The Language of Solitude, Page 3

  “You can’t be telling me that you love me less because I’m bringing you bad luck, can you?”

  “I don’t love you less. It’s not about me, Paul. It’s about you.”

  “How am I to understand this? Are you bringing me bad luck?”

  She nodded and said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Christine, but this is ridiculous. How long have we known each other?”

  “One year, three months, twelve days, and”—she looked at her watch—“twenty-two hours.”

  The waiter brought them tea, water, and the soup. They ignored him.

  Paul kissed Christine’s hand. “In that time I have felt happier than I have for a long, long time. The past few months have been some of the best of my life.”

  “It’s not about the past. It’s about the future.”

  “In which you’ll be seized by insanity and murder me?” He had not meant to sound so smug.

  “If you won’t take me seriously we can’t talk about this anymore.”

  “I’m taking you seriously.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I am. The person I can’t take seriously is someone who claims to be able to predict the future.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . because I can’t imagine the stars having any influence on our destinies.”

  “But I believe in it.”

  Paul took a deep breath and exhaled. He wished her bon appétit, took a couple of spoonfuls of soup, and wondered how he could end the conversation. He did not have the slightest desire to discuss superstition and horoscopes. But it was clearly important to Christine.

  “What exactly did he say?” he asked finally. “What makes him think that you could kill me?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  She put her spoon down. “It’s the year of the pig. He predicts that I will get a big surprise. That it will be a difficult year for me. For the business, and even more so for my personal life. That my mother will fall sick and that I will have problems with my son.” She paused and gave him an expectant look.

  “And?” Paul asked.

  “And what? What do you mean? That has all come true!”

  He wanted to say that you didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to tell a woman in her early forties that her mother, who was at least sixty, if not older, would have health problems. And if this woman had a child, which Christine had probably told this man already, it was very probably going through puberty, or just about to. A time when all parents have trouble with their children.

  “What did he say about your father?”

  “That he is dead.”

  The waiter put the eggplant stew on the table and cleared away their half-eaten soup.

  He would have liked to say to her that this statement had a high likelihood of being true, given the low life expectancy of men of that generation, but he hesitated, decided to simply nod instead, and said nothing.

  Christine took his silence as an invitation to tell him more. “He said that a man would enter my life. This man would be very important to me and would get closer and closer to me.” She paused again and looked at him. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Paul had to lean quite far across the table to hear the next few words she said.

  “It will not be good for this man. He will not survive this year.”

  Paul shook his head. “That doesn’t mean that you’ll kill me.”

  “I didn’t mean that I would murder you. It is being close to me that will kill you.”

  “How long is this supposed to last?”

  “For the year of the pig, until the Chinese New Year, the next nine months.”

  Paul leaned back and gave Christine a long look. He wished he could laugh out loud. Or take her face in his hands and kiss her gently on the forehead in the hope that that would be the end of her fears. But the way she was looking at him, the way her dark-brown eyes rested on his, left no doubt that she was serious about this.

  “I didn’t go to one of those booths in Wong Tai Sin Temple and get my palm read for a hundred Hong Kong dollars,” she said, as though she had not yet given up hope that she could convince him. “I went to Wong Kah Wei, one of the most highly respected fortune-tellers in Hong Kong. Every year, rich Europeans and Americans come to the city just to see him, and they pay a fortune for it. He even went to London once to give a member of the royal family a consultation. The only reason I can afford to see him is because I’ve known him for a such long time I pay a special-reduced fee. I’ve recorded his entire forecast so that if I want to I can listen to it anytime and check if he was right.”

  “And if he isn’t? Do you get your money back?”

  It was not the right time to make jokes. She gave him a look of irritation and disappointment.

  “Do you know the story of Oedipus?” he asked.

  “No,” she said curtly. She was clearly expecting him to make another joke.

  “It’s a Greek myth. A seer tells a king that his son will kill him and become a lover with his own mother. To prevent this, the king leaves his baby son out in the open to die, but a shepherd rescues the infant. Oedipus is brought up by a childless royal couple but leaves them when an oracle tells him that he will murder his father and marry his mother. On his journey he falls into a quarrel with an old man and kills him. That man is his father, the king of Thebes. Then Oedipus frees the city from a Sphinx and is given the hand of the king’s widow as a reward. She is his mother. If the king had not listened to the fortune-teller, none of this would have happened. The prophecy was fulfilled because the king took it seriously and tried to prevent it from happening. I suggest that we ignore astrologer’s forecast.”

  “You don’t understand what I mean,” she said, shaking her head. “Your story only confirms to me that each of us has a destiny that we can only avoid by making certain choices. Don’t you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  He looked Christine in the eye. He wanted to say something quite spontaneous in reply, something humorous, in a final attempt to stop her taking the situation so seriously, but he couldn’t think of anything. The longer the silence went on, the louder the question echoed in his mind: How should he, Paul Leibovitz, son of a German Catholic and an American Jew, raised in Munich and New York, unmarried, a member of no religion, in the fifty-fourth year of his life, having had many relationships of different depths and durations, and having experienced a failed marriage and the death of his child, reply? What did he believe in?

  Paul said nothing.

  Christine waited for a reply.

  Justin had asked him once if he believed in God.

  No, Paul had said. I believe in Miss Rumphius. A smile had flitted across his son’s face. The story of Miss Rumphius had been Justin’s favorite book for a long time. A little girl promises her grandpa to do something “to turn the world into a better place.” When she is an old lady she remembers her promise and uses her savings to buy flower seeds, which she scatters on the ground. The next year, the first plants grow. She gathers their seeds and spreads them over a wider area, and soon the neighborhood is filled with a wonderful display of flowers.

  You mean you believe in people who keep their promises?

  Yes, Paul had said to his son. And in people who do something to make the world a better place. Justin had understood what he had meant. Christine, he feared, would think that he was not taking her seriously.

  “I don’t know what you want to hear,” he said, avoiding a direct reply.

  “I don’t understand you. What’s so difficult about my question?”

  “Nothing. But the question of what the meaning of life is occurs more to teenagers, doesn’t it?”

  “Why should that be? It does no harm to take stock now and then.”

  “Okay.” Paul took a deep breath. “I believe in music. In good food. In having a wonderful evening with you—”

 
“I’m not asking what makes you happy,” she interrupted.

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No.” She rolled her yes and looked at her watch.

  He hadn’t meant to annoy her.

  The more he tried to avoid her question, the more uncomfortable he felt. What did he believe in? Not in a god, whatever people wanted to call it. Not in a power that determines our fate. Not in destiny. If in anything at all, then in coincidence. In the arbitrariness of nature. In its unjustness. I’m sorry to have to tell you.

  If Paul was being honest, he had no answer to Christine’s question.

  “I’ll have to take my time to think over it,” he said after a long pause. “Could I try to answer your question later?”

  “Whenever.”

  “And you? What do you believe in? Apart from the stars.”

  “You know what I believe in. In feng shui. In yin and yang. In the power of harmony. I see life as a giant mobile on which different weights are hanging. They have to find their balance, otherwise things don’t work. I believe in fate. I’m convinced that it wasn’t just a coincidence that we met. It was destiny.”

  She looked at her watch again.

  “I could tell you stories about my friends who were told the most astounding things by an astrologer that really came true. But I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time to talk about Chinese astrology with you for the rest of the afternoon. If you want to convince yourself, call Master Wong.” She took a pen out of her bag and wrote a telephone number on a napkin.

  “You know his number by heart?” he asked, hoping that Christine wouldn’t notice the hint of disbelief in his voice.

  “I’ve been seeing him for years. Ask him whatever you like. He doesn’t know anything about you. Maybe he can convince you.”

  She got ready to leave, but Paul stopped her.

  “If I go to him and he tells me that it will be a good year for me, in which my body and soul will not be endangered in any way, what happens then?”

  “I can’t imagine that will happen.”

  “But if it does?”

  “The we’ll have to consult him once more together. Now I really must go.”

  She got up, took the box of pralines and the rose, and gave him a kiss. “I’ll call you tonight. By the time Josh goes to bed. I promise.”

  Paul watched her leave. She turned back one more time at the door, blew him a kiss, and smiled briefly. He could not imagine not being able to see her for the next nine months. All because of a Chinese astrologer’s prophecy. Because the pig wasn’t compatible with the dragon. Or firewood should stay away from water. Or the horse disrupted the flow of the rat. Nonsense. If a visit to Wong Kah Wei was the only way to calm Christine down, then he could submit to the mumbo jumbo.

  He called the number. A woman’s voice. No, Master Wong was not free. Not today. Not tomorrow. The next available appointment was in eight weeks. Paul switched to Cantonese, and a spirited bargaining commenced, at the end of which he obtained an appointment for early that evening at three times the normal fee.

  In his travels in the previous thirty years, Paul had visited soothsayers, astrologers, and card-reading fortune-tellers, sometimes for fun, sometimes out of boredom, or out of curiosity when someone made an especially strong recommendation. In Sumatra, a blind seer of ghosts had warned him never to travel by boat again. In Bangkok, a former monk had been absolutely certain that the lines on his palm showed that an opulent wedding with an Indian princess was in store for him. A Chinese man in Kunming had prophesied great wealth for him in his fortieth year. Paul had listened to all these stories with amusement and not believed any of them. Quite rightly too. He had not become a millionaire, had not become a member of a royal family, loved traveling by boat, and had enjoyed the best of health to that day. Of course, now and then he had heard tales of friends who had been told things by a seer, fortune-teller, or palm reader that had apparently come true just as predicted. Everyone knew such stories from hearsay. Fairy tales, Paul thought. Stupid, silly fairy tales.

  He imagined Master Wong would be an old man with white hair, living in a poky little place somewhere in the depths of Mongkok or Ma Tau Wai. Dim light from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling and a few incense sticks burning in the corner, perhaps with a crystal ball on the table and tarot cards on the side.

  The master received his visitors on the eight floor of the Great Wealth Building on Queen’s Road Central, one of the most expensive addresses in Hong Kong. An elegantly dressed woman of around fifty, Ms. Yiu, was at the reception desk. She asked Paul to take a seat and disappeared into a small kitchen to make tea. The office space was unusually large; a fountain pattered in a corner, and on the opposite wall tiny red fish swam in an impressive aquarium, while the shelves next to it displayed several antique Chinese clay statues. Paul could see the day’s closing stock exchange figures for Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai on Ms. Yiu’s computer screen. There were plus signs flashing in front of the green numerals; it must have been a good day on the markets.

  Suddenly the door opened and a small, gaunt man appeared, looking at Paul in silence. The man’s face looked stern; at first glance, Paul felt that he was facing a bank official who would or would not grant him a loan.

  “Master Wong?”

  The man nodded and gestured to Paul to follow him into his office.

  Stock exchange indices were also lit up on Master Wong’s flat screen. In one corner of the room a set of gold golf clubs was propped against a bookshelf filled to bursting, and on the desk lay books, papers, pencils, a Montblanc fountain pen, and two newspapers, both open. The astrologer had clearly been poring over the results of yesterday’s horse races in Happy Valley. Paul was just about to wonder what he had gotten himself into when he realized that the astrologer was speaking. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but it filled every corner of the room. It was firm and piercing, giving the man an almost mysterious authority that did not fit his outward appearance at all.

  It was not a voice that one wanted to contradict.

  “You know about Chinese horoscopes?” It sounded as though that was a precondition for the consultation.

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me what you want to know.”

  “What the months to come have in store for me. Whether the year of the pig holds dangers for me or whether it will be a good year.”

  “I believe this is about an investment? Property? The right time to invest?”

  “No,” Paul replied, annoyed. “Just in general.”

  “Then I need your date of birth. The place. And the exact time. Do you know the details?”

  “But of course.”

  The man wrote everything down on a large sheet of paper. “I suggest that I tell you a few things about your past. If these things turn out to be correct, I will talk about your future. If I am wrong, then something is not right with my calculations. Then we will end the session. Of course you will not need to pay if that is the case. Is that all right with you?”

  Paul nodded.

  Master Wong started making his calculations. He stood up, fetched a thick, worn-looking book from the shelf, and looked inside it; he pulled out a second book to consult and made further notes. Paul had the feeling that Wong was growing more and more distant from him with every passing minute. He started to feel uneasy. He tried to stop himself from tapping his left foot by crossing his legs and crossed his arms behind his head.

  After long minutes of silence the astrologer put his pen down and looked at him.

  “You moved when you were a child.”

  Paul nodded. Many children did that, he thought, but he said nothing.

  “Moved continent, even.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You moved in early childhood.”

  “That’s also right.”

  “Your relationship with your family was distant.”

  “Yes,” Paul answered, his voice hoarse, his throat dry. He felt like a defen
dant in court, giving replies to a judge.

  “Your parents are both dead.”

  “Correct.”

  “Your mother died young.”

  “Also correct.”

  Master Wong smiled briefly. “You don’t have to confirm every piece of information. I’m not recording your personal details. All you have to do is tell me when I make a mistake.” He paused briefly before continuing. “You married between your fortieth and fiftieth year.”

  Paul inclined his head in a nod.

  “It was your first marriage.”

  “Yes,” Paul said, as if in a trance.

  “You are divorced. You have a child.”

  Paul shifted uneasily from side to side on his chair. He did not want to hear the rest.

  “A son.” The man paused for a long time. He consulted more books and scribbled something on a piece of paper, crossed through what he had written, and wrote something else beneath it. Paul could not decipher the Chinese characters upside down.

  He wanted to say that he had heard enough, that everything the master had said was right, that he could talk about the future now, that he did not want to hear the next sentence. But no words passed his lips.

  The astrologer lifted his head and looked him in the eye. “Your son is dead.”

  * * *

  Paul sat at an outdoor food stall at the end of Stanley Street. It was hot, and his shirt clung to his chest. The sweat was dripping from his chin and trickling down his neck and back. Even his leather belt was damp. He had a plate of fried noodles and a cold beer in front of him. He was still in a daze. Even if he had wanted to, he could not believe the experience he had just had.

  If a stranger had told him this had happened to him, Paul would not have believed a word of it. He wanted an explanation, but he had the feeling that he would not find one. Not now. He would have to search for it. For the second time that day he was in turmoil. Unsettled. Alone.

  It had grown dark, and the foldaway tables and plastic stools around him were almost all occupied. Several cooks were preparing food in large woks. The smell of fried meat, garlic, and onions wafted over to him. All around were hissing sounds and rising steam, and now and then a rogue flame from the cooking fires flared high into the darkness. Four construction workers with bare torsos huddled at the table next to Paul, sizing him up. One of the men raised his glass and toasted him. Paul smiled briefly by way of thanks.