Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  “Did he starve to death?”

  “We don’t know. We fled to Hong Kong one year after that, and never heard from him again.”

  “Then he’s probably still alive.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Have you not tried to find him since China opened up?”

  “How? My uncles and aunts all escaped to Hong Kong and Sydney. No one lives in Guangdong any longer.”

  “You can go to your village and look for him. Maybe he went back there, and if not, perhaps someone would know something about . . .”

  “Paul,” she interrupted him curtly. “You don’t get it. I’m never going to China. Never. We were counterrevolutionaries.”

  “Forty years ago!” He regretted his words almost as soon as he spoke them.

  X

  Zhang stood at the Lo Wu border, a few meters behind the counter for diplomats and VIPs, waiting for the Owens. It was hot and sticky in the hall; the air-conditioning was either not working at all or only very slightly. Zhang wiped the sweat off his brow with a tissue. He was so nervous that the bunch of keys he was fingering agitatedly slipped out of his hands twice. The identification of a dead body by a family member, a task disliked by almost all his coworkers, was for him one of the most unpleasant responsibilities of the homicide division, and the worst scenario was when parents saw the corpses of their children. In moments like that, Zhang felt, the heart of the world stopped, and nothing, absolutely nothing, could make it start beating again. The expressions of pain that death carved on the faces of the living often haunted him through the nights. Even after twenty years, he did not know how he ought to behave in such situations. Look away? Offer help? Cover up his own speechlessness with a torrent of words? In these situations, his coworkers always spoke of punishment, of revenge or justice, and gave assurances, over and over again, that the person who had done this would be hunted down and that they would not give up until that person, and anyone else involved, was caught. As much as Zhang meant whatever he said, he could never shake off the feeling that he was lying. So he preferred to say nothing, which meant that there was often an oppressive silence.

  How would the Owens react? Would grief or rage dominate? Would they ask questions, ones that he had no answers to?

  He was tired and worn out and longed to be with Mei. She would be able to calm him down with a few sentences now. Or he would lay his head down on her soft, warm breast, and very soon his thoughts would stop racing around dead people, murderers, and their motives.

  Zhang closed his eyes and focused on his breath, trying not to think about anything. He imagined a sunrise in the mountains of Sichuan. He saw a luminous green paddy field, flooded with water, and the yellow-white orb rising behind it, gradually spreading its light over everything. He took a deep breath in and counted to eight, breathed out and counted to ten. After four or five breaths he slowly felt stillness returning to him and he felt his face relaxing, as if he could, for a few seconds, step out of the role of the restless, anxious police detective.

  He had started meditating a few years ago. When he began, he had thought that external quiet was needed to meditate, but he had learned that stillness was already within him, and that meditation was merely the path to it. So wherever he was—in the office, buying groceries or at the Lo Wu border crossing—did not matter one bit. He had found it tremendously liberating to be able to soothe himself and not to be helpless in the face of his fears and his inner demons. Since then, he had practiced meditation several times every day, often only for a few minutes. It almost always helped.

  Zhang looked around the hall and immediately saw the Owens among the Western business travelers arriving. Paul had described the couple well. She was wearing a dark-blue trouser suit and he was in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt. Both of them were hiding their eyes behind sunglasses. Hers were so big that they covered half her face. They were accompanied by a young American man from the consulate who spoke incredibly good Mandarin but still stammered slightly at the beginning of every sentence. He was trying to hide his nervousness, which made it even worse. Two dark sweat patches were showing around his underarms, and he clutched a brown briefcase to his chest with both hands, like a swimmer clinging to a plank of wood in the water. The two men towered over Zhang by much more than a head, giving him the impression even when they were speaking to him that they were looking past him or away from him. Was that what made him feel uncomfortable from the very beginning? Was it the dark glasses that they did not remove, making it impossible for him to see their eyes and giving him the feeling that he was looking at a wall? Or was it the foreign language? His attempts to say a few sentences in English as a gesture of courtesy and respect were met with not a single response or reaction.

  Zhang hurriedly switched to Mandarin, introduced himself, and thanked them for coming. The consulate official translated what he said, but the Owens did not even nod in acknowledgment. They walked through the station out onto the plaza, where a black Audi limousine was waiting for them. Elizabeth Owen’s movements were sluggish; she had probably taken strong medication for her nerves. Her husband came to a sudden standstill and stretched a hand out as if he was looking for a wall or a tree to hold onto. He swayed slightly and seemed about to fall. Elizabeth did not notice or did not want to notice and walked slowly past him. After a couple of seconds, he gathered himself and followed.

  On the way to the police headquarters they were stuck in a traffic jam twice; with every minute that passed in the stationary car, Zhang felt the inside of the vehicle shrink, until he could barely tolerate its confines. In the rearview mirror, he saw Richard Owen reach for his wife’s hand several times, but she flinched away every time.

  At headquarters, the scene at the train station repeated itself. Luo, the head of the homicide division, and Ye, the powerful party secretary, were standing in front of the side entrance, surrounded by their assistants. They greeted the Owens with a few fragments of English; the Owens said nothing in response. It took the elevator only a few seconds to travel from the ground floor to the basement, but they seemed like an eternity to Zhang. Elizabeth Owen was trembling all over and the two men were silent, both looking away as if they had nothing to do with each other. In the basement, Luo led them down a long corridor into the small, badly lit morgue. Elizabeth stood still at the doorway. As if she could not take one more step toward the corpse which was laid out and covered with a gray blanket. The consulate official hesitated briefly, wondering whether to stay with her, before he followed her husband into the middle of the room.

  Wu, the old pathologist, waited for them in silence. They were standing in a semicircle in front of the body, in almost unbearable silence. Even Wu, who had carried out so many autopsies, seemed to be nervous. He fussed around the blanket before he finally raised it slowly. Zhang did not look. He stood next to Richard Owen and observed the two American men. The blood drained out of the consulate official’s face; he turned chalk white and started retching. Richard Owen did not hear him; he looked down at his son’s face without any reaction. He nodded and murmured a few words that made Zhang start, but whose meaning he was not sure he had understood correctly. He wanted to ring Paul as soon as the Owens had left and ask him what Richard Owen could have meant.

  In the first few years of his job, Zhang had tried to interpret the reactions of family members in such moments; he had thought they would tell him something about their relationship to the dead person, about their pain, about the meaning of loss. This Zhang of years past would have been disconcerted now; he would have started to harbor suspicious thoughts. He would have equated a lack of reaction with indifference. He would have registered every movement, every flicker of the eyelids, every twitch of the mouth exactly and judged it; he would have asked himself why this man did not burst into tears, why he did not want to touch his son, why he did not close his eyes or start trembling.

  Zhang had stopped asking himself ques
tions like this at some point. When parents, siblings, or friends were told of a death or when they identified the body, whether they wept, cried out with grief, broke down, or stayed as calm as if they had barely known the person said nothing, or only very little, about what was really going on inside them or how deeply affected they were by the death.

  Grief has as many faces as there are people, Zhang thought. It had that in common with love.

  So he felt all the more annoyed with the thoughts that were now whizzing through his mind. There was something not quite right here. He found the Owens increasingly odd. Why was Richard Owen not hurrying back to his wife’s side? Why was he not saying anything else? Zhang thought he would see more than pain and despair in his face. As a detective, he had learned to trust in his intuition and his instincts, but he was uncertain in this case. He was dealing with an American, whose culture he did now know.

  And something else confused Zhang. Why had Party Secretary Ye come with them to the basement? It had been a matter of protocol for him to greet them at the entrance, but Zhang had never seen him down here all these years. He was a political chief detective superintendent, leader of all the party members at the police headquarters; he organized their meetings, during which they studied the resolutions of the party conferences, the teachings of Deng Xiaoping and of Hu Jintao, the president of the People’s Republic of China and the party chairman, and practiced self-criticism and praising improvements. He had nothing to do with police investigative work and therefore had no place down here. What did his presence mean?

  The voice of his superior interrupted his thoughts. Zhang heard him say something about a head injury and that they still had no definite answers as to whether it was the result of a fall or an act of violence, but they hoped to have some certainty in the next few hours. They would not bother the family with questions for too long.

  So they had not decided yet whether to try to hush up the murder. Most of his fellow policemen secretly hoped they would; Zhang understood that very clearly from their comments. It would save them a lot of work. But Zhang feared such a solution. Every time external influence was exercised on an investigation, whether for political reasons or because someone had pulled strings, and suspects were released, interrogations were suspended, or innocent people had to be arrested, he reacted with physical symptoms, mostly nausea and vomiting. For a time, he had been called the “retching policeman” by the people at headquarters.

  They did not say a word on the way back to the train station. The Owens looked left and right out of the car windows in silence, without seeking support or comfort from each other. The unhappy consulate official sat between them, stiff and unmoving like a mannequin, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him.

  Zhang took them to the border. The lines of people in front of the counters snaked through the entire hall and only shortened in length very slowly, for the young border officials took their duties very seriously and performed them with great care. He took the passports from the three Americans and obtained exit stamps for them from the station manager. The consulate official was about to thank him, but the Owens turned away without a word and made their way to the train.

  When he was out of the station, he tried to call Paul, but there was no reply.

  Oh my God, Michael. I am sorry. I am so sorry. Zhang was almost positive that he had heard these words. What did Richard Owen mean by them? What was he apologizing for?

  It was not a good sign.

  XI

  As they waited for the train to take them back to Hong Kong, Richard Owen’s thoughts turned to his father, Richard Owen II. He saw him playing with Michael in the garden of his house in Wisconsin a year before he died. It had been an oppressively hot summer day; Richard remembered it quite clearly. The old man had been wearing shorts, which showed his pale, thin legs. That had been unusual. He had been throwing footballs to his grandson, coughing and gasping for breath after every toss. His cancer-ridden lungs had made him short of breath, but they had not known this yet on that day. Michael had been unstoppable. Just five minutes more, he begged every time his grandfather tried to end the game. He dived and lunged across the lawn, sprinting tirelessly for the farthest passes, snatching even the most difficult balls from the air, constantly fired up by the rasping, effortful words of encouragement from his grandfather. Good boy. Great catch. Great catch. The weak voice could no longer be heard from the house at the other end of the large garden.

  Richard Owen had sat on the terrace watching his father and his son, wondering if he should go over to them. He had dismissed the thought immediately. He would not be welcome. He was not even sure if they would let him join in. The day before, his father had only had strength enough for a few tosses, but when Richard had offered to replace him, his son had claimed that he was tired and gone up to his room.

  Michael was very close to his granddad. The two of them got along in a way that Richard did not understand, in a way that was alien to him and that he secretly envied. His father had never played ball with him before. He had not even found the time to attend the high school games in which his son had always been the quarterback and undisputed star. Where had the interest and the relaxed manner come from that enabled him to play with his grandson now, and since the boy had been able to walk, even? When he, Richard, played with Michael, they always started fighting within minutes. The boy was so sensitive. Awful. He reacted to every one of his father’s comments with an objection and he took every piece of advice as a criticism. He was only trying to give him a few tips to help him to improve his game. But Michael refused to profit from his father’s experience. At some point they had stopped playing football together. Now as he observed his son play with his own father, Richard didn’t know if there was a greater distance between him and his father or him and his son.

  Why were images from that afternoon over twenty years ago coming to him now, of all times? An afternoon that, as far as Richard could remember, had nothing remarkable about it. Why could he not remember a happier time with Michael? One of their fishing trips, on which they had not argued? Their trip to the Indy 500? He knew that they had had these experiences together, but with the best will in the world, he could not recall any details about them. He hated how unpredictable his memory was. He had nothing more important to think about or to remember right now. He was on his way to identify a dead body and he had no doubt that it was his son who lay in the morgue, regardless of any straw of hope Elizabeth still wanted to cling to.

  The train to Hong Kong was so full that the young man from the consulate had to stand. Richard sat between his wife and an old Chinese woman who stank of garlic and who nodded off repeatedly. Her head had already landed on his shoulder twice, and only a determined shake had woken her again. He would have preferred to go by car, which the consulate official had offered them, but Elizabeth had insisted on the train, probably because Michael had always taken the train.

  They had barely exchanged a meaningful word in the last few hours. Every time he started saying something, she turned away. When he tried to take her in his arms her whole body stiffened. As if it were all his fault. As if he had irresponsibly sent the boy off on some adventure against his will. They had been fighting over that for two days. It was quite the opposite, he reminded his wife over and over again, failing to convince her. If the goddamn family had only listened to him, their son would still be alive.

  As the third co-owner and former sole managing director of Aurora Metal, he had refused to invest in China for a long time. How could Elizabeth have forgotten all the discussions between father and son, the arguments that had resounded through the house, often ending in shouting and slammed doors? And when Elizabeth had gotten involved, Michael’s faction had seized the opportunity. He, Richard, had made his position clear to her more than once: The American and the Canadian markets were enough for him; they had already provided a good living for two generations before theirs, so why should they chan
ge anything? They had provided General Motors and Ford with reliable supplies of specially manufactured screws and motor parts for close to half a century. He had known the buyers at the firms for many years; he was friends with some of them; they had never complained about the quality or the price. Why should he start manufacturing the parts on the other side of the world all of a sudden? China was a place for General Electric, for McDonald’s, Boeing, or Philip Morris, the global players, not for Aurora Metal.

  Who were they, after all? A medium-size firm, a family business that was managed by a third-generation Owen, that never wanted its shares to be publicly traded on the stock exchange, that was proud of still manufacturing in the same small town, yes, practically on the same piece of land on which his grandfather, Richard Owen I, had founded the company in February 1910. They had grown with the automobile industry, quite organically, without acquisitions or takeovers. The two-man business had grown into a respected firm with nearly nine hundred employees: the biggest local employer, sponsor of the college basketball team and a high school football team, and generous donor to the community hospital, where two operating theaters were named after them. Of course there had been a few lean years—the oil crisis in the 1970s, the subsequent recession under the ineffective Democrat Jimmy Carter—but for the most part it was about cyclical upturns and downturns, which the company had handled well. In the summer of 1995 they had inaugurated their new factory: bigger than a football field, filled with the latest machinery, the best American equipment. Faster. Cleaner. Safer. More efficient. They had spent a hundred million dollars on it, convinced that they were prepared for the future.

  Less than two years later a young buyer from General Motors came to Richard Owen’s office for the first time. He was barely older than his son, fresh from college, his head full of figures but with no idea how things actually worked. One of those types that universities seemed to spit out from a conveyor belt. He refused an invitation to lunch. He did not smoke, and instead of coffee he drank one Diet Coke after another while negotiating prices. Telling him, Richard Owen, something about the pressure on costs and shorter supply deadlines, about further rationalization in manufacturing and a competitor from Pusan, whose quality was not far off theirs. Pusan? Richard Owen asked, not sure if he had heard right. Pusan, South Korea, that smart-ass had replied in an intolerably arrogant tone of voice. As though people in Wisconsin had to know every crappy backwater in Korea. Richard Owen had come close to throwing him out.