Perlmann's Silence

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Philipp Perlmann didn’t know how to live in the present. He never had. That morning, though, it was worse than usual. He reluctantly lowered his Russian grammar and looked across to the high windows of the veranda, in which a crooked-growing pine was reflected. It was in there, among the gleaming mahogany tables, that it would happen. They would look at him expectantly as he sat at the front, and then, after a prolonged, unbearable silence and a breathless halting of time, they would know: he had nothing to say.

Ideally, he would have left again immediately, without giving a destination, without an explanation, without an apology. For a moment the impulse to flee was as violent as a physical pain. He snapped the book shut and looked across the blue changing cabins to the bay, which was flooded with the gleaming light of a cloudless October day. Running away: at first it must be wonderful; he imagined it as a quick bold rush, headlong through all feelings of obligation, out into freedom. But his liberation wouldn’t last long. His telephone at home would ring again and again, and eventually his secretary would be downstairs pressing the doorbell. He wouldn’t be able to go into the street or turn on the light. His apartment would become a prison. Of course, it didn’t have to be Frankfurt. He could go somewhere else – Florence, perhaps, or Rome – where no one would be able to find him. But that would turn those cities into hideouts. He would walk through the streets, blind and dumb, before lying in his hotel room and listening to the ticking of his travel alarm clock. And eventually he would have to give himself up. He couldn’t disappear for the rest of his life. If only because of Kirsten.

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