Whispering Shadows

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  No, she heard herself say. No, you won’t. You were small and defenseless once, but this is today. You are a grown woman, over forty years old. You are not a victim, you are strong. Strong. Strong. You have the power of self-determination.

  No one was forcing her to be with Paul. She could break up with him. She could meet him at the ferry now and tell him that he was hurting her and abusing her trust in him and that she never wanted to see him again. For a split second she felt a strange relief at this thought. Like a person who had been expecting bad news for some time and found it liberating when it arrived. But did she really want to be without Paul? She loved him, believed they belonged together . . . Only children believed that the moon did not have one side turned away from the earth.

  She did have a right to be furious with Paul. Love allowed that. He had said something about an innocent man and an alibi, but she was completely uninterested in that. Could she expect him to have more understanding for her fear of the Chinese in the People’s Republic? What was a suitable time period within which to stop being frightened? Five years? Ten? Twenty? How long, she asked herself, was fear a natural defense mechanism? The thought of the uniformed men who had pushed her father from the window still having power over her life today was the most awful of all.

  Christine looked at the clock. In less than fifteen minutes Paul would arrive at Central. She had to hurry. She grabbed her bag, said that she didn’t know when she would be back, and left the office quickly.

  It was almost impossible to get a taxi in Johnson Road at this time of day. In her high-heeled shoes, she walked swiftly through the market in Tai Yuen Street. She knocked over a box of children’s clothing on the way and heard the stall keeper cursing behind her. She brushed past several passersby who swore at her, then snatched a taxi away from a woman with two children on Queens Road East. She was not especially superstitious, but she began to fear that she would have to pay for all her rudeness. The punishment followed in the form of a traffic jam because of an accident on Man Yiu Street, less than three hundred meters away from the ferry terminal. She was already more than five minutes late. She paid her fare, got out of the cab, took off her shoes, held them in her hand, and ran barefoot on the road between the stationary cars toward the pier.

  Paul saw her from a distance and walked toward her. Instead of saying anything, they embraced. She felt how he was holding his breath, his body stiffening slightly, as though he was expecting an attack, verbal at least, at the next breath. But she said nothing and did not let him go, held him tight until he gradually relaxed and started breathing evenly again, and his muscles were less taut.

  “Do you have time to take the Star Ferry?” she asked.

  “The Star Ferry?” He looked at her in total astonishment.

  “Yes, why not?”

  He nodded, and they walked past the piers which the boats to Cheung Chau and Peng Chau stopped at, past the taxi stand and the bus station, turned left behind the General Post Office into Connaught Place and, in a few minutes, reached the old white and green terminal from which the boats to Tsim Sha Tsui departed. She had taken this ferry very often before. Even after the opening of the much faster metro, which traveled beneath the harbor and took less than five minutes for the journey from Central, she had initially preferred taking the ferry, which was much slower. As time passed, she had taken the ferry less and less, and more out of nostalgia, and she had not been on it at all for years now. The ferry was a relic of another world, Christine thought, as the boat made its sedate approach to the quay. Even embarking and disembarking took more time than the entire journey with the MTR. The boat was so slow, so inefficient and uncomfortable, that taking it was an act of defiance against the laws and the logic that defined this city. Why did she want to take the Star Ferry now, of all times?

  They sat on the lower deck, which had no protection from the wind, and stank of diesel and oil. All through their bodies, they felt the vibration of the engine, which was chugging so slowly that they felt as if they could count every single stroke of the pistons.

  After a deckhand had cast off, she asked Paul, “You once asked me about my dreams. Do you remember what I said in reply?”

  “Yes. You said that you were from Hong Kong and that you didn’t have any dreams. Plans, yes, but no dreams.”

  “That’s right. And what did you say to that then?”

  “I was surprised, and I felt a little sorry for you,” Paul replied. “I said to you that dreams could be beautiful, and you laughed and shook your head as if you did not know what I was talking about.”

  “That’s right. For the last few hours I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to have a dream. It’s different from actually having a dream, but it’s still a start, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Paul looked at her waiting for a further explanation or an accusation. That he was destroying this tentative beginning, that she had been right not to dream, that now she saw how quickly a dream could be destroyed. But she did not say anything.

  “And?”

  “And nothing.”

  He looked at the dark, almost black, water.

  After a while he said, “I still owe you an explanation.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I’m very sorry about tonight, and that I couldn’t keep my—”

  Christine put her hand on his mouth and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I can . . .”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want any explanations. I love you. That’s enough.”

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

  XIX

  Zhang heard Paul putting on his shoes, opening the door and closing it gently behind him, walking over the terrace, down the steps to the path toward the ferry station, opening the squeaky garden gate and closing it again, standing still for a moment, and then hurrying away.

  After that there was silence. Zhang heard nothing at all for several seconds, apart from a barely audible hissing in his ears; only then did he become aware of the birdsong and the rasping and scratching of the bamboo plants in the garden. It was a silence that he no longer knew in Shenzhen. There, human or machine noises were ever present. Even at night, when he lay awake next to the sleeping Mei, the noise of construction or from traffic, the humming of air conditioners, or the voices of the brothel visitors floated up to intrude on him. In contrast, he noticed, the stillness that reigned in this house did him no good. It spread through him and pushed all thoughts of the case of Michael Owen, of Mei or Paul, to one side, and made space for memories that he did not want to engage with. Stillness, thought Zhang, is not good for people who want to forget.

  He got up from the couch and looked around the living room, trying to find something to distract him. He noticed the fresh flowers on the table and the candles everywhere. Both were extremely unusual for his friend. Had Christine planned to visit him this evening? If Paul had gone to so much trouble, that was a good sign. It meant he was venturing out of the world he had withdrawn to with his memories of Justin. But why had he not said anything about it? Maybe it was better that he hadn’t? If Zhang had known about the plans with Christine it would have been even more difficult for him to ask Paul to do him a favor. He was thankful that Paul had spared him this embarrassment.

  Zhang went to the table and looked at the furniture in the living room. He was struck anew by the beautiful Chinese antiques his friend owned. The long, chestnut-colored elm-wood dining table with its eight chairs was from the Qing Dynasty, as was the deep-red, carefully polished wedding chest with the round brass clasp in the middle. Both were over a hundred years old and in very good condition. Their simple classic shapes radiated a calm that had impressed him at first sight. On the shelves were several blue and white porcelain bowls and plates. Paul had once told him how old they were and which province they came from, but Zhang had forgotten
the details; he saw only the delicately traced patterns and the fine glazing, which had been applied with great care. There were two paper scrolls on the wall with popular motifs from traditional Chinese paintings: a bamboo grove and a scene of a temple in the mountains, done by an eighteenth-century master that Zhang had already admired many times.

  Did a person have to be from the West to have such an impartial appreciation of such specimens of Chinese art? He had never seen any antiques in a Chinese person’s flat, neither in his friends’ houses nor when he visited homes in the course of his investigations. Old cupboards and tables, beds and benches, yes, but they were not in good condition; they were not appreciated for their age or their quality; their owners only still had them because they could not afford anything else.

  Zhang wondered whether he would have one of Paul’s pieces of furniture or art in his apartment if he could afford it. He doubted it. He did not see in them the old China, whose art and culture his friend admired so much; to him, they signified something quite different. He did not see the skilled artisanal craftsmanship, the classical forms, or the traditions and experience of hundreds of years that lay behind them. He saw their destruction. He saw them lying in broken pieces on the street, how they had been smashed and set on fire, how he and his schoolmates had thrown them out of the windows and stamped around on them in the name of the Revolution. It was not possible for him to separate these memories, even if he wanted to.

  High up on the shelves was the sculpture of a Buddha. Zhang knew it well. He had tried to ignore it for a long time; for years, he had crept around it like a frightened child in front of a nasty uncle. It was a present from a Chinese person from Nanjing who had rescued it from the ruins of a temple and asked Paul to smuggle it out of the country in order to bring it into safety. You never knew how things would go in China.

  Zhang stood on a chair and took the figure down. It was made of wood, and the workmanship was not of particular artistic value. The facial features of the enlightened one were far from delicate, and his body, the crossed legs and the raised right hand, were very crudely carved. Despite this, Zhang thought the sculpture had an extraordinary aura. Its creator had not been a gifted artist but he had given it something that moved Zhang. It was familiar to him; it was, now that he was touching it, stroking the porous wood with his fingers, alive in a shocking way. He had tried for so long to forget, but there was no denying it. He saw himself standing at the edge of the village to which he and the other school pupils and university students from Chengdu had been sent. Little Zhang, a sixteen-year-old boy full of fear and questions, who had no one with whom he could share his feelings. He was small, much too small for his age; the faded blue Mao suit was two sizes too big and hung from his puny frame like a cut-out sack that someone had pulled over his head. He was so shy that he only ever spoke in the group when he was asked a question, and then not more than a few words.

  He smelled the warm, humid mountain air, he felt it on his skin, he felt the wind blowing over the mountains, bringing damp cold in the winter and lung infections that they could not fight off. No one was supposed to acknowledge it, but everyone knew a quarter of the kids never recovered, were left for dead. He heard the voices of the others, their singing, their screaming, their rejoicing. It was all suddenly so clear to him again, as though forty years were nothing more than the blink of an eye, as though there was no difference between yesterday and tomorrow. As though a lifetime was not enough to forget in.

  To distract himself he went over to the stereo system, switched it on, and pushed a random CD in. Piano music came out of the speakers, the quiet, enchantingly beautiful music of a Western composer. Zhang thought it was Chopin; he and Paul had listened to this album often while they played chess. It made him feel calm and strong then, but now it did not help. The beauty of the music made everything worse. Despite his efforts, the film in his head played on.

  A misty autumn day in the mountains of Sichuan: the clouds lie low in the valleys and swallow up the paddy fields in the distance, as though heaven and earth could be one. A troop of Red Guards marches on a muddy dam straight through the field, the leader of the brigade in front as always. Some of them hold red flags and wave them in the air vigorously, singing songs of the Revolution; their clear, loud singing echoes through the valley. They are young voices, full of faith; they do not yet have a trace of doubt. Zhang is walking barefoot; mud swells between his toes with every step. He has no idea where the path is leading. Some say they are walking to a show trial against the “bourgeois elements” and “counterrevolutionaries” in the next village, others say they are heading for the old temple farther up the valley. He doesn’t care where they are going; he just wants to go with them.

  After a long march—he doesn’t know any longer how far they walked—they finally reach their destination. The temple is hidden by a bamboo grove; it is not big, twenty meters square maybe, and surrounded by a wall with a mighty wooden gate. The gate is barred, and the young men and women are outraged. Who dares to bar entry to them, the avant-garde who are spearheading the great proletarian Cultural Revolution? They call, they shout, they demand entry, and with every minute that entry is denied to them, they grow more enraged. They rattle the wooden gate. They try to climb the wall, in vain. They throw stones at the green, glazed tiles of the temple roof and cheer loudly whenever a stone breaks a tile. Suddenly the heavy wooden bolt is drawn back from within. Out of the gate steps a monk, the sole remaining inhabitant of the temple. He is an old man, wrapped in a dirty gray cloth, emaciated, his head shorn bald, with legs like sticks. His cheeks are sunken and his eyes deep in their sockets; a long, thin beard straggles from his chin. The young people are shocked at the sight of him. They shrink back and fall silent, unsettled, undecided about whether this old man really is the decadent bourgeois element, the counterrevolutionary, the revisionist, who they have heard is hiding here.

  The leader of the group punches a fist in the air and calls out, “Long live the great Chairman Mao!” He sees the doubt in the faces of the others; he can feel that, right now, they need someone to tell them what to do, that they need to be led. He pushes the monk aside and orders them to storm the temple. All of them throng inside, pushing impatiently to get through the door as if there were not enough space for everyone. Zhang is among them. He is fired up; he senses that something exciting is about to happen, and he is happy he is allowed to be there.

  The first few Red Guards press into the meditation hall; they carry books, manuscripts, wall tablets, and Buddha statues into the courtyard and dump them in a pile. Others have discovered the corner of the temple where the monk sleeps; they defecate on his quarters, throw his notebooks on the pile in the courtyard, and set it alight. The flames shoot up high.

  The old man stands to one side, not moving, not saying a word. In his eyes is not even a flicker of fear. His silence only makes the pack more furious. They destroy the meditation hall, they tear the carvings from the walls, they burn every Buddha, every sculpture that they can get their hands on, and what they can’t burn, they smear with excrement. Only the monk himself remains untouched. His stillness, his pronounced serenity, unsettles them.

  At some point they begin to flag; a few of them squat on the ground amid the rubble, worn out. The fighters of the Cultural Revolution are tired from the battle against the “old thinking” that lived in this temple. Finally, they make their way back to the village. Only their leader stays, and with him, Zhang.

  The two of them stay in the courtyard and have a look around. The eighteen-year-old Tang Mingqing is tall, towering over Zhang by more than a head. His features are striking and he looks so handsome and strong and confident that he could have stepped straight out of a Communist Party propaganda poster. Zhang feels uncertain; he does not know what Tang plans to do, and if he wants him to be there. Why does he not follow the others? Is he staying out of curiosity? Or does he want to help Tang, do him a service, whatever he plan
s to do? He has known him for years, after all; they grew up on the same street in Chengdu and went to the same school before the Cultural Revolution. When Zhang and his group were sent to the village six months ago, Tang was there too and was the only person he knew. But that had not been enough for them to become friends and it would never be enough, for Zhang was too quiet and Tang was too loud, and the older boy had absolutely no respect for the puny kid from his neighborhood.

  The monk withdraws to the interior of the temple. He is sitting in the midst of the chaos in the meditation hall, his legs folded over each other in the lotus position, his thin hands lying on his bent knees. He looks at Tang and Zhang as if he knows exactly what is coming next.

  Tang strides toward the old monk, stops next to him, glances down at the man, looks around the room, points at a wooden beam in the corner, and asks Zhang to bring it to him.

  Zhang obeys.

  Tang steps behind the old man and looks over to Zhang once more. He looks focused and very calm at the same time, as if he were about to pass a probation period, to fulfill a duty entrusted to him, one that a prospective member of the Communist Party of China could not shirk. In the name of the Revolution. In the name of a new China. In the name of the Great Chairman.

  Tang strikes.

  Zhang looks on.

  ———

  They do not exchange a word on the way back to the village.

  Zhang says nothing and he does not want an answer, although the question—why did the monk have to die?—had shot through his mind once. A terrible question that he was immediately ashamed of; it showed him how weak his foundation was and how much work he still had to do on himself to overcome his decadent thinking and become a good revolutionary like Tang.