Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

First of all he addressed himself to the last two pages, for which he still didn’t have an English version. Here, in summary, Leskov discussed the creation of the individual past through narration. And again he fudged his way past an unambiguous position by jumping back and forth without comment between quite different words for create . He began with sozdavat’ , then switched to tvorit’ without explanation. The translation for both in the big dictionary was given as creating . The second word applied, judging by the example sentences, to the creation of something from nothing; it was used as if God’s Creation were the topic under discussion. The former referred more to artistic or academic creation; creative activity, such as the creation of a character in a novel. A huge difference, Perlmann thought, about which Leskov wasted not a word. Or did it only seem that way to the beginner that he suddenly felt himself once again to be?

Then, all of a sudden, came izobretat’ , which was given as inventing , devising and designing and thus dealt with inventions, but now in the sense of the creation of a new object – a machine, for example – out of entirely real materials. Cutting one’s past to size by means of narration, and thus to a certain extent sculpting oneself as a character – there was a lot in it. But that was something quite different from the thought that one actually invented or even created oneself in remembering narration. But Leskov, Perlmann sensed through all his linguistic doubts, would really have liked to put forward the extreme thesis of invention, and once there was also the word pridumat’ , which was translated as thinking up – as if, for example, one were thinking up an apology.

The last sentence of the text. In English it sounded less bombastic than it did in German, which had to do, above all, with the fact that essence had a lighter, more transparent sound than the whispering Wesen and – Perlmann supposed – the Russian sushchnost’ . And that it was essential for language to make the experience of time more diverse – that was a claim that matched many things in his own notes.

Perlmann took his black wax cloth notebook out of his suitcase, and was annoyed to break a fingernail on the straps, which had been stupidly pulled too tight. He read once again what he himself had jotted down about the formulation of memories, and then the passages about language and present. At some points the parallel with Leskov’s train of thought was startling. He put the notebook back in his suitcase and left the straps loose.

Outside there was dense fog now. The streetlights could only be seen as a diffuse blur of light, in which approaching billows of vapour disappeared. What on earth had made him defamiliarize his notes with another language? Can one be afraid of stepping too close to oneself? Or had another fear been at work: that articulacy in one’s mother tongue – and only in it – could change experience, so that the old means of experience, which one must not lose, would suddenly disappear?

Anyway, in English he could read his observations as if someone else had written them, someone who was spiritually akin and yet different to him. He opened the window and felt the cool night air like damp cotton wool on his face. In foreign languages one could feel sheltered just as one did in fog. No attack presented in another language could ever hit him, could penetrate him so thoroughly as an attack in his mother tongue. And his own, most intimate sentences hit him less hard when they were packed in foreign words. Because he also had to protect himself against these sentences, paradoxically. Or was it, in the end, something quite different? Had he been seeking to intensify the intimacy by enjoying the open secret of being the author of these notes?

The preceding, already translated pages about the appropriation of the past remained unclear, however one might twist and turn them. Once again, Perlmann looked up the crucial words, slipped into the example sentences and experimented with every possible combination of translations. For a while, for osvaivat’ he even considered confer , which only came up under prisvaivat’ ; it would be good to harmonize with Leskov’s idea of invention. In the end he crossed out all but one of the many alternatives he had jotted down, and was discontent because a feeling of randomness remained.

The light grey of dusk seeped into the fog, and the halos of the streetlights assumed a dazzling white gleam. Perlmann carefully piled up the handwritten pages of the translation. Eighty-seven pages. He also arranged Leskov’s text in order, and put it in the bottom laundry drawer. Then he wiped the dust from the table with his handkerchief and emptied the brimming ashtray. The translation was finished. His translation. It was finished. A relief, a successful sentence.

Shaking, he ordered coffee and had to clear his throat several times. He was shivering with the heating turned up when he poured coffee into himself later on. From time to time he picked up the translation and flicked through it for a few moments without reading. He wouldn’t be able to show it to Agnes. He would never be able to show her anything ever again. At a quarter to nine he bathed his eyes, put von Levetzov’s texts under his arm and went downstairs.

When the others stepped out on to the veranda and saw Perlmann sitting there already, they interrupted their conversations and, as soon as they sat down, fished busily among their papers. Perlmann just nodded to them briefly and turned the page.

‘So, on we go with this strange discipline,’ von Levetzov said cheerfully, and summed up the next text in a few sentences.

Perlmann was winning his battle against tiredness. It was a while before he had pulled what he had read the previous afternoon out from among his memories of the night; but then behind its tiredness his brain ran like a well-oiled mechanism, and he managed some contributions that largely determined the course of the session. Von Levetzov asked him several times to repeat his objection, and then took notes. Only Millar looked, while Perlmann was speaking, with ostentatious boredom through the window into the fog. Evelyn Mistral took off her glasses several times and listened to Perlmann with the expression of someone who is glad about someone else’s recovery from an illness. Every time he noticed that, he ended his contribution sooner than planned.

‘So, Perlmann, still working on your gay science?’ von Levetzov joked as he left.

Perlmann went to sleep as soon as he had crept under the covers. Kitty, holding the bear lispingly, asked him only questions that he didn’t know the answers to. The only thing he knew was that the grand piano wasn’t where it had always been. It wasn’t in Berlin either. There were only auditoriums there with masses of students, and when he came home and looked around the rooms for the grand piano, Agnes nodded incessantly and pulled open boxes of material for her own darkroom.

It was already dark when he woke up drenched in sweat. He would ideally have liked to stay in the shower for ever, and kept turning it back on so that the water ran over his face and distorted his view of the future. At last he sat in his dressing gown by the round table and let his eyes slide over the pages of the translation. He had forgotten that there was a whole series of gaps on the first thirty pages. He contentedly noted that the work on the later parts now made the open questions look quite simple. In the end he crossed out the marginal jotting sensory content? and made sure that it could no longer be deciphered.