Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  On the way back Perlmann had the feeling that his swallowing reflex had stopped working, and that he had to replace it every few seconds with an additional, almost already planned action. It didn’t mean anything, he said when she asked him why he was so quiet all of a sudden.

  Back at the hotel he drew the curtains and lay down in bed. It was baffling, he thought, how little he had internally bridled against all that conventional business outside the church. What had the bride actually looked like? Her features were suddenly strangely blurred, and he tried in vain to give the face back its sharp contours. He fell asleep while doing so.

  It was after three o’clock when he woke up. He showered for a long time, ordered coffee and a sandwich, and then sat down to Leskov’s paper. He wanted to finish it today. So that he could start on his own contribution tomorrow. He would just drop in very briefly at the trattoria to check on Sandra and reassure her about her test.

  Sensory content? It was a while before he understood his marginal note again. Leskov himself now addressed this point, and Perlmann was waiting impatiently for his conclusion. But the paper approached the question indirectly. First of all it discussed the case of remembered emotional qualities. Again the text became very difficult, because now Leskov began to deploy the rich Russian vocabulary for emotions and moods, and the pocket dictionary was not up to these nuances. Irritated, and with a feeling of linguistic imposture, Perlmann inched his way along from one example to the next. The conclusion was concise: if the story of the experienced past is retold, the remembered qualities of the experience also presented themselves in a different way.

  Perlmann was annoyed that he couldn’t understand the examples in all their depth because of the gaps in his language. It meant that he didn’t know what to make of the general assertion. And it was the key to what came next, because now Leskov constructed the case of remembered sensory impressions in analogy with the case of the emotions. The vocabulary for shadings in smell and taste became a problem, and there was much that Perlmann understood only very vaguely.

  Could one rewrite a whole world of past sensory impressions in the course of a new narrative memory? He doubted it. What he had felt at the sight of the new patient in his mother’s bed might really look different, even in terms of its quality of experience, if the narrative memory were one day to take a different path – if, as Leskov wrote, it were on the one hand to describe larger loops and on the other hand to grow more dense. And something similar might apply to the internal drama that was played out that evening when his father accused him of ingratitude for breaking off his training at the Conservatoire. It’s my life, and mine alone, Perlmann had replied in a quivering voice before rushing into the night. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that different stories could give different shades to the remembered experience of that moment. If, for example, one added the contemporary insight that his life had remained under the diktat of parental expectations, in spite of the touching heroics of his rebellion, his fury at the time still felt quite different from what it might have been in a story of a successful liberation.

  To this extent, then, one could follow Leskov. But the color of his father’s wool jacket, and the thumps on the coffin? Could that be rewritten? In a separate section Leskov, quoting no source, introduced Marcel Proust. But Perlmann found that less helpful than embarrassing, since it didn’t sound as if Leskov knew Proust at first hand.

  He turned on the light. Another nine pages. In conclusion, Leskov wrote, he now wanted to address the question of what his previous conclusions meant for the idea of the osvaivat’ of his own past. The page on which osvaivat’ should have appeared was missing from the dictionary. Perlmann furiously established that three pages were missing. He flicked to the end and glanced at the last few sentences of the paper. And so, he hoped that he had shown, Leskov concluded, that the ability to narrate and the ability to create a particular, very individual past were in the end one and the same. In this way, language and experienced time were much more closely linked than one might at first imagine. No one – this was the last, rather bombastic sentence – had understood the nature of language if they did not see it as the medium which, above all others, made possible a sophisticated experience of time.

  Perlmann set off for the trattoria. When he sat down to these last sentences after taking a break, he would also know, at last, the meaning of osvaivat’.

  Sandra wasn’t there. A child needs to have a bit of a life, too, her mother said, so she had let her go out when her friends had called round. The test – God, yes. ‘Che sarà, sarà!’

  Perlmann rested his elbow on the chronicle and smoked. He saw himself lying on his belly in the shade of the hotel garden, with his Latin book in front of his nose. Holidays on the Mediterranean, the first that his parents had been able to afford thanks to a small inheritance from Switzerland; then, seven years after the end of the war, still a sensation. Siesta time. Even his parents had had a lie down for a bit. Some of the hotel guests were dozing in the loungers on the beach. Over there was the sea, glimmering in the midday sun, and that shimmering glare, that was the present, the thing that really mattered. Some children were in the water, splashing each other and shrieking. Back then, of course, at thirteen, he hadn’t thought it explicitly but he had behaved and felt as if he had to master all those Latin words and irregular verbs before he would be allowed to go out into that glittering present.

  Perlmann opened the chronicle. It must have been in July. He read what it said about politics as if it had happened before he was born, it had so little to do with his life at the time. That applied equally to Eisenhower and King Farukh, and the death of Kurt Schumacher the following month. Benedetto Croce, finally, was something from another world. He only remembered Juan Manuel Fangio, the racing driver, and the day after his return from Italy there had been that radio report on the funeral of Evita Perón. They had sat by the little radio, and the speaker’s melodramatic voice, hacked about with atmospheric disturbances, had turned the funeral procession into something mythical, making his mother cry. Was it then that he had started to understand the time difference between continents? Because it was very curious for hundreds of thousands of people to walk through the Argentinian afternoon late in the evening.

  On the day of his visit to the circus with Hanna, the chronicle recorded only one event: Antonio Segni, who was still Italian prime minister at the time, set off on a trip to Washington.

  A few weeks later the film The Bridge by Bernhard Wicki had been shown. Perlmann was already holding the tickets in his hand when Hanna had looked in the display case and said no, she simply couldn’t bear to see such pictures. It had been the start of the critical period between them, and when she had gone running through the foyer of the Film Palace, her coat billowing around her, it had looked as if she were running away from him rather than the images.

  Sandra’s face was hot, her loose hair tousled. She greeted Perlmann only fleetingly, and the way her exuberance went out at the sight of him revealed that his presence reminded her of the test, and the fact that she didn’t want to think about it right now. Perlmann paid.

  Assimilating, he thought as the hotel came into view: that might be the meaning of osvaivat’. Assimilating your own past through narrative memory. What could that mean in Leskov’s theory? And what else did it mean?

  It was just before three when he had read the paper through to the end. Exhausted, he stepped to the open window. It was as quiet as the grave. He felt hungover and, what was worse, robbed of a support. What should he do now that the task of finishing Leskov’s paper no longer held him up?

  What Leskov had written on the last pages, he thought as he got undressed and slipped under the covers, did not produce a clear, consistent image. First of all there was the idea that appropriation – if that really was the term – was a form of understanding: one appropriated one’s own past by giving it a meaning. It was the understanding achieved by narrative memory, Leskov continued, that produced the c
rucial feeling of belonging. And accordingly, he interpreted the taste of strangeness that a past experience might have as a lack in their understanding. It was through narrative memory, this was his rather pithy conclusion, that a person first acquired a spiritual identity beyond time. So: without language no spiritual identity.

  Perlmann felt drawn to this thought; for several minutes he was enthused by it. Then again he felt uneasy: was there not also mental identity in the sense of an organic structure of feeling around which both a person’s actions and his imagination revolved, regardless of whether the structure of sensations was articulated in language or not? But that wasn’t the actual problem about Leskov’s theory, he thought, while, counter to his habits, he smoked a cigarette in bed. How did the business about appropriation fit with the thesis that remembering was in a certain sense invention? Appropriating – that assumed a given inner space of remembered experience that had to be paced out, so to speak, and conquered. But such a given inner space could, strictly speaking, not exist if past experience, even in its emotional quality, was only created by narration. Or not?

  Exhaustion took hold of him, and he buried his head in the pillow. On the desk was Ruge’s paper, of which he had read not a word. And at some point in the next few days he would have to go and see Millar, who wanted to talk to him about his idiotic question. For a moment he rested on his elbows and made a frantic attempt to remember. But the question had escaped him, and he fell back on to the pillow.

  In Santa Margherita, this little dump, he would hardly be able to get hold of the CD of Bach’s lesser-known Preludes. Should he try to do it in Rapallo, or go to Genoa? And how would he find the shop with the biggest range? Did taxi drivers know things like that?

  He had taken such trouble with Sandra and now, standing by his table, she looked snootily down at him. And why were the pages of the chronicle suddenly stuck together? Two menacing shadows darkened everything, and when he looked up, Millar and Ruge were standing in front of him. Ruge was bent forwards, holding with his chin and hands on to a tower of paper that could at any time bend in the middle and collapse. Millar’s flashing glasses came closer and closer to the chronicle. The word sneering shot through Perlmann’s head, and in the middle of the desperate attempt to snap the chronicle shut in front of Millar’s nose, he woke up and heard the rustle of the rain.

  10

  As he sat at the front, in his inevitable brown suit with the too-short sleeves, on the ostentatious armchair, Achim Ruge looked like a member of the plebs who had usurped the Kaiser’s throne. He had – this was more striking than usual today – a problem with the switch from short-sighted to far-sighted, and constantly put his glasses crooked, making everyone scared that he would injure himself with the wire end that stuck inwards like a thorn. In spite of his bizarre pronunciation, his English was bafflingly fluent, and today, once again, he surprised Perlmann with his rich vocabulary, which made Millar’s oral mode of expression sound practically pitiful. Back at Harvard they had smiled at him at first. The peasant boy from the country, from Germany. Then, he delivered his first works on the theory of grammar, supposedly it was a hundred pages long. It went off like a bomb, and Ruge became a star overnight. He stayed three years. Then, when they made him a tempting job offer (the story continued) the American way of life wasn’t for him. He wanted to get back to the farm. And this from a boy who had grown up in Böblingen, the son of a tax official.

  His paper began with a reference to experiments by Perlmann, which had attracted attention nearly ten years before, because they contradicted a current theory about the linguistic learning process. Perlmann had realized this with horror when he had sat on the edge of the bed, head heavy, quickly flicking through Ruge’s text. On the way down to the veranda Perlmann had tried in vain to call to mind the details from back then. It was all so far away. Only the summary that Ruge now repeated brought back the contours. But they were outlines of something that someone had discovered and plainly presented with verve at the time, but who was only coincidentally identical with him, Philipp Perlmann. Nonetheless, those experiments had established his position in the subject for years, and it had been a long time before the others had noticed that he had finally become a theoretical linguist. That this had come about because he didn’t like labs, and felt leeched dry after a day of teamwork, they could not know.

  The bad thing for Evelyn Mistral’s father had been the other doctors and the nurses who stood around him when he was operating. Yes, exactly, Perlmann thought now, exactly.

  It was strange – ironic, in fact, he said to himself as Ruge now explained his own experiments – but back then Perlmann had especially wanted to know something quite precisely, and this desire, atypical of him, had catapulted him into the spotlight. Or was what he had thought on Friday on this chair about his need for blurred lines wrong? Because his later works had been precise as well. Would they have been possible at all if there had not been a will to precision inside him? But those were two different things: the natural need and the learned will.

  His writings were well liked among the students, they were well written and transparently constructed. What never came was a big hit like Adrian von Levetzov had had, and Millar with his book two years before. Perlmann was quite sure that the others sometimes wondered what, in the final analysis, his achievement really was. That certainty was always at the forefront of Perlmann’s consciousness when he was dealing with colleagues on technical matters. Then he would have an impressive idea and for a while all self-doubt was forgotten: he came up with arguments, observations and suggestions that were somehow original, too. You could see it in the faces of his listeners. He had won them round. A cushion of respect had come into being, and he stayed up half the night to hold on to the feeling. The next morning he was once again nothing but a hard worker wondering what he had achieved.

  The next hour was entirely filled with a conversation between Ruge and Laura Sand, who compared her animal experiments, detail by detail, with what had been done in Bochum. To Perlmann’s surprise all the irritation and impatience had fallen away from her, and the concentrated peace and intensity of their analyses had something so hypnotic about it that from time to time even Ruge forgot to react. For the first time Giorgio Silvestri took notes. Only once was the atmosphere broken, when the red-haired American appeared and did his exercises outside the window. ‘John Smith,’ said Millar, keeping a straight face. ‘From Carson City, Nevada.’ Amidst the laughter Evelyn Mistral glanced at Perlmann.

  The way the academic preoccupation with language sounded this morning, it was a good thing, thought Perlmann. An interesting thing that should be encouraged. And then, all of a sudden, he sensed that he was thinking this thought with a very particular internal attitude: like someone watching an academic program on television after work, before switching to sports.

  It wasn’t really true to say that he was only marginally interested in language, but he wasn’t interested in it in this way. Dissecting, measuring, formalizing language: that basically didn’t interest him any more than chemistry. If languages constantly cast their spell over him, it was as a medium of experience, and above all as a means of feeling his way towards the present, which eluded his grasp with such diabolical dexterity. At the time it had seemed, when he was on the student secretariat, so natural, so logical, to enrol on the linguistics course. Many of the other things, like law or physics, ruled themselves out from the outset, so he didn’t even have to think about them. And medicine was out of the question, too: it meant far too much physical proximity to other people.

  He liked languages. And you have such a facilité, his mother said, seeking with her sprinkling of such words to conceal her complete lack of talent for foreign languages, not least from herself. And besides, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. As with so many other things, the only thing that he possessed was hard work, endurance and an often blind constancy of will.

  Achim Ruge had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair
. The two carved claws of the seat-back were wider than the armpits of the jacket, and stuck so far into the sleeves that they created the impression of a scarecrow that towered above Ruge’s big, bald head. But Perlmann didn’t want to be distracted either by that or by the ludicrous rubber bands on Ruge’s upper arms. For the first time he thought he understood his own choice of academia. It was a misunderstanding, nothing more. And this misunderstanding was fundamentally so simple, he thought, that it took one’s breath away: by leaving the Conservatoire he had said farewell to the hope of outwitting the present by playing the piano, and bending it to his will. Because the mere hearing of music would never extend further than to an intensified yearning for the present. And now he threw himself into a preoccupation with language as a medium that was supposed to take the place of music and replace the unfulfilled hopes for the present. These hopes had been so powerful, and so breathless the switch, that he had overlooked one simple fact: language created presence when one allowed oneself to fall into it, when one swam in it and played with it, and not when one dissected it and considered it with the eyes of one seeking for laws, for explanations, systematizations and theories. It was laughably simple, every child knew that. And yet he had confused the two things and had – in love with the impressionist, sensual density of language – devoted himself to an analytical effort that must systematically lead him away from what he was looking for, because it was quite simply defined in a different way.

  While Silvestri was reporting on experiments into aphasia and thus provoking a heated debate, Perlmann was in the Auditorium Maximum of Hamburg University, accepting his record of study from the hands of the dean. Whether he really felt, when he saw beneath the photograph and his name the entry linguistics, that something was wrong, or whether he had retrospectively read his warning unease into that distant moment, was something that could not be decided. And if one believed Leskov, it was a meaningless question. At any rate it now seemed to him that he had been separated from the crowd of the others in the hall by a fine and unnameable gap that had something to do with the fact that those others had experienced their self-selected membership of a subject with greater enthusiasm. And the longer Perlmann reflected upon this insidious little gap, the more the suspicion germinated within him that his action had even then sprung from a vagueness and a lack of internal definition, on the basis of which indifference towards the whole idea of study and research lay an indifference that it had taken him thirty years to discover and acknowledge.