Perlmann's Silence (4 page)

Perlmann understood the first sentence immediately. The second contained two words that he had never encountered before, although, in fact, it was clear what they must mean. The third sentence was opaque to him because of its construction, but he read on, through a series of unfamiliar words and phrases, to the end of the first paragraph. From one sentence to the next he grew more excited, and by now it was like a fever. Without taking his eyes off the page, he looked in his pocket for a sweet. As he did so he touched the pack of cigarettes that he had bought the previous day when he arrived at the airport. He hesitantly set them down on the bistro table beside the dictionary and then picked them up again. He had bought them yesterday as if under a compulsion, and at precisely the moment that he had begun to feel that he had arrived here irrevocably – that there was no longer a gap, either in space or in time, separating him from the start of this stay, and that there was consequently no longer the slenderest possibility that it might not happen. It had felt like a defeat when he had bought the cigarettes, and he had, as he put them in his pocket, had a dull sensation of menacing and inexorable disaster.

It was his old brand, which he had smoked until five years before. The joyful excitement he had felt at his unexpected success in reading Leskov’s text faded away and melted with the thrilling fear of the forbidden, when he now, with trembling fingers, put a cigarette between his lips. The dry paper felt ominously familiar. He took his time. He could still stop, he said to himself, heart thumping. But his self-confidence, he felt with alarming clarity, seemed to be leaking away.

He realized that he hadn’t got a light, and was relieved by this setback. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and thought of that day on the cliff, in the wind, when they had been on holiday. He and Agnes had looked at each other and then simultaneously thrown their burning cigarettes into the sea, the full packs after them, and laughed at their melodramatic gesture. A common victory, a happy day.

Suddenly, the waiter was standing next to him on the terrace, holding out a burning match. A feeling of defenselessness took hold of him. Things slipped away. He took his first puff in five years and immediately had a coughing fit. The waiter glanced at him with surprise and concern and walked away. The second puff was easier. It still scratched, but it was already a complete puff. Now he smoked in slow, deep puffs, his eyes half-closed. The nicotine began to flow through his body. He sensed a slight dizziness, but at the same time he felt light and a little bit euphoric. Of course, it was a euphoria that went hand in hand with the impression of artificiality, the feeling that this state arose in him without actually belonging to him, without really being his own. And then, all of a sudden, everything collapsed within him, and he felt wretchedly unwell.

He quickly stubbed out the cigarette and walked unsteadily to the pool, where he lay down on a lounger and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted even before anything had begun. After a while he grew calmer. He was relieved that nothing was pulsing and spinning any more, and gradually drifted into half-sleep. He didn’t wake up until a very bright voice above him, speaking English with a Spanish accent, said, ‘Forgive me for disturbing you, but the waiter told me you were Philipp Perlmann.’

2

She had a radiant smile, the like of which he had never seen, a smile in which her whole personality opened up, a smile that would have broken down anyone’s resistance. He sat up and looked into the oval face with its prominent cheekbones, wide-set eyes and broad nose, almost an oriental face. Her blonde hair fell straight down on to a white, crookedly fitting T-shirt; it was uncombed, living hair, a bit like straw.

Perlmann’s mouth was dry and he still felt a bit unsteady when he got to his feet and held out his hand.

‘You must be Evelyn Mistral,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I must have dozed off for a moment.’
Starting with an apology
.

‘Not to worry,’ she laughed. ‘It’s really like being on holiday here.’ She pointed to the high facade of the hotel with the painted gables over the windows, the turquoise shutters and the coats of arms in the colors of various nations. ‘It’s all so terribly smart. I hope they’ll let me in with my suitcase!’

It was an ancient, battered black leather case, with light brown edges that were torn in places, and she had stuck a bright red elephant on the middle of the lid.
Kirsten could drag a case like that around with her, too. It would suit her. And generally speaking she somehow reminds me of my daughter, although they don’t look at all alike
.

She had come by train, first class, and was impressed in the way a little girl might have been. You feel so important, she said. She had never been treated so well by a conductor. Then she had allowed herself a sumptuous lunch in the dining car. There had been no first-class carriage on the local train from Genoa to Santa Margherita, and it had struck her as quite odd to be suddenly sitting in a shabby, second-class compartment again. How quickly one was corrupted!

Perlmann took the case and accompanied her to reception. She walked lightly in her faded khaki skirt, almost dancing slightly in her flat, bright red patent shoes, and yet there was something hesitant and gawky in her gait. She was greeted by Signora Morelli, who was, as she had been the day before, wearing a dark blue, sporty-looking dress and a burgundy neckerchief, which gave her the appearance of a chief stewardess, an impression reinforced by the fact that she had put her hair up in a rather severe style. When Evelyn Mistral spoke Italian she pronounced the vowels in the Spanish way, short and harsh, in sharp contrast to Signora Morelli’s leisurely sing-song. As she checked in, leaning on the desk, her feet played with her red shoes. Sometimes she laughed out loud, and then her voice again had the brightness that Perlmann remembered from their phone call. ‘See you later,’ she said to him when the porter took the case and walked ahead of her to the elevator.

Perlmann walked slowly back across the expansive terrace to the pool. Now the red-haired man from that morning was back as well. Perlmann replied to his cheerful greeting with a brief wave, and sat down on a lounger on the other side. He abandoned himself to a feeling that was, in fact, merely the absence of anxiety. For the first time since his arrival he wasn’t battling against the things around him: the crooked pines that loomed on the coast road; the flags along the balustrade; the waiter’s red smoking jacket; the smell of pine resin and the remains of summer heat in the air. Now he was able to see that the grapes on the pergola were turning red. Agnes would have seen that first.

‘They’ve given me a fantastic room,’ said Evelyn Mistral, dropping her swimming towel on the lounger next to him. ‘Up there. The corner room on the third floor, a double room with antique furniture. I think the desk’s made of rosewood. And the view! I’ve never lived like this. But the price. Don’t even think about it! How are you supposed to earn that sort of money? But at least with a desk like that, you have no excuse not to work!’

She had taken off her bathrobe and was standing at the edge of the pool. Her gleaming white one-piece swimsuit set off her brownness, a brown with a yellowish glow. A dive and she was in the water. She stayed under for a long time and then swam back and forth a few times in the big kidney-shaped pool. The water barely sprayed up; the movements of her calm, almost lazy freestyle were elegant and contrasted with her gawky way of walking. From time to time she came over to him and rested her arms on the edge of the pool. ‘Why don’t you come in? It’s wonderful!’

Perlmann closed his eyes and tried to retain that image: the gleaming water and her radiant smile; her wet blonde hair. Even now it was no different: he could never experience the present as it was taking place; he always woke up too late, and then there was only the substitute, the visualization, a field in which he had, out of pure desperation, become a virtuoso.

As unexpectedly as before, when he had given him a light, the waiter was suddenly standing over him, passing him Leskov’s text, the dictionary and the cigarettes.

‘Someone else would like to sit there,’ he said, pointing to the columns. Then he looked in the pocket of his smoking jacket and handed Perlmann a book of matches with the inscription
Grand Hotel Miramare
.

Perlmann set the things down on the floor next to him and looked across to Evelyn Mistral, who was now on her back, letting herself drift with her arms spread wide. Her long hair, which looked brown in the blue water, lay like a chaotic fan around her face. She had closed her eyes, drops of water shimmered on her bright lashes, and when she glided back from a strip of shadow into the sun, her eyelids twitched. As before, when wanting to record an impression, Perlmann lit a cigarette. The inhalation and the sensation of heightened, slightly hurried vividness thus produced created the illusion that he could obtain the impossible through sheer obstinacy: hold the moment until he had managed to open it up and thus give it depth. Again he felt dizzy, but the sensation no longer crossed the boundary into nausea, and when the cigarette was finished he lit another one.

When Evelyn Mistral came out of the water and dried herself, her eye fell on Leskov’s text on the ground. ‘Oh, you speak Russian,’ she said. Then she narrowed her eyes. ‘That is Russian, isn’t it? I’d love to be able to do that. When did you learn? And how?’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t explain why he flinched at that moment, as if he’d been caught doing something forbidden.

‘I can’t, in fact,’ he said, and set down both text and dictionary on the other side of the lounger to make room for her. ‘Just a few words. This text here – it’s more of a prank that someone took the liberty of playing on me.’
The dictionary was lying with its back to her. She couldn’t have seen the dark smudges from all that flicking.

What other foreign languages did he speak? she asked as she puffed on one of his cigarettes later on.

‘I can speak a bit of yours,’ he said in Spanish.

‘Then you should be more familiar with me,’ she laughed. ‘
Usted
is far too formal. Colleagues don’t say that to each other. And in Spain since Franco as a rule we tend to say
tú
.’

After that they stuck with Spanish. Perlmann liked her Spanish voice, particularly the gutturals and the way she turned the
d
at the end of the word into a voiceless sound like the English
th
. It was a long time since he had last spoken Spanish, and he made a lot of mistakes. But he was glad of the language. He hadn’t learned anything new in English for years, nothing liberatingly strange in its newness. English no longer gave him the chance to recast himself in a foreign language.

He lost her when he talked about this subject. Her relationship with foreign languages was more serious, more practical. Yes, she enjoyed them, too; but when he talked about the possibility of becoming someone else in a foreign language, even though one was essentially saying the same thing as one said in one’s own, she was only a polite listener, and Perlmann felt like a mystic. And when he reflected out loud about whether the Spanish
tú
was more intimate than the English
you
in connection with the first name, or the same, and how both compared to the German
Du
in terms of intimacy, she looked at him with curiosity, but the smile that accompanied her gaze revealed that for her this was more of a game than a serious question. His monologue suddenly struck him as ridiculous, even kitsch, and he abruptly interrupted it to ask her about her work.

What someone can imagine is dependent on what they can say, and the same is true of what they want, she said. In her work with children she concentrated increasingly on this connection between imagination, will and language; on the way in which the internal play with possibilities became more refined and influential as the capacity for linguistic expression developed; and how this refinement of the imagination through language led to an increasingly rich organization of the will.

As she spoke she gripped her tucked-up knees with both hands. Only sometimes, when the wet strands slipped into her face, did she release her interlocking fingers. Her face was very serious and concentrated as she tried to find appropriate words, precise sentences. Perlmann liked her face now, too. But the more she got into her stride, the further away it became. And then when she talked about the chapters of a book that she wanted to present for discussion here, it struck him as very remote and alien. He thought of his shabby, black oilcloth notebook, which he hadn’t opened for so long, and it was only with difficulty that he managed to shake off the image of squared pages, yellowed to the point of illegibility. He dreaded the moment when she would ask him about his own work, and for that reason kept asking, apprehensive about the mendaciousness of his zeal, and yet pleased every time she began to respond to yet another question.

When Adrian von Levetzov’s name was mentioned, Perlmann gave a start. ‘I’d completely forgotten him,’ he murmured tonelessly, and he could see from Evelyn Mistral’s expression that his face revealed an anxiety that he would gladly have concealed at any cost. He hastily got up from the lounger, went over on one ankle and started hobbling to the entrance. As he passed the waiter, who was clearing a table, he forced himself to walk more calmly, unsure whether it was because of the pain in his ankle or whether it sprang from the desire to battle against anxiety and solicitude.

Von Levetzov was standing at the reception desk talking insistently, and in terrible tourist Italian, to Signora Morelli, who replied to him with a motionless face and in perfect English.

‘If the sun disturbs you, sir,’ she was just saying with a coolness that Perlmann envied, ‘you need only draw the curtains. We cannot easily alter the location of the hotel, now, can we? We do not, I fear, have a larger desk. But I’m sure we can find an additional side table.’

Von Levetzov’s face was pinched and slightly reddened when he looked over at the door. ‘Ah, Perlmann, at last,’ he said, struggling to rein in his irritation. ‘I thought you weren’t going to welcome me at all.’

‘Please do forgive me,’ Perlmann said breathlessly. ‘I was at the pool with Evelyn Mistral, and completely forgot the time.’
Why am I constantly apologizing? And to cap it all that sounded almost like a budding romance. One should meet such a man in a quite different way. One should be much more, obliging, but cool. I’ll never learn.

‘Well, you’re here now,’ said von Levetzov, and it sounded as if Perlmann were a pupil who had turned up late or a tardy assistant who was being forgiven. ‘I’m just trying to explain to these people that I need more room to work, more surface area. Above all, I need a table for my calculator alone. And then the sun. I tried it out just after I got here. There are problems with the screen. You must have noticed that yourself.’

Perlmann didn’t look at him as he nodded. Consequently, his lie felt more like an insignificant movement. He turned to Signora Morelli, whom he hadn’t liked at all at first when he had arrived the day before, but whose brittleness had made her more congenial to him each time he had seen her since. An additional table would, as she had said, be found for the signore, and, if he insisted, his room would be rearranged: the desk could be put against the back wall, which the sun didn’t reach. He could even be offered a different room, facing the rear and very shady, but perhaps a bit small for such a long stay.

Perlmann spoke Italian with her, and he spoke more quickly than his ability actually allowed him to. After the conversation by the pool the Spanish words sometimes came to him rather than the Italian, but he went on and on talking, even when the question of the room had long been resolved, so that Signora Morelli looked embarrassedly across to Adrian von Levetzov, who was irritably waggling a hotel prospectus. She couldn’t tell that Perlmann’s talking was a demonstration, a show for this man in the dark blue, almost black suit with the waistcoat and the gold watch chain.
Whatever may happen over the next few weeks, I can do that better than he can.