The Language of Solitude

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  XIV

  * * *

  Christine felt her knees buckle. Dr. Fu grabbed her under the arm in a reflex action and led her to a chair. She sat down and breathed heavily, registering what was around her only through a gray veil. A full waiting room, harsh fluorescent light, white-painted walls. Women flicking through magazines. The cry of a baby.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” the gynecologist said in response to her question. “You’re expecting a baby.”

  For a few seconds she thought she had lost consciousness. Not from shock, and not from fear either. Something within her had lost balance.

  A baby? Her? Out of the question. A mistake.

  She had not thought about having a baby for years. She was forty-three years old. She was expecting the menopause, not a baby. But what if it were true? If she were really pregnant for the fourth time in her life?

  The first pregnancy had to be terminated. It had been a mistake, the result of a fleeting relationship. And she was young, nineteen years old. Only later, when she became a mother, did she begin to realize what she had done. The second time, she had brought Josh into the world. Shortly after his third birthday she fell pregnant again. She wanted the baby, but her husband did not. On no account. He had many arguments against it: his frequent business trips to China, her travel agency, Josh, whom she already had too little time for. Christine acquiesced—reluctantly. Later she found out that her husband already had a Chinese mistress on the other side of the border at the time, a woman who bore him a son not long after. That was why her child had not been allowed to live. The thought was still hard to bear today. For years she was haunted by a recurring dream in which she labored in great pain to bring a healthy baby into the world, her first, which she wished for more than anything in the world, but it vanished without a trace right after the birth. She looked for it everywhere, ran from room to room in the hospital in her blood-stained nightdress, clawed through all the closets in her apartment, ran through an MTR train in a panic in her dream, staring at every passenger, checking every shopping bag, until she finally sank to the floor crying in the last carriage and woke up bathed in sweat. She had wanted never to be pregnant again then, and had even briefly considered getting sterilized.

  What if Dr. Fu was right? They would be old, very old, parents; the probability of birth defects was significantly higher. How would it work anyway? In her small apartment. The travel agency. Paul on Lamma. Sleepless nights, colic, teething. Her head was filled with doubts and questions, and just as Christine felt she might be buried beneath the weight of them, something miraculously tore her out of these thoughts, lifted her, and carried her away. A balance was restored, but it was no longer the same. In that moment there was neither fear nor worry, only a feeling she had no words for; it possessed her whole being and filled her with an almost unbearable sense of lightness. A human being was growing inside her. The size of a pinhead. A quirk of fate. A gift of happiness.

  And what about Paul? The longer she thought about it, the less she could imagine that he could want to become a father again after Justin’s death. She had never spoken about it with him. Sometimes she had wondered to herself what might have been if they had met ten years earlier. She would definitely have wanted to have a child with him. But she did not like those what-if games anyway; they didn’t lead to anything. “What if?” was a question for people who had the luxury of time. She was not one of those people.

  The thought of having an abortion without telling Paul anything about it crossed Christine’s mind. At this early stage it would be a matter of minutes. He wouldn’t even find out that she had been pregnant. She might have done it not so long ago. Pros and cons. The list of cons was unbearably long. To want a child or not. There was no and. With Paul, a secret abortion was unthinkable. She wanted to—she had to—tell him. If he said no, she would not object.

  * * *

  The flight from Shanghai had landed. Only a few more minutes.

  His laugh. His look, which lifted her spirits so. How had she been able to stand a week without him? His arms around her made all the difficult thoughts disappear. A child. With him. How could she have had even a second’s doubt?

  When they were seated in the airport express train, he asked, “Now, tell me, what’s the big surprise?”

  Christine was so nervous she could barely breathe. She hesitated, pulled his head toward her, and whispered, “Not here.”

  “Where, then? Where are we going?”

  “To Central. Then we’ll take a taxi to the Peak.”

  “There, of all places? Have you thought this over carefully?” His voice sounded surprised and expectant but neither rejecting nor fearful.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  The taxi dropped them off at the end of Peak Road. Paul bought two bottles of water at the cable car station before they turned onto Lugard Road, a narrow footpath that snaked around the top of the mountain, with trees growing so densely on both sides that it was like a green tunnel in which the aerial roots of the trees touched the ground. It was a hot day, but not too warm at this altitude; the birds were chirping away and only a gentle murmur rose from the city. This was what she had had in mind.

  Christine led Paul to the only bench that gave an unrestricted view of the harbor and of Kowloon.

  “You’re drawing this out,” he said, turning and giving her a piercing look.

  “I . . . I . . .” Christine faltered. I’m pregnant. I’m expecting a baby. She was afraid of saying one of those sentences. Words could sound so banal. “How much is one plus one?” she asked suddenly.

  He thought. He pushed his sweat-soaked hair away from his forehead, keeping his eyes fixed on her; Christine had the feeling that she was watching someone thinking, puzzling over something. “One plus one,” he repeated, “is . . .” Tears in his eyes. The short answer: “Three.”

  Christine nodded and felt her center of gravity start swaying once more. Like a suspension bridge with an overloaded truck going over it. Something could give way any moment and pull her into the depths. She was not able to make out what Paul’s expression meant, what his reaction was. Was he happy? Was he frightened? Yes or no?

  She felt defenseless, more at the mercy of another person than she had ever felt in her life, as though she had put everything she possessed in his hands. He took her in his arms; Christine did not know if he was crying tears of joy or sorrow. Her child. She did not want to lose another child. Not for the world.

  “What are you thinking?” he whispered.

  “If we’re too old for a child.”

  “You mean, if it will be healthy?”

  “Yes. No. We can test for that. I mean, whether it’s terrible to have such old parents,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

  “There are many things that make parents hard to put up with. I don’t know whether them being past the age of fifty or sixty is necessarily one of those things,” Paul replied.

  Was that a yes? Was he trying to tell her that he was glad? She did not have the courage to ask, so instead she said, as matter-of-factly as possible, “And how do you think it will go? I mean, the day-to-day of it?” Things to take into account. Practical thoughts. Perhaps she could hide behind them.

  “That’s not important.”

  “Why not?” she asked, unsettled.

  “Do we want to make a list of pros and cons?”

  “No. But we have to think about it.”

  “That’s true. We have to know if there is enough space inside us.”

  “You’re oversimplifying things,” she responded.

  “On the contrary. I’m asking the most difficult question first. Once we’ve answered that, we’ll have the answers to all the others.” He gave her a searching look. “What was your initial reaction?”

  She continued looking down at the ground and hesitated before replying. “Disbelief.”

  “I mean, were you happy or not?”

  Christine knew what he meant, but she did not trust herself to sa
y the words.

  “Yes or no? What did your heart say?”

  There was a strange calmness in his voice, and the longer they talked, the stronger the energy that he radiated became. He had found his answer, and he knew hers. “We’re old enough,” he continued, “to trust our intuition. What else or who else can we trust?”

  Only now did she have the courage to look at him. She saw the look on his face and asked herself how she could have doubted.

  * * *

  When they continued walking, Paul started talking about the times he had walked on the Peak with Justin. How they had imagined being able to fly, being birds pooping on people’s heads. About how his son had such a thirst for knowledge, how he had lain on a bench with his head in Paul’s lap, asking questions.

  “Once he wanted to know if the world used to be in black and white.”

  She smiled. “What made him ask that?”

  “We had watched the old Charlie Chaplin films. They weren’t in color, of course, so he thought they were what the world was like. Another time he kept asking me if grown-ups sometimes felt happy for no reason like children did, or if they always needed to have a reason to feel happy.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t know. I’m searching for it.”

  “For what?”

  “Happiness for no reason.”

  “And? Have you found it?”

  He tipped his head from side to side. “Happiness yes. But for no reason?” A wrinkle of the brow. “I’m afraid I’m not there yet.”

  Christine realized that her child would not just grow up with Josh as an older brother. Justin would be a part of her family, just as he had been part of their relationship in the last one and a half years. He belonged to it, just like the dead always belong, because they are a part of us. Some more so, some less so.

  “Master Wong knew,” Paul said suddenly in an unusual tone of voice. As though he were speaking to himself.

  “What?”

  “That you would get pregnant.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about it!” she exclaimed.

  “No?”

  Where did the awkwardness in his voice come from? “No, you didn’t. What exactly did he predict?” she wanted to know.

  “He said: I will give life.”

  “You will give life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Paul and her mother met for the first time. Christine had wanted to share her joy, so she told her about the pregnancy on impulse; her mother had insisted on meeting the father of the child. As soon as possible. Christine’s mother refused to go into the city for the occasion, so they had arranged to meet at House of Supreme Harmony, a Chinese restaurant in the shopping center in Hang Hau.

  Christine had been nervous about the meeting the whole day; she remembered the dinner at which she had introduced her ex-husband to her mother. It had been an excruciating two hours—torture. Her mother had disliked her future son-in-law at first sight. She had cross-examined him with questions, and he had answered politely, trying hard to make a good impression, to win her goodwill or at least her respect, but had received only a cold rebuff. Worst of all, Christine remembered how she herself had behaved. She had not dared to contradict her mother. She had grown more and more quiet in the course of the conversation, shriveled to a little girl as they talked about her as if she were a young child. She did not want to sit through another evening like that.

  With her first disapproving glance, Christine’s mother saw where the father of her second grandchild was from, or rather where he was not from. She had nothing against Westerners in principle, Christine knew that, but she believed that foreigners, regardless of where they came from, could not understand the Chinese way of thinking, or the culture, customs, and habits; she thought that there were fundamental differences in many respects, and that Westerners therefore had to be kept at a distance.

  The House of Supreme Harmony was her mother’s favorite restaurant; it was as big as half a soccer field and had red carpets and red-painted walls hung with fabric decorations in the shape of carp; there were gilded chandeliers and big round tables filled with families talking loudly, nineteen to the dozen. The floor was covered in food stains. Her mother thought that the more crowded and noisy a restaurant was, and the dirtier the carpet and tablecloths, the better the food was. Christine had long given up trying to persuade her otherwise. She usually didn’t even notice the noise, or if she did, she put up with it patiently, but this evening the racket made her feel even more tense. Paul had tried to calm her nerves, and reassured her that he knew how to make a good impression in situations like these; it was not the first time he had been introduced to Chinese parents as a prospective son-in-law. That was not exactly what she wanted to hear, but it did make her feel a little bit better. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Paul enter the restaurant. He had been to the hairdresser; his gray curls now reached only to just above his ears, and he was freshly shaven and wearing a pair of black linen trousers and a white shirt.

  He was holding a box of Christine’s favorite pralines in one hand and a present for her mother in the other. They were little cakes in the shape of peaches—to the Chinese, this was a symbol for longevity, chosen with thought—and filled with lotus seed paste. Christine’s mother placed the beautifully wrapped present on the table without even glancing at it. She looked Paul up and down briefly and sat.

  “Paul, this is my mother, Wu Jie. Mama, this is—”

  Wu Jie interrupted her daughter. “How much do you earn?”

  “Mama!” Christine wished she could sink into the ground with shame. How many times had she told her mother, and reminded her, not to ask this question? Christine wanted to object, but Paul signaled to her with a smile that he had expected this kind of interrogation.

  “The human being is a living treasure, but wealth is a dead one.”

  Oh, Paul, you could hardly have given a worse answer. Christine was afraid that he would go on to say that money meant nothing to him and that he lived very modestly from his savings since he had not worked for years because he was mourning his dead son. If so, the evening would come to an end before it had even really begun. Her mother would wait politely for the food, eat quickly, and make it clear that she wanted leave as soon as possible. She had lost her husband, her son, and her home; despite that, or perhaps because of that, she had worked until her body was worn out. How could she possibly understand Paul’s withdrawal from the world?

  Christine wondered how she could ever have agreed to the dinner. If only she could pretend she was feeling sick and leave the table for a moment. It was not a good idea for a Westerner to approach her mother with Chinese proverbs, and this particular one did not match her mother’s experiences, absolutely not. People and treasure were two very different things to Wu Jie; they were not related to each other at all. Not in her life.

  A mistrustful look. A brief glance that had nothing good in it. “With money, you are a dragon; without it, only a worm,” she said contemptuously.

  “You’re right there,” Paul replied. He had realized his mistake. In his friendliest what-an-honor-to-meet-you voice, he added, “That’s why I would like to reassure you that I earn enough.”

  “Hmm,” Christine’s mother murmured, not sounding satisfied, as she drank her tea in slurps. She had pinned her thin gray hair back with two simple clips and was wearing a traditional red Chinese jacket with a dragon pattern. She gave Paul a suspicious look over the rim of her thick glasses.

  Christine knew that for her mother the word “enough” did not occur in relation to money. Not because of greed, but because money was the only security that she trusted. Because money had enabled them to escape to Hong Kong. Because she was convinced that money could also grow wings for birds who could not fly.

  “Enough for the five of us,” Paul added. He had understood that his answer had
been anything but satisfactory. “I have a house on Lamma and a broad portfolio of stocks that is performing very well.”

  She had not realized he was such a gifted liar.

  “How much debt do you have against the house?” her mother wanted to know.

  Christine tried to catch Paul’s eye in vain; when he did not react, she pretended she hadn’t heard anything, and flipped through the menu instead.

  “None,” Paul replied.

  Wu Jie nodded, satisfied. “Do you gamble?”

  He seemed to have expected this question too. “No,” he replied calmly.

  “Not at all?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Apart from small bets on the horse racing at Happy Valley or Sha Tin, of course. But I wouldn’t call that gambling.”

  Her mother nodded. She placed bets there too; she wouldn’t have believed that anyone didn’t do that.

  “What do you work as?”

  “I do research,” he replied.

  “Into what?”

  “General research into principles.”

  A questioning glance at her daughter.

  Christine had no idea what Paul meant. “General research into principles, Mama,” she repeated in a tone as if to say that it answered all questions.

  “And you earn money that way?” the mother asked, still filled with doubt.

  Paul nodded calmly. “Please don’t worry. I’ll provide for the family.”

  Wu Jie looked at him carefully and said nothing for a while. “You’re old and want to become a father.”

  “A man cannot expect to find both ends of the sugarcane sweet.”

  Christine wondered whether she should let Paul know that he really should stop spouting proverbs; she tried to find his knee under the table but he was too far away. To her amazement, a smile flitted across her mother’s face.

  “Your Chinese is remarkable. You know our pearls of wisdom well. Our food too?”

  “He’s an excellent cook,” Christine interjected, hoping to change the subject.