Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  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, b
oat 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.