Perlmann's Silence (21 page)

Lying on the bed, he thought again of Agnes and what was special about her photographs. Sometimes she had spent months taking pictures only of the faces of ancient people, it had been like an addiction. The series had been a hit. She had had an eye for details, a gaze, it seemed, that could give a detail a stressed and unusually intense presence – as if it were her gaze that had fetched that detail from the blurry distance of a shadowy, temporal existence into the brightly lit present of solidly outlined forms. How he had envied her that gift!

She had never planned for it, forgetting things, losing her overall vision in her chaotic jumble of notes. Then he was the one who had jumped in to straighten things out. As a result he had become a compulsive planner, a fanatic of the overall vision. That had been the price, the price for her present.

The dining room looked very different this evening. Most of the circular tables had been replaced by a festively decorated dining table, and garlands of colored paper hung from the garlands. It was a wedding dinner, served by two extra waitresses who had been hired specially, as Adrian von Levetzov was able to report.

‘Hungry again?’ Millar asked, looking at Perlmann with his head inclined and a resigned smile on his lips. Perlmann said nothing, and concentrated on the shellfish starter. The jokes being made at the big table were hard to make out; most of the wedding guests spoke a dialect that he didn’t understand.

Now von Levetzov was telling everybody about a book about Henry Kissinger that had been discussed in the
Herald Tribune
.

‘That war criminal,’ Giorgio Silvestri said tightly. ‘He urged Nixon to bomb Cambodia and Laos. They were neutral countries at the time. That man ought to be up before a court.’ He looked challengingly across at Millar, who was dissecting his fish. ‘Isn’t that right, Brian?’

Millar slid his fish knife carefully under the spine, then used his fork to release the whole skeleton before setting it down on the edge of the plate. The corners of his mouth were twitching. He savored the moment. At last he took a sip of wine, dabbed his lips with his napkin and returned Silvestri’s impatient gaze with a soft, warm smile that Perlmann had never seen on him before.

‘Absolutely correct, Giorgio. That was exactly what I wrote in the college paper at the time. On the first page. After that my parents’ check didn’t come through for a while.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And it never really sorted itself out.’

It was incredible how quickly Silvestri’s face reacted. Barely had there been a hint of surprise and bemusement than his tense and hostile expression collapsed to make way for a grin, which revealed as clearly as in words that he had underestimated Millar. He raised his glass to him. ‘
Scusi. Salute!
’

It took Perlmann much longer to deal with his surprise.
Millar as a spokesman for the student movement?
He glanced furtively across at Millar, who was now concentrating once more on his fish. Something within him began to move, as slow and creaking as a rusty cog. Perhaps, out of pure fear, Perlmann had got him wrong. Fear was a feeling that degraded other people into mere screens. He was about to declare him a sign of his altered perception, when that silly remark over dinner occurred to him, and he devoted himself once more to the task of removing the head of his fish. It was only when the waiter had cleared away the plates that his irritation had sufficiently faded.

‘One question, Brian,’ he began, and then set out his uncertainty about the various English words for
color
and
shade
. Once again Millar surprised him. He tried out the different words, some out loud and some again with mute movements of his lips. He was starting to enjoy himself, and when he took a sip of wine it looked as if he were tasting the words along with the wine.

Again Perlmann’s feelings pulled and creaked.
Millar, the man from Rockefeller, the intellectual interpreter of Bach, as a sensual man. Sheila
. And then, as suddenly as if he had been struck by lightning, he was filled once more with hatred for this man Brian Millar, who was, by pleasurably weighing up nuances of meaning, contesting the activity on which he, Perlmann, had spent two weeks up in his room defending himself against the others, not least against Millar himself.
And like an idiot I myself have inspired him to do so. Because I thought I had to give him a sign. Solicitous idiot that I am.

He thanked Millar in the hope of stopping him, but now Laura Sand smilingly reminded Perlmann of their afternoon conversation about other English words. Achim Ruge once again demonstrated his astonishing confidence in English, and all through dessert these things formed the topic of conversation.

‘You need this for your paper on language and memory, don’t you?’ Millar asked at last.

Perlmann felt his hands turning cold. He didn’t want to nod at any cost, and yet he nodded.

‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ Millar said, and through the swelling heat in his face Perlmann could see that he was saying it without suspicion or spite.

‘One has the sense that you’re working on it day and night. Well, in . . . wait . . . in two weeks we’ll be able to read it.’

Before Perlmann followed the others into the drawing room, he went to the toilet and held his face in the water that he held in his cupped hands.
It’s only another eleven days. By Thursday morning Maria will have to have the paper.

‘If I play again today, it will have become a ritual,’ Millar was saying as Perlmann entered the lounge.

Von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral clapped. Millar grinned, unbuttoned his blazer and sat down on the piano stool after a hint of a bow. He played preludes and fugues from
The
Well-Tempered Clavier
.

For several minutes Perlmann sat there with his eyes closed and drove all his strength inwards to keep the panic from welling up in him like a fountain.
If I’m inside something I can write very quickly. I know that. And things like that don’t change. I need a day to get into it. Or two. Then there will be nine days left. Seventy, eighty working hours. I can still do it.

His spasm eased slightly, the music got through to him, and vaguely, as if from a long way away, there arrived the memory of Bela Szabo wiping the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. Perlmann reached for this hazy image as if for a life-saving instrument, and pulled it to him and stared at it until it became clearer and denser and gradually revealed a whole scene which, in its growing vividness, forced back the flickering fear.

While telling Perlmann the story in a hoarse voice, Szabo had sat doubled up, his elbows propped on his knees, his head in his hands. Shostakovich, who had been sent as a juror to the Bach competition in Leipzig, had spoken to him at the subsequent buffet. Szabo’s composition wasn’t bad, he had said, it was thoroughly pleasant, and even a bit more
. But not really a creative idea
.

While trucks thundered by outside the Conservatoire Szabo had repeated that sentence over and over again, and in the bitterness of his voice there had been the certainty that he would never be able to forget it. Perlmann had got up and, in spite of the heat, closed the window.

And that time in Leipzig Shostakovich had revealed himself as a complete coward, Szabo had said as he wiped his face with his handkerchief. When he was asked about an unsigned article in
Pravda
, in which Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky were branded as obscurantists and lackeys of imperialist capitalism, he had, albeit hesitantly, declared his agreement. He couldn’t believe his ears, Szabo said, and then Perlmann had seen the blood pulsing in the purple vein of fury that had appeared in his pale, alabaster temple. That kind of cowardice, Szabo had squeezed out, was partly responsible for the bloody crushing of the Hungarian uprising, at the end of which his father had been put against the wall. For perhaps a whole minute Szabo had sat there with his fists clenched. Then he had looked at Perlmann with his watery grey eyes, which were not dissimilar to Achim Ruge’s.
Why am I telling you all this?
Then, in English:
Let’s get back to work!
When he hated the language.

This evening once again Bach’s preludes and fugues had become invisible structures of crystalline architecture –
fine white lines behind the night
. That was the music that had so fascinated Shostakovich in Leipzig at the time that he reacted with his own cycle. Perlmann tried to hear the fugues of both composers side by side. Had he really liked the glass pearling and that special kind of fading that characterized Shostakovich’s pieces at that concert? Or had it been Hanna with her bandaged hand who had transfigured everything?

‘You looked as if you were very far away, on a different star,’ Evelyn Mistral said as they went outside. ‘Shall we have another walk tomorrow? Perhaps there’ll be another wedding!’ Perlmann nodded.

But not really a creative idea
. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, Perlmann looked up the Russian term for a
creative idea
and then tried to formulate Shostakovich’s whole remark in Russian. He wasn’t sure whether the way the Russian words lined up obligingly side by side caught the fluid casualness of the German remark –
nicht wirklich ein Einfall
. And suddenly he felt as if he couldn’t speak Russian at all. He stared at the words for a while to make sure that he really could read the Cyrillic script.

Had he himself ever had a truly creative idea? The moon shone into the room. He drew the curtains. Now the darkness was stifling. He opened the curtains again.
Nine days. Ten.
Panic seeped into his agonizing alertness. He went to the bathroom and took a whole sleeping pill.

15

He slept long into Sunday. The room-service waiter who brought him his late breakfast handed him a piece of paper that had been stuck on the door:
So, no ‘wedding walk’? If you want to do anything in the afternoon, let me know! Evelyn.

He liked her careful, forward-leaning handwriting with its rounded connecting lines, and when the waiter had closed the door behind him, he went to the telephone. In the middle of dialling he hung up.
Not with this head, and certainly not in such a jittery state.

Now, in Leskov’s paper, came the pages in which the memory of sensory experience was interpreted as analogous to the memory of emotions. The rich vocabulary for nuances of smell and taste, but also for qualities of sound, was like a thicket that one had to fight one’s way through, one step at a time, and once again Perlmann became aware how many nooks there were in English into which he had never yet shone a light. Often he had to pick up his English-German dictionary to know what was being talked about, and a good two dozen points remained where he wrote down an English word without knowing what it meant.
Millar would know
. Then he felt like a machine arranging signs purely according to syntactical rules, without knowing anything about the correspondence of the meanings. That didn’t only produce a sense of blindness and helplessness, but also kept him from really entering the slipstream of translation, which could have protected him against the panic that was – now that the numbness of night had faded – forcing its way ever more powerfully into his consciousness.

When he became aware that anxiety could spill over and drag him away at any moment, he stretched out his arm and reached for the Russian-Italian dictionary in the back corner of his desk, as if for an anchor. He was lucky, a series of the words he had failed to understand were made clear to him via this indirect route, and now he threw himself with all his might into the attempt to translate the next few paragraphs directly into Italian.

He deleted the first few lines that he had written right after an English paragraph, and took fresh sheets of paper for the Italian text. The prickly feeling that he always had when he jumped back and forth between two foreign languages slowly appeared. The passages that followed dealt with memories in color, and now he discovered how inexperienced he was in Italian when it came to unusual words for colors. Cheerfully excited, he picked up the red dictionary, in which he found many of the words that Laura Sand had explained to him the previous afternoon. He assembled an English-Italian list of these words, and was irritated that the Russian-Italian dictionary was too limited to fill in all the gaps.

When he looked in his suitcase for new writing paper, he came across the black moleskin notebook with his notes in it.
The only text of my own that I have with me
. In a mixture of curiosity and dread he sat down in the red armchair and began to read:

It cannot be stressed often enough: one grows into the world by repeating words parrot-fashion. These words don’t come by themselves; we hear them as parts of judgments, mottos, sentences. For a long time these judgments behave in a similar fashion: we simply parrot them as well. Not unlike the refrain of a children’s song. And one must almost describe it as a stroke of luck if one later manages to recognize these insistent, numbing sequences of words for what they are: blind habits.

mestre is ugly
, says the father whenever the topic turns to Venice.
venice is a dream
.
mestre, on the other hand, is ugly
. We hear the sentence over and over again; it comes with the regularity of a machine. It’s sheer repetition, the click of an automatism, nothing else. And then one repeats the sentence. One has not checked it, not a trace of appropriation. All that’s really happening is this: one repeats it; one says it again with increasing routine. That’s all. One understands the sentence; it’s a sentence in one’s mother tongue. Nonetheless, it doesn’t express anything that one could call a thought. It is a blindly understood, literally thoughtless sentence.

the po valley is boring
is another of these sentences, this time one from the mother. One says in future: ‘If it’s night when you’re travelling through the Po Valley it doesn’t matter; the Po Valley is boring anyway,’ and so on. The sentence is no longer available. It’s an internal fixed point, a constant, a load-bearer in the construction. It represents a set of points. It makes a track impassable. It obstructs a possibility. It steals a landscape from one, a piece of earth, because it directs one around this area and thus turns them into a white, blind patch on the map of experiences. How many of our familiar sentences behave like the sentences about Mestre and the Po Valley – without our noticing?

The memory of the bare hotel room with the high walls and the ancient fittings in the bathroom forced its way into his consciousness; a memory that Perlmann hadn’t touched for years. Even today he wanted nothing to do with it. He turned the page, determined to chase away, by doing so, the distant echo of his former feelings.

And then he was baffled to see that the paper continued in English, with smaller letters and a thinner ballpoint nib. First there came sections in which the theme was picked up from the beginning and modified. The
parroted sentences
were now described as
frozen elements
which, in their treacherous inconspicuousness, kept experiences from being made, and, by being experienced, from changing anything. They had a hypnotic effect, he had noted, and then added that this applied not only to statements like the ones about Mestre and the Po Valley, but also to questions that came like a refrain in every conversation about the future:
and then? what do you want to do after that? when will you be finished? what’s the point of all this
?

Linguistic waste
was what he had called everything that blocked experience like this, and robbed one of the chance of getting involved in anything new and surprising.
Linguistic waste
, Perlmann repeated to himself, and as he murmured the German word he was pulled into the slipstream of memory and saw himself lying on the bed in the bare room in Mestre, furious about all the linguistic waste that he had discovered far too late within himself, and also furious about himself because he had undertaken that senseless journey for a single sentence.

He had taken a night train to Milan, and then travelled through the Po Valley one grey morning in early October, even though it was a detour. He couldn’t remember now what it had looked like. But he very clearly remembered the defiant feeling with which he had pressed his face against the train window so that his fellow-passengers asked several times what he was looking at that was so interesting.

In Mestre he had gone into a hotel opposite the station, where the bellboy had opened up the dance hall of a room. After a few hours of sleep he had gone trotting down insignificant streets in the breaking dawn, until he was completely drenched. Afterwards, in the bathtub, he had felt nothing but emptiness. It was grotesque and bordered on madness: the whole journey, this whole exercise, just to come to terms with that one sentence of his father’s. As if he wanted to set up an example to stand in for all the other linguistic waste. Set up for whom? No one saw it; no one was aware of it. On the contrary: he would never be able to tell anyone. He would be laughed at or looked at as if he were out of his mind. Why, then? Would an indifferent shrug not have been much more effective? The worst thing was Agnes wasn’t an internal companion. She thought his journey was madness and was furious about his fanaticism. Even the film on television, with his favorite actors, didn’t help with his knowledge.

He called home later and was glad that Kirsten answered. Her voice awakened the absurd hope that he might be better understood by her, a sixteen year old.

‘What are you actually doing in this . . . what’s its name . . . Mestre?’ she asked.

After a pause, filled fortunately with hisses and clicks, he asked her how one managed to live in the present.

‘What? I can’t hear you properly.’

He repeated the question, this time fully aware of how ridiculous it sounded.

‘Dad, are you drunk?’

No, there was no need to call Mum, he said: she should just tell her that he had arrived safely.

He no longer had to prove the wrongness of the sentence to himself. It hadn’t got in his way for ages. He was ready, without further ado, to imagine Mestre as a flourishing city, something like Kyoto in cherry blossom. He had already thought that at the station in Frankfurt, and for a moment he had considered turning round. But by now he felt it was a question of loss of face, and at the same time he had flinched at the thought that such a thing might suddenly be an issue between them.

Did he still have to prove it to his father? Or was the journey a weird way of working off his fury at mountains of linguistic waste? Standing in for all the sentences? Why was no one else furious about the stifling power of linguistic waste? He had looked round at the station and also in the train – as if you could tell such a thing by looking at someone.

Would he have taken this ludicrous journey if he hadn’t had to assert himself against anyone with his lonely rage? Was it, in the end, a journey against Agnes more than anything else?

The question had pursued him when he had trudged across Mestre the following day. It was ridiculous, walking through a town – any town – and constantly asking oneself whether it was beautiful or ugly.
Absurd
didn’t cover it, he had thought. And then he suddenly landed in the Piazza Erminio Ferretto, an elongated square with lots of cafés and a great crowd of people smoking and chatting as they enjoyed their holiday. He had liked it there in spite of all the people. He had liked it, Agnes or no Agnes. Then, not far from the square, he found the Galleria Matteotti, a small-town echo of the famous Galleria in Milan. He didn’t know whether it was despair or self-irony, but he had paced it out, that insignificant passage, fifty-three comfortable paces it had been. He still remembered that.

In the afternoon, when he was standing outside the
albergo
in Venice where Agnes had washed his hair, it hurt again. The sun broke through when he sat down in that café where she had uttered her mysterious ‘Yeeess’. The tourists were taking off their coats and jackets. It didn’t keep him there. In the middle of giving his order he apologized to the waiter and walked quickly to the
vaporetto
, which took him to the station. In Mestre he paid the outrageous hotel bill and travelled direct to Milan, where he changed to the night train for Germany.

When he washed his worn-out, unshaven face in the train toilet just before Frankfurt, he was surprised to notice that he was pleased and contented to have made the journey.

‘Mestre is beautiful,’ he said when Agnes looked at him. ‘You should see the Piazza Ferretto! And the Galleria!’

He said it ironically, but she didn’t like that shade of irony. She sensed that it concealed an endured loneliness, and that that same loneliness gave him an unpleasant, reckless strength, a strength that could, because it was drenched in pain, drive him to a cruel act of revenge.

Perlmann showered for a long time, and then went on reading. The ballpoint nib changed again, and the handwriting became agitated, as if he had been in a hurry or irritated.
Language as an enemy of imagination.
He couldn’t remember this at all. He read it like something written by a stranger, astonished, uncertain and also a bit proud plainly to have had more thoughts over the course of time than he would have imagined himself capable of.

Thinking in sentences – he read – always meant a diminution of possibilities. Not only in the simple sense that the actually thought sentence by both logic and attentiveness ruled out other sentences that could have been thought instead. It was more important that linguistic thought took its initial bearings from the repertoire of familiar, tried-and-tested sentences which expressed a familiar picture of things, which seemed in their familiarity to lack alternatives. This impression, that things could not be seen differently, was the natural enemy of the imagination as the ability to envisage everything quite differently. And now example followed example. At first Perlmann was only full of amazement at the diversity of examples; but insofar as the outlined alternatives to the really existing world became increasingly radical, he recognized the text more and more clearly as his own, because his hatred of empty conventions was expressed more and more flagrantly.