Perlmann's Silence Read online

  It wasn’t through a process of reasoning that he had lost this faith, and the loss did not take the form of an internal discovery. He simply couldn’t find his way back to concentration, to the feeling of exclusiveness out of which his academic works had previously arisen. That did not mean that he would now have declared the unimportance of his research, or of research in general, as a statement of his world view. Except that he found his way to his desk less often. He spent more and more time looking out of the window. His new chair seemed to become more uncomfortable with each passing month, and the books on the big desktop increasingly struck him as being ungainly objects that disturbed the calming void.

  Since this had been the case, he looked upon academic work as if through a wall of glass, which turned him into a mere spectator. Making an academic discovery: he simply had no need for it now. Methodical investigation, analysis and the development of theories, hitherto a constant, a given, self-evident element in his life and in a sense its center of gravity – he had utterly lost interest in it, and so completely that he was no longer sure he understood how it could once have been otherwise. If someone spoke of a new idea, the beginnings of a notion, he could sometimes still listen; but only for a short time, and its elaboration interested him not at all. It felt like wasted time.

  Sometimes he tried to convince himself that it had all started on that clear, white, terrible day in January when he had seen Agnes for the last time, so shockingly, so irrevocably still. Then he could have seen himself as someone still in shock, someone only slowly recovering. That would have taken the edge off things.

  But it wasn’t true. He admitted to himself with amazement and some unease that he had forgotten when exactly it had begun. It had been small changes in his emotional responses to things, which had to do with his profession, emotional nuances, tiny changes of tone which had over months and years added up into something incisive that had one day entered his consciousness with total clarity. The beginning lay at a time when he, seen from outside, was at the peak of his productivity, and it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that something was starting to crumble behind that facade, and silently collapsing.

  He had started to forget. Not in such a way that it would have struck anyone else. There were no gaps in the structure of the academic routine. But he noticed increasingly that he was losing track of issues, especially those that weren’t yet fully entrenched, and which did not belong to the solid rhetorical stock of the subject – the new and interesting questions, then, which precisely because they were not yet all that well anchored, should have commanded his constant attention. He was, when he happened to flick through his papers, surprised by what he found there, and startled that he had simply forgotten it.

  The worst thing was: he was sure that this wasn’t a passing thing, a crisis that one knew would pass, even though one couldn’t say when and how. It felt threatening, but he knew that what was happening to him was irreversible and inescapable. Behind the feeling of threat, he discovered only gradually, at good moments there was the liberating, almost cheering astonishment over the fact that something was developing within him, something in the center, at the core of his life. But this sensation which glimmered through from time to time did nothing to mitigate his anxiety. To a certain extent there was no contact between the two sensations; they ran unconnectedly side by side. And what struck him about that unsteady and unreliable feeling which he kept trying to grasp was this: he was never sure whether it was a genuine sensation or one that he conjured up within himself and, so to speak, invented in order to have something to cling to when the change that he sensed frightened him too much.

  When he looked back at the book and tested himself, he found that he had retained only one Russian word for must. He gave up and reached for the other book that he had taken from the room when he had decided to spend his last free hours on the hotel terrace. It was Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, a book which had suddenly seemed like the ideal companion, as it sat on the shelf the previous morning, even though he hadn’t picked it up for many years, and the memory of the titular character and the Institute Benjamenta had become pale and vague. On the journey he had been on the point of opening it, but every time he had felt a strange, inexplicable horror that got in the way of his curiosity. As if the book contained something about him that he would rather not know.

  The first sentence took his breath away: We learn very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and we boys from the Institute Benjamenta will never come to much, that is, we will all be something very small and subordinate in later life. As if anaesthetized, Perlmann watched the waiter bringing a drink on a silver tray to the red-haired man by the pool. Minutes passed before he found the courage to go on reading, reluctantly and at the same time fascinated by those shattering sentences, the ghostly lightness of the prose. And then, after a few pages, there came a passage that felt like a slap in the face: Herr Benjamenta asked me what I wanted. I told him shyly that I wanted to be his pupil. At that he fell silent and read newspapers.

  That last sentence – no, it couldn’t be allowed to stand. In all its innocuousness it was a sentence that could not be borne. Perlmann set the book aside. The throbbing of his blood subsided only slowly. He didn’t understand why, but young Jakob’s story seemed in a sense to be about himself. All of a sudden he was sure the text that would be produced if he managed to capture his own distress in sentences would have a similar tone. They would have to be sentences of equal intensity, and just as incisive, if they really wanted to grab their listeners as he had done for years when he entered the auditorium.

  It wasn’t stage fright. It wasn’t the fear of suddenly staring into the audience or straight ahead at the lectern and having forgotten everything. He had suffered from that idea in the past, but it had been over a long time ago. It was something else, something that he had only recognized after a long time and with quiet horror: the very precise feeling that he had nothing to say. Fundamentally, he found it ridiculous walking down the center aisle of the lecture hall under the expectant eyes of the students. With almost every step the sensation grew that he was stealing their time from them.

  Then he opened his notes and began to speak in his practiced, fluent way. He was well known for being able to speak apparently off the top of his head. The students liked him, often several of them came up to the lectern afterwards and wanted to know more. That was particularly bad. During the lecture the empty space between lectern and desks had protected him, had acted as a protecting screen behind which he was able to hide his lack of interest, that stigma. When the students sat in front of him he felt unprotected, and worried that they might see that he was no longer involved. He took refuge in solicitous eagerness, spoke far too verbosely, filled up another blackboard and promised to bring the appropriate books along the next time. In many cases they were his own, which he pressed into the students’ hands like bribes. They felt that they were being taken seriously, understood. A committed professor. They needed to know him personally, and invited him to join them at their table in the pub.

  The first non-residential guests arrived for lunch at the hotel. Perlmann picked up his books and went to his room. As he closed the door his eye fell on the notice showing the price list, and he gave a start. The room cost around 300 marks. For a single person, this meant that his stay cost almost 10,000 marks, not including lunch and dinner. Times seven. OK, for Olivetti that was presumably nothing, and Angelini would know what he was doing when he put them up at the most expensive hotel in the town. Perhaps he’d negotiated a discount. But still, Perlmann held his face under the gleaming brass tap and then washed his hands for a long time. If it had been up to him he would never have stayed at a hotel like this, even if money were no issue. He just knew that he didn’t belong here. And he began to sweat when he thought of his shabby, black, waxed-cloth notebook that was all he had to give in return, a loose collection of notes that he hadn’t even looked at for ages. He felt like a fraudster, almost a
thief.

  That was the reason why his thoughts of flight, of every variety, included an intention to pay the bill for his room himself. Under the circumstances it would have been a demonstration. The others would have been able to tell that no higher power had forced him to take this step, but that his strange action must have something to do with his attitude towards the group. And he found that uncomfortable: it ran counter to his need to give as little of himself away as possible, and where possible to leave everything in the dark. But he didn’t want to be in anyone’s debt; at least in that respect he wanted to put things back in order.

  Hesitantly, he opened his suitcase and started carefully standing the books up on the desk. It had been hard for him the previous evening when he had finally set about making a selection. Even more clearly than usual he had become aware that he had had no academic intentions for a long time. How, in such a situation, was one to decide what to take along and what not? He had sat there for quite a while, playing with the bold idea of travelling without any textbooks at all, just with his own novels. But however liberating the idea might have been, he couldn’t risk it. Just in case they visited him here in the room, he had to construct a facade, a disguise. The important thing was for his distress to remain unnoticed. In the end he had packed a series of books that had turned up over the past few months and remained unread. They were books that anyone working in his field might have bought. He hadn’t yet dared to give up such routine purchases, although he was beginning to regret the money – a sensation that startled him, because since his school days it had always been self-evident to him that money spent on books was never money wasted.

  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.