour; the boy didn’t know what was happening to him. Perlmann even asked him about his holiday plans and his financial situation, and suppressed the question about a girlfriend only at the last moment. Afterwards, he was shocked by his own lack of detachment. A few days later the boy had come towards him with his girlfriend on the other side of the road. Perlmann had given a start when he saw the two of them whispering and laughing, and had had to warn himself against becoming paranoid. The girlfriend was very pretty, and the boy had no longer seemed intimidated and helpless. Even his ears didn’t seem to stick out so much. Now Perlmann remembered very clearly what he had thought: I’m losing my power of judgment. If I ever had one .

He showered for a long time to wash away the memory, and then started reading Leskov’s paper from the beginning. Now, going through it for the second time, he understood everything much better, and read the first paragraphs astonishingly quickly. The new dictionary was really fabulous; only the greyish paper with its soapy smoothness was still unpleasant to the touch, so that he needed to wash his hands every now and then. The programmatic sentence at the beginning of the text wasn’t a problem in English, and it was only in the examples for the concept of a remembered scene that he faltered. His concentration waned, and he started feeling uneasy. Sandra. The test . Shortly before eight he crept out of the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.

The proprietress asked jokingly where he had been yesterday, and then she called for Sandra, who came running over, ponytail bouncing, and put her open exercise book on his plate. There was still a lot of red on the pages, but it had been enough to get her a satisfactory mark – the first in weeks. His meals would be free for the rest of the week, the proprietor said, clapping his heavy hand on his shoulder. And he was to order the most expensive thing on the menu!

Perlmann opened the chronicle at the assassination of Robert Kennedy. That was right: only a few weeks before, while he had been preparing for his doctoral examination, Martin Luther King and Rudi Dutschke had been shot as well. Prague Spring. The student unrests in Paris. From week to week, almost from day to day, the tension between Perlmann’s personal concerns about the examination and the assistant’s post, and the political developments out in the world had entered his consciousness with ever greater clarity. What was more important? What did important mean in this context? And in what sense could one speak of an obligation to participate in the political developments? Was it clear what participate meant? For a while he had changed his habits, and read the newspaper before he arrived at his desk in the morning. But it went against his feelings and so, without finding an answer to his questions, he had gone back to his old, reverse rhythm.

It had been on the train to Venice that he had read about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the newspaper. Perlmann rested his head on his interlocking fingers and thought back to that moment in Mestre when the train turned on to the embankment to Venice. He had stretched his head out into the warm evening and repeated the magic word: Venice . Even now the moment was still so vivid that he thought he could see all the other heads and outstretched arms along the train. And then, as they entered the station, he had seen his newspaper on the seat, open at the thalidomide trial. Already clutching his suitcase he had looked once more at the pictures of crippled children. A painful alertness had passed through him as he realized that he was, in his significant irresolution, the last one standing in the compartment. Since then he had experienced in countless variations that conflict between his own happiness and his sympathy for the suffering of others. He had finally left the newspaper where it was, and the terrible pictures of the children had been washed away by the noisy, wonderful hubbub of the station.