His father had lived to hear that. After the report he had turned off the radio in silence, his mother had told him. ‘He wasn’t a sympathizer, you know that,’ she had added. ‘It’s just that he feels somehow under attack when these things are talked about.’ By the graveside she had surprised Perlmann: she, who otherwise wept easily, didn’t shed a single tear.
She had surprised him for a second time the following autumn, this time with her interest in the Cuban crisis, of which he would not have thought her capable. She had, he had felt all winter, seemed better than ever. And then, sometime in the spring, her startlingly rapid decline began. Her world shrank to magazine articles about kitschy German musicals, Kennedy in Berlin interested her not at all, and when he dragged her to see Irma la Douce, she babbled something about pornography on the way home. When he told her about the death of Édith Piaf, she no longer knew who that was, although she had secretly listened to her chansons for years when his father was sitting in the pub with the other post-office workers. She was unaware of the shooting in Dallas. By day she slept with her mouth open, and from ten o’clock she terrorized the night nurse.
When Perlmann arrived at the hospital on the first day of the New Year someone else was already lying in her bed. No, he didn’t want to see her again, he had explained to the nurse, who was alarmed by the edge in his voice. And there had been another faux pas. The graveside ceremony wasn’t quite finished when he lit a cigarette in front of everyone. Why had he not managed to turn that precious moment of liberation into a permanent distinction from all the others, a calm lack of subservience, a fearlessness that needed no dramatic gestures? He laughed to himself and at the same time bit his lips when he thought about how he had simply left the relatives standing outside the pub. To the baffled question of why he hadn’t stayed at the wake, when he was, after all, paying for it, he had said: ‘Chiefly because the word disgusts me.’ Then he had disappeared around the corner.
The food over at the hotel probably wasn’t as good as its reputation, the proprietor grinned as he walked over to Perlmann’s table during a break. Perlmann looked at his watch. Ten past eight. Still enough time. No, it was fine, he said, snapped the chronicle shut and picked up his briefcase. The stamps nearly fell into what was left of his tomato sauce. They were for Sandra, he said, holding them out to the proprietor. No, no, he said, Perlmann must bring them to Sandra in person, or she would be disappointed. And then he led him up the stairs to Sandra’s room, which, like the whole apartment, was cramped and full of junk.
Sandra’s joy over the stamps was subdued by her difficulties with English. She was in every other respect such a clever child, her mother sobbed, but she just couldn’t get to grips with this funny spelling that had so little to do with the pronunciation. And they, her parents, couldn’t help. Could he stay for a moment and explain one or the other to her? Otherwise her test on Monday threatened to be a disaster. He just had to look at the last exercise in the book. There was more red ink than blue.
Perlmann stayed till eleven. Sitting on an uncomfortable stool, he went through the two last exercises with Sandra and then explained some grammar to her as well. Often she was close to tears, but in the end she smiled bravely, and he stroked her hair.
Then the proprietor brought him almond tart and a grappa. Time didn’t matter any more anyway, and Perlmann read through the year he had begun in the chronicle. The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Right, that was the start of the Vietnam War. Khrushchev’s fall from power. The death of Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist. Perlmann knew him, but he hadn’t known that he had only reluctantly condemned the crimes of Stalin. And last of all Sartre, who had refused the Nobel Prize. What exactly had been his explanation? The text in the chronicle was confused, and made Sartre sound like a scatterbrain. Perlmann tried out various explanations as he walked across the deserted Piazza Veneto and along the promenade to the hotel.
Giovanni, who had been sitting watching television in the side-room, handed him a paper by Achim Ruge, almost a hundred pages thick, the text for Monday. The others had asked after him several times in the course of the evening, he said. ‘Because you weren’t at dinner yesterday, either,’ he added. Perlmann’s hand gripped the paper so convulsively that the top page was pulled out of its staple. Again he wanted to slap the pomaded head with the ridiculous sideburns. He turned away in silence and stepped into the open elevator.
In the corridor, all the bulbs were burning in the lamps. For a moment he was tempted to go and get the ladder, but then he walked into his room and sank on to the bed in the dark. After a while his head was filled again with the images of the new patient in his mother’s bed, the startled nurse, the coffin being lowered into the grave.
He went into the bathroom and swallowed the small bit of pill from yesterday. Édith Piaf’s real name had been Édith Giovanna Gassion, he thought before drifting into sleep. The individual snowflakes had melted on his mother’s coffin. He had found that distasteful. Perhaps the unseemly cigarette had had something to do with it as well.
8
Perlmann slept until late into the morning and then ordered a big breakfast. Over the first cup of coffee he was drawn back into the pull of translation, and now he found himself captivated not only by the experience of his faster comprehension, but by the ideas he was coming across in the text.
Leskov now attacked the idea that the narration of remembered scenes was a simple description of images arising, a linguistic inventory of fixed material that dictated the logic of narration through its unambiguously determined contours. That was neither the case with regard to the objective fixed points of a scene nor in the facets of the self-image read into it. The narration of one’s own past was always a fresh undertaking in which other forces were at work than the intention to call up recorded material in a detailed manner. There was above all the need to make a meaningful whole out of the remembered scene and one’s own presence within it, and accordingly a lack of meaning was interpreted as an imperfection of memory.
Perlmann faltered. What was the significance in this instance of smysl: sense? He would have liked to read the answer in an abstract form. But first there came several pages of examples, and the text became accordingly difficult, because Leskov’s descriptions were atmospherically precise, witty, and every now and again there was a sentence which, Perlmann assumed, had a poetic brilliance. He would have liked to know whether a Russian would have seen this as a break with the concise, laconic style that prevailed elsewhere in the text, or whether a native Russian would still perceive a unified stylistic form. At any rate, translating became a strain again at this point; he had to consult his grammar several times, and the limitations of the dictionary were infuriating. He irritably sent the chambermaid away again.
Dusk was already falling over the bay, giving the sea a metallic sheen, when Perlmann finally reached the conclusion drawn from the examples. The strongest power in narrative memory, Leskov wrote, was the desire to understand one’s past self through its actions. From this desire one composed past scenes in such a way that one’s own actions, and also one’s sensations, appeared accessible and reasonable. That didn’t mean measuring them against an abstract catalogue of reasonable characteristics. It simply meant this: the narrated past must be comprehensible from the point of view of the present narrator. The narrator would not rest before he could recognize himself in his past self. And that referred not only to questions of intelligence and the purposefulness of his previous action, but above all to its moral aspects. Narrative memory was always also a justification, a piece of inventive apologia.