Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

A local family with two children was coming forwards from the rear of the ship. The children threw a ball to each other, and suddenly the peace up here at the front, where only a few tourists had been standing at the railing taking photographs, was over. By the violence of his blazing irritation Perlmann could tell how far off-kilter he was. When the boy missed the ball, which flew overboard, he started screaming as if he were being burned at the stake; his parents could do nothing to calm him down, and Perlmann had to control himself to keep from yelling at him and shaking him till he stopped. He fled to the stern of the ship, but the screaming was even audible there, and the roar of the engine made clear thinking impossible. At last he went to the cabin and drank a lukewarm coffee at the bar.

He could – this was the next possibility – present his notes on language and experience as his contribution. He would have to call Maria from Genoa and ask her to have the paper ready by today, tomorrow lunchtime at the very latest. He could tell her what had happened with Silvestri. And ask her to cross out the heading mestre non è brutta – as the title of a paper that was already extremely questionable, it was an additional and unnecessary provocation.

He went through once more the sentences he had looked at on Monday night; some of them he read out under his voice. This morning he liked them; they struck him as apt and seemed to capture something important that one might easily fail to notice. They were unassuming, precise sentences, he thought. For a while their calm style merged with the peace of the gleaming surface of the water far out, and it didn’t seem impossible to him to approach the others with these sentences. But then a tottering old man bumped into him and knocked him against the bar, and suddenly Perlmann’s sense of security and the confidence that he had felt in his words just a moment before collapsed all around him. Now they struck him as being as treacherous as mirages, or the wishful thinking one has while half-asleep, and as he poured his slopped coffee from the saucer back into the cup, he said to himself with apprehensive sobriety that this solution was also unthinkable. Quite apart from the fact that it was not a coherent paper, these strange notes would be mocked as impressionistic and anecdotal, as unverifiable, often inconsistent, full of contradictions, in short, as unscientific. The paper would leave people like Millar and Ruge speechless. They saw only the possibility of irony. The most charitable thing would be for them to maintain an expressive silence.

That Perlmann would be left standing there as someone who had abandoned academia, and could henceforth not be relied upon, and that now, of all times, when he had received the prize and the invitation to Princeton was approaching – that wasn’t the worst thing about this possibility. What made the thought entirely unbearable was the fact that these notes were far too intimate, and laid him bare before anyone who read them. They had seemed so intimate to him that he had felt more at ease using a foreign language as a protection even from himself. To someone with English as a mother tongue – Millar, for example – that distance did not apply. Perlmann shuddered. And then, suddenly, he had a sense that he understood his dread about his own sentences better than before: many of the notes showed him as a shy and vulnerable child wrestling with experiences it had not understood.

If he presented nothing at all, that would in itself reveal something he would have preferred to keep silent. But it remained global and abstract. It was the confession of an incapacity that remained otherwise in darkness. What he thought and experienced behind it remained unclear, unfamiliar. It was up to him to hide himself away from further insights. His notes, on the other hand, were, it seemed to him, like a window through which one could see right into his innermost depths. To let the others read them would mean obliterating all the boundaries that he had so painstakingly constructed, and it seemed to Perlmann that there was barely any difference between this process and complete annihilation.

The air in the ship’s cabin was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife, and Perlmann felt he was suffocating on his own smoke. He stubbed out his cigarette and went quickly outside. He performed a complete tour of the ship, his eyes seeking something that might hold his attention for a moment, for just a few moments which would mean his last small respite, a last opportunity to catch his breath for what was about to come.

He was glad when an elderly, dwarfish man asked him for a light. For a moment he was tempted to escape into a conversation with him, but then he was repelled by the man’s permanently open mouth with its swelling, protruding tongue. Perlmann pulled his face into a painful smile and walked back to the front, where he stepped up slowly, almost in slow motion, to the railing, supporting himself on outstretched arms and closed his eyes.

The third possibility was one that he had not, until that moment, dared to capture in an explicit thought. Hitherto it had been present to him only in the form of a dark, impenetrable sensation, from which he had turned hastily away whenever it had appeared on the edge of his consciousness. Because it was a sensation – he felt that very clearly whenever it touched him – that emanated a terrible sense of menace, and merely to pursue its precise content was a sense of danger. And so it seemed to him a tremendous effort. It was a summoning of courage that he thought he felt physically now that he looked this possibility in the face for the first time: the possibility of presenting the translation of Leskov’s text as his own.

It was as if a treacherous poison were spreading through him when he allowed this desperate thought to unfold before him in all its clarity. It hurt to experience himself as someone who could in all seriousness consider such a thought. It was a dry pain, free of self-pity, and all the more horrific for that reason. What happened there, he sensed with an alertness in which all self-reassurance burned away, was a deep incision in his life, an irrevocable, incurable break with the past and the start of a new computation of time.

None of his colleagues would be able to discover the deception, even if the Russian text were by some improbable coincidence to fall into their hands. For them a Russian text was nothing more than a closed typeface, an ornament. And besides, none of them knew Leskov. No one knew his address. All they had heard was the name ‘St Petersburg’. And last of all, none of them had the slightest reason to make contact with this unknown, obscure Russian, who was a nobody in professional circles, and thus provoke the threat of discovery by Leskov himself. Later, if the works were to be published, Perlmann could withdraw the paper and replace it with one of his own. If necessary he could also delay the printing. He would publish the volume. Aside from his own printout there would be only seven copies of the bogus text, and it would be respected when he expressly asked that the text should not be distributed further, as it was only the first, provisional version, an experiment. If they then heard nothing more about its further development, saw no further versions and instead read an entirely new text by him, the others would at last set the paper aside. It would be forgotten, and grow yellow and dusty on a shelf or in a cupboard, until eventually it fell victim to a clearing operation like the one that everyone undertook sooner or later in their own flood of paper, and was destroyed.

So he could risk it. And from the point of view of scholarly esteem he would be in a much better position than in the two other cases. Admittedly, Leskov’s text was wayward and in some places bold; one could even call it eccentric. But in the discussion Perlmann could refer to the literature of memory research which had not been accessible to Leskov himself, and one could also characterize the paper as a conceptual one, a broad-brushstroke outline, and thus basically precisely appropriate to this occasion. Millar and Ruge, this was fairly clear, would screw up their noses at so much speculation. But it was certainly possible that the others would find the text interesting. That much was certainly true of Evelyn Mistral. But even a man like von Levetzov had recently taken notice of the subject. Perlmann, it might appear, was trying something new, something that perhaps was no longer linguistics, but which was imaginative and provocative. Something was happening, developing in Perlmann’s work, and secretly they might even be a bit envious of his courage.