Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

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.

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 desperately 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.