Perlmann's Silence (18 page)

‘You can see your mistake for yourself. It’s a very popular recording, by the way. You can have it.’ He was glad that he had said
mistake
and not
error
. It sounded more like school and would hit him harder.

Von Levetzov looked curiously across to Millar and then at Perlmann with a smile that was supposed to indicate that this time he was on his side.
He’s an opportunist, a conversational optimist, who always throws in his lot with the stronger battalion
.

Ruge smiled as well, but it was a smile without partisanship. He was simply amused by the matter; he who was always ready to attack in debates, and loved an exchange in which someone stood to win or lose.

Millar had opened the CD case, and shook his head with his lips pursed. ‘The label on the CD – that doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘It’s all in the booklet. In the other case.’

Millar contemptuously let the side of the booklet slide along his thumb. ‘That would mean that it’s a piece from the
Klavierbüchlein
,’ he said, and the comedy of his unsuccessful attempt at an umlaut took some of the contemptuous sharpness away from his words. ‘And it isn’t one of those. I’m absolutely sure of that.’ He snapped the case firmly shut and pushed it across to Perlmann, who left it in the middle of the table, right next to the gravy boat.

‘Well, Brian,’ said Perlmann, and tilted his head to the side as Millar often did, ‘we can listen to the piece over there later on.’

‘Yes, please,’ Laura Sand joined in. ‘I love that simple tune.’

If there was anything ironic about her remark, it was only the merest hint. But Millar irritably raised his eyebrows as if someone were mocking him in the most brazen way.

‘Well, Phil,’ he said, aping Perlmann. ‘Liner notes can contain mistakes, can’t they? It does happen. Even on CBS. No, no, we would need the score.’

‘Which could also be misidentified,’ said Silvestri, blowing smoke across the table.

‘Well now
,
Giorgio,’ snapped Millar.

‘
Buon appetito
,’ Silvestri grinned, raising his glass.

Millar stayed out of the rest of the conversation. He stared at the plate in front of him. Only once did he glance past Perlmann into the room, but lowered his head again immediately. Evelyn Mistral giggled, and when the others turned round they saw John Smith raising his glass to Millar.

‘By the way, Phil,’ Millar said suddenly over coffee, ‘how come you happen to have a copy of the record on you?’ He rested his chin on his folded hands and looked steadily at Perlmann. ‘Sort of a fluke, huh?’

The cool, casual sentence that Perlmann had had ready was gone. There was nothing there but a void, and in it his old fear of Millar. He put another sugar lump in his coffee and stirred it. He saw the ice-cream wrapper in the gutter and the emerald-green earrings. The translation of Leskov’s text was waiting for him upstairs. Suddenly, the sentence was there again. He looked up, and it was as if he could feel the collective eyes on his face like the heat of a lamp or the faint sting of a salty breeze.

‘I happened to see it and just picked it up,’ he said. It didn’t sound worldly, more embarrassed and apologetic, and he feared Millar’s next remark. Then he heard Laura Sand’s dark, throaty laugh.

‘A
trouvaille
, in fact,’ she said, and gave Millar one of her ironic glances as she stubbed out her cigarette.

There was mute, helpless fury in Millar’s face as he folded his napkin. He was the first to rise from the table.

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.

11

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.

In the end it was Evelyn Mistral who saved it. She asked a critical question, and when she saw the others nodding with relief she went on talking and, speaking more and more freely, developed a long train of thought that made the others reach for their pens after a while. The strip of red appeared on her forehead, and her explanatory hand movements were more vivid and expressive than Perlmann had ever seen them before. The nervousness with which she had previously had to battle in this room fell away from her, and only every now and again did she slip her heel from her right shoe. Later, when she became the center of a lively debate, she often tossed her hair to the left as the answers and interjections formed with her, to free her face from the hair that she was wearing loose today. But rather than swinging back, her hair hung in front of her face like an untidy veil, so that when she looked up from her notes only half of her glasses could be seen. Then she blew upwards from the left-hand corner of her mouth, and as that generally didn’t do the trick, at last she brushed the straw-blonde strands out of her face with her hand. When the coffee had produced a jittery alertness in him, Perlmann feverishly tried to find a possible way of contributing something to the discussion. But his thoughts were always too slow, and the two conclusions that he attempted were so ineffective that he started to feel like an onlooker. Both times Millar simply went on talking, without even turning to look at him, as if there had just been an irritating noise that he had had to let wash over him.

It had stopped raining, but dark clouds still hung over the bay, and drops fell into the gravel from the white tables on the terrace. The young man with the rucksack and the cape who now entered Perlmann’s field of vision had a hesitant gait, and was looking round like someone afraid of being caught doing something forbidden. He looked up at the facade, took a few steps towards the swimming pool, and when he saw that people were sitting on the veranda he walked quickly back to the steps. The gauntness of his build and the way he had held his cigarette reminded Perlmann of something unpleasant, something that had happened during the university holidays, but shortly before he could grasp hold of it, it had disappeared back into his exhaustion.

True, in fact, Millar was saying, this was the ideal opportunity to calmly revisit the various grammatical theories of the past few years and attempt to achieve some kind of balance. Achim and he himself could start work on it tomorrow, and then they could go through things together on Thursday and Friday. Would Adrian mind if his session was moved to the start of next week?

That means everything’s shifting by half a week. That means that my turn isn’t going to come in the fourth week. Which leaves me with fifteen days, assuming that Thursday and Friday are enough for the copying
. He thought it was a good idea, Perlmann said when the others looked at him quizzically.

‘Talk about a good idea!’ Evelyn Mistral said to him when they were the last to leave the veranda. ‘It gives me half a week extra! Shall we celebrate in town with a pizza? In spite of the rain?’

He would rather rest for a while, he said; he had slept badly.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ she said and touched him lightly on the arm.

When he woke up just before four, Perlmann suddenly knew what the young man in the cape had reminded him of. For the third time Frau Hartwig had reminded him to answer a letter about his working with an Israeli colleague; so just before the end of the day he had visited the office and dictated his refusal. After that he had gone through the rest of his mail, and because he was busy hurling a book catalogue into the waste-paper basket, he had almost failed to hear the hesitant, guilty knocking.

It was a student, a gaunt young man with a protruding Adam’s apple and sticking-out ears, holding his hand-rolled cigarette noticeably far away from himself, as if it disgusted him. In the labyrinthine building he had lost his bearings, and actually just wanted a lecture list. Perlmann asked him in and quizzed him for more than half an hour; the boy didn’t know what was happening to him. Perlmann even asked him about his holiday plans and his financial situation, and suppressed the question about a girlfriend only at the last moment. Afterwards, he was shocked by his own lack of detachment. A few days later the boy had come towards him with his girlfriend on the other side of the road. Perlmann had given a start when he saw the two of them whispering and laughing, and had had to warn himself against becoming paranoid. The girlfriend was very pretty, and the boy had no longer seemed intimidated and helpless. Even his ears didn’t seem to stick out so much. Now Perlmann remembered very clearly what he had thought:
I’m losing my power of judgment. If I ever had one
.

He showered for a long time to wash away the memory, and then started reading Leskov’s paper from the beginning. Now, going through it for the second time, he understood everything much better, and read the first paragraphs astonishingly quickly. The new dictionary was really fabulous; only the greyish paper with its soapy smoothness was still unpleasant to the touch, so that he needed to wash his hands every now and then. The programmatic sentence at the beginning of the text wasn’t a problem in English, and it was only in the examples for the concept of a remembered scene that he faltered. His concentration waned, and he started feeling uneasy.
Sandra. The test
. Shortly before eight he crept out of the hotel by the rear entrance and set off towards the trattoria.

The proprietress asked jokingly where he had been yesterday, and then she called for Sandra, who came running over, ponytail bouncing, and put her open exercise book on his plate. There was still a lot of red on the pages, but it had been enough to get her a satisfactory mark – the first in weeks. His meals would be free for the rest of the week, the proprietor said, clapping his heavy hand on his shoulder. And he was to order the most expensive thing on the menu!

Perlmann opened the chronicle at the assassination of Robert Kennedy. That was right: only a few weeks before, while he had been preparing for his doctoral examination, Martin Luther King and Rudi Dutschke had been shot as well. Prague Spring. The student unrests in Paris. From week to week, almost from day to day, the tension between Perlmann’s personal concerns about the examination and the assistant’s post, and the political developments out in the world had entered his consciousness with ever greater clarity. What was more important? What did
important
mean in this context? And in what sense could one speak of an obligation to participate in the political developments? Was it clear what
participate
meant? For a while he had changed his habits, and read the newspaper before he arrived at his desk in the morning. But it went against his feelings and so, without finding an answer to his questions, he had gone back to his old, reverse rhythm.

It had been on the train to Venice that he had read about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the newspaper. Perlmann rested his head on his interlocking fingers and thought back to that moment in Mestre when the train turned on to the embankment to Venice. He had stretched his head out into the warm evening and repeated the magic word:
Venice
. Even now the moment was still so vivid that he thought he could see all the other heads and outstretched arms along the train. And then, as they entered the station, he had seen his newspaper on the seat, open at the thalidomide trial. Already clutching his suitcase he had looked once more at the pictures of crippled children. A painful alertness had passed through him as he realized that he was, in his significant irresolution, the last one standing in the compartment. Since then he had experienced in countless variations that conflict between his own happiness and his sympathy for the suffering of others. He had finally left the newspaper where it was, and the terrible pictures of the children had been washed away by the noisy, wonderful hubbub of the station.

The pigeons had brought them together, the pigeons in St Mark’s Square. As he stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching them land on the heads and shoulders of the tourists, he, too, had suddenly found himself in the middle of a cloud of flapping animals whose wings smacked along his face and just missed pulling off his glasses. He felt as if he were being ambushed, and he had flailed his arms excitedly around. He had only noticed Agnes, with her big camera in front of her face, when the pigeons had stopped bothering him. Her camera clicked a few more times, and then for the first time he saw her clear, water-bright gaze and her mocking smile, softer and lighter than Laura Sand’s, because there was no background of rage.

She had come towards him in her light trousers and ankle-strap sandals. ‘I hope you’re not cross with me,’ she had said, and, as on countless subsequent occasions, he had been surprised by the darkness in her voice, which didn’t match her transparent eyes. ‘But it just looked so funny when you were defending yourself there. As if you were fighting a hailstorm or a typhoon. There was a story in the scene. I have to capture things like that. It’s like an addiction. If you like, I’ll send you a few prints.’

Before he had had a chance to answer she had laughed out loud and pointed to his hair. ‘No, don’t touch! It’s full of pigeon poop!’

When she discovered that his hotel was at the other end of the city, she pulled him with her to the little
albergo
around the corner where she was staying. He had to kneel on a stool, and then, in the cracked and stained washbasin, she had washed his hair. Her gentle, practical manner broke all resistance. She couldn’t explain to him why she had spoken to him in German, she said as she rubbed, something about him had just looked that way.

Back in the street she soon said goodbye to him. An appointment with a colleague from the newspaper. He had scribbled his address on a piece of paper, and then she had disappeared into the nearest alleyway. It had all been like a ghost story. He was glad that he hadn’t written his newly acquired title of doctor on the paper. And he had no idea what he felt when he sat afterwards in a café in St Mark’s Square, listening to music as he spent the little money he had on ridiculously expensive drinks, so that he was left with nothing to pay for dinner. Or rather he did. He knew one thing: he liked the way the episode with that woman had flashed into his life and cut into his present-poor time without either history or aftermath.

His train home left at noon the following day, and as he had only been there for three days he left the hotel early in the morning to see more of the little unspectacular canals and bridges. And then they met for a second time. Agnes was quite different from the day before, much more reserved, and at first he had the feeling that he was just bothering her. But then, looking again and again through her viewfinder, she had started talking about light and shade and the magic of black-and-white photography. He had felt like a blind man learning to see. Afterwards, over coffee that he paid for with the money he had set aside for a sandwich on the train, she wanted to know something about him. Linguist, he said, and before that he’d played the piano. Chopin. ‘Yeeesss,’ she had said with a nod, her eyes half-closed. And then, once again: ‘Yeeesss.’

On the long journey his thoughts had kept returning to that ‘Yeeesss’. Had it signified agreement? Agreement with him? Or had his information only confirmed her first impression, which might also have been negative? In all the years that followed he had never asked Agnes; he couldn’t say why. That mysterious ‘Yeeesss’ had also kept him from discussing the business about the thalidomide children, which had suddenly leapt out at him from time to time during those days, when the moment seemed to be perfect.