The corridor outside Timperly’s office is being set up with bedrolls and blankets by three Chinese men wearing Red Swastika Society smocks. The building is filling from the ground up with sick and wounded. “Thank you,” Timperly calls as Mohr closes the office door behind him.
A LINE HAS formed outside the kitchen, and stretches down the full length of the corridor. It is moving as quickly as can be expected. The hospital staff are fed twice daily according to a schedule that Timperly himself devised. Mohr finds himself downstairs, carrying his camera. There have been two more ambulances since his tea with Timperly. Mohr spent the entire time in the operating room. When he reached the limits of his effectiveness there, he began to wander about the hospital taking pictures. It seemed a good thing to do: ward to ward, floor to floor, clicking away at the fringes of all the misery.
One of the Chinese doctors in line beckons for him to take the place in front of him. Mohr thanks him, and declines. Affable and very young, the doctor had transferred here from a hospital in the war zone that had been evacuated a week earlier. “Come, come. Aren’t you hungry?” he asks.
“No, thank you, Doctor,” Mohr begs off, glancing down the queue, the length of which is a good indication of how serious the food situation is all across the city. The kitchen at Lester Hospital is notoriously bad even under the best circumstances.
“I admire your restraint.” The young doctor laughs.
“Not restraint. Fear. I can’t afford to miss a single day of work.”
The doctor laughs again.
“You haven’t seen Agnes Simson, have you?” Mohr asks, lifting his camera to photograph the line of people queued up for their meal.
The doctor steps out of the picture, shakes his head. “Not since this morning.”
Mohr snaps a few more pictures down the corridor, then returns to the first floor via a narrow staircase that is used mainly by kitchen staff. At the top of the stairs, he nearly steps on a young child, curled up and fast asleep on the landing. Mohr stoops down for a closer look. The child springs suddenly to his feet and backs away. Mohr squats, and in the poor light of the stairwell recognizes the newspaper boy from earlier in the day. The boy presses himself against the wall, stammering, “No mama no papa no chow. No mama no papa no chow.”
Mohr offers his hand, smiling at the boy. The child continues stammering, glancing into the corner where he has stuffed his unsold papers. Then he begins to cry. Mohr approaches cautiously, and again offers his hand. The boy recoils, passing a skinny forearm across his soot-smeared face.
“My pay chow,” Mohr says, pointing down the staircase in the direction of the cafeteria. “Come.”
The boy, very likely a regular caller at the hospital’s kitchen door, stops crying and allows Mohr to lead him by the hand. They start down one step at a time, the boy slack-armed, yielding. His hand is hard and callused, but also delicate and failing substance. Halfway down, Mohr stops abruptly. The stairwell echoes with the noisy clanging and clattering of the kitchen. He and the boy regard each other. The child is staring at his camera, fascinated. Suddenly Mohr changes course and they are going back up, taking the steps two at a time.
It is a clear night outside, a damp November chill in the air. Wong is waiting just up the street. Still holding the boy by the hand, Mohr makes his way toward the parked car. Curfew started an hour earlier. Shantung Road is deserted. They pause to look at the bombed facades, the windows all boarded up. The crater in the road is cordoned off; lying just beside it are the charred and gutted remains of two automobiles.
Wong steps from the car and opens the door. The boy stops short. Mohr nods toward the car. The boy tries to wriggle free but Mohr grips him tightly.
“Who have you got there?” Agnes asks from inside the car.
In his surprise, Mohr nearly lets go of the child. “A little friend,” he answers. He glances into the rear seat, where she is sitting, He is pleased to see her, and pleased to see that she is smiling. “I found him hiding in a stairwell.”
Agnes slides across the seat, steps out of the car. “Is he injured?” she asks, looking the child over. She says something Mohr is unable to understand, and with no further fuss, the child climbs obediently into the car.
Nobody speaks as Wong swings the car around and speeds up Shantung Road. The boy is sitting between Mohr and Agnes, rigid with excitement and mesmerized by the view out the front of the car. “His first motorcar ride,” Agnes observes.
“I’m glad you’re here. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“How could I not?”
“Where were you all afternoon? I looked everywhere.”
“I went with one of the ambulance drivers to look for Chen Siu-fang.” She leans her head back on the seat. “We went everywhere. Even to her house.”
“Did Timperly send you?”
She shakes her head. “I just went.”
He is not sure he should press for details, but tells her it was crazy to leave the hospital without saying anything to anybody. She ignores the remark, closes her eyes. They drive for a while in silence. Mohr fidgets with the ashtray, opening and closing the slender receptacle recessed into the door panel, idly noting how well it slides on its polished hinge. The boy watches intently, is delighted by Mohr’s invitation to try it himself.
“What are you going to do with him?” Agnes asks.
“I don’t know. Feed him. Give him a bath.”
He rolls down the window and takes out his cigarettes. Japan seems so distant now. Time had been so short, the nights so quiet. He would lie awake every night absorbing the peacefulness, listening to crickets chirping just outside the window, Agnes on the tatami beside him. Sleeping behind a paper screen was so much more intimate than behind a closed door. The corner where they slept was exposed, open to the whole cottage. At times, he was so overwhelmed by her presence that he was afraid to touch or be touched by her, for fear she might suddenly vanish, just disappear. He would then think of Käthe, and wonder if she and that other place, Wolfsgrub, were more real than the place where he now found himself. Where was his real life? Was it here or there? Could real life transpire someplace other than where one resided? It was the strangest form of guilt; absurd, of course. How could anything be more real than the moment? It is only the moment that is real. But it is also only the moment that passes.
They are on Thibet Road, approaching the checkpoint leading into the Settlement. Barbed-wire barricades stretch across the entire width of the street, but for a single lane for traffic to pass through. Sandbags at the curb are a curious foreground to the billboard advertisements for Benedictine and Vichy Salt Tablets.
Wong stops the car. A military policeman appears at the window. Mohr hands over his curfew pass. The soldier examines it, then points his flashlight into the car. “Who’ve you got there, Doctor?” he asks in a heavy Scottish accent. The boy turns away, buries his face in the upholstered car seat.
“My family,” Mohr says, looking the soldier squarely in the eye.
The flashlight lingers, then snaps off. The soldier hands the document back and steps away from the car without another word. As the car passes through the checkpoint into the Settlement, he notices Agnes staring at him. Wong casts puzzled glances into the rearview mirror. By the time they pull in front of the Yates Apartments, he realizes some diplomacy is going to be necessary. “Come on in, everyone,” he says cheerfully. “We have eggs and cod-liver oil!”
He leads the way upstairs, pausing on the landing at Granich’s door. There is no reason to doubt what Timperly has told him, though he still can’t quite understand how the actors and the scenes all link up. Delivering a letter? Basic decency seems to demand that he at least knock on the dead man’s door.
“What are you doing?” Agnes asks.
He raps lightly, puts an ear to the door. “Nobody home.” He leads the way up the last flight of steps. “I’ve gone into the hotel business since your last visit.”
The boy causes a minor commotio
n as soon as they enter the apartment. Wong’s wife objects politely but strenuously—objections that Mohr counters right away by rolling up his sleeves and marching the boy straight into the bathroom. The child resists at first, and refuses to undress, but when Mohr holds up one of his own freshly ironed shirts, and offers it to the boy as a gift, the boy strips off his filthy rags and climbs into the tub.
Agnes acts as emissary to Wong’s family while Mohr tends to the boy, scrubs him down, delouses him with rubbing alcohol. Wong fusses in the background, looks in on the proceedings once or twice. At last the two emerge, the tails of Mohr’s pressed shirt trailing behind the boy like an oversized gown. A compromise is reached. The boy will not take up any space in Wong’s cramped family quarters, but will be allowed to sleep in the hallway by the front door. Bedding is produced. The boy is fed, packed off in the corner with stern instructions from Wong’s wife, who seems to have softened at the sight of the little urchin wearing a shirt that she herself has washed and ironed. In turn, the boy seems willing to recognize her authority.
Well after midnight, Mohr and Agnes finally sit down to a cold supper of chopped carrots and sliced egg. Wong had prepared it for them before retiring for the night. As they eat, Agnes keeps glancing at the framed photograph of Eva on the desk.
“It came just the other day. A miracle that it got through.” Mohr fetches the photograph, offers it to Agnes. “She’ll be twelve next April.”
“She looks just like you,” Agnes remarks, and finishes eating. She puts her empty bowl down, pours out two cups of tea, then settles back on the sofa, blowing puffs of fragrant jasmine from her cup. “It’s very generous of you, opening your home to all these people.”
“Generous? As soon as this war is over I’ll throw everybody back out in the street.”
She sips her tea. “I wish I could joke about it.”
The air in the room suddenly feels stale. He gets up to open a window, and feels immediate relief as fresh air rushes into the room. The November air is brisk, soothing. A ghostly quiet hangs over the city. Bubbling Well Road is empty but for a group of SMP volunteers manning a machine-gun emplacement in the middle of the intersection. There is a rumbling of artillery in the distance, a faintly acrid smell in the air, an ominous glow on the northern horizon. He feels a little stupid for consenting so readily to Timperly’s request, but also pleased to have been asked. He smiles to himself. What will it be? Gaurisankar or Klotz am Bein? He didn’t come halfway around the world to sit on his ass in the waiting room watching the express trains blow past.
He closes the window, steps over to Zappe’s cage. “Still not speaking?” The bird cocks its head, bobs on its perch. He tries to coax it—Brüderlein fein, Brüderlein fein— then turns to Agnes. “The year I left, Käthe planted a field of flowers. Tall blue ones. Rittersporn. I don’t know the English word.”
“Delphinium,” Agnes says.
“It was a very large field. She cleared it, planted it, and began selling bulbs to the local florists. I was mostly living in Berlin at the time. Trying to earn money. I came back to Wolfsgrub as often as I could, but things everywhere were going from bad to worse. It wasn’t only the Nazis. In some ways I wish it had been that simple. There were so many frustrations: personal ones, artistic ones. I couldn’t support my family. Living in the countryside had become too confining, but spending half the year in the city wasn’t working out, either. I made everyone miserable around me and knew the time had come for me to go.”
He refills his teacup and begins to pace. “I was overjoyed by Käthe’s flowers.”
“You were proud of her success,” Agnes ventures.
“No! That’s just it. It had nothing to do with her. I was glad, yes, and happy. But mainly—mainly, I was relieved. It was completely selfish. She had found a way to support herself. It meant I could go away and, whatever happened, she would be able to take care of herself.” He stops here, jumbled and suddenly unsure why he’s telling Agnes this.
“So it was a good thing?” she offers.
“No. It was all wrong.” His voice quavers. “My guilt over leaving them behind was lessened by those flowers! It was so convenient.”
“Why did you leave them behind?” Agnes asks, as if it were the simplest question in the world.
Mohr stops pacing. The simple why eludes him. It always will. He loves Käthe and Eva, loves them with all his heart. It is painful to think of them, all alone now in Wolfsgrub. How happy they’d all be to be together again. And yet, at the time, it seemed absolutely necessary for him to go away alone. He looks again at Eva’s picture on the desk. A twelve-year-old looks back at him from the photograph, but she is fixed in his mind as a younger child—at eight, breaking an egg over his head for a shampoo, tugging at his arm to come outside and play. How old will she be when he next sees her? Will it be here? Or someplace else? Or never? He wasn’t simply driven out of Germany but hounded out of existence. His existence and her existence. Who could have anticipated how bad things would get back there? Or here, on the other side of the globe? Who could have foreseen any of it? Whatever the future holds, one day Eva will ask the same question, and, perhaps, she’ll even have an answer for it. What will she say? That her father was a selfish man? Or just flawed and foolish? Will they all look back on this someday, and smile and stir their coffee, and say it was all for the best?
WHY DID YOU leave them behind?
“I DON’T KNOW,” he says at last. It’s true. There is no satisfying explanation. Any answer he gave now would be different from an answer given yesterday or one he might give tomorrow. The past changes each time you begin to explain it, like a telegram that rewrites itself each time you take it out of your pocket. “I used to think I knew. But I don’t anymore.”
Agnes is watching, hands wrapped around the cup in her lap. He begins straightening up the papers on his desk. Käthe’s letter is among them. For a moment he considers showing it to Agnes, but is immediately disgusted with himself for the thought. The other night he had a vivid dream: Käthe and Eva arriving on the Saarbrücken. He was there and not there—watching them descend the gangway, and at the same time not there because he’d failed to come and meet the ship. His horror multiplied—at their surprise arrival, at his failure to meet them. Brehm was leaning over the top deck rail, waving his cap and laughing.
Agnes leaves the sofa, crosses the room. “It’s all right,” she says. “It’s late.”
He takes her in his arms. Confusion dissipates. Her uniform is flecked with bloodstains and smells of carbolic and rubbing alcohol. She feels small, but also firm and contained within herself. He holds her tightly. No, they haven’t merely blundered into each other. Not at all. She is integral and necessary, part of a vital circuit. They fall onto the narrow bed, embracing clumsily, and too tired, in the end, for anything but sleep.
He wakes up sometime later—hours or minutes, he can’t tell—thinking about his last day at the Country Hospital, a talkative, fussily coiffed British woman whom he’d given a cholera injection. “We may have lived our lives to the full in this burg, Dr. Mohr.” She pronounced the German word in a mordant contralto, as if pointing her finger. “But my friend Christabel says, if this conflict goes on much longer some of us will find ourselves in the predicament of dying beyond our means.” The witticism came out as if rehearsed, which it probably was. He asked if she was leaving the city. Her reply had been as unrehearsed as it was muddled and disturbing. “My husband refuses to close down the office.” She heaved a sigh and shrugged. “I suppose we’ll stay here until the last bomb falls.”
In a letter, Käthe had written, There is nothing left in Germany that would interest you. It was true. He was finished. Quitt! But it went so much deeper than skipping across borders and national boundaries. How to defend against something that must self-destruct? The entire German nation. Like an amputation on the battlefield, all one could do was get it over with as quickly as possible. But he has no place in this Anglo-Chinese colony, either. H
e told Timperly he’d chosen to remain here, but does he really have a choice? No. He was, finally, the outsider he’d always thought himself to be: stateless, without a passport. It irritated him to dwell on such a banal, bureaucratic detail, but he couldn’t help it. The distinction had taken on an ontological significance and was now as emotionally rattling as the bombs falling all around.
He shifts to make room for Agnes in the narrow bed. Just before dawn the big naval guns begin firing from the Whangpoo. Zappe lets out a squawk, then falls silent. Mohr gets up and lights a cigarette. He sits on the windowsill, smoking, listening to the guns and sirens in the distance.
“You should try to sleep,” Agnes says from the bed. She is awake, curled on her side with the sheet pulled up to her chin. In Japan she would watch him from bed the same way, as he sat writing in the morning.
“Sleep?” He smiles at the absurdity of the suggestion. A small convoy of trucks passes below, their roofs freshly painted with the Union Jack. They are driving in the direction of the Bund. Agnes joins him at the window, draped in the bedsheet. She helps herself to a cigarette. Mohr flicks his out the window, watches it fall into the street. “So wirf auch noch den Kompass über Bord.”
“What’s that?”
“Throw the compass overboard. From a poem I once wrote. ‘Die Sonette vom Neuen Noah.’ Sonnet of the New Noah.”
Side by side, backs to the window, leaning against the sill. Agnes pulls the sheet up around her shoulders, holds her cigarette just under her chin. “Do you feel like Noah?”
“I was thinking of this goddamn war.”
Another big gun booms in the distance. Agnes glances over her shoulder. “And here we are, up here in your little ark.”
He turns to look outside. “In my poem, Noah sees a whale and calls to it. He asks if it knows of any end in sight.”
“What does the whale tell him?”
“Nothing. It just swims off.”
She shrugs. “If you were a fish, the flood was not much of a problem.”
Mohr Page 20
