Perlmann's Silence (32 page)

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.

Perlmann now tried to leap back and forth between the foreign languages that came out of the loudspeaker, and each time he did so he felt clumsy and stupid as he collided against Japanese as if against an impenetrable wall. Then the particular pitch and brightness of the Japanese voice sounded as if the woman were mocking his incomprehension. He liked being able to make the whole effort on the quiet, involving himself only internally, to some extent, without the sound that came when you engaged with the world by speaking. And during a pause from the loudspeaker, when the only sound was the quiet rushing of the water and the puttering of the engine, he knew all of a sudden what he could have been: a long-distance runner through all the languages of the world, with lots of empty space around him, and without the obligation to exchange a single word with people.

He pursued that thought later on, sitting in a shabby bar near the harbor, over a pizza that repelled him. He asked the surprised proprietor for some paper and a pencil and started describing, on a stained waiter’s pad, the kind of presence and freedom that arose when one passed through several languages at brief intervals. At first it was an effort, he was tired by the sun and the loudspeaker, and the excessively loud voices still rang in his head. But then he got going. He managed precise and dense descriptions, and he formulated things that he had previously felt only vaguely, but had never grasped in words. Every now and again he glanced southwards. The hotel was over an hour’s boat journey away. He grew calm. Here at this wobbly table, from which the paint was flaking, amidst men in vests and dungarees, who probably worked in the harbor, he suddenly felt safe. He managed to stand by the idea that he was someone who was far more interested in sentences like the ones on these little bits of paper than the whole flood of linguistic data and theories.

He asked if he could use the telephone on the bar, and phoned Maria in the hotel. Something in his schedule had changed, he said, and asked whether she couldn’t have his paper ready by this evening or at least by tomorrow afternoon.

She would try, she said, but she couldn’t promise anything, and in fact it was rather unlikely, because some people from Fiat had just arrived and, of course, she would now have to see to them as well.

He knew it was childish, but he was hurt that Maria had reminded him that there was something else in the world apart from him and his group. Her reaction hadn’t been unfriendly, but her voice had been quite businesslike, and that was enough to suggest resentment, mingled with irritation that he hadn’t given her his notes to be typed up much sooner.

On the way back clouds rolled in and accumulated quickly, dark mountains with a delicate edge of sunlight. A squally wind announced a storm and soon the sea was like foaming, greenish lead against a dark, slate-grey wall in which flashes of lightning appeared like scribbled lines. When a violent shower began, the people withdrew inside, leaving Perlmann alone outside under the cabin porch.

Again sentences from the notes circled in his head. He tested them, tasted them, attempted a neutral, sober, detached judgment. Instead, he became increasingly insecure, the English language dampened the sentences, made them less brilliant, less pretentious,
but in the end it’s all trash anyway
. He pulled the stained pieces of paper from his pocket and read them, as gusts of wind lashed the rain across and drenched him to the skin. When it had finished, he paused for a while and stared out into the sheet lightning. Then slowly, almost softly, he crumpled the pieces of paper and pressed them with both hands into a solid ball. He turned them back and forth in his hands a few more times. Then he threw them out into the sea. The second possibility was eliminated, once and for all.

It was so terribly cramped, this prison of the three possibilities, whose bars he rattled with furious frustration. Again and again he attempted to flee by clinging to the idea of bigger connections, of altered proportions.
It’s mad to let myself be so tied up by ludicrous issues of respect within a group of colleagues that all that I remain seems to be entirely insignificant and not even present. And besides; there are disasters, wars, hunger and misery in the world out there, and there are real tragedies and real suffering. Why do I not free myself by simply denying the importance of this tiny, laughable problem? Why don’t I just tear down the prison walls by declaring them to be imaginary structures? Who’s actually stopping me from doing that?

But each attempt to take that much-longed-for step into freedom through an altered perspective and a re-evaluation of things proved to be deceptive and without any lasting effect as soon as the image of the loathed hotel re-entered the foreground and, as if it had hypnotic powers, extinguished everything else.

When the Portofino peninsula came into view Perlmann was gripped by panic, a panic that had seemed to have been defeated two hours before in the bar at the harbor. The word plagiarism formed within him; against his will it grew bigger and bigger, it spread within him and filled him with an internal roar. He had never been confronted with the word as he was now, he was discovering it properly now for the first time. It was a terrible word, a word that made him think of the color red, a dark red with a hint of black. It was a gloomy, heavy word with a doom-laden sound; a repellent and unnatural word. It seemed to him like a word that had been deliberately assembled to frighten and torment someone to their very depths by calling up in him the feeling that beneath all the actions of which people were capable there was no crime greater than the one represented by this hateful, angular word.

The only one who could unmask him would be Leskov himself, and he was in St Petersburg, thousands of miles away, without an exit permit and still tied to his sick mother. Better security from the discovery of deception was hard to imagine. But that reflection sounded feeble and papery compared to a mute certainty which made him shiver even more in his wet clothes: committing such a fraud, a theft of thought and writing on that scale would – for someone like himself, to whom words meant so much – inflict a wound that would never heal, a trauma from which he would never be able to recover. In a sense it would be the end of his life. After that the time until death would be something that he could only endure. Occasional forgetfulness and immersion in the everyday would make it a little more bearable, but Perlmann was quite sure that on the whole stretch that still lay before him there wouldn’t be a single day when he could keep from thinking about it, and hearing the word
plagiarism
inside himself.