The Language of Solitude

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  “Would you like to have a cup of tea at my place?” she asked suddenly, as the driver turned into Changle Lu, as though she had guessed what he was thinking.

  “I’d like that.” He wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.

  The car dropped them off at the corner of Fumin Lu. Yin-Yin bought a grapefruit, bananas, and a packet of watermelon seeds, and led him through a labyrinth of backyards and alleyways to her apartment. It was in the upper floor of a two-story building built in the 1920s. It was small, and Paul thought it was incredibly messy for a place that two young women lived in. Newspapers were strewn over the floor in the tiny hallway and socks and T-shirts were hanging from a laundry rack, with a plate of leftover noodles on top.

  “I’m sorry. My roommate Lu isn’t very tidy. She drives me crazy,” Yin-Yin said. She showed him into her room, opened the window, and disappeared into the kitchen to make tea.

  In her room there was enough space for an unmade bed, a small desk with a pile of papers, books, and fashion magazines on it, a bookshelf, and a music stand, which her violin case was propped up against. Her gorgeous cheongsam dangled from a hanger on the clothesline strung below the ceiling. Piled up on the only chair in the room were a dress and several tops. Paul sat cross-legged on the floor. The longer Paul looked at the chaos around him, the more he liked it. Twenty-five years ago the rooms he lived in would have looked the same. He heard Yin-Yin moving about in the kitchen. The clatter of mahjong tiles came from a neighboring apartment, and there was the distant monotone singsong of the man who collected old newspapers as he worked his way through the alleyways. The knife grinder followed in his wake, clamoring for attention. What a contrast to the quiet that surrounded him on Lamma.

  Yin-Yin came in with the tea, sat down opposite Paul on the bed, and gave him a long look that he could not read. Paul could not remember the last time he had been with a woman alone in her apartment, and he felt unease creeping through him; the feeling that he did not belong there, but did not want to leave.

  “Nice apartment,” he said, to break the silence. He who was normally so comfortable with silence.

  She smiled. Did she guess why he was feeling uneasy?

  “You’re a strange person,” she said.

  “What do you mean by strange?”

  “Unusual.”

  “Is that a compliment?” he asked, flattered.

  “More a realization.”

  “What makes you think that?” There was trace of disappointment in his voice.

  “I don’t know. The way you treat my father. The way you speak our language. The way you’re helping us. Most of the foreigners I know run around wearing suits and are in China to do business. What are you doing here? What are you getting out of being so involved with the cause of Mama’s illness?”

  “Good question. Difficult to answer.”

  “Try.”

  “I like your father.”

  “That’s not enough,” she said, smiling.

  “I find him incredibly brave. How he looks after your mother. How dedicated he is, and how calm he is as he goes about it. I felt both sorry for him and impressed by him. I’d like to help him. That’s all.”

  “I don’t think so. No one does something for nothing. That’s the same in the West, isn’t it?”

  “Not for me. That’s what’s unusual about me,” he said, hoping that she would catch the shade of sarcasm. Yin-Yin did not get his allusion. She shook her head quickly and sipped her tea.

  After a while she asked, “How old are you?”

  “I could be your father.” The answer of an old man.

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Fifty-three.” Since Justin had died he had lost all sense of his age; it meant nothing. Now, in this room, in her presence, fifty-three sounded terribly old.

  “Do you play an instrument?”

  “No.” As though he had to prove something to her, he added, “But I love music.”

  “I know.” She looked at him until he dropped his eyes.

  The clatter of the mahjong tiles. The singsong of the knife grinder. Birdsong. Every place has its own melody, Paul thought. You just have to take the time to listen to it.

  After a long silence, Yin-Yin said, “You were going to tell me about why you were once one of those people who had nothing to lose.”

  The wrong question. The right question. “Because I had lost everything then.”

  The wonder in her face. There was worry and concern in her eyes, but they were the eyes of someone who had not been hurt deep in the soul. There was still so much youthful confidence in them that it almost physically hurt him to see it. It is not the passing of the years that makes us older, he thought, it is the wounds that life inflicts. The hurts and the losses. It was a look that made him feel old. Older than he had ever felt, perhaps. At the same time it awakened a longing in him; for what exactly, he wasn’t sure. For the unbearable lightness of youth, that he himself had never experienced? For the feeling that life was like an endless ocean shimmering with possibilities, which you just had to dive into?

  “And now?” Yin-Yin interrupted his thoughts.

  “I have a lot to lose.”

  “What?”

  “Who,” he corrected her. “We can only ever lose people. Everything else can be replaced or is unimportant.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Christine.”

  “And who did you lose?”

  “My son.”

  She said nothing for a long time. He was afraid that she would ask more questions, try to comfort him, or, worst of all, tell him about someone else who had lost his child, how terrible that had been, and that she could imagine how awful it had been for him . . . But Yin-Yin clearly felt that even a single word at this moment would be one too many; she bore the silence, which had lost all trace of tension, as she looked at her feet and clutched her teacup. Paul felt a vague disappointment at first, then relief. He thought about Justin and what he would say if he could see his father sitting on the floor in this untidy room. He would laugh at me, Paul thought. He thought about Christine and felt a bottomless longing for her. They had spoken on the phone every day, but only briefly, and the last few days had been so busy and intense that he had barely had time to think about her. Now he felt exhausted by his efforts, and realized that he looked forward to seeing her very much.

  “You look tired. Would you like to go?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “What do you mean, you think so?”

  Paul smiled a little at himself. “That it would be better for me to go. I really am a little tired.”

  “I was afraid of being on my own.”

  “I know. Would you like me to stay?”

  She shook her head. “My brother lives nearby. I’ll go over to his apartment later.”

  “Where shall we meet tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll pick you up at the hotel at nine thirty.”

  * * *

  It was only when Paul was standing on Changle Lu that he realized how hungry he was. He had seen a few small food vendors opposite the supermarket, so he walked in the shadow of the plane trees toward Fumin Lu. It was shortly before twilight; cars, bicycles, pedestrians, and street peddlers were fighting for space in the overcrowded roads. Someone tried to sell him fake brand-name watches; another person tried to interest him in ballpoint pens. Belts, illegal DVDs. A woman followed him, hissing “Gucci, Prada, Wietong” continuously into his ear until he shooed her away by waving his arm decisively. Garish neon light lit up the fruit and vegetable stands, the tea booths, and the other street stalls. It made the faces of the stallholders look pale and cold. He walked past a massage parlor in which a couple of young women in pink dresses were staring at a television looking bored. One of them waved at him and he smiled back. In a gateway, an old man had hung a mirror on the wall, put a chair in front of it, and laid out scissors, combs, and razors neatly on a little table. He was reading a newspaper while waiti
ng for customers.

  Paul sat down in front of a soup-noodle stall that had set out folding tables and stools on the sidewalk. There was a delicious smell of meat broth, coriander, and garlic; a young man was kneading a grayish-white lump of dough, preparing noodles to order for each customer. He kneaded and shaped the ball, pulling it apart over and over again until he had a handful of long noodles that he then slung into a sieve and submerged into boiling water. Two young women who also worked for this stall squatted by his feet cleaning fish in the gutter, talking and laughing raucously; Paul could understand only snatches of what they said.

  The soup tasted wonderful: spicy and hearty lamb and vegetables. When Paul shouted out his compliments to the cook, he smiled back, looking embarrassed. The awkward smile of someone for whom praise was a rare luxury.

  The hum of life that surrounded Paul miraculously banished his tiredness. He felt a strong desire to go for a walk. He paid his bill, got up, and plunged into this world of alleyways, hidden courtyards, and plane tree avenues, in which wet underwear, stockings, and shirts hung on washing lines stretched across the streets and dripped down on the passersby; in which the smell of food wafted from every corner; in which he heard people who had eaten their fill burp and pass wind as he walked past their homes; the screech of quarreling; the snores of those sleeping. The whispers of the living.

  The longer he walked around, the better he liked this place. The faded, monotone Shanghai of his memory, in which everyone rode a bicycle and wore the same gray or blue Mao suit, had turned into a restless, greedy city, filled with people who were searching, cast out from somewhere else. Full of nervous energy and full of courage. Full of people who had left their villages and towns, lured there in the hope of a better life. Shanghai reminded him of the New York of his youth. Or of Hong Kong in the 1970s, which he had loved, before the city had become a well-behaved faceless, glass-walled, air-conditioned zone, which smelled only of exhaust fumes rather than of people.

  “Hungry for love,” Christine had called him two weeks ago. Perhaps, he thought, she had hit on the right thing but had chosen the wrong word. Maybe after the years of isolation on Lamma, “hungry for life” would be more accurate.

  * * *

  Back in the hotel he rang Christine straightaway. In the last few days he had found it more and more difficult to deal with her annoyance and ill humor over the constant delays of his return to Hong Kong. She had not wanted to know much about the results of the lab tests and his suspicions on Thursday. Yesterday, he had told her about his conversations with doctors in Shanghai and that there might be hope for Min Fang if certain factors were in place; he also said that her brother had asked him to stay a few more days.

  The longer the phone rang, the more nervous he got. Where was she? Why didn’t she pick up the phone? Do you have family in Hong Kong? the lawyer had asked.

  When he finally heard her voice, he noticed that something was not right.

  “Are you well?”

  “No,” she replied, sounding weak. “I’m sick.”

  “What’s wrong?” He did his best to remain calm.

  “I threw up all night and I feel incredibly tired. It’s been going on for days.”

  “Have you been to the doctor?”

  “Yes. I went yesterday, and another time before that.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about that,” he said accusingly.

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” Christine said, before falling silent.

  “Why aren’t you telling me what the doctor said?”

  He couldn’t bear her. I’m sorry to have to tell you.

  “Christine,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing that you have to worry about. I have to take better care of myself. I’m overworked. That’s all.”

  “Did you have a blood test?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Is everything normal?”

  “Yes, Paul. All fine.”

  “Do you have any bluish bruises on your body?” He had seen them on Justin but had not really paid attention to them. Bruises on a young boy—so what? They had been messengers from death.

  “No.”

  “Nosebleeds?”

  “No. Please don’t worry. It’s high time you came back,” she said, with no hint of accusation in her voice.

  “I know. Monday morning. On the first flight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I promise.”

  “I need you.”

  “I need you too.”

  A little disquiet remained.

  * * *

  Yin-Yin picked him up at the hotel. She had brought him two small presents: a can of premium-quality green tea and a recording of her playing the violin for Schubert’s quartet. She was in a good mood, having slept well, and was clearly glad to see him.

  They crossed Suzhou Creek and walked down the Bund. Chen’s office was at the other end.

  Twenty minutes later, they were standing in front of number 2, a white neoclassical building built at the turn of the previous century, which had once been one of the most elegant addresses in Shanghai. A smart bronze plaque by the entrance. They climbed the stairs up to the third floor. Chen the lawyer opened the door himself. He was Paul’s height but powerfully built, an impressive-looking figure who Paul thought looked more like someone from Wall Street than from China. Chen looked as though he spent many hours in the gym; he was wearing an elegant dark suit, a white shirt, black shoes, and rimless glasses.

  He led them down a long corridor past a row of offices. It was Sunday, and there was no one else was around. His office had an impressive view of the river; the furnishings reminded Paul of the office of a British barrister he had once visited in Hong Kong: a heavy dark mahogany desk, a leather armchair, and two leather Chesterfield couches in a corner. They sat down; he did not offer them anything to drink.

  “So, Gao sent you. How is he?”

  Yin-Yin said nothing. They had agreed that Paul would tell the story and do all the talking to begin with, but Paul was finding it hard to reply. Sitting opposite, Chen seemed less aggressive than he had been on the phone, and his voice had lost its commanding tone, but Paul still found it difficult to get the measure of him. He suspected that every question Chen asked was calculated to test them or trap them; every response had to be weighed up.

  “Very well, as far as we can tell,” Paul said vaguely.

  “Does he still walk around barefoot in his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “A good friend recommended him to us.”

  “And he sent you to me because . . .” Chen waited for Paul to complete the sentence.

  “Because he thinks only you can help us. At least, that’s what he told us.”

  “It must be an interesting case. What’s it about, then?”

  Paul had barely mentioned the words “Sanlitun” and “mercury” before Chen interrupted him abruptly. “Shall we take a walk on the Bund?” he said, standing up. “Leave your things and your cell phones here. We’ll come back to the office later.”

  They took the elevator down without exchanging a word, crossed the Bund, and walked by the water toward the Peace Hotel. On the promenade, they mingled with tour groups that were being directed by guides waving fans, and parents showing their children the Pudong skyline, looking proud. Tourists from the countryside, who could be identified by their shoes and their gray clothes, posed for photos with the skyscrapers in the background; young men walked around offering plastic toys, candied fruit, and lottery tickets for sale. There could hardly be a better place to have a confidential conversation.

  A couple of barges were traveling upriver slowly; the sound of a horn from one of the ships made Yin-Yin jump.

  After a while Chen said, “Now tell me what has happened.” After Paul had finished telling him everything, the lawyer steered them toward a bench that had just been vacated, and they sat down.

  “And Gao seriously
thought I could help you?”

  “Yes, he did,” Yin-Yin said firmly. Paul could tell from her voice that she would not be satisfied with an I’m-sorry-but-I-can’t-do-anything-for-you reply.

  Chen sighed. “I’m a commercial lawyer. I advise companies on takeovers and property transactions. I started in criminal law but that’s a long time ago now. What I do now is much more lucrative; I admit it.”

  “Why did Gao recommend you to us then?” Yin-Yin asked suspiciously.

  “Because we’re good friends. We went to college together. We were the top students of our year in the whole province of Zhejiang. After that we worked in the same practice for a few years, mostly on civil and criminal law. One day, two farmers came to my office. A party cadre had illegally confiscated their land without paying them compensation. That happened all the time.”

  “And?”

  “I sent them away. Not long after I got a job offer from Shanghai to work in a commercial law practice.”

  “Didn’t Gao have a similar case?” Yin-Yin wondered.

  “Yes, but years later. To this day I don’t know if it was coincidence or if someone was trying to test us. Gao took the case on. You have seen the consequences it had for him.”

  “He didn’t seem defeated,” Paul said.

  “You’re right there. Gao has a clear conscience. He’s the only person I know who I can say that about. I admire him for that. Sometimes I do him little favors as a friend.”

  “What kind of favors?”

  “I give him advice on complicated cases. Prepare the occasional document for him or get one of my colleagues to do some research on a case for him. He has no one else. Commercial law, you see, is profitable, but really quite boring in the long run. There are two souls beating in every heart. At least. Isn’t that so?” he asked with a short laugh. “But I’m afraid your case is too much for me. If we found a court willing to hear the case, it would no longer be about protecting Sanlitun. It would be about protecting the government. The government of the province and, in the end, of Beijing,” Chen said.