She also knew about the time that Silvestri had spent in Oakland.
‘On the subject of America,’ she said, ‘I think this Princeton business is brilliant! Do you think I could visit you there?’ With a strange hesitation, as if she had to struggle to remember him, she added after a pause: ‘With Martin. He’d love to see New York!’
The people they asked in Rapallo didn’t know whether the historical building was still there. Over lunch Perlmann learned about the treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia that had temporarily made Fiume into an independent state. He was amazed at how much his daughter knew, and how hungry for knowledge she was. And deep down that’s exactly what I never was: hungry for knowledge.
Within a few minutes the sky had clouded over. In the gloomy, flat light that now fell through the pizzeria windows, Kirsten’s enthusiasm suddenly faded, and they looked shyly at one another.
‘I’m not taking too much of your time away?’ she asked. ‘It’s your turn on Thursday, isn’t it?’
It was hard for Perlmann to admit to himself that he was furious about her tone, which expressed the fact that she now saw every feat that anyone had to perform in the light of her first presentation. He nodded briefly and suggested they leave.
On the journey back they stood in silence at the railing and looked at the foamy crests of the waves forming under a cold wind. Kirsten asked at one point whether she could read what he was going to say here. Perlmann was glad that a gust of wind gave him a moment’s pause. Maria had the text at the moment, he said then, and told her who Maria was. For a few frightened minutes he waited for her question about the subject of his talk; but it didn’t come. Instead Kirsten said, without looking at him, ‘Brian Millar. You don’t like him. Do you?’
‘Umm . . . he’s OK. He strikes me as a bit too . . . self-confident.’
‘Cocksure,’ she said in English, and looked at him with a smile. ‘I can see that.’
As they left the ship she suddenly stopped. ‘Is that why you don’t want to play the piano? You’re not scared of him or anything, are you? I thought he sounded pretty shallow last night, when we were talking about Faulkner.’
Perlmann knocked an empty coke can over the edge of the quay wall with his shoe. ‘This just isn’t the place for it, I reckon. That’s all.’
Now he needed to be alone and started walking at a brisk pace. But when the hotel came into view, Kirsten stopped again.
‘And you won’t explain that thing about Mum and Chagall? I’m sorry. I’m getting on your nerves. But you’re so . . . so down.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s about to start raining.’
In the hall Silvestri came towards them, the collar of his raincoat turned up and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He was going to the cinema, he said with the guilty grin of a schoolboy skiving on his homework. Could she come with him? Kirsten asked, and turned red when she became aware of the impetuousness of her question. Again Perlmann could hardly believe how quickly the Italian was able to react. The only clue that he would rather have gone on his own lay in the fact that his gallantry sounded a little too cheerful.
‘Volentieri; volentierissimo, Signorina,’ he said and offered her his arm.
Perlmann had to turn on the light when he sat down at the desk. Only now, when he saw the skewed pens and the screwed-up paper in the waste-paper basket, did he remember that he had got up in the night and tried to work. It wasn’t a very clear memory, and there was something strange and distant about it – as if it hadn’t been him at all. He picked up the crumpled paper, only to drop it again after a brief hesitation. Then he started to jot down some keywords. When Kirsten left from Genoa on Monday evening, he would be able to take a taxi quickly back here and start writing straight away. And then he still had three days before he absolutely had to give Maria a text.
The keywords, which stood side by side and on top of one another, refused to turn into sentences, and in the growing carelessness of the writing the lack of belief became increasingly evident. Perlmann ran a bath and sat down in the tub long before it was full. The worst thing was that he wished it was already Monday evening. As he did so he thought constantly about when the film would be over and Kirsten might knock at the door. He added more and more hot water until it was hardly bearable. Then he lay on the bed in his dressing gown, and as the burning of his skin slowly eased, he dozed off.
Something had gone wrong between her and Silvestri. Perlmann could see it at once when he opened the door to Kirsten. There was something defiant in her face, an expression like the one she had worn in the school competition when she had been beaten by her arch-enemy from the same class. She walked up to him and put her arms around his neck. She hadn’t done that for years, and Perlmann, who no longer knew how to hug a daughter, held her like a precious, fragile object. When she pulled away he stroked her hair, which smelled of restaurant. She sat down in the red armchair and reached into her jacket for her cigarettes. She looked furiously at the pack of Gauloises that she had fished out, and hurled them towards the waste-paper basket, which she just missed. Perlmann picked up the cigarettes, which had slipped from their wrapping. When he looked up, Kirsten was holding one of her own cigarettes in the flame of the red lighter. Her dark eyes glittered.
‘And now I’d like you to take me out, up to the white hotel on the hill,’ she said with a purple pout.
It sounded like a sentence from a film, and Perlmann had to suppress a chuckle. He put on his clothes and chose his blazer with the gold buttons. He was glad that it wasn’t yet Monday evening. When he came out of the bathroom, she pointed to the page of keywords that still lay on the glass desktop.
‘When I get bored in seminars I doodle as well,’ she said.
It was only when the taxi turned into the drive of the Imperiale that Perlmann managed to forget that remark.
Kirsten leaned far back in her turquoise plush armchair and looked out into the backdrop of lights in the bay.
‘I wish Mum was here, too,’ she said into the quiet music that spilled across from the bar into the lounge.
Perlmann choked on his sandwich. So perhaps, after all, she hadn’t come to terms with Agnes’s death better and faster than he had. And even if she had, it had been silly to resent her for it.
‘Yesterday in the café,’ she went on, ‘you said something about intimacy and freedom. I don’t know if I understood.’ She paused without looking at him. ‘Were you happy with Mum? I mean . . . It was good at home, there were never any arguments. But maybe . . .’
Perlmann closed his eyes. The camera clicked, and Agnes laughed mockingly as he beat his arms around him to drive away the pigeons. Then they were walking together through Hamburg, pointing out the gleaming colors of the wet, glistening autumn leaves to one another, while inside he repeated over and over to himself the doctor’s redeeming words about Kirsten’s health. In his face he felt the wind over the cliffs of Normandy, and saw Agnes’s arm in the yellow windbreaker, slinging the full pack of cigarettes far into the void with a circular motion. And then, as if this new memory had pushed its way darkly over the others without quite erasing them, he felt Agnes’s head on his stiff shoulder, after she had made her remark about that dreamy photograph of Hong Kong at the airport.
He opened his eyes and saw that Kirsten was looking at him.
‘We were fine. Most of the time we were fine together.’
Her smile at that moment, he thought later, revealed that she was pleased about the confidence in his voice, but unhappy with his choice of words. After all, she had asked about happiness.
She shook her packet of cigarettes and made to go. Following Silvestri’s habit of fishing one out with her lips, she paused, started the whole movement from the beginning and then used her fingers, as she normally did.
‘You know, Martin’s OK. He really is OK.’ She paused for too long, sensed it and struggled for words. ‘Really, he is. It’s just . . . I don’t know . . . sometimes he lacks a bit of . . . exciteme
nt. Something, you know, like that stupid guy Giorgio . . . that stupid Silvestri . . . or François . . . Oh, forget it.’ Turning her head quickly she threw Perlmann a crooked grin and then looked out of the window again.
Perlmann thought of how Agnes had come back from her trip to Shanghai, the one André Fischer had been on. That one present, a little ivory dragon, she had chucked at him halfway across the living room without warning, something she never normally did. And for a few days her other movements had become jauntier than usual, sometimes practically exuberant for no reason. Then things had returned to normal and the quietness that marked their dealings with one another had swallowed up the exuberance.
Perlmann asked how good Martin’s Russian was, when Kirsten’s silence began to oppress him. He was asking, he said, because she had made that remark the previous day about the big dictionary with the bad paper.
‘Oh, not bad, I think. His father, who’s a pretty revolting character, by the way, worked in Moscow for a long time, and Martin wanted to match his linguistic abilities. It seems to be the only bond between the two of them.’ She clumsily stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is talented. In lots of ways. That’s . . . that’s not it . . .’
It was long past midnight before they got out of the taxi in front of the Mira. Over the past two hours Kirsten had done almost all of the talking, and he had learned far more about her life than he had for ages. He now knew all about the other members of their shared apartment. He knew Kirsten’s travel plans for the coming year, and had joined her in her fury about the sloppiness of the medical insurance she’d taken out for her eczema. But most of all he now knew what her everyday life at university was like. He could even have quoted some of the graffiti that she saw every day. Enthralled, he had absorbed every single detail, and with each new topic he had tried to enjoy the closeness that his daughter sought with him as she went on talking, relaxed and almost dreamily, about the various different atmospheres over Lake Constance. But then she had fallen back into that tone that conveyed her pride for her father, who knew the university much, much better than she did, and for whom all the stories she told him must have been old hat. Stop, please stop! he could have cried out to her a dozen times. I’m not there any more. I haven’t been for ages! Her naivety had become more and more of a torture – as the lounge, with its fin-de-siècle plush charm, became emptier – and had driven him into an icy loneliness in which his temptation the previous day to confide in her all his fear and despair had not once returned.
Before Kirsten entered her corridor, she walked up to Perlmann, wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his chest.
‘We haven’t talked like that very often. Maybe never. It was nice. Did you think so, too?’
He nodded mutely. When she looked up and noticed the tears in his eyes, she stroked his cheeks with both hands. And before she disappeared round the corner three steps later, she waved at him, shyly at first, and then with ironic affectation.
23
At about half-past eight he picked her up for breakfast. She was dressed as she had been when she arrived, and was wearing all her rings as well. On the other hand her lips were bare, so that you could see the spot where her bottom lip had burst. When she saw Perlmann’s expression, she ran her index finger over the spot.
‘May I?’ she asked, and walked over to the mirror in the bathroom.
The pills. I should have cleared them away. Perlmann walked over to the window, closed his eyes and sought words for a casual, innocuous explanation.
‘Tell me,’ Kirsten said when she came out of the bathroom. ‘Barbiturates – isn’t that pretty strong stuff? And pretty dangerous, too? Because of addiction and everything, I mean.’
Perlmann breathed out before he turned round. ‘What? Oh, you mean the pills.’ He managed a smile. ‘Oh, no, the doctor told me not to worry about that. It’s all a matter of dosage. And I only need them very rarely, luckily.’ Now he hadn’t needed his well-chosen words. ‘Just now and again, so if there’s a night when my back hurts. And there’s something that isn’t quite right with the bed up here. And before the whole of the next day goes down the drain . . .’
She put one foot on the bedstead and retied her trainer. There was no way of telling whether she believed him.
Silvestri didn’t appear in the dining room until five to nine, and only drank coffee. Although he was sitting opposite her, Kirsten tried to ignore him, suddenly bombarding Ruge with questions about his lab in Bochum. Then, when Silvestri reached for his cigarettes, he sought Kirsten’s eye to offer her one. In the end he lit one for himself, glanced at Perlmann and sent the pack sliding jauntily all the way across the table so that it bumped into Kirsten’s saucer and made her coffee spill over the edge. Kirsten gave a start, lifted her dripping cup reproachfully for a moment, and then picked up the packet. Only now did she meet Silvestri’s eye. For a second Perlmann feared that she would simply push the pack back to him. But then she very slowly fished out a cigarette, put it between her lips and, looking in a completely different direction, stretched out her arm towards Silvestri with a gesture so blasé that it looked as if she had learned it at drama school. With a grin, the Italian dropped his lighter into her open hand from an exaggeratedly high position. There was a quiet metallic sound when it rubbed against all her rings. Without deigning to glance at him, Kirsten held her cigarette into the flame, snapped the lighter shut and set it down in the middle of the table. ‘Ecco!’ Silvestri laughed and reached for it. Then Kirsten turned and looked at him and stuck out her tongue.
Perlmann caught a glance from Evelyn Mistral. Her oriental face with its green eyes shot through with amber seemed to come at him from a long way away, and he didn’t know whether he was pleased about that, or unhappy.
Laura Sand’s third session passed at a more sluggish pace than the previous two. Some films injected a little life into proceedings, raising the question of whether animals understood the meaning of certain signs only in the sense that they reacted appropriately to them, or whether – albeit in a simplified, pallid sense – they attributed to others the intention of giving them a sign. Did animals have anything like a theory about the intellectual lives of their own species?
‘But that’s blindingly obvious!’ Kirsten exploded. ‘Of course they have! You can see that in their eyes!’
‘The fact is,’ Millar cut in, ‘that you can’t see anything at all in their eyes, and that it’s pretty fantastical to assume any such thing. To put it mildly.’ He said it in his usual confident, professional tone, and only a hint of irritation revealed that a discussion about Faulkner had taken place.
Perlmann thought about the funny things that Evelyn Mistral had been saying lately about the eloquent facial expressions of animals, and expected her to come to Kirsten’s aid. But she didn’t say a word, her arms folded over her chest, and even nodded when Millar and Ruge ridiculed a suggestion of goodness that von Levetzov had, in Perlmann’s eyes, only made because he wanted to be nice to Kirsten.
Like everyone else, Laura Sand was waiting for Silvestri to join in, since he was known to share Kirsten’s spontaneous opinion. But the Italian met this tense expectation with a poker face and picked more crumbs of tobacco from his tongue than were actually there. At last Laura Sand revealed with a twitch of the corners of her mouth that she had understood his refusal, and now developed her own thesis, which wasn’t so far removed from Kirsten’s feelings. At first Kirsten listened to her with excitement; but when it got technical, she leaned back inconspicuously and looked furtively at her watch.
‘I am a bit puzzled, though,’ she said to Perlmann later in the hall, though it sounded more intimidated than puzzled, ‘about how tough the debate was there. At our seminars it’s a lot . . . a lot looser, friendlier. Did you think it was really embarrassing when I burst out with my opinion?’
Perlmann didn’t reply, because at that point Maria walked up to them and handed him a printout of Leskov’s text, with the pages of his hand-written t
ranslation underneath.
‘Eccolo,’ she said. ‘It took until now because Signor Millar had some other things to write.’
For the title, printed in an exaggeratedly large, bold font, she had used a sheet of its own. Now she pointed at it and started to remark upon it. With a presence of mind that he didn’t experience deep within himself, Perlmann anticipated her and introduced Kirsten. He held the text behind his back with both hands, as he uttered words of praise about Maria which struck him as unbearably hollow. And no sooner had Maria addressed a question to Kirsten than he made an apologetic gesture, walked over to the reception desk and asked Signora Morelli to put the stack of paper in his pigeonhole.
‘I thought the text was very interesting,’ Maria said when she walked back to them. ‘Only the last third, that stuff about appropriation, I didn’t really understand that.’
‘Yes, that is a problem,’ said Perlmann, and started to turn away. ‘And many thanks for your work.’
‘You’re welcome. And . . . Just a moment . . . We’re still on for the other text on Friday?’
Perlmann felt Kirsten’s eyes on his face. When he turned round again, he had the feeling of moving a heavy, shapeless load. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as agreed.’
He was already holding the dining-room door handle when Kirsten pointed towards the pigeonholes. ‘That’s the text for your session on Thursday, isn’t it? Something about linguistic creation. Or did I misread it? You whisked the pages away so quickly!’ she laughed.
‘Later,’ Perlmann murmured when he saw Ruge and von Levetzov coming towards them.
‘You know,’ said Kirsten when they sat down at the table, ‘I thought I might be able to take a copy of the text. To read on the journey. Do you think I could ask Maria to make another printout for me?’