Perlmann's Silence (10 page)

‘Have you ever experienced what it’s like when someone bolts the door in front of your nose, even though you haven’t done anything, as if you’re in prison? Have you seen the big keys that are turned in the lock by the wardens with a noise that never seems to stop echoing?’ Silvestri’s white hand with the cigarette trembled, and a bit of ash fell on the Swiss roll.

‘They aren’t wardens,’ Millar said, struggling to maintain his self-control, ‘they’re nurses.’

‘Wardens is what they called them in Oakland,’ Silvestri said urgently. ‘The same word that you use for prisons.’

‘They’re nurses,’ Millar repeated, trying to stay calm, and then turned, wine bottle in hand, with a forced smile to Perlmann. ‘There are happier subjects. How did you enjoy my new paper?’

Perlmann felt Silvestri’s excitement vibrating within himself. He shoved a second piece of meat, far too big, into his mouth and made a gesture of apology as he chewed. ‘It’s OK,’ he said at last and attempted a smile that was supposed to express the fact that he didn’t take Millar’s criticism of him amiss.

‘I understand,’ Millar grinned when Perlmann failed to say anything more. ‘You can save your reply till tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it.’

Back in his room, Perlmann worked out his revulsion with particularly forceful movements and sat down at the desk with forced brio. Millar’s papers were, as usually, shatteringly brilliant; one could tell that as soon as one started flicking through them. His subheadings almost always took the form of a question, and his original questions, which had prompted so much research, had made him famous. There was also the fact that his vocabulary was unusually large for an academic author, and he had developed an unmistakeable style, juggling skilfully with the vividness of idiomatic phrases, and didn’t shy away from putting a slang expression in the middle of a dry sentence summing up data of some kind, and making it explode like a bomb. There were also people who found Millar’s style shrill and vain, but they had always been in a minority, and by now no one dared to say it out loud. Only Achim Ruge, who wrote in a desiccated, legalistic style, had made a remark to that effect at a conference some time before, and it had been passed on in whispers.

Perlmann had no reservations; not a single one. He had started with the newer of the two papers, to put Millar’s criticism behind him. He couldn’t think of a response. As he sat in front of his empty notepad, pen brandished, a fortissimo sounded from Millar’s room every now and again. Millar’s criticism was harsh, actually devastating. Perlmann was baffled that it didn’t touch him. It was a bit like having a local anaesthetic, and after reading Millar’s critical passages he felt almost cheerful.

But then, when he had finished the paper, he was shocked by his indifference. To express reservations, to be able to react to a criticism, you have to have opinions, opinions that can be formulated and stated. And that was exactly what he didn’t have. For some time he had been a man without opinions, at least as far as his subject was concerned. He agreed with everything, as long as it wasn’t obvious nonsense. It had never been so clear to him as now.

He stepped to the open window. The strip of light at Sestri Levante was now quite regular and still. What had it been like when he still had opinions? Where had they come from? And why had the source dried up?
Can you decide to believe something? Or do opinions just happen to you?

Ruge’s room had been in darkness before, and now the light from Millar’s window went out as well. But it was better to wait another half hour before moving. Two days out of thirty-three. So one sixteenth had already gone. It was a sum like the ones he had done at school. And like then it felt peculiar: all of a sudden it seemed like a huge amount. In fact, he thought, it had all gone fairly quickly, and if it went on like that it would soon be over. That there was still fifteen times the same amount of time to come seemed almost trivial. A moment later it seemed like an eternity: once and again and again . . . You had to think of the whole thing like a long-distance runner. You had to concentrate on it and overcome the next, manageable segment.

He furtively opened the door and reassured himself that no one was in the corridor. Then he ran, crouching, to the stairs, his suitcases held just above the ground, and hurried to the top floor, taking the steps two at a time in spite of the heavy luggage. Panting, he set the suitcases down in his new room and hurried back again. Together with his grammar and his dictionary, Millar and Leskov’s papers formed a big, shapeless stack, which he covered with his coat. After a searching glance through the room he used the key to avoid the noise of the slamming door.

The ceiling light in the new room cast a cold, diffuse light that recalled a station waiting room. On the other hand, the beam of light from the standard lamp beside the red armchair was warm and clear, an ideal light for reading. Once it was lit, the rest of the expansive room sank into a calming darkness that belonged to him alone. After a while he crossed this darkness to the bathroom and took half a sleeping pill. Until it took effect, he would just manage to scamper through Millar’s first text in bed. It was a difficult text with lots of formulae. But for that reason he’d hardly be able to do it tomorrow. Perlmann set his alarm clock for half-past seven. He would, he thought in his half-sleep, have to simulate an opinion for tomorrow’s session. It wouldn’t be enough to capture it in words; it was a matter of staging the opinion inside oneself as well. Was it possible to do that, fighting against the certainty that one lacked any opinion?

6

The waiter who brought him his coffee the following morning passed no remark about the new room. As he approached the round table beside the red armchair, Perlmann covered Leskov’s paper with the hotel brochure and pushed it aside to make space for the tray. He did it with a quick, furtive motion which unsettled him vaguely, but which he immediately forgot.

There was no time now for Millar’s first paper, which he hadn’t got round to reading the night before, because the five minutes of snoozing that he had allowed himself after the ringing of the alarm clock had turned into half an hour. Perlmann looked again at the passages that Millar quoted from his own writings. He could hardly believe that he himself should have written them. Not because he thought they were bad. But the author of those lines had a grasp of his subject and a firmness of opinion that Perlmann was so unable to remember that he suspected he had not even been present when they were written. That remote, alien author was not a bit closer to him than Millar’s academic voice, so that he felt like a referee in a dispute between strangers; a referee whose neutrality went so far that he pursued argument and counter-argument without the slightest desire to become involved himself. Afterwards, when he walked through the lobby, turned into the corridor leading to the lounge and approached the steps to the Marconi Veranda, he was still engaged in a vain attempt to stand up for himself.

Millar began by explaining the theoretical motifs and long-term research interests that had guided him in the present work. After a few sentences he got up and started walking back and forth, his arms folded in front of his chest. He wore dark blue trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt with epaulettes, which had clearly been left in a suitcase for a long time. Although his hair was still damp, it looked oddly dull, and there wasn’t a sign of its usual reddish gleam. The manner in which he put his case was like a resolute admiral addressing his men. As he set one well-formed sentence against another in his sonorous voice, he radiated the certainty of someone who knew his own world perfectly and didn’t doubt for a moment that he was in precisely the right place in that world – a world in which – as in an officer’s mess, there were immutable rules like, for example, the rule that one had to appear on time for breakfast. Perlmann had never been to the Rockefeller University at which Millar worked, but somehow it struck him as quite natural that people who went in and out of it were people like Brian Millar. He looked across to Giorgio Silvestri, who, rocking back and forth on his chair, had almost lost his balance a moment ago and had only managed to keep himself from falling by supporting himself on the window behind him. He would have liked to exchange a glance and a smile with Silvestri, but feared that would betray too much of his desire for complicity against Millar.

Millar sat down and sought Perlmann’s eye. But Adrian von Levetzov had been preparing to spring for a long time, and immediately began to speak. Had he not curried favor with Millar, fifteen years his junior, by giving him an apologetic smile – Perlmann would have admired him. His questions and objections all hit home, and Perlmann wished that they had occurred to him, too. But it wasn’t the case.
To think of these things you have to be right inside – as I am no longer inside.
He felt a twinge of envy like the ones he had felt often before, as an ambitious student, when someone else was faster at formulating ideas that he should have been capable of producing himself; and for a moment he was annoyed by his former violence towards himself. But then something strange happened: all of a sudden he experienced these sensations as no longer belonging to him, to his present; they were only reminiscences, obsolete emotional reflexes from a time when academic work had not yet become alien to him. He was puzzled to feel the extent to which he had survived himself, and for a while, as silence fell around him, it felt like a great liberation. But then the voices of the others reached him again, and he was horrified to realize how far from them that inner development had taken him, and how menacing it was, particularly in this room, which he had feared since his arrival.

Before Perlmann was able to say something, Achim Ruge intervened in the debate. The contrast with von Levetzov’s exaggeratedly obliging manner could not have been greater. As a critic, there was something surly and blustering about him, and if he accompanied a reservation with his gurgling laugh it sounded almost scornful. He treated Millar, his contemporary, like everyone else, not without respect, but entirely without subservience, and nothing intimidated him. When Millar said rather sharply, in response to one of his objections, ‘Frankly, Achim, I just don’t see that,’ Ruge shot back with a grin, ‘Yes, I know,’ for which he was rewarded with laughter, which Millar endured with a sour smile that was supposed to look sporting.

But it was peculiar, Perlmann thought: coming from Ruge, there was nothing wounding about it at all. One simply couldn’t take umbrage at the style of the man with the bald head and the terrible Swabian accent, because through all his bluster his benevolence was discernible; there was a sense that his aggressiveness lacked the faintest trace of spite. Now that his loud nose-blowing had been evaded, and he would no longer have to imagine him sitting opposite him on the other side of the wall, Perlmann could accept this Achim Ruge. And, in fact, it was absurd to assume that his respectability and rectitude made him dangerous.

Laura Sand had put down her pen and was about to say something. But when she saw that everyone’s eyes were on Perlmann, she leaned back and reached for a cigarette. Perlmann looked across at Silvestri, but instead of finding support there, his gaze bounced off the tense expectation that lay in the darkly glittering eyes. There was no getting away now. The time had come.

What issued from his mouth were unobjectionable sentences, and their dragging tempo barely differed from the natural expression of reflectiveness. But in Perlmann’s head they thundered like hollow, meaningless sequences of sounds that came from somewhere or other and trickled through him like something alien, not unlike the quiet vibrations you feel on a train journey. That perception threatened to silence him before each next syllable, so that he constantly had to give himself a jolt to reach the next sentence – to produce the required minimum of sentences, so to speak. And then, all of a sudden, the internal pressure grew too great, and a quiet explosion followed, giving him a gambler’s courage.

‘Your critique of my work is the most enlightening, the most insightful thing that I have read in a very long time,’ he heard himself saying. ‘I find your objections completely convincing, and think they refute the whole of my proposal.’ He lapsed into laughter shaped by a feverish feeling of vertigo. ‘It’s a fabulous experience, being freed from a wrong idea. I can’t thank you enough for that! And I actually think your criticism is much more penetrating than you assume.’

And now, suddenly in full command of his powers, he conjured one argument after another from his hat, tearing into everything his name stood for, not resting before every last idea that he had ever come up with was finally swept away. He spoke from a sense of ludic inspiration whose bitterness he alone could taste, and accompanied each rhetorical lunge with a motion of his arm which, like the arc of a sower of seeds, had something at once dismissive and generous about it.

Millar was disconcerted, and the others also looked as if they had stepped through a door and fallen unexpectedly into a void. The first to regain his composure was von Levetzov.

‘Remarkable,’ he said, and it was apparent that his usual inner attitude towards Perlmann had suddenly ceased to seem appropriate, although he had not yet had time to construct a new one. ‘But don’t you think you might perhaps be going a little too far?’

And then he began to pick up the pieces and cobble them back together until a large part of Perlmann’s previous position was once more intact. Evelyn helped with this, and all at once Ruge’s chief concern seemed to be to convict Perlmann of reaching over-hasty conclusions. Everyone seemed relieved that a familiar kind of discussion was gradually resuming. Only every now and again did Perlmann feel a furtive glance upon him.

Millar had shaken off his torpor, and was talking about Perlmann almost as if he were absent. He had no evidence, but Perlmann could have sworn that Millar thought of his earlier remarks as revealing particularly foolhardy sarcasm, and felt he was being teased. Nothing could have been further from the truth. And yet: it would be hard to stop hatred arising between them on the basis of this misunderstanding.

Back in his room, Perlmann felt empty and drained, like an actor after a performance. Would they see it as a mere mood, or had he already turned himself irrevocably into an outsider with his orgy of self-criticism? Then there was the business of his supposed topic, and it wouldn’t be long until they discovered that he had switched rooms. What sort of an image would that create in their heads? Perlmann slipped into half-sleep, in which he heard someone knocking at the door, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until it was a hammering that seemed to come from a thousand fists. He pressed himself against the door, barricaded himself in with the wardrobe, and now he could hear the wood splintering under axe-blows. Millar’s teeth were first to appear – big, white teeth bursting with health – then the whole Millar in an admiral’s uniform, behind him Ruge’s giant head, from which his chuckles spilled as though from a doll, and from the darkness of the corridor came Evelyn Mistral’s voice, distorted into shrill, vulgar laughter.

Perlmann gave a start, and on his way to the bathroom he put the chain on the door, ashamed of his action. Later he stood by the open window, two steps behind the balustrade, and gazed out into the pouring rain. Without the southern light, the bay looked like an abandoned stage after a performance, or like a fairground in the early morning, when the lights are turned off – so sobering and shabby that one felt cheated and hungover. All of a sudden, on the public part of the beach, one could see above all the rubbish and the dirt, empty bottles and plastic bags, and now it was also striking that the blue changing rooms urgently needed a lick of paint.

He picked up Leskov’s paper. He had only retained a few of the words he had copied out, and it was a while before he found his way back into the flow of his thoughts. In his next step Leskov now wanted to show that this kind of articulated self-image, on which our memory is based, can only come about through linguistic contouring, through the telling of stories. This announcement was followed immediately by a paragraph that gave Perlmann the feeling that he didn’t speak a word of Russian, so opaque was it even after the second and third reading. He tried to leave the whole passage alone and go on after it. But that didn’t work. The paragraph appeared to contain an argument that was the key to everything else, and if one hadn’t understood it, that which followed seemed unfounded, almost random. What he really wanted to do was hurl the paper into the corner. But then he resigned himself to being once more nothing but a schoolboy where this piece of writing was concerned, and not a reader with a command of Russian, and he began to dissect the individual sentences as if in a Latin class.

Slowly, half-sentence by half-sentence, the text yielded up its meaning. But at the crux of the argument there was a block of four sentences which remained impenetrable in the face of all his analytical effort and patience. What almost drove Perlmann to despair was the fact that it wasn’t as if the words weren’t in his dictionary. That was true of two of the words, but they were adjectives that struck him as negligible. All the other unfamiliar words were in the dictionary, but still he couldn’t wrestle any meaning from those sentences, let alone anything like a coherent argument. In the face of all experience, however, Perlmann acted as if it could be forced, he walked up and down and repeatedly murmured the four sentences, which he by now knew off by heart, out loud, imploring and gesticulating so that he might have been mistaken for a madman. He only paused when there was a knock at the door.

He quickly stuffed Leskov’s paper and the dictionary in the desk drawer, before opening the door, which clattered as it caught in the chain.

‘Oh, I’m disturbing you,’ said Evelyn Mistral when she saw his face in the chink.

‘No, no, wait,’ Perlmann said quickly and closed the door to get rid of the chain.

She had learned of his new room number from Signora Morelli after ringing and knocking in vain. Now, with her hands in the pockets of her rust-red jeans, she let her eye wander around the whole of the room and then pounced on the wing chair, into which she proceeded to slump.

The bed was the reason for the change, Perlmann said. He had the usual problem with his back.

‘And you like to be on your own,’ she said with a quiet twitch at the corners of her mouth, and sank cross-legged slightly deeper into the chair.

Perlmann didn’t know whether he was startled by her accuracy or delighted.