Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘It’s basically impossible to capture this light on film,’ said Laura Sand, setting her big camera bag down on the wall next to him. ‘It’s as if a luminous depth is something quite different from the physical radiance to which the film reacts.’

Perlmann had given such a violent start that she rested her hand on his arm, startled, and apologized. It was always the same, she said. David, her husband, often jumped because she was so quiet.

‘That’s balanced by Sarah’s noise! Especially with her bloody aerobics!’

They stayed together until dusk. She didn’t really like people watching her take photographs, she said at one point. ‘But since it’s you…’

She taught him how to see. Like Agnes. And yet quite different. Agnes had always talked about light, form and shade, brightness and depth, planes and edges. Listening to her, one might have thought she saw the world as a deserted geometrical structure. And her actual theme was human movement. Not just any movement: moments that point beyond themselves, scenes that concealed a story within themselves and forced the viewer to invent that story. Narrative photography she had called it. You understand: colors would only disturb us, distract us from the essential. It’s important for the man on the platform to explode in his movements when he glimpses the woman on the running board. The color of his coat is irrelevant.

She had had an incredible instinct for the density of moments. And her patience had been incredible, too, when she had waited hours and days for dense scenes, in pubs, at stations, at the beach, once even at a boxing match, which she loathed. When that wait even exceeded her patience, she had been tempted to start smoking again.

Laura Sand’s thinking was quite different. She thought in colors and moods, and what she said about them in the course of the morning contrasted so blatantly with her love of black clothes that Perlmann came close several times to talking to her about it. She used only color words that he had never heard before, and when she noticed that he couldn’t get over his astonishment, she laughed her throaty laugh and went on: ‘… medium flesh, canary, rose madder lake , magenta , true blue , sap green , sanguine… ’

No, she wasn’t interested in people – ‘when I’m taking photographs, I mean’. At first, she had only taken landscape shots, and later, in connection with her job, animals had joined them. David had to take the holiday snaps.

‘He thinks I’m a misanthrope,’ she smiled. And after a pause she added: ‘He knows me well. “That’s why you leave the monkey talk to other people,” he said again recently, “monkeys are far too much like people.”’

Impressionist photography , she called her idea.

‘Actually impossible. Physical events are far too dense. I’ve become an expert in filtering things out. My theory is, in fact,’ she laughed, ‘that it has much more to do with the gaps – the void – than the rest. David and Sarah have been teasing me about it for years, and at David’s poker game my theory has turned into the monthly running joke: “So from now on let’s build the houses with a load of void, it’ll be cheaper.” Oh, well. It’s a weird theory anyway, and sometimes I don’t even understand it myself.’

You wouldn’t have to worry, Perlmann thought, about this one delivering the kind of remark that Agnes came out with at the airport that time. Standing on the moving walkway, he had turned round to look at a big poster for Hong Kong, a picture with soft, velvety contours, a dreamy picture. Nice bit of kitsch , Agnes had said, a bit like the way you look at the world . Then, probably startled by her own slipped-out observation, she had laughingly taken his arm and pressed her head against his shoulder. Don’t be cross , she had said quietly as she felt how stiffly he was walking on. At passport control he hadn’t, as he usually did, turned round again. On his return they both made more of an effort; she was particularly attentive, and talked more than normal. They didn’t mention the remark. But for a while he was rather monosyllabic when she showed him her pictures. A thin fissure had remained between them, barely visible and yet never quite forgotten.

It was night by the time they entered the hotel. After Signora Morelli had given them their keys, Perlmann would have liked to voice his feeling that the past few hours had meant something to him. But the few steps to the elevator didn’t give him enough time, and when Laura Sand looked quizzically at him, it was as if anything that might have developed into a suitable sentence had been extinguished. He raised his hand with the key, it jingled faintly, and then he went upstairs, alone, and was glad that no one had done anything to change the gloomy lighting of his corridor in the meantime.

It was pure nonsense, he thought under the shower: what was there to make her suspicious? He had asked her whether severing was an apt word for the splitting of a personality; then they had talked for a while about cracking ; in the end she had, with a laugh, explained the Australian phrase cracking hardy . Then it had seemed for a moment as if she wanted to ask him the reason for his particular interest in these words, but he had managed to change the subject. No, it really couldn’t be said that he had given himself away.

Lying on the bed, he thought again of Agnes and what was special about her photographs. Sometimes she had spent months taking pictures only of the faces of ancient people, it had been like an addiction. The series had been a hit. She had had an eye for details, a gaze, it seemed, that could give a detail a stressed and unusually intense presence – as if it were her gaze that had fetched that detail from the blurry distance of a shadowy, temporal existence into the brightly lit present of solidly outlined forms. How he had envied her that gift!

She had never planned for it, forgetting things, losing her overall vision in her chaotic jumble of notes. Then he was the one who had jumped in to straighten things out. As a result he had become a compulsive planner, a fanatic of the overall vision. That had been the price, the price for her present.

The dining room looked very different this evening. Most of the circular tables had been replaced by a festively decorated dining table, and garlands of colored paper hung from the garlands. It was a wedding dinner, served by two extra waitresses who had been hired specially, as Adrian von Levetzov was able to report.

‘Hungry again?’ Millar asked, looking at Perlmann with his head inclined and a resigned smile on his lips. Perlmann said nothing, and concentrated on the shellfish starter. The jokes being made at the big table were hard to make out; most of the wedding guests spoke a dialect that he didn’t understand.

Now von Levetzov was telling everybody about a book about Henry Kissinger that had been discussed in the Herald Tribune .

‘That war criminal,’ Giorgio Silvestri said tightly. ‘He urged Nixon to bomb Cambodia and Laos. They were neutral countries at the time. That man ought to be up before a court.’ He looked challengingly across at Millar, who was dissecting his fish. ‘Isn’t that right, Brian?’

Millar slid his fish knife carefully under the spine, then used his fork to release the whole skeleton before setting it down on the edge of the plate. The corners of his mouth were twitching. He savored the moment. At last he took a sip of wine, dabbed his lips with his napkin and returned Silvestri’s impatient gaze with a soft, warm smile that Perlmann had never seen on him before.

‘Absolutely correct, Giorgio. That was exactly what I wrote in the college paper at the time. On the first page. After that my parents’ check didn’t come through for a while.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And it never really sorted itself out.’