Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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.

He had to wait again in the shop because the man Maria had spoken to was late. Under the startled eyes of the salesman Perlmann tore open the wrapper and frantically fumbled around with the double sleeve without managing to get it open. ‘ Ecco! ’ smiled the salesman, flipping it open with a single, easy motion. The second of the two CDs was the right one. Perlmann looked for number 930, put the CD in the CD player and put on the headphones.

It was the piece that Millar had played.

His earlier panic had vanished. But he was disappointed that the feeling of triumph wasn’t stronger. That it wasn’t, in fact, there at all. Suddenly, the whole action struck him as entirely pointless – childish and pointless. He paid and stepped into the street, weary and ashamed. With a sluggish gait he set off towards the station.

At first it was hard to make out that behind the scaffolding there was a bookshop, which seemed just to have opened. Perlmann turned round and walked into the shop, which had lots of mirrored windows and was fabulously illuminated. With his hands in his pockets he strolled along the tables of bestsellers, past the shelves of literary fiction and back into the languages section.

The big book with the red back and black inscription immediately caught his eye. It was a Russian-English dictionary, and vice versa. The paper was thin and greyish, and when you touched it you were left with a soapy film on your fingers; but the entries for the words were very detailed and in many cases a quarter of a column long. Osvaivat’. Perlmann sat down in an elegant but uncomfortable chair and looked up the word. To assimilate, master; to become familiar with . He had guessed correctly: what happened in the process of narrative memory was, according to Leskov, that one mastered one’s own past and thus brought it closer ; and those were precisely the elements in the term assimilation . Making it one’s own would be another formulation, he thought. How would one decide between those words if one were to translate the text into English?

He wished he had his vocabulary book with him, then he could fill in the many gaps in it via a detour through English. He looked along the shelf: they didn’t have a Russian-German dictionary. But they did have the German-English Langenscheidt that he, too, had at the hotel. Sich aneignen: to appropriate, to acquire, to adopt. So appropriating , it appeared, was the action of taking things into one’s own position, while one needed acquiring in the appropriation of knowledge, and adopting could mean assimilating an opinion and perhaps also taking up an attitude. He picked up the red dictionary again and looked up to appropriate : prisvaivat’ . Then to acquire and to adopt : usvaivat’ . Words, then, which were each distinguished only by their prefixes from osvaivat’ . How precisely could one work out Leskov’s choice of words? Permann stepped aside to let a woman with enormous earrings get to the shelf, where she made straight for the little Russian-Italian dictionary. He was tempted to talk to her and draw her into his internal discussion, but she had already turned away with an absent smile and was walking to the cash register. You could not, he thought, appropriate your own past as you could a subject. And not like a piece of knowledge, an opinion or an attitude, either. Did appropriation not also mean recognition ? For recognizing the dictionary gave soznavat’ , which could also mean realizing ; for acknowledging, priznavat’ . Had he not seen one of those words while skimming Leskov’s paper?

He looked furtively around and set the dictionary slowly back on the shelf. Again his face was hot in that way that you could see from outside. Agnes had seen that heat, at any rate, when he sat on the floor with mountains of dictionaries, and she hadn’t liked that hot face. You look somehow… fanatical , she had once said, and it had done no good when she had later explained that it had been the wrong word entirely.

He was two streets on when he turned round. He stopped under the scaffolding for a while, teetered on his heels and looked into the gutter, where the remains of an ice-cream wrapper lay in a disgusting brown mush. Then he turned abruptly, went in and got the big red dictionary down from the shelf. As he did so, he saw in the mirror that he was wearing the expression of someone reluctantly performing a secret mission. Credit cards only from 100,000 lire, said the man at the cash register. Perlmann set down next to it the other copy of the Russian-Italian dictionary that the woman had bought before, and now that was enough.

Was assimilation really an adequate translation of osvaivat’ ? he asked himself in the train. Assimilating , when used about emigrants, for example, meant adaptation or conforming , which was quite far removed from the idea of appropriation. And mastering could, in principle, also mean keeping certain memories at a distance. Given that usvaivat’ was also to be found in the text, could one acquire something which, like one’s own past, already belonged to one? Fine, Leskov might say that before narrative memory it didn’t really belong to one… And what about adopting ? Perlmann walked down the associative corridors that led off in his mind from the English word. You could also use it, he thought, when it came to absorbing a piece of culture or a religion. That meant that a certain internal detachment was involved, as when one was acting a part. And wasn’t there a hint of fakery and fraud in there as well? Then adopting would be impossible as a translation of usvaivat’ in the sense of appropriation. Or was it? For if narrative memory were a kind of invention…

Lots of people boarded the train at Genova Nervi, and the carriage became very noisy. Perlmann had to struggle to concentrate. Appropriating the past: didn’t that also mean standing by it ? And what would be the best English word for that? He lost his thread for a moment, and slipped into an exhaustion that often came upon him when he spent too long sitting on the floor with dictionaries. At Recco Station it occurred to him: endorsing . Under the curious glances of the people sitting opposite him he looked it up, balancing the big dictionary on his knees. Indossirovat’ . But that seemed to be a word that only occurred in a financial context. Podtverzhdat’ in the sense of confirming . Did that word occur in Leskov’s text? He looked out the window, past the eyes of the others, into the gloom. Incorporating something , it seemed to him, was also part of the meaning of appropriation. But now the train stopped in Santa Margherita.