Perlmann's Silence (17 page)

He had to wait again in the shop because the man Maria had spoken to was late. Under the startled eyes of the salesman Perlmann tore open the wrapper and frantically fumbled around with the double sleeve without managing to get it open. ‘
Ecco!
’ smiled the salesman, flipping it open with a single, easy motion. The second of the two CDs was the right one. Perlmann looked for number 930, put the CD in the CD player and put on the headphones.

It was the piece that Millar had played.

His earlier panic had vanished. But he was disappointed that the feeling of triumph wasn’t stronger. That it wasn’t, in fact, there at all. Suddenly, the whole action struck him as entirely pointless – childish and pointless. He paid and stepped into the street, weary and ashamed. With a sluggish gait he set off towards the station.

At first it was hard to make out that behind the scaffolding there was a bookshop, which seemed just to have opened. Perlmann turned round and walked into the shop, which had lots of mirrored windows and was fabulously illuminated. With his hands in his pockets he strolled along the tables of bestsellers, past the shelves of literary fiction and back into the languages section.

The big book with the red back and black inscription immediately caught his eye. It was a Russian-English dictionary, and vice versa. The paper was thin and greyish, and when you touched it you were left with a soapy film on your fingers; but the entries for the words were very detailed and in many cases a quarter of a column long.
Osvaivat’.
Perlmann sat down in an elegant but uncomfortable chair and looked up the word.
To assimilate, master; to become familiar with
. He had guessed correctly: what happened in the process of narrative memory was, according to Leskov, that one
mastered
one’s own past and thus
brought it closer
; and those were precisely the elements in the term
assimilation
.
Making it one’s own
would be another formulation, he thought. How would one decide between those words if one were to translate the text into English?

He wished he had his vocabulary book with him, then he could fill in the many gaps in it via a detour through English. He looked along the shelf: they didn’t have a Russian-German dictionary. But they did have the German-English Langenscheidt that he, too, had at the hotel.
Sich aneignen: to appropriate, to acquire, to adopt.
So
appropriating
, it appeared, was the action of taking things into one’s own position, while one needed
acquiring
in the appropriation of knowledge, and
adopting
could mean assimilating an opinion and perhaps also taking up an attitude. He picked up the red dictionary again and looked up
to appropriate
:
prisvaivat’
. Then
to acquire
and
to adopt
:
usvaivat’
. Words, then, which were each distinguished only by their prefixes from
osvaivat’
. How precisely could one work out Leskov’s choice of words? Permann stepped aside to let a woman with enormous earrings get to the shelf, where she made straight for the little Russian-Italian dictionary. He was tempted to talk to her and draw her into his internal discussion, but she had already turned away with an absent smile and was walking to the cash register. You could not, he thought, appropriate your own past as you could a subject. And not like a piece of knowledge, an opinion or an attitude, either. Did
appropriation
not also mean
recognition
? For
recognizing
the dictionary gave
soznavat’
, which could also mean
realizing
; for
acknowledging, priznavat’
. Had he not seen one of those words while skimming Leskov’s paper?

He looked furtively around and set the dictionary slowly back on the shelf. Again his face was hot in that way that you could see from outside. Agnes had seen that heat, at any rate, when he sat on the floor with mountains of dictionaries, and she hadn’t liked that hot face.
You look somehow . . . fanatical
, she had once said, and it had done no good when she had later explained that it had been the wrong word entirely.

He was two streets on when he turned round. He stopped under the scaffolding for a while, teetered on his heels and looked into the gutter, where the remains of an ice-cream wrapper lay in a disgusting brown mush. Then he turned abruptly, went in and got the big red dictionary down from the shelf. As he did so, he saw in the mirror that he was wearing the expression of someone reluctantly performing a secret mission. Credit cards only from 100,000 lire, said the man at the cash register. Perlmann set down next to it the other copy of the Russian-Italian dictionary that the woman had bought before, and now that was enough.

Was
assimilation
really an adequate translation of
osvaivat’
? he asked himself in the train.
Assimilating
, when used about emigrants, for example, meant
adaptation
or
conforming
, which was quite far removed from the idea of appropriation. And
mastering
could, in principle, also mean keeping certain memories at a distance. Given that
usvaivat’
was also to be found in the text, could one acquire something which, like one’s own past, already belonged to one? Fine, Leskov might say that before narrative memory it didn’t really belong to one . . . And what about
adopting
? Perlmann walked down the associative corridors that led off in his mind from the English word. You could also use it, he thought, when it came to absorbing a piece of culture or a religion. That meant that a certain internal detachment was involved, as when one was acting a part. And wasn’t there a hint of fakery and fraud in there as well? Then
adopting
would be impossible as a translation of
usvaivat’
in the sense of appropriation. Or was it? For if narrative memory were a kind of invention . . .

Lots of people boarded the train at Genova Nervi, and the carriage became very noisy. Perlmann had to struggle to concentrate. Appropriating the past: didn’t that also mean
standing by it
? And what would be the best English word for that? He lost his thread for a moment, and slipped into an exhaustion that often came upon him when he spent too long sitting on the floor with dictionaries. At Recco Station it occurred to him:
endorsing
. Under the curious glances of the people sitting opposite him he looked it up, balancing the big dictionary on his knees.
Indossirovat’
. But that seemed to be a word that only occurred in a financial context.
Podtverzhdat’
in the sense of
confirming
. Did that word occur in Leskov’s text? He looked out the window, past the eyes of the others, into the gloom.
Incorporating something
, it seemed to him, was also part of the meaning of appropriation. But now the train stopped in Santa Margherita.

‘One moment, please,’ he said afterwards to the taxi driver. He set the dictionaries down on the lid of the trunk and looked up
incorporating
.
Vkluchat’
. It seemed to him that he had read that. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ he said to the baffled driver.

In his room he immediately sat down at the desk. He was glad that he hadn’t stacked the books up as he had in his first room. In this way he could comfortably set out the material that needed to be translated. Above all, there was enough room for the Russian-English dictionary, which, when it was opened, occupied almost half of the desktop. The other dictionary, the one that the woman with the huge earrings had bought, he pushed into the right-hand corner at the back. He had never seen earrings that size before. He had liked the emerald green with the fine gold edge.

He started where Leskov began to speak about the idea of appropriation. For
osvaivat’
he wrote both
assimilate
and
master
, with a slash between them. It was a much slower process than translating into German. On the other hand, it was much more exciting, and if he managed an English sentence easily he breathed out heavily with joy. Often, on the other hand, easiness didn’t come into it. Comprehension was also possible when there were vague edges of meaning. Then, without really noticing, one brought along the great diversity of knowledge that accompanied every word in one’s own language, and that knowledge enabled one to fill in the gaps in comprehension when confronted by unfamiliar foreign words. Translation from one foreign language into another, on the other hand, ruthlessly exposed the smallest uncertainty in one’s linguistic sensitivity. Of course, that applied particularly to Russian. But Perlmann also quickly got a sense of how great his uncertainty was with regard to certain English expressions, and there were sentences when both sides blurred, it was like an equation with two unknowns. At such points he became aware of how many things he had hitherto simply ignored.

And, nonetheless, from the start it was like a fever that he didn’t want to come to an end. He had filled almost two pages, when the word
priznavat’
arrived. He was about to see if there was a translation other than
to acknowledge
, when he remembered dinner. He irritably slipped into his jacket and dashed down the stairs. The waiter was already clearing away the soup plates when Perlmann sat down at the table opposite Millar.

Only now, at the sight of Millar’s face, did Perlmann remember the CD. He reached into his jacket pocket and felt the cool plastic of the packaging. He had the sense of touching a relic from some past inner world that looked ridiculous in retrospect. And had Millar’s face not shown disapproval of his repeated lateness, he would have let things lie.

‘Oh, by the way, Brian,’ he began, trying to keep all sense of triumph out of his face, ‘that encore you played on Saturday isn’t number 902 in the catalogue. It’s 930; 902 is in G major.’

He had managed to say it in a relaxed, almost playful manner, and a touch of awareness of how ridiculous the whole business was had made its way into his voice. But now a silence fell upon the room, where the only person who wasn’t part of the group was John Smith, and gave the scene an ominous feeling of drama.

Millar straightened his glasses, leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. He stuck out his lower lip for a moment, shook his head barely perceptibly and said with a smile that made his eyes narrow:

‘Quite frankly, Phil, I don’t think I’m wrong there. I’m pretty familiar with the lesser-known Bach.’

Perlmann took his time. He held Millar’s challenging gaze. This one time he found it wonderfully simple. Their eyes locked onto each other. That moment compensated for much, and he savored it. After what was about to come, Millar wouldn’t dare to return to the business about his idiotic question.

He took the package containing the two CDs out of his pocket, let his eye rest upon it with theatrical elaborateness, and then pushed it slowly across the undulating tablecloth to Millar.
Laconically. Very laconically
.