Perlmann's Silence by Pascal Mercier

all of a sudden, she had finished, took her glasses off and leaned back with her arms folded. Perlmann felt as if the veranda were filling up with an intoxicating silence, and time seemed only to want to go on flowing when he had started talking. He felt for his cigarettes, touched the pack and discovered that it was empty. With his hand still on the box his eye drifted above Silvestri’s head and out and beyond to the sea, to check that the world, the real world, was much bigger than this hateful room, where he was now encircled by all the people whom he had assembled here only because he had wanted to accompany Agnes on her photographic journey through Italy in winter.
    Silvestri grinned, and he picked up his pack of Gauloises and threw it to Perlmann in a high arc all the way across the room. Still half-immersed in his attempt to hide in his own gaze and escape unnoticed into the light, Perlmann raised his arm and confidently caught the box. Even though that confidence seemed to issue not from himself as such, but only from his body, which he had been trying to leave behind as a decoy, it gave him back a little of his confidence. He thanked Silvestri with a nod and put one of the unfiltered cigarettes between his lips. What I say now will be completely random.
    At the first drag the sharp smoke took his breath away, and he couldn’t help coughing. He heard Silvestri laughing. Perlmann hid for a while behind his cough and finally, after wiping his weeping eyes with his handkerchief, looked around.
    ‘I’m working on a text about the connection between language and memory,’ he said. He was both relieved and shocked by the calm in his voice. It was something, he went on, that had interested him for many years. Too rarely, he thought, did his discipline investigate how language was interwoven with the various forms of experience. And in this respect it was precisely the experience of time that had received special treatment. It was an unorthodox theme for a linguist, he added with a smile that felt like a strenuous piece of facial gymnastics. But he also understood his stay here as an opportunity to go in alternative directions.
    Evelyn Mistral looked at him with radiant eyes, and now, for the first time, Perlmann noticed the green of those eyes, a sea-green with a few splinters of amber set into it. She was pleasantly surprised that he was dealing with something related to her own subject, and Perlmann had to look away to keep, in his deceitfulness, from being exposed to her smiling face any longer.
    Less had happened in the faces of the others than he had expected. Millar’s head seemed to be a little more bent than usual, but there was no mockery to be discovered in his expression, and in Adrian von Levetzov’s dark eyes there was even a gleam of moderate interest.
    Laura Sand’s suggestion for the sequence of the sessions met with general agreement. The date that Perlmann had fixed for himself was now treated as something quite natural. On that point, of course, von Levetzov avoided Perlmann’s eye. Instead he came to see him at the end of the session. He had found his announcement rather surprising, he said. But thinking about it properly he was also a little bit nervous. It must be a lovely feeling, trying out something new. He couldn’t wait to hear the result!
    Perlmann went to see Maria in the office, and introduced Millar to her. Today, as usual, she was wearing a glittering pullover that matched her hair-do, and as on the first evening Perlmann was captivated by the contrast between the hint of punk that surrounded her and the warm, almost maternal smile with which she addressed people. His two texts would be copied by four o’clock, she assured Millar. A copy would be put in everyone’s pigeonhole.
    ‘One text you know already,’ Millar said to Perlmann as he left, ‘and I’ll be keen to hear what you have to say about the other one. You have been subject to severe criticism, I’m afraid. But you