Perlmann's Silence (64 page)

Perlmann drew out the last lyrical notes until he could no longer avoid speeding up and descending to the low chords in preparation for the theme. Then, summoning up all his defiance to defeat his anxiety, when he attacked the first chord of the theme he felt like someone who – after a series of devastating losses – has staked everything on a single card, knowing that his chances of winning are vanishingly small.
It’s grotesque to hope for a crash of thunder during those crucial seconds.
He tried to imagine himself back in the bare practice room at the Conservatoire – he was someone who played entirely for himself. That exercise worked, but he had started it too late, soon the long run from the low notes would be on him, and then the time would have come. Later, he couldn’t remember how he had done it, but suddenly he was back in the middle of the theme, repeating two lengthy passages from the beginning. Confused by his own maneuver, he concentrated again on the idea of playing in the empty room. He couldn’t chicken out again. He heard the two frenzied runs, which darted so rapidly through the structure of the other notes that you only really became aware of them when the last, bright note flashed. The rest of the runs had actually gone flawlessly. So it wasn’t impossible, even though the two critical sequences belonged to a quite different category of difficulty.

For the very last time, the complete theme. The long run from below, which still had a human tempo. A series of familiar, light chords.
Now
. Perlmann couldn’t feel a thing any more, as his fingers slid over the keys. His anxiety had subsided, too. For just ten seconds he experienced a present full of numb tension, in which he was nothing but hands and ears. And then, with the bright conclusion of the second run, he knew it, even though he still couldn’t believe it:
no mistakes. Not a single one. Not one.
The rest was child’s play.

He sat where he was for a moment, as if completely dazed. A shudder of exhaustion ran through him, and at first his legs refused to obey him when he got up. A precious moment of presence. He would have given anything to be able to capture it for ever.

The applause, with which even the other hotel guests joined in, was loud and sustained. The loudest clapping came from the corridor, where Perlmann now spotted Giovanni and Signora Morelli. When their eyes met, Giovanni raised his thumb in a sign of congratulations. It was as if he were congratulating Perlmann for successfully scoring a goal. At that moment Giovanni’s gesture meant more than all the applause. But even more important was the expression on Signora Morelli’s face. It was the same one with which she had looked at him on Monday night, when he had spoken of his relief with tears in his eyes. Now she smiled at him, and set the applause off again with her clapping. It was as if that mute encounter across the whole room made him immune to the opinions of the others. It almost didn’t matter what they thought.

Leskov was the last to stop clapping. ‘I had no idea . . . ,’ he began, and the others nodded in agreement.

Perlmann was sparing with his information, but savored each item.

So why hadn’t he . . . ?

‘I don’t like performing,’ he said, and glanced straight past Millar. ‘I prefer to be alone with music.’

The way the others looked at him had changed over the past half hour. At any rate that was what Perlmann fervently wanted to believe. And the pause in the conversation that occurred now, which seemed to echo with surprise, seemed to bear it out.

Millar played with the rolled-up cash. ‘I remembered the Polonaise as being shorter,’ he said, and straightened his glasses so slowly that it looked as if he was doing it in slow motion. ‘But that was a long time ago, and I’m not a Chopin connoisseur.’

For a moment Perlmann saw only the reflection of the chandelier in Millar’s glasses. The expression that he saw a moment later contained no suspicion. But there was a glittering thoughtfulness in it, which, it seemed, was actually waiting to turn into mistrust. Perlmann gave a non-committal smile.

‘I like the insistent way the theme keeps returning,’ he said.

When Millar immediately got up and sat down at the piano, no one expected anything but Bach. What he played, however, could hardly have been further removed from Bach. It was the
Allegro agitato molto
from the
Études d’exécution transcendante
by Franz Liszt. Perlmann didn’t know the piece, but identified it straight away as Liszt. Millar made the occasional mistake as he played, and from time to time he had to bring the tempo back down a little. Nonetheless, his playing was a brilliant achievement for an amateur, and Perlmann felt a stabbing pain when he heard him overcoming technical difficulties that put everything in the A flat major Polonaise in the shade.

He himself had always steered clear of Liszt. There was something about his particular form of effusiveness that repelled him. And if anyone mentioned Chopin and Liszt in the same breath, it made him furious. Liszt reminded him more clearly than any other composer of the limits of his technical gifts, and his dislike was mixed with fear. But he had never wanted to analyse it in any greater detail.

When the piece was over, Millar took off his blazer and threw it on to the nearest armchair. There was sweat on his face. No one clapped: his energetic movements announced far too clearly that he was about to play an encore. It was
La leggierezza
that he played now, one of Liszt’s
Trois études de Concert.
The piece seemed familiar to Perlmann, even though he couldn’t remember the title. Again he felt envious, particularly of certain runs and trills. All the same, it was comforting when Millar stumbled in the incredibly long run that rippled down with glassy brightness, and cursed quietly.

It was shortly after this run that Perlmann noticed.
They aren’t waves, Philipp,
he heard Hanna saying,
they’re ribbons – bright, billowing ribbons like the ones that girls pull behind them when doing floor exercises.
From then on, he had always had that image in his head when he heard or played Chopin’s F minor Étude
from Opus 25, in which the right hand had to run through an almost uninterrupted sequence of regular quavers, when the charm of the piece lay in the fact that one could imagine no better medium for the theme than in precisely that regularity. And now he was hearing the same kind of ribbons in the piece by Liszt. They weren’t quite so long or quite so regular, and sometimes the left hand was involved as well. But it was the same musical idea. And while Perlmann inwardly made the comparison, he became clearly aware of something that had hitherto only touched him in the form of a vague, fleeting stumble: there was a thematic similarity between the first piece by Liszt that Millar had played and Chopin’s F minor Étude. Even the key was the same. With growing agitation, he tried to lay his memory of Chopin’s Étude over the notes by Liszt that he had just heard, like a pause the precision of which one wants to check. The piece that was being played interfered with that, and he tried to blank it out. Did that thematic kinship really exist? In one second he was quite sure of it; in the next he mistrusted his impression. If only he had a few minutes to hear the two pieces one after the other.

Perlmann didn’t stir from his concentration until he heard the applause and saw Millar putting his blazer over his shoulders, before slumping in the armchair.

‘Liszt?’ asked von Levetzov.

‘Yes,’ smiled Millar, ‘the only two pieces I can play. And I’ve always thought they somehow belong together.’

Perlmann pounced on the last remark as you might pounce on an opponent’s error in chess, if you saw straight away that it could decide the whole game.

‘That’s true,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Liszt cribbed them both. From Chopin. From the same piece, the F minor Étude from Opus 25.’

When Millar heard the word ‘crib’, the blood rushed to his face, as if the word had been applied to him. For a while he sat there numbly.

‘Cribbed?’ asked Leskov. ‘What does that mean?’

‘
Spisyvat’
,’ said Perlmann without hesitation.

Leskov grinned with surprise and improved his emphasis. ‘There you are. You even know a word like that . . .’

Perlmann reached for his cigarettes.

In the meantime, Millar had recovered himself. ‘I think, Phil,’ he said with controlled calm, ‘you will agree with me that a man like Franz List didn’t need to copy anything. Certainly not from Chopin, who isn’t a patch on him.’

Perlmann was seething, and he felt that his fingers, which were all painful now, had gone cold. It was, he thought, idiotic to provoke this confrontation now, less than twelve hours before Millar’s departure. And yet there was also something that he enjoyed: his fear of open conflict didn’t – as he had expected – discompose him. He felt a solidity that was new to him.

‘Whether he needed or didn’t need to imitate Chopin all the way down to his individual figures, I don’t know,’ Perlmann said on the way to the piano. ‘The fact is that in this case he did.’

He played in a lighter and more liberated way than he had expected, given his trembling fury, and he managed the brief Étude, which contained no particularly great technical difficulties, flawlessly. It only sounded a little too gentle, as he balked at a harder attack.

‘Encore!’ cried Giovanni, who had sat down a little way off, with Signora Morelli. Perlmann didn’t outwardly respond to the exclamation, and went back to his chair. But inwardly, Giovanni, his fan on the edge of the playing field, had performed a small miracle: the conflict with Millar, which Perlmann had just got so wound up in, suddenly lost its power over him, and assumed a playful tinge. He casually lit a cigarette and, as Silvestri had sometimes done, blew the smoke in the direction of Millar’s armchair. Evelyn Mistral tilted her head and nodded slightly.

‘I can’t hear a trace of plagiarism,’ said Millar, and his East Coast accent sounded even stronger than usual.

Ruge took off his glasses and ran his hand over his head. ‘I’m a terrible philistine. But I did have a sense, Brian, that there’s actually something to Philipp’s assertion.’

‘Me too . . . ,’ von Levetzov began.

‘Nonsense,’ Millar interrupted him irritably, visibly aggrieved that his two allies had left him in the lurch at the last minute. ‘Those two bars of Chopin’s are just thrown down haphazardly. A piece that’s been roughly hand-crafted. Practically ingenuous. Liszt’s things, on the other hand, are always very refined.’

Perlmann felt his face getting hot. Giovanni was forgotten. He looked at Millar. ‘You might also say deliberate or calculated or overblown or stilted or affected.’ It was like a breathless obsession, always adding another
or
, at the risk of not having another word to hand. He didn’t know he knew all those English words, and he had the strange, spooky feeling that they had come to mind only for this occasion, and that they would soon vanish from his vocabulary again without a trace.

Millar took off his glasses, closed his eyes and rubbed the top of his nose. Then he set his glasses on as carefully as if he were at the opticians, closed his eyes, folded his arms and said: ‘Remarkable vocabulary. But acquired. You can always tell the foreigner. And, of course, the words don’t have the slightest thing to do with Franz Liszt.’

Laura Sand quickly laid her hand on Perlmann’s arm. ‘I liked your Chopin. Particularly those lyrical pieces. It’s a shame you didn’t play them before.’

As he left, Leskov put the money from the bet in his pocket. Then he rested a heavy hand on Perlmann’s shoulder. ‘You are a one. You play like a professional and don’t say a word about it. And you know the most obscure Russian words!’ He laughed. ‘Do you know what your problem is? You keep too much to yourself. But you see: it all comes out in the end!’

Perlmann lay awake for most of the night. The storm clouds had passed. A shimmer of moonlight lay over the bay. It was quieter than usual. For hours he didn’t hear a single car. The five weeks were over; the mountains of time without present had faded at last. They had read his notes and heard his Chopin. Now they knew who he was. He had always thought that could never happen. He was confused that the disaster failed to materialize. He waited. Perhaps it would come after some delay, and all the more violently when it did. But it didn’t just begin like that. Very gradually he started to sense that for decades he had been living with an error. It wasn’t true that delineation meant screening oneself off and walling oneself away, as if in an internal fortress. What it came down to was something quite different: that if the others found out, one should stand calmly and fearlessly by what one was in one’s innermost depths. And Perlmann felt as if this insight was also the key to that present that he so longed for, which had always remained as intangible and fleeting as a mirage.