Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  “Then you must come and visit me at Wolfsgrub. You don’t have to be a Generälchen, and the mountain air will be good for you.”

  “My sister tells me you are a medical doctor as well as a playwright,” Frieda cut in.

  Mohr smiled. “Which means only that I will play my accordion for you rather than promise a kur.”

  Lawrence lit up. “At last, a man who doesn’t make promises! Oh, I should love to set out with an accordion and turn my back on the world! As soon as this beastly cough goes down, we’ll do it, shall we? To Greenland. Like your Captain Ramper.”

  Mohr laughed, pleased to learn that Lawrence had read his play.

  “With an accordion!” Lawrence continued, then nodded at Frieda. “I’m afraid if there’s a sound of accordions anywhere, the beloved women will not be left behind.” Frieda smiled indulgently, pleased by her husband’s sudden change of mood. Lawrence continued, “If we set out with music and light heels, how can you expect the women to let us go alone? Aspettiamo pure!”

  “We can pretend we are going to a gathering of the international Pen Club,” Mohr joked.

  Lawrence groaned. “How awful!”

  The attendant, who had been standing discreetly aside, came forward with a wheelchair. Frieda touched her husband on the arm. “I can manage by myself just fine, thank you.” He waved away the wheelchair. “I will walk,” he growled and stood up. “I look forward to reading more of your work,” he said, and they were gone, all talk of Greenland and escape and light heels vanished into a tedium of scented vapors, where the poor man was reduced to a paper silhouette of himself.

  The ship lights flickered. Mohr raised himself on an elbow, anticipating a plunge into darkness. Instead, the lights glowed brighter. Agnes was curled next to him, breathing softly. Belowdecks in the warship was a purgatory of artificial light. There were no portals, no openings to the outside. He felt strangely vulnerable and exposed; couldn’t imagine ever actually sleeping inside the steel hull of a warship. Nevertheless, he took off his glasses, held them on his chest, and tried to rest his eyes.

  “What about Käthe and Eva?” Agnes suddenly asked. She rubbed her eyes, a little disoriented, as if she had been dreaming.

  Her question startled him. “What about them?”

  “Do you still plan to bring them?”

  He dangled an arm over the edge of the berth, traced his fingertips along the steel floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He wanted badly to explain his predicament, but so far, in his effort to find just the right words, he’d succeeded only in keeping silent about it. He felt helpless and inarticulate. “I suppose they’re better off where they are, for now,” he said at last.

  “Do you miss them?”

  He closed his eyes again, feeling for the first time since boarding the ship that he might actually want to try to sleep after all. “Yes, but what should I do?”

  The engines surged. The whole ship began to rock, as if suddenly changing direction.

  “In China, we believe everything is predetermined,” she said.

  “In China, a man can have several wives.” It was an attempt at humor but came out sounding cruel.

  “I am not your wife,” she said and turned to the wall.

  “Don’t be angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry,” she said.

  But she was. He lay for a while listening to the straining of the ship’s engines, the sound of frantic activity above deck. The sound of footsteps just outside the doorway made him sit up. A few minutes later they were stumbling with all their bags behind an English sailor, down a narrow gangway that, by some miracle of the British Navy, deposited them onto the very wharf from which they’d embarked just three weeks earlier, aboard the NYK Express Lines Nagasaki Maru.

  They returned to a completely broken city, and stood on the jetty, dumbstruck, disoriented, and out of breath, clutching their luggage. It was shocking to see the swarms of people trying to leave—the sheer numbers—families of all nationalities being evacuated, pushing past them at the customs shed, waving their anxious good-byes from beyond the barrier fence.

  What to do now? Mohr offered to drop Agnes off at home. She refused; insisted on taking a separate taxicab. His protests were mild, distracted as he was by the chaos all around; shouting customs officials, police. A pit opened in his stomach as he kissed her good-bye. It felt different. She had changed, but not just her, him as well. She slid backward into the taxi. Mohr leaned into the window. “I need some time alone. To make sense of things.”

  “Please,” she cut him off wearily. “No more explanations.”

  “Will you call me when you get home?”

  She nodded, her smile a little too dark and uncertain for parting to be easy. Going home separately was more natural than dragging out good-bye. What other option was there? To make matters worse, he’d made her angry with his stupid quip back on the boat. This was not the time for talk. She was tired and worried about her mother, alone these two weeks.

  Turning onto Nanking Road from the Bund, he saw the badly damaged facades of the buildings. Sandbagged machine-gun emplacements and barbed wire at every intersection. Military vehicles and people moving along the streets. At the hotel lodge in Yamanaka he’d read the newspaper accounts of the August 13 bombings of the Cathay and Palace Hotels and New World Amusement Center—dropped not by Japanese but by Chinese airplanes. By accident! Thousands killed. The bombings had happened on the very day they climbed Fujiyama.

  Wong dissolved into tears when Mohr walked in the door. “Ó kán ni kó lee ’en,” he kept repeating. I am so sorry for you. Mohr was alarmed. He took Wong by the hand, tried to reassure him. “Bùh bìh gwá nìen.” You needn’t be anxious. “See? All one piecee!” Wong’s wife was standing in the hallway. Looking haggard, she greeted Mohr nervously, then fetched a pitcher of water. Wong dragged the bags in from the landing. He was unshaven, barefoot, wearing a dirty tunic. It looked as if he hadn’t been outside in days; he could not stop apologizing as he tried to fill Mohr in on all the horrors of the past two weeks. It took some time for the picture to emerge, all that Wong had seen and done. Evidently, he had been doing a fair amount of ambulance duty with the car. “Every day hospital-side, Missy Chen Siu-fang. Every day.”

  Mohr was too tired to absorb it all and went to his room. In spite of the summer heat, the windows were shut tight. The air was stale. The entire apartment smelled like bird shit and old cooking oil. He threw open the windows, let Zappe out of the cage, took the bird on his finger. Wong began unpacking but Mohr stopped him. “Not now. Hóu lâi yé kó i, Wong. Afterward.”

  He took a bath—a long, hot bath. In the tub, a revelation of the sort that only comes in moments of quiet exhaustion: that in coming back he had finally made this city his home, could never have felt truly settled here until he’d left and returned.

  AND NOW IT is November.

  The war has been grinding on, but the Japanese have not yet sent their troops to occupy the International Settlement or French Concession. In the last few weeks, Mohr has visited every refugee collection point in the Settlement, knows the conditions firsthand. There are now thirteen thousand in the New World Theater alone. The area has become a slime pit, an incubator of cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. In his report to the Chinese Red Cross, he said it should be evacuated immediately. An impossibility, clearly, but also the only way to minimize the death toll of the coming epidemics. A few days ago, he tried to get places for two more of Wong’s family at the Girl’s School on Thibet Road, elderly cousins of his wife. It was the best refugee facility in the city—or, rather, the most exclusive, as he’d remarked acidly to the King’s Daughter Society ladies, who refused to take them. He tried two more places after that, but conditions in both were simply too appalling, and so he ended up bringing them back home.

  Today, a consignment of smallpox vaccine is due in from Hong Kong. The chances of it coming in on time, if at all, are slim. Lester Hospital has become a collection point for food and medi
cine donations from all over the city. Wong makes regular use of the car, picking up and delivering supplies and people all across the Settlement. Chen Siu-fang is no longer cruising Pootung godowns and silk factories for patients, but has been put in charge of a small ambulance corps, with three donated Red Cross vehicles at her disposal. In compensation for the use of the car and for Wong’s efforts, Timperly has given Mohr permission to supply himself and his burgeoning household from the hospital’s stock of milk, eggs, rice, cod-liver oil, and whatever else there is to be had at the end of the day.

  A light knock at the door. Wong materializes carrying a tray.

  “Dzáo dzáo an Wong.” Mohr beckons him in.

  Wong clears a place amid the clutter of the desk, sets the tray down, and with a nod toward the open window says, “Ni yáo hsíao hsin!”

  Mohr shakes his head. No. Closing the window is out of the question. He pulls the tray closer, inspects. Tea, a small bowl of rice—there hasn’t been bread anywhere in the city for three days—and a boiled egg. Wong steps to the open window, gingerly touches his fingertips to the panes as if they could shatter at any moment. “All night fang fang fang,” he says, and in an unprecedented act of boldness pokes his head out and peers into the street. “No wantchee Master hurt.”

  “No wantchee anyone hurt,” Mohr says, peeling the egg and slicing it in pieces over the rice. Disregarding what he has just been told, Wong closes the window. Mohr lets it pass, will open it again just as soon as Wong leaves the room. The business with the windows has become a ritual between the two of them: Mohr tries to persuade Wong to keep the windows open—especially in the claustrophobic little room he and his expanding family now occupy. Wong refuses. There are now seven people living in the former waiting room. The air has become fetid. Mohr would like to put a limit on the number of people he will allow into the apartment, but realizes he can’t. The situation in the city has become too desperate. Even the Municipal Police can’t keep out the masses of refugees pouring into the Settlement. In spite of checkpoints and barricades and barbed wire, the streets are choked with humanity fleeing the war zones.

  “My come Master hospital-side?” Wong asks.

  Mohr glances at his wristwatch and nods.

  Wong leaves him to finish his breakfast. Their communication has taken on a telepathic quality. Straitened circumstances have lent an immediacy and an urgency to the smallest interaction. There is little to discuss, but also a heightened awareness of things. The presence of rice and eggs. The availability of coal. Hot water. There is so little left that can be called normal; yet in spite of all the hardship, Mohr feels unusually contented. He is working around the clock, feels completely drained and empty. Smiling at the thought (can a person really be empty who is aware of it?), he stirs the sliced egg into the rice and begins to eat, holding the bowl under his chin, Japanese style.

  Lawrence used to talk about counterfeit peace, the empty egoism he said was the essence—or lack of it—of modern man. Mohr remembers feeling badly stung by the remark, and becoming increasingly unsettled during their daily chats out on the veranda of Lawrence’s rented villa at Bandol, just months before he died. They’d been enjoying the warm afternoon sunshine and discussing a popular English novel by a writer named Walter Wilkinson called The Peep Show. Frieda said, “Speaking of peep shows, we watched you swimming this afternoon, Max,” and she pointed down to the rocky stretch that Mohr swam from every afternoon.

  “Like a bewildered seal rolling around,” Lawrence sniped.

  Mohr felt his temper rise. “Who can be anything but bewildered in this crazy world?” he returned with forced composure.

  “You needn’t try to idealize it,” Lawrence came back. “As long as the quick of the self is there, your bewilderment is counterfeit.” He lifted a finger from the armrest and pointed at Mohr as if giving him permission to examine himself. Counterfeit, authentic; emptiness, fulfillment; connection, annihilation; male, female. Mohr was fluent in Lawrence’s language, but was wary of his mania for dividing the world into oppositions. What was the opposite of swimming? Drowning! And it wasn’t “the quick of the self” that kept you afloat. To stay afloat you had to swim in all directions at once, toward ever-receding shorelines.

  Yamanaka had reminded him of Bandol in so many ways: a temporary idleness shadowed by tortuous indecision. As the days there stretched into weeks, the journey with Agnes had begun to seem a sort of reverberation of that earlier one. Marriage had been a central theme of both trips—his marriage. Specifically, his condition as a married man. With Agnes, it had gone largely unspoken. But it was all Lawrence would talk about. “Promise you’ll return with Käthe in February,” he insisted, close to death and yet bent as ever on extracting pledges and promises. He had a right to all his demands, not just because he was dying, but because his dependence on others had taken its toll, and dignity required it.

  Mohr ignored the request, continued with the task at hand.

  “What are you doing?” Lawrence asked after some minutes.

  He was sewing lavender and uncooked rice into a small sachet. “Something for you to put over your eyes when you sleep. I picked it in the fields over there.” Mohr pointed in the direction of the hills, where he walked every morning with the proprietor’s dog, Rabelais.

  “More of your Bavarian quackery? Sometimes I think I should call the health authority.” Lawrence cracked a smile, passed his hand across his mouth. “I suppose it must be something potent.”

  Mohr waved the sachet under his nose. Lawrence sniffed, then sat back in his chair as Frieda breezed back onto the veranda. Mohr offered her the little purple pillow to smell. “The smell makes me think of sleep,” she said.

  “Then you must have one, too. I’ve made one for myself already.”

  “What is it that you need medicine for?” Lawrence frowned, then turned to look over the rail of the veranda to the Mediterranean shimmering in the sunlight.

  “It’s not medicine,” Mohr replied. “Just something to relax and calm you down.” The point was taken. Lawrence continued to look out over the water. The sparring between the two of them had become tedious in those last weeks they were together. It was partly Mohr’s fault for sharing so much of his personal troubles, but Lawrence liked to draw them out, was ever eager to examine. That Mohr should feel confined by married life bothered Lawrence to the point of anger. “Is it a doom to you?” he would demand. “Do you feel condemned to it?”

  Mohr tried to explain it as a question of separate destinies, how to be together and apart at the same time. “What you have called mutual union in separateness.”

  Lawrence reacted as if the words caused him physical pain. “You must be her man, utterly.” He scowled. “Anything less is not worth a forked radish.”

  There was some element of vengeance in it, of the sick man envying health. A man who feels cramped by married life will always be an irritation to a man being nursed by his wife and who is contented with the simplest domesticities—regular meals, a comfortable bed, a window that lets in the breeze. Why are the healthy man’s discontents viewed as spiritual failings, but the sick man’s cantankerousness merely as lapses of spirit? Why not the reverse? Why not call the dying man to judgment and allow the healthy man his lapses? Eventually, Lawrence stopped berating and took to teasing instead, calling him der schwarze Ritter, the black knight.

  Mohr feeds Zappe the last bits of rice, and watches as they are picked away, one by one. The bird has fallen quiet lately, rarely even squawks. The sounds—bombs and artillery in the distance, the whine of airplanes—seem to have rendered the poor animal mute. When he opens the cage now, the bird will not be coaxed out. “Zappe, my little friend. You’ve stopped talking.” He fetches the cover and drapes it over the cage.

  UTILITY WORKERS ARE restringing downed wires along Shantung Road. Mohr watches their acrobatics from the car. A maze of ladders and large coils of wire have made an obstacle course of the entire street. An English foreman on the ground in pi
th helmet and kneesocks directs the activity with an aggressive, self-conscious authority that seems more desperate than reassuring. Wong navigates the clogged and crowded street with telepathic assurance. Driving in Chen Siufang’s ambulance corps has made him a confident—if slightly aggressive—driver. He also enjoys showing off the clever alternative routes he has learned all across the Settlement and French Town. “Who taught you this way?” Mohr asks as Wong makes a sudden turn down a narrow alleyway.

  Wong smiles into the rearview mirror. “B’long my pidgin.”

  “Your pidgin b’long your pidgin. My pidgin b’long everybody pidgin.”

  Wong hangs his arm out the window to signal a turn. “Everybody pidgin b’long, Dr. Mohr!” He laughs, pushes his cap back on his head. Wong is right. Mohr’s business is everybody’s business, and everybody’s business is his business. He has precious little privacy these days, keeps no secrets. Wong has begun showing a dry, ironic side that seems to be a consequence of his total dependence on Mohr. The humor suits Mohr well. In fact, the more cramped the situation in the apartment becomes, the more he enjoys his wry, impertinent “Number One.”

  A group of Red Cross volunteers spills out of the main entrance just as they pull in front of Lester Hospital. Mohr hauls his black medical bag across the seat. Wong opens the door, salutes with a grin. He is wearing a newly cleaned uniform. It has never quite fitted him properly.

  Inside, Mohr finds Timperly talking to two doctors about cholera in the refugee camps. “We can’t bring them here,” Timperly is saying. “The isolation ward is overflowing.” He acknowledges Mohr with a nod.

  “And beriberi?” one of the doctors asks.

  “Send Marmite,” Mohr suggests. “There are dozens of donated crates piling up downstairs.”

  Timperly lets him know with a patronizing nod that the subject is already well in hand. In spite of arriving ambulances and pandemonium outside, the doctors calmly continue their discussion. Mohr scans the lobby for Agnes.

  Timperly concludes with the other doctors, and turns to Mohr. “I expect you’ll be off to the Country Hospital later today.”