Perlmann's Silence (22 page)

In the next paragraph came observations running in precisely the opposite direction. Sentences as a medium that drove the narrator to more and more new images that could come as a complete surprise to him.
Language and imagination
. Wasn’t that Evelyn Mistral’s theme, too? Or was it an illusion, prompted by the mere connection between the two words? Perlmann felt his thoughts crumbling, and that slipping sensation merged with a feeling of weakness that came from his empty stomach. He slipped into his jacket and was already in the corridor when he opened the door again and pushed the moleskine notebook under the bed cover. Then he walked a secret path to the trattoria.

Sandra had plainly kicked the duvet on to the floor, and she herself lay fully clothed on the bed, with one knee-sock pulled down to the ankle and her cheek pressed deep into the pillow. He absolutely had to check on her, her parents said as soon as he stepped inside the restaurant. They were more laconic than usual. He had only learned that she had a maths test the next day, and her mother’s face revealed that there had been an argument that she now regretted.

Sandra’s shining head hung over the edge of the bed and swung slightly with each breath she took. Perlmann looked at her twitching eyelids and the dangling hand with its cheap ring and chewed thumbnail. Once her calm breathing was interrupted by a faint groan. He walked over to the little desk that her father had made and picked up the exercise book that Sandra had set defiantly face down on it. The last two pages were full of furiously crossed-out calculations. He snapped the exercise book shut, and the landlady gave a start when she noticed her anxious expression bouncing off his closed face.

‘I just thought . . .’ she said faintly as she brought him the chronicle.

The chronicle listed nothing for the days of his senseless, lonely journey to Mestre. Perlmann flicked back: bloodbath in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking. He didn’t read the column to the end. Against his true emotions, when he paid, and this time the proprietor didn’t dare to protest, he managed a conciliatory smile. Then he walked through the unusually warm evening to the harbor and sat down right on the edge of the embankment on a rock, against which the light waves broke.

Thousands of people had been shot, and he had wasted three days of his life on a harmless, ridiculous sentence, that anyone else would have forgotten long ago. He had the feeling of making himself very small and paying for this loss of any sense of proportion by staring, completely motionless, at the fine strips of spume that broke twitching from the night. It was not until he started shivering that he took off his glasses and wiped away the blurring layer of salt.

It was that movement that made him aware that resistance had been stirring in him for some time against his incipient feeling of guilt. It had not been a completely random sentence that he had fought against, but a sentence,
my
sentence, that stood in for all the linguistic waste that could bind and stifle someone’s experience.
Sentences as a source of unfreedom
. And the business about proportion, the sense of scale that had to be preserved – that wasn’t right either. Not here at any rate. Perlmann would have liked to know where the error was if one thought that the broadening of one’s perspective automatically produced the complete unimportance of all things in the forlorn limitedness. But the explanation didn’t come. He just knew: it wasn’t like that, even when expansion beyond the purely geographical encompass the magnitude of suffering.

With a movement of violent resolution he got up and as he walked slowly to the hotel, he silently battled his inner adversary, who was trying once again to make his sentence about Mestre ridiculous with bloody images from Peking. When the crooked pines of the hotel, the flags and lanterns came into view, he began to sense that if he admitted to that crazy journey, this also had to do with his struggle for self-assertion, which he was tirelessly fighting for over there at the hotel. And as he climbed the steps, that sense turned into a hot, palpitating defiance.

He had crossed the lobby and was on the first flight of stairs when he heard the voices of his colleagues coming from the dining room.

‘We’ll find out tomorrow!’ Millar was saying, and this was followed by Adrian von Levetzov’s laughter, accompanied by Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice.

Perlmann involuntarily took a step towards the wall, took another two steps and disappeared out of eyeshot. After that he hurried on, and was out of breath by the time he turned into his corridor. The whole corridor was pitch-black; the two lightbulbs must have blown. As he felt around for the lock with his key he was startled at how insecure that harmless darkness made him. Afterwards he stood by the window with his heart thumping, and looked down at an elegant couple who, coming from the restaurant, moved towards the steps with a hint of a tango step, before hopping down, laughing, and disappearing in an Oldtimer with chauffeur.

It was a long time before he had recovered his comforting defiance. At last he took the black notebook out from under the cover and went on reading.

The next few paragraphs described how concise sentences, apparently drawn from a wide overview, could become a prison by cutting off contradictory feelings, and thus causing the internal world to shrink still further. The particularly treacherous thing about this, he noted, was that such sentences had the deceptive sound of superior insight, against which even the author of the sentences was hardly able to defend himself.
i need a lot of anonymity
, was one of the examples, and another:
i like listening best
. And a little later:
i have developed a dread of people
.

Perlmann vaguely remembered: he had written those lines after a convivial evening with some of Agnes’s friends. Because time had seemed too slow and sticky to him, he had talked far too much, not least about himself. Afterwards, in the dark, everything he had said had struck him as entirely wrong, and he had got to his feet again to become clear about his feelings.

He was glad that the next paragraph was about sentences which, rather than adding something, could point the way towards a freedom that had hitherto only been guessed at, by creating a new state within one’s inner world, capturing it in words and thus keeping it from slipping away again.
being able to say no without inner effort: that’s what matters
. And a paragraph further on:
the others are really others. others. even the ones one loves
.

The air that came streaming in when he opened the window suddenly seemed much less warm than before. Over in Sestri Levante a fire raged, looking quite large even from here. Distorted by individual gusts of wind that made the pines down on the terrace bob, the sirens of the fire department echoed across.

All these example sentences, which he had with one exception written down in German, so that they now effectively leapt out at him from the middle of the English text with the intrusive familiarity of the mother tongue – were they actually sentences that applied to him?

He felt as if his inner contours blurred when he tried to look them straight in the eye for an answer to this question, and it passed through his mind that that feeling was like the impression that one had of things when one swam towards them under water. Uncertainly, almost fearfully, he turned the page and found a few very carefully written pages about the connection between language and presence. In a first attempt he had outlined – in different variations – how linguistic expression could give experiences presence and depth by wresting things experienced from fleetingness. And to his surprise he found, placed in parentheses, a digression in which he compared the linguistic and photographic fixing of the present.

Perlmann was amazed at how stubborn and precise his thinking had been in this respect, and at the same time it hurt to feel how clearly he had had Agnes’s photographs before his eyes as he wrote. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The young Sicilian in the frayed army coat who had dropped his battered suitcase and coat on the platform, and the bride he was now whirling around in the air. Agnes had shot about twenty pictures of the scene. One was published, in which the young woman, battling dizziness, held her hand in front of her laughing face, which appeared over her husband’s shoulder, half of her chin hidden by his raised coat collar. This photograph had earned Agnes a great deal of praise. But at home she had hung another one, which she thought was much better: it captured the swirl at exactly the moment when the spin, supported by flying hair, concealed both faces so that the viewer felt challenged to invent them.
That’s what I thought!
Agnes laughed when he expressed his disappointment at the real, very peasant-like face of the bride and invented a different one.

And then that other picture: the gaunt Chinaman, with one hand on the saddle of his bicycle, bending down to his son and offering him his cheek to kiss. The child, a nipper with a baker’s boy cap that came down over his ears, held his face up to him and pursed his lips while his eyes, half-covered by the brim of his cap, were caught by something entirely different that must have been somewhere in the direction of the photographer. Agnes had taken the picture in Shanghai, on the trip on which that fellow André Fischer from the agency had accompanied her, about whom she had been so expressively silent.

Perlmann’s thoughts sluggishly returned to the present of the hotel room. The fire beyond the bay was now clearly under control. He tore open a new pack of cigarettes and read diametrically opposite views on the next page: the present as something essentially fleeting that could be artificially deep-frozen by linguistic description. This did not establish presence, but created the mere illusion of presence. Real presence, he had noted, arose out of the readiness to yield utterly to the fleetingness of experience. And then, emphasized by their insertion, two German lines that took him completely by surprise him once again:
presence: a perfume, a light, a smile, a relief, a successful sentence, a shimmer under olives.

That in this way – experimenting with words, images and rhythm – he had occupied himself with his vain search for present, had escaped him entirely. For the duration of two cigarettes he tried in vain to summon up the scene in which these lines had been produced. Suddenly, he took a piece of paper and wrote:
sunk in white oblivion
. As he slowly stubbed out the cigarette until the rest of the tobacco was completely crumbled and the naked filter scoured along the glass of the ashtray, he stared at the words. Then he scrunched up the paper and threw it flatly into the waste-paper basket.

Another one-and-a-half pages; the rest of the notebook was empty pages from which, when he shook them, the wing of a dead fly fell on Leskov’s text. A long paragraph and, finally, quite a short one. The long one, written with the same pen as the one before, set out an observation that moved Perlmann as if he were reading it for the very first time: experimenting with sentences was a way of finding out what experiences one really had. Because just having experiences, by experiencing something, did not mean that one had any idea what they were.
Speechlessness as blindness to experience
, he had written in German:
Sprachlosigkeit als Erlebnisblindheit.
Glum because it sounded bombastic, he read on and found an observation that struck him even more: it could happen that one went on thinking in the medium of old and outdated sentences and thus see oneself as someone who still had the old experiences, even though quite new experiences had in the meantime seeped into the old structure, and they would only be able to unfold their transforming power when they were also poured into new sentences.

While Perlmann was pursuing this thought, he suddenly realized the circumstances under which he had written the lines about present, perfume and smiling. It had been a winter evening, and the galleys of the second edition of his last book had been in the beam of light from his desk lamp. At first it had been the content of the text that he hadn’t been able to deal with. Then that feeling of staleness had spread to everything else – to paper and print as a whole, to desk lamp, desk and bent backs. The questionable line had carried him out for a moment into a brighter, freer space, the comforting enclave of the imagination. His protest had gone no further than that.
Why not? Why didn’t I get up and go?
Perlmann hesitated. He didn’t know whether the question had arisen within him only now, or whether it, too, was part of the memory of that moment when the sharp beam of lamplight had seemed like torture.