Perlmann's Silence (7 page)

When he had shaken the water out of his ears and heard the telephone, he immediately thought it must have been ringing for ages. He ran dripping through the room. As he reached for the receiver, he looked at his wet footprints on the pigeon-blue carpet and felt a desperate annoyance with his subservience, which mocked all his good intentions, rising up within him.

‘Hi, Phil,’ was all the voice said. Perlmann recognized it immediately. The two syllables were enough to remind him what he had tried without great success to explain to Agnes after he got back from Boston: the voice formed the words in a completely undetached way. Its tone didn’t just show that this was the speaker’s mother tongue; the tone wasn’t only an expression of the self-evidence with which the language was at the speaker’s disposal. There was more at stake: the tone contained – and even Agnes’s frown could not shake his conviction about this – the message that this was the only language that truly deserved to be taken seriously.
Self-righteous, you understand, his penetratingly sonorous voice is self-righteous. He speaks as if the others were to blame and very much to be pitied for the fact that they, too, don’t speak East Coast American, this Yankee language. This self-righteousness, this sonorous arrogance, that was what drove me up the wall.

‘Hi, Brian,’ said Perlmann, ‘how are you?’

‘Oh, fine,’ said the voice, and now Perlmann was once again quite sure that what he had said to Agnes was the precise truth.

‘By the way, Phil,’ the voice went on, and now this American mania for shortened first names was getting on Perlmann’s nerves again, ‘apparently my room’s right next to yours.’

Perlmann saw Ruge’s desk in front of him, right up against his own, and he felt as if the two walls of his room were being pushed closer and closer together until they crushed him.

‘How nice,’ he heard himself saying and had a feeling that with those empty words he was sealing his own defeat. He had never, even when standing naked, felt so exposed.

‘Me, too,’ he said at last, when Millar stressed how much he was looking forward to seeing him later over dinner.

Big puddles of water had formed around his feet, and were spreading outwards. He was shivering, and went back into the shower. It was quite clear, he thought, as he let the water run over his face: he couldn’t stay in his room. And the new room had to be far away, on another floor and if possible in the other wing of the hotel.

But what explanation should he give to Signora Morelli when making his request? And how could he prevent Ruge and Millar from taking it personally when he moved out? He would have to destroy something that would make the room uninhabitable and couldn’t be quickly repaired. Maybe rip the telephone from the wall and claim he had tripped over the wire. But a telephone connection could be quickly mended, far too quickly. Or do something with the television aerial and say he’d accidentally bashed it with the chest of drawers. But even a television socket could be easily changed. There wasn’t anything that could be broken in the bathroom without making it look deliberate. Pouring something on the carpet, like a whole pot of coffee. But you didn’t ask for a different room because of a stain on the carpet, least of all if you’d made it yourself.

Achim Ruge blew his nose and trumpeted even more loudly than he had in the afternoon. Shortly afterwards the sound of piano music came from Millar’s room. Bach. Trembling with irritation, Perlmann tried to find the station on the bedside-table radio. Nothing. Millar must have brought a radio-cassette recorder with him.

He listened reluctantly. He didn’t know this composition. He had never had a memory for Bach. He wouldn’t have dared to say it in the Conservatoire, but he found most of Bach’s piano music monotonous and boring. Secretly, he had often thought, Bela Szabo had felt the same. Otherwise he would, like the other teachers, have insisted on Perlmann playing at least a minimum of Bach.

Perlmann picked up his Russian grammar. Leskov’s text, he felt, was going to defeat him again now. But he could at least memorize the Russian entry for
must
. Then he would have something, a tiny bit of progress, that he could cling to when he came down to dinner later on. He walked back and forth with the open book in his hand and spoke the words more loudly than usual, to assert himself against Millar’s Bach and Ruge’s repeated nose-blowing.

Shortly before eight Perlmann stood at the window in his grey flannel trousers and dark blue blazer, watching people coming up the steps from outside, to eat in the famous restaurant of the Miramare. Break a windowpane. That could be explained by clumsiness, and would be a reason to change rooms, now that the nights were growing rather cool. But even a windowpane was quickly replaced.
Run away. Simply run away. Down the steps to the shoreline promenade, around the rocky outcrop over there, out of vision, and then keep going, keep on going.
He clenched his fists in his pockets until the nails cut into the palms of his hands. On the way to the door he stopped and repeated the entry for
must
twice. It took.
Now the important thing to be is laconic
, he thought as he pulled the door shut,
not unfriendly, but laconic.

On the stairs he was horrified to realize that it was already half-past eight, and he was late for the first communal dinner. Still hobbling slightly, he entered the elegant dining room with the glittering candelabras. Now that he saw his colleagues sitting at a big, round table, it was clear to him that he had no idea what official words of greeting he was going to say.

3

Millar looked at the clock and rose to his feet, although admittedly without coming towards him. He was wearing grey trousers and a dark blue double-breasted jacket, a thin-striped shirt and a navy-blue tie, with a stylized anchor embroidered on it in golden yellow thread. His appearance and his stiff posture recalled those of a naval officer, an impression reinforced by the fact that his angular face with its thrusting chin was as tanned as if he had been at sea for weeks. As he stood there by the table with his broad shoulders, while his colleagues had stayed in their seats, he looked like the man in charge of everything, who had risen to greet a latecomer.

‘Good to see you, Phil,’ he said with a smile that revealed his big, white teeth. His handshake was so brief and powerful that a sensation of complete passivity arose in Perlmann.

‘Yes,’ he murmured, annoyed at his idiotic reaction. As before, in Boston, it was the steel-blue eyes behind the flashing glasses that made him shrink inwardly to a schoolboy, a little squirt who was oppressively aware that he still had to prove himself to the teacher. Millar had just had a night flight and a working session with his Italian colleagues, and those eyes still looked as rested, alert and calm as if he had just got up.
Fit
, Perlmann thought, and saw the laughing face of Agnes when he gave free rein to his unfounded hatred for the word once again.

While the others were already sitting by their empty plates, Perlmann hastily wolfed down his soup. He was glad that a seat for Giorgio Silvestri had been left free between him and Millar. There was still some unpleasantness with Millar, he suddenly felt quite clearly: some shortcoming that he couldn’t call to mind. Only when he heard von Levetzov thanking Millar for a text he had sent him did he remember the package with the four offprints that had arrived from New York in August, bearing the stamp first class mail, which always made Perlmann think of diplomatic mail that had found its way to him by mistake.

The package had been on his desk when he had visited the office in the afternoon (after Frau Hartwig had gone home), aimlessly, just to check that he still belonged to the university. At home he had immediately stuffed the things in the cupboard, from which a mountain of offprints always stared at him, some of which regularly fell on the floor. At first, as outside lecturer and then as lecturer, he had responded to every offprint with a letter that was often as long as a review. A considerable correspondence had come into being, because he had never known when such an exchange of letters was over, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to make the other person’s letter the last. The others felt that they were being taken seriously, even flattered. It represented an opportunity for them to go on commenting upon their work, and Perlmann often found in a subsequent offprint that this new work could be traced back to a particularly stimulating correspondence with him. A lot of time had passed on each occasion, and he felt like his correspondent’s training partner, both self-appointed and somehow conscripted, while he wasn’t advancing his own career. Then, with his commitments as professor, these extensive exchanges had put too much of a strain on his time. He had not found a middle way, and from one day to the next he had simply stopped replying.

He himself had never sent out offprints; it was only in response to an enquiry that his secretary had ever taken one from the stack. He had never been able to believe – really believe – that other people wanted to read what he wrote. The thought that someone might engage with his work was embarrassing to him. And that sensation was, paradoxically, run through with an indifference that amounted to something like sacrilege, because it called the entire academic world into question. It wasn’t arrogance, he was quite sure of that. And the fact that other people plainly read his things and his reputation was growing did not alter that feeling in the slightest. Every time he opened the cupboard the mountain of unread material that tumbled out at him felt like a time bomb, even if he couldn’t have said what the explosion would consist of.

‘I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your prize,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann when the waiter had cleared the soup plates. It sounded, Perlmann thought, as if he had taken a very long run-up to this remark, a run-up that had begun upstairs in his room, or perhaps even on the journey. Von Levertzov fanned away the smoke that drifted up to him from Laura Sand, and then turned to Evelyn Mistral. ‘You must be aware that our friend here recently won a prize that represents the greatest acknowledgement for academic achievements that exists in our country. It’s almost a little Nobel Prize.’

‘Well . . .’ Millar interjected.

‘No, no,’ von Levertzov continued, and after he had sought vainly for a sign of confirmation in Ruge’s face, he added with a smug smile. ‘One sometimes wonders a little who is going to get the prize, but I am certain that in this case the decision was justified.’

Perlmann gripped his glass with both hands and studied the ripples in the mineral water with as much concentration as if he had been observing the outcome of an experiment in the laboratory. He had done the same at the award ceremony, when his achievements were being celebrated in a speech. Two weeks after Agnes’s death he had sat under candelabras there, too, emotionally dead and deaf to everything, glad that no speech was expected on his part.

It’s bound to be your turn soon
. The sentence had already formed within Perlmann; but then, to his surprise, he managed not to say it out loud. A small, a tiny step in the direction of the ideal of non-subservience. Suddenly he felt better, and his voice sounded almost cheerful as he said to Evelyn Mistral, ‘There’s always something random about such decisions. I’m sure it’s the same in Spain, isn’t it?’

It was exactly the same, she said. To put it mildly. What annoyed her most was that awards were often given to professors who had basically stopped working a long time ago, who lived off their past merits and lazed about in the safeguarding of reputations earned many years ago.

‘You would be horrified, Philipp, if you saw that. These are people who have stopped achieving anything at all!’

On her forehead, right above her nose, a faint red stripe had formed. Perlmann had heard a familiarity in her tone, and the tension between that intimacy and her fury, which cut into him like a big, sharp knife, was almost unbearable.
Why did I even think she was different? Because of the red elephant?

He was glad of the fuss that von Levetzov made about the food to show that he was a gourmet. He took the silence that fell a moment later, and in which all that could be heard was the clatter of cutlery and the voices from neighboring tables, as a sign that from now on he was not the center of attention.

‘By the way, Phil,’ Millar said into the silence, ‘that business with the prize doesn’t surprise me at all. The day before I left I was staying with Bill in Princeton – you know Bill Saunders – and he was telling me that you’ll soon be receiving an invitation for a guest semester. They already know what you’re doing,’ he added with a smile in which, it seemed to Perlmann, the customary reverence for Princeton was mixed with a doubt, held at bay with difficulty and nonetheless enjoyed, about the wisdom of this very special decision.

Even though he was holding his fish knife with grim desperation, as about to cut a piece of stubborn, stringy meat, Perlmann was proud that he managed not to look at Millar.
Say nothing. Keep silent.

‘Bill was, incidentally, a bit cross that you didn’t invite him, too,’ Millar said at last, and because his voice contained a hint of irritation at Perlmann’s lack of reaction, it sounded almost as if he himself were Bill Saunders complaining.

‘Oh, really?’ said Perlmann, and looked at Millar for a moment. He was pleased about the mildly ironic tone that he had managed, and now he looked again at Millar, for longer this time, and quite calmly.
His eyes aren’t steel-blue, but porcelain-blue.
In Millar’s grin, he thought, there was a hint of insecurity, and the fact that he
now started talking briskly and loquaciously about Princeton in general seemed to confirm that impression. But rather than a feeling of triumph, a vacuum suddenly appeared inside Perlmann, and then the sensations of a fugitive suddenly crashed in on him.
Why won’t they just leave me in peace?
As he removed fish bones in slow motion, he fought the impulse to stand up and run away. With relief he joined in just as Millar’s language was beginning to make him furious once again. He greedily immersed himself in his fury.

Millar let himself tumble into his sentences, particularly his idiomatic, colloquial turns of phrase with a delight that Perlmann found repellent.
Wallowing. He’s actually wallowing in his language.
Perlmann hated dialects, and he hated them because they were often spoken like that, with the same trampling presumption with which Millar spoke his Yankee American. Worst of all was the north German dialect that he had grown up with. That his parents had finally grown very remote from him had a great deal to do with it. The older they grew, the more defiantly they insisted on speaking to him in Platt, and the more clearly he sensed that defiance, the more resolutely he spoke in High German to them. It had been a mute battle with words. You couldn’t talk about it. What use would it have been to say to them that their faces were becoming more and more rigid and dogmatic, and that that had much to do with the fact that they were increasingly led simply by the phrases and metaphors of the dialect, and by the prejudices that were crystallized in it?

The man with the rolled-up jacket sleeves, the open-necked shirt and the pale, unshaven face who was now looking round in the doorway and then coming towards them must have been Giorgio Silvestri. When Perlmann shook his hand and saw the relaxed, ironic alertness in his dark eyes, very different from Millar’s, the alertness of a cat about to pounce, he was immediately won over by him. He felt as if in the form of this thin, frail-looking Italian, who appeared to be scruffy until you took a closer look at his clothes, someone had arrived who could help him. And then when the first thing he did was to light a Gauloise and blow the smoke into Millar’s face, Perlmann was quite sure of things. Only the fact that he replied to Evelyn Mistral’s greeting in fluent, unaccented Spanish and thus merited her radiant laughter, was slightly disturbing.

His English was no less fluent, although accented. Addressed on the subject by Laura Sand, who was staring at him unwaveringly, Silvestri talked about the two years that he had spent working on a psychiatric ward in Oakland near San Francisco.

‘
East
Oakland,’ he said, turning to Millar, and went on when he saw Millar’s sour, frowning smile. ‘After that I had enough. Not of the patients, who still write to me. But of the merciless, in fact one would have to say barbaric American health system.’

Millar avoided the renewed cloud of smoke as if it were poison gas.

‘Well,’ he said at last, suppressed what was on the tip of his tongue and devoted himself to his dessert.

Silvestri ordered from the waiter, who started treating him as an old acquaintance as soon as he heard his Florentine accent, a special dessert and a triple espresso. Perlmann made a joke about it, and that was when it happened: he was giving in to his need for contact.

For years he had battled against that habit of touching people, particularly when he had just met them, when he addressed a charming joke or a personal remark to them. As he was now doing with Silvestri, he rested his hand on their forearm, and when standing up he would often enough find himself suddenly putting an arm around their shoulders. There were people who saw this simply as evidence of an outgoing, lovable nature, and others who found his behavior disagreeable. His need for physical contact did not differentiate between men and women, and in the case of women there were often misunderstandings. The presence of Agnes had helped, but not always, and when she had witnessed the event, one had been able to tell from her face how puzzling and even weird she found it that he, who preferred to sit on the edge of big, empty squares, had this particular tic. It was no less puzzling to him, and each time it happened he felt the compulsion as a crack running right through him.

It was von Levetzov’s idea to go across, after dinner, to the drawing room where the ochre-colored armchairs stood. Brian Millar, who came last because he had been inspecting the little room with the round, green-baize-covered gaming tables, stopped and then walked over to the grand piano.

‘A Grotrian-Steinweg,’ he said, ‘I would prefer this to any Steinway.’ He played a few notes and then closed the lid again. ‘Another time,’ he smiled when von Levetzov encouraged him to play something.