Perlmann's Silence

  His train home left at noon the following day, and as he had only been there for three days he left the hotel early in the morning to see more of the little unspectacular canals and bridges. And then they met for a second time. Agnes was quite different from the day before, much more reserved, and at first he had the feeling that he was just bothering her. But then, looking again and again through her viewfinder, she had started talking about light and shade and the magic of black-and-white photography. He had felt like a blind man learning to see. Afterwards, over coffee that he paid for with the money he had set aside for a sandwich on the train, she wanted to know something about him. Linguist, he said, and before that he’d played the piano. Chopin. ‘Yeeesss,’ she had said with a nod, her eyes half-closed. And then, once again: ‘Yeeesss.’

  On the long journey his thoughts had kept returning to that ‘Yeeesss’. Had it signified agreement? Agreement with him? Or had his information only confirmed her first impression, which might also have been negative? In all the years that followed he had never asked Agnes; he couldn’t say why. That mysterious ‘Yeeesss’ had also kept him from discussing the business about the thalidomide children, which had suddenly leapt out at him from time to time during those days, when the moment seemed to be perfect.

  Which of his fellow passengers had it been who had lent him L’Espresso? Perlmann immediately recognized Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem, which the chronicle republished; it was the one that had been in the magazine that day when he was travelling home: When you fought the policemen yesterday in Valle Giulia / I sympathized with the police / Because the police are sons of the poor, they come from the outskirts, whether urban or rural. And then he accused the students: You have the faces of spoiled kids / . . . / You are fearful, insecure, desperate. Perlmann had been preoccupied with that poem for a long time, because it struck him that there was something in it, and at the same time thinking something like that struck him as an act of disloyalty. He had avoided the countless teach-ins over the years that followed, and had instead, in the silent library reading room, pursued the question of how the peasants of Andalusia had worked out the idea of freedom and self-determination during the Civil War.

  By the time Agnes’s photographs had arrived, Venice was but a pale memory, and his excitement about the assistant’s post kept him on tenterhooks. Never before had he seen such vivid pictures of himself. Or such funny ones. One, in which a girl with Asian features stuck her head at an angle into the picture, even had a certain slapstick quality. And what was incredible: in these black-and-white pictures St Mark’s Square was drenched in a light more glowing than he had ever seen in color.

  And yet he was startled to the core: the panic that had filled his eyes at his encounter with the pigeons revealed a profound fear of life. There’s a story in the scene, she had said. He hoped the camera exaggerated. Or else that Agnes didn’t see what he saw. Both were unlikely. Weeks passed. In the end she was the one who rang.

  The chronicle was already an astonishing potpourri, Perlmann thought. Between an analysis of the way in which the Italian press reacted to the student revolt, and the report on the Soviet troops’ invasion of Prague there was a gossipy article about Sophia Loren’s latest affair, which was only slightly shorter. The photograph of the diva was in fact slightly bigger than the picture of tanks in Wenceslas Square. He would have liked to go on reading, but he was the last one in the restaurant and the proprietor was yawning as he cleared up. And tomorrow Perlmann wanted to get a good bit further with Leskov’s paper.

  By now it was a familiar experience, walking across the deserted Piazza Veneto to the hotel. He wondered whether Leskov was really giving an accurate account of the matter of the self-image. His examples, he now noticed, were always about someone making a decision or at least performing a pointed action that was preceded by a process of reflection: a proclamation was signed; the military doctor was duped; a marriage concluded against the will of the parents. That in such cases there was a remembered self with complicated contours that could only be articulated linguistically was clear. But what about when he remembered the pigeons that had besieged him? Agnes might have been right that there was a story to be told about him. But he, the one who was remembering, didn’t know it, not even now. All there had been, it seemed to him, was panic and sweat and flapping feathers. And if he read a self-image into that frantic confusion, then that picture consisted of contours of feeling and nothing else. Everything else was impenetrable; that was part of the specific nature of that panic, and also of its power.

  A calmer example of his past self, which resisted narrative disclosure, was the very correctly dressed young man from those days who had been irritated by the spinsterish librarian in the reading room, because she had asked him why he wasn’t over at the teach-in. And what about that wide-awake moment when his joyful excitement about Venice and his horror at the thalidomide children had collided? Perhaps, he thought, these things would become clearer in Leskov’s work if he now exposed what he had skimmed through in an impatient first reading to the precise attention of a translator.

  Someone had rung from Germany an hour ago, said Giovanni. As far as he had understood, it had been Perlmann’s daughter.

  Perlmann immediately called Kirsten.

  ‘You were away for a long time,’ she said. ‘Do you often go out with your group?’

  She was nervous about her presentation. Only one more week. She was desperate about Faulkner’s remark that the relationship between the two stories was one of musical counterpoint. From one day to the next she found the various theories about the unity of the whole more and more incomprehensible. She wondered whether, contrary to most interpreters, she should claim that the unity didn’t exist at all. Or, at best, only in Faulkner’s mind. She didn’t have time to write out a whole paper, she would have to make do with detailed notes.

  ‘What do you do if you have a blackout and suddenly don’t know what to say?’

  ‘You won’t have one,’ said Perlmann, and heard how disappointed she was by his silly answer.

  12

  Wednesday was a radiant late autumn day with a horizon that dissolved into a dreamlike haze. When Perlmann got up from his desk and looked down at the terrace he saw Millar and Ruge, who had sat down to one side at a table full of books and papers preparing the next two sessions. Once he stepped to the window just as John Smith was approaching them with an affable gesture. Millar’s reaction was plainly so unfriendly that Smith immediately turned on his heels and trotted over to the pool.

  The translation was coming on nicely, and Perlmann was becoming practiced at quickly retreating behind his fortress of dictionaries after looking out of the window. He would have liked to walk over to the window less often; but there wasn’t much to be done. When he had finished a paragraph, he picked up the Russian-Italian dictionary as a reward and translated some of Leskov’s easier sentences into Italian. Then he imagined sitting in a circular room whose walls were filled to the top with dictionaries. He would walk along these walls and translate more and more new sentences into more and more new languages. There was no reason ever to leave this room, because this was the place where he found his actual will. Here, after more than three decades, he could roll back the misunderstanding that he had become aware of back then in the Auditorium Maximum, without recognizing it or being able to keep it from unfolding.

  At noon he went to see Maria in the office and asked her the Italian word for self-image. To explain to her that he didn’t mean autoritratto, self-portrait, he sketched out something of Leskov’s train of thought. She was immediately gripped by the subject and kept asking him questions until he had given her an outline of the whole text.

  ‘So that’s what they’re talking about on the veranda!’ she said at last, and choked on her smoke. ‘I wish I could listen in!’

  He hastily turned towards her screen and asked straight away if that way of writing wasn’t tiring on the eyes after a while.

  Now came the four s
entences in Leskov’s text that had hitherto been a complete puzzle to him. With the help of the new dictionary they were soon translated. But it was a long time before Perlmann had worked out the concise and awkwardly phrased argument for the necessary linguistic nature of self-images.

  Seeing a past action as meaningful meant attributing reasons for it to one’s past self. But reasons related to one another as only sentences can. Hence the differentiation of the self-image that bore the memory was possible only through language.

  It was a strikingly simple thought, and at first sight it seemed telling. But when Perlmann lay down on his bed to rest, his doubts began to accumulate. Was it true that one considered oneself in the light of one’s reasons when one looked back? And what did the internal wrangling which – at least for him – tended to precede an important action, have to do with logical relationships between sentences? Not to mention all the ambiguities and dichotomies that ran through the emotional life, and which one sometimes remembered very clearly. Again he saw himself standing in the empty train compartment, looking at the thalidomide children and then stepping on to the platform, into the echoing voice of the loudspeaker and the unfamiliar smells.

  Suddenly, Leskov’s train of thought seemed to collapse like a house of cards, and when he began translating again he felt sobriety, almost reluctance. But that passed quickly when he managed some elegant English sentences, and in the course of that afternoon he understood that apart from joy in the sensuality of language there was also something else that drew him irresistibly to translation: one could think without having to believe anything, and one could speak, without having to assert anything. One could deal with language, without having to be concerned about the truth. For a man with no opinions, like myself, translator or interpreter would have been the ideal profession. The ideal disguise.

  When Perlmann next looked down at Millar and Ruge, von Levetzov was sitting at the table as well. There was a hurricane lamp between the papers, and the waiter was arranging the cable of the standard lamp, which he must just have put there. From time to time, Millar rubbed his bare forearms, before starting to speak again, making energetic gestures. Now Ruge shook his head, picked up a sheet of paper and held it up in front of Millar’s nose with two fingers like a search warrant, as the American went on speaking.

  At that moment Perlmann knew that he would never, never again, want to take part in a debate. He didn’t want to be attacked ever again, and never again did he want to have to defend an opinion that was no more his own than was any other opinion.

  Now he couldn’t find his way into Leskov’s text. The words he had written out over the last hour seemed to be extinguished within his head, and his vocabulary book struck him as the symbol of eternal homework which one would never finish, however long one lived. When he got a Cyrillic letter wrong twice in a row, he realized that he had had enough. He had thought he was on his way to see Maria to ask her about the lovely old fountain that he had stood by for a long time in Genoa two days previously, before he discovered the bookshop in the next street.

  But then he found himself in the corridor at the end of which was Evelyn Mistral’s room and, after a brief hesitation, he knocked.

  She had really organized her room. While up in his own, his unpacked suitcase and the plastic bag of dirty laundry stood under bare walls and his coat lay on his unused bed, here everything was tidy and inhabitable. She had put her second bedside table next to the desk as a storage space, and although there were stacks of paper and books lying around all over the place, it didn’t look chaotic. On the walls there were two posters of Rome and Florence and a row of photographs. Push pins weren’t permitted, she laughed, but Signora Morelli had allowed her to use them. She stood for a remarkably long time in the corner by the window, and when he looked towards the photograph behind her head she became embarrassed and held her hand over it. It was a picture of her dog Totó.

  ‘And he’s been dead for a year,’ she said. ‘Crazy, isn’t it?’

  Perlmann sat down at the antique table with the ornate legs, and looked at her across the bunch of flowers. If she had – that night in that huge kitchen in Salamanca – understood her father’s problem, then she could understand his misery now; in spite of the silver glasses that lay on an open book on the desk in the beam of light from the lamp. He smiled, and when he then took a deep breath, it was like a long run-up to something risky.

  ‘I recently told you about Juan, my brother,’ she said and got up to fetch a letter from her bedside table. ‘Now the lunatic writes that he’s giving up his studies and going into films. He wants to be a cameraman! He hasn’t a hint of training in that direction.’ She narrowed her eyes and held the paper far away from herself. ‘And then this remark here: “And even if I can only carry the cables for the first few months . . .” Dios mío, he’s so brilliant, he could have studied law standing on his head!’

  ‘I envy him,’ Perlmann heard himself saying, and then again: ‘I envy him a lot.’

  Puzzled, she folded up the letter. ‘That sounds as if you want to run away on the spot.’

  Did he see in her smile a willingness to sympathize with such a wish? Or did her reaction to Juan’s letter reveal fixed boundaries of understanding? The red elephant on the suitcase: what did it represent?

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, and straightened a flower. ‘It’s just . . . sometimes I think we don’t try nearly enough things out before we settle on one. Out of fear, probably. A fear that can become a prison. Juan doesn’t seem like the fearful type.’

  ‘No,’ she laughed, ‘quite the opposite: sometimes I think he has the soul of a gambler. Then I worry for him, and get annoyed about his irrationality. But basically, I think I love him for it.’ She looked at her watch and disappeared into the bathroom to change for dinner.

  They were already in the corridor when she stopped and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You are joining us for dinner?’

  He hesitated and looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘It would be better,’ she said quietly. Then she took him by the waist for a brief moment and pushed him slightly. ‘Come on,’ she laughed, trying to parody Millar’s pronunciation, in which an o sounded like

  an a.

  Her touch a moment ago, he felt, protected him as they entered the dining room, and that protection continued until the waiter cleared away the plates from the starters. Then Millar abruptly turned aside from Laura Sand and looked at him.

  ‘I’m slowly coming to think you would prefer to forget our appointment about your question. Or am I mistaken?’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Perlmann replied, and was glad that he didn’t need to say anything further. His reply had sounded firm, and it had even contained a challenge. But it didn’t correspond to anything inside him. Inside there was suddenly nothing but a vulnerable void, and it didn’t help at all that Evelyn Mistral was sitting next to him.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Millar, stretching the last syllable out until it sounded grotesque.

  It was this melodious sarcasm that tipped the balance. Perlmann felt himself getting hot, and he was fleetingly brushed by a warning sensation, and then the attack that seemed to come from nowhere started moving relentlessly within him.

  ‘By the way, Brian,’ he began, and tilted his head involuntarily to the side, ‘I was reading a newspaper article about that fellow Chessman, who was gassed in your country in 1960. He was on death row for twelve years. The execution was postponed eight times, always a few hours before the appointed day. I’m sure you know about that?’

  Millar wiped his mouth so slowly that the movement looked affected. Laura Sand gave Perlmann a penetrating look.

  ‘Now, Phil,’ Millar said at last, ‘I was eight years old at the time.’

  ‘But Americans know about these things, don’t they?’

  ‘So what?’ Millar’s voice had become very quiet.

  ‘What? You mean . . .’ Giorgio Silvestri joined in.

  ‘No. Of course not,’ Millar interrupt
ed irritably, ‘all that toing and froing was impossible.’

  For a moment silence fell around the table; the voices of the few other guests and the muted clatter from the kitchen could be heard. Silvestri twirled a Gauloise between his fingers as if he had just rolled it. He looked at Millar with a dark gleam in his eyes.

  ‘But basically you think it’s all right for people to be gassed? Or strapped into the electric chair?’

  Millar’s cheeks suddenly looked hollow, and it was as if he had blanched under his tan.

  ‘I have no definitive view on the death penalty. But there are points in its favor. And rhetorical tricks won’t help you at all.’

  Silvestri violently pushed his chair back and had already half-risen to his feet when he calmed himself, picked up his cigarette from the floor and pretended to be examining a wobbly chair leg. There could have been an explosion between the two men at any moment, and the others all seemed to start breathing again when the waiter came in with the main course.

  ‘It’s the impersonal, bureaucratic aspect of an execution that makes my blood boil,’ Laura Sand said a moment later. ‘Quite apart from the terrible details of the killing. I always have the same picture in front of my eyes: two uniformed men with doughy official faces dragging this person, who has done nothing to them, along the corridor and strapping him in. When I see the stupid rectitude of their bootsteps, I always think I’d be capable of shooting at those uniforms,’ she said and clenched her fists.

  ‘The state has a monopoly on violence,’ von Levetzov broke in.