Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  The departure of the others made him jump; he had been so far away. Didn’t he have anything to add? Ruge asked him on the way out. Perlmann was still filled with the insight that he had just gained into the logic of his misunderstanding, and managed a relaxed smile. He had just enjoyed listening for once, he said offhandedly. Otherwise one has to do so much talking.

  ‘Erm . . . well, yes, you’re right there,’ Ruge laughed, and it seemed to Perlmann as if his laughter was a touch less confident than usual.

  Millar was leaning against the reception desk, playing with his room key. Now he walked up to Perlmann. What was happening about their meeting? ‘About that question, I mean.’

  Perlmann asked Signora Morelli for the key and sought her eyes as if she could help him. The protection given him by his insight of a moment ago seemed to have been blown away.

  ‘I’ll give you a call,’ he said at last and disappeared so quickly into Maria’s office that it bordered on effrontery.

  The many bracelets on Maria’s wrists clattered with every movement that she made at the computer. Today she had chewing gum in her mouth and, as usual, she breathed out the smoke as she spoke. Perlmann asked her to phone Rapallo about the CD. Laughing, she made the people at the other end look it up, in spite of the fact that it was the beginning of the siesta. Neither of the two music shops there had the CD, but the second offered to order it from Genoa, it would take between one and two days. Perlmann shook his head when she passed on the information, so she ended the phone call, puzzled by his haste. She showed no impatience when Perlmann asked her to try in Genoa. The chewing gum snapped from time to time between her teeth. She knew the big music shop in the city; she had, she said, grown up there. At first they said they didn’t have the CD, and judging by Maria’s face they doubted whether it existed at all. But then Maria said a few indistinct words, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, which must have been Genoese dialect, and then she asked them to take a look in the storeroom and amongst the new acquisitions. It took a long time. Perlmann felt uneasy, and he was grateful to Maria when she jokingly said that there must be some really lovely music on it. She was visibly relieved when she was finally able to tell Perlmann that the CD was there. It had come in the last delivery and hadn’t yet been properly unpacked. He asked her to see to it that it was set aside for him, and that it should on no account be sold. He would drop by in the course of the afternoon. As he left he would have liked to give Maria an explanatory word, but apart from a repeated Mille grazie! nothing came to mind.

  He fetched money and credit cards from the room and then walked to the station. There was no point hurrying. He didn’t want to find himself, yet again, standing outside a shop closed for siesta. On the platform, where he had to wait for almost an hour, at regular intervals that remained inexplicable, one was assailed by a shrill ringing sound that penetrated one to the marrow. Luckily, the train was almost empty. Perlmann drew the grubby curtain over the window of his compartment and tried to sleep. A week had passed. A fifth. Was that a lot or not much? He wished Silvestri would make up his mind soon about whether he was going to deliver his lecture in the fourth or fifth week. If it was the fifth, Perlmann had only another fifteen days to write a paper. Otherwise it was eighteen days; nineteen, if he postponed the copying until Saturday. Sometimes Maria didn’t work on Saturday. Was copying possible anyway? Might she leave him alone with the machine?

  Genoa was crammed with cars. All over the place trucks parked in the middle of the street to be unloaded. You sat at a green light, not moving an inch; a concert of car horns, it was hopeless. It was always like this, the taxi driver said calmly, looking at his flustered passenger in the rear-view mirror. Siesta? Yes, sure, but not for delivery men. At least not on Mondays. When they stopped outside the music shop after an eternity, the shop was still in darkness, even though the lunch break had been over for ten minutes, according to the sign on the door. Perlmann dispatched the taxi. Why didn’t people stick to what was written down? Why?

  And then, as if his desperate irritation had suddenly woken him, it occurred to him that he would have to factor in at least two or three days for Maria to type out his paper. All of his previous calculations had been wrong. He took off his jacket and wiped his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief. In reality it was like this: if Silvestri opted for the fifth week, and if he also wanted to give Maria the Friday, Perlmann had no more than ten days. And if she was willing to write the whole thing out on Monday and Tuesday, that made thirteen, which required his colleagues to read the paper in a single day. On the other hand, if Silvestri made his presentation in the fourth week, that made sixteen days, again assuming that Maria could do it in two days and make the copies on Friday evening before she went away for the weekend. Trembling, Perlmann put his jacket back on and shook himself disgustedly as he felt his shirt sticking to his back.

  He had to wait again in the shop because the man Maria had spoken to was late. Under the startled eyes of the salesman Perlmann tore open the wrapper and frantically fumbled around with the double sleeve without managing to get it open. ‘Ecco!’ smiled the salesman, flipping it open with a single, easy motion. The second of the two CDs was the right one. Perlmann looked for number 930, put the CD in the CD player and put on the headphones.

  It was the piece that Millar had played.

  His earlier panic had vanished. But he was disappointed that the feeling of triumph wasn’t stronger. That it wasn’t, in fact, there at all. Suddenly, the whole action struck him as entirely pointless – childish and pointless. He paid and stepped into the street, weary and ashamed. With a sluggish gait he set off towards the station.

  At first it was hard to make out that behind the scaffolding there was a bookshop, which seemed just to have opened. Perlmann turned round and walked into the shop, which had lots of mirrored windows and was fabulously illuminated. With his hands in his pockets he strolled along the tables of bestsellers, past the shelves of literary fiction and back into the languages section.

  The big book with the red back and black inscription immediately caught his eye. It was a Russian-English dictionary, and vice versa. The paper was thin and greyish, and when you touched it you were left with a soapy film on your fingers; but the entries for the words were very detailed and in many cases a quarter of a column long. Osvaivat’. Perlmann sat down in an elegant but uncomfortable chair and looked up the word. To assimilate, master; to become familiar with. He had guessed correctly: what happened in the process of narrative memory was, according to Leskov, that one mastered one’s own past and thus brought it closer; and those were precisely the elements in the term assimilation. Making it one’s own would be another formulation, he thought. How would one decide between those words if one were to translate the text into English?

  He wished he had his vocabulary book with him, then he could fill in the many gaps in it via a detour through English. He looked along the shelf: they didn’t have a Russian-German dictionary. But they did have the German-English Langenscheidt that he, too, had at the hotel. Sich aneignen: to appropriate, to acquire, to adopt. So appropriating, it appeared, was the action of taking things into one’s own position, while one needed acquiring in the appropriation of knowledge, and adopting could mean assimilating an opinion and perhaps also taking up an attitude. He picked up the red dictionary again and looked up to appropriate: prisvaivat’. Then to acquire and to adopt: usvaivat’. Words, then, which were each distinguished only by their prefixes from osvaivat’. How precisely could one work out Leskov’s choice of words? Permann stepped aside to let a woman with enormous earrings get to the shelf, where she made straight for the little Russian-Italian dictionary. He was tempted to talk to her and draw her into his internal discussion, but she had already turned away with an absent smile and was walking to the cash register. You could not, he thought, appropriate your own past as you could a subject. And not like a piece of knowledge, an opinion or an attitude, either. Did appropriation not also mean recogniti
on? For recognizing the dictionary gave soznavat’, which could also mean realizing; for acknowledging, priznavat’. Had he not seen one of those words while skimming Leskov’s paper?

  He looked furtively around and set the dictionary slowly back on the shelf. Again his face was hot in that way that you could see from outside. Agnes had seen that heat, at any rate, when he sat on the floor with mountains of dictionaries, and she hadn’t liked that hot face. You look somehow . . . fanatical, she had once said, and it had done no good when she had later explained that it had been the wrong word entirely.

  He was two streets on when he turned round. He stopped under the scaffolding for a while, teetered on his heels and looked into the gutter, where the remains of an ice-cream wrapper lay in a disgusting brown mush. Then he turned abruptly, went in and got the big red dictionary down from the shelf. As he did so, he saw in the mirror that he was wearing the expression of someone reluctantly performing a secret mission. Credit cards only from 100,000 lire, said the man at the cash register. Perlmann set down next to it the other copy of the Russian-Italian dictionary that the woman had bought before, and now that was enough.

  Was assimilation really an adequate translation of osvaivat’? he asked himself in the train. Assimilating, when used about emigrants, for example, meant adaptation or conforming, which was quite far removed from the idea of appropriation. And mastering could, in principle, also mean keeping certain memories at a distance. Given that usvaivat’ was also to be found in the text, could one acquire something which, like one’s own past, already belonged to one? Fine, Leskov might say that before narrative memory it didn’t really belong to one . . . And what about adopting? Perlmann walked down the associative corridors that led off in his mind from the English word. You could also use it, he thought, when it came to absorbing a piece of culture or a religion. That meant that a certain internal detachment was involved, as when one was acting a part. And wasn’t there a hint of fakery and fraud in there as well? Then adopting would be impossible as a translation of usvaivat’ in the sense of appropriation. Or was it? For if narrative memory were a kind of invention . . .

  Lots of people boarded the train at Genova Nervi, and the carriage became very noisy. Perlmann had to struggle to concentrate. Appropriating the past: didn’t that also mean standing by it? And what would be the best English word for that? He lost his thread for a moment, and slipped into an exhaustion that often came upon him when he spent too long sitting on the floor with dictionaries. At Recco Station it occurred to him: endorsing. Under the curious glances of the people sitting opposite him he looked it up, balancing the big dictionary on his knees. Indossirovat’. But that seemed to be a word that only occurred in a financial context. Podtverzhdat’ in the sense of confirming. Did that word occur in Leskov’s text? He looked out the window, past the eyes of the others, into the gloom. Incorporating something, it seemed to him, was also part of the meaning of appropriation. But now the train stopped in Santa Margherita.

  ‘One moment, please,’ he said afterwards to the taxi driver. He set the dictionaries down on the lid of the trunk and looked up incorporating. Vkluchat’. It seemed to him that he had read that. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said to the baffled driver.

  In his room he immediately sat down at the desk. He was glad that he hadn’t stacked the books up as he had in his first room. In this way he could comfortably set out the material that needed to be translated. Above all, there was enough room for the Russian-English dictionary, which, when it was opened, occupied almost half of the desktop. The other dictionary, the one that the woman with the huge earrings had bought, he pushed into the right-hand corner at the back. He had never seen earrings that size before. He had liked the emerald green with the fine gold edge.

  He started where Leskov began to speak about the idea of appropriation. For osvaivat’ he wrote both assimilate and master, with a slash between them. It was a much slower process than translating into German. On the other hand, it was much more exciting, and if he managed an English sentence easily he breathed out heavily with joy. Often, on the other hand, easiness didn’t come into it. Comprehension was also possible when there were vague edges of meaning. Then, without really noticing, one brought along the great diversity of knowledge that accompanied every word in one’s own language, and that knowledge enabled one to fill in the gaps in comprehension when confronted by unfamiliar foreign words. Translation from one foreign language into another, on the other hand, ruthlessly exposed the smallest uncertainty in one’s linguistic sensitivity. Of course, that applied particularly to Russian. But Perlmann also quickly got a sense of how great his uncertainty was with regard to certain English expressions, and there were sentences when both sides blurred, it was like an equation with two unknowns. At such points he became aware of how many things he had hitherto simply ignored.

  And, nonetheless, from the start it was like a fever that he didn’t want to come to an end. He had filled almost two pages, when the word priznavat’ arrived. He was about to see if there was a translation other than to acknowledge, when he remembered dinner. He irritably slipped into his jacket and dashed down the stairs. The waiter was already clearing away the soup plates when Perlmann sat down at the table opposite Millar.

  Only now, at the sight of Millar’s face, did Perlmann remember the CD. He reached into his jacket pocket and felt the cool plastic of the packaging. He had the sense of touching a relic from some past inner world that looked ridiculous in retrospect. And had Millar’s face not shown disapproval of his repeated lateness, he would have let things lie.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Brian,’ he began, trying to keep all sense of triumph out of his face, ‘that encore you played on Saturday isn’t number 902 in the catalogue. It’s 930; 902 is in G major.’

  He had managed to say it in a relaxed, almost playful manner, and a touch of awareness of how ridiculous the whole business was had made its way into his voice. But now a silence fell upon the room, where the only person who wasn’t part of the group was John Smith, and gave the scene an ominous feeling of drama.

  Millar straightened his glasses, leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. He stuck out his lower lip for a moment, shook his head barely perceptibly and said with a smile that made his eyes narrow:

  ‘Quite frankly, Phil, I don’t think I’m wrong there. I’m pretty familiar with the lesser-known Bach.’

  Perlmann took his time. He held Millar’s challenging gaze. This one time he found it wonderfully simple. Their eyes locked onto each other. That moment compensated for much, and he savored it. After what was about to come, Millar wouldn’t dare to return to the business about his idiotic question.

  He took the package containing the two CDs out of his pocket, let his eye rest upon it with theatrical elaborateness, and then pushed it slowly across the undulating tablecloth to Millar. Laconically. Very laconically.

  ‘You can see your mistake for yourself. It’s a very popular recording, by the way. You can have it.’ He was glad that he had said mistake and not error. It sounded more like school and would hit him harder.

  Von Levetzov looked curiously across to Millar and then at Perlmann with a smile that was supposed to indicate that this time he was on his side. He’s an opportunist, a conversational optimist, who always throws in his lot with the stronger battalion.

  Ruge smiled as well, but it was a smile without partisanship. He was simply amused by the matter; he who was always ready to attack in debates, and loved an exchange in which someone stood to win or lose.

  Millar had opened the CD case, and shook his head with his lips pursed. ‘The label on the CD – that doesn’t mean a thing.’

  ‘It’s all in the booklet. In the other case.’

  Millar contemptuously let the side of the booklet slide along his thumb. ‘That would mean that it’s a piece from the Klavierbüchlein,’ he said, and the comedy of his unsuccessful attempt at an umlaut took some of the contemptuous sharpness away from his words. ‘And it isn’t one of
those. I’m absolutely sure of that.’ He snapped the case firmly shut and pushed it across to Perlmann, who left it in the middle of the table, right next to the gravy boat.

  ‘Well, Brian,’ said Perlmann, and tilted his head to the side as Millar often did, ‘we can listen to the piece over there later on.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Laura Sand joined in. ‘I love that simple tune.’

  If there was anything ironic about her remark, it was only the merest hint. But Millar irritably raised his eyebrows as if someone were mocking him in the most brazen way.

  ‘Well, Phil,’ he said, aping Perlmann. ‘Liner notes can contain mistakes, can’t they? It does happen. Even on CBS. No, no, we would need the score.’

  ‘Which could also be misidentified,’ said Silvestri, blowing smoke across the table.

  ‘Well now, Giorgio,’ snapped Millar.

  ‘Buon appetito,’ Silvestri grinned, raising his glass.

  Millar stayed out of the rest of the conversation. He stared at the plate in front of him. Only once did he glance past Perlmann into the room, but lowered his head again immediately. Evelyn Mistral giggled, and when the others turned round they saw John Smith raising his glass to Millar.

  ‘By the way, Phil,’ Millar said suddenly over coffee, ‘how come you happen to have a copy of the record on you?’ He rested his chin on his folded hands and looked steadily at Perlmann. ‘Sort of a fluke, huh?’