‘What I like so much about it,’ Hanna had said when she played him the piece for the first time, ‘is its simplicity. I would almost say, its touching simplicity.’ He had understood immediately, but hadn’t been contented with the word. ‘Simple is too pallid,’ he had said after a while. ‘Ingenuous would be better, if it didn’t have that dismissive aftertaste.’ Then they had talked about the word for a long time, and to a certain extent rediscovered it for themselves. By the end the aftertaste had gone, and they merely found it a beautiful word. When he glanced at the score and saw that it was number 930 in the catalogue, he had laughed. ‘If you read the number the way the Americans write a date, with the month before the day, you get your birthday!’ And so the name had been born: the ingenuous birthday piece.
‘That was all Bach, of course,’ von Levetzov smiled, ‘but I can’t put my finger on that one at the moment. I know my way around Mozart better.’
‘Whereas I don’t know my way around anywhere,’ Ruge said with his inimitable dryness, receiving ringing laughter in which some of the other hotel guests joined in.
‘It was the second and third of the English Suites,’ Millar said in his explaining admiral’s voice.
‘English? Why English?’ Laura Sand asked with the sulky, irritable expression that she always wore when she didn’t understand something.
The title, Millar explained, crossing his legs, didn’t come from Bach himself. There was a copy of the score by Johann Christian Bach, who worked in London, and on it was written, without any further commentary, faites pour les Anglais. So people became accustomed to talking about the English Suites.
While Millar was talking, and extravagantly explaining every detail of the story, Perlmann suddenly had the feeling that he had made a discovery: The will to know something very precisely like that. That’s what I’ve always lacked. I only want to know the outlines of things, and I like it when the lines blur a little. That’s why academic research was always alien to me from the outset.
She would like to hear the encore again, Laura Sand said. ‘I like it. It’s so… ingenuous.’
As Millar was playing, she closed her eyes. Her face was beautiful; Perlmann hadn’t noticed that until now. Before, her furious expression with its mocking lips had dominated everything else. He had seen her as intelligent and interesting, as filled with a penetrating alertness, but not as beautiful. Now the long lashes and the almost straight eyebrows gave the white face, which the African sun had clearly been unable to affect, a marble calm. She looked exhausted.
Perlmann held Hanna’s face next to it. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled that this woman had used, in English, the very word that he and Hanna had used for the piece. Did that violate his past intimacy with Hanna, as expressed in their little naming game?
When she opened her eyes for a moment, Laura Sand must have seen that he was examining her, because an instant later she popped one eye open, and that one-eyed mockery was like a protruding tongue.
The encore had been a little Prelude in G minor, number 902 in the catalogue, Millar replied when von Levetzov asked him.
As with the discovery at the previous day’s session, Perlmann involuntarily sat bolt upright. His heart was beating like mad. Had he been mistaken, just because he couldn’t tell Bach’s pieces apart? Wasn’t it the birthday piece? While Millar spoke like an expert about Bach’s lesser-known piano music, Perlmann let the piece play out again within him. It was the piece, he was quite sure of it. So was the date he had in his head the wrong one? Was Hanna’s birthday the second of September?
After a few quick draws on his cigarette, he remembered: once they had gone to the circus on her birthday. Hanna had been furious that the trapeze act had been performed without a net. She had closed her eyes, and trembled afterwards. A few days later the youngest of the acrobats had fallen to her death, her body lying in the sawdust below. And the circus had always come to Hamburg punctually at the start of the autumn, not at the beginning of September. Millar is mistaken. Brian Millar, the star who knows everything, has made a mistake. And one that involves something he called a trouvaille. But be careful – to burst out with it before he had checked it would be too risky. Thirty years had passed, and the memory could play tricks on one. Of course, it was a ridiculously insignificant mistake. It was grotesque to make anything of it. But Perlmann felt it with almost physical certainty: while he was on his hobbyhorse, having to admit this tiny mistake, this utterly inconsequential mistake, would hit Millar in the middle of his vanity, it would hit him even harder than if he had made a mistake in his academic subject. And this time there was no Jenny to blame.
Two mistakes in the formulae, and now this. And it was always Philipp Perlmann who found fault with him. Millar would be fuming, this man who was now whipping his American ankle-boots back and forth, as he explained the difference between piano and harpsichord music to Evelyn Mistral, who was listening to him with an irritatingly devoted expression. I can’t afford to make a mistake. I must call Hanna. Tonight.
Luckily, the guests from outside – some of them slightly drunk – were so noisy that the group soon dispersed. Angelini, who wanted to go into town with Silvestri, said goodbye. He had been delighted to meet everyone. Had nothing changed about Leskov’s refusal? Shame. And that Perlmann’s session was going to take place on the Monday of the reception – that was still the case? He absolutely wanted to be there.
‘Will you tell me if the date changes?’
Perlmann nodded mutely.
‘Prometti?’
Again Perlmann nodded.
Angelini put an arm around Silvestri’s shoulder. ‘He will be the last to give a paper. Don’t you think he’s too modest?’
Perlmann didn’t wait for Silvestri’s reaction.
Back in his room, he didn’t even take the time to remove his jacket, but sat down on the bed straight away and looked up the international enquiries number. When he had lost touch with Hanna, she had been unmarried, and later someone had told him she was now a piano teacher in Hamburg. There were two Johanna Liebigs in Hamburg. Italian enquiries had no information about professions, so he asked for both numbers. As excited as he might have been before a first date, he lit a cigarette.
The first Johanna Liebig was an old woman who was outraged that someone should disturb her so late at night. Perlmann stammered an apology and put the phone down, disappointed, but secretly pleased about the little delay. The second number rang for a very long time. Then Hanna answered. He recognized her voice straight away.