Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘Exactly,’ said Perlmann, ‘that’s exactly why you mustn’t give it that power.’

  ‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ von Levetzov reassured him.

  ‘Anyone who thinks the death penalty worthy of consideration is suffering from an incurable disease: a lack of imagination,’ said Silvestri, who had regained control of himself and avoided Millar’s eye.

  Evelyn Mistral rested her hand on his arm. ‘That’s what we always said at home, too. Our example was the garrotte, which we had right through to the end of Franco.’

  ‘You probably think you’re the only person with an imagination,’ Millar said to Silvestri. ‘I think that’s presumptuous.’

  ‘I feel much the same as Laura,’ said Ruge, ‘but we must be honest: there was also Höss.’

  ‘And Eichmann,’ added von Levetzov.

  Perlmann had thought much the same, sitting in the trattoria, and he had felt uncomfortable not knowing what to think about it. Now, when he saw Millar nodding, something within him made up its mind.

  ‘The victims should have gone to Buenos Aires,’ he heard himself saying, ‘rather than the secret service. And once they got there they should have shot him down. And the same with Höss.’

  Millar curled his lips and looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought, Phil, that you were in favor of lynch law.’

  Perlmann felt as if he were stumbling. ‘Killing must be based on a personal relationship,’ he said quietly, stirring his coffee. ‘A hatred for one’s tormentor, for example. Otherwise it’s perverse.’

  In spite of the sleeping pill, Perlmann woke up twice that night and lay awake for a long time. He thought of the vulnerable void that had spread within him after Millar’s remark, and the inner violence that had suddenly blazed through that void. He kept thinking about those two things, and no longer understood himself.

  It was nearly morning when he found himself back in that circular room full of dictionaries. A calm, milky light fell through the conical glass roof. The room didn’t have a door. It didn’t need a door. It was silent. It was unreachable, untouchable. It was wonderful. Then the room began turning around him, and with him at the same time. The revolutions became increasingly swift, the bright spines of the books became colorful smears that grew paler and paler until they merged into a paper-thin wall of the palest grey, which only survived for a short time before collapsing under the merciless glow of noon and revealed the view of the bay, which was full of shouting children. He was high above the bay, but that didn’t matter, he would just step out into the light, everything was very easy and full of hope, and it was quite incomprehensible why his head should have collided with a diamond-hard, invisible wall. It allowed itself to be touched, that strange wall, but then again it didn’t, because the touched resistance could not be distinguished from an unresisting void. He feverishly tried to find a door, but the wall with its unyielding void mercilessly made his damp hands slip, so that he sank to the floor and suddenly felt his pillow growing damp from his tear-wet face.

  13

  For the two days after that Perlmann tried to be as unnoticeable as possible during the sessions on the veranda. Even though it had been a long time since he had looked at grammatical theory, he was still familiar with the difficulties of the individual proposals, and twice he managed to express objections that surprised and impressed the others, so that even Millar raised his eyebrows and nodded grudgingly. After that, on each occasion he could slip back into the background.

  While listening, he had an experience which, he now became aware, had accompanied him for a long time, but which he had never been able to imagine so clearly before: every time a new title was mentioned, or a label for yet another theory, he gave a start, and the complicated Latinate word seemed like an instrument of torture, because his first thought was always: I don’t know and I should know. But then, when they talked about the theory, he realized time and again that he knew it down to its smallest details. In fact, he knew it at the very moment of horror, one might almost say that this knowledge was part of his horror, and gave it its peculiar coloring. Except that the knowledge had no power of any kind over the horror. And over the years, he thought, the horror at a supposed gap in his knowledge had become a horror at the powerlessness of knowledge. Knowledge was like a wheel rotating at an overheated rate, without moving anything in his soul and without being able to protect him against the iron logic of its experience. Perlmann thought of the sentences of hopelessness that Jakob von Gunten had written down.

  After the sessions he slept into the afternoon and then sat down to Leskov’s paper. By now he had worked out in English Leskov’s theoretical vocabulary. There were some repetitions, and the more abstract passages went relatively smoothly. The only difficult parts were, time and again, the examples with all their sensory details and nuances. Even now he sometimes found himself at a complete loss with them, and in some cases the English text, black with corrections, remained hopelessly wooden and clumsy.

  One particularly hard nut to crack lay in the many examples with which Leskov illustrated his argument that narrative memory was unscrupulous when it came to defending the moral integrity of the past self. He cited clinical material that had been assembled by two of the pupils of Luria, the famous Russian neuropsychologist. These consistently concerned people suffering from a moral trauma. The extent of the confabulation and reinterpretation of past actions took one’s breath away, and even Leskov himself was plainly struck dumb by them, because he could hardly stop giving examples.

  And then came a piece of text describing how some of these people, when their truthful memories were too oppressive to be straightened out, split internally and kept the transgressive self away from the unstained self that was a refined fabrication. Perlmann stayed up half the night polishing these examples. And as he did so he discovered that in his impatient first run-through he had skipped a whole paragraph explaining the idea of these internal separations with reference to the ramification of stories. Leskov, it was clear, was playing here with the many Russian words for the concepts of separation and splitting, and it made Perlmann furious that he simply had no feeling for the nuances and had in the end to level everything out into splitting and fission. For the first time he found the new dictionary disappointing. Razdvoit’ was cognate with dvoinik, the word for a double or doppelgänger. But what exactly did that kinship mean? Then there was a missing sentence that would have given an example to confirm his suspicion that razyedinyat’ referred to the separation of people, although that – but even here he wasn’t entirely sure – wasn’t right for the severing given in the dictionary. And it was particularly irritating that the dictionary gave him no help as to whether he could use the obvious word cracking without doing violence to the text. When he looked through the English version of this section on Friday before he went to the trattoria, he crossed out the names of Luria’s pupils, and adapted the rest of the text accordingly. Who cared about those names anyway?

  It was noisy in the trattoria that evening. Some sort of club that the landlord belonged to was celebrating its jubilee, and even Sandra had to help in the restaurant. She had kept the little corner table free for Perlmann, but soon he was joined by an old man with a pipe and a beret. ‘Big fat book,’ the old man said when Sandra brought Perlmann the chronicle. Then the old man’s eyelids closed slowly, and he seemed to go to sleep over his beer.

  Perlmann had been surprised when Agnes had suggested getting married on the anniversary of their first meeting in St Mark’s Square, the day that she called the day of the pigeons. She normally rejected anything that carried a whiff of sentimentality. But he had liked it, and at the register office he had used all his powers of persuasion to make it possible.

  Then, when they were waiting for the train to Paris that day, the headlines of the tabloids announced the death of Louis Armstrong, and now it seemed to him that the photograph used back then was exactly the same as the one in the chronicle. Agnes, who affectionately called hi
m Satchmo, had been very quiet for a while after that, and when they got home to their first shared apartment, they had listened to the many jazz records that she owned. Their responses had been strangely contrasting: while he started liking these sounds, which had accompanied Agnes for a long time, to her they seemed suddenly alien. He could no longer remember the details, but at the end of their conversations on the subject they had decided to buy a used grand piano on instalments.

  At the newspaper stands in Paris, too, Armstrong’s death had been the predominant theme. At the corner next to the hotel, even today, there was a kiosk, as he had seen straight away when he had travelled to Paris in the last days of the previous August, because the start of the new school year with its noisy fervour in the playgrounds had thrown him into a panic. But today the kiosk looked quite different from before, when he had gone to fetch the paper every morning for ten days. And the hotel was barely recognizable, too. That had unsettled him. As if the world’s chief task were to serve as a stage for my memory. He had trudged morosely through the hot streets and wondered what he was doing there in Paris. Everything was different from how he remembered it, and with every discovery of that kind his French got even worse, so that the waiters answered him in English or German. After the second night he had taken the early train home.

  The pipe fell out of the old man with the beret’s mouth as he slept. He started awake and downed his glass in one. He looked curiously at the picture of Charles Manson being led along a corridor by two prison wardens. His tired face contorted into a grin and then, with the edge of his hand he made the gesture of a throat being slit, accompanied by a click of his tongue.

  Perlmann quickly flicked back to the previous year. The picture of a thalidomide child, and next to it a report on the suspension of the trial. Was the report bitterly ironic or not? His Italian wasn’t good enough to tell.

  The invasion by the Americans of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Perlmann flicked three years ahead: Nobel Prize for Henry Kissinger. That had been a month before Kirsten’s birth, when Agnes was finally able to leave the hospital, still weak from the infection. No, Kirsten’s leukemia had had nothing to do with that infection, the doctor had reassured them two years later. Frozen with fear, they had spent whole nights wondering whether they should take the risk of chemotherapy, which had only just been developed. For months their fear overshadowed everything else, and the news from the rest of the world bounced off it. Even the last American helicopter lifting off from Saigon left him cold.

  Only the death of Dmitri Shostakovich got through to him. It had been incredible to see him come on to the stage in person after the twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, his homage to Bach, had faded away. A man with round, horn-rimmed glasses in his pinched, twitching face, who had on the one hand written this music and on the other been caught up in his love-hate relationship with Stalin. For the first time Hanna had been sitting next to Perlmann at a concert. Her bandaged, blistered hand, which had forced her to take a few days’ break from playing, had been in her lap. He had very much liked her simple black dress.

  The old man had simply got up and left, without paying. Perlmann paid for him, and there was a debate because the proprietor didn’t want to take any money from him except for the beer, because of his extra tuition. ‘See you next week!’

  Today a crazed motorcyclist was driving around the deserted Piazza Veneto. The roar of the engine could be heard all the way to the hotel.

  Giovanni handed Perlmann, along with the key, the four texts that Adrian von Levetzov had distributed for his session on Monday. It was almost 200 pages in all. Perlmann set them on his suitcase and then fetched the ladder to unscrew the lightbulbs in the corridor, which had all been put back in.

  14

  Waking from a few hours’ troubled sleep, at dawn Perlmann sat down to Leskov’s text. Now came the sections which were supposed to show that not only the interpretation, but also the experienced quality of remembered feeling depended upon narration. If narrative memory became both more extensive and more dense – this was the thesis – it could be that the coloring and shade of remembered experience changed dramatically. It was, Perlmann thought, clever of Leskov to operate even here with terms like coloring and shade, which actually belonged in the domain of the sense of sight. He was thus rhetorically preparing the later thought that where the suggestibility of qualities of experience was concerned, sensory impressions behaved no differently from emotions. But was his thesis, in fact, accurate where the emotions were concerned?

  It all depended on the examples. During his first attempt, they had defeated him because his pocket dictionary contained only a small part of the vocabulary that Leskov was drawing upon. That problem was solved. But now he discovered once more how uncertain he was, deep down, with the English words. It wasn’t crude uncertainty, based on simple gaps in his knowledge. He was familiar with all the English words. But it was as if, when he tried them out, he was on shaky ground that could slip away at any moment – it was a bit like walking on a thin layer of fresh snow over black ice.

  That applied particularly to coloring, shade, tint, tone and nuance. What, for example, would the selection of words be like if it came to describing the colors of autumn leaves? And what about the political hue of a daily newspaper? If one were to slip at this point, Leskov’s text could easily be messed up, and even made to look ridiculous. And it was much the same with the naming and description of emotions and moods. Abandonment wasn’t the same as loneliness; melancholy and grief were not to be confused; cheerfulness and serenity – what about those? It was, he thought, difficult even in one’s mother tongue to distinguish between purely rhetorical variants and tangible emotional differences. And the further removed the foreign language, the less certainty there was in the matter.

  But in that case how could one know whether an example really was evidence for Leskov’s thesis? And could one honestly expect this area of vocabulary to be clearly transferred from one language to the other? Or was it the case, in the end, that each language categorized the experienced inner world in a slightly different way? And did that support or contradict Leskov’s thesis?

  Perlmann was torn between the vexing uncertainty that hung over his translation, and the cheering feeling of just having developed a new thought. The hours flew by. Every now and again he walked to the window and looked out on to the bay, which was filled once again with the glowing autumn light, so different from the broken, pallid light that would now be falling on the trees outside his window at home.

  Aside from the task of translating: what was the actual substance of Leskov’s thesis? Would remembered anxiety really change if the story of Kirsten’s leukemia had ended differently? Would not the terrified wait when the young doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses had picked up the final lab report be fixed in his mind forever, just like the thump of the clods of earth on his mother’s coffin? And the unforgettable mixture of admiration and trepidation that Shostakovich’s appearance had prompted? Were such things not simply part of a solid core of past experience, around which there grew stories that one might rewrite several times in the course of a life, leaving the center of experience itself unchanged?

  Trembling with hunger and exhaustion, Perlmann went to the trattoria at about half-past two. The only thing that interested him in the chronicle was the day when his anxiety about Kirsten had come to an end. No other day had embedded itself in his memory with such diamond-hard precision. Not even the day of the pigeons. Agnes had touched his arm when the doctor, holding the lab report, gave them the liberating information. Then they had walked across half the town, showing each other the colors of the gleaming wet autumn leaves, over and over again. For the first time he had cancelled his teaching duties with a lie, and they had gone to Sylt for a week. Those were days full of presence, days of wind and expansiveness and relief.

  The fact that the death of Jean Gabin had been in the paper at the time had escaped him. Now that he read the long article in the chronicle P
erlmann remembered telling Agnes the story of the film Le chat, while they tromped gurglingly through the mudflats. For years, Gabin hadn’t exchanged a word with Simone Signoret because she had killed his beloved cat out of jealousy. When they were sitting opposite one another by the fire in the evening, he would hand her a piece of paper that always bore the same words: le chat. She put these pieces of paper in a drawer, and one day, when she got clumsy, they all fell on the floor, hundreds of them. Agnes had thought the movie was monstrous, and Perlmann was ashamed, because Gabin’s behavior in the film wasn’t all that strange to him.

  The first time since his arrival, Perlmann felt the need to leave after dinner, and near the hotel he found a small path leading into the hills. As he tapped rhythmically on the stone wall with a stick, he tried out Leskov’s theory of the emotions, which he had recalled in the trattoria a short time before. But then he simply yielded to the pride that soon he would really have translated this long Russian text into English. He had another eighteen pages before the conclusion, and seven of those he had recently dealt with, even if there were still minor gaps involving the problem with the concept of appropriation. When the path turned and ran parallel to the slope, he supported himself on the wall and looked down at the town and the sea. The translation will be ready by the middle of the week. Then the neat stack of pages would lie on the otherwise empty glass plate of the desk. He had done something he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of doing. He felt that he, whenever he thought about this moment, should also really have thought beyond it. But that didn’t work. It didn’t work.

  In the middle of the week, half of his stay was over. And yet from a presentless time the mountain was just as high as it been at the beginning. And it was all much worse than it had been at the start, because the fear that ate like a silent acid into his pride as a translator – and hollowed it out so that it might collapse at any moment – made the mountain look like a gigantic wall that leaned towards him, with every heartbeat a tiny bit more.