Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Only the death of Dmitri Shostakovich got through to him. It had been incredible to see him come on to the stage in person after the twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, his homage to Bach, had faded away. A man with round, horn-rimmed glasses in his pinched, twitching face, who had on the one hand written this music and on the other been caught up in his love-hate relationship with Stalin. For the first time Hanna had been sitting next to Perlmann at a concert. Her bandaged, blistered hand, which had forced her to take a few days’ break from playing, had been in her lap. He had very much liked her simple black dress.

The old man had simply got up and left, without paying. Perlmann paid for him, and there was a debate because the proprietor didn’t want to take any money from him except for the beer, because of his extra tuition. ‘See you next week!’

Today a crazed motorcyclist was driving around the deserted Piazza Veneto. The roar of the engine could be heard all the way to the hotel.

Giovanni handed Perlmann, along with the key, the four texts that Adrian von Levetzov had distributed for his session on Monday. It was almost 200 pages in all. Perlmann set them on his suitcase and then fetched the ladder to unscrew the lightbulbs in the corridor, which had all been put back in.

Waking from a few hours’ troubled sleep, at dawn Perlmann sat down to Leskov’s text. Now came the sections which were supposed to show that not only the interpretation, but also the experienced quality of remembered feeling depended upon narration. If narrative memory became both more extensive and more dense – this was the thesis – it could be that the coloring and shade of remembered experience changed dramatically. It was, Perlmann thought, clever of Leskov to operate even here with terms like coloring and shade , which actually belonged in the domain of the sense of sight. He was thus rhetorically preparing the later thought that where the suggestibility of qualities of experience was concerned, sensory impressions behaved no differently from emotions. But was his thesis, in fact, accurate where the emotions were concerned?

It all depended on the examples. During his first attempt, they had defeated him because his pocket dictionary contained only a small part of the vocabulary that Leskov was drawing upon. That problem was solved. But now he discovered once more how uncertain he was, deep down, with the English words. It wasn’t crude uncertainty, based on simple gaps in his knowledge. He was familiar with all the English words. But it was as if, when he tried them out, he was on shaky ground that could slip away at any moment – it was a bit like walking on a thin layer of fresh snow over black ice.

That applied particularly to coloring , shade , tint , tone and nuance . What, for example, would the selection of words be like if it came to describing the colors of autumn leaves? And what about the political hue of a daily newspaper? If one were to slip at this point, Leskov’s text could easily be messed up, and even made to look ridiculous. And it was much the same with the naming and description of emotions and moods. Abandonment wasn’t the same as loneliness ; melancholy and grief were not to be confused; cheerfulness and serenity – what about those? It was, he thought, difficult even in one’s mother tongue to distinguish between purely rhetorical variants and tangible emotional differences. And the further removed the foreign language, the less certainty there was in the matter.

But in that case how could one know whether an example really was evidence for Leskov’s thesis? And could one honestly expect this area of vocabulary to be clearly transferred from one language to the other? Or was it the case, in the end, that each language categorized the experienced inner world in a slightly different way? And did that support or contradict Leskov’s thesis?

Perlmann was torn between the vexing uncertainty that hung over his translation, and the cheering feeling of just having developed a new thought. The hours flew by. Every now and again he walked to the window and looked out on to the bay, which was filled once again with the glowing autumn light, so different from the broken, pallid light that would now be falling on the trees outside his window at home.

Aside from the task of translating: what was the actual substance of Leskov’s thesis? Would remembered anxiety really change if the story of Kirsten’s leukemia had ended differently? Would not the terrified wait when the young doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses had picked up the final lab report be fixed in his mind forever, just like the thump of the clods of earth on his mother’s coffin? And the unforgettable mixture of admiration and trepidation that Shostakovich’s appearance had prompted? Were such things not simply part of a solid core of past experience, around which there grew stories that one might rewrite several times in the course of a life, leaving the center of experience itself unchanged?

Trembling with hunger and exhaustion, Perlmann went to the trattoria at about half-past two. The only thing that interested him in the chronicle was the day when his anxiety about Kirsten had come to an end. No other day had embedded itself in his memory with such diamond-hard precision. Not even the day of the pigeons. Agnes had touched his arm when the doctor, holding the lab report, gave them the liberating information. Then they had walked across half the town, showing each other the colors of the gleaming wet autumn leaves, over and over again. For the first time he had cancelled his teaching duties with a lie, and they had gone to Sylt for a week. Those were days full of presence, days of wind and expansiveness and relief.

The fact that the death of Jean Gabin had been in the paper at the time had escaped him. Now that he read the long article in the chronicle Perlmann remembered telling Agnes the story of the film Le chat , while they tromped gurglingly through the mudflats. For years, Gabin hadn’t exchanged a word with Simone Signoret because she had killed his beloved cat out of jealousy. When they were sitting opposite one another by the fire in the evening, he would hand her a piece of paper that always bore the same words: le chat . She put these pieces of paper in a drawer, and one day, when she got clumsy, they all fell on the floor, hundreds of them. Agnes had thought the movie was monstrous, and Perlmann was ashamed, because Gabin’s behavior in the film wasn’t all that strange to him.

The first time since his arrival, Perlmann felt the need to leave after dinner, and near the hotel he found a small path leading into the hills. As he tapped rhythmically on the stone wall with a stick, he tried out Leskov’s theory of the emotions, which he had recalled in the trattoria a short time before. But then he simply yielded to the pride that soon he would really have translated this long Russian text into English. He had another eighteen pages before the conclusion, and seven of those he had recently dealt with, even if there were still minor gaps involving the problem with the concept of appropriation. When the path turned and ran parallel to the slope, he supported himself on the wall and looked down at the town and the sea. The translation will be ready by the middle of the week. Then the neat stack of pages would lie on the otherwise empty glass plate of the desk. He had done something he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of doing. He felt that he, whenever he thought about this moment, should also really have thought beyond it. But that didn’t work. It didn’t work.

In the middle of the week, half of his stay was over. And yet from a presentless time the mountain was just as high as it been at the beginning. And it was all much worse than it had been at the start, because the fear that ate like a silent acid into his pride as a translator – and hollowed it out so that it might collapse at any moment – made the mountain look like a gigantic wall that leaned towards him, with every heartbeat a tiny bit more.