Perlmann's Silence (23 page)

He read the few sentences of the last paragraph with mounting dread, and all of a sudden his eyes seemed to hurt, so that he would ideally have liked to keep them from looking at the lined paper.
What separates me from my present is like a fine mist, an intangible veil, an invisible wall. They don’t put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk through it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn’t I take it long ago?

His eye still darting over the words, Perlmann started to close the notebook, and he could only catch the final question by tilting his head on one side. Then he stuffed the notebook back in his suitcase and pulled the strap unnecessarily tight.

When he got up, his eye fell on von Levetzov’s texts, which were stacked up on the desk. Soon he would be thinking
another nine days
– he felt that extremely clearly, and his heart was already preparing to thump at a faster rate. He hastily reached for a cigarette and stifled the thought with a look of tight concentration at Leskov’s text.

Almost another five pages, he saw quickly, dealt with remembered sense-impressions, before the conclusion about the appropriation of the past began. His notes had kept him from finishing today, and then he had wasted hours on his attempt with the Italian version. A twinge of guilt crept over him, but he resisted its burden by convincing himself it was all about the translation and not the fact that he had read nothing at all in preparation for tomorrow’s session.

What he sought was something quite particular, while afterwards, waiting for the effect of the sleeping pill, he slipped into half-sleep. He would recognize it straight away; but this abstract impression of particularity was still not enough deliberately to push open the door to the right corridor of memory. Only once he had abandoned his strenuous efforts was it suddenly there: back then, on the first trip to Venice, he had not thought once about his father’s sentence concerning Mestre. Amazed, he buried his face in the pillow and let himself slide towards oblivion. At the last moment he gave a start and propped himself up on his elbows, his hands clasped, both thumbs on the base of his nose. Again he struggled with the terrible images from Peking, which made it look like sheer scorn that someone could consider it important whether he had once thought of a particular sentence years before or whether he hadn’t. And again that struggle ended in a defiance that became all the more violent the more opaque the problem appeared from the point of view of justification.

Exhausted, he let his head drop back into the pillow, and soon slipped into a dream which consisted only of him, sweating, as if at an exam, looking for the Chinese name of the big square in Peking. His futile search made him so furious that he repeatedly wrote down the spookily intangible word so many times in a squared exercise book until it turned into sentences uttered by his parents, which, in an attempt to cross them through, he thickly underlined. At last he clapped the open exercise book face down on to the table, and was amazed that, although it was clearly Sandra’s exercise book, it had a black wax cloth cover.

16

‘Signor Perlmann!’ Maria stopped him as he dashed through the hall at five past nine the next morning. ‘I just wanted to ask when I can start writing out your text. It’s like this, you see: now that her old typewriter has been fixed, Signora Sand is giving me nothing more to do, and Evelyn – I mean, Signorina Mistral – has her own computer. Giorgio isn’t finished yet, so I thought I would ask you myself. I would have time to do it straight away, and I’ve been told that it’s your turn in ten days from now. Signor Millar has some work for me, too, but, of course, you come first.’

Perlmann closed his eyes for a moment and brought up his other arm when he felt that the stack of von Levetzov’s texts was threatening to slip out from under his arm.

‘Not for fourteen days,’ he said hoarsely. ‘My session isn’t for fourteen days.’

Maria straightened the yellow silk scarf at the neck of her glittering black pullover and looked at him uncertainly. Perlmann’s heart was beating so violently that he had the impression she must be able to hear it.

‘I would be happy to let Signor Millar go ahead of me,’ he said at last with a smile that felt as alien on his face as he always imagined it must feel when he saw an air steward smiling on a plane.

‘
Va bene
,’ said Maria hesitantly.
He heard no clattering heels on the marble floor when he turned into the corridor to the veranda. She would be watching after him thoughtfully.

Von Levetzov was just putting his watch back into his waistcoat pocket when Perlmann sat down. This man with the smooth, black hair and rimless spectacles, who was wearing a new tie yet again and looked more than ever like a senator out of a picture book, looked so right in the high, carved chair, as if the chair had been made specifically for him.

‘We should tell you first of all,’ he said, turning to Perlmann, ‘that we have decided to have another meeting in the second half of this week. It suddenly struck us as nonsensical to waste the little time that we have. Laura will take over the block of Thursday and Friday; Evelyn will do the start of next week; and then you would be in ten days. In that way there would be a few wild-card days at the end, depending on when Giorgio can sort it out. Only, of course, if that’s all right with you,’ he added with an expression that betrayed not the slightest sign of suspicion.

Perlmann looked into the distance. Evelyn Mistral’s feigned panic looked to him like tasteless clowning, and was at the same time as unreal as the scene on a transfer picture.

‘It’s OK,’ he heard himself saying in a hollow voice.

‘Fine,’ said von Levetzov, and began to elucidate his texts.

My text has to be in the pigeonholes by Tuesday at the latest. I have to give Maria two days. Friday morning, then. I have to be ready by Thursday night. Only another four days, of which three half-days are down the drain because of the sessions. Which leaves only two-and-a-half days. And the nights. Once in the silence of a single night I wrote out half an essay. Once. A long time ago.
Only when he caught the eyes of his colleagues did Perlmann notice that von Levetzov had clearly asked him a question.

‘Yes,’ he said into the blue, and saw straight away from Ruge’s frown that that made no sense as an answer. Cheeks burning, he started flicking through the texts and waited until von Levetzov went on, saying, ‘Well, then . . . ?’

For a long time – it might have been two hours – Perlmann didn’t hear what was going on around him. He could find only a single way to resist the overwhelming panic. He began to work. Methodically, he began to draw up in his notebook a list of all the themes he had ever worked on. Then he took a new page for each heading and jotted down the associations grouped around it. He marked the relationships of the themes to one another with various kinds of arrows. A structure formed. He slowly grew calmer, and all that remained of his inner tension was a thumping headache. Wrapped up in a cocoon of forced and barely substantial confidence, he suddenly rose to his feet and, ignoring the sudden silence, left the room without looking at anyone.

She always carried aspirin with her, Maria said, and started rummaging in her handbag. When she found nothing, she ran both hands threw her gleaming lacquered hair, disturbing the quiff that had stood out above her forehead like the brim of a hat. Finally, she found the tablets under a pile of paper on the desk and offered Perlmann her glass of mineral water.

She would have his manuscript on Friday morning, he said, as he set the glass back down on the corner of the desk. The cold in his fingers couldn’t just come from the glass, he thought, his left hand was cold as well. Could she have it ready by Monday evening?

How long was the text? she asked. The question disconcerted him, and for a moment he felt as if he was stumbling.

‘It’s just that everyone else’s texts are so long,’ she smiled apologetically, as the pause got longer and longer.

‘Maybe fifty pages,’ he said woodenly. Then he thanked her formally for the tablets and left the office.

For a moment he stepped up to the glass front door. The sky of the bay, which looked strangely boring, seemed this morning to be entirely colorless.
Disappear behind the rocky spur
. He didn’t want to think it yet again, and forced himself to go back to the veranda.

This time there was no interruption. Laura Sand’s alto voice with its smoky petulance flowed on. Perlmann sat down and looked at his notes. Words, nothing but individual words. How could he have thought, before, that this scribble could help him out of his fix? Let alone the fact that he was supposedly working on a text about the connection between language and memory.

Now the others leaned forwards as if in response to a command, and started flicking through von Levetzov’s texts. So as not to draw attention to himself, he started flicking, too. But it didn’t work: the pages were still charged from copying, and stuck together, so that a heavy clump moved as a whole. Perlmann tried in vain to pull the pages apart, and his thumb, his ugly thumb with the ridiculous grooves on the nail, became bigger and more ugly in front of his aching eyes, as if a merciless magnifying glass were being held over it. Beyond his swelling thumb he caught the amused and sardonic glances of the others, and what he didn’t see of those glances he felt.

That he didn’t hurl his clumps of paper at the heads of the others, or bang his forehead down on the table top, struck him later as a miracle. At the very last minute something intervened so that he – outwardly untouched – pulled one of the texts apart with a faint electrical crackle, and started making notes in the margin.

But that saving gentleness was only whitewash. At the next break in the discussion Perlmann took the floor, and what he now delivered into an awkward, leaden silence for almost half an hour was a vehement, ruthless denunciation of the whole area of linguistics that von Levetzov stood for – and not only von Levetzov.

After the first, hesitant sentences, during which he had to clear his throat several times, he spoke with a calm and a fluency that startled him, and which strengthened themselves from one moment to the next, so to speak, and the pauses during which he drew on a cigarette further underlined, he thought, the firmness of his conviction. As he spoke he didn’t look at anyone, but kept his eye fixed on the reddish, gleaming wood of the conference table, after he had banished his reflection with a sheet of paper right at the beginning.

He had no idea where everything he was saying came from. He had never thought it out in the form of explicit, memorable thoughts, and yet it felt as familiar and natural as a conviction that one has carried around with oneself for half a lifetime. At that moment he was grimly determined to yield to the astonishing process that had got under way, as long as it continued, let the others react how they might. Once he almost lost the thread, because the thought came to him that this could be a rare moment of present – a present, certainly, that had the strange quality of coming to him not from outside, from the world, but rather of being produced from within, creating the impression that time as a whole was not something that made its independent progress outside him, but something internal, an aspect of himself which, according to the amount of freedom he granted it, unfolded into the world in a rich or a parsimonious form. This idea made Perlmann dizzy. He stammered and repeated himself, and only when he had furiously crushed all the marginal thoughts about time did he find his way back to the earlier flow of his speech.

After that he intervened in what he said only in a guiding sense, so that his criticism explicitly and with suicidal sharpness also referred to his own works. He wanted to soften what he sensed was the inevitable impression that he was launching a personal attack on von Levetzov. His words had long ceased to bear any internal connection with von Levetzov, but were directed against Brian Millar, although he did not mention his name a single time. As, staring blindly at the mahogany, he imagined Millar’s face, his sentences became more and more strident, his choice of words more and more uncontrolled until it verged on vulgarity. On the edges of his field of vision the world began to blanch and to darken, so that he spoke his annihilating appraisals into a reddish, glowing tunnel from which, as if they were coming simultaneously from within and without, his father’s sentence about Mestre and his own sentence about saying now came towards him. Dismayed, he felt things within himself falling into utter disarray, but there was no stopping, he talked and talked, slicing the air with his palm as though bringing down a butcher’s axe, until the energy of desperate self-assertion finally gave way to a feeling of exhaustion.

For a while no one spoke. Voices could be heard from the lounge, and from outside came the stuttering of a boat engine that wouldn’t quite start. From the corner of his eye Perlmann could uneasily see Laura Sand adding details to the figures in her notebook.

The first eye he caught was Silvestri’s. He wore an expression of calm, sad alertness, an expression that he might have used with a confused or weeping patient, free of professional condescension, filled with an inward-turning shadow of solidarity, but also a gaze that concealed a will not to be disconcerted by anything he might encounter.

Perlmann would have liked to cling to that expression, but there were all the others: Achim Ruge, polishing his glasses with a corner of his wool jacket; Evelyn Mistral glancing shyly at him as she played awkwardly with the clasp of her white bracelet; Brian Millar, his arms folded particularly energetically and his head lowered, his eye focused on his fingertips as if he were inspecting his nails. And last of all Adrian von Levetzov, whom Perlmann looked at last, in the certainty that he had just made an enemy. Von Levetzov had taken off his glasses and let them dangle lightly in one hand as he rubbed his eyes with the thumb and index finger of the other. Perlmann had never seen him without his glasses, and was startled by the baggy eyelids that could now be seen. For a few fearful seconds in which hope and fear discolored one another, he waited for his reaction.

And then he was properly put to shame by Adrian von Levetzov, whose patriarchal elegance he had privately mocked and despised. He clumsily put his glasses back on and checked that they were on straight, by running two fingers along the curve of the ear pieces. Then, thoughtfully and gently, he pushed all the papers away from him, leaned right back into the chair and folded his hands over his head – a gesture that Perlmann had never seen him perform before and of which, even though he could not have explained it, he would not have thought him capable.

‘Recently, at a conference in London,’ he began and, after looking briefly at Perlmann, raised his eye beyond him, as if looking for someone at the pool, ‘I went to the theater one evening to see
Macbeth
again. I was alone, and in a strange mood free of self-deception. I immersed myself fully in Shakespeare’s wonderful language, and suddenly I had the feeling that there was nothing rewarding to be discovered about language that was not already contained within that experience of immersion. In the minutes leading up to the interval the thought of our profession had something tired, almost ludicrous about it, and I was quite ready to throw off my professional garb like a tired and worn-out skin. I think the two colleagues whom I met in the foyer found me rather strange at that moment. And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing had passed like a ghost, and afterwards in the pub I talked heatedly to my colleagues about a new publication in our field.’

He drew his glance back from the distance and smiled at Perlmann. ‘Somehow your . . . outburst of a moment ago reminded me of that,’ he said, speaking in German. ‘Except: there’s nothing I can do about it. I didn’t invent our discipline, did I? And it isn’t as uninteresting as all that, either; in spite of Shakespeare. Otherwise, I’m sure you wouldn’t have called us all here. Would you?’