Perlmann's Silence (31 page)

24

At the end of the Tuesday session, Millar suggested talking about Evelyn Mistral’s works on Wednesday and Thursday, so that he could travel to Florence on Friday to meet his Italian colleague about the encyclopaedia. For a moment Perlmann felt a helpless fury, because the last free day on which he could have written was being taken from him. But even before Laura Sand gathered her things together and the others got up, that feeling had already collapsed in on itself, making way for a numbing indifference.

It was accompanied by a leaden weariness, which was further diminished by the fact that he was yielding to his compulsive need for sleep more and more often and with increasingly little resistance. If he woke up, the weariness tended to weigh heavier on him than before, and every time he crept under the shower in his clothes, the indifference seemed to become even more encompassing until he felt as if he had, in that short time, forgotten how to feel anything at all. If he ate anything, it happened very mechanically, and where the blindness of sensation was concerned, it was barely distinguishable from the food ingestion of a plant. It was only a matter of time before he ceased that activity, too, he thought, as he slipped once more into a twilight state in which he felt sheltered for a few moments, before the next maelstrom of flitting dream images carried him away.

On Tuesday evening Kirsten rang. He had been right, she said, the compartment had filled up in Milan, and then a real snoring concert had started up, so that she hadn’t had a wink. In Zurich she had had to wait for almost two hours for a connection, but breakfast had been fantastic.

‘I hope,’ she said with anxious hesitation, ‘you didn’t misunderstand my farewell remark. It wasn’t supposed to be an accusation.’

The practice room in the Institute had struck her as even shabbier than usual. ‘And those inevitable paper cups! I couldn’t help thinking about your crystal glasses!’

Martin? ‘Imagine. He was standing at the station just by chance, because he’d worked out the thing with the night train.’ She paused. ‘When I saw him, I had a guilty conscience. Because . . . well, yeah, because of what I said.’

The seminar session? ‘I slept through it with my eyes open! Once, when Lasker mentioned
The Wild Palms
, I couldn’t help thinking about my discussion with Millar. God, is that guy pleased with himself!
Cocksure
doesn’t begin to cover it!’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t get to sleep, and wished his earlier compulsion to rest would return. In the middle of the night he fetched his notes from the suitcase and sat down at the desk. He slowly flicked the pages. No, translating the German examples into English didn’t work; they sounded dull, weird and even ridiculous.
Presence: a perfume, a light, a smile . . .
He had already picked up the felt-tip pen to cross out the two lines when he stopped and smoked a cigarette. He left the lines as they were and flicked to the end.
What separates me from my present . . .
Without hesitation he crossed out the whole of the last paragraph. But that wasn’t enough for him. He went on blackening the page until the last white dot had disappeared and the whole thing formed a deep black block that left traces on the next page. He waved and blew the page dry, then flicked back to the two indented lines. After a quick look he blackened them out too. For a while he sat motionless in front of the first page. Then, with the felt-tip pen, he drew the heading: mestre non è brutta.

On Wednesday morning on the way to the veranda he went to see Maria in the office and gave her the notes. She laughed at the title. Now the text was ready earlier after all, she said. She still had a whole pile of things to get done today and tomorrow, but she would manage to get it done by Monday, as agreed. Perlmann nodded to everything. He was already in the doorway when he heard her laughing again. She was pointing at the blacked-out closing paragraph. ‘Like something in a secret dossier!’ she said. ‘It really stirs the curiosity!’

It took Evelyn Mistral almost an hour to shake off her nerves. Only then did her frantic play with her glasses stop, and she started sitting comfortably in the big armchair. It was plainly hard for her to believe that Millar and Ruge weren’t just being polite, but that they had really liked her paper. But then, when she felt safe, she became more commanding from one minute to the next, delivered a lot that wasn’t in the text, and reported on a series of exciting experiments of imagination and will that Millar found really inspiring. The feeling of having succeeded in this illustrious circle was making her increasingly excited. Her face was red and she smoked much more than usual, von Levetzov holding out a burning match to her, always at exactly the right time, with the attentiveness of a trainer. Once when, contrary to her usual habits, she tried to inhale and started coughing, there was laughter which unambiguously expressed the fact that the others accepted her in her accomplishment and were glad of her relief.

Perlmann took the greatest trouble to look interested, and on Wednesday afternoon he finally – constantly struggling against exhaustion – caught up with reading her paper. But everything he said sounded wooden, and even as he spoke all the meaning seemed to drain from his words. In the first third of the text came the passage where Evelyn Mistral spoke about why the differentiation of imagination and will occurred in the medium of language. It wasn’t the same reflection as the one in Leskov’s work, he noticed straight away. But when he tried to remember Leskov’s argument, there was nothing but emptiness. That kind of emptiness, which had something definitive about it, and was quite unlike a temporary gap in the memory, chilled him to the core. He only just managed to fight down the idea that he was on the point of losing his mind.

On Thursday evening he went to the trattoria. He saw that it was on the tip of the proprietor and his wife’s tongues to ask him where he had been for the last few days. But after a long, startled look at him they both suppressed their curiosity. Perlmann went to the toilet and looked at his face in the mirror. It wasn’t, he thought, any paler than usual. On the contrary, the boat trip with Kirsten had left a hint of a tan. But the color, he saw now, had not been the cause of his hosts’ shock. It was the lifelessness of his features that had made them start. His face had something of the exhaustion of a shipwreck about it, something forlorn that gave one the strange idea that its owner had run off and simply left it there. Perlmann attempted a smile, but immediately stopped when he saw how cold and mask-like it looked.

When Sandra came skipping into the almost empty restaurant, her parents glanced at Perlmann to tell her to be quiet. Then he asked the girl to sit down with him and enquired about school. She didn’t seem to notice anything special about his face, but was bored by all the questions and relieved when she was allowed to go again. Perlmann left half of his dinner on the plate, mumbled a vague apology and was glad when the glass-bead curtain rattled shut behind him.

For a while he stood in the harbor watching the waves breaking on the concrete blocks in front of the jetty. It wasn’t at all true that it was going to happen tomorrow. Tomorrow was, after all, only Friday, the day when he had been supposed to give Maria his text. Assuming that he was going to deliver lectures at his session rather than use handouts, he still had six days to play with. Minus the time for Silvestri’s sessions. He took a few deep breaths. Now the important thing was to keep alive the little bit of confidence that still stirred. Five days, that was basically a lot of time. After all, he had experience of writing lectures, a lot of experience. Slowly, as if his confidence might be broken by excessively violent movements, he walked back to the hotel.

When he opened the door to his room, the phone began to ring.

‘It’s me,’ Kirsten said. ‘I just wanted to hear quickly how you’ve been.’

At first Perlmann didn’t understand. It was only when Kirsten called ‘Hello?’ for the second time that he got it: she thought his session had been today. It was out of annoyance at the tone of student camaraderie, which she was using again now, that he hadn’t mentioned the postponement to her on Sunday in Rapallo.

‘It isn’t my turn yet,’ he said. ‘There was a change to the timetable. I’m not for a week.’

‘Oh, so there was no point in me touching wood. Whose turn was it today?’

‘Evelyn.’

‘Aha.’

There was a pause.

‘Is Giorgio still there?’

He laughed, and was surprised. ‘Yes, he’s still here.’

‘Say hello from me. Don’t be too friendly, though! And tell him . . . no, leave it.’

Perlmann sat down at the desk and looked at the page of headings, on which he had drawn some figures in the margin.
When I get bored in the seminar, I doodle as well
, she had said. He would probably never know what had happened between her and Silvestri. And he couldn’t ask under any circumstances. He had only made that mistake once. He saw her furious face in front of him and heard the joke that Agnes had made about his startled reaction.

At that moment the phone rang again.

‘I have to go to Bologna, to the clinic, tonight,’ said Silvestri. ‘Now of all times, when the boss is away, the other senior doctor is ill and suddenly all hell seems to have broken out.’ Perlmann heard him smoking. ‘Two patients have . . . run away. They’re considered dangerous, and the police are involved.’ He coughed. ‘I’m sorry to be so unreliable. But I can’t just leave the others hanging. My sessions on Monday and Tuesday are out of the window. I assume you yourself will take on these dates. I’ll be coming back, and perhaps I can present something in the second half of the week.’ He laughed. ‘And if not – academia will have to go on without me!’

Perlmann slowly hung up. His fingers left traces of sweat on the receiver.
Monday
.
Tomorrow is Friday. And I have nothing. Not a single sentence.
He wiped his hands on his trousers. He shivered. What he did now didn’t matter in the slightest. Any movement was just as unfounded and useless as any other. There was now no stopping it.

With dragging steps he walked into the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill. The water tasted more chlorinated than usual. The taste reminded him of his first swimming lesson in the municipal pool, when he had almost drowned. It was an oppressive memory, but it led away from the present, and he clung to it as the numbness slowly spread within him.

II

The Plan

25

He woke with a headache and a film of sweat on his face. It was a quarter to ten, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky on the mirror-smooth water of the bay.
Today I have to make a decision. Any decision
.

Here in this room, under the eyes of the others, so to speak, he couldn’t reach a decision, he thought in the shower. He left the hotel by the rear entrance and had a coffee in a bar on the Piazza Veneto. His headache gradually eased, and he was better able to bear looking out into the radiant autumn day.

There was no point hushing up Silvestri’s departure from the others. Over the course of the day they would find out from Signora Morelli, certainly by the time they asked for the texts for the Monday session. And then they would inevitably assume that he, Perlmann, would be giving the next two sessions.
Where are his papers
? he could hear Millar asking. By dinner time Perlmann would have to be able to say that copies were being made. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show his face.

Down at the jetty, where the liners docked, people were gathering: locals with baskets and bicycles, but also a few tourists with cameras. All of a sudden it seemed to Perlmann that a long boat trip would help him more than anything else to gain clarity, and he put as much emphasis as possible on that thought to drown out his mounting panic.

A boat left for Genoa at eleven. He stood aside from the waiting group. Another quarter of an hour. He smoked impatiently. Now he didn’t think he could bear to stay on dry land a moment longer. He finally wanted to set foot on the boat and watch the stretch of water widening between himself and the jetty. At eleven o’clock the ship had still not come into view. He cursed the Italian lack of punctuality.

When he stood at the railing half an hour later, right at the front of the ship, he made an effort to open his senses wide so that their impressions would penetrate him deeply and powerfully, overwhelming and suffocating his despairing thoughts. He had no sunglasses with him. It hurt to look out into the dazzling light, but he narrowed his eyes and tried to take it all in even so. The light broke on the water. Near the bow it was sparkling points, gleaming little stars, further out calm surfaces of white gold and platinum; above it a layer of gauzy mist, and in the distance the glittering surface passed seamlessly into haze that dissolved at the top in a dome of milky blue. He inhaled the heavy, slightly intoxicating smell of seawater in slow, deep draughts, a smell that had repeatedly drawn him to the harbor in Hamburg, even as a child, because it promised an intense and also a completely effortless present.

I must concentrate. When I pass this spot again on the way back, I’ll have to know what I’m going to do.
He sat down in the shade under the cabin porch. There were only three possibilities. One consisted in presenting nothing at all. No text. No session. That would be a declaration of bankruptcy, which would also alienate the others, because it would come unheralded and without a request for understanding. He had missed that. On the contrary, when asking Millar for information about English words, he had inevitably created the impression of working on a paper. It would be a sudden, speechless bankruptcy, without explanation on his part and without understanding from the others, an abyss of mute embarrassment. And that possibility struck Perlmann as completely unbearable, when he considered how he could announce it. He couldn’t simply put a piece of paper in his colleagues’ pigeonholes telling them aridly that he would not be providing a contribution, that the sessions assigned to the purpose had been cancelled. Should he add:
because with the best will in the world I haven’t been able to think of anything?
They would demand an explanation, either explicitly or through their silence. Or should he admit complete failure over dinner, tap his glass and then, with words upon which the very situation would bestow a dreadful and involuntary solemnity, explain that unfortunately he had absolutely nothing more to say in academic terms? Should he perhaps visit the individual colleagues in their rooms and tell them of his incapacity, six times in a row and then a seventh time on the phone to Angelini, who was so keen to come to his session? Perlmann got a dry mouth and walked quickly back to the bow to let the airstream dispel that thought.

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.

Perlmann felt ill, and he threw the cigarette he had just lit into the water. He was relieved that they were now entering Genoa harbor and there were some things to look at: the crew throwing the ropes, the steaming water spraying from the bow and, further away, the big ships and the cranes whose arms glided over the tall stacks of colorful containers. When the family from before was suddenly standing next to him and the children were loudly calling out the things they could see, Perlmann wasn’t bothered, quite the contrary. He fled his thoughts and wished he could step outside his innermost depths and lose himself in things, dissolve himself entirely in the stones of the quay wall, in the wooden poles against which the ship was rubbing, in the cobbles of the street, in all the things that were simply just there and entire unto themselves.