Perlmann's Silence (14 page)

He played brilliantly, or rather, Perlmann thought after a while, he played
competently
, even if that was an unusual word in this context. Perlmann was immediately prepared to concede that he would have expected nothing less from Millar. But it was more to do with Millar’s playing. He noticed it only reluctantly, but Millar played his Bach in a quite particular style; a style, besides, that he had never before encountered in such an extreme form. For a long time Perlmann sought words for it, and finally opted for this formula: the melody had been completely dissolved in structure. He tried to identify two features of his experience that were conjured up by Millar’s playing. One perceived the way in which the sequences of notes were spread out over time. The notes, even though they had faded away in the usual sense, in another sense remained where they were, and subsequent notes were added as part of a structure, and thus, from one bar to the next, a kind of architecture came into being, one that was experienced as simultaneity. The leading notes currently sounding were, Perlmann thought, like the moving tip of a piece of chalk writing, the traces of whose past movements were seen as a whole on the board.
But isn’t that always the case with melody? Isn’t that actually the essence of musical form? How come it sounds like something new and specific in his playing, something special? How does he do that?

The other effect of Millar’s playing was that one couldn’t surrender to the heard melody. One couldn’t allow oneself to fall into it for as much as a moment; one was kept outside as if by an invisible wall, and that made listening demanding, even though one wasn’t really aware of it. Perlmann tried out a series of descriptive words:
austere, brittle, matter-of-fact, cold, intellectual, gothic.
He rejected them all. They were superficial and clichéd. One had to take into account the fact that the special quality of Millar’s playing was not simply the expression of a temperament, a character, but that it represented an actual interpretation, an interpretation of Bach’s music.

Perlmann hid his right hand under his left and tried to play along with Millar’s right hand. As he did so he moved his feet inconspicuously. It was a long time since he had done that. Back then, as a sixth-former, he had gone to practically every concert in which a pianist was involved, and sometimes he had even hitchhiked to Lübeck and Kiel. His favorite concerts were pure piano evenings, when you could concentrate upon the pianist entirely without distraction. At the back, in the cheap seats, you could brazenly close your eyes and try to imitate the hands that were playing at the front. Most of the works that he had the opportunity to hear in this way he was already familiar with. His musical memory was – apart from Bach – excellent. It hadn’t been that.
Does Millar know what that is: a frightening passage?

By now the guests from outside, who had previously been sitting at the dinner table, had arrived in the lounge. The ochre-colored armchairs were all occupied, the door to the bar was open, and the formal clothes contributed to the impression that a little concert was taking place. Millar had now been playing for half an hour, and all of a sudden Perlmann found his Bach flat and boring. He would have loved to run to the trattoria and read in the chronicle what had been going on in the world when he had heard the grey-haired, bent-backed Clara Haskil at one of her last concerts.

Millar, who seemed baffled by the size of the audience behind his back, thanked them for their applause with an athletic bow that reminded Perlmann a little of a salute. The loudest and longest applause came from Adrian von Levetzov, who at first looked as if he was going to get up, but then, after glancing around at the others, remained sitting on the edge of his chair.

‘
¡Un extra!
’ cried Evelyn Mistral. ‘How do you say that in English?’

‘Encore,’ Millar smiled, and when he saw the others nodding he sat back down at the piano. For a moment he took off his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘What we will have now,’ he then said with complacent thoughtfulness, ‘is a precious little piece that hardly anyone plays. For example, it doesn’t appear on a single record. It’s a little
trouvaille
of my own.’

After only a few bars Perlmann felt a sense of familiarity. With increasing clarity he had the impression that he knew this piece, or rather, he had known it well a long time ago. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the past, for a long time in vain, until it was suddenly quite naturally there.
Hanna’s piece, of course. It’s Hanna’s piece. The one we called the ‘ingenuous birthday piece’, one of her favorites.

He immediately saw her before him: Johanna Liebig with the dark strand in her fine, golden hair, which framed an unusually flat face with a very straight nose and a bronzed complexion. You could call it a beautiful face, although you had to be careful not to say it to her. He had always found it a little unapproachable, and had feared the direct gaze from her hazel eyes, which she was able skilfully to deploy. That unapproachability was the reason nothing had ever happened between them. He simply hadn’t dared, and suddenly he had realized that it was too late. At the time he hadn’t known that there was a time for such things, and that you could miss it, and even today he didn’t know whether she’d been waiting for it. Then, after a time when she kept out of his way, they became good friends. They listened to each other’s playing and criticized one another, and sometimes they went to concerts together. She was more talented than him, but in her case he hadn’t minded. There was no competition between them, on the contrary, he didn’t mind her being superior to him, and mothering him slightly, in a mocking way. He only grew furious when she, who was able to take everything more easily, more playfully, accused him of stubbornness. That made him feel helpless, and afterwards he wouldn’t say a word; something that happened later with Agnes, when she tried to rage against his ponderous and often humorless manner.

‘What I like so much about it,’ Hanna had said when she played him the piece for the first time, ‘is its simplicity. I would almost say, its touching simplicity.’ He had understood immediately, but hadn’t been contented with the word. ‘
Simple
is too pallid,’ he had said after a while. ‘
Ingenuous
would be better, if it didn’t have that dismissive aftertaste.’ Then they had talked about the word for a long time, and to a certain extent rediscovered it for themselves. By the end the aftertaste had gone, and they merely found it a beautiful word. When he glanced at the score and saw that it was number 930 in the catalogue, he had laughed. ‘If you read the number the way the Americans write a date, with the month before the day, you get your birthday!’ And so the name had been born:
the ingenuous birthday piece
.

‘That was all Bach, of course,’ von Levetzov smiled, ‘but I can’t put my finger on that one at the moment. I know my way around Mozart better.’

‘Whereas I don’t know my way around anywhere,’ Ruge said with his inimitable dryness, receiving ringing laughter in which some of the other hotel guests joined in.

‘It was the second and third of the English Suites,’ Millar said in his explaining admiral’s voice.

‘English? Why English?’ Laura Sand asked with the sulky, irritable expression that she always wore when she didn’t understand something.

The title, Millar explained, crossing his legs, didn’t come from Bach himself. There was a copy of the score by Johann Christian Bach, who worked in London, and on it was written, without any further commentary,
faites pour les Anglais
. So people became accustomed to talking about the English Suites.

While Millar was talking, and extravagantly explaining every detail of the story, Perlmann suddenly had the feeling that he had made a discovery:
The will to know something very precisely like that. That’s what I’ve always lacked. I only want to know the outlines of things, and I like it when the lines blur a little. That’s why academic research was always alien to me from the outset
.

She would like to hear the encore again, Laura Sand said. ‘I like it. It’s so . . . ingenuous.’

As Millar was playing, she closed her eyes. Her face was beautiful; Perlmann hadn’t noticed that until now. Before, her furious expression with its mocking lips had dominated everything else. He had seen her as intelligent and interesting, as filled with a penetrating alertness, but not as beautiful. Now the long lashes and the almost straight eyebrows gave the white face, which the African sun had clearly been unable to affect, a marble calm. She looked exhausted.

Perlmann held Hanna’s face next to it. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or troubled that this woman had used, in English, the very word that he and Hanna had used for the piece. Did that violate his past intimacy with Hanna, as expressed in their little naming game?

When she opened her eyes for a moment, Laura Sand must have seen that he was examining her, because an instant later she popped one eye open, and that one-eyed mockery was like a protruding tongue.

The encore had been a little Prelude in G minor, number 902 in the catalogue, Millar replied when von Levetzov asked him.

As with the discovery at the previous day’s session, Perlmann involuntarily sat bolt upright. His heart was beating like mad. Had he been mistaken, just because he couldn’t tell Bach’s pieces apart? Wasn’t it the birthday piece? While Millar spoke like an expert about Bach’s lesser-known piano music, Perlmann let the piece play out again within him. It was the piece, he was quite sure of it. So was the date he had in his head the wrong one? Was Hanna’s birthday the second of September?

After a few quick draws on his cigarette, he remembered: once they had gone to the circus on her birthday. Hanna had been furious that the trapeze act had been performed without a net. She had closed her eyes, and trembled afterwards. A few days later the youngest of the acrobats had fallen to her death, her body lying in the sawdust below. And the circus had always come to Hamburg punctually at the start of the autumn, not at the beginning of September.
Millar is mistaken
.
Brian Millar, the star who knows everything, has made a mistake. And one that involves something he called a
trouvaille
.
But be careful – to burst out with it before he had checked it would be too risky. Thirty years had passed, and the memory could play tricks on one. Of course, it was a ridiculously insignificant mistake. It was grotesque to make anything of it. But Perlmann felt it with almost physical certainty: while he was on his hobbyhorse, having to admit this tiny mistake, this utterly inconsequential mistake, would hit Millar in the middle of his vanity, it would hit him even harder than if he had made a mistake in his academic subject. And this time there was no Jenny to blame.

Two mistakes in the formulae, and now this. And it was always Philipp Perlmann who found fault with him. Millar would be fuming, this man who was now whipping his American ankle-boots back and forth, as he explained the difference between piano and harpsichord music to Evelyn Mistral, who was listening to him with an irritatingly devoted expression.
I can’t afford to make a mistake. I must call Hanna. Tonight.

Luckily, the guests from outside – some of them slightly drunk – were so noisy that the group soon dispersed. Angelini, who wanted to go into town with Silvestri, said goodbye. He had been delighted to meet everyone. Had nothing changed about Leskov’s refusal? Shame. And that Perlmann’s session was going to take place on the Monday of the reception – that was still the case? He absolutely wanted to be there.

‘Will you tell me if the date changes?’

Perlmann nodded mutely.

‘
Prometti?
’

Again Perlmann nodded.

Angelini put an arm around Silvestri’s shoulder. ‘He will be the last to give a paper. Don’t you think he’s too modest?’

Perlmann didn’t wait for Silvestri’s reaction.

Back in his room, he didn’t even take the time to remove his jacket, but sat down on the bed straight away and looked up the international enquiries number. When he had lost touch with Hanna, she had been unmarried, and later someone had told him she was now a piano teacher in Hamburg. There were two Johanna Liebigs in Hamburg. Italian enquiries had no information about professions, so he asked for both numbers. As excited as he might have been before a first date, he lit a cigarette.