The Diplomat’s Daughter

by Karin Tanabe

  “Take half of this,” said Emi, ripping the chunk of the wet ham apart with her hands, wishing Claire had just waited until the following day.

  “Do you know where the Germans get all this food?” she asked, watching her wrap it in a paper sack that she had brought.

  “They make most of it,” said Claire, tying the bag closed. “They have their own farm, north of the Mampei Hotel. And unlike everyone else in the prefecture, they have healthy animals—pigs, cows, chickens, goats—vegetables and grain.”

  “You know about the farm?” asked Emi, caught unaware.

  “Of course,” said Claire, holding the bread up to her nose and inhaling deeply. “A lot of people do.”

  “Of course,” said Emi, regretting how vulnerable she had been just moments before.

  “Don’t tell the Moris that the food fell in the mud,” said Claire, taking a large bite out of the bread, despite its layer of filth.

  Emi nodded and pushed her bike up the hill away from Claire. She was sure that it was the start of her telling the Moris very little.

  CHAPTER 27

  LEO HARTMANN

  JANUARY–APRIL 1944

  Leo’s green eyes did not open for thirty days. The Chinese doctors at the mission hospital, where Agatha had taken him in a rickshaw, his near-lifeless body bouncing on the wooden seat like a corpse, said that his left lung had collapsed and that his right eye had been so badly damaged that he’d probably lost his vision on that side. It was also possible, they warned her, that he might never wake up.

  Agatha—wearing a white doctor’s coat given to her by one of the religious nurses who had nearly fainted when she’d seen her exposed cleavage—cried for hours over Leo’s broken body the first night. She was scared of everything, she told the medical staff, who came into the bleak room constantly—the hospital, the darkness outside, Leo’s slack, torpid face.

  She’d last been in that particular hospital when her mother died in 1933, she’d explained, hysteria finding her once again.

  “From what?” a doctor asked gently.

  “From misery!” she had shouted. “From this awful city!”

  When she started screaming as blood began leaking out of Leo’s nose like a harbinger of death, the same nurse who had ensured Agatha’s ample assets were covered gave her a pill to make her sleep, which she did, on the floor beside Leo until noon the following day.

  It was not until eighteen hours after the assault by Pohl’s hand that Hani and Max were notified by Agatha—still in her revealing dress and doctor’s coat, makeup smeared across her face like watercolor—that their only son was in the hospital on Zhizaoju Road, barely holding on to life. The grief-stricken Hartmanns stayed by Leo’s side as much as possible, but because their money in Vienna was still frozen, or had disappeared, they had no choice but to depart for their jobs every day. And when they left, Agatha discreetly appeared.

  It was on the thirtieth day in his hospital bed that Leo finally opened his one good eye. He tried to move up in bed, to lift his hands to his face, but his body felt shattered, no longer one continuous line of oxygen and carbon, but thousands of pieces held precariously together by bandages and gauze.

  “Agatha,” he said, but no sound came out of his mouth.

  He stayed still, closing his eye again for several minutes. When he opened it, he saw a nurse was in his room, and deciphered that he was in a hospital.

  “You are in the Bethel Hospital,” she said to him, her face full of relief. “Can you see me?”

  “Yes,” Leo whispered when she removed a tube from his mouth, this time hearing his weak voice.

  “Good. You’ve given us quite a scare, especially with your eyes,” she said, coming closer to him. “You’ve been here a month, you know.” She put her small hand on his bandaged one. “Your friend, she is still here watching over you,” the kindly nurse said motioning to the hallway, but Leo couldn’t turn his head to follow. “She is a German, but her Chinese is very good. She can even scream in our language.”

  “What happened to my other eye?” said Leo, when the nurse started to inspect his face again. He was sure she meant Agatha, but feeling so much physical pain, and so suddenly, he could only think of himself.

  “We’ll have to find out,” she replied. “Right now it’s bandaged. I’ll call in a doctor who can take the dressing off. Perhaps.”

  The senior doctor tending to Leo did take off his bandages, wanting to run a series of tests to see if Leo had any vision left on his right side.

  “May I have a mirror?” Leo asked him when his face was uncovered.

  “First tell me if you can see anything at all,” said the Chinese doctor, Dr. Zhou, in accented British English. “Open your eye, very slowly.”

  “Is it open?” Leo asked, skeptically, feeling as if his skin was breaking apart.

  “It is,” the doctor said, leaning in and looking closely. “Can you see anything?”

  “Nothing,” said Leo, his throat constricting over the word. “Some dim gray light.”

  “And the other eye?” asked the doctor, with a strong headlight focused on Leo’s face.

  “I can see . . . my left eye seems fine.” Leo moved his hand up slowly, only making it to his neck, but the doctor stopped him.

  “We’ve been without you for a month. Don’t try to stretch too much, not just yet. Take it very easy but let’s not give up hope yet about your right eye,” he said. “Your vision may get better over time. The rest of you certainly will. But, to be very honest,” he said, motioning to Leo’s face, “it isn’t very pretty to look at now. And then we must talk about your worst-case scenario, which is that your sight may be compromised.”

  “Blind,” said Leo, the word sticking dryly in his throat.

  “Yes, you may be blind in your right eye for the rest of your life,” said Dr. Zhou. “But luckily we have two eyes, and you will learn to see with just one.”

  “Could I see my face now?” asked Leo, not feeling like he could believe what the doctor said until he saw his reflection. Dr. Zhou first ran a series of tests, but when he deemed Leo strong enough, he had a nurse bring a mirror.

  “Why should it be today?” she asked him, holding the mirror behind her back. “You just woke up. Maybe tomorrow is the better day.”

  “Today is the right day,” said Leo, motioning to her. She positioned the glass for him and looked away as he looked into it.

  He wanted to ask her if it was really him, but of course it was. His other eye was still green as springtime, but the rest of his face was unrecognizable. His cheeks were thicker from the bruising, he had a long scab on the side of his mouth, crusted as thick as pie, and a stitched-up wound along his jawline, the black thread looking like it could barely keep his skin together. Leo turned his head slightly and saw that his right ear was bent and the skin just below his neck was covered in fading bruises. Leo had been told about his lung, but he was sure that even without the collapse, he wouldn’t be able to breathe at the sight of himself.

  “It will all heal,” said the nurse, trying to comfort him. “Your face, your body. Dr. Zhou says that your eyesight could improve, and even if it doesn’t, at least it’s still in its socket, where it should be. You must focus on the fact that you are alive. We were very worried that there was irreparable brain trauma and that you’d never wake up.”

  Leo nodded, trying to be thankful for the outcome. “I hit a German SS officer,” he said, still looking at his eye, which refused to look back at him. “Unfortunately, he hit me harder.”

  “Next time,” said the Chinese nurse, “hit a Japanese.”

  * * *

  For the first two weeks after he was dismissed from the hospital, Hani didn’t allow anyone in the apartment other than Max and the medical staff. Liwei had given them money to have a nurse help during the day, but he’d also relayed the fact that Agatha was desperate to care for Leo.

  “I don’t think so,” Hani had said firmly, assuring Agatha that she would be able to
see Leo again in time. And she was, when Leo prevailed on his mother that it could be no other way.

  “She is the reason that this happened to you,” said Hani, crying in their apartment on a February morning. “That my beautiful Froschi is . . . is what? Blind?”

  “I’m not blind,” said Leo, comforting his mother, who still looked so out of place in her cheap dresses, pacing the cramped, frigid apartment. “I’m partially blind.” Though he was as anxious as his mother was about his state, he tried not to show his unease to his rattled parents, and tried to focus on healing and placating them.

  “That’s still blind,” said Hani, leaning her head on his shoulder and holding him as if he might float away. “I hate the way your eye just sits there still, like a marble. Oh Froschi,” she said, starting to cry, a daily activity for her since Leo was injured. “All this way and then you are attacked by an SS officer. Here. In China!”

  “For the last time,” said Leo, sitting up slowly, his ribs still feeling bent backward, “I attacked him. Felix Pohl. I left Liwei’s on my own accord and chased him and Agatha through the streets. She is not to blame; she even tried to stop me. But I wanted to hit him, so desperately. From the moment I saw him in Liwei’s, his hands on Agatha, wearing that uniform in this city, something just took off in me. I was not going to let the night turn to day without attacking Pohl. It was something bigger than being rational or irrational; it was me finally doing something about what happened in Vienna.”

  “But why?” asked Hani incredulously. “We fled Vienna, only for you to chase after danger here?”

  “Aren’t you hearing me?” asked Leo, starting to wheeze.

  The Hartmanns had urgently wanted to take Leo somewhere other than their apartment to convalesce in, as winter had only exacerbated their leaking ceiling with mold. Their neighborhood was so crowded that there seemed to be residents falling out the windows.

  “I hit him for you, for me, for our abducted factory manager, for what they did to Father in Vienna, for what they are doing to our relatives, our friends. That is why I attacked him. It wasn’t just for Agatha.”

  “Oh, Leo. I didn’t raise a foolish boy, a brute carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. We don’t even know what they are doing in Europe,” said Hani, frustrated. “We are so isolated from the news here.”

  “The Nazis? Come, Mother,” said Leo, motioning for her to sit with him. “We have a pretty good idea, don’t we?” He knew Hani read the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, which was printed in German and distributed to the community.

  “I still blame the girl,” said Hani, her arms around her son again.

  “You must stop,” said Leo, peeling her away from his torso. “Pohl would not have hit me if I hadn’t followed them. I’m to blame, only me. Don’t you understand, after all our years away from Vienna? I had to win at something. Just one thing.”

  “Is this how you won?” she asked, looking like she didn’t know what to do with her arms if they weren’t around Leo. “By going blind?”

  “I’m alive, am I not?” he said, exhaustion starting to get the better of him. “I wouldn’t be if I had done the same thing in Austria.”

  “No, you would not be,” said Hani sighing. She threw her hands up in frustration and turned to leave for her piano lessons but stopped at the door.

  “I only say this for you, Leo,” she said, pausing.

  “Say what?” he replied.

  “Agatha can start taking care of you instead of Meifen,” she said of the nurse who had been tending to Leo during the day. “We’ve accepted enough of Liwei’s money.”

  With Hani’s reluctant permission, the days went from Leo being fussed over by a caring nurse, to Leo being warmly embraced—flesh-to-flesh when he had grown strong enough—by Agatha Huber.

  The return of his health—and of his lust for Agatha, finally played out on his makeshift bed—moved in with the spring. Shanghai was coming alive again, with the death toll from the cold and starvation beginning to decline. News of the Red Army pushing the Germans out of Crimea was bringing a ray of hope to the Jewish residents of Shanghai.

  Leo and Agatha, who themselves were restricted to making love during daylight hours, spoke of the war, but more often, spoke of each other, and eventually, of them together.

  “The night you first came to work at Liwei’s, I thought you were the funniest thing,” said Agatha. It was the first hot day of April and she was stretching her bare legs out in the apartment that she’d become a fixture in. As Leo’s bruises had gone from blue to yellow, and his eye had stopped aching, Agatha’s guilt—which Leo assured her was misplaced—started to wane. Joy, and an appreciation of their time together, firmly took root. “I remember the expression on your face,” she continued, “like a ten-year-old boy who had no idea that such things went on. The dancing, the sex. Liwei and Jin were oblivious to your shock, but we, all the girls, noticed. It was a welcome change,” she said, smiling and showing off her pretty teeth. “Innocence and Shanghai seldom go together.”

  “I didn’t look that surprised, did I?” said Leo. He wanted to blurt out that he had lost his innocence long ago, many times over with Emi, but compared to the men Agatha was used to, he was exceptionally green.

  “You definitely did,” said Agatha laughing, her body wrapped in Leo’s worn-out bedsheet and nothing else. “The girls all used to call you luchik. It means sunbeam in Russian—but we say it to mean sweetheart, or baby.”

  “I’m offended,” said Leo, laughing. He grasped for his chest, which was still strained by sudden movements.

  “Don’t, luchik,” said Agatha, trying to get him to lie down. “Your poor lungs.”

  “You’re making me laugh,” said Leo, taking her arm and pulling her next to him. “But I bet that SS officer never laughs again. Not after being punched by a Jew and losing you.”

  “He never had me,” said Agatha, reaching for Leo’s bare torso, as thin as it was during his first year in Shanghai. “Not in that way.”

  “But in the other way,” said Leo jealously.

  “Yes, in this way,” she said, touching his body. “You’ve known that since the day Pohl walked in. Jin told you. He’s a bigger gossip than any of the girls at Liwei’s.”

  “Is he?” asked Leo, who never noticed any of Jin’s faults. “He told me because he knew how much I would care.”

  “Because you’re Jewish?” Agatha asked, her hand moving to Leo’s face. “And Pohl . . . is not,” she added.

  “Is not!” said Leo, pulling away from her. “Felix Pohl is an SS officer. That makes him not only not Jewish, but actively trying to eradicate an entire race of people.”

  “He never spoke about it to me,” said Agatha, apologizing. “I left Germany many years ago. I was a child. I didn’t pay attention to any of the political talk.”

  “And you don’t pay attention to it now, either?” asked Leo, surprised by Agatha’s ignorance.

  “A little bit,” she said. “Of course. But I don’t care that you’re a Jew. I care that you are being persecuted, that you had to leave Austria, but your religion doesn’t bother me. I haven’t believed in God in a very long time. It makes my job easier.”

  “I doubt your job is ever easy,” said Leo, trying to understand what it would be like to be so far removed from Nazi Germany. Agatha had spent most of her life in China. Perhaps that’s why she went so easily with Pohl, he mused. Or perhaps it was just different if you weren’t a Jew.

  “What I do at Liwei’s—and after—it’s shameful. I know it is,” said Agatha quietly. “But it pays, and I’ve been on my own for eleven years now. I’ve told you before—I first came to Shanghai when I was ten years old, after my father died. My mother followed a British missionary here. It was a terrible idea, but she was a woman who was always enticed by terrible ideas. When she died in ’33, and I was a teenager alone in Shanghai, I lived with the help of the church for a few years, but they could only do so much.”

  “So, Liwei,” said Le
o, who understood well the choices for women like Agatha in their city.

  She nodded and he watched her rub the edge of the dirty sheet with her painted fingernails, like a security blanket. “I never went to high school. Instead I just learned English working in the church that the British ran. As for Chinese, I guess I learned that in the street. Speaking both languages helped me at Liwei’s, far more than a high school diploma would have.”

  “Shanghai is an education in itself,” said Leo.

  “To say the least.” Agatha closed her eyes and put her hand over Leo’s bad one, as had become a habit for her. “I turned twenty-five this year, but this city makes you feel much older.”

  Perhaps a romance of some sort was inevitable, thought Leo, his fingers running down Agatha’s bare leg. He hadn’t been with another woman since Emi and night after night Agatha had been there, right in front of him, in her low-cut dresses, embodying male desire. But in the privacy of the Hartmanns’ dark, charmless apartment, without her hair done or her lips painted, Leo liked her even more. He liked the control she had on her life, how hardship of any kind didn’t seem to diminish her. By April, he realized, she had become a whole person for him—and, he hoped, he had become more than the boy who ran after her.

  “I have to go to work,” Agatha said sadly, standing up and putting on her clothes.

  “Don’t dance with anyone,” Leo protested, propping himself up on his elbows to watch her. His field of vision was cut off, but no one needed two eyes to see how beautiful Agatha was in a state of undress.

  “I could lie and tell you I won’t, but what choice do I have?” said Agatha, stepping into her pants.

  “None,” said Leo, remembering Jin’s words to not judge Agatha too harshly. “But I have to say it.”

  “Fine. Let’s pretend that I won’t,” she said, bending to kiss his forehead. “And in two weeks, you’ll be back,” she added, as Leo had announced that he would return to Liwei’s on the first day of May.