Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Right from the start, Laura Sand’s session went better than all the others. The veranda was in darkness and the projector cast film images on a screen that stood at a slightly crooked angle on a stand. There were quite long sequences of images, in which animals showed behavior that would be hard to see as anything other than symbolic. At short intervals, clouds of cigarette smoke passed through the beam of the projector. Laura Sand’s voice was strangely soft, and sometimes that made her seem bashful, so that she threw in the occasional brash remark. There was nothing – that much was quite clear – that she loved as much as these animals. Often she showed a sequence several times to stress an observation or enlarge upon an explanation. But she also repeated sections in which the movements of the animals were simply comical. ‘Again!’ Ruge cried out at one such point, and to Perlmann’s surprise Millar joined in, too: ‘Yes! Where’s the slow-motion button?’

Perlmann was glad to be able to sit in the dark. After the third aspirin that he put in his mouth with the most economical movements possible, and washed down with coffee, the headaches slowly faded, and he escaped into the wide Steppe landscapes that formed the background of many of the animal scenes. Often Laura Sand hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and had played expertly with the light, until the animals’ bodies moved against the light like figures in a shadow play. And sometimes the camera escaped the research discipline, and crept over the empty landscape, which glimmered in boiling midday light. Then Perlmann managed to forget that in exactly a week he would be the one sitting up there at the front.

When the blinds went up and everyone rubbed their eyes in the murky light of a rainy day, it was already past twelve. A debate immediately broke out about the fundamental concepts with which Laura Sand tried to capture what she had observed. Perlmann got involved, too, and defended them even more resolutely than Evelyn Mistral. What he said contradicted everything that he usually claimed in publications, and more than once Millar raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Barely a quarter of Laura Sand’s texts had been discussed when it was time for lunch.

‘So you had a film show today!’ laughed Maria when Perlmann ran into her outside the office. ‘By the way, I explicitly told Signor Millar again that your text, as you told me, can wait. But then he didn’t want me to type out his things anyway. I didn’t understand why.’ She smiled coquettishly and glanced at her reflection in the glass door. ‘So first of all I went to the hairdresser, and then started on your text, which I some how like – if I may say that. I’ll just interrupt it if you bring me the other, urgent text tomorrow. Va bene? ’ Perlmann nodded, and was glad when von Levetzov appeared and dragged him along into the dining room.

‘Have you been able to take a look at my synopsis?’ Evelyn Mistral asked him over dessert.

‘Yes, I have,’ Perlmann said, and scraped the last bit of pudding out of the bowl as he racked his brains as to how she had described her problem to him.

‘So? You can just tell me if you think it’s stupid,’ she said with a forced smile.

‘No, no, absolutely not. I think the idea of producing the connection through the concept of the ground is a good one.’ Even before he had finished the sentence he realized that he was really talking about Leskov’s argument, which was contained in those four recalcitrant sentences.

Evelyn Mistral’s spoon circled aimlessly in the bowl. ‘Oh, right, yes. That could be a thought,’ she said at last, glancing at him bashfully.

‘I… I’ll sit down to it again this afternoon,’ Perlmann said. ‘Time is… time is a bit short.’

Something in his quiet voice made her sit up and listen. Her face relaxed.

‘Fine,’ she said and laid her hand on his arm for a moment.

Afterwards, in the room, Perlmann tried in vain to concentrate on Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand’s papers. He felt obliged to try. If he could have shown tomorrow that he had at least been working in that sense, it would have been some small protection against everything else that was now heading inexorably towards him. But faced with that writing he felt as he had done on his outward-bound flight: as if he were suddenly blind to meanings; the texts couldn’t get through to him and flattened out before his eyes into pedantic ornaments.

Over the next few hours he walked slowly and aimlessly through the town. At the stationery shop where he had bought the chronicle the window display had been completely changed. Perlmann was annoyed that this made him lose his sense of equilibrium; but only several streets further on did he manage to shake the whole thing off.

Complete nonsense , he said to himself repeatedly as he became aware of something inside him stubbornly trying to make the chronicle responsible for the dilemma he was in. At the bar of a café, where he drank a coffee, the internal struggle finally stopped. The clouds had parted, the sun glittered in the puddles, and suddenly life seemed to gain pace and color. Perlmann held his face in the dusty beam of sunlight that fell through the narrow glass door. For a moment he felt a forbidden happiness like the one that comes from skipping school, and when the sun disappeared again he clung with all his might to that feeling, although it grew more and more hollow from one moment to the next, and made way for a dull and barely restrained anxiety which suited the gloomy light that now filled the bar again.

For the time being it was only Maria that he would have to say anything to. His colleagues’ questions would only start on Monday, and the situation would only come to a definitive head on Wednesday. His anxiety was somewhat assuaged by this thought, and Perlmann continued his aimless walk through little side streets.

He got to the trattoria early. The proprietress brought him the chronicle and told him with delight that Sandra’s drawings had been singled out for special praise by the art teacher that morning. Then he had allowed Sandra to travel across to Rapallo with some other children. Perlmann forced out a smile and struggled to stuff into his mouth the spaghetti that he thought was overcooked today. The proprietor’s question of where he had been for the past two days annoyed him, and he pretended not to have heard it.

His interest in the chronicle was over now, once and for all, he established as he flicked through its pages. Just as he was about to snap it shut, his eye fell on a painting by Marc Chagall. In the cheap, miniaturized reproduction the blue had lost much of its luminous power. Nonetheless, Perlmann had immediately recognized that it must be Chagall’s blue. He fully opened the book again and read the text. There was something about that date; but it escaped his remembering gaze and remained far outside on the periphery of his consciousness, as intangible as the mere memory of a memory. It had had nothing to do with Chagall’s colors, of that he was sure. He had avoided that subject for many years, so as not to have to hear Agnes’s harsh judgment about it. And, in fact, it seemed to him, it hadn’t really been about Chagall at all. Something else was to blame for the fact that he had suddenly felt quite alone. But behind his closed lids nothing appeared that might have explained why his disappointment then seemed so closely connected with his anxiety now.

The memory only came later, when he was sitting in front of the television at the hotel, just as alone and desperate as he had been in the living room after he had called off the lecture. If you think so , was the first thing Agnes had said when he had asked her, even though there was no longer any possibility. And when she saw the wounded expression on his face: Oh, all right then, why not. It can happen to anyone. But her relaxed tone and dismissive gesture hadn’t been able to conceal her disappointment: her husband, a rising star in his subject, hadn’t managed to write the lecture that he had been supposed to deliver in the Auditorium Maximum, even though for days he had been sitting over it until late into the night.