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.
‘Erm… no, of course not,’ Millar said irritably. ‘And that’s not what I meant. But that’s exactly where there’s a contradiction in Laura’s film. There’s no getting round it.’
‘Of course. And nor should there be,’ Ruge smiled. ‘What concerns me is just this: it’s a contradiction that we’ve got to endure, both here and elsewhere. Endure it, without avoiding it.’
‘Ecco!’ said Silvestri.
Laura Sand leaned back and lit a cigarette. There was a complacent gleam in her furious expression. Perlmann didn’t like that gleam. Suddenly, he missed Agnes.
Millar gave Silvestri a contemptuous look. ‘I think that’s too simple,’ he said then, turning to Ruge. ‘Cheap – if the word is allowed.’
‘Oh, it’s allowed, certainly,’ replied Ruge. ‘But it’s wrong, I fear. Because enduring that contradiction – in the sense in which I mean it – that is, on the contrary, extremely difficult. Or expensive,’ he added with a grin.
Millar drummed his fingers on the table top. ‘I don’t think so, Achim… Oh, forget it.’
Over dessert and coffee he didn’t say a word. Now and again he bit his lips. Perlmann suddenly wasn’t sure whether Brian Millar was as tough an opponent as he had previously thought.
Before he went to bed, Perlmann prepared his desk for the following day. He moved the lamp to the side and straightened a stack of blank sheets on the glass, with his writing materials next to them. He went through the books in his suitcase and finally carried three volumes over to the desk. Then he took half a pill. If he was to be able to start writing straight away tomorrow, he would have to sleep well. When the first, familiar signs of numbness set in, he began to compose the structure of his paper. Four subheadings, underlined and with a number in front of them. The four lines were precisely the same length. It looked very neat. It would turn out well.
21
When Kirsten, announced by Giovanni, stood at his door at six o’clock the following morning, Perlmann had to control himself to keep from throwing his arms around her neck.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said with a smile in which sheepishness and mockery mixed, and which also contained a confidence that he had never seen in his daughter before. ‘You sounded so weird on the phone the day before yesterday that I thought I should check everything was all right.’
She was wearing a long, black coat and light-colored sneakers, and her recalcitrant hair was held together with a lemon-yellow hairband. On the floor next to her was the scuffed red leather travelling bag that Agnes had dragged around with her like a talisman on all her trips.
‘Come on, sit down,’ he said, and cursed his heavy head and furry tongue. ‘How on earth did you get here?’
She had been on the road for fifteen hours from Konstanz, hitching all the way. Six times she had stood by the roadside, and once – at a gas station on the Milan ring road, long after midnight – it had been more than an hour before anyone had picked her up. Perlmann shuddered, but didn’t say a word. The best part had been at the beginning, in Switzerland. There, a man had even invited her to dinner before they drove down the Leventina gorge. ‘A nice respectable Swiss man with suspenders!’ She laughed when she saw his face.