Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘You know, I had a terribly dry mouth when I was sitting up at the front, at least at first. Luckily, I found a boiled sweet in my jacket. Lasker nearly managed a smile when he saw how bothered I was by the stickiness on my fingers afterwards.’

  On the way to the door she tugged on the tassels of the coats of arms and laughed at the clouds of dust. In the doorway she turned round again.

  ‘Incredibly elegant – almost illicit. And then the view out to the pool . . . But the position at the front is the same. Emotionally, I mean. I was worried I might forget everything at the crucial moment. Complete nonsense, of course. But still.’ She looked at him. ‘You probably can’t understand that any more, when it’s been routine for so many years. Am I right?’

  Perlmann rested his hand on her shoulder and pushed her gently outside.

  After a walk along the sea, in the course of which she talked about Martin and stopped from time to time to hold her face in the morning sun, she grew tired and wanted to try and get some sleep. Outside the door to her room she gave him a kiss on the cheek and laughed at the purple print it left.

  ‘See you later? Do you have work to do?’

  He raised his hand and quickly turned round.

  He stood by the window for hours on end until his back hurt. Now and again he glanced at his desk. How tidy the desk looks! she had said before they had gone to breakfast. As if you’d just finished something.

  The presence of his sleeping daughter. She made everything seem unreal, or rather she created a twofold reality: two levels to a certain extent, between which he swung back and forth at every moment, not knowing which one he belonged to – or wanted to belong to – more. Above all, with Kirsten’s arrival time had doubled, two unconnected strands of time passed through him now, both claiming to be actual, real time, the time that mattered. One was the time that Kirsten had brought with her, the time of her weekly seminars, and also the time in which the weeks and months of her acquaintance with Martin were counted. That was the time into which he had threaded himself before, on their walk, to be close to her. Now, standing at the window, he tried again to slip into that time, he searched it for present, a present that could make everything apart from his daughter unimportant and free him of his anxiety. But Kirsten’s sleep had, if it hadn’t demolished that time, deep-frozen it for a few hours, and the imagined present with her would only be able to turn into a real present at the moment when she opened her eyes down there, on the second floor of the other wing. By now he was entirely back in that other time, the time of the hotel, the time of anxiety, which had gone on ticking with treacherous silence behind the back of Kirsten’s time.

  Perlmann drew one curtain and lay down on the bed. There were, strictly speaking, not only these two temporal realities, he thought, and was grateful for the soft, velvety sound that his thoughts now assumed. There was, in fact, also the time that belonged to him and Kirsten alone, the time that began with Agnes’s death, the time of shared abandonment and grief. That one – Perlmann’s hands clawed involuntarily into the cover – Martin had no business with, absolutely no business at all. And before that there was, again, another time in which Herr Wiedemann or Wiedemeier or whatever that young whippersnapper’s name was, had no place: the time with Agnes and Kirsten, the time when all three of them had chosen, from mountains of pictures, the photograph of the month and in the end the photograph of the year: family time, so to speak.

  Perlmann rubbed his eyes. The serious picture of Agnes on the windowsill appeared, and now he also saw the coffee seeping into the pale carpet. There was also Frankfurt time, the snowed-in time when his letterbox filled up with junk mail and the dean waited for his report. That time had something to do with Kirsten’s time in Konstanz, it seemed to him; but now the thoughts became so gentle and pleasantly vague that it would have been a shame to spoil them by concentrating.

  When Kirsten woke him with her knocking it was late afternoon. ‘I slept like a log!’ she said and whirled through the room. ‘Will you show me the town now?’

  When he came out of the bathroom, she was holding the big Russian-English dictionary, flicking through it and then constantly rubbing her fingers on her jeans.

  ‘That’s an amazing thing,’ she said. ‘Every single turn of phrase explained! I don’t think Martin knows that. Except the paper’s horrible to the touch. Actually repellent. Where did you get this great tome?’

  Perlmann felt as if he were seeing Santa Margherita for the first time. And as if this wasn’t the town that had the Marconi Veranda in it. The many squares, arches, alleyways – it was as if they hadn’t been there before, and sprang into being under Kirsten’s gaze. By the wooden way he stood around when she went up to things to look at details, one might have thought he was bored. In fact, with his eyes often half-closed, he was letting himself fall into the borrowed present of her enthusiasm, feeling like someone looking out at the sea through the barred windows of his cell.

  Afterwards, in the café, he was a hair away from succumbing to the overwhelming temptation to tell Kirsten about his desperation. Just before it came to that, he felt the blood pulsing through his whole body. At once disappointed and relieved, he then heard her asking the waiter the way to the toilet, and when she came back with her springy gait and swinging bag, it seemed to him impossible to take the step which, he knew, would have changed so much between them. But his blood pulsed on, so he took out his cigarettes.

  She stared at him, thunderstruck.

  ‘You . . . since when have you been smoking again?’

  He played it down, spoke with hollow nonchalance about Italy, the cafés and the cigarettes that were simply a part of it. He was revolted by himself, and she didn’t believe a word. There was a shadow on her face now. She felt it was like a betrayal of Agnes, a desertion. He was quite sure about that. A burning helplessness took hold of him, and without anticipating it, he started talking about intimacy, about various forms of loyalty, about love and freedom.

  ‘If intimacy has something to do with the harmony of two lives, one might wonder whether it’s compatible with the ideal that two people shouldn’t curtail each other’s freedom,’ he concluded.

  ‘Dad,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t know you like this!’

  The shadow had disappeared, making way for a smile full of curious dread. She accepted one of his cigarettes and took out her red lighter.

  ‘Actually, I don’t think it’s so bad that you’re smoking again,’ she said. ‘At least it means I don’t have to apologize!’

  Turning the corner of a building on the way back, they were suddenly in front of the trattoria. Perlmann stopped and pushed the flat of his hand between the glass beads of the curtain. Then he slowly drew it back and walked on without a word.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Kirsten.

  ‘Nothing. That kind of curtain . . . I like it. There’s something . . . something of the fairy tale about it.’

  ‘You’re full of surprises today!’ she laughed. ‘And on the subject of fairy tales: doesn’t that white hotel on the hill up there look fantastic? Could we go there tomorrow?’

  ‘The Imperiale. You have expensive tastes,’ he laughed, and for a moment he disappeared entirely in her time and forgot that the other time, the time of the veranda, was ruthlessly ticking on.

  When he collected her from her room for dinner, he was struck dumb for a moment.

  ‘Smashing,’ he said at last, in English, after she had twirled twice on her axis in her glittering black dress, still slightly crumpled in places from the journey. Around her neck she wore a piece of Indian jewellery, and all the rings but one had vanished. When his eye settled in puzzlement on her hands, she winked an eye and grinned.

  ‘You didn’t like them, did you?’

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘I can read you like a book. Always could. Don’t you remember?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Time to go. Don’t forget your bag.’

  On the way to the door s
he looked at herself again in the big, half-blind mirror on the wall and straightened a stocking. If only she would drop the damned purple, he thought. And her heels didn’t need to be quite so high, either. Just before they left the corridor, he stopped and held her back by the arm.

  ‘I wanted to ask you a favor. Just a small thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Brian Millar will probably play in the lounge after dinner. At the grand piano, I mean.’ He paused and looked at the floor. ‘No one here knows that I play as well. Played. And I’d like it to stay that way. OK?’

  She looked at him quizzically and shook her head very slightly.

  ‘But you don’t need to hide yourself! I’d like to see if this man Millar plays better than you!’

  ‘Please. I . . . I can’t really explain. But that’s how I’d like it.’

  ‘If you want, of course,’ she said slowly, and played absently with the strap of her bag. ‘But . . . there’s something up with you. I’ve been feeling it for some time. Won’t you tell me?’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘or we’ll be the last ones in.’

  At dinner Perlmann felt as if he were sitting on hot coals. He tried not to look, but his attention was focused entirely on what his daughter was saying, and he twitched at every mistake she made in English. But she did dazzlingly well. She had ended up next to Silvestri, diagonally opposite Millar.

  The Italian had – and Perlmann wouldn’t have expected it of him – immediately stood up when they stepped to the table, and had straightened Kirsten’s chair for her as she sat down. At the sight of this, Ruge’s face had twisted into a grin, and Kirsten had blushed slightly under her freckles. When she dared to speak a few words of Italian, Silvestri immediately continued in his mother tongue, until she waved him to stop and he rested his hand, laughing, on her bare arm. And even though she talked mostly to Millar after that, Perlmann was quite sure that she didn’t forget Silvestri’s presence beside her for a moment.

  English and history, she said, when Millar asked her what subjects she was studying. But that might change, she was still only starting. When answering Millar’s questions about the details of her study she made more linguistic mistakes than before, and Perlmann had no idea what he was eating.

  But then, when the subject turned to Faulkner, and in particular to The Wild Palms, it came bubbling out of her almost faultlessly, and he wondered more than once where she got all these obscure words. Her dinner grew cold as she defended her thesis, face glowing, and Millar, who couldn’t quite remember the novel and whose argument was surprisingly weak, set down his cutlery several times and grabbed his gleaming glasses. When Kirsten was clearly about to win on points, Perlmann forced himself at least to eat the last mouthful of fillet steak, and thought of his colleague Lasker, who had stayed specifically because of his daughter.

  Although he didn’t know why, he avoided looking in Evelyn Mistral’s direction. But twice he caught her eye, and both times he was confused by the mocking shyness in her green eyes. As if his daughter’s presence revealed something about him which, to her annoyance, disturbed her previous feelings.

  Laura Sand, on the other hand, listened to the discussion of Faulkner in her sulky way and asked at the end what phase of his life the novel coincided with. Just once, when she thought Perlmann wasn’t watching her, her eye slipped over him and betrayed that she too was busy revising her previous image of him.

  Over coffee, Silvestri offered Kirsten a Gauloise. Smiling smartly, she bent over his lighter, inhaled the smoke and instantly had a coughing fit. Silvestri’s unshaven face pulled into a grin, and he kept his next drag in his lungs for a particularly long time. Kirsten bravely wiped the water from her eyes and carefully took another drag; by now she had her coughing under control. As she added milk and sugar to her coffee, she let the cigarette with its purple stains dangle casually from the corner of her mouth. When Silvestri went on looking teasingly at her, for a moment it looked as if she were going to stick out her tongue at him.

  As they left, von Levetzov held the door open for Kirsten and bowed slightly. Perlmann, who was walking behind her, had had enough of seeing his daughter in his colleagues’ force field, and really wanted to go upstairs. But now Kirsten was shaking hands with Evelyn Mistral, whose head was tilted sideways almost as much as Millar’s usually was, and then the two women walked silently towards the lounge without saying a word to one another.

  While Millar was playing, Kirsten kept glancing across to Perlmann, giving him to understand, with the disparaging twitch of her lips that had for a time made Agnes furious, that she couldn’t understand why he was hiding in the face of this mediocre performance. And when Millar stood up and closed the lid over the keys, her applause was the shortest and faintest.

  But he had been good, rather better than usual, and Perlmann was slightly hurt that his daughter felt the need to cheer him up with her partisan judgment.

  Although few questions were being put to Kirsten now, she looked very excited, turned her head to everyone who spoke and, to Silvestri’s delight, smoked one Gauloise after another. When, in passing, someone mentioned Perlmann’s imminent invitation to Princeton, she frowned and smiled at him. She was the last to stand when the company broke up.

  At the bottom of the stairs Evelyn Mistral walked towards Perlmann, who was with Kirsten.

  ‘Yet again, our wedding stroll comes to nothing,’ she said in Spanish, pointedly looking only at him. ‘I’m sure you have other plans.’

  ‘Erm . . . I don’t know . . . yes, we’ll . . . ,’ he said, annoyed both by his stammer and by the fact that the Spanish woman, whom he felt he barely recognized at that moment, was so expressively ignoring Kirsten with her eyes.

  ‘You don’t need to apologize,’ she said with a face that reminded him of a schoolmistress. ‘¡Buenas noches!’

  Halfway up the stairs Kirsten stopped and looked down to the hall, where Evelyn Mistral was standing with Ruge and von Levetzov. ‘Did I hear her wrong or did she call you tú? I mean, I don’t speak Spanish that well, but that’s what it sounded like to me.’

  Perlmann hadn’t known it was so hard to sound casual. ‘Oh, that, yes. It’s quite customary in Spanish academic circles.’

  Before she turned into her corridor, Kirsten stopped again. ‘Boda. What does that mean again?’

  This time he managed a natural smile. ‘Wedding.’

  The steep wrinkle that he didn’t like formed above her nose. ‘Wedding?’

  ‘A little joke between us.’

  She kicked something imaginary from the carpet, glanced at him briefly and disappeared into the corridor.

  22

  When Perlmann woke from his light and troubled sleep the next morning, and looked down at the terrace, he saw Kirsten laughing at Silvestri’s trick with the swallowed cigarette. They both had cups in front of them, and on the white bistro table there were two blue packs of cigarettes that looked precisely identical. Kirsten’s tousled hair fell on her yellow sweatshirt, and now, as she brushed a strand out of her eyes, he saw the big sunglasses that covered half of her face.

  In his dream she had been wearing last night’s glittering dress, and her piled-up hairdo hadn’t suited her at all. Had she really been wearing sunglasses? Perlmann held his face under the jet of water. Or was the feeling that she was strange to him – the feeling that he had constantly battled against – to do with something else? He had been surprised and proud that she could suddenly speak Spanish. But he hadn’t really understood what she was saying with her purple mouth as she walked past him down the stairs. His colleagues were waiting for her in the hall, and when she walked up to them, the bright sound of her laughter had made him unsure whether she really was his daughter.

  He walked so slowly down the hall that Signora Morelli looked up from her papers behind the reception desk. His daughter seemed to like it here, she said. He nodded, ordered coffee from the waiter who was just coming in, and stepped outside.

  Kirsten desp
erately wanted to go across to Rapallo.

  ‘Do you know,’ she asked Silvestri in stumbling Italian, ‘whether the building where the two treaties were signed is still standing?’

  Perlmann was silent. She was calling the Italian tu. And why two treaties?

  ‘I’ve really got to get some work done,’ Silvestri laughed when he saw how disappointed she was that he didn’t want to come with her. ‘I haven’t been as industrious as your father.’

  Later, on the ship, Kirsten talked about Silvestri’s work in the clinic, and if her voice hadn’t been a touch too casual, one might have thought she had known him for years. He had plainly talked to her a lot about his previous work with autistic people, and all of a sudden she also knew about Franco Basaglia, whose boldness she described as if she had been present at his experiment in opening the portals of the institutions. From time to time she drew on an unfiltered Gauloise, and it seemed to Perlmann as if the way in which she plucked crumbs of tobacco from her tongue was copied from the movement of Silvestri’s white hand. In ten days, she announced, Giorgio would have to go to Bologna to oversee the start of a new therapeutic plan, and at the same time he would be able to tend to some particularly difficult patients who would otherwise have had to get by without him.

  The fact that Kirsten was, behind her big sunglasses, preoccupied with Silvestri’s appointment diary, added yet another new time to the many others, and Perlmann was uncertain whether this new time – in which Kirsten was Silvestri’s companion – brought his daughter closer to him because it was an Italian time, a time on this side of the Alps, or whether Kirsten, wrapped up in this new time, seemed strange to him, a traitor, even, because it was the time of a person who – unlike Martin beyond the Alps, for example – was waiting for a text from him.