Whispering Shadows (4 page)

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.

Tai Po Market. Tai Wo. To Paul, the station names sounded like a distant echo from another life. He had often made this journey before, not just to see Zhang in Shenzhen but also on weekends, to escape the hemmed-in feeling and frenzy of Hong Kong and its bustling, noisy heartbeat. He had sought refuge here with Wendy Li, back when he thought their love had a chance. For two years, they had traveled to the New Territories nearly every time they had a day off; they had gone hiking and camping, made love in the night on the warm sand of the Sai Kung beach, and, in the candlelight, dreamed of having children together. They had seen each other for the last time in Sai Kung. She had told him that she loved him, and how grateful she was to him, because no one else in the world could make her laugh the way he did. Three days later, she had married the man that her family had chosen for her, a man whose existence Paul had not known anything of. How long ago was that now? What had happened to the Paul who had been so good at making women laugh? Who had liked to present a woman with a picnic on the beach by candlelight or spoil her with breakfast in bed? Who had been able to love so passionately? When had he ceased to exist?
After Wendy got married? During his marriage to Meredith? After Justin's death? “That must have happened in another life,” he used to say so often. How many lives did a person have? Two? Three? Or just one, after all?

The train slowed down and before long, in the blink of an eye, paddy fields gave way to barbed wire fences, roads, cars, concrete walls, and buildings that towered in the sky. Skyscrapers clustered together like trees in a thick forest. The train stopped with a jerk and people jostled to get out in a frenzy, as if not everyone was allowed to get off, as if whoever did not manage to get off the car in a few seconds would be forced to make the journey back immediately.

Paul followed the crowds up the stairs as they pushed and shoved him through various dimly lit corridors to the automated immigration control. He slid his Hong Kong identity card into the machine and, seconds later, passed through the turnstile. He walked through the arrival hall out onto the station concourse and rang Zhang.

“Are you there already?” he asked, amazed. “I still have work to do in the office. Do you want to wait or shall we meet at four in Starbucks? It's around the corner from our apartment. Then we can go get the groceries and I'll cook. Okay?”

“Okay. Where's the Starbucks?”

“In CITIC City Plaza. That's the big new shopping mall.”

“Is it far from the station?”

“No, not at all. Take the new metro line 1 to Ke Xue Guan Station. Exit D there is the south side of Shennan Zhong Road. Walk up the road to the shopping mall. On the right is Seibu, the Japanese department store, and on the left is the Chillout Lounge. You'll see Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and . . .”

“Zhang, you've got to be kidding me.”

“What do you mean?”

“A chill-out lounge?”

“You haven't been here for a long time.”

“Not for years.”

Zhang sighed. “Would you prefer to wait at the station for me,
then?”

Paul thought for a moment. “That would probably be better, yes.”

“Then wait for me in the station concourse. I'll be there in ­forty-five minutes.”

———

Paul sat down on a bench and thought about the first time he had crossed this border. It must have been in the summer of 1980, shortly after Deng Xiaoping had declared this insignificant backwater a special economic zone. Back then he had had to cross the Lo Wu Bridge on foot and rent a bicycle at the station. There were no taxis, not even a bus service then. He had cycled through the puddle-strewn streets made muddy by the monsoon rains, past pig farms and basic single-story buildings. Shenzhen had been nothing more than a small town where people made a living from fishing or cultivating rice. The passersby had worn blue or green Mao suits, he remembered quite clearly, and their looks of surprise, often fear, had followed him wherever he went. Whenever he had stopped, a crowd had gathered around him and he had been marveled over and stared at, touched and patted. Two children had pulled at the black hairs growing on his forearms. He had encountered searching looks and sometimes confused expressions; none of them had let him out of their sight for a second. When he had used a public toilet, the curious people had trailed him to the door and waited outside to see what would happen. In the toilet hut, several Chinese people had been squatting over holes in the ground with their trousers down. Paul remembered well their loud cries of horror when they saw the foreigner come in. Two of the men had almost fallen into the drop latrines in shock. The commotion acted like a marching order for the curious onlookers. They flooded in through the small doorway, and in an instant, Paul was surrounded by dozens of people in a space that stank of piss and shit. At first they still stood at arm's length, but the more people crowded in, the smaller the distance between him and them. Soon they were standing so close to him
that he could feel their breath on his skin. He tried smiling at them but there was no response. They whispered and murmured among themselves. At the time, Paul's Cantonese was not good enough to understand everything they said, but he made out the words “foreign devil,” “spy,” and “class enemy.” He would never forget how the looks of amazement and curiosity gradually faded from their faces, to be replaced by a look of brooding distrust. He tried to make his way to the exit, but the men standing in front of him were crammed too close together. Even if they had wanted to make room for him, they could not have done so. He was pouring with sweat. He wanted to get out, just to get out there. Suddenly he heard a deep voice calling loudly, which made the crowd fall silent. A policeman was standing in the doorway. He looked around the room and, after he had spotted Paul, he barked orders for everyone who was not using the toilet to leave at once. Before long he and Paul were alone.

They stood facing each other in silence, sizing each other up. The policeman was wearing an ill-fitting uniform that was much too big for his slight build. They must have been about the same age. Paul noticed the man's features were soft and did not match the stern, brisk voice.

“Now you can continue in peace,” he said, and turned his back to Paul. “I hope you don't need toilet paper. There's none here.”

That was how Paul Leibovitz and Zhang Lin met for the first time, and a friendship that had lasted over twenty-five years now had grown from that meeting. There had been times when Paul had traveled to Shenzhen nearly every week, and later on, when it had become easier for Chinese citizens to travel to Hong Kong, Zhang had also visited his friend several times a year. After Justin's death, Zhang was the only person whose company Paul could bear. Zhang came to Lamma for a day every six weeks. They did not do much; just sat on the terrace, drank tea, played Go or chess or listened to music. The first year, Zhang had often cooked a big pot of soup in the afternoon that Paul would finish off the following week. Zhang was able to listen and also able to be silent. He was wise enough to
know that there was no possible comfort and honest enough not even to try to hide the fact that he knew this. For this, Paul was immeasurably grateful. Otherwise he would have had to ask him not to come again. Some days they had not exchanged more than a few sentences. Nevertheless, Zhang would come again six weeks later without fail.

Zhang's most recent visit was over a month ago, and the thought of seeing him again now filled Paul with a feeling of calm that did him good. He stood up, looking to catch sight of his friend, and soon he saw him coming toward him from a distance. He walked with a slight limp, and his blue jacket and his shoes were more worn out than they should have been for a detective superintendent; a cigarette that had gone out hung from his lower lip. They hugged each other briefly, and Paul could see in Zhang's eyes that he understood exactly what this visit meant for him. He had never experienced this mutual understanding, which needed barely a word or a gesture, with anyone else before.

“Always good to see you. Here today, especially,” Zhang said in greeting. He smiled. “Have you eaten? Shall we go and buy the food?”

“Sure.”

They walked across the station concourse to the metro station. It had opened just a few weeks ago, and everything was still so empty and clean that Paul felt as if they were on a trial journey. They had the last car almost to themselves. Zhang, who looked exhausted, flopped onto one of the shiny aluminum seats.

“You can't imagine what's going on at work right now,” he said, lowering his voice. “Everyone's running around like crazy, as if they've been told to practice self-criticism in public. Or give access to their bank accounts. Even the mayor's office has called.”

“Why?”

“Why? The dead foreigner is driving everyone into a frenzy. Let's say he's not just a tourist who sadly happened to die of heart failure while taking a walk. Let's say he's an investor, an entrepreneur from
America, who manufactures lights, rain boots, or Santa Clauses in China and has died a violent death. That would be . . .” He searched for words. “That's never happened here but I imagine that would lead to one or two headlines in Hong Kong and in America. What do you think?”