Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

She shook her packet of cigarettes and made to go. Following Silvestri’s habit of fishing one out with her lips, she paused, started the whole movement from the beginning and then used her fingers, as she normally did.

‘You know, Martin’s OK. He really is OK.’ She paused for too long, sensed it and struggled for words. ‘Really, he is. It’s just… I don’t know… sometimes he lacks a bit of… excitement. Something, you know, like that stupid guy Giorgio… that stupid Silvestri… or François… Oh, forget it.’ Turning her head quickly she threw Perlmann a crooked grin and then looked out of the window again.

Perlmann thought of how Agnes had come back from her trip to Shanghai, the one André Fischer had been on. That one present, a little ivory dragon, she had chucked at him halfway across the living room without warning, something she never normally did. And for a few days her other movements had become jauntier than usual, sometimes practically exuberant for no reason. Then things had returned to normal and the quietness that marked their dealings with one another had swallowed up the exuberance.

Perlmann asked how good Martin’s Russian was, when Kirsten’s silence began to oppress him. He was asking, he said, because she had made that remark the previous day about the big dictionary with the bad paper.

‘Oh, not bad, I think. His father, who’s a pretty revolting character, by the way, worked in Moscow for a long time, and Martin wanted to match his linguistic abilities. It seems to be the only bond between the two of them.’ She clumsily stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is talented. In lots of ways. That’s… that’s not it…’

It was long past midnight before they got out of the taxi in front of the Mira. Over the past two hours Kirsten had done almost all of the talking, and he had learned far more about her life than he had for ages. He now knew all about the other members of their shared apartment. He knew Kirsten’s travel plans for the coming year, and had joined her in her fury about the sloppiness of the medical insurance she’d taken out for her eczema. But most of all he now knew what her everyday life at university was like. He could even have quoted some of the graffiti that she saw every day. Enthralled, he had absorbed every single detail, and with each new topic he had tried to enjoy the closeness that his daughter sought with him as she went on talking, relaxed and almost dreamily, about the various different atmospheres over Lake Constance. But then she had fallen back into that tone that conveyed her pride for her father, who knew the university much, much better than she did, and for whom all the stories she told him must have been old hat. Stop, please stop! he could have cried out to her a dozen times. I’m not there any more. I haven’t been for ages! Her naivety had become more and more of a torture – as the lounge, with its fin-de-siècle plush charm, became emptier – and had driven him into an icy loneliness in which his temptation the previous day to confide in her all his fear and despair had not once returned.

Before Kirsten entered her corridor, she walked up to Perlmann, wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his chest.

‘We haven’t talked like that very often. Maybe never. It was nice. Did you think so, too?’

He nodded mutely. When she looked up and noticed the tears in his eyes, she stroked his cheeks with both hands. And before she disappeared round the corner three steps later, she waved at him, shyly at first, and then with ironic affectation.

At about half-past eight he picked her up for breakfast. She was dressed as she had been when she arrived, and was wearing all her rings as well. On the other hand her lips were bare, so that you could see the spot where her bottom lip had burst. When she saw Perlmann’s expression, she ran her index finger over the spot.

‘May I?’ she asked, and walked over to the mirror in the bathroom.

The pills. I should have cleared them away . Perlmann walked over to the window, closed his eyes and sought words for a casual, innocuous explanation.

‘Tell me,’ Kirsten said when she came out of the bathroom. ‘Barbiturates – isn’t that pretty strong stuff? And pretty dangerous, too? Because of addiction and everything, I mean.’

Perlmann breathed out before he turned round. ‘What? Oh, you mean the pills.’ He managed a smile. ‘Oh, no, the doctor told me not to worry about that. It’s all a matter of dosage. And I only need them very rarely, luckily.’ Now he hadn’t needed his well-chosen words. ‘Just now and again, so if there’s a night when my back hurts. And there’s something that isn’t quite right with the bed up here. And before the whole of the next day goes down the drain…’

She put one foot on the bedstead and retied her trainer. There was no way of telling whether she believed him.

Silvestri didn’t appear in the dining room until five to nine, and only drank coffee. Although he was sitting opposite her, Kirsten tried to ignore him, suddenly bombarding Ruge with questions about his lab in Bochum. Then, when Silvestri reached for his cigarettes, he sought Kirsten’s eye to offer her one. In the end he lit one for himself, glanced at Perlmann and sent the pack sliding jauntily all the way across the table so that it bumped into Kirsten’s saucer and made her coffee spill over the edge. Kirsten gave a start, lifted her dripping cup reproachfully for a moment, and then picked up the packet. Only now did she meet Silvestri’s eye. For a second Perlmann feared that she would simply push the pack back to him. But then she very slowly fished out a cigarette, put it between her lips and, looking in a completely different direction, stretched out her arm towards Silvestri with a gesture so blasé that it looked as if she had learned it at drama school. With a grin, the Italian dropped his lighter into her open hand from an exaggeratedly high position. There was a quiet metallic sound when it rubbed against all her rings. Without deigning to glance at him, Kirsten held her cigarette into the flame, snapped the lighter shut and set it down in the middle of the table. ‘ Ecco! ’ Silvestri laughed and reached for it. Then Kirsten turned and looked at him and stuck out her tongue.

Perlmann caught a glance from Evelyn Mistral. Her oriental face with its green eyes shot through with amber seemed to come at him from a long way away, and he didn’t know whether he was pleased about that, or unhappy.

Laura Sand’s third session passed at a more sluggish pace than the previous two. Some films injected a little life into proceedings, raising the question of whether animals understood the meaning of certain signs only in the sense that they reacted appropriately to them, or whether – albeit in a simplified, pallid sense – they attributed to others the intention of giving them a sign. Did animals have anything like a theory about the intellectual lives of their own species?

‘But that’s blindingly obvious!’ Kirsten exploded. ‘Of course they have! You can see that in their eyes!’

‘The fact is,’ Millar cut in, ‘that you can’t see anything at all in their eyes, and that it’s pretty fantastical to assume any such thing. To put it mildly.’ He said it in his usual confident, professional tone, and only a hint of irritation revealed that a discussion about Faulkner had taken place.

Perlmann thought about the funny things that Evelyn Mistral had been saying lately about the eloquent facial expressions of animals, and expected her to come to Kirsten’s aid. But she didn’t say a word, her arms folded over her chest, and even nodded when Millar and Ruge ridiculed a suggestion of goodness that von Levetzov had, in Perlmann’s eyes, only made because he wanted to be nice to Kirsten.