Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The first non-residential guests arrived for lunch at the hotel. Perlmann picked up his books and went to his room. As he closed the door his eye fell on the notice showing the price list, and he gave a start. The room cost around 300 marks. For a single person, this meant that his stay cost almost 10,000 marks, not including lunch and dinner. Times seven. OK, for Olivetti that was presumably nothing, and Angelini would know what he was doing when he put them up at the most expensive hotel in the town. Perhaps he’d negotiated a discount. But still, Perlmann held his face under the gleaming brass tap and then washed his hands for a long time. If it had been up to him he would never have stayed at a hotel like this, even if money were no issue. He just knew that he didn’t belong here. And he began to sweat when he thought of his shabby, black, waxed-cloth notebook that was all he had to give in return, a loose collection of notes that he hadn’t even looked at for ages. He felt like a fraudster, almost a thief.

That was the reason why his thoughts of flight, of every variety, included an intention to pay the bill for his room himself. Under the circumstances it would have been a demonstration. The others would have been able to tell that no higher power had forced him to take this step, but that his strange action must have something to do with his attitude towards the group. And he found that uncomfortable: it ran counter to his need to give as little of himself away as possible, and where possible to leave everything in the dark. But he didn’t want to be in anyone’s debt; at least in that respect he wanted to put things back in order.

Hesitantly, he opened his suitcase and started carefully standing the books up on the desk. It had been hard for him the previous evening when he had finally set about making a selection. Even more clearly than usual he had become aware that he had had no academic intentions for a long time. How, in such a situation, was one to decide what to take along and what not? He had sat there for quite a while, playing with the bold idea of travelling without any textbooks at all, just with his own novels. But however liberating the idea might have been, he couldn’t risk it. Just in case they visited him here in the room, he had to construct a facade, a disguise. The important thing was for his distress to remain unnoticed. In the end he had packed a series of books that had turned up over the past few months and remained unread. They were books that anyone working in his field might have bought. He hadn’t yet dared to give up such routine purchases, although he was beginning to regret the money – a sensation that startled him, because since his school days it had always been self-evident to him that money spent on books was never money wasted.

The desk was wide enough for the books, and if you pushed them back to the wall, with heavy volumes at the sides, the whole thing was stable, and there was enough room to write. Bringing his computer, the little appliance with the vast storage space for all the unwritten texts, was something he hadn’t managed to do; it would have struck him as the height of mendacity. Perlmann set down pencils, a ruler and his best ballpoint pen on the glass desktop, along with a stack of white sheets. Tomorrow morning he would absolutely have to start working. I have no idea what. But I have to start. At all costs.

He had been saying that to himself for months. And yet it hadn’t happened. Instead he had gone on working on his Russian for many hours a day. That connected him with Agnes. Supported by music that they both loved, he had withdrawn into an inner space in which she, too, sat at the table and quizzed him as usual, laughing as, once again, she understood something more quickly than he did. The specialist literature had been left where it was, and had started piling up on a shelf, within reach and yet never touched, a constant admonition. The language books were almost the only things on the desk. Only when he had colleagues visiting and there was a danger that they would enter his study, did he bring some order into the great chaos of an academic in the midst of his work, with mountains of open books and manuscripts. It was always a struggle between anxiety and self-esteem, and it was always the anxiety that won.

Meanwhile, there had been regular correspondence about the research group. There were enquiries into practical details to be answered, and official confirmations to be written. He had done that in his office at the university. At home there had been nothing to remind him of his inexorably approaching departure, and he had become practiced, almost a virtuoso, at not thinking about it.

For his lectures he had for a long time been using old manuscripts that had become strange to him, and sometimes he had started feeling like his own press spokesman. If an unexpected question came out of the audience and put him in an awkward position, he gave himself a breathing space by saying with deliberate slowness, ‘You see, it’s like this…’, or ‘That’s a good question…’ These were alienated formulas that he would never have used before, and he hated himself for them. In the seminars he lived from hand to mouth and relied on his memory. He was an experienced player. He thought and reacted quickly, and, if necessary, when he no longer had anything substantial to hand, he could set off a rhetorical firework. Students could still be impressed by such things. In the everyday business of teaching, he thought almost every time he left the practice room, he would retain his disguise.

But this was very different. In less than three hours’ time some people would arrive who would not be deceived, people who didn’t have to battle with such feelings, ambitious people who were used to the rituals of academic debate and the situation of constant competition. They would be coming with new works of their own, with fat manuscripts, with projects and perspectives, and they brought with them high expectations of the others, and also of him, Philipp Perlmann, the prominent linguist. For this reason they were a threat to him. They became his adversaries, even though they could have had no inkling of the fact. People like them had a very fine sense of everything to do with the social reality of their subject. They registered with seismographic precision if something was wrong. They will notice I’m no longer involved – that I’m no longer one of them. And sooner or later in those five weeks it would come out: he of all people, the leader of the group, the conductor of the whole thing, would stand there empty-handed – as if he hadn’t done his homework. They would react with disbelief. It would be a quiet scandal. Certainly, a facade of kindness would remain, but it would be a killing kindness, because its beneficiary was certain that it was a mere ritual, which could not attenuate the silent contempt.

It was now just after one. Perlmann felt uneasy; but the idea of sitting downstairs in the elegant dining room eating with silver cutlery was unbearable. And the idea of eating repelled him too. At that moment he felt as if unease and hunger could get as big as they wanted: he would only eat on the homeward flight, at that point in time that was so horrifically far away.

He lay on the bed. Brian Millar was in Rome now. His plane from New York had landed there that morning, and now he was meeting his Italian colleague to discuss the plan for the linguistic encyclopaedia. He wouldn’t fly on to Genoa until late afternoon. So there were still a few hours until that encounter. Laura Sand would also be turning up in the late afternoon, because she first had to travel by train from Oxford to London, and was then flying via Milan. It must all have been rather a strain for her, because she had just got back from her animals in Kenya. Would she be true to herself and come here dressed all in black, as she usually did? Adrian von Levetzov had announced his arrival for early afternoon: in his stilted, baroque manner he had written something about a direct flight from Hamburg to Genoa. Frau Hartwig couldn’t help laughing at the stark contrast between his elegant writing paper and Achim Ruge’s torn-off piece of paper, in which he communicated diagonally across several coffee stains that he had to organize work in his Bochum lab for the time of his absence, and couldn’t say whether he would be arriving on Tuesday or Wednesday. When Giorgio Silvestri would be able to leave his clinic in Bologna was uncertain, but at any rate he wanted to try to be here for dinner. After the phone conversation, Perlmann had been uncertain whether he liked Silvestri’s smoky voice or not. Angelini’s reference to him had been very reticent, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he had invited him. Perhaps just because Agnes had said that linguistic disorders in the case of psychoses must surely be interesting.