Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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.

‘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.