Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

She also knew about the time that Silvestri had spent in Oakland.

‘On the subject of America,’ she said, ‘I think this Princeton business is brilliant! Do you think I could visit you there?’ With a strange hesitation, as if she had to struggle to remember him, she added after a pause: ‘With Martin. He’d love to see New York!’

The people they asked in Rapallo didn’t know whether the historical building was still there. Over lunch Perlmann learned about the treaty between Italy and Yugoslavia that had temporarily made Fiume into an independent state. He was amazed at how much his daughter knew, and how hungry for knowledge she was. And deep down that’s exactly what I never was: hungry for knowledge.

Within a few minutes the sky had clouded over. In the gloomy, flat light that now fell through the pizzeria windows, Kirsten’s enthusiasm suddenly faded, and they looked shyly at one another.

‘I’m not taking too much of your time away?’ she asked. ‘It’s your turn on Thursday, isn’t it?’

It was hard for Perlmann to admit to himself that he was furious about her tone, which expressed the fact that she now saw every feat that anyone had to perform in the light of her first presentation. He nodded briefly and suggested they leave.

On the journey back they stood in silence at the railing and looked at the foamy crests of the waves forming under a cold wind. Kirsten asked at one point whether she could read what he was going to say here. Perlmann was glad that a gust of wind gave him a moment’s pause. Maria had the text at the moment, he said then, and told her who Maria was. For a few frightened minutes he waited for her question about the subject of his talk; but it didn’t come. Instead Kirsten said, without looking at him, ‘Brian Millar. You don’t like him. Do you?’

‘Umm… he’s OK. He strikes me as a bit too… self-confident.’

‘Cocksure,’ she said in English, and looked at him with a smile. ‘I can see that.’

As they left the ship she suddenly stopped. ‘Is that why you don’t want to play the piano? You’re not scared of him or anything, are you? I thought he sounded pretty shallow last night, when we were talking about Faulkner.’

Perlmann knocked an empty coke can over the edge of the quay wall with his shoe. ‘This just isn’t the place for it, I reckon. That’s all.’

Now he needed to be alone and started walking at a brisk pace. But when the hotel came into view, Kirsten stopped again.

‘And you won’t explain that thing about Mum and Chagall? I’m sorry. I’m getting on your nerves. But you’re so… so down.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s about to start raining.’

In the hall Silvestri came towards them, the collar of his raincoat turned up and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He was going to the cinema, he said with the guilty grin of a schoolboy skiving on his homework. Could she come with him? Kirsten asked, and turned red when she became aware of the impetuousness of her question. Again Perlmann could hardly believe how quickly the Italian was able to react. The only clue that he would rather have gone on his own lay in the fact that his gallantry sounded a little too cheerful.

‘ Volentieri; volentierissimo, Signorina ,’ he said and offered her his arm.

Perlmann had to turn on the light when he sat down at the desk. Only now, when he saw the skewed pens and the screwed-up paper in the waste-paper basket, did he remember that he had got up in the night and tried to work. It wasn’t a very clear memory, and there was something strange and distant about it – as if it hadn’t been him at all. He picked up the crumpled paper, only to drop it again after a brief hesitation. Then he started to jot down some keywords. When Kirsten left from Genoa on Monday evening, he would be able to take a taxi quickly back here and start writing straight away. And then he still had three days before he absolutely had to give Maria a text.

The keywords, which stood side by side and on top of one another, refused to turn into sentences, and in the growing carelessness of the writing the lack of belief became increasingly evident. Perlmann ran a bath and sat down in the tub long before it was full. The worst thing was that he wished it was already Monday evening. As he did so he thought constantly about when the film would be over and Kirsten might knock at the door. He added more and more hot water until it was hardly bearable. Then he lay on the bed in his dressing gown, and as the burning of his skin slowly eased, he dozed off.

Something had gone wrong between her and Silvestri. Perlmann could see it at once when he opened the door to Kirsten. There was something defiant in her face, an expression like the one she had worn in the school competition when she had been beaten by her arch-enemy from the same class. She walked up to him and put her arms around his neck. She hadn’t done that for years, and Perlmann, who no longer knew how to hug a daughter, held her like a precious, fragile object. When she pulled away he stroked her hair, which smelled of restaurant. She sat down in the red armchair and reached into her jacket for her cigarettes. She looked furiously at the pack of Gauloises that she had fished out, and hurled them towards the waste-paper basket, which she just missed. Perlmann picked up the cigarettes, which had slipped from their wrapping. When he looked up, Kirsten was holding one of her own cigarettes in the flame of the red lighter. Her dark eyes glittered.

‘And now I’d like you to take me out, up to the white hotel on the hill,’ she said with a purple pout.

It sounded like a sentence from a film, and Perlmann had to suppress a chuckle. He put on his clothes and chose his blazer with the gold buttons. He was glad that it wasn’t yet Monday evening. When he came out of the bathroom, she pointed to the page of keywords that still lay on the glass desktop.

‘When I get bored in seminars I doodle as well,’ she said.

It was only when the taxi turned into the drive of the Imperiale that Perlmann managed to forget that remark.

Kirsten leaned far back in her turquoise plush armchair and looked out into the backdrop of lights in the bay.

‘I wish Mum was here, too,’ she said into the quiet music that spilled across from the bar into the lounge.

Perlmann choked on his sandwich. So perhaps, after all, she hadn’t come to terms with Agnes’s death better and faster than he had. And even if she had, it had been silly to resent her for it.

‘Yesterday in the café,’ she went on, ‘you said something about intimacy and freedom. I don’t know if I understood.’ She paused without looking at him. ‘Were you happy with Mum? I mean… It was good at home, there were never any arguments. But maybe…’

Perlmann closed his eyes. The camera clicked, and Agnes laughed mockingly as he beat his arms around him to drive away the pigeons. Then they were walking together through Hamburg, pointing out the gleaming colors of the wet, glistening autumn leaves to one another, while inside he repeated over and over to himself the doctor’s redeeming words about Kirsten’s health. In his face he felt the wind over the cliffs of Normandy, and saw Agnes’s arm in the yellow windbreaker, slinging the full pack of cigarettes far into the void with a circular motion. And then, as if this new memory had pushed its way darkly over the others without quite erasing them, he felt Agnes’s head on his stiff shoulder, after she had made her remark about that dreamy photograph of Hong Kong at the airport.

He opened his eyes and saw that Kirsten was looking at him.

‘We were fine. Most of the time we were fine together.’

Her smile at that moment, he thought later, revealed that she was pleased about the confidence in his voice, but unhappy with his choice of words. After all, she had asked about happiness.