Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘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 allowed.’

‘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.

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.’