Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The first would be Evelyn Mistral. The train from Geneva was to arrive in Genoa at half-past one. He wouldn’t regret it, her boss had written to him, when suggesting her in his place, because he himself had to undergo an operation. She was making a name for herself in the field of developmental psychology. The list of her publications was impressive for someone who was only twenty-nine. But the stack of her papers that Frau Hartwig had put on Perlmann’s desk had gone unread. All he knew of her was her voice on the telephone, an unexpectedly clear voice with a polished Spanish accent.

Politeness decreed that, as their host, he should wait for them downstairs. But it was another five leaden minutes before he finally got to his feet. When he walked to the chair to fetch his jacket he stumbled over his empty suitcase. He was about to close it and put it away when he noticed Leskov’s text half-hidden in a side pocket, a fat typescript in Russian, a bad photocopy in an unusual paper format, folded in at the corners from the journey and otherwise generally crumpled. The text had been enclosed with the letter in which Leskov said that he had not received an exit permit, and couldn’t have come in any case, as his mother had suffered a sudden serious illness. The text was about what he was working on at present, he had written, and he hoped that in this way he would be able to stay in academic contact with him. Sending him this text was a piece of flattery, Perlmann had thought. His Russian wasn’t nearly good enough to cope with it. He had set it aside and forgotten it. It had only come to hand again when he was packing on Sunday evening. It’s nonsense , he had thought, but in a way he had liked the idea of having a Russian text with him. It was something exotic and thus intimate, so in the end he had packed it along with his Russian pocket dictionary.

As he held it in his hand now, the text suddenly seemed to him to be something that he could use to distinguish himself from the others, and defend himself. Opening up this text to himself, or at least trying to do so, was at least a plan for the coming weeks. It was something into which he could withdraw in his free time, an internal region that the others could not penetrate, and from which he would defend himself against their expectations; an inner fortress in which he was invulnerable to their judgment. If he stayed in it, and one Russian sentence after the other opened up to him, he might even succeed in wresting a few moments of presence from the mountain range of time. And then, after the remaining thirty-two days, when he was sitting by the aeroplane window again and enjoying the loop in which the plane rose above the sea, he could say that he now spoke Russian much better than before, so that he had not entirely lost that time after all.

Perlmann took the text and the dictionary, and when he went downstairs and nodded to Signora Morelli, his step was lighter than in the days before. He sat down in a wicker chair under the portico by the entrance and looked at the title that Leskov had written by hand in big, carefully drawn letters: o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy. He only needed to use the dictionary once and he had it: on the role of language in the formation of memories.

That seemed familiar to him. That’s right. It had been the subject of their conversation in St Petersburg. He saw himself standing with Vassily Leskov at a window of the Winter Palace and looking out on the frozen Neva. Agnes’s death was only two months in the past, and he certainly hadn’t felt like going to a conference. But at the time when he had received the invitation, Agnes had been all for it straight away – Then we can try out our Russian – and he had gone, because, in spite of the pain it gave him, it made him feel connected to her. After the start of the session he and Leskov had sat in the foyer of the conference building and fallen into conversation; it had, he thought, been much like his meeting with Angelini. Leskov had been far from sympathetic to him at first; a heavy, rather spongy man with coarse features and a bald head, eager to talk to colleagues from the West and therefore solicitous, almost submissive, in his manner. He talked nineteen to the dozen, and Perlmann, who would rather have had his peace, initially found him intrusive and bothersome. But then he had started listening: what this man was saying in sometimes antiquated but almost perfectly correct German about the role of language for experience, above all the experience of time, began to captivate him. He described experiences that had long been familiar to Perlmann, but which he could not have described with such accuracy, such nuance and such coherence as this Russian, who fumbled around constantly in the air with the damp stem of his pipe between his massive fingers. Soon Leskov sensed Perlmann’s growing interest. He was pleased with it and suggested showing him some more of the city.

He led him across St Petersburg to the Winter Palace. It was a clear, sunny morning in early March. Perlmann particularly remembered the houses in light, faded ochre, gleaming in the sun: his memory of St Petersburg consisted entirely of that color. Beside him, Leskov showed him lots, explained lots, a man in a worn, green loden coat, with a fur hat and a pipe, advancing with heavy, clumsy footsteps, waving his arms around and snuffling slightly. Perlmann often didn’t listen. His thoughts were with Agnes, who had intended time and again to come here to take photographs, ideally in the summer, during the white nights. Sometimes he stopped and tried to see a section of his field of vision through her eyes, her black-and-white eyes, which had only been concerned with light and shade. In this way, he thought now, as he flicked through the text, a curious associative connection had formed between Agnes and this Russian: Leskov as a travel guide on Perlmann’s imaginary stroll with Agnes through St Petersburg.

The hours in the Winter Palace and then in the Hermitage collection created a strange intimacy between the two men. Perlmann revealed to his companion, whom he barely knew, that he was in the process of learning Russian, whereupon a beaming smile spread over Leskov’s face, and he immediately continued talking in Russian, until he noticed that Perlmann was utterly unable to follow him. Leskov was very familiar with the paintings collected here. He pointed out some things that one might otherwise not have noticed on a first trip, and from time to time he said something simple in Russian, slowly and clearly. Perlmann spent these hours in a mood in which the effect of the paintings and joy of Russian sentences understood mingled with the pain that he would not be able to tell Agnes all this, that he would never be able to tell her anything ever again.

He had resisted the temptation to talk about Agnes while he was in this mood. What business was it of this Russian’s? It was only when they looked down at the Winter Place from the Peter and Paul Fortress that he began now, of all times, when their earlier intimacy had fled in the bitterly cold air. It happened against his will, and he was furious when he heard himself, to crown it all, talking about how hard he had found it since then to continue with his academic work. Luckily, Leskov did not understand the full meaning of his words. He replied only that it was quite natural after such a loss, and added almost paternally that it would all come back to him. And then, from their newly revived intimacy, he told him that he had been jailed as a dissident. He didn’t say for how long and gave no further details. Perlmann didn’t know how to react to this information, and for a moment there was an uncomfortable pause that Leskov finally ended by taking him by the upper arm and suggesting with unfitting, artificial cheerfulness that they should start addressing one another informally. Perlmann was glad that Leskov had to go home soon afterwards, to look after his old mother with whom he lived, and that he didn’t invite him along. He had replied to the invitation to Santa Margherita that Perlmann sent him a few weeks later with an exuberant letter: he would apply for an exit permit straight away. And then, three months ago, the depressed missive in which Leskov had declined Perlmann’s invitation had arrived attached to this text.