Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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?