The pill, Perlmann thought, I should just have taken the smaller bit. He rested his head on his hand so that he could rub his temples without anyone noticing. Perhaps that would help against the thumping heaviness that lay over his eyes like a ring of steel. When he took his hand away, he caught the eye of Evelyn Mistral, who was fighting against Millar’s sceptical face with sentences that were growing faster and faster. He nodded, without knowing what they were talking about. When Millar noticed this agreement, he looked like someone who is now utterly confused. Plainly, Evelyn Mistral’s train of thought had nothing to do with the interpretation that he had composed for Perlmann’s puzzlingly naive question.
Perlmann poured himself a cup of coffee, and when he reached into his jacket pocket for the matches, he felt the packet of headache pills. Keeping his hand in his pocket, he pressed out two tablets, brought them inconspicuously to his mouth and swallowed them. As if his head had been cleared merely by the act of swallowing, he concentrated on the formulae in Millar’s paper. With a jolt that he was able to cushion somewhat at the last moment, he sat bolt upright: a bracket was missing from one of the formulae. Struggling to control his excitement, he topped up his coffee. Don’t make a mistake now. Methodically, and with painful concentration, he looked through the whole formal part. He could barely believe his eyes: just before the end a quantifier was missing, which not only made the deduction wrong, but actually made the formula nonsensical. His headache had fled, and it was as if his impatient alertness were forcing its way out from within himself and straight onto the paper. He was absolutely sure of his case. Now everything hung on the presentation. With a furtive slowness that he enjoyed more than anything in ages, he lit a cigarette, pushed his chair back and sat down with the paper in his other hand, his legs crossed as if sitting at a pavement café. He saw Millar sitting in the front row of the lecture hall on that earlier occasion, Sheila beside him in her short skirt.
‘I see,’ Laura Sand said, and leaned back. Millar took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It was the first time Perlmann had seen his face without glasses. It was a surprisingly vulnerable face with eyes that had a boyish, almost childlike expression, and for that brief moment, before Millar put his glasses back on, Perlmann wanted to have nothing more to do with his planned attack, but the flash of Millar’s glasses had closed once more over his face, which had looked so defenseless a moment before, and Perlmann seized his moment.
‘Tell me, Brian,’ he began with deceptive mildness, ‘isn’t there a bracket missing from the fourth formula? Right at the beginning, I mean. Otherwise the domain of quantification is too small.’
Millar darted him a quick glance, pressed his glasses firmly on to his nose and frowned as he flicked through the pages.
‘Jenny, Jenny, baby,’ he muttered with ostentatious irritation, ‘why always the formulae? She’s the best secretary in the world,’ he added, glancing round at everyone, ‘but she has a block with formulae. Many thanks, Phil.’
Perlmann waited for him to make a note. ‘One other small thing,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘As it stands, formula ten makes no sense. The deduction isn’t right either.’
His whole chest becoming a soundbox for his heartbeat was something he had never experienced before. Perlmann gripped his knee, tensed his arms and braced himself against the power of his roaring pulse. Millar’s brief, slightly flickering glance was unmistakeable: this was too much, particularly when it came from someone capable of asking such a simple question.
‘Quite frankly, Phil,’ he began imperiously, ‘I can’t see anything there that isn’t completely in order.’
‘I can,’ said Ruge. He scribbled something on the paper and grinned at Millar. ‘There’s a quantifier missing in the middle.’
Now von Levetzov too picked up his pen. His face twitched with a mixture of delight and malice. Millar ran his biro along the line and faltered.
‘Hang on . . . oh yes, OK, there it is,’ he murmured. He added the sign and made another note on his piece of paper. ‘Jenny, baby, we’re going to have to have a serious talk,’ he said as he wrote, and then looked at Perlmann. ‘Of course, I’d have spotted it in the galleys. But still, thanks.’
His polite smile was like a contrasting background designed to make his humorless, unforgiving face stand out. It wasn’t Jenny. It wasn’t a typo.
Afterwards, on their way through the drawing room, Millar pushed his way next to Perlmann.
‘That question of yours,’ he said, ‘I have the feeling there was something I didn’t understand. Perhaps we should sit down together.’
‘Absolutely,’ Perlmann replied, and afterwards he had the strange feeling of having said it in a gruff way that was alien to him – almost as if he were Millar.
Was he happy with the new room? Signora Morelli asked him as she handed him the key and the first post from Frau Hartwig.
‘Yes, very much so,’ he replied. He wished her question had sounded less businesslike; he would have liked his sense of complicity with her, which he had felt the previous day, to have lasted a little longer.
In his post there were two lecture invitations and a request for a reference from a student. Perlmann saw the student in front of him, sitting on the edge of his chair with his hands between his knees, looking at him through his thick glasses. The university courtyard was filled with the sluggish, hot silence of an early August afternoon. For more than two hours he had talked through his unsuccessful homework with him. The boy had filled half an exercise book with jagged, frantic handwriting. Then, in the doorway, after stammering an effusive goodbye, he had suddenly bent double, and it had taken Perlmann a moment to work out that this was a deep bow, a minion from another century taking his leave. Leaning against the closed door he had stood there for a long time and considered his office, which he had now been using for seven years: the beautiful desk, the elegant chair behind it, the lamps, the seating area. All of it far too expensive, he had thought, feeling like an interloper in the office of someone who actually did something.
He rang Frau Hartwig and dictated the reference to her, recommending the student for a grant. When she read the text back to him, he was startled by all his unfounded praise. He didn’t dare take it back, and moved on to the letters declining to give the lectures. Yes, he said finally, there was a hint of summer left in the air.
‘You can be glad that you’re down there,’ said Frau Hartwig. ‘The first autumn storms have started up here. Some people can’t suppress their envious remarks. You can imagine which.’
As soon as he had replaced the receiver, Perlmann sat down in the red armchair and picked up Leskov’s paper. But he soon lowered it again. You are going to write something for Italy, aren’t you? Frau Hartwig had said at the end of July. Perlmann had only nodded and continued with his business at the shelf. She had, incidentally, postponed her holiday, she explained a few days later. To just before Christmas. After that he had only gone to the office when she wasn’t there, and left her instructions on tape. In late September she had hesitantly asked if she could take two weeks’ holiday, or whether he needed her. ‘Just go,’ he had replied, and by way of disguise he had turned the relief in his voice into enthusiasm for the island of Elba, with which he associated nothing at all apart from Napoleon.
Now there were several pages in Leskov’s paper in which he engaged with the objection that we remember many episodes that we never put in story form. How then could he claim that language played such a key role in the episodic memory?
Leskov’s reply was expressed in eccentric terms, Perlmann thought, but basically the elements of his train of thought were familiar to him, and suddenly the translation started going faster than ever. When he grasped a sentence literally at first glance, he felt as if he had at that moment forgotten it was a Russian sentence – it had yielded its meaning to him with so little resistance. With breathless delight he went on reading. The truth of Leskov’s thesis was irrelevant; the main thing was comprehension. In fact, he n
oticed, many of the words he had copied out were now in his head. His confidence was growing from one paragraph to the next, and now all of a sudden he also had an incredibly lucky hand when it came to opening the right pages in the dictionary. It bordered on clairvoyance. When he finally had to turn on the light, he was already on page 20.
He could get cigarettes from the place Sandra had bought them from yesterday. Sandra. The promised stamps from Germany. He got Frau Hartwig’s envelope out of the waste-paper basket and tore the stamps from it. Then he left the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.
He was late today, the proprietress joked as she brought him the chronicle. He would have to choose something from the menu. Perlmann opened the book at the year when his father hadn’t awoken from his lunchtime nap. The Decca record company had, after listening to demo tapes, reached the view that The Beatles had no future, and turned down the opportunity to produce them. Antonio Segni became Italian president. It was a name that meant nothing to Perlmann, and he read the biographical outline to the smallest detail. Adolf Eichmann was hanged.
His father had lived to hear that. After the report he had turned off the radio in silence, his mother had told him. ‘He wasn’t a sympathizer, you know that,’ she had added. ‘It’s just that he feels somehow under attack when these things are talked about.’ By the graveside she had surprised Perlmann: she, who otherwise wept easily, didn’t shed a single tear.
She had surprised him for a second time the following autumn, this time with her interest in the Cuban crisis, of which he would not have thought her capable. She had, he had felt all winter, seemed better than ever. And then, sometime in the spring, her startlingly rapid decline began. Her world shrank to magazine articles about kitschy German musicals, Kennedy in Berlin interested her not at all, and when he dragged her to see Irma la Douce, she babbled something about pornography on the way home. When he told her about the death of Édith Piaf, she no longer knew who that was, although she had secretly listened to her chansons for years when his father was sitting in the pub with the other post-office workers. She was unaware of the shooting in Dallas. By day she slept with her mouth open, and from ten o’clock she terrorized the night nurse.
When Perlmann arrived at the hospital on the first day of the New Year someone else was already lying in her bed. No, he didn’t want to see her again, he had explained to the nurse, who was alarmed by the edge in his voice. And there had been another faux pas. The graveside ceremony wasn’t quite finished when he lit a cigarette in front of everyone. Why had he not managed to turn that precious moment of liberation into a permanent distinction from all the others, a calm lack of subservience, a fearlessness that needed no dramatic gestures? He laughed to himself and at the same time bit his lips when he thought about how he had simply left the relatives standing outside the pub. To the baffled question of why he hadn’t stayed at the wake, when he was, after all, paying for it, he had said: ‘Chiefly because the word disgusts me.’ Then he had disappeared around the corner.
The food over at the hotel probably wasn’t as good as its reputation, the proprietor grinned as he walked over to Perlmann’s table during a break. Perlmann looked at his watch. Ten past eight. Still enough time. No, it was fine, he said, snapped the chronicle shut and picked up his briefcase. The stamps nearly fell into what was left of his tomato sauce. They were for Sandra, he said, holding them out to the proprietor. No, no, he said, Perlmann must bring them to Sandra in person, or she would be disappointed. And then he led him up the stairs to Sandra’s room, which, like the whole apartment, was cramped and full of junk.
Sandra’s joy over the stamps was subdued by her difficulties with English. She was in every other respect such a clever child, her mother sobbed, but she just couldn’t get to grips with this funny spelling that had so little to do with the pronunciation. And they, her parents, couldn’t help. Could he stay for a moment and explain one or the other to her? Otherwise her test on Monday threatened to be a disaster. He just had to look at the last exercise in the book. There was more red ink than blue.
Perlmann stayed till eleven. Sitting on an uncomfortable stool, he went through the two last exercises with Sandra and then explained some grammar to her as well. Often she was close to tears, but in the end she smiled bravely, and he stroked her hair.
Then the proprietor brought him almond tart and a grappa. Time didn’t matter any more anyway, and Perlmann read through the year he had begun in the chronicle. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Right, that was the start of the Vietnam War. Khrushchev’s fall from power. The death of Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist. Perlmann knew him, but he hadn’t known that he had only reluctantly condemned the crimes of Stalin. And last of all Sartre, who had refused the Nobel Prize. What exactly had been his explanation? The text in the chronicle was confused, and made Sartre sound like a scatterbrain. Perlmann tried out various explanations as he walked across the deserted Piazza Veneto and along the promenade to the hotel.
Giovanni, who had been sitting watching television in the side-room, handed him a paper by Achim Ruge, almost a hundred pages thick, the text for Monday. The others had asked after him several times in the course of the evening, he said. ‘Because you weren’t at dinner yesterday, either,’ he added. Perlmann’s hand gripped the paper so convulsively that the top page was pulled out of its staple. Again he wanted to slap the pomaded head with the ridiculous sideburns. He turned away in silence and stepped into the open elevator.
In the corridor, all the bulbs were burning in the lamps. For a moment he was tempted to go and get the ladder, but then he walked into his room and sank on to the bed in the dark. After a while his head was filled again with the images of the new patient in his mother’s bed, the startled nurse, the coffin being lowered into the grave.
He went into the bathroom and swallowed the small bit of pill from yesterday. Édith Piaf’s real name had been Édith Giovanna Gassion, he thought before drifting into sleep. The individual snowflakes had melted on his mother’s coffin. He had found that distasteful. Perhaps the unseemly cigarette had had something to do with it as well.
8
Perlmann slept until late into the morning and then ordered a big breakfast. Over the first cup of coffee he was drawn back into the pull of translation, and now he found himself captivated not only by the experience of his faster comprehension, but by the ideas he was coming across in the text.
Leskov now attacked the idea that the narration of remembered scenes was a simple description of images arising, a linguistic inventory of fixed material that dictated the logic of narration through its unambiguously determined contours. That was neither the case with regard to the objective fixed points of a scene nor in the facets of the self-image read into it. The narration of one’s own past was always a fresh undertaking in which other forces were at work than the intention to call up recorded material in a detailed manner. There was above all the need to make a meaningful whole out of the remembered scene and one’s own presence within it, and accordingly a lack of meaning was interpreted as an imperfection of memory.
Perlmann faltered. What was the significance in this instance of smysl: sense? He would have liked to read the answer in an abstract form. But first there came several pages of examples, and the text became accordingly difficult, because Leskov’s descriptions were atmospherically precise, witty, and every now and again there was a sentence which, Perlmann assumed, had a poetic brilliance. He would have liked to know whether a Russian would have seen this as a break with the concise, laconic style that prevailed elsewhere in the text, or whether a native Russian would still perceive a unified stylistic form. At any rate, translating became a strain again at this point; he had to consult his grammar several times, and the limitations of the dictionary were infuriating. He irritably sent the chambermaid away again.
Dusk was already falling over the bay, giving the sea a metallic sheen, when Perlmann finally reached the conclusion drawn from the examples. The strong
est power in narrative memory, Leskov wrote, was the desire to understand one’s past self through its actions. From this desire one composed past scenes in such a way that one’s own actions, and also one’s sensations, appeared accessible and reasonable. That didn’t mean measuring them against an abstract catalogue of reasonable characteristics. It simply meant this: the narrated past must be comprehensible from the point of view of the present narrator. The narrator would not rest before he could recognize himself in his past self. And that referred not only to questions of intelligence and the purposefulness of his previous action, but above all to its moral aspects. Narrative memory was always also a justification, a piece of inventive apologia.
It was just before half-past seven when Perlmann stopped, exhausted, halfway down page 43. Two dozen pages of the vocabulary notebook were full, and on the right, next to the line that ran down the middle of the page, there were many gaps. Another twenty-five pages. If he got up very early tomorrow he would be able to finish it. And now he wanted to know: that business about the inventive elements in memory was all well and good, but where, in Leskov’s essay, was the experienced, sensory content of memory? The last time he saw him, his father had, as always, been wearing his wool felt jacket, and the fact that the color of the wool had alternated between dark olive green and light charcoal, depending on the light, was really not something that he had invented; it bothered him now, in memory, exactly as it had at the time. Or the loud thump with which the frozen lumps of earth had fallen on his mother’s coffin: what did Leskov make of that? Sensory content? He wrote in the margin.
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