Perlmann's Silence (8 page)

Perlmann felt his breathing suddenly becoming more difficult.
So he can do that too.
He asked the waiter who brought the drinks to open a window.

Von Levetzov raised his glass. ‘As no one else is doing so, I would like to greet everyone and raise a toast to our favorable collaboration,’ he said with a sideways glance at Perlmann, who felt the sweat of his hands mixing with the condensation on the glass. ‘So we will be working up there,’ he went on, pointing at the door of the veranda, which was reached by a flight of three steps. ‘A perfect room for our purposes. I took a picture of it before. Veranda Marconi, it is called, after Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of radio technology, as the plaque outside says.’

Perlmann, who hadn’t noticed the plaque, looked down at his new shoes, which hurt him. The painful pinch that would always be associated with confirmation and hard church pews merged with the hot sensation of shame about his forgotten welcome speech and a looming, helpless vexation with von Levetzov’s behavior as travel guide.

‘Now we’re just waiting for Vassily Leskov,’ said Laura Sand, and Perlmann felt as if she had been reading his thoughts and was trying, by changing the subject like this, to prevent the others from rising to their feet to catch sight of the veranda. ‘When’s he coming? And more particularly, who is he?’

He was a linguistic psychologist without tenure at a university, Perlmann said. Teaching commissions only every now and again. How he kept his head financially above water, he couldn’t say. What was impressive was how good Leskov was at describing things, much better than most of the other people working in the field. It made one realize the extent to which, before any kind of theory, the important thing was to describe our experiences very precisely with language. Admittedly, his work was a kind of old-fashioned, introspective psychology, which didn’t get you anywhere these days. But that was precisely what he, Perlmann, had found interesting in their conversation in St Petersburg.

‘So you speak Russian, too?’ von Levetzov asked irritably. Perlmann wasn’t prepared for the question, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment.

‘No, no,’ he said, and immediately managed a regretful smile, ‘not a word. But he can speak perfect German. His grandmother was German and only ever spoke to him in her mother tongue when he lived with her after his father’s death. His English was a bit clumsy, he told me; but he would certainly have managed here.’

Perlmann had no idea why he had lied, and he couldn’t quite believe how unerringly he had done it. Evelyn Mistral, to whom he glanced across only hesitantly, was watching him with a face that was thoughtful and roguish by turns.
Now we’re accomplices
, he thought, and didn’t know whether he was pleased about it or whether his new feeling of vulnerability had predominated.

‘Unfortunately, his exit permit was refused,’ he concluded, and reached for the cigarettes with a relief that surprised him.

‘Let’s take another look at the veranda,’ said Achim Ruge, when the conversation about conditions in the former Soviet Union had run aground and Millar looked at his watch with a yawn.

Perlmann was last to go up the three steps.
What will it be like when I come down them that day?

Ruge had sat down at the front in the high-backed chair whose embroidered upholstery looked like Gobelins. ‘If someone sitting here has nothing to say it’s his own fault,’ he said with a gurgling laugh, prompting general laughter. Perlmann pretended to study the tasselled coats of arms that ran along the wall.

‘So what do you have to say about language, Achim?’ he heard Evelyn Mistral asking, trying to imitate a strict teacher. ‘Or have you forgotten to do your homework?’

More laughter. Only Laura Sand didn’t join in, but investigated the old chest in the corner. Now the others were outdoing one another with caricatures of a cross-examination, and with mounting enjoyment Ruge was playing the devious idiot who hides behind a facade of intimidation. Perlmann’s heart thumped in his throat. When Silvestri made a dry remark and then, with a swift movement of his tongue, made his cigarette disappear into his mouth, Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice cracked with laughter. Perlmann didn’t wait to hear what Millar, who was just getting a breath of fresh air, would say. As if anaesthetized he left, asked Giovanni for the key to his room and hobbled hastily, toes aching, upstairs.

He put on the chain, took off his painful shoes in the dark and fell back on the bed. Immediately the sentences started circling in his head, sentences spoken over dinner and on the veranda a moment before, sentences about the prize, about Princeton, about lazy Spanish professors, about forgotten homework. They kept returning, those sentences, as persistent as an echo that refused to die away or come to an end.

Perlmann was all too familiar with these tormenting circles of sentences, that compulsion to cling to sentences that had been uttered, and every time he was sucked into that wake, he felt as if he had spent the bulk of his life listening like this to sentences that had injured or frightened him. Agnes had suffered from the fact that he would sometimes turn up days, even weeks later with such a sentence and lend it a weight, a drama it had never had – just because he had been chewing away at it for so long, on walks or during hours of sleeplessness. Often she could hardly remember having said anything of the kind. That, in turn, struck him as mockery and made him helplessly furious. He was embittered. He had felt abandoned by everybody and crept away. Agnes told him how dangerous this memory for sentences was, how inhibited it could make you, so that you no longer dared to say anything spontaneous, if the thing you had said was then placed on the scales and later held up in front of you like a crime. He had seen that. This time the insight had helped. But the next time he had fallen right into the trap all over again.

He sat up and turned on the light. Tomorrow morning, at the first work session in the veranda, he would have to act as director. He would have to do that with skill and understanding, to see to it that his own contribution was made as late as possible. To do that, he needed a clear and rested mind. But with the darkness the sentences would come back, too.

He went to the bathroom and saw in front of him the long look that the doctor had given him before writing out the prescription for twenty strong sleeping tablets.
He’s a decent man and a good doctor, but he can’t understand someone not being able to sleep, he’s not familiar with it.
Perlmann took half a tablet,
certainly no more than that.
Then he set the alarm for seven. The session was due to begin at nine. In the joking banter surrounding this question, Ruge, Millar and von Levetzov had won out over the others, even if it was still, as far as Millar’s biological clock was concerned, the middle of the night.

Perlmann turned out the light and waited for the tablets to take effect. Down on the coast road a motorbike passed at full speed. Otherwise it was silent. Suddenly, Ruge blew his nose in the next room: three trumpet blasts. It was as if there were no wall between them. Ruge seemed to fill even Perlmann’s room with his physical presence. All of a sudden everything was right in front of Perlmann’s eyes again: the mirror-image desk, Ruge sitting at it with his great peasant head and watery grey eyes behind his wired-up glasses, and on the other side Millar with his Bach.

Perlmann got to his feet and put his ear to the wall. Nothing. Back in bed he ran once again through the possible explanations for a change of room:
the bed, my back; they couldn’t check that, they would just have to believe me.
He relaxed and felt the first hint of numbness in his lips and fingertips.

Now the sentences couldn’t get at him any more. And Ruge could sit at his desk playing the piano as much as he wanted. From tomorrow there would be no one on this side. Ruge shook with laughter, gurgled, burped and had to gasp for air. His grand piano came inexorably closer. It expanded, while Perlmann’s piano shrank like melting cellophane. Now it was Millar who was playing.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, I tell you, it’s boring, even if you find that shocking.
Millar was standing by the ochre-colored grand piano, and while Evelyn Mistral squeaked with pleasure he bowed uninterruptedly until he was finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

‘I just wanted to ask you quickly if you got there all right,’ said Kirsten. A thin layer of numbness lay on Perlmann’s face, and his tongue was furry and heavy.

‘Wait a moment,’ he murmured, and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where he let cold water run over his face. His hand tingled as he picked up the receiver again.

‘Sorry if I woke you,’ said Kirsten. ‘I’m just so used to us calling each other at this time of day.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said, and was glad that it didn’t sound too washed-out.

The business with the shared house had sorted itself out nicely, she told him; only one woman was a bit difficult. ‘And just imagine: today I signed up for my first presentation. About Faulkner’s
The Wild Palms
, the one with the double narrative. And then it turned out that it’s my turn in fourteen days’ time! I feel quite different when I think about it. I hope you don’t have to sit at the front as well!’

Perlmann was monosyllabic, and repeatedly collecting spittle against his dry tongue. Yes, he said at last, everything’s fine; the hotel and the weather, too.

‘And did you bring your Russian things with you?’ she asked.

One half-hour passed after the other, and Perlmann still couldn’t get back to sleep. In the middle of a poisoned weariness there was still an island of dry alertness that wouldn’t go out. At half-past one he phoned reception and for safety’s sake asked to be woken at seven. Then he took the second half of the sleeping pill.

4

He was still enveloped in leaden weariness when his alarm call came, from a long way off, it seemed to him. He mumbled
grazie
and hung up. Immediately afterwards the alarm clock rang. Sitting on the edge of the bed he bent over and covered his face with both hands. He had the feeling of having slept deeply in the sense that a span of total oblivion lay between the current moment and the events of the previous day. Nonetheless, he felt insecure, as if we were walking on very thin ice, and something was pushing against his eyes as if someone had poured lead into his sinuses. He cursed the sleeping pill.

After he had misdialled and ended up talking to the laundry, he ordered coffee from room service. As he was waiting for the waiter, he stood in the cool air by the open window and watched as the lights went off over by Sestri Levante. Again a sunrise without any presence, the usual transparent blue seeping through the fine morning mist, but all as in a film seen too often, and this time separated from him by a wall of weariness and a throbbing headache.

He didn’t have the strength to protest when the waiter set a tray with a sumptuous breakfast down on the round table. He hastily gulped down three cups of coffee, took an aspirin and lit a cigarette. After the first few puffs he felt slightly dizzy, but the sensation was much weaker than the day before. Now music came out of Millar’s room: Bach. Perlmann went into the shower, where he shivered in spite of the hot water. Afterwards he drank the rest of the coffee. Now the cigarette only tasted bitter. Quarter to eight. From eight the others would be going to breakfast. It was enough if he appeared at about half-past. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to do with the time left to him except to wait for Millar to go to breakfast and the music to stop.

He picked up Leskov’s text. The first sentence after yesterday’s marks was difficult, and Perlmann relied on paper and pencil to make the convoluted construction clear to himself:
I shall demonstrate that and in which sense it is by capturing our memories in words that we create these memories and thus our own experienced past in the first place.
The music stopped, and a moment later Millar’s door clicked shut. Perlmann slowly drank the orange juice and ate one croissant, then another one. At breakfast down below he would only need to drink something. His headache was subsiding. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Creating the past by narrating memory stories – that seemed to be the idea. He excitedly looked in his suitcase for his black notebook. He no longer knew what, but that thought had something to do with his own notes.

The door to Ruge’s room clicked shut, and a few moments later Perlmann heard the sound of him blowing his nose, much more muted in the hotel corridor. Suddenly, Perlmann was painfully wide awake: he hadn’t prepared a single suggestion for the organization of his work over the coming weeks. He put the black notebook back. He couldn’t understand how he could have forgotten it, when he usually prepared everything in minute detail. If he had got up later and gone down to breakfast straight away, it might have occurred to him only when he stepped into the veranda. It was as if the fear split him deep within, and for one fleeting moment he had an idea what it must be like to lose yourself.

He quickly washed his face with cold water, thought for a moment about whether he should order some more coffee, then took his writing pad and pocket diary and sat down at the desk. No, Ruge wasn’t sitting opposite him now. And anyway, the wall was a wall and not a two-way mirror. His throbbing headache was back, and while he drew columns for the five weeks, with his other hand he gripped his forehead and pressed it as hard as if he wanted to crush it.

Seven blocks of two days in which they would assemble in the veranda to discuss each other’s current work. Three days a week, to have individual conversations or withdraw. That sounded like the correct dosage. Perlmann marked Monday and Tuesday as well as Thursday and Friday. He himself would take the last block. But even so he was left, he was horrified to see, with only three weeks, and not even a whole three, because the others each needed two or three days to read. He had at all costs to see to it that he made it into the last column, the one that had still been left blank, and in the lower half of it, so that he still had four weeks; that was the absolute minimum. That meant using any explanation to keep two half-weeks free. He looked at his watch: twenty-five to nine. He lit his third last cigarette.
They’ll walk out on me during the session
. The minutes passed inconsequentially.
If Leskov had been able to come, the problem would only be half as big
. He would have to be careful that he didn’t give himself away with his maneuvering.

When he walked over to his suitcase to get a pullover he saw himself in the high mirror on the wall, in the same trousers and the same shirt as yesterday afternoon. He stopped for a moment, then frantically started changing. As he did so, he was filled with furious shame at his insecurity. Battling tears of fury, he slipped back into the clothes he had just been wearing, put his jumper over his shoulders and walked, pencil and paper in hand, to the door. Before he pulled it shut he saw on the carpet a torn-off button of his fresh shirt, which lay on the crumpled bed. When, happy at the absence of pain in his ankle, he hurried down the purple carpet of the wide staircase, it was two minutes past nine.

All the others were already there, with notepads and manuscripts in front of them. Only Silvestri had brought nothing but an untidily folded newspaper. For Perlmann it was impossible not to sit at the front. It would have looked like a ludicrous refusal that gave the carved armchair a far too great, almost magical significance. So he sat down after a brief hesitation, which he alone perceived, at the head. Through the windows on the other side of the room he could see the blue swimming pool, and behind it, beyond the hotel terrace, the top half of a gas station. At this time of day the parasols had not yet been put up, the loungers were still empty. Only the red-haired man from yesterday was already there, tapping out the music from his headphones on his drawn-up knee.

The phrases of greeting and all other introductory words stuck in Perlmann’s throat. He wanted to get straight to business, he said, and immediately started explaining his suggestion for the course of the work. As he spoke he became more secure; what he said sounded practiced and well thought out. Then he went to the board and drew the five columns. The second half of the current and the first half of the fourth week he left blank. Sitting awkwardly, he stiffly wrote his own name beside the Thursday and Friday of the last week.
Only three and a half weeks, then. And if you take in the reading time for the others, it’s only three; plus one, two days at most. How am I supposed to do that?

‘Why do you want to keep your contribution from us for so long?’ von Levetzov asked with a smile that was supposed to express appreciative interest, but in which there was also a bit of irritating surprise and, it seemed to Perlmann, a hint of suspicion, so faint that it took his special eyes to see it. ‘You’re one of the main reasons we’re here.’ Evelyn Mistral smiled at Perlmann and nodded emphatically.

Perlmann felt his stomach contracting as violently as if he were reacting to a searing poison. He tried to breathe calmly, and very slowly put a cigarette between his lips. When his eye fell on Silvestri, he thought of the doctor on the telephone. He held the cigarette in the flame for much longer than necessary and inwardly rehearsed the tone that the doctor had used – the tone of natural delimitation, the non-subservient tone. He took a deep drag and, leaning back, finished the uncomfortably long pause with the words: ‘I think the work of each of us is deserving of equal interest, so that the sequence in which we get to it is insignificant. Isn’t that right?’

Even before he had finished his sentence he knew that he had got the tone completely wrong. He looked up and looked at von Levetzov with a smile which, he hoped, took something of the edge off the rebuke.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ von Levetzov said, startled, and added sharply, ‘No need to get worked up.’

‘Perhaps everyone should give a short account of what their contribution will be about,’ said Laura Sand, ‘then we’ll be more able to judge a sensible sequence.’

At first Perlmann was grateful to her for having saved the situation like that. But a moment later he was filled with panic. He hid his face behind his clasped hands. That would look like he was concentrating. Cold sweat formed on his palms. He closed his eyes and yielded for a while to leaden exhaustion.

But it had been as clear as day that it would come sooner or later. After all, even yesterday, when he was talking to Evelyn Mistral, that question had made him shiver. So why, in the meantime, had he not come up with a clever answer? He would have had to work it out effectively and then memorize it until, at the moment it was needed, he could summon it up as something to be presented with complete equanimity and even, for the brief span of his presentation, believed – a staged self-deception that was available to him as part of his facade.
But now, what I say will be completely random.

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t have said what subject Adrian von Levetzov had sketched. While he himself sought feverishly for formulae which he could later cobble together into the appearance of a subject, only the complacent, mannered tone of von Levetzov’s English got through to him. It was only towards the end, while von Levetzov was preparing for yet another question from Ruge, that Perlmann started distinguishing individual words. But it was strange: instead of receiving the words in their familiar meaning, and slipping through them to the expressed thought, all he heard was that most of them were foreign words, jargon with its roots in Latin or Greek, which, when linked together, produced a kind of Esperanto. He found these words ridiculous, just silly and then that ghostly insecurity suddenly rose up within him again, the sensation that had for some time made him pick up the dictionary with increasing frequency. Each time he did so the feeling fell from a clear sky that he no longer had the faintest idea of the meaning of a technical term that he had read thousands of times; it had an irritating blurriness that made it look like a wobbly photograph. And yet every time he consulted the dictionary he made the same discovery: he had precisely the correct definition in his head; there was nothing more precise to know. Uncertain whether this discovery reassured him, or whether the insecurity grew because it had needed such a discovery, he put the dictionary back on the shelf. And often, a few days later, he looked up the same word again.

Laura Sand had, when it was her turn, a cigarette between her lips, and tried to keep the smoke from getting in her eyes. Her initial sentences were halting as she looked for something in her papers, and anyone who hadn’t known that her books on animal languages were among the very best on the subject would have taken it for a sign of uncertainty. At last she found the piece of paper she had been looking for, let her eyes slide over it, and started talking with great fluency and concentration about the experiments she had performed over the past few months in Kenya. What she said was wonderfully concise and clear, Perlmann thought, and set out in that dark, always slightly irritated voice which, when she wanted to emphasize something, dropped into the broad Australian accent normally concealed behind an unremarkable British English. Like yesterday, when she had arrived, she was entirely dressed in black; the only color about her was the red in the signet ring on the little finger of her right hand.

Again Perlmann hid his face behind his hands and struggled to remember the specialist questions that he had recently examined,
when I was still on top of things
. But nothing came. Only Leskov suddenly appeared in his inner field of vision, Leskov with his big pipe between his bad, brown, tobacco-stained teeth, his massive body sunk in the worn, dirty grey upholstery of the chair in the foyer of the conference building. Perlmann tried not to listen when the vividly remembered figure spoke about how deeply words intervened in experience. He didn’t need that image, he said to himself. He really didn’t need it at all, because he had the black notebook with his own notes in it. If only he could go quickly upstairs and cast his eye over them.

Giorgio Silvestri held one knee braced against the edge of the table and balanced on the back legs of his chair. He let his left arm dangle backwards, and rested his right on the arm, a cigarette between his long, slender fingers.
Un po’ stravagante
, Angelini had called him. When he started speaking now, with a voice that was soft but, in spite of its strong accent, very confident, his white hand tirelessly moved with its cigarette, emphasizing certain things, casting others in doubt or making them seem vague. If one listened to schizophrenic patients, he said, the usual expectations with regard to coherence were disappointed. But the shifts in meaning and instances of conceptual incoherence obeyed a logic; there wasn’t mere chaos. He wanted to use his time here to write up his collected clinical material on this thesis. He asked for a late date, as all his work in the hospital had delayed him.