Perlmann's Silence

  Perlmann said nothing. It was nearly one o’clock and he was internally rehearsing the sentences for Maria; because the idea that he could walk past her unnoticed for a second time, when she was waiting for his paper, was unlikely in the extreme.

  He found all this material incredibly exciting, Millar said when Laura Sand looked at her watch and gathered her papers together. So he suggested continuing with the same thing on Monday. He flicked through the texts. ‘And on Tuesday. Because there’s is a lot I’d still like to know about it, in theoretical terms as well.’

  Laura Sand took her time before returning his expectant glance. ‘OK,’ she said then, and the way she imitated Millar’s Yankee accent was a sign that she had accepted his conciliatory offer.

  Millar pushed his glasses back on his nose with his index finger. ‘Swell.’

  She pulled a face at the word. His mouth twitched.

  Perlmann calculated feverishly: that meant that the second half of the coming week was taken up with Evelyn Mistral, and it would be his turn on the Monday of the last week. The text would have to be in the pigeonholes by Saturday at the latest. That meant that Maria would have to have it on Wednesday morning – Thursday at the latest. Five-and-a-half days. That could be enough. His heart was pounding. Suddenly, everything was open again.

  ‘While we’re on the subject,’ Silvestri spoke into Perlmann’s calculation. ‘As far as the last week is concerned I can only do the first half. On Thursday I’m afraid I have to sort a few things out at the hospital.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘So I can’t be at your session, which will probably happen at the end. But I’ll get the text.’

  ‘Of course,’ Perlmann said hoarsely. A week, I’ve gained a whole week.

  As if numb with relief he walked through the lounge. Maria was waiting for him in the hall. He walked over to her with a presence of mind that later surprised him as much as it repelled him.

  ‘I didn’t get around to saying it in the morning. The timetable has changed slightly, and now I’m going to use the opportunity to rework my text again. As things look right now, you won’t have to do anything with it until next Friday.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, slightly irritated, and ran her hand sideways through her hair so that her earring jangled quietly. ‘What should I . . . ? All right, then. I’ll just go on typing up your other text. Will that do?’

  During Maria’s last words Evelyn Mistral had joined them.

  ‘Yes, do that,’ said Perlmann, and couldn’t help running his tongue over his lips.

  ‘You’ve been writing a lot recently, haven’t you?’ Evelyn said to him as they were walking together through the hall. ‘And all in secret!’

  Perlmann pulled a helpless face and shrugged.

  ‘And now I’ve gained half a week,’ he said. ‘Not bad. Although, I’m actually finished and almost a little disappointed having to wait until Thursday. Silly, isn’t it? And I’ve got such stage fright!’

  No, said Perlmann, he didn’t have time to stroll through town. He had something he wanted to work on. But on Sunday he would be available again, very definitely.

  He sat for almost an hour in the red armchair before he worked out what was going on. Before, when he had parted from Evelyn Mistral and gone energetically upstairs, two at a time, he had been glad to enjoy his relief, and at the same time – for the first time in ages – he had once again felt something like buoyancy. In that one week that he suddenly had at his disposal he would surely be able to get something written. But then, when he had lit a cigarette and, to his surprise, rested his feet on the circular table, the relief he had promised himself did not come, and it had not helped at all to predict the unexpected, happy turn of events. He meekly took his feet off the table and sat up straight. And only now did it dawn on him that the cramped weariness that had set in instead of relief was disappointment – disappointment that it wasn’t all over yet, and that there was still a long sequence of days to come, in which he would have to live through that tension, that anxiety and above all that lack of belief in himself. He drew the curtains, took a quarter of a sleeping-pill and lay down in bed. Just before he fell asleep there was a knock on the door. He didn’t react.

  It wasn’t, in fact, Chagall’s colors that he had been defending in his dream, he thought when he woke up in the gloom and, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbed his throbbing temples. Admittedly, the painter’s name had wandered constantly through his thoughts like a ghost, but what he had cried out – in a hoarse voice and the most indistinct of words, against a wall of incredulity – had been a defense of Laura Sand’s poetic images of suffering.

  He went into the shower and tried to find the words that had remained only a furious intention in his dream. Words came. He spoke them into the stream of water, choked and then intensified his defense until it became a fiery speech peaking in the claim that only beautiful images could depict suffering for what it was – because beauty was, in fact, truth, and the only truth that could plumb the whole depth of suffering. When he turned off the water and rubbed the taste of chlorine from his face with his towel, he shuddered at his kitsch and was glad for a while to be able to listen to the sober, boring voice of the announcer on the television news.

  At dinner, Achim Ruge amazed him. In the middle of the main course, and without interrupting his dissection of his fish, he suddenly said: ‘You know, Brian, I really didn’t understand what it was that bothered you so much about Laura’s film. They’re very precise, very eloquent shots – much better than anything you get to see on television on the subject.’

  Laura Sand went on eating, without even looking up. Millar lowered his knife and fork, took off his glasses and cleaned them thoroughly.

  ‘Now, Achim,’ he said then, ‘I see it like this: in this case dreamlike, photographically successful pictures conceal more than they reveal. Beauty, you might say, is lying here. Of course, I don’t mean, Laura, that you are lying,’ he added quickly, although without getting a glance from her, ‘I just mean it in a – how should I say it? – in an objective sense. Truthful pictures of hunger and death don’t need to be bad, of course. But they should, I think, be as dry as agency reports. Sober. Completely sober. Certainly not dreamy. And I don’t think it’s an aesthetic question, it’s a moral one. Sorry, but that’s how I see it.’

  He waited for a reaction from Laura Sand, but again he waited in vain, so that after an apologetic gesture in Ruge’s direction he addressed himself to his dinner again.

  For a while the only sound was the rattle of cutlery, and the waiter who topped up their wine seemed like an intruder. With all his might Perlmann resisted the feeling that there was something in what Millar had said. He was tempted to adopt the opposite view, and that impulse also had something to do with the fact that Millar’s hairy hands got on his nerves, hands that were capable of producing that mysterious simultaneity of sounds in Bach and now manipulated the fish cutlery with the delicacy of a surgeon. But then he thought about the taste of chlorine in the shower and bit his lips.

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ Ruge was saying now. ‘Taking suffering seriously and allowing oneself to be morally touched by it can’t mean denying beauty. Or forbidding it, to a certain extent.’

  Laura gave him a glance of agreement.

  ‘Erm . . . no, of course not,’ Millar said irritably. ‘And that’s not what I meant. But that’s exactly where there’s a contradiction in Laura’s film. There’s no getting round it.’

  ‘Of course. And nor should there be,’ Ruge smiled. ‘What concerns me is just this: it’s a contradiction that we’ve got to endure, both here and elsewhere. Endure it, without avoiding it.’

  ‘Ecco!’ said Silvestri.

  Laura Sand leaned back and lit a cigarette. There was a complacent gleam in her furious expression. Perlmann didn’t like that gleam. Suddenly, he missed Agnes.

  Millar gave Silvestri a contemptuous look. ‘I think that’s too simple,’ he said then, turning to Ruge. ‘Cheap – if the word is all
owed.’

  ‘Oh, it’s allowed, certainly,’ replied Ruge. ‘But it’s wrong, I fear. Because enduring that contradiction – in the sense in which I mean it – that is, on the contrary, extremely difficult. Or expensive,’ he added with a grin.

  Millar drummed his fingers on the table top. ‘I don’t think so, Achim . . . Oh, forget it.’

  Over dessert and coffee he didn’t say a word. Now and again he bit his lips. Perlmann suddenly wasn’t sure whether Brian Millar was as tough an opponent as he had previously thought.

  Before he went to bed, Perlmann prepared his desk for the following day. He moved the lamp to the side and straightened a stack of blank sheets on the glass, with his writing materials next to them. He went through the books in his suitcase and finally carried three volumes over to the desk. Then he took half a pill. If he was to be able to start writing straight away tomorrow, he would have to sleep well. When the first, familiar signs of numbness set in, he began to compose the structure of his paper. Four subheadings, underlined and with a number in front of them. The four lines were precisely the same length. It looked very neat. It would turn out well.

  21

  When Kirsten, announced by Giovanni, stood at his door at six o’clock the following morning, Perlmann had to control himself to keep from throwing his arms around her neck.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ she said with a smile in which sheepishness and mockery mixed, and which also contained a confidence that he had never seen in his daughter before. ‘You sounded so weird on the phone the day before yesterday that I thought I should check everything was all right.’

  She was wearing a long, black coat and light-colored sneakers, and her recalcitrant hair was held together with a lemon-yellow hairband. On the floor next to her was the scuffed red leather travelling bag that Agnes had dragged around with her like a talisman on all her trips.

  ‘Come on, sit down,’ he said, and cursed his heavy head and furry tongue. ‘How on earth did you get here?’

  She had been on the road for fifteen hours from Konstanz, hitching all the way. Six times she had stood by the roadside, and once – at a gas station on the Milan ring road, long after midnight – it had been more than an hour before anyone had picked her up. Perlmann shuddered, but didn’t say a word. The best part had been at the beginning, in Switzerland. There, a man had even invited her to dinner before they drove down the Leventina gorge. ‘A nice respectable Swiss man with suspenders!’ She laughed when she saw his face.

  No, she hadn’t actually been scared. Well, OK, perhaps a bit when the guy who drove her from Milan to Genoa kept on about her appearance. She’d been annoyed that she didn’t speak enough Italian to shut him up. But then he’d let her get into the back to sleep for a while. And when he insisted on a goodbye kiss – well, yes, apart from the fact that it had scratched a bit and she hadn’t liked his smell, it had been quite funny. She had driven the rest of the journey with a dolled-up woman in an open-topped Mercedes, who had talked without interruption about her argument with her husband and paid her, Kirsten, no further attention. Here, in the sleeping town, it had been a long time before she had found someone to show her the way to the hotel.

  ‘But now I’m here and I think it’s great that I’ve done it! You know, Martin was quite cross about me suddenly leaving like that. He actually tried to talk me out of it. But when I was coming out of the student canteen I met Lasker, and when he stopped specially to tell me how perceptive he thought my presentation was, I was so high that I just had to do something crazy. Do you think I could give Martin a quick call and tell him I got here safely?’

  Perlmann showed her how to get an outside line, picked up his clothes and went into the bathroom. He took alternate hot and cold showers to drive away the after-effect of the pills, and every now and again he held his tongue under the stream of water.

  So in the end she hadn’t come because of him, but because she wanted to celebrate her success. He tried to fight against his disappointment with vigorous rubbing. He had never seen her with purple lips before. It was the same purple that Sheila had worn. It emphasized the pout of her lips, which even as a little girl she had refused to accept. The color didn’t suit her. Not at all. And then all those rings, at least one on each finger. They were all mixed up, and yet it looked as if she was wearing knuckle-dusters on each hand.

  Only now did he notice that his chin hurt because he was convulsively gripping his razor. Once again he bathed his eyes, which looked swollen and unhealthy. Then he slipped into his clothes, leaned against the door with his eyes closed for a moment, and then went back into the room.

  Kirsten was still on the phone, and guiltily turned her head when she heard Perlmann. ‘See you on Tuesday, then!’ she said quickly. ‘Yes, I will. See you then. Bye.’ She put down the phone. ‘I want to be back in time for Lasker’s seminar. I thought there might be a night train from Genoa on Monday evening. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired at the next session! But . . . umm . . .’ she looked at the floor.

  ‘Of course, I’ll give you the ticket,’ said Perlmann, ‘after all, you came here because of me.’

  She came up to him and he rested his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘You look tired. And pale,’ she said. ‘Has something happened? The way you asked about Mum on the phone: I couldn’t understand a word.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that.’ His tongue was heavy again. ‘I don’t know . . . I was a bit confused. It doesn’t mean anything more than that. And as to what’s happened, no, no, nothing particular has happened.’

  She looked at him with the concentrated, sceptical look that she had inherited from Agnes. ‘But you’re not having a particularly great time here, either, are you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all a bit exhausting. With all the other colleagues.’

  ‘And it’s been less than a year. Sometimes it seems to me as if it can’t have been more than a few weeks. You too?’

  He felt the burning sensation behind his eyes and pulled her to him for a moment. Then he pushed her away with forced brio. ‘Right, so let’s find you a room in this place!’

  Less than half an hour after she moved into her room, she was back with him, her clothes changed and her hair still damp.

  ‘God, the price of a room like that – it’s insane!’

  She didn’t want to sleep now. She wanted to see the sea at dawn, the terrace, the really fantastic hotel in general.

  ‘And you’ve got to show me the conference room as well! Have you got a session on Monday? Do you think I could listen?’

  Perlmann felt as if his chest was filling with lead. Breakfast first, he finally suggested. As they walked to the elevator, she turned round and looked back down the long corridor.

  ‘Are you all up here?’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. No. Just me, in fact.’ He pressed the button for the elevator again.

  ‘And why’s that?’

  ‘Why? Umm . . . ah . . . that’s more or less coincidence. Lots of the rooms downstairs are being renovated over the winter, and there was some sort of problem with the bed. I’m quite content. It’s nice and quiet up here.’

  The elevator door opened. ‘Aha,’ she said and plucked at her yellow sweatshirt with the printed emblem of Rockefeller University. On the way down Perlmann looked with concentration at the jumping illuminated numbers.

  It was only a quarter past seven, and the dining room, its lights still lit, was deserted. The waiter struggled to hide his surprise. ‘Benvenuta!’ he said with a slight bow when Perlmann explained who Kirsten was.

  She ate for two, admired the silver cutlery and the chandeliers and kept pointing enthusiastically at the sea, where the day was breaking, and the faint dawn light was making way for the transparent blue of a cloudless sky.

  Perlmann drank only coffee. He would have liked to smoke, but didn’t dare. Before, when Giovanni told him he had sent up a signorina who claimed to be his daughter, the first thing he had done was to check whether he had emptied and rinsed out the
ashtray. He couldn’t tell her now that he was smoking again. He guessed that this half hour, sitting quite alone in the big, snow-white dining room as light filtered increasingly in, so that the chandeliers suddenly were switched off, as if by an invisible hand – that this half hour would be the loveliest moment of her visit, and he wanted to hold on to it for as long as possible.

  When she was finished, she took a pack of cigarettes out of her Indian-looking shoulder bag. She sheepishly put one between her lips. ‘Only one every now and again. Not like Mum and you before.’ Then she rummaged for a red lighter with a fine gold rim and lit her cigarette. Perlmann registered that she was only inhaling it half-heartedly. It was nearly eight o’clock. Soon it would be over, that moment of silent intimacy in the empty dining room.

  Millar, Ruge and von Levetzov came in at the same time and stopped, nonplussed, for a moment. Then they approached the table and Perlmann introduced Kirsten. At first she didn’t know what was happening when von Levetzov lifted her hand and made as if to kiss it. There was still a confused smile on her face when Millar shook her hand and bowed athletically.

  ‘Good girl!’ he said, and pointed to the sweatshirt. ‘That’s my university!’

  ‘And, of course, he thinks it’s the best one,’ Ruge said to her in German. ‘Only because he doesn’t know Bochum!’ he added with a giggle. He shook her hand. ‘Good morning. When did you get here?’

  Perlmann was glad that the women hadn’t come yet. When Kirsten had finished her cigarette, he excused himself and they went out to the terrace. Before they reached the veranda Kirsten suddenly stopped and craned her neck.

  ‘That looks like . . . Is that the conference room?’

  Perlmann nodded.

  She took his hand. ‘Come on, you’ve got to show it to me now.’

  Inside, she immediately sat down in the high armchair with the carved back. She compared the elegance of the room with the shabbiness of the practice rooms at the university: here the mahogany tables, there the greyish Formica ones; the gleaming white porcelain ashtrays, as opposed to the cigarette butts floating in the dregs of the cardboard coffee cups; the immaculate, electrically adjustable board behind her, in contrast to the blind boards back home, which constantly got stuck. Then she picked up one of the crystal glasses for the mineral water.