Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  She had taken to following their conversations with her eyes more than her ears. In the weeks leading up to his departure, he was easily excited, but on their last night together, he was quiet. The weather had grown cold and damp. They were lying in bed. It was late at night. “You want to stay, don’t you?”

  Mohr looked away. “I don’t know what I want.” He said it as if the choice were between this house in the country with goats and chickens or a tobacco shop in the city selling lottery tickets and magazines. “You can’t run away from the times,” he said at last. “You can only turn your back.”

  “Is that what you’re doing? Turning your back?”

  They went to Munich together and said good-bye at Stachus. Mohr didn’t want to say good-bye at the station, bundled up against the cold, struggling with luggage and waving his final wave to them from the train. In the end, he just wanted to get it over with, and carried himself as if he’d developed new muscles in his legs. Käthe felt as if she were just recovering from something. When they said good-bye, it was with the feeling that they’d never loved one another more than at that moment. Or ever would. Mohr turned and walked away quickly, gripping a bag in either hand, leaning forward with his hat slipping back on his head, overcoat flapping, unbuttoned. He stopped at the station entrance, turned and waved, then disappeared through the doors and was gone.

  It is brisk now, and dry. Your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. A refreshing breeze blows from the north, the direction of the lake. High up in the forest, elk are calling. It is mating season, and the hills reverberate with their lowing cries. Should you go back in and continue looking at photographs? Or put them away? It’s not an easy thing to decide. What right do you have to intrude into their lives like this? How can you presume to be so intimate? Or is it simply the past you are looking at—empirical, true, and over? You don’t know what to do. The further back one goes, the more blurred the days and years of a lifetime become until, finally, it merges into the homogenous infinity of not-being.

  There you are.

  What was the past before photography? Was it easier to face when there was nothing to look at?

  Shanghai

  Aseries of loud explosions awakens him shortly before dawn. It is followed by a barrage of naval guns from the flotilla of Japanese warships in the Whangpoo. Mohr sits up in bed, rests his chin on his knees listening to a symphony of air-raid sirens, clattering machine guns, and antiaircraft fire. Yesterday a stray shell landed in the middle of Yates Road. He was on the other side of the Settlement when it happened, overseeing the transfer of medicine and supplies from a hospital being evacuated in the war zone. The time might have been better spent at Lester Hospital, but Timperly wouldn’t risk losing a whole truckload of free medicine, and Mohr was dispatched with a Chinese driver and a Sikh NCO to fetch the precious and perishable cargo to safety. It took eleven hours.

  He gets out of bed, marches across the room, and lifts the telephone from its cradle. He pauses before putting it to his ear, as if his hesitation might miraculously restore the dial tone. It doesn’t. He’ll have to wait until later to find out how the night went for Agnes. With a glance at the cluttered mess on his desk, he lifts the cloth from Zappe’s cage, lights a cigarette, and steps over to the window.

  It is just after five o’clock. In thirty minutes the curfew will end. There is something reassuring, if also surreal, about the sight of the deserted street below. A bunker of sandbags has been built in front of the apartment building, a snail-shell shape, open at one end. The rickshaw pullers have turned it into a sort of staging area from which they dart across crowded lanes of traffic.

  He opens the window. A sudden breeze blows the ash from his cigarette. He steps on it. A bizarre voyeurism has overtaken the city, combined with a peculiarly British civic-mindedness. Yesterday a cartoon by Sapajou in the North China Daily News mocked Shanghailanders as camera-touting tourists flocking to their rooftops to watch “fly fly eggs”—pidgin for bombs—fall from the sky. In the same edition was a notice from a local housewife on how to keep tomato juice, unrefrigerated, for up to a week (lemon juice).

  He picks up Käthe’s letter.

  The distance between us seems greater than ever, darling. You’re so difficult to reach and the mail has become so uncertain. The birthday telegram did come through. Thank you so much. At least I know you’re still all right. I can’t imagine what you must be going through. It’s impossible to get much of an impression from the newspapers. Are you working as a doctor? You’ll laugh at the question, since there must be nothing but wounded and war and every sort of horror. Are you allowed to help? As a German, I mean? I so desperately want to be there with you now, if only so you can tell me that there was once something pure and true between us. It could turn out that we’ll never see one another again, or that you love another woman—I don’t know where I’m going with all this—just tell me that something lives within us that was once beautiful and real, okay? Tell me, if ever we see one another again, that there will still be this connection, apart and separate from everything else. I sound dumb now. Pardon. I enclose photos of Eva, but for all I know this letter will be lost somewhere on the border of Manchuria, or be burned. Now you’re surrounded once again by grenades and exploding bombs. When will I have news? Everyone here asks about you, but I don’t know myself! How far we’ve been driven apart! You are all I can think about, and how close we once were. Now there is nothing but silence. I feel so peculiar today. What we had was real and beautiful and unforgettable, wasn’t it? Tell me you think so, too. We are fine. Eva is big and strong and happy. There is nothing left in Germany that would interest you. We hope that the war ends soon. God protect you from illness and war and want. I can’t think of a single happy thing to say today, nothing to make you smile. I don’t know why. You’ll just have to take this letter as is, okay? K.

  He folds the letter and puts it aside. Once again, everything and nothing has changed.

  Returning from Japan six weeks ago, he had stood at the railing of the Satroclus and watched in amazement as a Japanese destroyer fired shell after shell into the skeleton of the Chapai Power Station. Agnes and the other five passengers who had come on the British boat from Nagasaki were belowdecks. Mohr chose to ignore the warnings of the officer in charge and came up for a look at the devastation that had been wrought in the short time they’d been gone. Japanese warships were arrayed up and down the Whangpoo as far as the French Bund. The flagship, Idzumo, was dressed for war and hulked in the middle of the river. They passed close enough that he could see its sandbagged sides, its bridges strung with hammocks, and even make out the shapes of individual soldiers pointing antiaircraft guns to the sky. A sudden burst of gunfire erupted from one of the cruisers lying alongside the Idzumo. He dropped into a crouch behind the rail and watched in disbelief as machine gunners fired on a tiny flotilla of sampans trying to cross the river about three hundred meters upstream. Spurts of water erupted in ever crueler arcs until the fishermen, heaving their oars, swung their little boats around and headed back toward Nantao.

  He retreated from the railing in a crouch, his stomach knotted tightly, his shirt soaked in sweat. The punc punc punc punc of the machine guns continued. He returned below. Agnes was in one of the tiny galleys on the lowermost deck. Her eyes were closed.

  “I’ve never felt so sick,” she groaned.

  She had been crying. The sound of engines and the dull, gray-metal atmosphere made talk unnatural. He brushed the hair from her cheek and she made room for him on the narrow berth. He lay down beside her, drained by the ordeal of the last thirty-two hours, but also suffused with the exhilaration of having made it safely back.

  His thoughts drifted to the little cottage on the gently sloping hill just above Lake Yamanaka—another cosmos, entirely. He’d never felt more out of touch. They’d arrived late at night, been shown to the cottage by a lantern-toting porter from the New Fuji Grand Hotel, which owned a string of cottages on one side of the lake. On tha
t first morning, he woke up slowly, gradually taking in all the new sounds and fragrances. The waxy light filtering into the room through paper screens was like nothing he’d seen before, soft and opaque and also clear and transparent. He slipped out of bed and went to look out the window. “There it is!” He couldn’t contain himself. “Fujiyama.” The mountain rose up across the lake. Right out of a dream. Agnes tugged the sheet over her shoulders and sat up. “Come look,” he insisted. “There it is. We’re going to climb it.”

  She smiled, shook her head. “First things first,” she said.

  He left her to get dressed, went outside and stood on the cottage’s front stoop in his undershirt and shorts, exhilarated by the sight of the mountain, the fresh morning air.

  Later that day, on their first ride around the lake, he felt a similar exhilaration. It was the freedom to go—and to be—wherever he pleased. As they stopped to take in yet another magnificent view of Fujiyama, Agnes said, “Hiroshige painted right here where we are standing.”

  Mohr was embarrassed not to know Hiroshige. “How did you learn to ride so well?” he asked.

  “My father taught me.” She flicked the reins and trotted off. He watched her round the bend, feeling strangely, wonderfully disoriented. The day was hot and humid, but the air along the lakeshore was refreshingly cool. They rode in silence for a long time, Agnes leading several paces ahead. Mohr’s exhilaration began to fade; his freedom began to feel dubious, counterfeit. Was it right that he was here with her? How was it wrong? He tried to think of Agnes and Käthe as spokes meeting in the nave of a wheel—and himself as the hollow hub, the empty place on which everything turned.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, feeling right away that his evasion somehow violated the serenity of the setting. They’d gone nearly halfway around the lake and it was time to decide whether to continue all the way around or turn back. Mohr patted the animal’s dusty neck. “Let’s stop for a rest.”

  They dismounted. Mohr tied the horses. Agnes took the camera from the saddle pack and made some photographs. They were a short distance above the lakeshore, in a small meadow surrounded by a dense thicket thrumming with summertime: calling songbirds, chirruping cicadas. A carpet of wildflowers spread out in all directions, buzzing with bees and fluttering with butterflies. The horses grazed, flicked their tails. Agnes walked down to the water. He lay down in a soft patch of grass, closed his eyes, and drifted off, feeling transient and singular, like a passing cloud.

  Some time later, Agnes returned. She sat down in the grass beside him, holding a bunch of wildflowers she’d picked. “I like the sapphire ones,” she said, slipping a stem from the bouquet and offering it.

  He rose on his elbow, accepted the tiny flower. “Do you know the name?”

  She shook her head. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  She gazed out across the lake from under her hat. The hunting-club outfit she had on seemed oddly out of place in this landscape—creamcolored jodhpurs, tightly wrapped leggings, and a white summer shirt. He put his arms around her and kissed her, then lay back down in the grass. “I’d like to come back here,” she said. “Right here. To this very spot.” She looked down at him. “I’m going to do it. I’m going to come back to this exact place every day.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day.”

  “I’m sure there are other places that are just as nice.”

  “But here, we are exactly halfway.” She pointed to the cottage, just visible among the trees directly across the lake. “And being halfway, the farther away we ride, the closer we come to home.”

  Mohr laughed. “The same way that if you keep going east, you eventually end up in the west?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”

  It wasn’t until evening, as they sat together on the steps of the cottage, that he began to understand what she meant. The night air was humid but cool. A mild breeze. The moon rose in a yellow sliver over the lake. He sipped his tea, slowly rolling the perfectly turned porcelain cup between his palms. Rolling and sipping, rolling and sipping. He became conscious of the touch of her thigh against his—sitting on the narrow step, unsure what closing this half-distance would mean, and if it were even possible.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “I don’t know,” was his answer for the second time that day. Another evasion, but also a truthful reply, one that needed no clarification. He reached for his cigarettes and stood up, walked a few paces into the shadows, beyond the cottage’s lamp glow. “I haven’t heard silence like this for a long time.” He remained in the shadows, taking in the cozy lamplit cottage silhouetted against the night sky. Agnes bent forward and stubbed out her cigarette, scattering the glowing embers back and forth until they disintegrated in the gravel. Then she stood up and went inside, leaving him feeling suddenly shuttered in and grown over by vines.

  His sense of isolation seemed to grow rather than diminish during the weeks they spent together, as if each were seeking the other on a plane beyond everyday life. It had been that way with Käthe, and with Lawrence in the end, too: a contradictory sense of intimacy and isolation that somehow resolved itself into something beyond, and possibly other than, friendship. Mohr thought of Lawrence frequently in Japan. They’d met almost exactly ten years earlier, on a bright October day in 1927. A broad terrace in Baden-Baden. Lawrence had been waiting for him and waved at an empty chair. “Frieda has left me here and gone off for a nap.” He said it the way an old man might rue an inconvenience. “I have never understood why people insist on sleeping during the day.” Then he fixed a look on Mohr, his aqueous eyes neither smiling nor frowning but radiating illness and frank appraisal. His red beard was freshly clipped against his hollow cheeks. “Sit down,” he said.

  Mohr sat. He immediately felt too large, was embarrassed by his brand-new tweed jacket, and his good health. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, clasped and unclasped his hands self-consciously. Lawrence had answered his letter immediately, which had caught Mohr off guard, made him feel as if he were being granted an audience. He wasn’t certain if he should take the initiative and begin a conversation, or simply sit and admire the view, as Lawrence seemed content to do.

  A deer emerged from the wood and began to graze at the far end of the lawn. “How tame,” Lawrence said and coughed, passing his fist across his mouth as if repressing something foul. More deer emerged from the wood. “Eden is so badly lost,” he went on, watching the deer.

  “Lost or tamed?” Mohr ventured.

  Lawrence thought for a moment, then said, “The question is not only how to prevent suburbia from spreading all over Eden, but also how to prevent Eden from running into a great wild wilderness.”

  “I would not mind Eden returning to wilderness.” Mohr came forward in his chair. “Where can you find real life in all this goddamned civilization?”

  Lawrence put his fist to his mouth again, but did not cough. “Are you married?”

  “And I have a daughter named Eva.” Mohr smiled. “Speaking of Eden.”

  Lawrence did not return the smile. “I meant are you happily married?” The question was neither offhanded nor intended personally.

  Mohr paused to consider his answer. “When I am in my little house in the mountains, all I can think of is getting out. And when I’m away, all I want is to return.”

  Lawrence cocked his head. “I have always said that the Eden between a man and a woman has always been a matter of either love or of understanding. It can never be both.”

  Mohr was puzzled, not certain he understood what Lawrence was saying. He recalled the quasi-platonic flavors in Lawrence’s books, terms such as sex-circuit, the idea of separate beings perfectly polarized, a cosmic duality that was not the result of a broken, fragmented whole but, rather, the singling away into purity and clear being of things that were mixed. He was tempted to quote this, but was constrained by
self-consciousness and the feeling that it would have the wrong effect.

  “I don’t think I can agree with you,” he said at last. “But maybe we use the words differently. I would say that love and understanding must always go together—and I am not thinking of Kant, but of my wife and child.”

  “Herr Doktor, let’s be honest. Understanding comes always at a price. It is very difficult to preserve one’s central innocence without becoming bitter. Especially in a relationship between a man and a woman.” Lawrence frowned. “Love and understanding? I don’t know anyone who has managed it—and anybody who claims to have is a swindler or an idiot.”

  A period of silence fell. Mohr felt strangely weakened. All the heightened sensibility, all the infirmity. The Kurgäste came and went on the terrace, elderly ladies, mostly. He was surprised to find this radical Englishman so comfortable amid all the Bürgurtum. Lawrence sputtered once or twice, ever on the verge of eruption. At last, Frieda appeared with the announcement that it was time for his Inhalationskur. She was bright and friendly and simply dressed, a lapsed aristocrat, whose airs Mohr was all too familiar with. A web of family connections had gotten him there, and he found himself immediately at ease with her.

  “These cures will kill you,” Lawrence grumbled to no one in particular. “Really, in Baden one ought to be at least seventy-five years old, and an Exzellenz, or at the very least a Generälchen. The place is such a back number.”

  Mohr chuckled, suddenly at ease, and at last found his balance describing his life in the mountains.

  “It sounds lovely,” Lawrence said. “I haven’t been in Bavaria since before the war. Isartal. It was lovely.”