Perlmann's Silence (3 page)

The desk was wide enough for the books, and if you pushed them back to the wall, with heavy volumes at the sides, the whole thing was stable, and there was enough room to write. Bringing his computer, the little appliance with the vast storage space for all the unwritten texts, was something he hadn’t managed to do; it would have struck him as the height of mendacity. Perlmann set down pencils, a ruler and his best ballpoint pen on the glass desktop, along with a stack of white sheets. Tomorrow morning he would absolutely have to start working.
I have no idea what. But I have to start. At all costs.

He had been saying that to himself for months. And yet it hadn’t happened. Instead he had gone on working on his Russian for many hours a day. That connected him with Agnes. Supported by music that they both loved, he had withdrawn into an inner space in which she, too, sat at the table and quizzed him as usual, laughing as, once again, she understood something more quickly than he did. The specialist literature had been left where it was, and had started piling up on a shelf, within reach and yet never touched, a constant admonition. The language books were almost the only things on the desk. Only when he had colleagues visiting and there was a danger that they would enter his study, did he bring some order into the great chaos of an academic in the midst of his work, with mountains of open books and manuscripts. It was always a struggle between anxiety and self-esteem, and it was always the anxiety that won.

Meanwhile, there had been regular correspondence about the research group. There were enquiries into practical details to be answered, and official confirmations to be written. He had done that in his office at the university. At home there had been nothing to remind him of his inexorably approaching departure, and he had become practiced, almost a virtuoso, at not thinking about it.

For his lectures he had for a long time been using old manuscripts that had become strange to him, and sometimes he had started feeling like his own press spokesman. If an unexpected question came out of the audience and put him in an awkward position, he gave himself a breathing space by saying with deliberate slowness, ‘You see, it’s like this . . .’, or ‘That’s a good question . . .’ These were alienated formulas that he would never have used before, and he hated himself for them. In the seminars he lived from hand to mouth and relied on his memory. He was an experienced player. He thought and reacted quickly, and, if necessary, when he no longer had anything substantial to hand, he could set off a rhetorical firework. Students could still be impressed by such things. In the everyday business of teaching, he thought almost every time he left the practice room, he would retain his disguise.

But this was very different. In less than three hours’ time some people would arrive who would not be deceived, people who didn’t have to battle with such feelings, ambitious people who were used to the rituals of academic debate and the situation of constant competition. They would be coming with new works of their own, with fat manuscripts, with projects and perspectives, and they brought with them high expectations of the others, and also of him, Philipp Perlmann, the prominent linguist. For this reason they were a threat to him. They became his adversaries, even though they could have had no inkling of the fact. People like them had a very fine sense of everything to do with the social reality of their subject. They registered with seismographic precision if something was wrong.
They will notice I’m no longer involved – that I’m no longer one of them.
And sooner or later in those five weeks it would come out: he of all people, the leader of the group, the conductor of the whole thing, would stand there empty-handed – as if he hadn’t done his homework. They would react with disbelief. It would be a quiet scandal. Certainly, a facade of kindness would remain, but it would be a killing kindness, because its beneficiary was certain that it was a mere ritual, which could not attenuate the silent contempt.

It was now just after one. Perlmann felt uneasy; but the idea of sitting downstairs in the elegant dining room eating with silver cutlery was unbearable. And the idea of eating repelled him too. At that moment he felt as if unease and hunger could get as big as they wanted: he would only eat on the homeward flight, at that point in time that was so horrifically far away.

He lay on the bed. Brian Millar was in Rome now. His plane from New York had landed there that morning, and now he was meeting his Italian colleague to discuss the plan for the linguistic encyclopaedia. He wouldn’t fly on to Genoa until late afternoon. So there were still a few hours until that encounter. Laura Sand would also be turning up in the late afternoon, because she first had to travel by train from Oxford to London, and was then flying via Milan. It must all have been rather a strain for her, because she had just got back from her animals in Kenya. Would she be true to herself and come here dressed all in black, as she usually did? Adrian von Levetzov had announced his arrival for early afternoon: in his stilted, baroque manner he had written something about a direct flight from Hamburg to Genoa. Frau Hartwig couldn’t help laughing at the stark contrast between his elegant writing paper and Achim Ruge’s torn-off piece of paper, in which he communicated diagonally across several coffee stains that he had to organize work in his Bochum lab for the time of his absence, and couldn’t say whether he would be arriving on Tuesday or Wednesday. When Giorgio Silvestri would be able to leave his clinic in Bologna was uncertain, but at any rate he wanted to try to be here for dinner. After the phone conversation, Perlmann had been uncertain whether he liked Silvestri’s smoky voice or not. Angelini’s reference to him had been very reticent, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he had invited him. Perhaps just because Agnes had said that linguistic disorders in the case of psychoses must surely be interesting.

The first would be Evelyn Mistral. The train from Geneva was to arrive in Genoa at half-past one. He wouldn’t regret it, her boss had written to him, when suggesting her in his place, because he himself had to undergo an operation. She was making a name for herself in the field of developmental psychology. The list of her publications was impressive for someone who was only twenty-nine. But the stack of her papers that Frau Hartwig had put on Perlmann’s desk had gone unread. All he knew of her was her voice on the telephone, an unexpectedly clear voice with a polished Spanish accent.

Politeness decreed that, as their host, he should wait for them downstairs. But it was another five leaden minutes before he finally got to his feet. When he walked to the chair to fetch his jacket he stumbled over his empty suitcase. He was about to close it and put it away when he noticed Leskov’s text half-hidden in a side pocket, a fat typescript in Russian, a bad photocopy in an unusual paper format, folded in at the corners from the journey and otherwise generally crumpled. The text had been enclosed with the letter in which Leskov said that he had not received an exit permit, and couldn’t have come in any case, as his mother had suffered a sudden serious illness. The text was about what he was working on at present, he had written, and he hoped that in this way he would be able to stay in academic contact with him. Sending him this text was a piece of flattery, Perlmann had thought. His Russian wasn’t nearly good enough to cope with it. He had set it aside and forgotten it. It had only come to hand again when he was packing on Sunday evening.
It’s nonsense
, he had thought, but in a way he had liked the idea of having a Russian text with him. It was something exotic and thus intimate, so in the end he had packed it along with his Russian pocket dictionary.

As he held it in his hand now, the text suddenly seemed to him to be something that he could use to distinguish himself from the others, and defend himself. Opening up this text to himself, or at least trying to do so, was at least a plan for the coming weeks. It was something into which he could withdraw in his free time, an internal region that the others could not penetrate, and from which he would defend himself against their expectations; an inner fortress in which he was invulnerable to their judgment. If he stayed in it, and one Russian sentence after the other opened up to him, he might even succeed in wresting a few moments of presence from the mountain range of time. And then, after the remaining thirty-two days, when he was sitting by the aeroplane window again and enjoying the loop in which the plane rose above the sea, he could say that he now spoke Russian much better than before, so that he had not entirely lost that time after all.

Perlmann took the text and the dictionary, and when he went downstairs and nodded to Signora Morelli, his step was lighter than in the days before. He sat down in a wicker chair under the portico by the entrance and looked at the title that Leskov had written by hand in big, carefully drawn letters:
o roli yazyka v formirovanii vospominaniy
. He only needed to use the dictionary once and he had it:
on the role of language in the formation of memories
.

That seemed familiar to him. That’s right. It had been the subject of their conversation in St Petersburg. He saw himself standing with Vassily Leskov at a window of the Winter Palace and looking out on the frozen Neva. Agnes’s death was only two months in the past, and he certainly hadn’t felt like going to a conference. But at the time when he had received the invitation, Agnes had been all for it straight away –
Then we can try out our Russian
– and he had gone, because, in spite of the pain it gave him, it made him feel connected to her. After the start of the session he and Leskov had sat in the foyer of the conference building and fallen into conversation; it had, he thought, been much like his meeting with Angelini. Leskov had been far from sympathetic to him at first; a heavy, rather spongy man with coarse features and a bald head, eager to talk to colleagues from the West and therefore solicitous, almost submissive, in his manner. He talked nineteen to the dozen, and Perlmann, who would rather have had his peace, initially found him intrusive and bothersome. But then he had started listening: what this man was saying in sometimes antiquated but almost perfectly correct German about the role of language for experience, above all the experience of time, began to captivate him. He described experiences that had long been familiar to Perlmann, but which he could not have described with such accuracy, such nuance and such coherence as this Russian, who fumbled around constantly in the air with the damp stem of his pipe between his massive fingers. Soon Leskov sensed Perlmann’s growing interest. He was pleased with it and suggested showing him some more of the city.

He led him across St Petersburg to the Winter Palace. It was a clear, sunny morning in early March. Perlmann particularly remembered the houses in light, faded ochre, gleaming in the sun: his memory of St Petersburg consisted entirely of that color. Beside him, Leskov showed him lots, explained lots, a man in a worn, green loden coat, with a fur hat and a pipe, advancing with heavy, clumsy footsteps, waving his arms around and snuffling slightly. Perlmann often didn’t listen. His thoughts were with Agnes, who had intended time and again to come here to take photographs, ideally in the summer, during the white nights. Sometimes he stopped and tried to see a section of his field of vision through her eyes, her black-and-white eyes, which had only been concerned with light and shade. In this way, he thought now, as he flicked through the text, a curious associative connection had formed between Agnes and this Russian: Leskov as a travel guide on Perlmann’s imaginary stroll with Agnes through St Petersburg.

The hours in the Winter Palace and then in the Hermitage collection created a strange intimacy between the two men. Perlmann revealed to his companion, whom he barely knew, that he was in the process of learning Russian, whereupon a beaming smile spread over Leskov’s face, and he immediately continued talking in Russian, until he noticed that Perlmann was utterly unable to follow him. Leskov was very familiar with the paintings collected here. He pointed out some things that one might otherwise not have noticed on a first trip, and from time to time he said something simple in Russian, slowly and clearly. Perlmann spent these hours in a mood in which the effect of the paintings and joy of Russian sentences understood mingled with the pain that he would not be able to tell Agnes all this, that he would never be able to tell her anything ever again.

He had resisted the temptation to talk about Agnes while he was in this mood. What business was it of this Russian’s? It was only when they looked down at the Winter Place from the Peter and Paul Fortress that he began now, of all times, when their earlier intimacy had fled in the bitterly cold air. It happened against his will, and he was furious when he heard himself, to crown it all, talking about how hard he had found it since then to continue with his academic work. Luckily, Leskov did not understand the full meaning of his words. He replied only that it was quite natural after such a loss, and added almost paternally that it would all come back to him. And then, from their newly revived intimacy, he told him that he had been jailed as a dissident. He didn’t say for how long and gave no further details. Perlmann didn’t know how to react to this information, and for a moment there was an uncomfortable pause that Leskov finally ended by taking him by the upper arm and suggesting with unfitting, artificial cheerfulness that they should start addressing one another informally. Perlmann was glad that Leskov had to go home soon afterwards, to look after his old mother with whom he lived, and that he didn’t invite him along. He had replied to the invitation to Santa Margherita that Perlmann sent him a few weeks later with an exuberant letter: he would apply for an exit permit straight away. And then, three months ago, the depressed missive in which Leskov had declined Perlmann’s invitation had arrived attached to this text.