Perlmann's Silence (13 page)

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 strongest 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.

Before he went to dinner, he flicked absently through Ruge’s paper.
If I start on it on Monday, I’ll still have fifteen days for my own contribution.
It was only when he reached the stairs that he realized the idea didn’t throw him into a panic. He paused. It was as if the thought had occurred in the mind of someone else, someone completely uninvolved, and the weird idea crept over him that he was splitting away from himself.

‘I knocked on your door several times yesterday and today, Phil. I wanted to talk about the baffling question you asked me at the session,’ Millar said across the length of the table when the waiter had brought the soup. ‘And then, when you weren’t at dinner, I started to get worried. We all did, by the way.’

Perlmann felt that his fear of Millar was suddenly turning into black humor, accompanied by a pleasing sense of dizziness like the one he always felt when he had his first cigarette of the morning.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.
Deadpan
was how he would have described his face at that moment.

‘I know that now,’ said Millar, and lowered his head. ‘Evelyn’s just told me about the business with the new room.’

Perlmann looked into the sea-green of her eyes. She had her face under control, but her eyes contained a certain roguish laughter that seemed to have its origins right in the dark yellow particles of the iris.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The bed. My back. Do you get that, too?’

‘No,’ replied Millar, ‘I don’t. Not at all.’

‘He just couldn’t stand being between us, Brian,’ Ruge grinned.

Millar picked up his tone. ‘And we’re such nice guys, Phil. But seriously: can we make an appointment for tomorrow?’

The panic mustn’t show in his voice, and Perlmann ran his fingertips along his forehead, back and forth, and then again.

‘I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow,’ he said, and was pleased when he noticed that the quiver in his voice had remained a mere idea. ‘I’ll let you know some time next week.’

‘OK,’ Millar drawled, and Perlmann was sure that his drawl expressed a hint of suspicion. Or at least the drawl contained the message that suspicion would be inevitable if the matter were to be postponed again.

Perlmann lifted his plate and tried to get the last bit of soup into his spoon. With this kind of spoon that was something of a feat, and so it was that he didn’t notice Carlo Angelini until Silvestri got up to hug him. Angelini darted Perlmann an apologetic grin and walked around the table to greet the ladies first. Finally, he fetched a chair from the next table and sat down beside Perlmann. Unfortunately, he would have to leave again tomorrow morning, he said, but he wanted at least to look in this evening. How was it going?

‘
Benissimo
,’ said Evelyn Mistral, when Perlmann hesitated. Everything was perfect, Millar agreed, and before von Levetzov could speak, he thanked Angelini on behalf of the group.

Angelini listened to the explanation of how the work had been organized, and then asked about the subjects under discussion.

‘I know more or less what you’re working on,’ he said to Perlmann, who no longer had the faintest idea what he had told him back in Lugano. And then, with a smile that alternated between pride and irony, Angelini announced that the mayor of Santa Margherita was going to hold a reception for them all.

From the corners of his eyes, Perlmann saw Laura Sand pretending to blow her nose to keep from exploding with laughter. Only a small party, Angelini said, and the high point would be the appointment of Perlmann, as leader of the project, as an honorary citizen of the town.

‘With a certificate and a medal,’ he grinned. ‘It will begin on the Monday of the final week, so three weeks the day after tomorrow,’ he said after glancing at his pocket diary. ‘At eleven o’clock in the morning. Of course, I will be there as well.’

If Silvestri gives a presentation in the fourth week, I will gain a day because of the reception.

‘Then you just give your paper on Monday afternoon,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann.

‘And, of course, we expect something very special from a newly fledged freeman of the town,’ Ruge chuckled.

Angelini invited everyone for a drink in the drawing room. It was puzzling what connected Angelini and Silvestri, Perlmann thought as he walked behind the two of them, and saw them joking like very good friends. Angelini, the Italian yuppie in his elegant suit, who moved in the world of conventions like a fish in water, and Silvestri, this insubordinate, anarchically minded individualist, who happened this evening to be wearing a rumpled black shirt on top of everything. Was it something from their school days? Or because they both came from Florence?

My hatred of conventions
, he thought when he heard the fragments that Angelini addressed, in turn, to his colleagues. That hatred had been in Perlmann long before he met Agnes. But it was only because the feeling had found an echo in her that he had become fully aware of it. What Agnes had been most unable to bear was people who not only thought and acted conventionally but felt conventionally as well. People who felt what they thought they ought to feel. Her attempts to capture the subject in photographs were a failure. He heard her dark, sonorous voice, which could sound so brave before sometimes collapsing into the deepest melancholy:
At best you can show what people feel, and not that it would be more authentic to feel differently now. There are no pictures for that.
The hatred of conventional feeling had been a strong bond between them. But it had often alienated her from people they liked. It had, against her will, made her shy of people.

‘This might be the moment to play something for us,’ von Levetzov said to Millar, pointing to the grand piano with a smile full of flattering respect.
He’s treating him like his brilliant star pupil, who has outgrown him through his diverse and towering talents. And he didn’t need that. Not him.

‘Oh, yes, that would be super!’ exclaimed Evelyn Mistral.

Perlmann was irritated by her girlish enthusiasm and the teenage vocabulary that he had liked so much on her arrival, because it matched the red elephant on her suitcase. In defiance of all reason, he was furious about her enthusiasm, and internally reproached her for it – as if she were obliged to know what a nightmare Millar was gradually becoming to him, and as if she owed him making these sensations her own.

‘If you insist,’ Millar smiled, and heaved himself out of the deep armchair. On springy steps he walked across to the grand piano, unbuttoned his blazer and straightened the piano stool. He was making, Perlmann thought, the face of someone trying not to look vain, even though he knew that all eyes were upon him.

The movements of his hands were economical, energetic in the powerful chords, but without any effusive artistic gestures, he never lifted his hands more than a few centimeters above the keys. Reluctantly, Perlmann was forced to admit that he liked that. He himself had tried to play that way.

And yet he found Millar’s hands repellent. They were, he realized for the first time, hairy all the way down to the joints of his fingers. The thick hair on his arms continued into his hands like fur.

He compared the playing hands with the hands of the four other men. The only disturbing thing about Silvestri’s slender, white hands was the yellowish shimmer on the right index and middle fingers. Angelini was holding a cigarette, and one couldn’t have seen the nicotine on his tanned fingers in any case. Von Levetzov’s hands were folded on his knee, manicured, smooth hands with the first liver spots, on the little finger of his left hand a signet ring with his artistically intertwined initials. Achim Ruge’s hands lay on the wide arms of the chair, heavy hands that looked more like those of a manual labourer or a peasant than an academic. Perlmann liked them, just as he had found it easy to like Ruge since changing rooms.

The face that Millar made when playing matched the sober, matter-of-fact movements of his hands. It was an attentive, concentrated face that seemed to show a certain emotion, even though Millar had not made the slightest attempt to comment upon the music or his feelings through facial expressions.
I like that, too, in fact. Why can’t I simply take this man Brian Millar as he is? Why do I constantly have to chafe at him?

Millar was playing Bach. It must have been one of the English Suites, Perlmann thought, but he couldn’t have said which one. It was a while before he could identify his strange sensation: it was the absence of any surprise that what Millar was playing was Bach. Fine, the music coming from his room had been Bach as well. But that wasn’t it, he thought. He had the impression that it couldn’t have been anything but Bach; that where Millar was concerned it could only have been Bach. He thought he knew that if he had been asked before what Millar would play, he would have named Bach without hesitation. Bach and perhaps classical jazz, those were the sounds that suited his incredibly blue eyes in his clear, alert face, and his well-articulated, clear way of thinking, talking and writing.