Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  He drops his cigarette onto the floor and steps on it, shaking his head. No. He hadn’t deserved any of it. The land, the house, the woman. He hadn’t deserved a fraction of it. Not a fraction. He glances up at the soldiers, one of whom is pinching his cigarette between fingertips and staring back at Mohr with an open sympathy that borders on tenderness. It is an authentic look, not counterfeit or sentimental, and expresses the exhaustion of the entire city. Mohr shrugs, shakes his head as if to say, I am as befuddled by all this as you are, my friend. The soldier returns the gesture without so much as a smile.

  Agnes suddenly materializes with a cup of water. Mohr stands up to accept, but Agnes pushes him back, sits down next to him on the step. “Drink it.”

  He empties the cup in three large gulps. “It’s warm,” he says.

  “It’s clean,” she replies, taking the cup back. “You look pale. Are you all right?”

  “As fit as ever.”

  “Do you have your tablets with you?”

  He pats his coat pocket. “Right here.”

  A massive cleaning detail has begun, directed by Red Cross volunteers and public utility workers. The newspaper boy has somehow sneaked past the guard at the front entrance and is scurrying between the rows of cots hawking his papers. Agnes rises to leave.

  “Wait.” Mohr hesitates, aware of the pathetic egotism in what he is about to ask. “Come home with me tonight.”

  Agnes regards him for a moment. “So. You’re tired of being alone?”

  He pulls her down beside him, a little more forcefully than he’d intended. She is startled. Once again, he is on the verge of explaining: that he has no good choices—or, more precisely, no choices that leave him with any vestige of goodness, that no good can possibly come from any path he chooses to take. She looks at him with that familiar, clouded expression, her dark, practical eyes, and he releases her hand. She stands, smooths down the folds of her uniform, and walks away.

  He finds himself staring at the soldier again. The man flashes a stupidly presumptive grin. Mohr ignores it, gets up to resume his rounds.

  He works in a fog for the rest of the morning. At some point toward midday, the number of wounded begins to slow, but more and more sick refugees are turning up. All but the most badly off are given water to drink, a dose of cod-liver oil—which for some reason there is an abundance of—and sent right back out onto the street. Toward the end of the afternoon Mohr finds himself handing out empty matchboxes. Evidently a call has gone out across the city for matchboxes to put aspirin tablets in, but there is no aspirin, and crates of matchboxes are piling up on the dock, so there is nothing else to do but give them out, empty.

  He passes Agnes several times during the course of the morning. They exchange glances but nothing further. He wants a chance to explain himself, to describe his predicament, how he feels backed against a wall, yet also optimistic, and ready for change. He wants her to know that, in spite of their separate lives, he feels a bond. It should not be simply refuted due to complicated and inconvenient circumstances. Smashing human connections is the easiest thing in the world to do. What a pity if they couldn’t rise above the level of angry little egotists. But Agnes has every reason to reject him. Perversely, he begins to hope that she will do just that. It will take the decision away, restore his tarnished innocence. In a strange way, she predicted this impasse while they were still in Japan, sitting one evening out on the steps of the cottage. He was stiff in the legs after three hours on the tatami mat, sitting at the lacquered writing table by the window. He had been working on the manuscript. The Unicorn. In the very first week he’d felt rooted in a daily rhythm. It had felt right to be there with her. No questions, no vagueness. They just simply got on well together. Her reserve and calm balanced his impulsiveness. Working on the novel felt right, too.

  “I can’t imagine what writing a book would be like,” she said, and drew closer. The horses had been taken back to the stable just before nightfall. The old man seemed too frail to handle such large animals, but he brought them up at dawn every morning, left them tied to the post beside the cottage, and vanished as silently as he came. Mohr had joked that it was not a man at all, but a forest spirit who brought the horses up from underground. “Do you think you’ll finish it?”

  “I’ve hardly begun.”

  “Will you try to get it published?

  He shook his head. “I can’t really be too concerned about that,” he said, taking out his cigarettes. He offered one to her. She put it to her lips, bent toward the cupped flame. “It doesn’t really matter if I do or not,” he said, watching the ember at the tip of the match extinguish in a tiny curl of smoke that hung for a moment in the still night air.

  “You’re writing it for yourself, then?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “And when it’s finished?”

  “When it’s finished? I’ll put it away and forget about it.”

  “Something you’ve worked on for so long? You think you can do that?”

  They smoked in silence, listening to the cicadas in the trees, waves of sound building, shrinking back, then building again like the coda of a sonata that erupts and sinks back again, erupts and sinks, but never expires. He waited for the obvious next question, but Agnes never asked it.

  A RUMOR HAS been circulating around the hospital that the Chinese are sending reinforcements into Chapai to stop the Japanese. The troop numbers he’s heard throughout the afternoon range from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, but by early evening that rumor is replaced by another, more alarming one: that the Chinese are in fact withdrawing from Chapai, and in their retreat setting fire to everything. It is impossible to know which version of events is correct, but what gives credibility to both is the fact that the flow of wounded to the hospital has virtually stopped.

  “It isn’t because they’ve stopped fighting,” Timperly remarks. He has asked Mohr up to his office for a short break and a cup of tea. The cleanup of the lobby is well in hand. The glass doors have been boarded up, the floors are free of broken glass. Mohr declined at first, thinking he’d rather find an empty cot and close his eyes, but Timperly insisted. Now Mohr finds himself looking out the window of the superintendent’s office. The bomb crater up the road has been cordoned off and traffic flows around it at almost the normal rate. “Incredible,” he muses aloud. “Really not much different than ants.”

  Timperly pours tea into two cups from a cracked pot. “As far as I know, ants don’t demolish their own nests.”

  It is nearing twilight. With the office doors closed against the pulsing disorder of the hospital, the feeling in the room is as close to tranquillity as anything Mohr has felt all day. Mohr sips his tea. Directly across the street from the hospital is a brand-new building that he’s never taken much notice of, but which seen now in the twilight reminds him of Berlin. He feels captured and fixed, split between here and there, now and then. Blue sparks arcing from the electric tram wires overhead suddenly illuminate the facades of Nollendorfplatz. Käthe is sitting next to him. She squeezes his arm, rustles closer on the hard wooden seat. The tram squeals around the corner and is gone.

  “Has anybody heard from Chen Siu-fang?”

  “I have calls in to the SMP, the Red Cross, and about three other places; am still waiting to hear back.” Timperly stirs his tea, absorbed, then looks up and shrugs. “There’s nothing we can do but wait.”

  Silence for a few moments while they sip their tea, trying to release some of the tension of this unusually long day. It’s the first time he and Timperly have sat quietly together like this. Mohr feels himself unwind a little, looks out the window and watches the sky, streaked with red and purple. Timperly is preoccupied as well. His hand shakes slightly when he lifts his cup. He is the opposite of the waistcoated English doctors on staff at the Country Hospital. Mohr has come to respect him. So what if he goes about as if his contact with the earth is affected by hidden tracks and wires? Abruptly, he breaks the silence. “Tell me some
thing, Mohr. Do you really believe that a person becomes lost as soon as he begins to worry about how he can help the masses?”

  Mohr turns from the window. “Pardon me?”

  “Your words.” Timperly picks up a book and reads from it. “‘Those who force themselves to love the masses are seized by the fearful hatred which lies hidden in every enforced love.’” He shakes his head, puzzled. “Phillip Glenn. I’ve just finished reading it.”

  Mohr tries, unsuccessfully, to mask his surprise. “Since when do you find time for reading?”

  “It hasn’t been easy.” Timperly’s tone is at once confiding and confessional. “I don’t mind telling you that, as a socialist, I’ve been hard put to understand what you mean.”

  Mohr is suddenly uncomfortable. “It’s a novel, not a manifesto.”

  Timperly turns to another passage and reads, “‘As long as he had change in his pockets he would give, but with no more concern than when cleaning his teeth as long as he had toothpaste.’” He closes the book, puts it down, and smiles. “I mean, really, Mohr. Is charity for you merely a question of having the toothpaste?”

  Mohr smiles self-consciously, caught off guard. He reaches across the desk for the book, unable to suppress a tiny surge of bitterness in spite of what strikes him as something of a miracle. An English translation of his book, available right here in China. He glances at the translator’s name, which has certainly not been lost on Timperly: Countess Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck. A bloody aristocrat! “The political sentiments belong to the character in the book.” He fans through the pages. “Modeled on an old friend. A man whose spirit went beyond ideology.”

  Timperly takes this in, squinting from behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “Well, I can’t speak to the spiritual qualities. But knowing you as I do, I was a little surprised by the reactionary opinions.”

  “Are you trying to draw me into a debate on socialism?”

  Timperly does not answer right away. He removes his glasses, rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I never properly thanked you for the use of your car and driver.”

  “It was a reactionary gesture, Doctor; you can rest assured.” Mohr smiles, still trying to regain equilibrium. He is pleased by Timperly’s interest and effort, but also slightly wary of his motives.

  “You’re stuck here, aren’t you, Mohr?” Timperly stops rubbing his eyes, begins to clean his spectacles with a pocket handkerchief. A squeaky cart rolls by the closed door of the office, and Mohr listens as the noise fades down the corridor. He is determined not to be drawn into any traps, glances at his watch with an air of distraction. “I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question.”

  Timperly continues cleaning his glasses. A silence descends, threatens to become a contest of wills, but Mohr is too tired for that. “If you mean that I am without a valid passport, then yes. I am, as you say, stuck here.” He is about to stand up, but suddenly changes his mind and sits back in the chair. “What if I said I’ve chosen to remain here? Would that un stick me?” He smiles, turning the tables. “Or in being without a passport, have I somehow forfeited my free will?”

  “You’re not alone,” Timperly states flatly. His tone is sympathetic. He puts his glasses back on. “I know many people in exactly the same position. And not only Jews.”

  Mohr feels a twinge. It’s Timperly’s enunciation, as if he were himself offended by having to use the word. In Germany the word Jude has always seemed to imply a misfortune of birth. The English, Jew, seems imbued with a no less accusatory quality of lapsed decorum, a breech of etiquette. Mohr glances at his watch again, anxious to put an end to the strange interrogation. “I need to get back to the ward.”

  “I’ll get to the point,” Timperly says, also glancing at his watch. He folds his hands, presses his fingertips to his lips. The gesture seems oddly studied and out of character. The rituals of tea have always felt strange to Mohr, English manners in general; a residual effect of his prison-camp experience where, as a medical officer, he’d been subjected to a strange deference and respect. It didn’t take long to realize that it was really a form of ridicule. Since then, he’s always been wary of trying to share too much of an English joke.

  “I am curious about some of your contacts here.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Timperly keeps his fingertips pressed to his lips, eyes set intently. “The fellow from the German Embassy, Fuchs. He isn’t the only one interested in you.” He stands up, begins to pace. “The Special Branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police have been here as well.”

  “Stubbings.”

  “That’s the name. He wanted to know about your trip to Japan. And Konrad Granich.”

  “Granich?” Mohr looks up, startled.

  “He’s been murdered. In a village just outside Nanking.” Timperly crosses the room, and then turns as if ready now to answer any questions Mohr might care to ask.

  But Mohr has no questions and stands up to leave. “I’m sorry,” he says, feeling sickened for the second time that day, wanting only to go downstairs and finish his work for the day. Then to go home. With Agnes, if possible.

  “You knew Granich,”

  “Yes, I knew him,” Mohr says flatly. “And, evidently, you knew that I knew him.”

  Timperly acknowledges this with a shrug.

  Mohr takes this in, then shakes his head. “I don’t care to know any more and I can’t think of anything to say.”

  “You must admit there’s a curious pattern here.”

  “A pattern?” Mohr looks squarely at Timperly, then shakes his head and laughs. “Well, if we’re going to play detective, have you noticed that barbed wire seems to reappear in this city in five-year cycles? 1927, 1932, 1937. You could say the real culprit of the situation is—the calendar.”

  “This issue concerns me, Mohr. You can’t expect me not to be curious.”

  “Sometimes ordinary life is too banal to be believed. Events don’t fit into patterns, no matter how wonderfully they seem to align.”

  “I won’t argue the philosophical point with you. I’m perfectly willing to accept, for example, that the reason for your trip to Japan was simply to run off with one of my nurses.” Timperly’s expression becomes serious. “But the fact is, none of that is of any concern to me, either. Sit down. I have something important to ask you.”

  Mohr hesitates, then returns to his seat.

  “I must ask for your help rescuing a very sick comrade.”

  “‘Comrade’?” Suddenly he realizes he is being taken into Timperly’s confidence.

  “He’s very ill, and I’m afraid I’ve run out of options.”

  “Why can’t you treat him yourself?”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “What is wrong with him?”

  “We won’t know until we can get a doctor to see him.”

  “He’s a communist?”

  “And too well known to travel openly.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Better not to know.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Hungjao.”

  “Ah, a well-heeled communist!”

  Timperly acknowledges the joke with a faint smile.

  “You want me to bring him back here?”

  “It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  Timperly pauses to formulate. “If the opinion is that he should be brought to hospital for treatment, then…”

  “Then what?”

  “Then by all means, he should be brought here directly. It would be best for everyone involved if he could be treated and allowed to convalesce right where he is. But that judgment has to be made by a doctor.”

  Mohr regards Timperly skeptically. “I’m no revolutionary. I don’t mind saying I’m completely indifferent to your cause. To politics, in general.”

  “Even those that have oppressed you?”

  “Especially those!”

  “Well, I trust you. That’s good enough.”

  “Was G
ranich part of your group?”

  “He was,” Timperly states without any trace of emotion. “And so is your old friend Vogel.”

  “Oh, so you know Vogel, too?” Mohr slaps his thigh with an exasperated chuckle, slides back in the chair, hitches his trousers, crosses his legs. “Of course, I should have guessed. Are you also some sort of spy? No, wait. Don’t tell me. I want to be the only asshole in this city who doesn’t know.”

  “It was Vogel who suggested that I hire you.”

  Mohr takes this in, resisting the urge to press for details.

  “Will you help us?”

  “I should refuse to have anything to do with all of you,” Mohr says in disgust, then hauls himself out of the chair and breaks into a sardonic smile. “But what choice do I have?”

  Timperly stands up, extends his hand across the desk, as pleased as Mohr has ever seen him. “I will send a car to pick you up in the morning.”

  “All this time I thought you were just a charity hospital superintendent, Dr. Timperly.”

  “I could say the same about you, Dr. Mohr.”

  “Can I ask what Granich was up to?”

  “He was delivering a letter.” Timperly says it as if all there is to be said about it is summed up in his flat tone.