Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because . . . Because . . .”

  “Because I slurp my soup, can cook Chinese food, and speak Cantonese?” he retorted. “That should actually prove the opposite. Or have you ever met a foreigner who was born here or grew up here because his father was in Her Majesty’s Service or worked for a company here who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin or had even the slightest interest in the culture and history of Hong Kong?” He poured more tea for her and for himself before continuing. “No. I was born in Germany. My mother is German and my father is American. I first came to Hong Kong in 1975 via Vietnam and Bangkok. I’ve lived here ever since.”

  “On Lamma?” she asked, astounded.

  “No, in the city. I moved to Lamma only two years ago. Shortly after my divorce.”

  “Don’t you feel it gets too lonely here?”

  He shook his head gently.

  “Do you live here on your own?”

  He looked her straight in the eye. There was that expression again, that she had felt so intensely before: vulnerable, open, and raw, a kind of nakedness that was unfamiliar to her.

  “Some days, yes. Some days, no.”

  She remembered the child’s shoes in the hall. She wanted to ask a question, but his look told her that it would be better to stay silent.

  “And you?” he asked her, after a long pause.

  It was an invitation that she could not refuse. He was the first person in a long time who was paying attention to her without wanting anything in return. Without demanding a cheaper flight, an upgrade, a pay raise, a day off, or money for a new computer game. The first person for whom she did not have to slip into a particular role: not be the mother, the ex-wife, the boss, or the daughter. He simply sat across from her listening, leaning his head to one side then the other, sipping his tea and asking her questions. She told him about the Catholic school she had attended in Hong Kong and about getting her degree in tourism in Vancouver. About how difficult it was to earn money from a small travel agency in the age of the Internet and to bring up a child at the same time. About the evenings she fell asleep, exhausted, in front of the television, and Josh or Tita woke her at night in front of the flickering screen. About the Sunday dinners with her mother, a burdensome duty that she, like most Hong Kongers, could not escape. She talked about the failure of her marriage. About her husband, who had had a Chinese mistress and child on the other side of the border for years and not told her a thing. Who had supported this woman and their child throughout his marriage to her. That was the real reason why they had never had enough money, why they had to sell the small rental apartment in Kowloon Tong and, later on, even their car, though the business at World Wide Travel had still been going well. She had never really thought about it, or, looking back on it, perhaps she had not wanted to. She had trusted her husband and there had always been good reasons for his many business trips to China. So he claimed, at least, and she had not wanted to doubt him, not even when the first rumors of his infidelity had reached her. She had defended him: to her friends, to her mother. She had believed him, she had wanted to believe him, but he had deceived her, cheated on her, and betrayed her. He had gone behind her back and lied to her. She said all this without self-pity. That was the risk that human beings took when they trusted other people; that was the price they paid. Later, her relations had whispered among themselves that she had brought this on herself; she had been so naïve, so trusting. She had had no contact with her family for months because of their opinions. She would not have done any differently today. Believing and hoping. Over and over again.

  As if trusting was only for fools. As if we had a choice.

  Darkness had started to fall by the time Christine’s torrent of words slowed to a trickle. In the twilight she could make out Paul’s shadowy outline; he sat opposite her, motionless. The flickering of the candle, which he had lighted, fell on his face. He looked exhausted, as if he was the one who had been talking the whole time. They sat in silence for a long time; it was not an ominous silence, though, but one that lifted their spirits.

  A gesture, a mere hint, and . . .

  ———

  He walked her down to the ferry terminal. It had stopped raining and the light from the streetlamps was reflected in the puddles. The restaurants in Yung Shue Wan were brightly lit and full of big families who didn’t mind the cold wind; their laughter and chatter sounded through the village and over the hills around it. A couple of fishing boats were bobbing up and down in the harbor.

  The ferry arrived on time.

  They stood facing each other, silent, unsure of how to part. But even though they did not arrange to meet again, parting with a noncommittal “Maybe we’ll see each other again,” her feeling of intimacy, of being comforted and safe, remained undiminished.

  V

  Sleep was out of the question. He lay on the futon, stared up at the ceiling, and listened to the whirring fan and the furious whine of the mosquitoes trying in vain to find a hole in the mosquito net. The rain drummed heavily against the windowpanes once again. He had spoken more today and listened to more than he had in all the previous months in total. Of course he had had to offer the freezing and shivering woman a hot shower and some hot soup; he had not given it a second thought. But why hadn’t she left after that? As far as he could remember, he had not prompted her to do so. Neither directly nor indirectly. Why not? Why had he let this intruder in his world not only do as she pleased but even told her where he was born, how long he had lived in Hong Kong, and that he was divorced? He could not explain his sudden talkativeness. Nor his attentiveness when she had talked. Listening and asking questions. Over and over again. What for? Had he really wanted to know all that? In retrospect, this sudden intimacy with a stranger was beyond unpleasant, as if he had stepped over an invisible boundary and given away something precious about himself, betrayed someone or something, though he could not say who or what.

  As if trusting was only for fools. As if we had a choice. These words stuck in his mind. We always have a choice, he had wanted to reply to her, but he had kept silent instead. She was a beautiful woman; he had to give her that. He pictured her sitting in front of him in the twilight, her pageboy haircut, her skin unusually tanned for a Hong Kong woman, her slim but toned arms and hands, her long, tapering fingers. He heard her voice: a soft, agreeable voice that removed much of the aggressiveness and crudeness from the sound of Cantonese, and which made her English unusually gentle and melodic. It still sounded clearly in his ears. Paul remembered far too many details about the day and it disturbed him.

  He felt revulsion rise in him. A disgust for himself. His chattiness. His questions. His interest in her.

  ———

  The following Sunday, he went into the village later in the morning, when the ferries with the day-trippers from Hong Kong were arriving, and did something he never usually did: he sat down on the Sampan terrace, which gave him a good view of the passengers arriving. He told himself he wasn’t waiting for anybody. He told himself he had followed an impulse. When he saw her from afar among the throng of visitors, he knew that he had been lying.

  They spent the day together. It was an unusually mild, pleasant day for the season; the sun shone from a cloudless sky, and the beginnings of the brief tropical spring were in the air. They walked without exchanging many words. They drank tea on his terrace. And from the silence, Paul started telling her about himself, hesitating a little to begin with. Why had he lived in Germany and America as a child? Christine wanted to know.

  Where should he begin? With his father, Aaron? The crazy Jew from New York—or Brooklyn, New York, to be exact, he’d always insisted on that distinction—that remarkable man who had gone to Europe as an American soldier and, in Germany, of all places, in Munich, had fallen in love with the daughter of an official in the Social Democratic Party. Or with Heidelinde, his mother, for whom the
relationship must have been a kind of delayed act of resistance to Nazi racial policy, for his parents were so ill suited that he had never been able to see any other reason for their union. How his father had paid for his love for a German. His family in New York had given him the choice between separating from his wife or being disowned by them. After he had decided to stay with the German, all contact with the family was broken off and never, as far as he knew, resumed. Paul had been the only relation at his father’s funeral.

  He told her about that day in the spring of 1962, shortly after his tenth birthday, when his family had moved practically overnight from Munich to New York, without anyone explaining the reason for the move to him. Aaron Leibovitz had come home one night—Paul remembered it very clearly now as he was talking about it—with his pale skin even whiter than usual, his long nose even more pointed, his fleshy lips stretched into a thin line. He had sat down at the kitchen table and said they would be moving, to New York, to Manhattan, to the Lower East Side. In two weeks at the most. His wife had dried her hands on her apron and walked out of the room without saying a word, as she so often did. Aaron Leibovitz said nothing for a while then he stood up, put his hand on his son’s shoulder, mumbled something about being sorry and about packing his things, and left the house. Paul would have liked to say to him that he needn’t be sorry, not at all, quite the opposite, in fact. He had no objections to moving house, wherever they moved to. With a Jewish father and with the daughter of a Social Democrat as a mother, living in postwar Munich was not exactly easy. Paul could not say which of the insults flung at him in school was worse, “Jewish pig” or “Socialist pig,” and to be honest, when he thought about moving to America, he could think of no one he would miss in Germany, apart from his grandparents, though he was not even sure about that. He would have missed Heinrich, his only friend, whom he had shared a bench with in class, but he had died the year before from a lung infection that had been diagnosed too late.

  Christine listened without asking many questions; perhaps that was why he kept on talking. He didn’t know why or how, perhaps it was her way of listening to him without interrupting, without commenting on what she heard, without taking it as an opportunity to tell her own story or make a witty remark, as Meredith used to do. Her comments had often been astute or funny or both at the same time, and at the beginning he had admired her for it, but later, they had irritated him and driven him to silence. He had felt used, as though what he said was nothing more to her than another opportunity to prove her intelligence and her sense of humor. Christine was different. She took in what he said and it moved her, he saw it in her eyes, and she was fine with his silences. It did him good but it felt strange too.

  Paul thought about how much silence there had been in his family and how oppressive, unhappy, and suffocating he had found it. It had never been a communal silence, more a brooding over things unsaid. He talked about the six-day voyage from Hamburg to New York, when this family had been even quieter than it usually was. “We spent most of our time on deck. We stood by the rail, looked at the sea, and imagined a new beginning. My father dreamed, I think, of a flourishing business that would make us forget about the debts and the bankruptcy in Germany that had forced us to move. My mother must have dreamed of a marriage without fighting, and I dreamed of a school I could go to without the pit of my stomach aching with dread, and of having a friend.”

  He stopped talking and waited to see if she would say something, but she was wise enough to stay silent.

  “After a week,” he continued, “I knew that I would remain a stranger in this new world. The place I came from was not just Munich, it was also, in the New York of the 1960s, a black mark that I would never be free of, no matter how I tried. Here, I was the German, the Nazi, the little Hitler, and hardly any of the boys on the street or in the school playground cared that my surname was Leibovitz, that my father was a Jew and had fought against the evil Germans. My accent gave me away as soon as I opened my mouth. That’s why I only ever spoke after being asked to do so several times, and even then only very reluctantly and hesitantly.”

  He looked at Christine as if to make sure that she wasn’t laughing at him, to make sure that she understood what he was saying. She nodded, but instead of continuing, Paul stood up and began walking up and down the terrace, saying nothing.

  No, she had not done anything wrong. No, it was not that she should have interrupted him or said anything, expressed her understanding or sympathy in some way. Why had he suddenly fallen silent, then? He himself did not know.

  At the ferry, when they said good-bye, she asked him for his telephone number, but he ignored her request. When she came to the house again the following weekend, he lay on his futon and did not move.

  He knew that he was hurting her, but he did not have the strength for explanations. He had burned himself out the previous Sunday, and had suffered from it the whole week. She called his name a few more times, knocked on the door, and waited a few minutes, which seemed endless, until she finally went. The next morning, he found her business card, which she had posted through the slot in the door. He rang her ten days later.

  And so the last six months had passed. Pleasurable Sundays, filled with harmony, were followed by days of silence, difficult weeks in which he could only bear to hear her voice on the telephone, in which he asked her on Saturdays not to come but spent Sundays walking up and down on the pier impatiently, full of longing, full of trepidation that she might have come against his wishes. He could only talk to her about Justin in the sketchiest way, and he could hardly bear any physical contact. Their only attempt to sleep with each other had ended after a few minutes. No part of him had moved; he had lain next to her rigidly like a plank of wood. Over and over again, he told himself that he had to end this relationship; the reason he did not do so was Christine’s patience with his moods, the considerateness with which she reacted. She did not accuse him of anything. She did not ask him for anything. Why not?

  “Because I can feel that you’re giving me what you can right now,” she had replied.

  “And that’s enough for you?”

  “I think time is on my side,” she had said, with a shy smile.

  VI

  Paul was still sitting on the harbor promenade more than an hour after his meeting with the Owens.

  He pulled his cell phone out. Zhang’s number was saved somewhere in the phone; all he had to do was find it among all the extras, programs, services, profiles, and functions. He pressed the wrong button a few times until he finally got the ring tone.

  “Hello?”

  It was always good to hear Zhang’s deep, familiar smoker’s voice.

  “It’s me. Am I disturbing you?”

  “You? Never. You know that.”

  “Where are you?” asked Paul. “Do you have a minute?”

  “I’m sitting on the other side of the street from the police station, eating a bad noodle soup. Awful.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “What a question. Have you ever seen a Chinese person eating alone? I’m surrounded by . . .”

  “I mean, do you have other officers with you?”

  “No.”

  Paul told him about his meeting with the Owens in a few sentences. When he had finished, he waited for a reaction from Zhang, but in vain. He heard the sound of traffic and a couple of men’s voices in the background, but not his friend’s. He heard the scrape of chairs and tables and someone swearing. “Zhang? Are you still there?”

  “Of course. I was just paying and looking for a quieter spot to talk in. Paul, what do you think about coming to visit me again?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “Uh, yes, of course, I’d love to, sometime,” Paul replied, confused and unsure about whether his friend had heard what he had said.

  “You haven’t been for a long time. A lot has
changed.”

  “Yes, but you know how I hate leaving Lamma.”

  “What about this evening?”

  At first, Paul thought he had misheard him. This evening? What on earth was Zhang thinking?

  “Are you crazy? Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

  “I’m not asking anything. I’m simply asking my dear friend to dinner.”

  “Zhang, that’s very kind of you, but Hong Kong is already too much for me. How am I supposed to make it over to you in Shenzhen?”

  “Listen, we’ll meet at the station, buy some groceries together, go to my house, and I’ll cook for you. After that I’ll take you back to the border and put you on a train.”

  It sounded as if he was inviting his doddery old father, who suffered from dementia, over on a visit. Paul paused to think, and Zhang pounced on the hesitation.

  “You can do it,” he said immediately. “Just for a couple of hours. You climbed the Peak yesterday, right?”

  “Hmm.” Zhang would not leave him in peace.

  “When was the last time you saw Mei? She’ll be so pleased to see you.”

  Paul liked Zhang’s wife very much and, apart from at Justin’s funeral, it really was years since he had seen her. It was quiet now in the background. Zhang had clearly found himself a spot where no one could hear him.

  “Apart from that, there are a few things that I’m not too keen to discuss on the phone.”

  “Has something happened?” Paul asked, startled.

  “There’s quite an uproar at the station. I heard something about it in the corridor just now.”

  “About Michael Owen?”

  “I don’t know. They found a body in Datouling Forest Park this morning. I think it’s a foreigner.”

  ———

  Hung Hom. Tai Wai. Sha Tin. The Kowloon-Canton Railway train sped from station to station. Paul was still not sure if he had taken far too much upon himself. But his friend had sounded quite definite and convincing; in the end, Paul had placed more trust in Zhang’s encouraging voice than in his own feelings of weakness. He also felt a strange sense of duty toward Mrs. Owen, a mother who was worrying about her son. If he could be helpful to her, he would try it for one afternoon.