She was wearing the black coat again, and holding her red travelling bag when she suddenly appeared at about half-past six. It was as if the question of the text had never come up. He was actually quite nice, stupid Giorgio, she said, but she really couldn’t stand his endless mockery. And she certainly knew more about Faulkner than he did. She was wearing make-up again, and the bright-red hairgrip, he thought, didn’t match the gleaming, greasy purple of her lips.
They got to the station far too early; the dimly lit platform was still deserted. There was suddenly an embarrassed silence between them. They looked shyly at one another, and then Kirsten began aimlessly rummaging in her travelling bag. Suddenly, the abandoned platform was filled with the shrill ringing that Perlmann already knew. It was a penetrating, endlessly protracted noise that sounded ghostly because it was in the night, even though not the slightest thing was happening. They both exploded simultaneously into laughter, and Kirsten put her hands over her ears. They hastily left the station and stepped out under the plane trees in front of the exit.
She asked him if he really wanted to ride with her to Genoa when silence threatened to fall once more. That was really awkward. But he insisted on it. So later on they sat opposite one another in the shabby carriage, and Perlmann felt like bursting into tears when he realized that he was searching for topics of conversation as frantically as if she were a total stranger. At last he brought the subject around to Maria’s hairdo and asked whether hairspray was the latest thing.
‘Have you been living under a rock?’ she laughed. ‘That’s been out for ages. It’s like way, way out. No one wears it any more!’
Later she lit her last Gauloise and handed him the red lighter. Before he gave it back, he studied it very precisely, glad to be able to do something to counteract the silence that was threatening to fall once more. On the delicate gold rim the word Cartier was engraved in tiny letters. He was about to ask where she had got it, when her facial expression warned him, and he put it in her hand without a word. She turned it between her fingers as she looked out into the night.
‘I’ll give it to you,’ she suddenly said, smiling with relief like someone who has just said a long overdue goodbye. ‘Here, take it.’
He hesitantly took it from her. Her lips curled mockingly, then she snapped her fingers. ‘Over.’ He glanced at it once more and slipped it into his pocket. François.
She was temporarily alone in the couchette compartment. That could change in Milan, he thought, and then asked if she had any francs with her. For breakfast in Zurich. She leaned out of the window and stretched out her arm. He took her hand. At the front of the train the conductor started to close the doors.
‘You didn’t come to breakfast very often at home, either. To Mum’s distress.’ She sniffed, and now he saw the tears. ‘Only on the first day of the holidays, then we always sat together, all morning. That was… that was wonderful.’ She let go of his hand and wiped her eyes. ‘Giorgio told me you never come to breakfast.’ The train started moving. She laughed. ‘Gli ho detto che ti voglio bene. Giusto?’
Perlmann nodded and raised his hand to wave. Through his tears he saw Kirsten making a sieve with her hands and calling out something that he didn’t understand. He stopped until he was quite sure that he could no longer see the red tail light of the train.
Because Kirsten’s ticket had cost more than he had expected, he no longer had enough money for a taxi. He only just caught the last train to Santa Margherita. Now and again on the journey he reached for the red lighter in his pocket and ran through Kirsten’s Italian sentence in his mind. In the hotel he threw himself on the bed and let his tears flow freely.
24
At the end of the Tuesday session, Millar suggested talking about Evelyn Mistral’s works on Wednesday and Thursday, so that he could travel to Florence on Friday to meet his Italian colleague about the encyclopaedia. For a moment Perlmann felt a helpless fury, because the last free day on which he could have written was being taken from him. But even before Laura Sand gathered her things together and the others got up, that feeling had already collapsed in on itself, making way for a numbing indifference.
It was accompanied by a leaden weariness, which was further diminished by the fact that he was yielding to his compulsive need for sleep more and more often and with increasingly little resistance. If he woke up, the weariness tended to weigh heavier on him than before, and every time he crept under the shower in his clothes, the indifference seemed to become even more encompassing until he felt as if he had, in that short time, forgotten how to feel anything at all. If he ate anything, it happened very mechanically, and where the blindness of sensation was concerned, it was barely distinguishable from the food ingestion of a plant. It was only a matter of time before he ceased that activity, too, he thought, as he slipped once more into a twilight state in which he felt sheltered for a few moments, before the next maelstrom of flitting dream images carried him away.
On Tuesday evening Kirsten rang. He had been right, she said, the compartment had filled up in Milan, and then a real snoring concert had started up, so that she hadn’t had a wink. In Zurich she had had to wait for almost two hours for a connection, but breakfast had been fantastic.
‘I hope,’ she said with anxious hesitation, ‘you didn’t misunderstand my farewell remark. It wasn’t supposed to be an accusation.’
The practice room in the Institute had struck her as even shabbier than usual. ‘And those inevitable paper cups! I couldn’t help thinking about your crystal glasses!’
Martin? ‘Imagine. He was standing at the station just by chance, because he’d worked out the thing with the night train.’ She paused. ‘When I saw him, I had a guilty conscience. Because… well, yeah, because of what I said.’
The seminar session? ‘I slept through it with my eyes open! Once, when Lasker mentioned The Wild Palms, I couldn’t help thinking about my discussion with Millar. God, is that guy pleased with himself! Cocksure doesn’t begin to cover it!’
Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t get to sleep, and wished his earlier compulsion to rest would return. In the middle of the night he fetched his notes from the suitcase and sat down at the desk. He slowly flicked the pages. No, translating the German examples into English didn’t work; they sounded dull, weird and even ridiculous. Presence: a perfume, a light, a smile… He had already picked up the felt-tip pen to cross out the two lines when he stopped and smoked a cigarette. He left the lines as they were and flicked to the end. What separates me from my present… Without hesitation he crossed out the whole of the last paragraph. But that wasn’t enough for him. He went on blackening the page until the last white dot had disappeared and the whole thing formed a deep black block that left traces on the next page. He waved and blew the page dry, then flicked back to the two indented lines. After a quick look he blackened them out too. For a while he sat motionless in front of the first page. Then, with the felt-tip pen, he drew the heading: mestre non è brutta.
On Wednesday morning on the way to the veranda he went to see Maria in the office and gave her the notes. She laughed at the title. Now the text was ready earlier after all, she said. She still had a whole pile of things to get done today and tomorrow, but she would manage to get it done by Monday, as agreed. Perlmann nodded to everything. He was already in the doorway when he heard her laughing again. She was pointing at the blacked-out closing paragraph. ‘Like something in a secret dossier!’ she said. ‘It really stirs the curiosity!’