Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

But the worst thing was that twelve-year-old Kirsten heard him cancelling down the lecture with a reference to illness. But you aren’t ill at all, Dad. Why did you lie? That was the only time that he had wished his daughter was far away, and had even hated her for a moment. He had gone into the living room and had, contrary to his custom, closed the door. And then Chagall’s death had been announced on the television news. He had stared at the stained-glass window shown in the report with a fervour which was, when he noticed it, so embarrassing to him that he swiftly changed channels.

Perlmann had lost the thread of the film that was playing out in front of him, and turned off the television. That was seven years ago now. And throughout all that time he hadn’t thought once about that cancelled lecture. In the nights leading up to his capitulation he had for the first time the very same experience that had paralyzed and frozen him for weeks: the experience of having absolutely nothing to say. It had been such a shock, this sudden experience, that he had had to banish it from his mind. And in that he had been very successful, because he had gone on to write dozens of lectures which had flowed easily and naturally from his pen. And throughout all that time not a single trace of a memory of that failure had crossed his path. Until today, from which perspective that late-March evening appeared as the first, menacing premonition of his present catastrophe.

He took half a sleeping pill, hopped through all the television channels again and then turned out the light. It was not quite true to say that the experience that had been banished back then had never again announced its presence. He thought once more of that moment a year ago, when he had suddenly found himself presented as a main speaker. From the panic that had flared up then there was – it now appeared to him – a hidden experience arc leading six years back to the day of Chagall’s death. And why not? Agnes had said when he irritably explained to her that he couldn’t simply tell the organizers of the conference that he had nothing to say.

Perlmann’s thoughts began to blur at the edges. How did Agnes’s two reactions – the one a year ago and the one seven years ago – fit together? He tried to imagine the face that had accompanied the two remarks. But the only face that came was the one in the photograph in Frankfurt, which he had fled yesterday because it knew too much.

Whenever all thinking and wanting began to dissolve and silence could have begun at any moment, he gave a start, and then everything behind his forehead convulsed. The fourth time he turned the light on and washed his face in the bathroom. Then he dialled Kirsten’s number. Her drowsy voice sounded annoyed.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I woke you.’

‘Oh, it’s you, Dad. Just a second.’ He heard a wiping sound, then for a while nothing more. Only now did he look at his watch: a quarter to one.

‘So, here I am again.’ Now her voice sounded fresher. ‘Is anything up? Or are you just calling?’

‘Erm… just calling. That is… I wanted to ask you why Agnes . . . why Mum didn’t like Chagall’s colors.’ He cursed himself for ringing her up with a heavy, furry tongue and not at least testing out his voice beforehand.

‘What colors?’

He clenched his fist and was tempted simply to hang up. ‘The colors in Marc Chagall’s paintings.’

‘Oh, right. Chagall. You’re speaking so indistinctly. Well… I don’t know… funny question. Did she really not like them?’

‘No, she didn’t. But there’s something else, too: do you think she would have understood if I’d had nothing to say?’

‘What do you mean, nothing to say ?’

‘If… I mean, simply if nothing had occurred to me.’

‘About what?’

‘About… just like that. Nothing had occurred to me. And the others were all waiting.’

‘Dad, you’re speaking in riddles. What others?’

‘Just the others.’ He had said it so quietly that he was unsure whether she had heard.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Dad, what’s up with you?’

He quickly tried to produce some spit, and let it run over his tongue. ‘Nothing, Kirsten. It’s nothing. I just wanted to talk to you a bit. Good night now.’

‘Erm… yes. So, ah… good night.’

He went into the bathroom and took another quarter tablet. Luckily, he hadn’t asked her if she remembered his cancelled lecture back then. It had been a close thing. He turned on to his belly and pressed his face into the pillow, as if by doing so he could force sleep to come.

Laura Sand’s second session also started with film images. It was quite different material from the previous day, and in the first half-hour there were occasional sequences in which she’d got the aperture wrong. She cursed at the poor quality of the film, but Perlmann saw immediately that that wasn’t the problem. Almost as clearly as if they were images edited in, he saw Agnes coming out of the darkroom in her white apron, furious with herself and as much in need of comfort as a child. Instead of returning to the real film, he stayed with these images and slipped back through the night to the conversation with Kirsten. He had mumbled something about Chagall, and asked her some absurd question about Agnes. The damned pill had immediately obliterated the details. I’ve got to give them up. Give them up. He reached for his mineral water, and when his glass clinked against the coffee pot the others turned their heads. Luckily, Maria had been sitting in front of her screen before. As a result he hadn’t had to spool out the prepared sentences, which had sounded even more wooden with each internal run-through.

‘ ¡Dios mío! ’ Evelyn Mistral murmured quietly. Perlmann looked straight ahead. The images that were being shown now were, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful. The glassy light of an early morning over the Steppe turned the contours of the meagre shrubs into mysterious, poetic forms that made the imagination pounce upon them immediately, and the faded yellow of the Steppe, run through with pale grey, lost itself against the rising sun in an apparently endless white depth. The view had so captivated even Laura Sand herself that she had lingered on the same shot until her arms had been trembling with exhaustion.

Now the camera swung slowly to the side, and all of a sudden the Steppe was scattered with the ribcages of dead animals. ‘ ¡Jesús María! ’ cried Evelyn Mistral, and then she could be heard gasping, open-mouthed. The camera moved further to the left, then came a cut, and now one saw the edge of a settlement, still in the same dreamy light. The people barely moved. They looked suspiciously or apathetically into the camera. The swollen bellies of children, fully grown bodies so gaunt that their wrists looked like grotesque enlargements. Flies everywhere, which the people had given up resisting long ago. The camera slowly crept over the settlement. The pictures were all the same. The camera glided on until the people had disappeared from the picture. For a few seconds once again the beauty of the deserted Steppe, now already in a light that gave a sense of the searing midday heat. Then the film stopped.

For a few moments no one stirred in the dark, the only sound was Laura Sand’s chair shifting. Then Evelyn Mistral and Silvestri walked to the window and released the blinds, which snapped up.

‘Well,’ said Millar in the tone of someone who has just heard something very dubious.

Laura Sand jerked her head up. ‘Something wrong?’ A lurking harshness quivered in her voice.

‘Well, yes,’ said Millar. ‘Hunger and death as a poetic backdrop – I don’t know.’