‘You know, I had a terribly dry mouth when I was sitting up at the front, at least at first. Luckily, I found a boiled sweet in my jacket. Lasker nearly managed a smile when he saw how bothered I was by the stickiness on my fingers afterwards.’
On the way to the door she tugged on the tassels of the coats of arms and laughed at the clouds of dust. In the doorway she turned round again.
‘Incredibly elegant – almost illicit. And then the view out to the pool… But the position at the front is the same. Emotionally, I mean. I was worried I might forget everything at the crucial moment. Complete nonsense, of course. But still.’ She looked at him. ‘You probably can’t understand that any more, when it’s been routine for so many years. Am I right?’
Perlmann rested his hand on her shoulder and pushed her gently outside.
After a walk along the sea, in the course of which she talked about Martin and stopped from time to time to hold her face in the morning sun, she grew tired and wanted to try and get some sleep. Outside the door to her room she gave him a kiss on the cheek and laughed at the purple print it left.
‘See you later? Do you have work to do?’
He raised his hand and quickly turned round.
He stood by the window for hours on end until his back hurt. Now and again he glanced at his desk. How tidy the desk looks! she had said before they had gone to breakfast. As if you’d just finished something.
The presence of his sleeping daughter. She made everything seem unreal, or rather she created a twofold reality: two levels to a certain extent, between which he swung back and forth at every moment, not knowing which one he belonged to – or wanted to belong to – more. Above all, with Kirsten’s arrival time had doubled, two unconnected strands of time passed through him now, both claiming to be actual, real time, the time that mattered. One was the time that Kirsten had brought with her, the time of her weekly seminars, and also the time in which the weeks and months of her acquaintance with Martin were counted. That was the time into which he had threaded himself before, on their walk, to be close to her. Now, standing at the window, he tried again to slip into that time, he searched it for present, a present that could make everything apart from his daughter unimportant and free him of his anxiety. But Kirsten’s sleep had, if it hadn’t demolished that time, deep-frozen it for a few hours, and the imagined present with her would only be able to turn into a real present at the moment when she opened her eyes down there, on the second floor of the other wing. By now he was entirely back in that other time, the time of the hotel, the time of anxiety, which had gone on ticking with treacherous silence behind the back of Kirsten’s time.
Perlmann drew one curtain and lay down on the bed. There were, strictly speaking, not only these two temporal realities, he thought, and was grateful for the soft, velvety sound that his thoughts now assumed. There was, in fact, also the time that belonged to him and Kirsten alone, the time that began with Agnes’s death, the time of shared abandonment and grief. That one – Perlmann’s hands clawed involuntarily into the cover – Martin had no business with, absolutely no business at all. And before that there was, again, another time in which Herr Wiedemann or Wiedemeier or whatever that young whippersnapper’s name was, had no place: the time with Agnes and Kirsten, the time when all three of them had chosen, from mountains of pictures, the photograph of the month and in the end the photograph of the year: family time, so to speak.
Perlmann rubbed his eyes. The serious picture of Agnes on the windowsill appeared, and now he also saw the coffee seeping into the pale carpet. There was also Frankfurt time, the snowed-in time when his letterbox filled up with junk mail and the dean waited for his report. That time had something to do with Kirsten’s time in Konstanz, it seemed to him; but now the thoughts became so gentle and pleasantly vague that it would have been a shame to spoil them by concentrating.
When Kirsten woke him with her knocking it was late afternoon. ‘I slept like a log!’ she said and whirled through the room. ‘Will you show me the town now?’
When he came out of the bathroom, she was holding the big Russian-English dictionary, flicking through it and then constantly rubbing her fingers on her jeans.
‘That’s an amazing thing,’ she said. ‘Every single turn of phrase explained! I don’t think Martin knows that. Except the paper’s horrible to the touch. Actually repellent. Where did you get this great tome?’
Perlmann felt as if he were seeing Santa Margherita for the first time. And as if this wasn’t the town that had the Marconi Veranda in it. The many squares, arches, alleyways – it was as if they hadn’t been there before, and sprang into being under Kirsten’s gaze. By the wooden way he stood around when she went up to things to look at details, one might have thought he was bored. In fact, with his eyes often half-closed, he was letting himself fall into the borrowed present of her enthusiasm, feeling like someone looking out at the sea through the barred windows of his cell.
Afterwards, in the café, he was a hair away from succumbing to the overwhelming temptation to tell Kirsten about his desperation. Just before it came to that, he felt the blood pulsing through his whole body. At once disappointed and relieved, he then heard her asking the waiter the way to the toilet, and when she came back with her springy gait and swinging bag, it seemed to him impossible to take the step which, he knew, would have changed so much between them. But his blood pulsed on, so he took out his cigarettes.
She stared at him, thunderstruck.
‘You… since when have you been smoking again?’
He played it down, spoke with hollow nonchalance about Italy, the cafés and the cigarettes that were simply a part of it. He was revolted by himself, and she didn’t believe a word. There was a shadow on her face now. She felt it was like a betrayal of Agnes, a desertion. He was quite sure about that. A burning helplessness took hold of him, and without anticipating it, he started talking about intimacy, about various forms of loyalty, about love and freedom.
‘If intimacy has something to do with the harmony of two lives, one might wonder whether it’s compatible with the ideal that two people shouldn’t curtail each other’s freedom,’ he concluded.
‘Dad,’ she said quietly, ‘I don’t know you like this!’
The shadow had disappeared, making way for a smile full of curious dread. She accepted one of his cigarettes and took out her red lighter.
‘Actually, I don’t think it’s so bad that you’re smoking again,’ she said. ‘At least it means I don’t have to apologize!’
Turning the corner of a building on the way back, they were suddenly in front of the trattoria. Perlmann stopped and pushed the flat of his hand between the glass beads of the curtain. Then he slowly drew it back and walked on without a word.
‘What was that?’ asked Kirsten.
‘Nothing. That kind of curtain… I like it. There’s something… something of the fairy tale about it.’
‘You’re full of surprises today!’ she laughed. ‘And on the subject of fairy tales: doesn’t that white hotel on the hill up there look fantastic? Could we go there tomorrow?’
‘The Imperiale. You have expensive tastes,’ he laughed, and for a moment he disappeared entirely in her time and forgot that the other time, the time of the veranda, was ruthlessly ticking on.