Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker Read Free Book Online

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 itwas 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