She put one foot on the bedstead and retied her trainer. There was no way of telling whether she believed him.
Silvestri didn’t appear in the dining room until five to nine, and only drank coffee. Although he was sitting opposite her, Kirsten tried to ignore him, suddenly bombarding Ruge with questions about his lab in Bochum. Then, when Silvestri reached for his cigarettes, he sought Kirsten’s eye to offer her one. In the end he lit one for himself, glanced at Perlmann and sent the pack sliding jauntily all the way across the table so that it bumped into Kirsten’s saucer and made her coffee spill over the edge. Kirsten gave a start, lifted her dripping cup reproachfully for a moment, and then picked up the packet. Only now did she meet Silvestri’s eye. For a second Perlmann feared that she would simply push the pack back to him. But then she very slowly fished out a cigarette, put it between her lips and, looking in a completely different direction, stretched out her arm towards Silvestri with a gesture so blasé that it looked as if she had learned it at drama school. With a grin, the Italian dropped his lighter into her open hand from an exaggeratedly high position. There was a quiet metallic sound when it rubbed against all her rings. Without deigning to glance at him, Kirsten held her cigarette into the flame, snapped the lighter shut and set it down in the middle of the table. ‘Ecco!’ Silvestri laughed and reached for it. Then Kirsten turned and looked at him and stuck out her tongue.
Perlmann caught a glance from Evelyn Mistral. Her oriental face with its green eyes shot through with amber seemed to come at him from a long way away, and he didn’t know whether he was pleased about that, or unhappy.
Laura Sand’s third session passed at a more sluggish pace than the previous two. Some films injected a little life into proceedings, raising the question of whether animals understood the meaning of certain signs only in the sense that they reacted appropriately to them, or whether – albeit in a simplified, pallid sense – they attributed to others the intention of giving them a sign. Did animals have anything like a theory about the intellectual lives of their own species?
‘But that’s blindingly obvious!’ Kirsten exploded. ‘Of course they have! You can see that in their eyes!’
‘The fact is,’ Millar cut in, ‘that you can’t see anything at all in their eyes, and that it’s pretty fantastical to assume any such thing. To put it mildly.’ He said it in his usual confident, professional tone, and only a hint of irritation revealed that a discussion about Faulkner had taken place.
Perlmann thought about the funny things that Evelyn Mistral had been saying lately about the eloquent facial expressions of animals, and expected her to come to Kirsten’s aid. But she didn’t say a word, her arms folded over her chest, and even nodded when Millar and Ruge ridiculed a suggestion of goodness that von Levetzov had, in Perlmann’s eyes, only made because he wanted to be nice to Kirsten.
Like everyone else, Laura Sand was waiting for Silvestri to join in, since he was known to share Kirsten’s spontaneous opinion. But the Italian met this tense expectation with a poker face and picked more crumbs of tobacco from his tongue than were actually there. At last Laura Sand revealed with a twitch of the corners of her mouth that she had understood his refusal, and now developed her own thesis, which wasn’t so far removed from Kirsten’s feelings. At first Kirsten listened to her with excitement; but when it got technical, she leaned back inconspicuously and looked furtively at her watch.
‘I am a bit puzzled, though,’ she said to Perlmann later in the hall, though it sounded more intimidated than puzzled, ‘about how tough the debate was there. At our seminars it’s a lot… a lot looser, friendlier. Did you think it was really embarrassing when I burst out with my opinion?’
Perlmann didn’t reply, because at that point Maria walked up to them and handed him a printout of Leskov’s text, with the pages of his hand-written translation underneath.
‘Eccolo,’ she said. ‘It took until now because Signor Millar had some other things to write.’
For the title, printed in an exaggeratedly large, bold font, she had used a sheet of its own. Now she pointed at it and started to remark upon it. With a presence of mind that he didn’t experience deep within himself, Perlmann anticipated her and introduced Kirsten. He held the text behind his back with both hands, as he uttered words of praise about Maria which struck him as unbearably hollow. And no sooner had Maria addressed a question to Kirsten than he made an apologetic gesture, walked over to the reception desk and asked Signora Morelli to put the stack of paper in his pigeonhole.
‘I thought the text was very interesting,’ Maria said when she walked back to them. ‘Only the last third, that stuff about appropriation, I didn’t really understand that.’
‘Yes, that is a problem,’ said Perlmann, and started to turn away. ‘And many thanks for your work.’
‘You’re welcome. And… Just a moment… We’re still on for the other text on Friday?’
Perlmann felt Kirsten’s eyes on his face. When he turned round again, he had the feeling of moving a heavy, shapeless load. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as agreed.’
He was already holding the dining-room door handle when Kirsten pointed towards the pigeonholes. ‘That’s the text for your session on Thursday, isn’t it? Something about linguistic creation. Or did I misread it? You whisked the pages away so quickly!’ she laughed.
‘Later,’ Perlmann murmured when he saw Ruge and von Levetzov coming towards them.
‘You know,’ said Kirsten when they sat down at the table, ‘I thought I might be able to take a copy of the text. To read on the journey. Do you think I could ask Maria to make another printout for me?’
‘Later,’ said Perlmann. He hadn’t managed to keep his distress and fury out of his voice. He put his hand on her arm and smiled awkwardly. ‘We’ll talk about it later. OK?’
It took her ages to freshen herself up for the journey and pack her few belongings. Perlmann looked apprehensively down at the bay, where the first dawn was breaking below the gloomy sky. She hadn’t said another word about the text. And that (he knew his daughter far too well) had nothing to do with the fact that they had all gone on sitting in the dining room until after three, laughing at the jokes of Achim Ruge, who had risen to the occasion under Kirsten’s admiring gaze.
She would never speak again about that text of her own free will. She would sooner bite off her tongue. It had always been like that when he had treated her impatiently about anything. As before, she then tended to put on that pointedly oblivious, uninterested face that conveyed a single unambiguous message: It’s nothing. Once, when someone in a specialist discussion had put forward the thesis that there was no other form of expressing negative assertions of existence apart from the linguistic, he had said, laughing, ‘You don’t know my daughter.’
Shortly after Kirsten had gone to her room, he had taken the text from his pigeonhole. He had only looked quickly at the last printed page: thirty-seven pages, it was now. Then he had put the printout in his suitcase and added the handwritten sheets to Leskov’s text in the lower clothes drawer. He had phoned Genoa Station and reserved a sleeping compartment. Five minutes later he had phoned again and changed the reservation to a couchette. No, she couldn’t tell him with the best will in the world, the irritated woman had said, what connections to Konstanz there would be at six o’clock in the morning in Zurich. Since then he had been standing by the window and, although his back hurt, that seemed to him to be the only position in which he could bear to wait.