Perlmann's Silence (27 page)

He went into the bathroom and took another quarter tablet. Luckily, he hadn’t asked her if she remembered his cancelled lecture back then. It had been a close thing. He turned on to his belly and pressed his face into the pillow, as if by doing so he could force sleep to come.

20

Laura Sand’s second session also started with film images. It was quite different material from the previous day, and in the first half-hour there were occasional sequences in which she’d got the aperture wrong. She cursed at the poor quality of the film, but Perlmann saw immediately that that wasn’t the problem. Almost as clearly as if they were images edited in, he saw Agnes coming out of the darkroom in her white apron, furious with herself and as much in need of comfort as a child. Instead of returning to the real film, he stayed with these images and slipped back through the night to the conversation with Kirsten. He had mumbled something about Chagall, and asked her some absurd question about Agnes. The damned pill had immediately obliterated the details.
I’ve got to give them up. Give them up.
He reached for his mineral water, and when his glass clinked against the coffee pot the others turned their heads. Luckily, Maria had been sitting in front of her screen before. As a result he hadn’t had to spool out the prepared sentences, which had sounded even more wooden with each internal run-through.

‘
¡Dios mío!
’ Evelyn Mistral murmured quietly. Perlmann looked straight ahead. The images that were being shown now were, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful. The glassy light of an early morning over the Steppe turned the contours of the meagre shrubs into mysterious, poetic forms that made the imagination pounce upon them immediately, and the faded yellow of the Steppe, run through with pale grey, lost itself against the rising sun in an apparently endless white depth. The view had so captivated even Laura Sand herself that she had lingered on the same shot until her arms had been trembling with exhaustion.

Now the camera swung slowly to the side, and all of a sudden the Steppe was scattered with the ribcages of dead animals. ‘
¡Jesús María!
’ cried Evelyn Mistral, and then she could be heard gasping, open-mouthed. The camera moved further to the left, then came a cut, and now one saw the edge of a settlement, still in the same dreamy light. The people barely moved. They looked suspiciously or apathetically into the camera. The swollen bellies of children, fully grown bodies so gaunt that their wrists looked like grotesque enlargements. Flies everywhere, which the people had given up resisting long ago. The camera slowly crept over the settlement. The pictures were all the same. The camera glided on until the people had disappeared from the picture. For a few seconds once again the beauty of the deserted Steppe, now already in a light that gave a sense of the searing midday heat. Then the film stopped.

For a few moments no one stirred in the dark, the only sound was Laura Sand’s chair shifting. Then Evelyn Mistral and Silvestri walked to the window and released the blinds, which snapped up.

‘Well,’ said Millar in the tone of someone who has just heard something very dubious.

Laura Sand jerked her head up. ‘Something wrong?’ A lurking harshness quivered in her voice.

‘Well, yes,’ said Millar. ‘Hunger and death as a poetic backdrop – I don’t know.’

Laura Sand’s face looked even whiter than usual above her black polo neck.

‘Nonsense,’ she said, squeezing the word out so violently that only the first syllable could really be heard.

‘That,’ Millar said slowly, lowering his head, ‘I can’t find.’

Adrian von Levetzov’s nervous hand revealed that he couldn’t bear the coming argument. ‘In which area was it filmed?’ he asked with the cheerful interestedness of a member of the educated classes, something to which he would not normally have succumbed.

‘The Sahel,’ Laura Sand snapped back.

‘Indeed,’ Millar murmured, ‘indeed.’

Giorgio Silvestri blew out his smoke more loudly than necessary. ‘The pictures at the end were very impressive,’ he said. ‘Even if that light –
come dire
– seduces one into oblivion. Or obfuscation. But I would actually like to come back to the subject: the interpretation of the interesting looks that the animals gave each other.’

His voice had had a strange, unassuming authority, Perlmann thought afterwards when the specialist discussion had once again got under way. It was the voice of someone who was used to intervening at the right moment and giving an awkward situation in a conversation a particular turn. That intervention had not been even slightly boss-like, and now the Italian had once again pulled up one knee, and was lolling in his chair like a teenager.

In the rest of her contributions Laura Sand remained cool, and one could sense her restrained fury even when its first explosion had passed. Millar made an effort and disguised his objections in the form of questions. Today, luckily, the words just poured out of Evelyn Mistral any old how, and when she said that the animals were, in her view, exchanging a boisterous linguistic form, which also contained some funny grammatical errors, even Laura Sand couldn’t help laughing.

Perlmann said nothing. It was nearly one o’clock and he was internally rehearsing the sentences for Maria; because the idea that he could walk past her unnoticed for a second time, when she was waiting for his paper, was unlikely in the extreme.

He found all this material incredibly exciting, Millar said when Laura Sand looked at her watch and gathered her papers together. So he suggested continuing with the same thing on Monday. He flicked through the texts. ‘And on Tuesday. Because there’s is a lot I’d still like to know about it, in theoretical terms as well.’

Laura Sand took her time before returning his expectant glance. ‘OK,’ she said then, and the way she imitated Millar’s Yankee accent was a sign that she had accepted his conciliatory offer.

Millar pushed his glasses back on his nose with his index finger. ‘Swell.’

She pulled a face at the word. His mouth twitched.

Perlmann calculated feverishly: that meant that the second half of the coming week was taken up with Evelyn Mistral, and it would be his turn on the Monday of the last week. The text would have to be in the pigeonholes by Saturday at the latest. That meant that Maria would have to have it on Wednesday morning – Thursday at the latest.
Five-and-a-half days. That could be enough
. His heart was pounding. Suddenly, everything was open again.

‘While we’re on the subject,’ Silvestri spoke into Perlmann’s calculation. ‘As far as the last week is concerned I can only do the first half. On Thursday I’m afraid I have to sort a few things out at the hospital.’ He looked at Perlmann. ‘So I can’t be at your session, which will probably happen at the end. But I’ll get the text.’

‘Of course,’ Perlmann said hoarsely.
A week, I’ve gained a whole week.

As if numb with relief he walked through the lounge. Maria was waiting for him in the hall. He walked over to her with a presence of mind that later surprised him as much as it repelled him.

‘I didn’t get around to saying it in the morning. The timetable has changed slightly, and now I’m going to use the opportunity to rework my text again. As things look right now, you won’t have to do anything with it until next Friday.’

‘I see,’ she said, slightly irritated, and ran her hand sideways through her hair so that her earring jangled quietly. ‘What should I . . . ? All right, then. I’ll just go on typing up your other text. Will that do?’

During Maria’s last words Evelyn Mistral had joined them.

‘Yes, do that,’ said Perlmann, and couldn’t help running his tongue over his lips.

‘You’ve been writing a lot recently, haven’t you?’ Evelyn said to him as they were walking together through the hall. ‘And all in secret!’

Perlmann pulled a helpless face and shrugged.

‘And now I’ve gained half a week,’ he said. ‘Not bad. Although, I’m actually finished and almost a little disappointed having to wait until Thursday. Silly, isn’t it? And I’ve got such stage fright!’

No, said Perlmann, he didn’t have time to stroll through town. He had something he wanted to work on. But on Sunday he would be available again, very definitely.

He sat for almost an hour in the red armchair before he worked out what was going on. Before, when he had parted from Evelyn Mistral and gone energetically upstairs, two at a time, he had been glad to enjoy his relief, and at the same time – for the first time in ages – he had once again felt something like buoyancy. In that one week that he suddenly had at his disposal he would surely be able to get something written. But then, when he had lit a cigarette and, to his surprise, rested his feet on the circular table, the relief he had promised himself did not come, and it had not helped at all to predict the unexpected, happy turn of events. He meekly took his feet off the table and sat up straight. And only now did it dawn on him that the cramped weariness that had set in instead of relief was disappointment – disappointment that it wasn’t all over yet, and that there was still a long sequence of days to come, in which he would have to live through that tension, that anxiety and above all that lack of belief in himself. He drew the curtains, took a quarter of a sleeping-pill and lay down in bed. Just before he fell asleep there was a knock on the door. He didn’t react.

It wasn’t, in fact, Chagall’s colors that he had been defending in his dream, he thought when he woke up in the gloom and, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbed his throbbing temples. Admittedly, the painter’s name had wandered constantly through his thoughts like a ghost, but what he had cried out – in a hoarse voice and the most indistinct of words, against a wall of incredulity – had been a defense of Laura Sand’s poetic images of suffering.

He went into the shower and tried to find the words that had remained only a furious intention in his dream. Words came. He spoke them into the stream of water, choked and then intensified his defense until it became a fiery speech peaking in the claim that only beautiful images could depict suffering for what it was – because beauty was, in fact, truth, and the only truth that could plumb the whole depth of suffering. When he turned off the water and rubbed the taste of chlorine from his face with his towel, he shuddered at his kitsch and was glad for a while to be able to listen to the sober, boring voice of the announcer on the television news.

At dinner, Achim Ruge amazed him. In the middle of the main course, and without interrupting his dissection of his fish, he suddenly said: ‘You know, Brian, I really didn’t understand what it was that bothered you so much about Laura’s film. They’re very precise, very eloquent shots – much better than anything you get to see on television on the subject.’

Laura Sand went on eating, without even looking up. Millar lowered his knife and fork, took off his glasses and cleaned them thoroughly.

‘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.