Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The pigeons had brought them together, the pigeons in St Mark’s Square. As he stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching them land on the heads and shoulders of the tourists, he, too, had suddenly found himself in the middle of a cloud of flapping animals whose wings smacked along his face and just missed pulling off his glasses. He felt as if he were being ambushed, and he had flailed his arms excitedly around. He had only noticed Agnes, with her big camera in front of her face, when the pigeons had stopped bothering him. Her camera clicked a few more times, and then for the first time he saw her clear, water-bright gaze and her mocking smile, softer and lighter than Laura Sand’s, because there was no background of rage.

She had come towards him in her light trousers and ankle-strap sandals. ‘I hope you’re not cross with me,’ she had said, and, as on countless subsequent occasions, he had been surprised by the darkness in her voice, which didn’t match her transparent eyes. ‘But it just looked so funny when you were defending yourself there. As if you were fighting a hailstorm or a typhoon. There was a story in the scene. I have to capture things like that. It’s like an addiction. If you like, I’ll send you a few prints.’

Before he had had a chance to answer she had laughed out loud and pointed to his hair. ‘No, don’t touch! It’s full of pigeon poop!’

When she discovered that his hotel was at the other end of the city, she pulled him with her to the little albergo around the corner where she was staying. He had to kneel on a stool, and then, in the cracked and stained washbasin, she had washed his hair. Her gentle, practical manner broke all resistance. She couldn’t explain to him why she had spoken to him in German, she said as she rubbed, something about him had just looked that way.

Back in the street she soon said goodbye to him. An appointment with a colleague from the newspaper. He had scribbled his address on a piece of paper, and then she had disappeared into the nearest alleyway. It had all been like a ghost story. He was glad that he hadn’t written his newly acquired title of doctor on the paper. And he had no idea what he felt when he sat afterwards in a café in St Mark’s Square, listening to music as he spent the little money he had on ridiculously expensive drinks, so that he was left with nothing to pay for dinner. Or rather he did. He knew one thing: he liked the way the episode with that woman had flashed into his life and cut into his present-poor time without either history or aftermath.

His train home left at noon the following day, and as he had only been there for three days he left the hotel early in the morning to see more of the little unspectacular canals and bridges. And then they met for a second time. Agnes was quite different from the day before, much more reserved, and at first he had the feeling that he was just bothering her. But then, looking again and again through her viewfinder, she had started talking about light and shade and the magic of black-and-white photography. He had felt like a blind man learning to see. Afterwards, over coffee that he paid for with the money he had set aside for a sandwich on the train, she wanted to know something about him. Linguist, he said, and before that he’d played the piano. Chopin. ‘Yeeesss,’ she had said with a nod, her eyes half-closed. And then, once again: ‘Yeeesss.’

On the long journey his thoughts had kept returning to that ‘Yeeesss’. Had it signified agreement? Agreement with him? Or had his information only confirmed her first impression, which might also have been negative? In all the years that followed he had never asked Agnes; he couldn’t say why. That mysterious ‘Yeeesss’ had also kept him from discussing the business about the thalidomide children, which had suddenly leapt out at him from time to time during those days, when the moment seemed to be perfect.

Which of his fellow passengers had it been who had lent him L’Espresso ? Perlmann immediately recognized Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem, which the chronicle republished; it was the one that had been in the magazine that day when he was travelling home: When you fought the policemen yesterday in Valle Giulia / I sympathized with the police / Because the police are sons of the poor, they come from the outskirts, whether urban or rural. And then he accused the students: You have the faces of spoiled kids /… / You are fearful, insecure, desperate. Perlmann had been preoccupied with that poem for a long time, because it struck him that there was something in it, and at the same time thinking something like that struck him as an act of disloyalty. He had avoided the countless teach-ins over the years that followed, and had instead, in the silent library reading room, pursued the question of how the peasants of Andalusia had worked out the idea of freedom and self-determination during the Civil War.

By the time Agnes’s photographs had arrived, Venice was but a pale memory, and his excitement about the assistant’s post kept him on tenterhooks. Never before had he seen such vivid pictures of himself. Or such funny ones. One, in which a girl with Asian features stuck her head at an angle into the picture, even had a certain slapstick quality. And what was incredible: in these black-and-white pictures St Mark’s Square was drenched in a light more glowing than he had ever seen in color.

And yet he was startled to the core: the panic that had filled his eyes at his encounter with the pigeons revealed a profound fear of life. There’s a story in the scene , she had said. He hoped the camera exaggerated. Or else that Agnes didn’t see what he saw. Both were unlikely. Weeks passed. In the end she was the one who rang.

The chronicle was already an astonishing potpourri, Perlmann thought. Between an analysis of the way in which the Italian press reacted to the student revolt, and the report on the Soviet troops’ invasion of Prague there was a gossipy article about Sophia Loren’s latest affair, which was only slightly shorter. The photograph of the diva was in fact slightly bigger than the picture of tanks in Wenceslas Square. He would have liked to go on reading, but he was the last one in the restaurant and the proprietor was yawning as he cleared up. And tomorrow Perlmann wanted to get a good bit further with Leskov’s paper.

By now it was a familiar experience, walking across the deserted Piazza Veneto to the hotel. He wondered whether Leskov was really giving an accurate account of the matter of the self-image. His examples, he now noticed, were always about someone making a decision or at least performing a pointed action that was preceded by a process of reflection: a proclamation was signed; the military doctor was duped; a marriage concluded against the will of the parents. That in such cases there was a remembered self with complicated contours that could only be articulated linguistically was clear. But what about when he remembered the pigeons that had besieged him? Agnes might have been right that there was a story to be told about him. But he, the one who was remembering, didn’t know it, not even now. All there had been, it seemed to him, was panic and sweat and flapping feathers. And if he read a self-image into that frantic confusion, then that picture consisted of contours of feeling and nothing else. Everything else was impenetrable; that was part of the specific nature of that panic, and also of its power.

A calmer example of his past self, which resisted narrative disclosure, was the very correctly dressed young man from those days who had been irritated by the spinsterish librarian in the reading room, because she had asked him why he wasn’t over at the teach-in. And what about that wide-awake moment when his joyful excitement about Venice and his horror at the thalidomide children had collided? Perhaps, he thought, these things would become clearer in Leskov’s work if he now exposed what he had skimmed through in an impatient first reading to the precise attention of a translator.