Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  Mohr laughs, gazes at her, silhouetted against the window. He plucks the cigarette from between her fingers, flicks it out the window, but when he tries to embrace her, she turns away, drawing the sheet around her and folding her arms. “My Chinese grandfather used to say that if you wanted to understand the English, you had to read the Bible. And then he would shake his head and say he could never read the Bible.”

  Mohr draws back, feeling a slight pang of rejection. It has grown light enough to see the plumes of smoke rising on the horizon to the north. “Timperly is sending a car for me today. I’m being taken to someone who can’t come to hospital.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” He regards the thick plumes rising up over the rooftops. “I just hope it’s not in that direction.”

  “He wouldn’t tell you where?”

  “Someplace in Hungjao.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Agnes shoots him an irritated look. She fetches her clothes from the back of the chair and starts for the bathroom.

  “Wong will take you to work in my car.”

  She pauses at the door. “No. I’m going with you.”

  “I don’t think Timperly would want that.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going with you.” She leaves the room.

  “You can’t. They need you at the hospital.”

  She closes the door without an answer.

  “Von jedem Tier ein Paar!” he calls after her. “Two of every creature.”

  The great curtain of smoke rises up in the direction of Chapai. Mohr is secretly, selfishly pleased.

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK a large black Packard pulls up in front of 803 Bubbling Well Road. Mohr and Agnes have been waiting at the curb, watching a man in a quilted overcoat scrape up a handful of rice from the pavement into his ragged cap. He works diligently, keeping an eye on the rickshaw cart from which the rice has spilled. He is oblivious of the big black automobile until it is nearly on top of him, and struggles to collect the last scraps with glances over his shoulder as if fending off a territorial challenger. When the last grain has been gathered, he hurries to catch up to the rickshaw cart.

  It is a bright November morning. Traffic is moving at the usual crawl. The main and side roads all throughout the Settlement are teeming with wandering humanity, fighting for space with sidewalk vendors, beggars, and rickshaw pullers. Mohr asks the driver where he is taking them.

  “Hungjao,” the man says.

  “Where in Hungjao?”

  The man doesn’t answer, keeps his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  “I see,” Mohr says, and settles back in the seat. He rolls down the window, lights a cigarette, thinking of the boy, his hardened little existence. Despite the thundering of guns and wailing sirens, the child slept soundly. Wong’s wife gave him breakfast, which he ate sitting on his bedroll, just inside the front door. As Mohr and Agnes were leaving, the boy blocked the way and began talking rapidly, clutching his tattered cap in his hands.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He doesn’t want any more castor oil, just egg,” Agnes said. Wong’s wife scowled as the boy pleaded his case. Mohr laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “No more castor oil, then.” The essence of courage is not taking care of oneself, but proving how we need one another. The boy then tried to slip out with them, but Agnes put him firmly on notice.

  “We can’t keep him against his will,” Mohr objected.

  “A street orphan has no will,” Agnes said.

  “Oh? I would say the boy is pure will.”

  “I would call it luck.”

  “You call surviving on the street luck? He sells newspapers. That’s not luck.”

  “And he hands over all the money to some gangster who has hundreds of little urchins just like him all over the city.”

  “You call that luck?”

  “Certainly. And finding you. I call that purest luck.”

  Somebody had left a bicycle at the bottom of the staircase. It was English, the exact model Käthe had bought on their first anniversary.

  “What are you doing?” Agnes asked.

  Mohr put down his medical bag and mounted the familiar black contraption. It was identical, except for the fat silver bell, which he rang, then rang again. Eva would ride with him, sitting sideways on the crossbar. He had made a little seat for her with a towel and an old piece of saddle leather. They would ride together down to Rottach to swim or to buy fish or to watch the tourists getting on and off the boats that ferried them across the lake. What was it like there now? In March Käthe had written that Oscar Nathan had been forced out of his house on the lake by none other than Heinrich Himmler, who had simply appropriated the old villa as a vacation house for himself. “We used to talk about the coming of an age when money would be abolished,” was Mohr’s sardonic reply. “Who’d have thought it would happen so soon?”

  How quickly everything had changed.

  He turns to Agnes. “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville / Notre blanche maison, petite mais tranquille.”

  “I don’t understand French.”

  “I have not forgot our place not far from town / The peaceful white cottage where we lived alone. It’s from Baudelaire.”

  Agnes smiles. “I have thought about it, too. The view was so beautiful.” She reaches across the car seat to take his hand. They ride for a short time in silence, holding hands and looking out at the battered city through the windows. For some reason, the driver has taken them into the French Concession instead of following Bubbling Well Road out to Hungjao. He drives down a series of crowded side streets and, at one point, seems to be heading back in the direction of the Old Chinese City. Another series of left and right turns puts them on Avenue Foch, driving westward. Every intersection is barricaded with barbed wire and sandbags. Carts heaped with belongings fill the streets. Men, women, children—everybody carrying, pushing, or simply clutching onto something. They pass a convoy of Japanese armored vehicles, evil-looking things with protruding guns and slits for windows. On top of each is a small turret with a soldier’s head protruding like an open bud. The city is being smashed, picked apart, bit by bit, and Mohr begins to feel frightened. It is not a suspenseful fear, the fear of something immanent. He feels caught in a tremendous downward purling, turns to Agnes. “You need to call your mother. Let her know that you’re okay.”

  Agnes lets go of his hand. “I spoke with her last night. Before we left the hospital, as a matter of fact.”

  They are entering one of the older suburban areas of houses and parks and gardens behind walls. “Is she okay? Does she have everything she needs?”

  Agnes nods. “I wouldn’t have left her alone if she didn’t.”

  In Hungjao, the riding clubs and golf courses are not only open, but crowded. Every day, the newspapers publish letters from disgruntled suburbanites demanding an end to the inconvenient disruptions of the war. Shanghai’s Schemozzle, a book by Sapajou, has just appeared on the newsstands. An excellent souvenir. Shows no dead bodies, no burnt buildings, makes no attempt to impress one with the horror of war. The inimitable Sapajou captures the grave, the comic, the critical and the sympathetic aspects and spirit of this Shanghai war.

  IT IS HARD to know what to think.

  “AND WHAT ABOUT your parents?” Agnes asks after a short pause. “You’ve never told me anything about your family. Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “A sister,” he says, and takes out another cigarette. He hadn’t meant to begin a conversation about family, had asked about her mother because of the precarious state of things, the dangers all were facing. His sister? He has no idea, though he wonders from time to time how she is faring now in her beloved Deutschland. Hedwig was almost certainly still there. She’d worked too diligently scrubbing away her Jewishness to admit it now by committing so distasteful an act as—emigration.

  “Were you close?” Agnes asks.

  Mohr shakes his head. “Not at all.”

  Ag
nes is observing him closely. He turns to look out the window.

  “What about your parents?”

  “My father was a very gentle man,” he says, aware of the arrogance in speaking of his own father with such distance. But distance is all he has ever been capable of in matters of the family. A peculiar by-product of assimilation. “Not a gentleman, but a gentle man,” Mohr continues. “I was the difficult one. Always gave my parents a hard time. When I was seventeen, I went climbing in the mountains. Without asking permission. I just took my rucksack and left. My father took out an advertisement in the Würzburg newspaper.” He chuckles and shakes his head, remembering. “I made it all the way to the Dolomites. When I finally came home, my father met me on the doorstep in his housecoat. He was furious. I wasn’t sure he was going to let me in the house. Then he said, ‘Who the devil is Peter Tambosi?’ It was the name I signed to the telegram I’d sent home to say that all was well.”

  “Why that name; why not use your own?”

  “To be funny. So they wouldn’t take what I had done too seriously, and to signal that all was well. But partly because signing my name would have meant taking full responsibility. I was afraid to do that. So I made up a name—Peter Tambosi—and traveled under it incognito. It was fun. My first real adventure.”

  The driver has been listening with occasional glances into the backseat. “Are we getting close?” Mohr asks.

  The driver nods.

  “Is that why you volunteered for this?” Agnes asks. “For adventure?”

  “I didn’t really have a choice.”

  “You could have refused.”

  “On what grounds? I’m a doctor. I have professional responsibilities.”

  “On the grounds that you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

  He meets the driver’s rearward glance, then turns to Agnes. “Better no compass than a false one,” he says, smiling, and rolls down the window. The cold air is refreshing. Suburban houses flicker by in a hodgepodge of ever larger, ever grander European styles. Ragpickers and refugees are spilling over into the manicured parts of the Settlement, in spite of barbed wire and barricades being put up and manned by soldiers. Lawrence’s comment about lost Eden comes back to him. Is war the first step in a return to wilderness? He turns to Agnes. “In any case, there’s a big difference between lost and missing.”

  Agnes raises an eyebrow. “Oh? And which are you?”

  Mohr laughs, realizing suddenly that he is happy, feels upbeat and cheerful. Also a little frightened; and without an answer to her question. Play like this always ends in the same place—tangled high up among the branches. If only she’d asked him that question earlier—as they were steaming eastward toward Japan. Or better, she should ask Käthe. Yes, Käthe would know the answer.

  The driver hits the brakes, turns abruptly into a narrow driveway. He cuts the engine. “Wait here,” he tells them.

  It is an older house, packed onto a block of nearly identical houses with gabled, red-tiled roofs, arched front doorways, and servants’ entrances at the back. The windows are all shuttered. At the end of the driveway is a trellised gate leading into a large garden. It could have been Dahlem, or Grünewald, any wealthy suburb. The driver returns minutes later and leads them inside. He has shed his chauffeur’s cap, carries himself now as if vested with higher responsibilities. Inside, the house is cold and sparsely furnished, as if it will shortly be abandoned. They are led up to the second floor. A Chinese man emerges from one of the rooms.

  “Thank you for coming, Doctor.” His English is unaccented. He is modestly dressed, a plain quilted jacket and loose-fitting trousers. He leads them into a darkened room, empty except for a narrow, military-style cot on which a man is lying under heavy blankets. Beside the cot is an upended wooden crate, next to which are two wooden camp chairs. On the crate are a canteen and a metal drinking cup.

  Agnes draws open the curtains. Sunlight filters through the slats of the drawn exterior shutters. She opens them, flooding the room with light. Mohr kneels beside the cot. The man is Chinese, in his mid- to late forties. Mohr asks permission before pulling down the blankets. The man is disoriented, as if he’s been sleeping. He doesn’t answer. Mohr works quickly. When he presses the abdomen, the man lets out a howl of pain. Mohr stands, pulls the stethoscope from his ears. “How long have you had this pain?”

  A familiar voice answers, “Five days.”

  Startled, Mohr turns. It is Vogel: gaunt, slightly hollow-cheeked. He comes into the room, acknowledging Agnes with a curt nod, and goes immediately to the sick man’s side. Mohr is speechless, and stands aside as Vogel whispers to the patient in what sounds like fluent Mandarin. “Can you say what’s wrong?” he asks, looking up.

  “Acute appendicitis,” Mohr answers, regaining composure. “But it’s only a guess.”

  Vogel speaks again to the man, who responds in a weak voice. “Can you treat him here?” Vogel asks.

  “Well, why not? Let’s just cut him right open.” Irritated, Mohr tugs the stethoscope from his neck and drops it into the bag. His sarcasm hangs in the air, and he is glad to let it linger, feeling betrayed and abused by all the secrecy and sudden surprises. Vogel stands aside to let Agnes adjust the man’s blanket. She dampens a cloth with water from the canteen and presses it to the man’s forehead. The young man who ushered them in and the driver are standing just inside the room. At Vogel’s nod, they withdraw, closing the door behind them with a gentle click.

  “Sit down, Max,” Vogel says, gesturing to one of the folding chairs.

  “There’s no time to sit down.” Mohr picks up his bag to leave. “This man needs to get to hospital immediately.”

  “Can you take him?”

  Mohr regards his friend for a moment, then sits down, cradling his medical bag on his lap. Vogel sits across from him. Gesturing to the man on the cot, he says, “He is Liu Feng, a general of the Eighth Route Army.”

  Mohr is about to ask what the Eighth Route Army is, if it is the same army that is currently burning Chapai to the ground, but he suddenly feels too absurd and ignorant and, in the end, helpless. One war per lifetime is enough to teach a man all there is to know. “He needs a hospital,” he says. “I can’t do anything for him here.”

  “Will you bring him?”

  Mohr stands, then sits down again, bewildered and suddenly unsure. He fumbles with the worn leather grip of his medical bag, looking Vogel squarely in the eye. His friend’s face is tired, careworn, and yet—and this Mohr realizes for the very first time—without the slightest glimmer of skepticism. He is as tidy and crisply dressed as ever, with thinning hair combed straight back, suit newly pressed. To be so resolutely connected to a set of facts, and have one’s days unfold according to them. Mohr used to think that the wear in a face such as Vogel’s masked turmoil and inner conflicts. But maybe that’s only the case with skeptical natures. For a man too firmly guided by commitments, and unhampered by doubts, maybe the lines and crags are simply lack of sleep, and sagging skin. “You called me naive the last time I saw you,” he says at last. “So pardon me if I ask a naive question.”

  “Go ahead.” Vogel clasps his hands on his knee.

  “Why don’t you take him there yourself?”

  Vogel shifts in his chair. “Because the general and I can’t be seen together.”

  It is quiet in the room. Mohr absorbs this piece of information the way he’s always taken in Vogel’s revelations: he laughs. “I’d never have taken you for a communist, Vogel. Not in a million years. That big house, the car and driver. The expensive suits.”

  Vogel shrugs.

  “I suppose it’s all just a cover. You’ll give up all the luxury after the revolution, right? Were you a member of the Party back in Berlin, too?”

  Vogel shrugs again. “It would be wrong to say that the Party in Berlin is the same Party as the one here in China. Comintern and the CCP are following a different course at present. The goal is the same. The paths are different.”
/>   This is all he cares to know. In a sense, he feels as if he’s known this about Vogel all along. The city is full of people like him, like Timperly, and like poor young Granich. It is bursting apart because of men just like them, men of the world—presidents, secretaries, generals, bankers, revolutionaries, missionaries, priests. Yes, it is power that puts things into the world. But on the individual level, power doesn’t seem much more than bullying. He can remember Lawrence once saying, “The tree that falls with a crash, grew without a sound.” Could the world be improved by men who chose, simply, not to get involved?

  “Was it you who asked me here?”

  Vogel compresses his lips and nods. “I’m going away, Max, and don’t know when—or if—I’ll be back.”

  “You’re leaving China?”

  Vogel nods.

  “Where are you going? To Palestine?”

  “Eventually, probably, yes. You should go there yourself, Max. I can help you.”

  Mohr shakes his head. “And exchange one nationalism for another? You know my answer to that.”

  “You should reconsider, Max. This is no time for stupid platitudes.”

  “Stupid platitudes? You’re one to talk. Out to build a socialist Zion in Palestine? Why not Uruguay? Or Tibet?”

  Vogel cuts him off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mohr.”

  “At least I can admit it. Anyway, I have everything I need right here.”

  Vogel seems surprised. “Oh? And what about your wife and daughter?”

  Mohr glances over at Agnes, then gets up for another look at the general. “The man needs an appendectomy.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. What are you going to do with Käthe and Eva? You’re not still thinking of bringing them here, are you?”

  Mohr feels the heat rising in his face, his pulse quickening. Just as he is about to tell Vogel it’s none of his goddamn business, the two men who have been waiting in the corridor enter carrying a stretcher between them. Mohr beckons them over, steps away from the cot. “Be careful moving him,” he tells them, gesturing for Agnes to follow him downstairs.