Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It was incredible how quickly Silvestri’s face reacted. Barely had there been a hint of surprise and bemusement than his tense and hostile expression collapsed to make way for a grin, which revealed as clearly as in words that he had underestimated Millar. He raised his glass to him. ‘ Scusi. Salute! ’

It took Perlmann much longer to deal with his surprise. Millar as a spokesman for the student movement? He glanced furtively across at Millar, who was now concentrating once more on his fish. Something within him began to move, as slow and creaking as a rusty cog. Perhaps, out of pure fear, Perlmann had got him wrong. Fear was a feeling that degraded other people into mere screens. He was about to declare him a sign of his altered perception, when that silly remark over dinner occurred to him, and he devoted himself once more to the task of removing the head of his fish. It was only when the waiter had cleared away the plates that his irritation had sufficiently faded.

‘One question, Brian,’ he began, and then set out his uncertainty about the various English words for color and shade . Once again Millar surprised him. He tried out the different words, some out loud and some again with mute movements of his lips. He was starting to enjoy himself, and when he took a sip of wine it looked as if he were tasting the words along with the wine.

Again Perlmann’s feelings pulled and creaked. Millar, the man from Rockefeller, the intellectual interpreter of Bach, as a sensual man. Sheila . And then, as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightning, he was filled once more with hatred for this man Brian Millar, who was, by pleasurably weighing up nuances of meaning, contesting the activity on which he, Perlmann, had spent two weeks up in his room defending himself against the others, not least against Millar himself. And like an idiot I myself have inspired him to do so. Because I thought I had to give him a sign. Solicitous idiot that I am.

He thanked Millar in the hope of stopping him, but now Laura Sand smilingly reminded Perlmann of their afternoon conversation about other English words. Achim Ruge once again demonstrated his astonishing confidence in English, and all through dessert these things formed the topic of conversation.

‘You need this for your paper on language and memory, don’t you?’ Millar asked at last.

Perlmann felt his hands turning cold. He didn’t want to nod at any cost, and yet he nodded.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ Millar said, and through the swelling heat in his face Perlmann could see that he was saying it without suspicion or spite.

‘One has the sense that you’re working on it day and night. Well, in… wait… in two weeks we’ll be able to read it.’

Before Perlmann followed the others into the drawing room, he went to the toilet and held his face in the water that he held in his cupped hands. It’s only another eleven days. By Thursday morning Maria will have to have the paper.

‘If I play again today, it will have become a ritual,’ Millar was saying as Perlmann entered the lounge.

Von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral clapped. Millar grinned, unbuttoned his blazer and sat down on the piano stool after a hint of a bow. He played preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier .

For several minutes Perlmann sat there with his eyes closed and drove all his strength inwards to keep the panic from welling up in him like a fountain. If I’m inside something I can write very quickly. I know that. And things like that don’t change. I need a day to get into it. Or two. Then there will be nine days left. Seventy, eighty working hours. I can still do it.

His spasm eased slightly, the music got through to him, and vaguely, as if from a long way away, there arrived the memory of Bela Szabo wiping the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. Perlmann reached for this hazy image as if for a life-saving instrument, and pulled it to him and stared at it until it became clearer and denser and gradually revealed a whole scene which, in its growing vividness, forced back the flickering fear.

While telling Perlmann the story in a hoarse voice, Szabo had sat doubled up, his elbows propped on his knees, his head in his hands. Shostakovich, who had been sent as a juror to the Bach competition in Leipzig, had spoken to him at the subsequent buffet. Szabo’s composition wasn’t bad, he had said, it was thoroughly pleasant, and even a bit more . But not really a creative idea .

While trucks thundered by outside the Conservatoire Szabo had repeated that sentence over and over again, and in the bitterness of his voice there had been the certainty that he would never be able to forget it. Perlmann had got up and, in spite of the heat, closed the window.

And that time in Leipzig Shostakovich had revealed himself as a complete coward, Szabo had said as he wiped his face with his handkerchief. When he was asked about an unsigned article in Pravda , in which Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were branded as obscurantists and lackeys of imperialist capitalism, he had, albeit hesitantly, declared his agreement. He couldn’t believe his ears, Szabo said, and then Perlmann had seen the blood pulsing in the purple vein of fury that had appeared in his pale, alabaster temple. That kind of cowardice, Szabo had squeezed out, was partly responsible for the bloody crushing of the Hungarian uprising, at the end of which his father had been put against the wall. For perhaps a whole minute Szabo had sat there with his fists clenched. Then he had looked at Perlmann with his watery grey eyes, which were not dissimilar to Achim Ruge’s. Why am I telling you all this? Then, in English: Let’s get back to work! When he hated the language.

This evening once again Bach’s preludes and fugues had become invisible structures of crystalline architecture – fine white lines behind the night . That was the music that had so fascinated Shostakovich in Leipzig at the time that he reacted with his own cycle. Perlmann tried to hear the fugues of both composers side by side. Had he really liked the glass pearling and that special kind of fading that characterized Shostakovich’s pieces at that concert? Or had it been Hanna with her bandaged hand who had transfigured everything?

‘You looked as if you were very far away, on a different star,’ Evelyn Mistral said as they went outside. ‘Shall we have another walk tomorrow? Perhaps there’ll be another wedding!’ Perlmann nodded.

But not really a creative idea . As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Perlmann looked up the Russian term for a creative idea and then tried to formulate Shostakovich’s whole remark in Russian. He wasn’t sure whether the way the Russian words lined up obligingly side by side caught the fluid casualness of the German remark – nicht wirklich ein Einfall . And suddenly he felt as if he couldn’t speak Russian at all. He stared at the words for a while to make sure that he really could read the Cyrillic script.

Had he himself ever had a truly creative idea? The moon shone into the room. He drew the curtains. Now the darkness was stifling. He opened the curtains again. Nine days. Ten. Panic seeped into his agonizing alertness. He went to the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill.

He slept long into Sunday. The room-service waiter who brought him his late breakfast handed him a piece of paper that had been stuck on the door: So, no ‘wedding walk’? If you want to do anything in the afternoon, let me know! Evelyn.

He liked her careful, forward-leaning handwriting with its rounded connecting lines, and when the waiter had closed the door behind him, he went to the telephone. In the middle of dialling he hung up. Not with this head, and certainly not in such a jittery state.