Perlmann's Silence (16 page)

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 crucial 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.

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.