But by the time she had made her way through the hedges and the bamboo grove, opened the garden gate, closed it behind her, and seen the house and the terrace, all the longings and expectations that she had wanted to leave behind in Hong Kong had returned.
Paul had turned the garden into an enchanted forest. Tea lights placed close together marked out the terrace and several white and red lanterns were hanging from the trees. A string of fairy lights was wound around the frangipani tree and an eight-candle candelabra was on the table next to two glasses, a big bouquet of red roses, and a bucket with a bottle of champagne in it. The doors and windows were open, and the only light in the house came from the candles on the tables and windowsills in the kitchen and the living room.
Paul lay quietly on his deck chair and pretended to be dozing. She could see perfectly well that he had opened one of his eyes by a tiny slit and was following her movements. She had never received such a welcome from anyone before.
She went to the table and saw how much care he had taken to decorate everything. There were more than a dozen small bowls full of delicious things; she could see eggplant, hundred-year-old eggs with mustard and ginger, and steamed crabs, all her favorite dishes. White frangipani petals and many more small red bougainvillea petals were strewn on the table. Her place setting was a disc of deep-red silk and a tea light flickered on both plates. She heard Paul getting up carefully and creeping up behind her. Then he was standing behind her and covering her eyes with his hands.
Her knees gave way. For a moment, she was afraid that this was all a dream and that she would wake up any minute and find herself on her couch in Hang Hau, staring at the test screen on the television. Then she felt his lips on her neck and her skin prickled. How could a person kiss so tenderly? She wanted to turn around, but he took her in his arms, lifted her up, turned in a circle with her, and carried her into the house and up the stairs like a sleeping child. He laid her on the bed and started undressing her. There were candles burning in the bedroom too. By their light, she watched his every move and she saw that he would not lose his strength today. She could hardly hold still with excitement and she wanted to tear off her skirt, her blouse, and her bra, or at least help him with the buttons and the belt to hurry things up, but he stroked her hands to her side and whispered, “We have time.”
The gentleness with which he undressed her, the way his fingers glided over her skin, aroused her so much that she would not be able to take much more, would explode if he did not release her soon. How could he control himself for so long? How could he cover her with kisses for so long, until she was practically floating from the touch of his tongue?
When the moment came, she felt as if she was losing consciousness. As though he was sending waves of happiness through her body, waves that swept everything in their way along with them, that lifted her high and carried her into another world she had never been to, where there was no fear and no doubt, where there was one answer to every question. A world she had not even thought existed and that she never wanted to leave again. She felt indescribably weak and at the same time stronger than she had ever been in her life.
Their bodies were so intertwined that they were like one body. She held Paul tight and knew that she would never let him go again.
After some time she heard him laughing quietly as he lay in her arms. She took his head in her hands and saw that he was laughing and crying at the same time. He got up and carried her through the dark house down to the garden, where all the tea lights had burned down to the wick and gone out. He put her down on a chair gently, went back into the house, fetched two bathrobes and a basket full of tea lights, lit them one after another, and soon the garden was lit as it was when she arrived. He brought some warm rice from the kitchen, opened and poured the bottle of champagne, handed her a glass, and kissed her on the neck again, making her heart pound with excitement once more.
“You’re driving me crazy,” she whispered. “If you don’t stop, the candles will go out another time without us.”
“Again? I’m not a young man of twenty anymore,” he whispered back.
“What a shame,” she said, kissing him on the forehead.
Paul began feeding her. He picked up a piece of eggplant with his chopsticks, circled it in front of her open mouth, and let it drop in. He fed her some chicken in lemon sauce, cold duck, and tofu cooked in seven spices. She knew Paul was a keen cook, but his food had never tasted so good.
“This is incredible,” she said, amazed. “How long did you spend in the kitchen?”
He was clearly pleased by her praise. He poured more champagne into her glass and clinked glasses with her.
“What are we toasting?” Christine asked, curious.
“You.”
“Why me?”
“Because I want to thank you.”
“Me? What for?”
“For your love. ‘As if trusting was only for fools. As if we had a choice.’ When you first said that to me I thought you were crazy. Of course we have a choice.”
“And now?”
Paul sipped from his champagne, leaned his head to one side, and gave her a thoughtful look. “Now I know that you’re right. When I had dinner with Victor Tang your words suddenly came to me. I missed you terribly and I quoted you.”
“Did he know what you were talking about?”
“He knew very well. But he thinks the opposite is true, that we have no choice but not to trust.”
Christine thought about her brother and her father and she thought about the story that Paul had told her yesterday on the telephone about Tang’s father. “That’s very Chinese.”
“He said something similar.”
“What?”
“That he wouldn’t trust any Chinese person from his generation.”
“I wouldn’t either. In love, we have no choice but to trust. But apart from that, yes we do have a choice.”
Christine listened in silence as he talked about the past two days, trying to imagine Tang and his world—the mansion, the gold golf clubs, the servants, Anyi—but she could not. It was too alien to her. It was as if Paul were telling her about his journey to the land of darkness, not about a place she could get to by train in an hour. What Paul was describing confirmed her worst fears and left her feeling indifferent at the same time. She was interested only insofar as she was still worried about Paul. She didn’t care about Tang, and the Owens meant nothing to her. Only when the conversation turned to Zhang, and Paul spoke slowly and increasingly hesitantly about the temple and the old monk, did she grow uncomfortable. She could see how difficult it was for him to tell this story.
There was a long silence in the enchanted forest after that.
“Why did he never say anything?” Paul said in a half whisper, tipping his head back and looking up into the night sky as though the stars might have an answer for him.
Christine marveled at his question. Was it really so difficult for him to understand that Zhang could not share this secret? “Paul, your friend was just too ashamed, and he never found the right time. I think that after the right time passes, every minute of silence becomes another lie and they mount up so quickly that at some point it becomes simply impossible to talk about. Don’t you know that feeling? Are you sure that you would have said anything in his place?”
He was still staring up at the stars in the sky. “No,” he said, without looking at her. “Confucius claims that trust once lost can never be regained. Do you think that too?”
“Stop that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Even the Chinese philosophers get it wrong sometimes.”
“Hmm. I’ll think about it.”
“Paul, it’s not the head that forgives but the heart.”
He smiled. “But even the heart takes time.”
“Especially the heart.”
He nodded and fell into a long silence again.
“About Elizabeth Owen. She was here this afternoon. She wanted to thank me. It’s strange, but I had a bad conscience after she went.”
“After everything you’ve done for her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I got the feeling that I should have told her that it was her husband who told Victor Tang about Michael’s negotiations.”
“Why?”
“She thinks it was Anyi.”
“I would too, if I were her.”
“But I know the truth,” Paul retorted.
“And you think she doesn’t?”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Paul, Elizabeth Owen is not stupid. I’m sure she has a sense of who it was but she doesn’t want to know. You can’t force the truth on someone who doesn’t want to see it. Anyway it’s none of your business. It’s a matter for the two of them.”
Paul gave a deep sigh. “Sometimes I envy your pragmatism.”
“You mean my simple view of the world?” she asked in mock indignation.
“No,” Paul laughed out loud. “Not at all. But things like that bother me for ages.”
He shook his head, got up, and fetched another bottle of champagne from the fridge. He put his arm around her and kissed her. “It’s exactly that which I am grateful to you for, Christine. For your sense of humor and your belief in people, even though I can’t always share it.”
“Then watch out: the ability to trust is contagious.”
It was still wonderfully warm so they pushed the chairs together and sat facing each other with their legs on each other’s laps. They talked and ate and drank the second bottle too, until they heard the first birdsong and the sky above them gradually grew lighter. Christine could not remember when she had last spent the night outdoors in Hong Kong.
At some point they went upstairs and crawled into the bed, which still smelled of them. Paul lay next to her with his arms crossed under his head and his eyes open and Christine was reminded of her son. Not that there was the slightest resemblance between them, but the look in his eyes made her think of Josh when he was three or four years old and how he had greeted her in the mornings sometimes with such boundless happiness. It was not long before Paul fell asleep and Christine watched him, far too happy for sleep to cross her mind. She had taken the day off—her first in many years. Even on the day of her grandmother’s funeral she had gone to the office in the afternoon. After a while she got up to surprise Paul with breakfast. She crept downstairs, tidied up in the garden, made some tea, and took the raspberry jam and the croissants out of the bag she had brought with her. She warmed them up in the oven, put everything on a tray, brought it up, and sat down next to him on the bed.
She listened to his quiet, even breath and watched his face at peace in the warm glow of the early daylight, and she asked herself whether she was frightened that he would pull away one more time, as he had so often in the past few months. Whether she was afraid that he would leave her or cheat on her, just like her husband had left her and cheated on her. Whether she was still haunted by the pain that her husband had caused her. No, she thought. No, she was not. She would not surrender to the power of mistrust. Because of that, her best friend said she was naïve and credulous, and her mother scolded her for being innocent, simple, and unworldly about love. Christine knew that she was none of those things. How could someone who loved be simple? How could anyone call her unworldly when there was almost nothing more important in the world than to love and to be loved?
She thought about the cold and rainy day in February when she had first met Paul. She had thought that he was about to shatter into thousands of tiny bits of glass like a car windshield on impact. He had been silent as if he had lost the power of speech; she remembered the wounded look on his face. This last night, in the flickering of the candlelight, he had looked no less vulnerable, but something was back in his eyes, a light that she had not seen all these months but that she had always known existed. He had laughed and joked and loved her more gently than any man ever had, and he had found his speech again. He would never lose her again, that she was sure of. He had carried her in his arms through the house and into the bedroom.
Past the rain boots and the raincoat.
EPILOGUE
November, Hong Kong
Dear Justin,
It’s still very early in the morning. The sun just woke up about half an hour ago and it’s bright red and “crawled” out of the sea, as you always used to say. (Do you remember the first time we saw it sink into the sea? You were afraid that it would go out forever and when it rose again the next morning you were convinced for a very long time that it slept in the water and that is why the sea was so warm.)
I woke up much earlier than usual today and couldn’t settle down again because my head was full of a very special experience I had yesterday. But I’ll tell you more about that later. Anyway, I hadn’t slept much and couldn’t lie in bed anymore so I got up when the birds and the little children were still sleeping. Now I’m sitting, as I have every morning for the last few weeks, on the roof terrace. There is a pot of tea in front of me and in the distance through the bamboo I can see the sunlight dancing on the sea. Today will be a good day—I feel it. The air is clear, which it only ever is in November in Hong Kong, and my garden is honey scented because the frangipani tree is blooming with more flowers than ever before.
There is a big pile of paper next to me, covered in closely written handwriting—all the letters I have dedicated to you. I had the idea of writing to you a long time ago but never had the courage to. Who writes letters to his dead son? It was only after I returned from my trip to China as an assistant detective that I dared to start. I felt very strange writing the first few sentences, but Christine strongly encouraged me to keep on writing, for she wanted to get to know you, and this is the only way. Every letter became easier to write, and a few days ago I thought about an older French journalist I used to meet often in Saigon at the end of the war. Maybe I already told you about him before. No matter what time of the day or night it was, I always saw him writing on the terrace or in the lobby of our hotel. He even wrote while having his breakfast or during his dinner. One day, I went up to his table and asked him why he did it. “Writing helps!” he said. I was in my early twenties then and did not know what he was talking about. What was writing supposed to help with? Now that I have written over fifty letters to you, I know what he was talking about. Writing really does help. It helps with loneliness. It helps with fear. It helps with the terror of forgetting. It helps with the melancholy of the everyday. Writing has an almost magical power—and I don’t need anything other than an empty piece of paper and a pencil. (Yes, yes, and a pencil sharpener, I hear you say.)
I have written down everything that has been important to me since you were born: The moment I first held you in my arms, the first bath I gave you. I have described our trips to the Peak, the many bruises that suddenly appeared and that we did not recognize as symptoms, and everything else up to the story of Michael Owen and his parents. I have felt better with every sentence, with every line. (Now that reminds me of the afternoon when you lay ill on the couch and refused to let go of your book. And when I asked you over and over again to rest properly and finally getting annoyed, you claimed that reading helped. What did it help with? I wanted to know. You didn’t reply for a long time. Finally you said in a very firm tone, “Tummy aches, boredom, bad moods, scolding dads.” So writing and reading help!)
Yesterday afternoon I cleaned the house thoroughly. Since your illness I have a mania for cleaning that I can’t get rid of. I suddenly stopped in the hall—it was as though I heard you calling me. I was standing in front of your yellow rain boots and the red raincoat with the blue polka dots. I looked at the markings on the door frames that I had moved here from our apartment in R
epulse Bay. The last one was dated February 28 at four feet two and a half inches. You were a small child. Even at birth.
I wonder how tall you would be now. If you would reach up to my chest, and what shoe size you would have. I saw you standing in front of me—your curly blond head, your deep-blue eyes, and that smile that could soften my heart like nothing else in the world. I felt the pressure behind my eyes building again, and suddenly something happened that I had thought never would. I wasn’t filled with sadness when I thought of you, but with a different, completely new feeling. At first I didn’t even know what it was or how I should describe it. I thought about it the whole evening and half the night, and I think I now know what I can call it: gratitude. I can’t think of a better word for it. Now I hear you saying quite clearly, “What do you mean by that, Daddy? Why gratitude? What have I done for you to be grateful to me?” That’s the way you always used to ask me questions when you didn’t understand something.
I’m grateful to you for every smile. Now don’t look at me like that, as if a smile were nothing that a person had to be grateful for. I mean it seriously. For every time we went looking for shells on the beach. For every good-night story that I was able to tell you. For every morning that you crawled into our bed. I’m grateful for every question that you asked me, every moment that I was able to share with you. Grateful without end. I did not always feel like that before because I took that all for granted, but your illness taught me never to take anything for granted again. I know now that some memories may fade or even disappear altogether, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to think about you all the time to know you are with me.
I think that yesterday afternoon was the first time that the gratitude was stronger than the sadness. Before, the pain of your physical absence, the fact that I can no longer touch you, that you no longer walk beside me and grab my hand when you’re startled by something—this pain overshadowed everything. I knew the power of fear. I knew the power of jealousy and sorrow, but not the power of gratitude.
Whispering Shadows Page 33
