Читать книгу Mohr - Frederick Reuss - Страница 7

He lives in the Yates Apartments, at 803 Bubbling Well Road. It is a modern, semicircular building, eight stories tall, with an elevator and a curved facade that billows out dramatically in the front but from the side gives the impression of having been chopped in half. Mohr’s fifth-floor apartment overlooks the street, but even at that distance, there is no escaping the clamor of the pavement. He likes to stand at the window, smoke, and watch the traffic streaming below: screeching, honking, banging, billboarded Bubbling Well Road.

It is a warm July morning. A young mother is waiting for him with her sick baby. According to Wong, she waited on the doorstep for most of the night. It isn’t the first time a patient has waited all night to see him. Visiting hours are clearly posted on a sign downstairs in Chinese and in English. If he’d known she was there, he would certainly have tended to her right away, but Wong enforces the office hours strictly and will fetch him only in an emergency.

The headache he had when he woke up is gone. Given how little he’s been sleeping lately, it’s a wonder he doesn’t walk around all day with temples throbbing. He enters the examination room. Together with the waiting room across the corridor, the clinic comprises exactly half of his apartment. The examination room has plumbing; plenty of towels, too, which he takes great pains to keep in clean supply. How Käthe would smile at all the well-ironed towels.

He washes his hands at the basin with glances over at the woman. “Nee gin tee’en how sheeay mo?” he asks in the phrasebook Mandarin he uses with uneven success. “How are you feeling?” he repeats in English, but the woman won’t answer, or even look directly at him.

Diphtheria. He’s almost certain of it. The third case in two days. How will he explain to the poor woman that she should go directly to the isolation hospital on Shantung Road? He looks up at the clock on the wall, a gift from Vogel, who helped him procure the examination table and just about everything else he’s managed to acquire in the last two and a half years. He likes to joke that he’s the lowest-overhead doctor in the International Settlement, and can’t count the number of patients he’s seen, much less keep track of his rates. They vary from patient to patient, visit to visit. Yesterday began with a Russian hemophiliac. The man claimed all his money had been in the American Oriental Bank, the collapse of which had been reported in the North China Daily News only the day before (“Surely you read about it, Doctor. Please understand!”). Then came a Chinese man with gout (two dollars), and an anemic Chinese lady who wanted to gain weight (promised to pay seven dollars). Next a German with tropical eczema, known locally as Hong Kong Foot (paid three dollars). A Persian gentleman with liver trouble agreed to come every day for eight days (paid five dollars in advance). Then an Austrian with dysentery (complete rogue, paid nothing); an Indian with gonorrhea (paid three dollars); Chinese, insomnia (paid five dollars); Dutch, migraine (promised four dollars). In between, telephone consultations with three Chinese and one Spaniard, who spoke French and promised payment by courier (no show).

He gestures toward the examination table. The woman is a child herself, sixteen years at most. She is wearing a smudged voile blouse. He detects a faint whiff of perfume. A singsong girl from a nearby bordello, perhaps? Gently, she lays the baby on the examination table. He feels the infant’s hot little feet and arms.

“Hou tung? How long sick?”

The mother doesn’t answer. He touches the baby’s swollen throat, holds the stethoscope against the tiny chest and listens to the infant’s heartbeat, glancing up at the nervous mother with the preoccupied doctor’s mien that hints at consolation without actually offering it. Since returning to medicine, he’s had to retrain himself not to feel, to keep his eyes fixed on the frail human surface of things. It goes against his nature to do so, but that he has finally succeeded is oddly comforting.

“Sheeay bing? Diarrhea?” He squeezes the baby’s belly gently, and knows the answer even before the mother can shake her head.

“Sin kau tung?” He draws his thumb from abdomen to esophagus. “Vomiting?”

The mother shakes her head again and says something he doesn’t understand. He can’t distinguish much between Wu, the Shanghainese language, and the other Chinese dialects that swirl around him every day. He has trouble enough understanding the local pidgin, his own attempts at which usually go uncomprehended. “Four day,” she murmurs, holding up four fingers.

He finishes the examination and gestures for her to take the baby from the exam table and sit down. She presses the infant to her breast. “Four day no chow,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Please, wait,” he tells her, and leaves the room to think.

In the bedroom he fills Zappe’s dish with seed. The mynah was a gift from an elderly Chinese patient he had treated last year for opium addiction. A caged bird? The poor creature’s wings had been clipped. He called it Zappe after the character from his play Improvisations in June. And the little black bird speaks—pidgin! No can do, no can do. He’s taught it some German, too—Brüderlein fein, Brüderlein fein.

It is getting hot, the air damp and heavy. It rained all June, but nothing compared to the heavy floods of two summers ago, when 200,000 bodies floated down the Yangsee. He puts Zappe’s cage on the windowsill. The bird bobs its head, ruffles its feathers. He lights his first cigarette of the day. Three Castles, usually. Chesterfields “when there is company”—as the enormous new billboard across the road proclaims. A row of idle rickshaws stands against the curb, the pullers gathered around a steaming tea cart. Yesterday he had photographed a young mother on the sidewalk feeding her child from a dirty bowl, shoveling scraps of food into the little mouth with chopsticks. He’d treated the child some weeks earlier for scarlet fever and was pleased to see it so well recovered. The rickshaw pullers laughed as he took the pictures. He clowned for them a little, dropping to one knee, then standing up; backing away, then coming forward to snap a quick set of pictures. There is something comforting about the mask a camera provides: the photographer’s intentions so plain to see, yet also inscrutable. Standing at the window now, he can hear the voices of the rickshaw coolies blending in with the steady roar of traffic. Vogel is always urging him to move, find someplace quieter. He has offered to lend whatever money it will take; an old China hand, as the British say. But Vogel isn’t British. He’s a Jew from Berlin, and displays all the affectations of having lived in Shanghai for too long, most notably a big Packard, an armed driver, and a mysterious web of connections reaching like tentacles up and down the social ladder.

Mohr glances at his watch. He’s due at the Country Hospital on Great Western Road at eight o’clock. Finishing there, he’ll go straight to Lester Hospital on Shantung Road and work there until two. The hospital work is an important supplement to his income from the practice. Shanghai is crowded with doctors of every nationality, but the Germans all want Aryan doctors. “A Jewish doctor getting started has only so many options in this city,” Vogel explained to him the very day he arrived. “In Shanghai it’s scrape scrape scrape, friend.”

And that is what Mohr does. He scrapes and supplements and spends half of what he needs on the practice and loses half of what he manages to send back to Käthe through transaction fees, inflation, and other rogue factors. It’s ridiculous—both what he needs and what he’s able to send. He needs clean towels and linen and medicine and cotton bandages, too. But how to explain to Käthe, to whom he managed to send only two hundred dollars last month, that he now has a car? Does he really need it? Bussing and rickshawing to and from the hospital was exhausting. He hates to complain and accounts for every last dollar in letter after letter.

He finishes the cigarette and returns to the woman, whose baby is probably going to die. She is sitting where he left her. He squats down, holding on to one arm of the chair for support, and looks directly at her. “Diphtheria.” He pronounces the word slowly, as best he can in English. He doesn’t know the Chinese word for the disease but assumes it’s more descriptive than Corynebacterium diphtheriae or KlebsLöffler. The ethereal vocabulary of medicine has always been difficult.

The woman stares back, uncomprehending.

“Wong!” he calls, and stands back up.

Wong appears almost instantly.

“Catchee car, Wong.”

“Car bottom-side, Master.”

He slips the stethoscope from his neck, goes to the sink, and begins to scrub. Speechless and cold, the woman holds her baby in her lap. He glances at her, then down at his stained white coat, his cracked and spotted brown leather shoes. The pipes chatter when he shuts off the water. He wrings his hands—once, twice—over the basin, dries them with a clean towel. The woman is watching. Without really looking, she is watching; in watching, she is telling him she knows there is nothing he can do. Nothing. He drops the towel into the laundry bin. It isn’t the small, measured movement of the herbalists he has observed in the old Chinese City, rich with age and patience, but just the crumple, crumple, snip, snip of modern medical practice, so big and powerless it makes him want to whistle.

THE COUNTRY HOSPITAL is for foreigners only, but 1937 has been a good year for epidemics and overcrowding is forcing an uneasy egalitarianism on all Shanghai hospitals. In early June, the Country Hospital began admitting Chinese cases of scarlatina, meningitis, and diphtheria. Seventy-six at last count. As of a day ago, seventeen have died. Over at the Chinese-only Shantung Road hospital, 2,412 cholera cases have been admitted since the first of the month. As of yesterday, 735 have died. Mohr can’t help taking note of these numbers. Statistics have never interested him much, but life in the International Settlement is nothing but numbers: commerce, nationalities, frightened people.

The car makes its way through morning traffic. Mother holds her baby tightly, pressing herself into the farthest corner of the backseat. Mohr sits silently, taking in the view. Rickshaw traffic, roadside commerce. Tea, rice, sugarcane, watermelon and sunflower seeds, candy, fruits, vegetables, full-course meals bubbling on kerosene stoves, ear cleaners (who keep him supplied with a steady stream of patients with infections), astrologers, letter writers, tailors, beggars, monks, cripples. Red silk banners hang from every shop front, billboards and neon lights in every direction. The war in the north has not altered the pace of the city. Every morning he scans the headlines in the North China Daily News. He would like to meet the mordant White Russian cartoonist who signs his name “Sapajou.”

Cigarette smoke curls up between his fingers. He glances again at the young mother and her baby and suddenly recalls a dream he had had the night before about Wolfsgrub. Very detailed. He flew over Tibet, swooped down over the forest edge, and landed. Everything was very still. He stood on the hill looking down at the house. The meadow was plowed. Everything as it always was—and very, very distinct. Eva wasn’t there. She was in school. The sofa stood before the front door, the old green one. Käthe had just finished cleaning. She was wearing a kerchief, and the dog was lazing on the ground. Sunshine, plowed earth on the high, steep fields, and blue delphinium, row upon row of them, top-heavy, in full bloom. His shoes grew heavier and heavier as he walked downhill. Käthe was dusting the sofa and looked up but didn’t see him. His guilt became overwhelming as he drew closer. He told himself that now everything would be good again. He’d come from Tibet, run back home. Wutzi growled. As he took Käthe in his arms and saw her blue eyes shining, he woke up. Wong was standing there with the morning paper and tea and warm milk. His clothes were laid out; the bath water was running. Outside, the sound of an argument on the street, some rickshaw pullers from Yates Road, moving in on the ones who are regularly encamped here . . .

WONG OPENS THE car door. The mother glances nervously across the vast plateau of backseat, unsure, then steps from the car, clutching her bundle. Mohr leads her past the two Sikh policemen standing guard at the front entrance to the nursing station on the first floor. After a brief flurry over what to do, he watches as the young woman and her baby are taken through the doors and into the isolation ward. She glances over her shoulder just as the doors begin to close. He smiles, offers a halfhearted wave, feeling that, perhaps, his skills of dissociation have been developed a little too far.

Then upstairs to Nagy’s office. The Hungarian pediatrician manages the staff of part-time doctors who work at the hospital. It has been two weeks since Mohr has received any salary. Nagy is in his office. “Good morning,” he says without looking up. A compact man in his midfifties, bureaucratic in the old-school manner. His upper lip, though always clean-shaven, seems to bear the shadow of a large Balkan mustache. If he has never worn one, perhaps he should start. As Mohr waits for Nagy to finish writing, his eyes wander to the wall of photographs that have interested him from the first day he called here. They are arranged in four rows of five, in identical black-lacquer frames. Dead trees. Nothing else. Just dead, leafless trees. As Nagy finishes the note, he begins talking about a refrigeration crisis and the problem of evaporating ether. Then, suddenly, he breaks off, opens a drawer in his desk, and takes out a book. “Your novel,” he beams. “Die Freundschaft von Ladiz. Would you do me the honor of signing it?”

Mohr is too surprised to answer.

“I got it at Kelly and Walsh. They ordered it directly from Zurich.” Nagy smiles, offers the book.

Mohr flushes, red heat in his cheeks, his ears. He turns the book over, reads the description on the back cover: A mountain-climbing adventure, a story of heroism and friendship. Then he shakes his head and places the book facedown on the edge of the table. “No.” He shakes his head again. “Thank you, but no.”

Nagy is taken aback. “But I thought you would be pleased to know that your books are still available.” A nervous smile. “Personally, I would find it an honor to have my work banned by the Nazis.”

Mohr glances at the book once again, then at Nagy. “I don’t know,” he stammers. A rising anger, a familiar and unwelcome lack of clarity. He fingers the handle of his medical bag, feeling unsteady and somehow trapped, regards Nagy for a moment longer. Then, with sinking calm, he mutters, “I’m sorry,” and strides out of the office without another word—down the corridor, down the crowded, narrow staircase, through the front doors, and out into the full heat of day. “Shantung Road hospital,” he tells Wong as he climbs into the backseat.

Driving through the crowded city, the big Ford V8 feels excessive, big enough to house an entire Chinese family. He has always felt conscious of taking up too much space here, rushing about, tactless and not quite welcome. It is hot. He lowers the window, takes the little ivory fan from the side pocket of his medical bag, begins to fan himself. Beautiful little objects, fans. In one of his first letters home he drew a picture of one for Eva, with pagodas and dragons and promises to take her out to find one for herself the moment she arrived—of paper or bamboo or ivory, painted and carved and decorated and hanging in roadside stalls all over the city. And moonstones—because anything that falls to earth from the moon brings good luck, little Eva. And noodles. And bean sprouts. He smiles at the thought of Eva using chopsticks. It is something he still can’t do himself, in spite of several attempts, and Wong eager to demonstrate. “No b’long plopper, Doctor. No can do.” Food dribbling down his chin, he persisted until the front of his shirt was completely ruined. Wong laughed and shook his head. “Doctor no b’long Shanghai side.”

He is right. Doctor no b’long Shanghai side. Mohr’s temper subsides as he flicks the little fan back and forth near his cheek, takes in the tree-lined elegance of Avenue Foch. Dr. Mohr no b’long.

THE LESTER HOSPITAL for Chinese, generally referred to as the Shantung Road hospital, is one of the oldest in Shanghai. Twice a week, Mohr treats a steady flow of outpatients in the “chit clinic,” where, upon presentation of a signed note, free treatment is given to the Chinese employees of foreign-owned firms whose contributions support the hospital. “The coolie hospital” is the other name, and an accurate description of the medical work he does here, setting fractured limbs, suturing the wounds of godown porters, dock workers, and other manual laborers.

He heads straight to the second-floor ward, taking the stairs two at a time and hoping, as he does every day, not to run into Timperly, the hospital superintendent. The corridors of the old building are narrower and dingier than those at the Country Hospital. The way the light filters in through the tall, north-facing windows, and these furtive daily arrivals, reminds him of school, the old Königliches Gymnasium in Würzburg.

“Dr. Mohr!” Timperly calls up the stairwell. The black bag feels like a dead weight as Mohr turns and waits on the second-floor landing. “You’re here early,” Timperly says. Mohr is about to offer an explanation, but Timperly cuts him off. “We’re closing the pediatric ward.”

“Closing?”

“We’ve taken in forty diphtheria cases since yesterday. There are no more beds and we’re out of antitoxin.”

“I saw one this morning. Mother and child.”

Timperly takes this in. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any more antitoxin until tomorrow.” He looks at his watch. “If you don’t mind a little change, I’d like you downstairs in the emergency room. Nurse Simson will assist you for the day.”

“If that’s where I’m needed.”

“That’s where you’re needed,” Timperly quips back. His manner has always been distant, professional, which is either a general antipathy toward Germans or latent anti-Semitism. Or, maybe, both. Timperly’s manner hasn’t changed since the day he had walked into Mohr’s practice and announced he wanted to hire him.

“What brings you here, to me?”

“We’re always on the lookout,” Timperly had explained. “Anyone willing to treat poor Chinese. I’ve heard your clinic spoken of. You treat for free.”

“That’s not exactly correct.”

“Excuse me. According to ability, of course.”

“According to willingness would be more accurate.”

“I can offer you a small salary. Not much, you understand. But at least it’s something.”

“I will do it,” Mohr said straight out.

“If you need some time to consider.”

“Not necessary. I will do it.”

Timperly didn’t hide his surprise. “I appreciate a man who can decide things quickly,” he said. “I don’t think you will regret it.”

Mohr lit a cigarette and smiled from behind the curtain of smoke. “Purple plums, yellow melons, the village roads smell sweet,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“From Su Tung Po.” He gestured to the window, still smiling. “I am always surprised by all this city offers, the sights and the smells.”

“Ah, I see. You are a student of Chinese poetry.”

“Not really,” Mohr said, enjoying the difficulty the Englishman was having in taking his measure.

In eighteen months the measure-taking has not ceased. Mohr follows Timperly to the emergency ward. His scruffy red hair is uncombed, and in his wake Mohr detects a faint odor of unmetabolized gin and tonic, that drink the British here are so fond of. In the emergency ward, Timperly introduces Mohr to nurse Agnes Simson, then excuses himself and hurries off.

Mohr stands aside as the nurse finishes removing the bandage from a man with a deep gash in his leg. “He was run over by a truck unloading cargo,” she says over her shoulder, then steps aside, invites him to examine the wound.

“His son was hit, too,” she explains. “They were carrying a large crate and didn’t see the truck coming.” She is in her midthirties, with black hair and dark eyes that seem on the verge of cheer, but somehow only on the verge. She talks as Mohr examines the leg. “Disgraceful conditions. Landing piers, godowns. Nothing but death traps.”

Mohr nods agreement. She is Anglo-Chinese, and he immediately feels they have something in common. He can’t say exactly what it is, beyond the assumption that she must also feel herself to be something of an outsider.

“How long ago was he injured?”

“He came in this morning.”

“The leg is already becoming infected. It must have happened some time ago.”

He stands aside as she prepares a new bandage. When it is ready, they work together, cleansing the wound with carbolic acid. The man lets out strangled gasps and sucks air between rotting teeth. Although he can’t be more than forty, his face is dark and leathery, deeply lined. When he tries to sit up, Nurse Simson pushes him gently back down onto the cot.

As Mohr finishes cleaning out the wound, another nurse appears. Her name is Chen Siu-fang and he has noticed that she comes and goes from the hospital by car and driver. She is young and pretty. Her bearing suggests a class element that Mohr can only guess at.

“Excuse me,” she says politely, then whispers something quietly to Nurse Simson, who winces and shakes her head.

“Is something wrong?”

“His son has just died.”

Chen Siu-fang excuses herself and hurries off. Mohr glances up the row of cots as Nurse Simson pats the man’s brow with a damp cloth, carefully refolds and places it on his forehead, then resumes bandaging. He notices the finely articulated bones of her hands, how she concentrates on her work as if attending to some inherited custom. By her hands he can see that she is older than she looks. She finishes wrapping the leg, then turns and asks, “Will you tell him, Doctor?”

“Me? But I don’t speak Chinese.”

“Tell him in English. Or German, if you like. I’ll translate.” She begins clearing away the blood-soaked cotton.

“May I ask why?”

She stuffs a bundle of dirty bandages into the metal pail underneath the rickety instrument cart and turns to Mohr with a careworn look. “A few minutes ago I said his son would be fine. It was the only way I could get him to calm down and let me look at his leg.”

The man senses something as Mohr steps up to his side, touches his forearm lightly. “Es tut mir sehr, sehr leid,” he begins, then switches to English. “I’m very sorry, but your son has passed away.”

The man stares, uncomprehending, then looks to Nurse Simson, who speaks to him softly in Chinese. He regards her for a moment, then turns away. Tears well up; he shakes his head from side to side. Mohr touches the man’s forearm again, lingers for a moment, and steps away from the cot. Nurse Simson remains with the man while Mohr moves to the next patient, trying to collect himself.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she says, catching up some moments later. Mohr glances at the man, who has covered his eyes and is weeping into the crook of his arm. It isn’t the first time he has had to break such news, but every time feels like the first time. He is about to say this to the nurse, then realizes by her look that he has just done so.

“How old was he?”

“Eleven or twelve.”

“My daughter is twelve,” Mohr says all at once, then stops short. Nurse Simson acknowledges his sudden embarrassment with a smile, and sets straight to work on the next patient.

For the rest of the morning he follows her ward to ward, cot to cot, patient to patient. A thirty-minute rest at midday, then they resume work in the afternoon. Very little passes between them, but he observes her closely. The way she tilts back the head of a semiconscious man by pressing the heel of one hand against his forehead, then pinching open an eyelid with her thumb; the way she unwinds a bandage with rapid circular twists of the wrist. By late afternoon the air on every floor of the old building is stifling. He pats his forehead and neck with his handkerchief, pauses here and there, embarrassed to be slowing down. In spite of open windows and ceiling fans slowly turning overhead, his shirt has become damp with perspiration and clings to his back.

The nurse shows no sign of being uncomfortable, even seems privately amused to see him flagging. In response, Mohr begins speaking to her in the clipped manner that he has always found so offensive in other doctors. Scissors. Tape. Hypodermic. Then, as they are examining a young boy with an inner-ear infection, he is suddenly nauseated. Short of breath.

“I need to sit down.”

“Oh my, Doctor. You are pale.” She guides him to a small chair at the end of the ward and sends for water.

“Do you have any aspirin?”

She rummages through the pockets of her smock, produces a small packet.

“For him.” Mohr points to the boy, leans his head back against the wall, and loosens his collar. Ears ring. Darkness closes in from the periphery. A metal cup is placed in his hand. He lifts it to his lips. How wonderfully cool and good it tastes.

“Would you like to lie down?”

Eyes closed, overwhelmed, a feeling of things incomplete.

“Doctor? Are you all right? Would you like to lie down?”

He shakes his head.

She tries to take his pulse, but he pulls away, then swoons trying to stand up too quickly. She helps him back down onto the chair. “I’ll get a doctor to come look at you.”

“No, no. Please. Not necessary.”

“But a doctor…”

“I am a doctor!” He has felt this nausea and shortness of breath once or twice before, but each time it has passed quickly and been forgotten. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Already, he feels himself returning to normal. “I’ll just go home and rest.” He stands, without difficulty this time. “Would you mind telling Dr. Timperly?”

She nods.

“I can’t bear to,” he adds wryly.

“Let me help you to your car.” She takes his arm and they make their way through the ward together, ignoring the curious glances of staff as she guides him down the stairs and out the main entrance. With collar unbuttoned and bow tie hanging untied from his neck, he feels like one of those senile old men always getting lost in the corridors. There is something grimly amusing in being escorted out of the building like this. He is pleased by the way she has taken his arm. The way she is holding it. Holding him. Would it be pathetic to make another joke? The aged cavalier?

It’s humid outside, and the smell of car exhaust is thick in the air. The sky is overcast. The rain, when it comes, will be heavy. “Are you sure you are all right, Dr. Mohr?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Thank you.” He can feel his strength returning.

“Where do you have your car?”

He points across the street. The car is parked virtually on top of a small sidewalk fruit stand. Still holding his elbow, she walks with him to the curb. As they wait to cross the busy street, he asks how long she has worked at the hospital. She seems surprised by the question. “Ten years,” she says.

“How is it that you came to work here?”

She looks at him as if the answer should be obvious. “I had no choice.”

Mohr works to interpret the remark, then grins and says, “Me neither.”

When they arrive at the car, Wong begins to argue with the fruit seller over who will have to move. Mohr is in no hurry, and eases himself slowly into the rear seat. She hands him his medical bag, which he hadn’t realized she has been carrying all along. He accepts it with a sheepish smile, puts it on the seat next to him. Wong closes the door. Mohr fumbles slightly as he slips a damp card from his pocket and passes it through the window. “If you would like to visit sometime. To see my clinic.”

She inspects the card, one side printed in English, the other in Chinese. “Thank you. I would very much like to see your clinic, Dr. Mohr.”

“Low shun low shun.” Mohr smiles, deploying his best phrasebook pronunciation.

“Bitte schön, Herr Doktor. I hope you feel better.” She smiles and waves as the big black car merges into the throng of traffic flowing out of the old Chinese part of the city.

Avenue Edouard VII, Avenue Foch, Thibet Road. The crowded streets shimmer in the late-afternoon heat. The tightening in his chest has eased. He is tired and needs to sleep. Should he have let her fetch a doctor, let himself be looked at? Dozing in the back of the car, Mohr recalls a day eight years ago when the Lawrences were visiting. An urgent note came from Frieda: Lorenzo is going to die. Come immediately! Mohr followed Hartl, the little boy whom Frieda had sent to fetch him. It was a crisp autumn morning. They marched along the dirt path that cut across the valley. The sun had just broken over the eastern ridges, casting long shadows in the damp grass. Kaffee Angermaier was directly across the valley from Wolfsgrub. The sunny southern side, a very pleasant spot, fifteen minutes away. Mohr had been so happy when Lawrence said he was coming to visit that autumn. “I’ll tell you when to tune up the accordion,” he wrote.

Hartl skipped ahead, swatting fence posts with a stick. Mohr tried to send him home, but the boy was determined to deliver his charge in person. Frieda was waiting for them. She hurried out the door in a breathless panic. “He is going to die,” she gasped. “I was just in his room.”

They ran up the narrow staircase and paused just outside the bedroom door. Then entered quietly.

The room was filled with morning sunlight, curtains and window wide open. Frieda hurried to the side of the bed and beckoned to Mohr. Lawrence was lying under a thick pile of down. Mohr squatted beside the wooden-frame bed. Suddenly Lawrence’s eyes sprang wide open. He turned his head. “Ha!” he chortled. “I know just what you have all been thinking!”

Ha ha ha. A short while later they were sitting downstairs in the dining room, eating breakfast.

“When are you going back to Berlin?” Lawrence wanted to know.

Mohr shrugged and rubbed the stubble on his face. “I don’t know. I was thinking I’d stay here a little longer.”

“So you are enjoying yourself, then! That’s very good. The man who likes to buzz around.” He fixed a look on Mohr, a look that had come to be a trademark of their friendship—a murky imputation of unhappiness. “Come with us to France. I know a wonderful place near Marseille. We were there last winter. Good, and cheap.” He slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “You don’t have to be in Berlin to buzz, Mohr. You should know that.”

Mohr returned Lawrence’s look. “For your information, I’ve been buzzing all night. If it wasn’t for your emergency, I would be home sleeping right now.”

Lawrence laughed. “I can’t help it if Frieda gets a shock every time she looks in on me. It was she who sent for you. And you who were out carousing.”

“I was not carousing. I was delivering a baby. The woman’s husband was the one carousing. I sent for him four times!”

“He never came?”

Mohr shook his head. “He staggered in drunk just as I was leaving.”

Lawrence broke into a hearty laugh and quickly dissolved into a fit of coughing and gasps of “Marvelous! Marvelous!”

Later that same day, they were sitting outside at Wolfsgrub. Eva bounded around in the grass with the dog. A warm afternoon, basking in the sunshine. Frieda and Käthe were discussing the water in the moss-covered rain barrels in front of the house. Käthe said it tasted better than spring water because it came from the sky. Frieda said it should be used only for washing and the garden. Lawrence reached into his pocket and handed Mohr a piece of paper. “Apropos of the new father this morning,” he said, smiling.

Good husbands make unhappy wives: so do bad husbands, just as often; but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

Just as Mohr had finished reading, Eva came racing toward them, leaped into Lawrence’s lap, nearly sending him over backward.

“Eva!” Käthe reprimanded in a stern voice.

Eva held up a fistful of wildflowers, gentians. Lawrence accepted them with a smile, then stood up. “You must show me where you found these,” he said, and they toddled off into the meadow together.

“Do you think it’s all right?” Frieda asked when they were out of earshot.

“Is what all right?”

“Should I tell him to keep his distance? He’s infectious.”

Käthe looked to Mohr. He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. “No harm can come from Lorenzo,” he said and went inside, knowing it was not true and wanting, suddenly, to be alone.

BEING ILL DOESN’T suit Mohr. On the other hand, it suits him just fine. Strange how the same verb applies to infirmity and desire: a passing illness, a passing fancy. When transitory states become permanent, do they also become malignant? Is being in love different from being sick? Or being in exile? Cliché questions.

He should ask Käthe.

No, he shouldn’t.

Is something wrong with his heart?

Mohr manages to remain in bed reading until just after nine o’clock, when Wong announces the first patient. After Mohr sees the man—a Russian with advanced cirrhosis—the Clinic Closed sign is put out and he returns to bed. By midday he is restless and uneasy. He feels wide awake, just fine. There’s nothing wrong, no need for prolonged idleness, so he reports for his regular shift at Lester Hospital—only to discover it is Nurse Simson’s day off.

The rounds go smoothly enough. Nevertheless, he can’t help feeling a mild disappointment. He tries his best to ignore it, but it’s not easy, and by the end of the afternoon Nurse Simson is still very near the center of his thoughts. No, she is not a thought, but a well-veiled feeling. How strange to want to fend it off, like trying to hide from oneself. Somehow, he feels compromised. Yet what has he done?

On returning home, he is surprised to find Nagy waiting outside the apartment building. He steps from the shadow of the front entrance. “Good evening, Dr. Mohr!”

“Good evening,” Mohr stutters, glancing at his watch. Embarrassed, he grips his medical bag tightly.

“I owe you an apology.”

“And I as well.”

“No, no,” Nagy insists. “You have every right to be angry for not having been paid. Checks were supposed to have been delivered by now. It was thoughtless of me to ask for a personal favor under the circumstances.”

Nagy’s apology comes as a surprise. “I hope I haven’t given you a shock,” he says and delivers a gregarious pat to Mohr’s shoulder.

Mohr loosens his grip on the bag. “I don’t get many visitors.”

“I came to invite you to tiffin.”

“Tiffin?” An odd gesture. Mohr glances up at the windows of his flat. Accepting invitations is awkward. He doesn’t go out to eat very often. It isn’t just a question of expense. Mainly, he prefers his modest diet and Wong’s cooking. He’s never been an adventurous eater and lately has been putting on weight, has had to let his trousers out twice in the past year. Bread, cheese, a cutlet. For salad, a tomato and cucumber, lightly peppered. He’s also come to enjoy Wong’s preparations of rice and vegetables, sprinkled with soya. Wurst from the German butcher on Hankow Road is one of his guiltiest pleasures. It is stupidly expensive, but their bratwurst is almost better than back home.

Nagy produces an envelope from his pocket and offers it. Mohr accepts with a nod of thanks, slips it directly into his pocket.

“I took the liberty of advancing you next month’s salary. There is so much uncertainty these days.”

It takes a moment to register. A month, plus the two weeks he is owed, comes to nearly seven hundred Shanghai dollars. Not counting the diamond in Vogel’s safe, this is more wealth than he’s had on hand since his arrival. “Come upstairs with me,” he says. “I must first see if any patients are waiting.”

He leads the way up the dark staircase. The sign on the door reads: Dr. Max Mohr, M.D. General Practitioner, Specialist in Nervous and Mental Diseases, Homeopathy. Fumbling with keys, he describes the overflowing wards at the Shantung Road hospital. “The situation is severe. No medicine. Not even ether.”

An agitated Wong pulls open the door—“Cheu kan kan! Cheu kan kan!”—and points to the open examination room.

A man is lying doubled up on the floor. Mohr kneels to examine him and immediately recognizes his neighbor from downstairs. He has been badly beaten, is bleeding. There is no odor of alcohol on his breath, nor does he seem under the influence of opium. He is young and Jewish—from Frankfurt, Mohr guesses. To call him shy would be an understatement. Mohr has spoken to him only in passing on the stairs.

“What happened?”

The man groans. His nose lies flat across his face, eyes badly swollen. Nagy rolls up his shirtsleeves, helps the man onto the examination table, then holds him down firmly as Mohr cleans the blood from his face, sets the broken nose. “You may have a fractured skull,” Mohr tells the man in English when he is done. “You should go to hospital for observation.”

The man shakes his head. “No. No hospital,” he sputters back in English.

Mohr switches to German. “You could have a concussion,” he says. “Let me take you to hospital.”

The man shakes his head, gets down from the table. He is unsteady on his feet. His face is raw and badly swollen. Mohr feels a sharp pang of recognition and regards him carefully, knowing all he cares to know. He’s had enough of this story and that story, his story and her story, the whole seasick world floating in an ocean of hate. His skin has grown thicker here, and he admits to being used to it, used to the way life here rubs up against life, a blur of struggle. Sometimes he wishes he’d accepted the offer to work in the mission hospital at the Tibetan frontier station. High up in the mountains. But is there any place beyond trouble? The rickshaw coolies here drop dead of heat prostration in summer and freeze to death on the streets in winter while he tries to keep his shirts clean, gives injections, sets limbs, pumps stomachs, and writes letters home to Käthe.

“Do you know what happened to you?”

“Bandits,” the man says somewhat unconvincingly.

“Then we must call the police.”

“No!” The man shakes his head, touches his bandaged nose.

Nagy turns away with an exasperated shrug.

“Can we at least help you down to your flat?”

The man refuses.

“Do you know him?” Nagy asks when the man has left.

“Only in passing. He came in January.” Mohr remembers seeing him in the Chocolate Shop down the street, and was a little surprised to see him sitting at the counter, calmly reading a book in the midst of a throng of noisy English children. A birthday party was under way with cake and candles. For a moment, he felt the strongest urge to join it.

A SHORT WHILE later, Nagy and Mohr are sitting in the Wing-On rooftop garden restaurant, at a table with a view up Nanking Road toward the Bund. It is cooler up here than down at street level. The red-tiled floor glistens with water, sprinkled by little boys who pass between the tables carrying brass pails. Wet tiles, a cool breeze. The lighted tower clock of the Customs House—Big Chin—dominates the nightscape. Nagy orders tea and some rice and dumpling dishes. “Have you been up here before?” he asks.

“Never.”

“It was the first modern department store in Shanghai. Built just after the war.”

“Like KaDeWe in Berlin.”

“Exactly,” says Nagy. He becomes serious. “I would like to apologize again for yesterday. I feel absolutely foolish.”

Mohr sips his tea, finding the lacquered splendor of the bustling rooftop restaurant a pleasant diversion. The waiter places some dishes on the table.

“They are pork dumplings. A little like Leberknödel.” Nagy picks one up with his fingers, pops it into his mouth. Mohr follows his example, and chews slowly, nodding approval. Delicious.

Atop the Customs House, Big Chin’s six-ton chime erupts. The bell tolls, the city blazes. Off the Bund, the river is littered with ships and junks and sampans of all sizes. On Soochow Creek, boat traffic is at a standstill. Mohr begins to relax in a way he hasn’t been able to for a very long time. He imagines bringing Käthe and Eva up here and ordering these same dumplings and tea, showing them how to enjoy this big, exotic Oriental city. Nagy summons the waiter for more food and starts to talk about the recent visit to Shanghai of the German minister to China, Trautmann. “Just horrible,” he says. “Hitler Jugend and Bund Deutsche Mädel marching through the streets.”

Mohr had seen the pictures in the newspaper. “I thank god every morning that I don’t have to worry about the Roman Empire.” He smiles wryly, helps himself to another dumpling.

“That martinet! Did you see how he looked? Hair dangling in his eyes. Like he shares Hitler’s barber!”

Yes, he’s seen all the photos, and ignores them the way he ignores all the other things he struggles daily to put out of mind. A fresh breeze blows across the rooftop, on it a profusion of fragrances—food, tobacco, eau de cologne. He is only half-listening to Nagy, and sips his tea, letting his eyes wander to the other tables scattered among the inlaid lacquer screens and potted plants. The lushness is a little too metropolitan for his comfort, but he enjoys it all the same, and feels no compunction to talk. Why should he? It feels good not to be a talker, for a change. One of the unique aspects of life in the International Settlement is the way people make themselves over from the very moment of arrival. A curious and very rapid process.

Nagy is still talking, his mouth full, eating and talking. The incident that morning seems distant. So does the bout of nausea at the hospital yesterday. “Vacation,” Nagy is saying as Mohr’s eyes fall back into place.

“Excuse me? I didn’t catch the last part.”

“A vacation,” Nagy repeats.

Slightly addled by the strong tea, the buzz of talk, Mohr reaches for his cigarettes. A stylish couple at a nearby table has attracted his attention. The woman looks very familiar, but he can’t place her. A movie actress? Perhaps. Broad-shouldered, with hat fashionably cocked on her head, confident of her effect on the room. The man is older, slightly paunchy and gray. Mohr feels oddly displaced by their presence. “Vacation?”

A smile crests at the corners of Nagy’s mouth. “When did you last have a rest?”

Mohr eases back in his seat. “I can tell you exactly. It was between October and December, 1934. Aboard the Saarbrücken. Seven weeks on the open sea.”

“And since then nothing?” Nagy calls the waiter. “I’m having a whiskey soda. Will you join me?”

He glances again at the movie couple, feeling suddenly impelled to alcohol. He hardly ever drinks anymore. “Why not?” He lights a cigarette with a nightlife flourish, inhales deeply. “May I confide something?”

“Of course.”

“I came here to begin a new life.”

Nagy smiles. “Like everyone, I assure you.”

“I also came here to earn a living. As a doctor.” He puffs on the cigarette, taps the ash into the little porcelain dish at his elbow.

“Don’t tell me you’ve stopped writing!”

The formulation is slightly irritating. He doesn’t quite know how to respond, except with a shrug. “It’s more basic than that; something more fundamental.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Imagine this.” Mohr rocks back on his chair as the waiter sets the drinks down. “You are trying to escape. From what, exactly, you don’t know. You lack words to describe it, are totally bewildered. You come down from your mountain and see a huge, modern city in front of you, which you recognize as the place where all your contemporaries live. You realize that you no longer belong to a natural world. But you also don’t belong to the mass of humanity that lies before you, the big, noisy city. You stop and sit down to rest, pluck a handful of thyme from the ground, rub the leaves between your fingers, sniff. You can still smell the delicate aroma. But is it the same aroma that your ancestors, or even your parents, smelled? No. It isn’t. Something has disrupted a once clear relationship. You glance back at your mountain. Should you return? Give up on this expedition to the city? You can’t. A dark, heavy Nothing lies between you and all the things of nature. You can’t escape it, and there is no turning back.”

Nagy leans forward, taking in this flight of fancy. “Go on, go on.”

“So, you head down to the city to see what’s going on. You decide you would rather give yourself over completely to that dark, heavy Nothing, would rather experience complete, total alienation, than deceive yourself with false connections. So, forward march!”

“Into the city?”

“Into today! The middle of the century!” Mohr stops and glances around, aware that his voice is carrying, but also enjoying himself.

“So you’re saying this is a bad time for writers everywhere, not just in Germany.”

“Who’s talking about writers? I’m talking about all of us. You, me, those people over there.”

“But you have to admit, for writers times are especially bad,” Nagy persists. “Especially Jewish writers.”

Mohr turns his glass in his fist. “Times are bad for everybody. What matters is whether connections still exist between people, if there is anything left linking people at all.”

“I hope you don’t mind me asking you these personal questions.”

“Personal?” Mohr smiles, shakes his head. “My dear Dr. Nagy, what you’re asking is far beyond personal. You’re asking me to speak to my condition. I’m not sure I can even comprehend it, much less speak to it.”

Nagy considers this for a moment. “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.”

Mohr looks down into his glass. “I feel foolish talking about it.”

“I see nothing foolish in what you are saying,” Nagy objects.

Mohr shrugs, slips another cigarette from the pack lying on the table. “A person like me must live without the will and the shall and the future. It’s the only way.”

“What about your work?”

“The same thing. Without the will and the shall and the future.”

The waiter stops by the table.

“Another?” Nagy asks.

“Why not?” The idea of becoming drunk has taken on a certain appeal. He stares for a moment at the glowing end of his cigarette. “I am a dilettante, Dr. Nagy.”

“You are too hard on yourself.”

Mohr shrugs, removes his eyeglasses and cleans them with an edge of tablecloth. “And I never could keep my mouth shut,” he says at last, taking in the fuzzy lights of the hanging lanterns strung underneath the roof awning, the laughter from the surrounding tables. “Never mind. Plenty of poets have worked for the water bureau.” He smiles, puts his glasses back on. “Let’s not take ourselves too seriously.”

A short time later they are walking together up Nanking Road, very pleasantly drunk, ambling along in crumpled, sweat-stained linen. Mohr’s stride is a challenge for the shorter man, who skips alongside, equally drunk and singing with a strained British accent: On the way to old Nanking! Tibet and far Yunan . . .

A jai alai game is under way at the racetrack. They weave through the evening bustle. Nagy has just told him that he came here in 1927 from Szged, and claims to be a misfit and an outsider. “Like you, Mohr. Just like you.”

“Like me? What do you mean like me?”

“A Jew. Just like you.”

Mohr stops short, inspects his hands, palms up, palms down, in mock panic. “Really? Just like me?”

Nagy laughs, a nasal honk that draws glances. Mohr keeps the pantomime up, light-headed, wisps of the schoolyard. Funny, how he finds himself recalling so much of innocent, cabbage-white boyhood lately. He is dizzy, disoriented, still thinking about the young man downstairs, how he refused help and staggered off like a beaten dog. He’s seen it so often, beaten Jews staggering off, refusing help. Suddenly he feels ashamed, and stops again. A streetcar clangs past.

“What’s the matter?” Nagy asks.

“I don’t much care for all this Jewish talk. Never have. The world would be so much better off if people just stopped it. All this preoccupation with identity.”

“You may be right. But it’s hard to ignore something when it is foisted on you.”

Mohr takes out his handkerchief, pats the perspiration from his forehead, his neck. “Do you know what it is to feel a connection? I can close my eyes and feel a connection. A real connection to everybody whom I have known and even those I never knew—whole families dead and gone. I can see their faces, as if I were looking at their photographs. When I open my eyes again they are gone, and I am all alone. I wish I could be among them always—the living as well as the dead. A true connection. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time. I don’t know where it comes from.” He stops, wondering if what he is saying makes any sense at all. Is it the alcohol? Nagy is looking at him with baffled admiration.

Mohr tucks the handkerchief away. “I will sign the book, Dr. Nagy. I don’t know what it means, but I will sign it.”

Nagy nods his thanks, slightly embarrassed. They continue walking.

“August would be a good time,” Nagy is saying as they finally arrive back at the Yates Apartments. Mohr fishes the keys from his dampened trousers pocket, feels the whiskey evaporating from his skin, smells it percolating on his breath. “There is an American doctor coming from Canton,” Nagy says. “You are free to go as soon as he gets here.”

“Go? Go where?”

Nagy shrugs. “Anyplace you like! To Ching-tao. To the seashore. It’s where everybody goes in summer.”

The idea of going where everybody goes is not at all appealing. Mohr offers his hand. “Thank you. I enjoyed the evening.”

Nagy clasps Mohr’s hand tightly. “You’re no dilettante,” he says, leveling. “I will remember our conversation tonight.”

A gracious nod. Nagy’s sincerity makes Mohr feel foolish. He knows better. The smell of food cooking wafts from the building as he approaches the front door. Before going in, he turns to watch Nagy settle back on the upholstered seat of a rickshaw, then disappear with a wave into the melee of Bubbling Well Road.