Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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.

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.