Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann felt ill, and he threw the cigarette he had just lit into the water. He was relieved that they were now entering Genoa harbor and there were some things to look at: the crew throwing the ropes, the steaming water spraying from the bow and, further away, the big ships and the cranes whose arms glided over the tall stacks of colorful containers. When the family from before was suddenly standing next to him and the children were loudly calling out the things they could see, Perlmann wasn’t bothered, quite the contrary. He fled his thoughts and wished he could step outside his innermost depths and lose himself in things, dissolve himself entirely in the stones of the quay wall, in the wooden poles against which the ship was rubbing, in the cobbles of the street, in all the things that were simply just there and entire unto themselves.

There was nothing to keep him on dry land. The lack of any rocking movement gave him a feeling of imprisonment, even though he had the chance of going wherever he wanted in this city on the slope, which in the noon autumn light had something about it of a desert city, something oriental. The ship didn’t get back until a quarter past three, but there was a tour of the harbor every hour, and the people for the one o’clock trip were just boarding. Perlmann was glad that it was late in the year and the two seats next to him were free. When he let his arm dangle over the side, he could almost touch the dark green, almost black water. Pools of oil and rubbish drifted past, at the clearer spots one could make out seaweed, and sometimes a rusty chain used to moor a ship.

He gave a start when the loudspeaker was turned on with a click, and an unnecessarily loud woman’s voice greeted the passengers, first in Italian, then in English, German, French and Spanish and at last in a language that must have been Japanese. It was idiotic, but he hadn’t thought about that, as if he were on a sightseeing boat for the first time in his life. It was going to be an hour of torture: all that information, all those explanations that interested him not in the slightest, and everything in six languages. And he urgently needed to think. Peace and concentration had never been as important as they were now.

The voice from the loudspeaker, shrill and bored, began with details about the size of the harbor and the volume of its goods shipments, then a tape played the same information in the other languages, all women’s voices, only the Spanish text was spoken by a man. Perlmann covered his ears, the repetitions were unbearable. That he had been so stupid as to take this trip struck him as a sign that there was no way out of his plight. It was like a harbinger of inescapable doom.

They passed by the first big ships, their curved, black bows loomed far into the air, lifeboats were fastened along the railings, and single sailors waved. Hidden behind another vessel, a black ship’s wall suddenly appeared, bearing the word leningrad in white, Cyrillic script. Perlmann turned hot and cold. He gulped and felt everything convulsing inside him. At that moment he desperately wished the letters were completely alien to him, just white lines that provided nothing to read and nothing to understand. That they were so familiar and self-evident to him was a source of unhappiness; the actual reason, it seemed to him, for his desperate situation.

Agnes, he was quite sure, would have advised him to take the first path. Of course, she would have understood that it was unpleasant for him; but she would have seen the whole thing in far less dramatic terms than he did. It was, she might have said, as if she had had to tell the agency: ‘Sorry, but over the past few weeks I haven’t come up with any usable shots.’ That was all, a temporary crisis, no reason to speak of a loss of face.

But Agnes had worked for an agency in which everyone was very cooperative, almost chummy. She hadn’t known the academic world, with its atmosphere of competition and mutual suspicion, she had just known it from his stories, and there had often been a bad atmosphere between them when he thought he sensed she was mutely reproaching him for an excessive and disproportionate sensitivity in such matters.

The trip now continued along the quay where the big freighters lay. Between the individual ships one could see the long row of trucks that picked up the goods. This was where the freight was discharged. Discharged , he thought to himself, and for a moment he stopped resisting the loudspeaker and concentrated instead on the vocabulary of harbors and ships. He lost himself entirely in the shrill Italian voice and then the others, the taped voices with their sterile tones which, it seemed to him, had not the slightest thing to do with the colorful backdrop outside.

Without really noticing, he began translating from one language to another in his mind. At first he tested how well he could keep up when he translated into German. It became increasingly clear to him that it was a matter of keeping a very particular balance of concentration. One had to look back at the sentence that had just come to an end, and could only begin to form the German sentence when the point of syntactical clarity had been reached in the foreign sentence – no earlier, because otherwise one could find oneself starting on the wrong foot, and end up stumbling. That meant that you inevitably concluded the German sentence after a certain time lag, with a powerful need to put it behind you to have your head free for the next one. So in the second half of the sentence you automatically speeded up, exploiting the routine and self-evidence with which your mother tongue was available to you. That phase could barely hold the attention, because it already had to be deployed entirely upon the new sentence. During that second it was a tightrope act, from which one could fall either of two ways. First of all, it could happen that you had to think for a moment too long about the old sentence, perhaps even that an unfamiliar word would put you in a panic; then you started too late into the process in which you should have been constructing your trained expectations concerning the new sentence, and had to admit that you had missed the new sentence. Or else you were pursued by the fear that that was precisely what could happen; then you risked the danger of letting your eye dart just a bit too far forward, even before the German version of the old sentence had found the point at which it sounded most natural and could be left up to the unconscious concluding process, so then you couldn’t conclude the old sentence. The worst case was a combination of the two. Then a kind of paralysis set in: you sensed that you should actually take a quick look back to finish the old sentence correctly, but it was plain that you had arrived too late for the new sentence. You didn’t know which was more important, and that doubt meant you lost time, and then you lost control of both sentences, the old one and the new one, and you had to shake off your irritation with your own failure very quickly to catch up with the next sequence of sentences.

That seemed to Perlmann to be the hardest thing: not to succumb to irritation over occasional and inevitable errors. Part of the training of an interpreter, he thought, would be to show no irritation, to reach in a flash and unemotionally the decision that the current sentence was beyond saving, a normal breakdown that should be forgotten straight away. Above all it was a matter of confidence: the certainty that one could depend completely upon one’s capacity for concentration. And as long as one maintained and experienced that difficult balance, remaining master of the situation, it was a wonderful feeling that could be quite intoxicating. That feeling would intensify still further, he thought, if one were capable of translating between two foreign languages, two that were as exotic as possible, far removed from the natural self-evidence of one’s mother tongue. A diversity in the languages you had mastered, that was freedom, and being able to push your own boundaries far out into the realm of the exotic, that must be a massive intensification of the sense of life, a real rush of freedom.