Perlmann's Silence
When the piece was over, Millar took off his blazer and threw it on to the nearest armchair. There was sweat on his face. No one clapped: his energetic movements announced far too clearly that he was about to play an encore. It was La leggierezza that he played now, one of Liszt’s Trois études de Concert. The piece seemed familiar to Perlmann, even though he couldn’t remember the title. Again he felt envious, particularly of certain runs and trills. All the same, it was comforting when Millar stumbled in the incredibly long run that rippled down with glassy brightness, and cursed quietly.
It was shortly after this run that Perlmann noticed. They aren’t waves, Philipp, he heard Hanna saying, they’re ribbons – bright, billowing ribbons like the ones that girls pull behind them when doing floor exercises. From then on, he had always had that image in his head when he heard or played Chopin’s F minor Étude from Opus 25, in which the right hand had to run through an almost uninterrupted sequence of regular quavers, when the charm of the piece lay in the fact that one could imagine no better medium for the theme than in precisely that regularity. And now he was hearing the same kind of ribbons in the piece by Liszt. They weren’t quite so long or quite so regular, and sometimes the left hand was involved as well. But it was the same musical idea. And while Perlmann inwardly made the comparison, he became clearly aware of something that had hitherto only touched him in the form of a vague, fleeting stumble: there was a thematic similarity between the first piece by Liszt that Millar had played and Chopin’s F minor Étude. Even the key was the same. With growing agitation, he tried to lay his memory of Chopin’s Étude over the notes by Liszt that he had just heard, like a pause the precision of which one wants to check. The piece that was being played interfered with that, and he tried to blank it out. Did that thematic kinship really exist? In one second he was quite sure of it; in the next he mistrusted his impression. If only he had a few minutes to hear the two pieces one after the other.
Perlmann didn’t stir from his concentration until he heard the applause and saw Millar putting his blazer over his shoulders, before slumping in the armchair.
‘Liszt?’ asked von Levetzov.
‘Yes,’ smiled Millar, ‘the only two pieces I can play. And I’ve always thought they somehow belong together.’
Perlmann pounced on the last remark as you might pounce on an opponent’s error in chess, if you saw straight away that it could decide the whole game.
‘That’s true,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Liszt cribbed them both. From Chopin. From the same piece, the F minor Étude from Opus 25.’
When Millar heard the word ‘crib’, the blood rushed to his face, as if the word had been applied to him. For a while he sat there numbly.
‘Cribbed?’ asked Leskov. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Spisyvat’,’ said Perlmann without hesitation.
Leskov grinned with surprise and improved his emphasis. ‘There you are. You even know a word like that . . .’
Perlmann reached for his cigarettes.
In the meantime, Millar had recovered himself. ‘I think, Phil,’ he said with controlled calm, ‘you will agree with me that a man like Franz List didn’t need to copy anything. Certainly not from Chopin, who isn’t a patch on him.’
Perlmann was seething, and he felt that his fingers, which were all painful now, had gone cold. It was, he thought, idiotic to provoke this confrontation now, less than twelve hours before Millar’s departure. And yet there was also something that he enjoyed: his fear of open conflict didn’t – as he had expected – discompose him. He felt a solidity that was new to him.
‘Whether he needed or didn’t need to imitate Chopin all the way down to his individual figures, I don’t know,’ Perlmann said on the way to the piano. ‘The fact is that in this case he did.’
He played in a lighter and more liberated way than he had expected, given his trembling fury, and he managed the brief Étude, which contained no particularly great technical difficulties, flawlessly. It only sounded a little too gentle, as he balked at a harder attack.
‘Encore!’ cried Giovanni, who had sat down a little way off, with Signora Morelli. Perlmann didn’t outwardly respond to the exclamation, and went back to his chair. But inwardly, Giovanni, his fan on the edge of the playing field, had performed a small miracle: the conflict with Millar, which Perlmann had just got so wound up in, suddenly lost its power over him, and assumed a playful tinge. He casually lit a cigarette and, as Silvestri had sometimes done, blew the smoke in the direction of Millar’s armchair. Evelyn Mistral tilted her head and nodded slightly.
‘I can’t hear a trace of plagiarism,’ said Millar, and his East Coast accent sounded even stronger than usual.
Ruge took off his glasses and ran his hand over his head. ‘I’m a terrible philistine. But I did have a sense, Brian, that there’s actually something to Philipp’s assertion.’
‘Me too . . . ,’ von Levetzov began.
‘Nonsense,’ Millar interrupted him irritably, visibly aggrieved that his two allies had left him in the lurch at the last minute. ‘Those two bars of Chopin’s are just thrown down haphazardly. A piece that’s been roughly hand-crafted. Practically ingenuous. Liszt’s things, on the other hand, are always very refined.’
Perlmann felt his face getting hot. Giovanni was forgotten. He looked at Millar. ‘You might also say deliberate or calculated or overblown or stilted or affected.’ It was like a breathless obsession, always adding another or, at the risk of not having another word to hand. He didn’t know he knew all those English words, and he had the strange, spooky feeling that they had come to mind only for this occasion, and that they would soon vanish from his vocabulary again without a trace.
Millar took off his glasses, closed his eyes and rubbed the top of his nose. Then he set his glasses on as carefully as if he were at the opticians, closed his eyes, folded his arms and said: ‘Remarkable vocabulary. But acquired. You can always tell the foreigner. And, of course, the words don’t have the slightest thing to do with Franz Liszt.’
Laura Sand quickly laid her hand on Perlmann’s arm. ‘I liked your Chopin. Particularly those lyrical pieces. It’s a shame you didn’t play them before.’
As he left, Leskov put the money from the bet in his pocket. Then he rested a heavy hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘You are a one. You play like a professional and don’t say a word about it. And you know the most obscure Russian words!’ He laughed. ‘Do you know what your problem is? You keep too much to yourself. But you see: it all comes out in the end!’
Perlmann lay awake for most of the night. The storm clouds had passed. A shimmer of moonlight lay over the bay. It was quieter than usual. For hours he didn’t hear a single car. The five weeks were over; the mountains of time without present had faded at last. They had read his notes and heard his Chopin. Now they knew who he was. He had always thought that could never happen. He was confused that the disaster failed to materialize. He waited. Perhaps it would come after some delay, and all the more violently when it did. But it didn’t just begin like that. Very gradually he started to sense that for decades he had been living with an error. It wasn’t true that delineation meant screening oneself off and walling oneself away, as if in an internal fortress. What it came down to was something quite different: that if the others found out, one should stand calmly and fearlessly by what one was in one’s innermost depths. And Perlmann felt as if this insight was also the key to that present that he so longed for, which had always remained as intangible and fleeting as a mirage.
Now and again he dozed off . . . Not a trace of plagiarism, he heard Millar saying. In reply he slung unfamiliar English words at him, until he noticed at last that it was always one and the same word: spisyvat’. It’s all coming out! laughed Leskov, and in his mouth there was just a single tooth stump, because he was the old woman by the tunnel. Like in a film! She said. ‘As if!’ And then she threw the chronicle at the others, who were doubled up with laughter.
At one point Perlmann t
urned on the light and looked in the suitcase to see if the envelope with Leskov’s text was still inside.
The moon had disappeared. A fog bank blurred the silent lights of Sestri Levante. Luckily, he had resisted the temptation to play the Nocturne in D flat minor. Why in the world don’t you want to play that piece? Szabo had asked. Because, Perlmann had replied, staring at the keys. Now he could hear it, bar for bar. Her golden hair with the dark strand.
54
When the two taxi drivers stepped into the lobby, everything suddenly went so fast that Perlmann, who had been counting the hours, felt quite unprepared.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Ruge, after thanking him for everything. ‘Worse things happen!’
Perlmann felt these words tearing open a wound. They assumed something had happened that someone could take amiss – a failure, a disgrace, even a transgression. And he had merely given a weaker presentation than usual. One time in his glittering career. Accompanied by a fainting fit, certainly. But who can do anything about their body? Otherwise, from the vantage point of the others, nothing had happened. So why this sentence that cut and burned, made even more unbearable by the terribly respectable, Swabian cadence? What, he called inaudibly after Ruge, what am I not supposed to worry about? Von Levetzov was already shaking his hand and saying something about a conference at which they would certainly see one another again, while Perlmann still wrestled with Ruge’s words. Was he referring to his fainting? Or the notes? Or that dreadful text? Why did he have to say that? And why at that precise moment, which gave what was said – whatever it might be – a particular weight? He tried to call to mind Ruge’s face and the tone of his voice when talking about the death of his sister. But the more he struggled to remember those things, the more they eluded him. Had they really existed?
Laura Sand didn’t know where to put her cigarette and finally jammed it between her fingers, which were holding her travel bag. ‘I’ll send you a few pictures,’ she said, tapping her camera bag. ‘Pictures that Chopin would have liked,’ she added with her mocking smile. In the doorway she tripped over her long black coat. For a moment Perlmann closed his eyes to make sure that the inner picture of her mocking face would always be available to him.
What came next was something that he had tried several times to imagine during the night, but his fantasies had got him nowhere.
‘Thanks for everything,’ said Millar, shaking his hand firmly. He said it in a workmanlike manner. That was how he would always say goodbye. And yet he wasn’t just acting in line with convention. There had been a twitch in his face, leaving yesterday evening behind. ‘And about your book: I’ll talk to my publisher next week. I’ll entrust it to him quite specifically.’
Perlmann nodded mutely, and felt as if for those whole five weeks he had given the same response to everything anyone had said to him: a silent nod of the head.
Millar pulled up the zip of his windbreaker and picked up his case. Two steps later he set it down again and turned round. ‘By the way: your Chopin – it sounded pretty good. And Liszt isn’t all that better. No comparison with Bach,’ he grinned.
Perlmann thought about Sheila and the balloon. ‘I’ve never heard Bach like yours,’ he said. ‘A very distinct style.’
Millar blushed. ‘Oh, thanks. Many thanks. No one’s ever said that to me before. We should have . . .’
Perlmann nodded mutely. Before Millar got into the taxi, he looked back up at Perlmann and raised his hand. When the taxi disappeared, Perlmann was filled with a feeling of emptiness and loss.
Leskov was sitting on the terrace in the sun when Perlmann and Evelyn Mistral came outside half an hour later. Her train left Genoa at eleven, she said in reply to Leskov’s question.
‘Then you’ll easily be back here by one,’ said Leskov to Perlmann. ‘Because that’s when our ship sails,’ he added, seeing Perlmann’s incomprehension. On such a beautiful day Leskov wanted to invite him on a boat trip to Genoa, harbor tour included. Especially when the coast road had just been closed. ‘I’ll pay with this!’ he said with a laugh, and pulled his crumpled winnings from his trouser pocket.
Perlmann felt the handle of the suitcase getting damp. Motionless, he looked down at Evelyn Mistral’s red shoes.
‘You can’t possibly refuse him that,’ she said to him in Spanish, lowering her voice.
Two more days of despair for him. Unless he scrubbed the idea of Ivrea. Then it’s just one.
‘Don’t you want to?’ Leskov asked. The disappointment in his voice and his anxious face were unbearable.
‘No, of course I do,’ Perlmann said hoarsely, ‘and I’ll be back by one whatever happens.’ He was glad when the taxi hooted down below.
It was a silent train journey. Perlmann fought unsuccessfully against the trepidation that was choking him. He had to extract each individual word from himself, and didn’t know how to make it clear to Evelyn Mistral that his silence had nothing to do with her. As she began, out of embarrassment, to talk about the book she was just reading, he wondered again and again whether he should give her Leskov’s text, so that she could hand it to him in Geneva. Two days. One, at any rate. No suspicion could fall on her. She had never been anywhere near Leskov’s suitcase. Perhaps Leskov would assume that his plane had flown on from Frankfurt to Geneva, where the text had been found at last. But how in the world was he to explain to her that the envelope had to reach St Petersburg as quickly as possible, when they had both stood facing its recipient half an hour before?
‘You’d rather have had the afternoon to yourself, wouldn’t you?’ she asked as the train arrived at Genoa Station.
Perlmann nodded.
‘But he seemed to be looking forward to the boat trip as excitedly as a child.’
Again he nodded mutely.
The big suitcase with the red elephant on the middle of the lid bumped against the steps of the carriage as she got in. Perlmann took the case from her, and let her hold his suitcase. When they stood facing one another in the empty, musty-smelling compartment, he ran his hand over her freshly washed, straw-like hair. After a brief hesitation, during which she tried to read his face, she put her arms around his neck and leaned playfully back.
‘¡No te pierdas!’
He nodded, picked up the valise and a few steps later he was outside. When he turned round she was standing at the open carriage door.
‘That earlier text of Vassily’s: you read it didn’t you?’
Perlmann took a deep breath and looked at her. ‘Yes. But it would be too long a story.’ He looked at the floor for a moment, and then raised his head again. ‘Our secret?’
Her radiant smile crossed her face.
‘I like secrets like that. And I’m the soul of discretion.’
The conductor walked along the train and closed the doors. She stood at the compartment window. She was plainly thinking away. Her curiosity got the better of her.
‘Was it the text you had with you on the terrace when I arrived?’
Perlmann nodded.
‘And that’s why you didn’t want the others . . .’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The train set off.
‘You could make up various stories about that,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll try that on my journey. As a way of passing the time!’
Perlmann was glad that instead of talking he was able to wave. He went on mechanically doing so until her carriage was out of sight. Only when he lowered his arm did he notice that he was clutching the handle of the valise so tightly that it cut into his hand.
He ordered a coffee in the station bar. According to the hands of the clock on the wall, behind its cracked glass, it was just after eleven. The plane he had planned to take left at a quarter past twelve. Now Leskov was keeping him from atoning for his action as quickly as possible. It was only with difficulty that Perlmann managed to keep his impotent rage within bounds, and the young woman next to him looked with alarm at his fist with its white knuckles holding the long sugar spoon, rather th
an putting it back in the bowl. You can’t refuse him that. But she couldn’t have known. Disappointment over a boat trip, as against two more days of despair, that was the calculation. And it wasn’t just despair. Perhaps those were precisely the two days that would cost Leskov his job, because they were the two that would have let him copy out and rephrase the missing pages in time.
Perlmann took the bus to the airport. He closed his mind’s eye to those memories and, without looking round, he immediately went to the check-in counter and on to security control. On the x-ray screen Leskov’s text was only a vague shadow. He sat impatiently in the waiting room and looked out at the plane that was just taking the food container on board. The water beyond the runway lay in gleaming light. What had Leskov called the southern light? Siyayushchy. I’ve hardly seen anything of this area. When the coast road was closed, on top of everything. Perlmann started pacing back and forth. Then he would have to fly tomorrow, as originally planned. His reservation was still valid. Just one more day that Leskov would have to wait for the text. That would mean scrubbing Ivrea. Or at least postponing it. He imagined the bright office. Or else he could fly back here tomorrow afternoon and take a later train to Ivrea. He studied his boarding pass. Yes. He crumpled up the green piece of cardboard, threw it in the bin and pushed his way, amidst cries of protest from the security officials, past the queuing people and out into the hall.
There were no seats on the flight from Frankfurt to Genoa tomorrow afternoon, and the waiting list was already long. Perlmann still felt the pressure of the crumpled boarding pass in the palm of his hand. What about flights from Frankfurt to Turin? The hostess listlessly consulted the computer, and mistyped several times. All flights were booked, but there was just one name on the waiting list. Perlmann asked her to add his to it.
Ten past twelve. With the check that he had planned to cash in Frankfurt, he went to the bank in the arrivals hall. As he waited in the line, Perlmann couldn’t help going through Leskov’s arrival all over again. I like to have my own money. Then he ran, with all his cash in his hand, out to a taxi and asked the driver to take him to Santa Margherita as quickly as possible.