Perlmann's Silence (26 page)

Perlmann asked the stewardess for a glass of water and ignored the curious gaze of his neighbor by closing his eyes again. Perhaps he would have got through his Latin and Greek tests even without that little notebook under his desk? But he wouldn’t have dared. Because in point of fact he had never found foreign languages easy. There was no question of a particular talent. He wasn’t like Luc Sonntag, who would see through the most intricate ablative constructions, even though he was always going around with girls. Perlmann was industrious, and thorough – so thorough that Agnes had often fled from the room because she was afraid of his particular kind of thoroughness. Then he had firmly dug his heels in still further and gone on swotting so that, at some distant point in the future, he could enjoy his new linguistic understanding.

He was good at that, he thought. It was perhaps the only thing he really was good at: with an unimaginable firmness of will, undertaking an effort with a distant goal in mind, for the sake of a future ability that would someday make him happy. He had mastered his renunciation, this deferral of happiness, in a thousand variations, and his gift of invention was inexhaustible when it came to thinking up more and more things that he had to learn in order to be equipped for his future present. And thus he had systematically, and with impeccable thoroughness, cheated himself of his present.

When the plane touched down he had the feeling that a seal was being put on something, even if he couldn’t have said what. The fat man next to him turned down the corner of his page and put his book away. ‘Bad as that?’ he asked with a grin when he saw that Perlmann had deliberately left his book in the seat pocket.

White columns of smoke rose into the night sky from the industrial plants beside the airport. Perlmann trudged heavily across the tarmac towards the red building. When he took his passport from the official’s hand the thought suddenly struck him:
I may not get out of here alive
. In the taxi he asked the driver to turn up the music. But from time to time the thought flickered up anyway. As he stepped into the hotel he was grateful for Signora Morelli’s crisp ‘
Buona sera
’, and tonight it didn’t bother him that someone had once again fixed the lighting in his corridor.

He sat down, exhausted, on the bed and stared for several minutes at the stack of texts by Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand, and the mail from Frau Hartwig. His exhaustion turned into indifference, and at last all that still interested him was his hunger. He showered quickly and then went down to eat. As quiet as someone who has given up on everything, he shovelled the food into him and answered questions with the mild friendliness of a convalescent.

Later he lay awake for a long time in the darkness without thinking anything. There was nothing left to calculate. He wouldn’t have a text to give Maria on Friday. The tension was over. Everything was over. When the effect of the pill flooded through him, he gave up and dropped off.

19

Right from the start, Laura Sand’s session went better than all the others. The veranda was in darkness and the projector cast film images on a screen that stood at a slightly crooked angle on a stand. There were quite long sequences of images, in which animals showed behavior that would be hard to see as anything other than symbolic. At short intervals, clouds of cigarette smoke passed through the beam of the projector. Laura Sand’s voice was strangely soft, and sometimes that made her seem bashful, so that she threw in the occasional brash remark. There was nothing – that much was quite clear – that she loved as much as these animals. Often she showed a sequence several times to stress an observation or enlarge upon an explanation. But she also repeated sections in which the movements of the animals were simply comical. ‘Again!’ Ruge cried out at one such point, and to Perlmann’s surprise Millar joined in, too: ‘Yes! Where’s the slow-motion button?’

Perlmann was glad to be able to sit in the dark. After the third aspirin that he put in his mouth with the most economical movements possible, and washed down with coffee, the headaches slowly faded, and he escaped into the wide Steppe landscapes that formed the background of many of the animal scenes. Often Laura Sand hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and had played expertly with the light, until the animals’ bodies moved against the light like figures in a shadow play. And sometimes the camera escaped the research discipline, and crept over the empty landscape, which glimmered in boiling midday light. Then Perlmann managed to forget that in exactly a week he would be the one sitting up there at the front.

When the blinds went up and everyone rubbed their eyes in the murky light of a rainy day, it was already past twelve. A debate immediately broke out about the fundamental concepts with which Laura Sand tried to capture what she had observed. Perlmann got involved, too, and defended them even more resolutely than Evelyn Mistral. What he said contradicted everything that he usually claimed in publications, and more than once Millar raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Barely a quarter of Laura Sand’s texts had been discussed when it was time for lunch.

‘So you had a film show today!’ laughed Maria when Perlmann ran into her outside the office. ‘By the way, I explicitly told Signor Millar again that your text, as you told me, can wait. But then he didn’t want me to type out his things anyway. I didn’t understand why.’ She smiled coquettishly and glanced at her reflection in the glass door. ‘So first of all I went to the hairdresser, and then started on your text, which I some how like – if I may say that. I’ll just interrupt it if you bring me the other, urgent text tomorrow.
Va bene?
’ Perlmann nodded, and was glad when von Levetzov appeared and dragged him along into the dining room.

‘Have you been able to take a look at my synopsis?’ Evelyn Mistral asked him over dessert.

‘Yes, I have,’ Perlmann said, and scraped the last bit of pudding out of the bowl as he racked his brains as to how she had described her problem to him.

‘So? You can just tell me if you think it’s stupid,’ she said with a forced smile.

‘No, no, absolutely not. I think the idea of producing the connection through the concept of the ground is a good one.’ Even before he had finished the sentence he realized that he was really talking about Leskov’s argument, which was contained in those four recalcitrant sentences.

Evelyn Mistral’s spoon circled aimlessly in the bowl. ‘Oh, right, yes. That could be a thought,’ she said at last, glancing at him bashfully.

‘I . . . I’ll sit down to it again this afternoon,’ Perlmann said. ‘Time is . . . time is a bit short.’

Something in his quiet voice made her sit up and listen. Her face relaxed.

‘Fine,’ she said and laid her hand on his arm for a moment.

Afterwards, in the room, Perlmann tried in vain to concentrate on Evelyn Mistral and Laura Sand’s papers. He felt obliged to try. If he could have shown tomorrow that he had at least been working in that sense, it would have been some small protection against everything else that was now heading inexorably towards him. But faced with that writing he felt as he had done on his outward-bound flight: as if he were suddenly blind to meanings; the texts couldn’t get through to him and flattened out before his eyes into pedantic ornaments.

Over the next few hours he walked slowly and aimlessly through the town. At the stationery shop where he had bought the chronicle the window display had been completely changed. Perlmann was annoyed that this made him lose his sense of equilibrium; but only several streets further on did he manage to shake the whole thing off.

Complete nonsense
, he said to himself repeatedly as he became aware of something inside him stubbornly trying to make the chronicle responsible for the dilemma he was in. At the bar of a café, where he drank a coffee, the internal struggle finally stopped. The clouds had parted, the sun glittered in the puddles, and suddenly life seemed to gain pace and color. Perlmann held his face in the dusty beam of sunlight that fell through the narrow glass door. For a moment he felt a forbidden happiness like the one that comes from skipping school, and when the sun disappeared again he clung with all his might to that feeling, although it grew more and more hollow from one moment to the next, and made way for a dull and barely restrained anxiety which suited the gloomy light that now filled the bar again.

For the time being it was only Maria that he would have to say anything to. His colleagues’ questions would only start on Monday, and the situation would only come to a definitive head on Wednesday. His anxiety was somewhat assuaged by this thought, and Perlmann continued his aimless walk through little side streets.

He got to the trattoria early. The proprietress brought him the chronicle and told him with delight that Sandra’s drawings had been singled out for special praise by the art teacher that morning. Then he had allowed Sandra to travel across to Rapallo with some other children. Perlmann forced out a smile and struggled to stuff into his mouth the spaghetti that he thought was overcooked today. The proprietor’s question of where he had been for the past two days annoyed him, and he pretended not to have heard it.

His interest in the chronicle was over now, once and for all, he established as he flicked through its pages. Just as he was about to snap it shut, his eye fell on a painting by Marc Chagall. In the cheap, miniaturized reproduction the blue had lost much of its luminous power. Nonetheless, Perlmann had immediately recognized that it must be Chagall’s blue. He fully opened the book again and read the text. There was something about that date; but it escaped his remembering gaze and remained far outside on the periphery of his consciousness, as intangible as the mere memory of a memory. It had had nothing to do with Chagall’s colors, of that he was sure. He had avoided that subject for many years, so as not to have to hear Agnes’s harsh judgment about it. And, in fact, it seemed to him, it hadn’t really been about Chagall at all. Something else was to blame for the fact that he had suddenly felt quite alone. But behind his closed lids nothing appeared that might have explained why his disappointment then seemed so closely connected with his anxiety now.

The memory only came later, when he was sitting in front of the television at the hotel, just as alone and desperate as he had been in the living room after he had called off the lecture.
If you think so
, was the first thing Agnes had said when he had asked her, even though there was no longer any possibility. And when she saw the wounded expression on his face:
Oh, all right then, why not. It can happen to anyone.
But her relaxed tone and dismissive gesture hadn’t been able to conceal her disappointment: her husband, a rising star in his subject, hadn’t managed to write the lecture that he had been supposed to deliver in the Auditorium Maximum, even though for days he had been sitting over it until late into the night.

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.’