Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

For the two days after that Perlmann tried to be as unnoticeable as possible during the sessions on the veranda. Even though it had been a long time since he had looked at grammatical theory, he was still familiar with the difficulties of the individual proposals, and twice he managed to express objections that surprised and impressed the others, so that even Millar raised his eyebrows and nodded grudgingly. After that, on each occasion he could slip back into the background.

While listening, he had an experience which, he now became aware, had accompanied him for a long time, but which he had never been able to imagine so clearly before: every time a new title was mentioned, or a label for yet another theory, he gave a start, and the complicated Latinate word seemed like an instrument of torture, because his first thought was always: I don’t know and I should know . But then, when they talked about the theory, he realized time and again that he knew it down to its smallest details. In fact, he knew it at the very moment of horror, one might almost say that this knowledge was part of his horror, and gave it its peculiar coloring. Except that the knowledge had no power of any kind over the horror. And over the years, he thought, the horror at a supposed gap in his knowledge had become a horror at the powerlessness of knowledge. Knowledge was like a wheel rotating at an overheated rate, without moving anything in his soul and without being able to protect him against the iron logic of its experience. Perlmann thought of the sentences of hopelessness that Jakob von Gunten had written down.

After the sessions he slept into the afternoon and then sat down to Leskov’s paper. By now he had worked out in English Leskov’s theoretical vocabulary. There were some repetitions, and the more abstract passages went relatively smoothly. The only difficult parts were, time and again, the examples with all their sensory details and nuances. Even now he sometimes found himself at a complete loss with them, and in some cases the English text, black with corrections, remained hopelessly wooden and clumsy.

One particularly hard nut to crack lay in the many examples with which Leskov illustrated his argument that narrative memory was unscrupulous when it came to defending the moral integrity of the past self. He cited clinical material that had been assembled by two of the pupils of Luria, the famous Russian neuropsychologist. These consistently concerned people suffering from a moral trauma. The extent of the confabulation and reinterpretation of past actions took one’s breath away, and even Leskov himself was plainly struck dumb by them, because he could hardly stop giving examples.

And then came a piece of text describing how some of these people, when their truthful memories were too oppressive to be straightened out, split internally and kept the transgressive self away from the unstained self that was a refined fabrication. Perlmann stayed up half the night polishing these examples. And as he did so he discovered that in his impatient first run-through he had skipped a whole paragraph explaining the idea of these internal separations with reference to the ramification of stories. Leskov, it was clear, was playing here with the many Russian words for the concepts of separation and splitting, and it made Perlmann furious that he simply had no feeling for the nuances and had in the end to level everything out into splitting and fission . For the first time he found the new dictionary disappointing. Razdvoit’ was cognate with dvoinik , the word for a double or doppelgänger. But what exactly did that kinship mean? Then there was a missing sentence that would have given an example to confirm his suspicion that razyedinyat’ referred to the separation of people, although that – but even here he wasn’t entirely sure – wasn’t right for the severing given in the dictionary. And it was particularly irritating that the dictionary gave him no help as to whether he could use the obvious word cracking without doing violence to the text. When he looked through the English version of this section on Friday before he went to the trattoria, he crossed out the names of Luria’s pupils, and adapted the rest of the text accordingly. Who cared about those names anyway?

It was noisy in the trattoria that evening. Some sort of club that the landlord belonged to was celebrating its jubilee, and even Sandra had to help in the restaurant. She had kept the little corner table free for Perlmann, but soon he was joined by an old man with a pipe and a beret. ‘Big fat book,’ the old man said when Sandra brought Perlmann the chronicle. Then the old man’s eyelids closed slowly, and he seemed to go to sleep over his beer.

Perlmann had been surprised when Agnes had suggested getting married on the anniversary of their first meeting in St Mark’s Square, the day that she called the day of the pigeons . She normally rejected anything that carried a whiff of sentimentality. But he had liked it, and at the register office he had used all his powers of persuasion to make it possible.

Then, when they were waiting for the train to Paris that day, the headlines of the tabloids announced the death of Louis Armstrong, and now it seemed to him that the photograph used back then was exactly the same as the one in the chronicle. Agnes, who affectionately called him Satchmo , had been very quiet for a while after that, and when they got home to their first shared apartment, they had listened to the many jazz records that she owned. Their responses had been strangely contrasting: while he started liking these sounds, which had accompanied Agnes for a long time, to her they seemed suddenly alien. He could no longer remember the details, but at the end of their conversations on the subject they had decided to buy a used grand piano on instalments.

At the newspaper stands in Paris, too, Armstrong’s death had been the predominant theme. At the corner next to the hotel, even today, there was a kiosk, as he had seen straight away when he had travelled to Paris in the last days of the previous August, because the start of the new school year with its noisy fervour in the playgrounds had thrown him into a panic. But today the kiosk looked quite different from before, when he had gone to fetch the paper every morning for ten days. And the hotel was barely recognizable, too. That had unsettled him. As if the world’s chief task were to serve as a stage for my memory. He had trudged morosely through the hot streets and wondered what he was doing there in Paris. Everything was different from how he remembered it, and with every discovery of that kind his French got even worse, so that the waiters answered him in English or German. After the second night he had taken the early train home.

The pipe fell out of the old man with the beret’s mouth as he slept. He started awake and downed his glass in one. He looked curiously at the picture of Charles Manson being led along a corridor by two prison wardens. His tired face contorted into a grin and then, with the edge of his hand he made the gesture of a throat being slit, accompanied by a click of his tongue.

Perlmann quickly flicked back to the previous year. The picture of a thalidomide child, and next to it a report on the suspension of the trial. Was the report bitterly ironic or not? His Italian wasn’t good enough to tell.

The invasion by the Americans of neutral Cambodia and Laos. Perlmann flicked three years ahead: Nobel Prize for Henry Kissinger. That had been a month before Kirsten’s birth, when Agnes was finally able to leave the hospital, still weak from the infection. No, Kirsten’s leukemia had had nothing to do with that infection, the doctor had reassured them two years later. Frozen with fear, they had spent whole nights wondering whether they should take the risk of chemotherapy, which had only just been developed. For months their fear overshadowed everything else, and the news from the rest of the world bounced off it. Even the last American helicopter lifting off from Saigon left him cold.