‘And now I’d like you to take me out, up to the white hotel on the hill,’ she said with a purple pout.
It sounded like a sentence from a film, and Perlmann had to suppress a chuckle. He put on his clothes and chose his blazer with the gold buttons. He was glad that it wasn’t yet Monday evening. When he came out of the bathroom, she pointed to the page of keywords that still lay on the glass desktop.
‘When I get bored in seminars I doodle as well,’ she said.
It was only when the taxi turned into the drive of the Imperiale that Perlmann managed to forget that remark.
Kirsten leaned far back in her turquoise plush armchair and looked out into the backdrop of lights in the bay.
‘I wish Mum was here, too,’ she said into the quiet music that spilled across from the bar into the lounge.
Perlmann choked on his sandwich. So perhaps, after all, she hadn’t come to terms with Agnes’s death better and faster than he had. And even if she had, it had been silly to resent her for it.
‘Yesterday in the café,’ she went on, ‘you said something about intimacy and freedom. I don’t know if I understood.’ She paused without looking at him. ‘Were you happy with Mum? I mean… It was good at home, there were never any arguments. But maybe…’
Perlmann closed his eyes. The camera clicked, and Agnes laughed mockingly as he beat his arms around him to drive away the pigeons. Then they were walking together through Hamburg, pointing out the gleaming colors of the wet, glistening autumn leaves to one another, while inside he repeated over and over to himself the doctor’s redeeming words about Kirsten’s health. In his face he felt the wind over the cliffs of Normandy, and saw Agnes’s arm in the yellow windbreaker, slinging the full pack of cigarettes far into the void with a circular motion. And then, as if this new memory had pushed its way darkly over the others without quite erasing them, he felt Agnes’s head on his stiff shoulder, after she had made her remark about that dreamy photograph of Hong Kong at the airport.
He opened his eyes and saw that Kirsten was looking at him.
‘We were fine. Most of the time we were fine together.’
Her smile at that moment, he thought later, revealed that she was pleased about the confidence in his voice, but unhappy with his choice of words. After all, she had asked about happiness.
She shook her packet of cigarettes and made to go. Following Silvestri’s habit of fishing one out with her lips, she paused, started the whole movement from the beginning and then used her fingers, as she normally did.
‘You know, Martin’s OK. He really is OK.’ She paused for too long, sensed it and struggled for words. ‘Really, he is. It’s just… I don’t know… sometimes he lacks a bit of… excitement. Something, you know, like that stupid guy Giorgio… that stupid Silvestri… or François… Oh, forget it.’ Turning her head quickly she threw Perlmann a crooked grin and then looked out of the window again.
Perlmann thought of how Agnes had come back from her trip to Shanghai, the one André Fischer had been on. That one present, a little ivory dragon, she had chucked at him halfway across the living room without warning, something she never normally did. And for a few days her other movements had become jauntier than usual, sometimes practically exuberant for no reason. Then things had returned to normal and the quietness that marked their dealings with one another had swallowed up the exuberance.
Perlmann asked how good Martin’s Russian was, when Kirsten’s silence began to oppress him. He was asking, he said, because she had made that remark the previous day about the big dictionary with the bad paper.
‘Oh, not bad, I think. His father, who’s a pretty revolting character, by the way, worked in Moscow for a long time, and Martin wanted to match his linguistic abilities. It seems to be the only bond between the two of them.’ She clumsily stubbed out her cigarette. ‘He is talented. In lots of ways. That’s… that’s not it…’
It was long past midnight before they got out of the taxi in front of the Mira. Over the past two hours Kirsten had done almost all of the talking, and he had learned far more about her life than he had for ages. He now knew all about the other members of their shared apartment. He knew Kirsten’s travel plans for the coming year, and had joined her in her fury about the sloppiness of the medical insurance she’d taken out for her eczema. But most of all he now knew what her everyday life at university was like. He could even have quoted some of the graffiti that she saw every day. Enthralled, he had absorbed every single detail, and with each new topic he had tried to enjoy the closeness that his daughter sought with him as she went on talking, relaxed and almost dreamily, about the various different atmospheres over Lake Constance. But then she had fallen back into that tone that conveyed her pride for her father, who knew the university much, much better than she did, and for whom all the stories she told him must have been old hat. Stop, please stop! he could have cried out to her a dozen times. I’m not there any more. I haven’t been for ages! Her naivety had become more and more of a torture – as the lounge, with its fin-de-siècle plush charm, became emptier – and had driven him into an icy loneliness in which his temptation the previous day to confide in her all his fear and despair had not once returned.
Before Kirsten entered her corridor, she walked up to Perlmann, wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his chest.
‘We haven’t talked like that very often. Maybe never. It was nice. Did you think so, too?’
He nodded mutely. When she looked up and noticed the tears in his eyes, she stroked his cheeks with both hands. And before she disappeared round the corner three steps later, she waved at him, shyly at first, and then with ironic affectation.
23
At about half-past eight he picked her up for breakfast. She was dressed as she had been when she arrived, and was wearing all her rings as well. On the other hand her lips were bare, so that you could see the spot where her bottom lip had burst. When she saw Perlmann’s expression, she ran her index finger over the spot.
‘May I?’ she asked, and walked over to the mirror in the bathroom.
The pills. I should have cleared them away. Perlmann walked over to the window, closed his eyes and sought words for a casual, innocuous explanation.
‘Tell me,’ Kirsten said when she came out of the bathroom. ‘Barbiturates – isn’t that pretty strong stuff? And pretty dangerous, too? Because of addiction and everything, I mean.’
Perlmann breathed out before he turned round. ‘What? Oh, you mean the pills.’ He managed a smile. ‘Oh, no, the doctor told me not to worry about that. It’s all a matter of dosage. And I only need them very rarely, luckily.’ Now he hadn’t needed his well-chosen words. ‘Just now and again, so if there’s a night when my back hurts. And there’s something that isn’t quite right with the bed up here. And before the whole of the next day goes down the drain…’