by Daniel Kalla
She waved her free hand in front of her. “Solly, sir, my no savvy.”
“Of course not.” The baron sighed heavily. “Where are my manners?” He held a hand out to the scowling SS officer beside him. “Allow me to introduce Sturmbannführer Huber. Major Huber is the Gestapo chief here in Shanghai. He would be most interested in discussing poor Hans’s fate with you and Dr. Adler.”
“What are you saying to her?” Huber demanded in German.
“That you would like a word with Dr. Adler.”
Huber scoffed. “More than just a word, let me tell you.”
Von Puttkamer turned back to Sunny and spoke in English again. “Will you pass a message to the doctor for me?”
“I no talkee doctor no more,” Sunny blurted. “He pay me. I catchee my baby. No more see doctor.”
With surprising agility for a man of his size, von Puttkamer darted around Yung Min. He stopped inches away from Sunny, looming above her and blocking the view of the sky. The scent of his cologne filled her nostrils. When he spoke, his smile was gone. His eyes bored into her. “I think you are still in very close contact with Dr. Adler.” He snorted at Joey. “I wouldn’t be the least surprised if that mongrel baby of yours wasn’t his as well.”
Fighting back a shudder, Sunny shrugged as if all his insults were lost on her.
“You tell that doctor of yours that our business is not finished. Nowhere close,” he shouted, spraying her face with spittle. “Verstehen Sie? You understand?”
CHAPTER 10
According to the clock on the far wall of the ward, the patient died at 5:06 a.m. Given the severity of the man’s burns, the only surprise to Franz was how long he had survived. The man hadn’t closed his eyes all night. They had remained open even in death, until Franz brushed them closed. Franz had never learned anything about the man: not his name, not his rank and certainly not how he had acquired his burns. Franz couldn’t speak any Japanese beyond basic words such as arigatō, kon’nichi wa and sayonara, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he could. The soldier had never uttered a word, even though he had remained alert until the end. At times, he had appeared curious about Franz’s presence, but most of the time, he seemed simply resigned. Franz respected his dignified stoicism, but he had a more practical reason for wanting the patient to hang on, at least until six o’clock, when Captain Suzuki had promised to return. The only instruction the doctor had issued on his way out the door the night before was “Do not let any of them die overnight.”
Aside from a baby-faced soldier on guard, Franz had been alone with the patients once the red-haired nurse, Helen Thompson, had gone to lie down at midnight. She had kindly offered to remain on the ward with Franz, but he saw no point in both of them staying up, since there was little for either to do but administer painkillers. Besides, Franz hadn’t been told where, or even if, he had sleeping quarters of his own.
Earlier, he and Helen had chatted over cups of weak green tea. “The man with the burns,” Franz had inquired. “When did he come?”
“Two days ago.” Helen absentmindedly swept back her unruly red curls. “I don’t know the first thing about him. Not even if he’s a soldier or a sailor. His clothes were burned beyond recognition.”
“The injuries are so extensive.”
“Terrible. I was not expecting Captain Suzuki to do more than order painkillers.” She lowered her voice, even though there was no risk of being overheard by anyone who understood English. “The heavy doses of morphine the captain sometimes orders—he must know that the patients will stop breathing once they have been administered.”
“But he didn’t order any for this patient?”
“Not in the usual dosage, no. Anyone can see the poor man doesn’t stand a chance, but the captain insists on dressing changes and more and more debridement. As though we can somehow replace all that destroyed flesh.”
Eager to change the subject, Franz said, “I once worked here at the Country Hospital.”
“Oh? When was that?”
“From ‘38 to ‘41. Pardon me, Miss Thompson, but I do not remember meeting you here.”
“It’s Helen. And you didn’t.” Her smile was understanding, even amused. “I’ve only been here for a few weeks. I used to be a prisoner at Lunghwa Camp. I ran the infirmary there, such as it was. One day, two soldiers showed up out of the blue and plucked me from the camp without a word of explanation.”
“Are you American?”
“Close.” She smiled. “Canadian. From Toronto. My husband is an attaché. He works for the Foreign Service here in Shanghai. Or used to, anyway. So did my father.”
Franz nodded. “Are there any other Western nurses at the Country Hospital?”
“Only one, as far as I know. Sister Margareta. She’s Swiss.”
“Mein Gott! Sister Margareta is still here?” Franz marvelled, remembering the stern old nurse in her white habit. “I thought she was well over a hundred when I came here five years ago.”
“She’s a hundred and twenty if she’s a day.” Helen laughed. “But I think even the Japanese are too frightened of her to let her go. And God is too afraid to take her.”
Franz chuckled. “With good reason on both accounts.”
“Besides, the Japanese nurses here aren’t really trained as such. The girls have told me as much themselves. They are really only care aides.”
“Are there any other Western doctors?”
Helen shook her head. “You are the first one I’ve encountered.”
Franz still wasn’t certain whether Ghoya had singled him out because of his ability or as a form of punishment. Perhaps it involved a degree of both. “Do you know why the Japanese chose you to work here?” he asked.
“Not because of my nursing skills,” she said, but her laugh was easy. “Aside from the camp infirmary—and that hardly counts—I haven’t worked as a nurse since I left Toronto over four years ago. I came to Shanghai to be the dutiful wife of a junior diplomat.”
“So then …”
“I speak Japanese.”
“Oh. Did you learn it here?”
Helen shook her head. “When I was twelve, my father was posted at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. We lived there for three years.”
“That must have been something.”
“Oh, I absolutely loved it. Everything about Japan. The food, the culture, and especially the people—so polite and kind. In all my time there, I don’t remember anyone so much as raising his or her voice to me. Nowadays …” She sighed wistfully. “It’s as though they were an entirely different race.”
Almost without exception, all Franz had ever known of the Japanese was their warlike nature. But he had seen first-hand in Austria how a refined and cultured people could turn on their own compatriots seemingly overnight. He thought of a neighbour in Vienna, an older widow who had regularly shared fresh tomatoes from her garden with him and Hannah. After the Anschluss, she had only acknowledged them through anti-Semitic mutterings. And Hannah’s cello teacher, who had once been so encouraging of her playing but later refused to “ever set foot inside a home polluted with Jews.”
Keeping the thoughts to himself, he asked, “What do you know of Captain Suzuki?”
“Little more than you do. He’s a talented surgeon, I can see that much. I think he must have trained in America.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The way he speaks, and the expressions he uses. Once, when I dropped a retractor, the captain called me a ‘dumb cluck.’ I had to keep from laughing.” Her smile faded. “But most of the time he treats me as if—” She paused to search for the words. “—I were a piece of equipment. Nothing more.”
Franz cleared his throat and posed the question he had been desperate to ask. “Helen, do the Japanese let you go home after your shifts?”
She squinted at him. “Home, Dr. Adler?”
“I mean back to the camp where your family is staying.”
“I am not in the same camp as my father.”
> “And your husband?”
“Not him either.” Her affable facade showed its first cracks and she looked away. “Both my father and my husband were deemed political prisoners and transferred to Chapei Camp. I haven’t seen them in over a year. I don’t even know if …”
Embarrassed, Franz cleared his throat. “I apologize. I had no idea.”
“Lunghwa Camp is surrounded by barbed wire and dogs. Whatever the Japanese call it—‘Civic Assembly Centre’ or other such doublespeak—it’s still a prison. No, Dr. Adler, that camp is anything but home for me. I live here at the hospital now. I prefer it that way.”
“I see.”
Her expression softened, and she reached out to touch his sleeve. “I’ve never asked to go back. Maybe if you spoke to Captain Suzuki, he might allow you …” But her words lacked conviction, and their conversation soon petered out.
The thought of being trapped in the Country Hospital—with Sunny and Hannah so close and yet so far away, as if they were living at the North Pole—had hung over him like a pall for the rest of the night.
Franz was deciding if he should inform the young guard of the burn victim’s death when Helen appeared on the ward in the morning, adjusting her cap and stifling a yawn. Franz motioned to the dead patient, but she didn’t appear the least surprised. “How do you think the captain will take it?” he asked.
She frowned. “What else could he have expected?”
Franz didn’t have to wait long to find out. Captain Suzuki marched onto the ward at twenty minutes before six with a soldier, a junior doctor and two Japanese nurses in tow. He wore a lab coat over a rumpled blue uniform, and his face was even more lined than it had been the previous day, as though he had been up all night too. Even before Franz had a chance to explain, the captain motioned impatiently to the burn victim. “When did he die?”
“Half an hour or so ago.”
“Were you planning to just leave him there?”
“I … I didn’t know the procedure—”
Suzuki brushed past Franz and stepped up to the bed. He stood there as motionless as the corpse, reminding Franz of the stoic fathers and husbands he had seen at the bedsides of lost loved ones back in Vienna. After a few moments, the captain spun away from the bed and hurled orders in Japanese to his cluster of subordinates. In seconds, the nurses had swaddled the body from head to toe in a sheet and the soldiers were whisking him off the ward. Within a minute, the bed was freshly made and awaiting its next patient.
The others followed Suzuki as he performed his rounds on the ward. He stopped to palpate abdomens and examine under dressings. He asked the odd question of Franz or Helen, but never once did he speak directly to the patients. As he left the last patient, he glanced at Helen. “Is the operating room prepared?” he asked in English.
Helen bowed her head. “Yes, Captain.”
Suzuki turned again and headed off the ward. Uncertain whether to follow, Franz stood watching the others hurry after him, until Helen looked over her shoulder and beckoned him with a small wave.
They convened at the sink outside the operating room. No one spoke. After Suzuki had finished scrubbing, Franz washed his hands with a fresh bar of soap that he imagined could have been made to last a month at the refugee hospital. He donned the surgical gown and rubber gloves that one of the Japanese nurses held out for him. The ache from his broken rib was compounded by lack of sleep, and he braced his chest with his elbow as he followed Suzuki into the operating room. Inside, he felt the room spin for a few agonizing seconds, but the spell was mercifully short.
Franz recognized the man lying on the table as a patient from the ward. According to Helen, his leg had been badly crushed by the wheel of a truck. The mangled limb jutted out from a corner of the bed sheet. One glimpse at the mottled blue leg told Franz that his femur had been shattered and its blood supply compromised. The leg was clearly beyond salvage.
Without a word from Suzuki, the young Japanese doctor stepped up to the head of the bed. He mumbled a few words to the patient, covered his face with an anesthetic mask and began dripping ether onto it. The man was unconscious before the anesthetic’s paint-thinner smell had even reached Franz’s nostrils.
Suzuki held out a gloved hand to Helen, who passed him a scalpel. Standing beside him, Franz lifted a sponge off the surgical tray, preparing to dab at the incision that he was anticipating Suzuki would make. Instead, the captain thrust the scalpel handle-first into Franz’s palm and stepped away from the bed, motioning impatiently at the patient.
As Franz slid into the vacated spot, he repositioned the scalpel between his index finger and thumb. With his other hand, he ran a gloved finger along the bumpy surface of the patient’s thigh, which felt more like wood than tissue, searching for where the skin warmed from cool to body temperature. He finally located the spot, only a few inches below the hip. Franz considered seeking Suzuki’s consent but, recognizing this as some kind of test, dug the scalpel deep into the tissue and began to slice around the thigh.
Suzuki watched in stony silence as Franz sutured the major blood vessels, sawed through the bone and finished stitching the wound shut over the stump where the patient’s leg had been. The captain hadn’t touched the patient or spoken a word during the half hour it took Franz to complete the procedure, and he made no comment afterward.
The nurses transferred the man to a stretcher while a soldier took away the black rubber bag holding the amputated limb. By the time Franz had scrubbed and changed gowns, another patient was lying on the table, anesthetized and prepared for surgery. The opening in the surgical drapes revealed a severe abdominal wound, from which poked a number of catgut sutures from a recent surgery.
Suzuki kept his arms folded across his chest as Helen extended the scalpel to Franz. He explored inside the belly with his other hand, finding multiple metallic fragments inside the wound. He operated more by feel than by sight, cutting away dead tissue, protecting vital organs and blood vessels, and plucking out more sharp pieces of shrapnel than he had ever removed from one person. All the while, Suzuki stood like a statue, offering neither advice nor assistance.
And so it went all morning long. Despite his anxiety over being separated from his family, the throb in his chest and his spiralling fatigue, by the fifth or sixth surgery, Franz realized that he was enjoying practising his craft again. He was reminded of a story he had read as a child about a concert pianist who stumbles across a perfectly tuned grand piano on the desert island where he has been marooned. Like the story’s hero, for a while, Franz was able to lose himself in his passion.
He was standing at the sink for the eighth time that day, wondering why the captain was even bothering to scrub if he had no intention of operating, when Suzuki finally spoke. “You are competent enough,” he grunted. “They were right about that much at least.”
Franz was puzzled but just bowed his head and said, “Thank you, Captain.”
“I merely stated a fact, nothing more.” Suzuki turned away from the running water and locked eyes with Franz. “After today, you will assist me when it suits me and operate on your own when I say so.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Franz repeated to fill the awkward silence.
“Don’t think for one moment that I need your assistance. I do not want you here.” As Suzuki walked away, he added, “And, Dr. Adler, you will never have cause to thank me.”
Back inside the operating room, Franz again felt twinges of light-headedness. He worked at a deliberately methodical pace on the next—and final, according to Helen—case of the morning. As he operated on a shrapnel-peppered arm, the dizziness returned in worsening waves. He worried his legs might buckle or his hands might slip and slice through some vital blood vessel or nerve.
The blunting of his technique wasn’t lost on Suzuki, and Franz could feel the captain’s critical gaze on him. But Franz managed to finish the procedure without incident, though he twice braced himself with a hand and thigh against the table.
I
t wasn’t until the patient had been taken from the operating theatre and Franz was following Helen out that the room began to spin violently. The nausea came seemingly out of nowhere. He reached for any kind of support but found only air. The room tunnelled into blackness. He opened his mouth to tell Helen to turn the lights back on but no words emerged, and he felt himself toppling forward.
CHAPTER 11
I should be home, Sunny thought for the umpteenth time. Her palm was still bleeding where a shard of glass had cut her, but she warily reached her hand back into the wicker box. She dug another bottle free of the sticky mess of broken glass, powder and spilled tinctures.
After three days of posturing—including a threat to “blow the hospital up to the sky,” as Ghoya had screamed at a nurse who had been in his office about an exit pass—the “King of the Jews” had allowed the refugee hospital to reopen. Earlier that morning, soldiers had returned the confiscated supplies, tossing the boxes onto the curb outside the hospital from a moving truck, breaking several bottles and spilling others. A couple of coolies had removed the boards from the front door, but many of the staff and patients were too afraid to return after the raid. Only three nurses and two doctors had reported back to work, including the old dermatologist, Dr. Goldman. Fewer than half the patients had moved back from the heim across the street. Two had already died at the hostel, largely from medical neglect. Even Frau Adelmann, still half paralyzed, had opted to stay in her flat rather than risk another run-in with the Japanese.
Sunny was too preoccupied with Franz’s absence to worry about the soldiers returning. Five days had passed without a word from or about her husband. She missed him so much, she felt she might go out of her mind with worry if it weren’t for Joey. The sight of her baby—even when he woke her at four in the morning crying with hunger—warmed her inside and gave her reason to persevere. She hated having to leave Joey with Esther to go to work these days. And it hurt to think that Esther, who was still nursing the baby, was more essential to Joey’s contentment and survival than she was.
