Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann took the CD from the table. She would really like to hear it, Laura Sand said with a mocking glance at Millar, who was energetically striding through the door. Perlmann nodded and walked ahead of her. On his way into the lounge he felt as shattered as if he had just been through a long day’s competition.

Millar didn’t come in until the CD was already playing. The fury in his face had made way for a scornfully cagey expression. With ostentatious boredom he let his eye glide around the whole of the lounge and set his glasses on his head from time to time, so that he could get a better view of something in the far-off corner.

Perlmann was holding the CD booklet in his hand. ‘That was number 902 in G major,’ he said once the piece was over.

‘Oh, I know that piece very well, Phil,’ Millar said smugly. ‘It is, I fear, number 902a. In G major.’

Perlmann looked at the booklet. ‘902a is only a third as long. Not quite, even. You’ll hear it in a moment. Because this is the piece coming now.’

Millar’s face twitched, but he didn’t say anything. In the short pause before Hanna’s birthday piece Perlmann waved the booklet at him, pointed to a line with his index finger and said, ‘Now. Number 930.’

Millar raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t understand, and went on surveying the room.

‘I should point out the mistake to CBS,’ he said when the last note of the record had faded away. ‘I could also point out to them that I don’t think it’s a particularly good recording. Glenn Gould, of course.’

Then, in the foyer, he stepped up beside Perlmann. ‘Have you forgotten our appointment?’

‘No,’ said Perlmann, resisting his blue gaze. ‘By no means.’

Afterwards, at the desk, it was immediately clear to him again where he had broken off his trail of thought before: was there another translation for priznavat’ apart from to acknowledge ? That was important, because of the inventive components that narrative memory had, according to Leskov. Wouldn’t it sound strange to talk about acknowledging one’s own inventions? Didn’t one tend rather to acknowledge facts?

Before he looked it up he paused, so as to be clear about the strange sensation that accompanied his renewed concentration on Leskov’s paper. He was surprised how quickly and easily he managed to brush aside the battle with Millar in which he had just been involved. Such things usually preoccupied him for an unreasonable length of time, and often one would have said that he was being persecuted by them. It was as if at the sight of Cyrillic script he had gone into a different room within himself, and closed the door behind him. It was wonderful being behind that door, which protected him against everything that raged in him outside it. The thought of what might be going on in him beyond the door, and beyond that in the outside world, could not be suppressed; but it was present only as a faint glimmer in the background, and one could get used to ignoring its occasional flickerings.

Priznavat’ could also mean admit , and priznanie was plainly the classical word for confession . Here again Perlmann wrote down all the possibilities. All his fatigue fell from him now; he was busy starting something new and exciting.

Admittedly something – something outside – was still missing to make everything right. It was a while before he hit upon it. Then he fetched the ladder from the end of the corridor and restored the gloomy lighting in the corridor ceiling lamps. Now it was good. Now he could work.

The business about appropriation was still unclear at four o’clock in the morning. Once Leskov used podtverzhdat’ and three times vkluchat’ . So there was also an idea involved that one appropriated a piece of the past by making it part of a whole, which was oneself. One brought it, if it had previously been alien, back within this unity.

Apart from the fact that, of course, the idea of wholeness or unity required explanation: what could this process of integration look like if it was supposed to be the case that narration was what created memories in the first place? Was it true to say that the various narratives grew increasingly together, so to speak? Making something one’s own , sich etwas zu eigen machen – one thought at first of a piece of substance, a solid core that was extended by the new, which had hitherto remained outside. But for Leskov there could no such solid core, a constant that was taken for granted in all narrative appropriation, because what applied to one piece of memory applied to all. If he was ready to claim that a self, a person in the psychological sense of the word, had no solid core and nothing whatsoever in terms of substance, but was a web of stories, constantly growing and subject to a constant process of relayering – a little like a structure of cotton candy at a carnival, except without material? Perlmann grew dizzy at the thought, and excitedly turned his attention to the next paragraph.

It was half-past five when weariness overtook him. Seven of the nine last pages of the text were translated. It was years since he had been so proud of something. And it was, he thought, the first time in ages that he had managed to immerse himself so thoroughly in something.

Since Agnes’s death. He took her picture from his wallet. She was reclining on a lounger on the beach, her arms folded over her head, her sunglasses pushed into her chestnut hair. Her water-clear gaze, which had so often given him courage, was directed at him, and it was plain that she had just been mocking his wish to have a color photograph of her.

During that holiday they had learned Cyrillic script and their first Russian words. She had been faster then him. She had done it playfully, while he had as usual worked methodically, almost pedantically. While she was grasping whole words at once, he still had to think about each individual letter.

Perlmann turned off the light. She had driven that stretch of road hundreds of times, briskly and confidently. Until that jinglingly cold morning. She had only wound the window down a chink, and the waving hand in its black glove had looked doll-like and mechanical. They had both laughed, and in the middle of that laugh she had scooted off in her ancient Austin, a racing start down their shovelled driveway. She hadn’t driven more than ten minutes to the road through the forest. A film of powdery snow over treacherous black ice, a moment’s inattention. The photographic equipment on the back seat had been undamaged.

Three hours later, on the veranda, Perlmann struggled to keep his eyes open and poured one cup of coffee after another into himself. Silvestri grinned when he saw him reaching for the pot again, and rubbed his eyes as a sign of sympathy. Ruge was now explaining the part of his text that had nothing to do with Perlmann’s experiments. He wore a baggy, roll-neck sweater that hung in untidy folds over the collar of his jacket and made his neck look even shorter than usual. At first Perlmann attributed it to his own weary head, in which there were repeated little absences, but then he became aware that Ruge really had lost his concentration this morning. His presentation was halting and disjointed, and his eyes lacked their usual belligerent, roguish gleam. Increasingly often he ran his hand over his bald head and turned the pages as hesitantly as if he didn’t understand a word of what they said. And when he put his glasses on his head, with his sparse ring of grey hair he looked like an old man who was losing his sight. The lack of pleasure that he emanated transmitted itself to the others, too. Not even Millar stepped in when the pauses were drawn out. And for a while the session seemed to be going completely wrong.