Perlmann's Silence

  He drew his glance back from the distance and smiled at Perlmann. ‘Somehow your . . . outburst of a moment ago reminded me of that,’ he said, speaking in German. ‘Except: there’s nothing I can do about it. I didn’t invent our discipline, did I? And it isn’t as uninteresting as all that, either; in spite of Shakespeare. Otherwise, I’m sure you wouldn’t have called us all here. Would you?’

  Perlmann lowered his eyes and gave his head a slight shake, without a clear intention and significance, turning it into an equally slight nod.

  The awkward pause was ended by Ruge. ‘I didn’t know you had a weakness for poetry, Adrian,’ he said with a grin, drawing imaginary circles on the table top.

  ‘Neither did I,’ Millar cut in, ‘and I can’t wait to hear about the exciting kind of linguistics that Phil is doubtless going to introduce us to next week.’

  Von Levetzov slowly packed his things together, got up and then stopped by the table, his hands on the stack of books and paper. He kept his eye – a searching eye that seemed to spring from an inner circling – fixed on the parquet floor beyond the table’s edge. His features, it seemed to Perlmann, had formed into an expression of self-reliance that he had never seen on this man’s face before, even Evelyn Mistral gazed at him the way one gazes at someone who is forming a completely independent judgment about something.

  ‘I don’t know, Brian,’ he said slowly, and the smile with which he now turned to Millar contrasted starkly with his usual solicitousness towards his admired American colleague, ‘that may not be Philipp’s concern. I could imagine that he’s not interested in that at all.’

  He darted Perlmann a fleeting glance and then walked to the door with an attitude that suggested he wasn’t a part of the group any more.

  Perlmann thought about von Levetzov’s attitude and his last sentence all afternoon, over and over again. As he did so, he oscillated between the worrying sensation of having completely lost his balance, and the liberating feeling of someone who, by voicing a proscribed opinion with no regard for the consequences, has edged a step closer to himself.

  Finally, now, he read all the texts he should already have known that morning. They interested him not in the slightest, those texts which, as always with von Levetzov, were composed with almost baroque care and attention. But he forced himself to read every line. He wanted to be prepared for tomorrow.

  Hidden behind that thought, however, he was driven by the wish discreetly to thank the tall northerner – about whom he had plainly been completely mistaken – for his considered reaction. And also for addressing him in German. Recalling that moment now, it seemed to him had never before felt the intimacy of his mother tongue so forcefully and gratefully. From time to time he imagined von Levetzov’s face without its glasses, looking strangely naked. Opera. Always Mozart. Alcohol. An actress.

  Midway through his reading of the third text he suddenly got to his feet, slipped into his jacket and walked down to von Levetzov’s room. He had no idea what the apology should sound like, and to gain time he put his ear to the door. Von Levetzov was on the phone, clearly to his secretary.

  ‘Then we’ll have to move the whole program,’ he was saying. ‘Let the contributors know that their times are changing accordingly. All right, so that’s that. What about the application to the foundation? Aha . . . yes . . . good. And the galleys?’

  Perlmann turned round and went back to his room. Again he called the end of the session to mind: von Levetzov’s sentence, his attitude. And now this businesslike voice, the voice of a man merging with his subject. It didn’t fit. Not at all.

  He dragged himself to the middle of the fourth text, then broke off and went to the trattoria. Even as he parted the glass-bead curtain he sensed that it had been wrong to come here. He could only concentrate on the story of Sandra’s test by concentrating very hard, and he immediately forgot it again. There’s still Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. One whole day and two half-days. And the nights.

  When the proprietor brought him the chronicle he waved it away at first, but then he took it after all and looked up the summer when he had been given his first professorship. Aldo Moro murdered. Sandro Pertini new president. Death of Pope Paul VI. Bored, he snapped the book shut.

  What had been happening in the world back then didn’t interest him. He was looking for something quite different, a memory that forced its way to the surface and kept exploding just before it got there. It had something to do with the grand piano and a question asked by five-year-old Kirsten.

  Lost. I’ve lost. That was it: that was what he had thought back then when he set his professorial certificate down on the grand piano and tried to play with leaden fingers. Little Kirsten, clutching her teddy, had clearly been standing in the doorway for a long time before she asked why he was playing so many wrong notes.

  Are you sad?

  We’re going to move, Kitty, to Berlin.

  Isn’t it nice there?

  Yes, child.

  So why are you sad?

  Dad is sad, she told Agnes, who was breathlessly setting down the shopping bags. Nonsense, he said and showed her the letter with a smile. The Berlin agency is bigger, she laughed, and gave him a kiss.

  When suddenly he hadn’t been able to get to grips with the chronicle it was as if a safety net had been taken away. What still supported him was the translation of Leskov’s text, he thought on the way back, and hurried to get to his room.

  Another five pages on the daring thesis that narrative memory also creates the sensory content of the remembered. Perlmann struggled once again through the thicket of unusual words for sensory nuances, and after three hours he had an English version of the part that he had translated directly into Italian the previous day – with lots of mistakes, he now realized. Immediately after that came the zealous, awkward passage on Proust. The last page and a half on this subject were easier again in terms of vocabulary; on the other hand, the concluding argument was so incomplete and bizarre that he kept checking whether it might be down to his translation. At last he came to the conclusion that Leskov had simply fudged matters – he had wanted to force through at all costs his exotic thesis of the past as an invention. He seemed to be truly in love with it.

  Shortly after midnight Perlmann walked through the clear, cold, starry night to the Piazza Veneto to buy cigarettes. Next came the closing passage about appropriation: nine pages, seven of which he had largely finished, leaving aside the difficulties with the key concept. He wanted to get through it that night, so that he could finish the text in one go on Wednesday. At the same time he felt a suffocating sense of trepidation at the thought of having to set Leskov’s text aside and move over entirely to the emptiness in his head. He tore open the packet as soon as it fell from the machine, and then discovered that he hadn’t brought any matches. Shivering, he ran back to the hotel.

  First of all he addressed himself to the last two pages, for which he still didn’t have an English version. Here, in summary, Leskov discussed the creation of the individual past through narration. And again he fudged his way past an unambiguous position by jumping back and forth without comment between quite different words for create. He began with sozdavat’, then switched to tvorit’ without explanation. The translation for both in the big dictionary was given as creating. The second word applied, judging by the example sentences, to the creation of something from nothing; it was used as if God’s Creation were the topic under discussion. The former referred more to artistic or academic creation; creative activity, such as the creation of a character in a novel. A huge difference, Perlmann thought, about which Leskov wasted not a word. Or did it only seem that way to the beginner that he suddenly felt himself once again to be?

  Then, all of a sudden, came izobretat’, which was given as inventing, devising and designing and thus dealt with inventions, but now in the sense of the creation of a new object – a machine, for example – out of entirely real materials. Cutting one’s past to size by means of narration, and thus t
o a certain extent sculpting oneself as a character – there was a lot in it. But that was something quite different from the thought that one actually invented or even created oneself in remembering narration. But Leskov, Perlmann sensed through all his linguistic doubts, would really have liked to put forward the extreme thesis of invention, and once there was also the word pridumat’, which was translated as thinking up – as if, for example, one were thinking up an apology.

  The last sentence of the text. In English it sounded less bombastic than it did in German, which had to do, above all, with the fact that essence had a lighter, more transparent sound than the whispering Wesen and – Perlmann supposed – the Russian sushchnost’. And that it was essential for language to make the experience of time more diverse – that was a claim that matched many things in his own notes.

  Perlmann took his black wax cloth notebook out of his suitcase, and was annoyed to break a fingernail on the straps, which had been stupidly pulled too tight. He read once again what he himself had jotted down about the formulation of memories, and then the passages about language and present. At some points the parallel with Leskov’s train of thought was startling. He put the notebook back in his suitcase and left the straps loose.

  Outside there was dense fog now. The streetlights could only be seen as a diffuse blur of light, in which approaching billows of vapour disappeared. What on earth had made him defamiliarize his notes with another language? Can one be afraid of stepping too close to oneself? Or had another fear been at work: that articulacy in one’s mother tongue – and only in it – could change experience, so that the old means of experience, which one must not lose, would suddenly disappear?

  Anyway, in English he could read his observations as if someone else had written them, someone who was spiritually akin and yet different to him. He opened the window and felt the cool night air like damp cotton wool on his face. In foreign languages one could feel sheltered just as one did in fog. No attack presented in another language could ever hit him, could penetrate him so thoroughly as an attack in his mother tongue. And his own, most intimate sentences hit him less hard when they were packed in foreign words. Because he also had to protect himself against these sentences, paradoxically. Or was it, in the end, something quite different? Had he been seeking to intensify the intimacy by enjoying the open secret of being the author of these notes?

  The preceding, already translated pages about the appropriation of the past remained unclear, however one might twist and turn them. Once again, Perlmann looked up the crucial words, slipped into the example sentences and experimented with every possible combination of translations. For a while, for osvaivat’ he even considered confer, which only came up under prisvaivat’; it would be good to harmonize with Leskov’s idea of invention. In the end he crossed out all but one of the many alternatives he had jotted down, and was discontent because a feeling of randomness remained.

  The light grey of dusk seeped into the fog, and the halos of the streetlights assumed a dazzling white gleam. Perlmann carefully piled up the handwritten pages of the translation. Eighty-seven pages. He also arranged Leskov’s text in order, and put it in the bottom laundry drawer. Then he wiped the dust from the table with his handkerchief and emptied the brimming ashtray. The translation was finished. His translation. It was finished. A relief, a successful sentence.

  Shaking, he ordered coffee and had to clear his throat several times. He was shivering with the heating turned up when he poured coffee into himself later on. From time to time he picked up the translation and flicked through it for a few moments without reading. He wouldn’t be able to show it to Agnes. He would never be able to show her anything ever again. At a quarter to nine he bathed his eyes, put von Levetzov’s texts under his arm and went downstairs.

  17

  When the others stepped out on to the veranda and saw Perlmann sitting there already, they interrupted their conversations and, as soon as they sat down, fished busily among their papers. Perlmann just nodded to them briefly and turned the page.

  ‘So, on we go with this strange discipline,’ von Levetzov said cheerfully, and summed up the next text in a few sentences.

  Perlmann was winning his battle against tiredness. It was a while before he had pulled what he had read the previous afternoon out from among his memories of the night; but then behind its tiredness his brain ran like a well-oiled mechanism, and he managed some contributions that largely determined the course of the session. Von Levetzov asked him several times to repeat his objection, and then took notes. Only Millar looked, while Perlmann was speaking, with ostentatious boredom through the window into the fog. Evelyn Mistral took off her glasses several times and listened to Perlmann with the expression of someone who is glad about someone else’s recovery from an illness. Every time he noticed that, he ended his contribution sooner than planned.

  ‘So, Perlmann, still working on your gay science?’ von Levetzov joked as he left.

  Perlmann went to sleep as soon as he had crept under the covers. Kitty, holding the bear lispingly, asked him only questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The only thing he knew was that the grand piano wasn’t where it had always been. It wasn’t in Berlin either. There were only auditoriums there with masses of students, and when he came home and looked around the rooms for the grand piano, Agnes nodded incessantly and pulled open boxes of material for her own darkroom.

  It was already dark when he woke up drenched in sweat. He would ideally have liked to stay in the shower for ever, and kept turning it back on so that the water ran over his face and distorted his view of the future. At last he sat in his dressing gown by the round table and let his eyes slide over the pages of the translation. He had forgotten that there was a whole series of gaps on the first thirty pages. He contentedly noted that the work on the later parts now made the open questions look quite simple. In the end he crossed out the marginal jotting sensory content? and made sure that it could no longer be deciphered.

  Only the title was still missing. Formirovanie was formation. So: on the role of language in the formation of memories. Perlmann hesitated, looked up Rolle in his German-English Langenscheidt, and then replaced role with part. The whole thing sounded wooden, he thought, and also formation was actually too weak for the subject if one considered the radical theses of the texts. Had Leskov become frightened by his own courage? If one looked up formation, one found formirovanie and obrazovanie with the note (creation). Nonetheless, creation was unambiguously sozdanie or tvorenie; those were the words Leskov should have called upon here. The intricate, programmatic sentence that had caused too much trouble also included sozdavat’, after all. Perlmann sat there motionlessly for a while. Then he wrote in capital letters at the top edge: the personal past as linguistic creation. There was no room for his name.

  To make further amends for yesterday, he set off for the dining room. Maria was still sitting in front of the screen in the office. When Perlmann saw her he stopped, teetered on his heels a few times and then went back up to his room. He irresolutely held the translation in his hands, half rolled it up and then opened it again. In the end he took it with him.

  The others were now standing in the hall. He waved to them with the text and stepped into Maria’s office.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to give me the text until Friday morning,’ said Maria.

  ‘Erm . . . this is . . . this isn’t actually it,’ stammered Perlmann, feeling his face burning.

  ‘Ah, so this is a different one,’ she said. ‘How industrious you all are!’ She flicked through it and suddenly paused. ‘There are a few lines in Italian here! Why did you cross them out?’

  ‘It . . . it was a sort of experiment,’ he said quickly with a dismissive gesture.

  ‘When do you need the text by?’ she asked as he turned to the door. ‘Because of Signor Millar, I mean.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’

  She fastened the text together with a big paperclip, and held it away from herself.
‘Cute title,’ she smiled. ‘Where do you want your name? Over the title, under it, or only at the end of the text?’

  ‘No name, please.’ His per favore was out of place; not only was it superfluous, but it sounded suspicious to his ears. ‘The text is just for me,’ he added stiffly.

  She rocked her head as if to say she didn’t think it was a good reason. ‘Va bene. As you wish. We can always add it. And what about the other text?’ she asked, when his hand was already on the door handle. ‘Will I have it by Friday morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, without looking at her.

  ‘By the way, Phil,’ said Millar as Perlmann dipped his spoon into the soup, ‘about Maria: she said she’d have time to type something out for me by Thursday. But I thought it was a misunderstanding. She could hardly have typed your text in two days. And a moment ago I saw you bringing her your text. No problem. Jenny will just have to get down to it as soon as I’m back.’

  The soup scalded Perlmann’s tongue and throat. ‘Erm . . . no, no, you can . . .’ he began, and then closed his eyes until the peak of pain had passed. He coughed and wiped the water from his eyes. ‘I mean . . . yes, thank you very much.’

  Millar looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You OK?’ Perlmann nodded and had to rub his eyes again.

  He was glad that every subsequent mouthful hurt. The pain was something that he could deal with while the others gossiped about a series of colleagues who had recently published something.

  ‘I noticed again today how precisely you read,’ von Levetzov suddenly said to him.

  Perlmann let the ice cream melt on his tongue and swallowed it in small portions. He had been repelled by the way his mother, after his tonsil operation, had enjoyed playing the role of nurse.

  ‘Yesterday it almost looked as if he hated the whole subject,’ Ruge giggled, unashamedly licking the cream from his upper lip.