Return it.
Shanghai
He lives in the Yates Apartments, at 803 Bubbling Well Road. It is a modern, semicircular building, eight stories tall, with an elevator and a curved facade that billows out dramatically in the front but from the side gives the impression of having been chopped in half. Mohr’s fifth-floor apartment overlooks the street, but even at that distance, there is no escaping the clamor of the pavement. He likes to stand at the window, smoke, and watch the traffic streaming below: screeching, honking, banging, billboarded Bubbling Well Road.
It is a warm July morning. A young mother is waiting for him with her sick baby. According to Wong, she waited on the doorstep for most of the night. It isn’t the first time a patient has waited all night to see him. Visiting hours are clearly posted on a sign downstairs in Chinese and in English. If he’d known she was there, he would certainly have tended to her right away, but Wong enforces the office hours strictly and will fetch him only in an emergency.
The headache he had when he woke up is gone. Given how little he’s been sleeping lately, it’s a wonder he doesn’t walk around all day with temples throbbing. He enters the examination room. Together with the waiting room across the corridor, the clinic comprises exactly half of his apartment. The examination room has plumbing; plenty of towels, too, which he takes great pains to keep in clean supply. How Käthe would smile at all the well-ironed towels.
He washes his hands at the basin with glances over at the woman. “Nee gin tee’en how sheeay mo?” he asks in the phrasebook Mandarin he uses with uneven success. “How are you feeling?” he repeats in English, but the woman won’t answer, or even look directly at him.
Diphtheria. He’s almost certain of it. The third case in two days. How will he explain to the poor woman that she should go directly to the isolation hospital on Shantung Road? He looks up at the clock on the wall, a gift from Vogel, who helped him procure the examination table and just about everything else he’s managed to acquire in the last two and a half years. He likes to joke that he’s the lowest-overhead doctor in the International Settlement, and can’t count the number of patients he’s seen, much less keep track of his rates. They vary from patient to patient, visit to visit. Yesterday began with a Russian hemophiliac. The man claimed all his money had been in the American Oriental Bank, the collapse of which had been reported in the North China Daily News only the day before (“Surely you read about it, Doctor. Please understand!”). Then came a Chinese man with gout (two dollars), and an anemic Chinese lady who wanted to gain weight (promised to pay seven dollars). Next a German with tropical eczema, known locally as Hong Kong Foot (paid three dollars). A Persian gentleman with liver trouble agreed to come every day for eight days (paid five dollars in advance). Then an Austrian with dysentery (complete rogue, paid nothing); an Indian with gonorrhea (paid three dollars); Chinese, insomnia (paid five dollars); Dutch, migraine (promised four dollars). In between, telephone consultations with three Chinese and one Spaniard, who spoke French and promised payment by courier (no show).
He gestures toward the examination table. The woman is a child herself, sixteen years at most. She is wearing a smudged voile blouse. He detects a faint whiff of perfume. A singsong girl from a nearby bordello, perhaps? Gently, she lays the baby on the examination table. He feels the infant’s hot little feet and arms.
“Hou tung? How long sick?”
The mother doesn’t answer. He touches the baby’s swollen throat, holds the stethoscope against the tiny chest and listens to the infant’s heartbeat, glancing up at the nervous mother with the preoccupied doctor’s mien that hints at consolation without actually offering it. Since returning to medicine, he’s had to retrain himself not to feel, to keep his eyes fixed on the frail human surface of things. It goes against his nature to do so, but that he has finally succeeded is oddly comforting.
“Sheeay bing? Diarrhea?” He squeezes the baby’s belly gently, and knows the answer even before the mother can shake her head.
“Sin kau tung?” He draws his thumb from abdomen to esophagus. “Vomiting?”
The mother shakes her head again and says something he doesn’t understand. He can’t distinguish much between Wu, the Shanghainese language, and the other Chinese dialects that swirl around him every day. He has trouble enough understanding the local pidgin, his own attempts at which usually go uncomprehended. “Four day,” she murmurs, holding up four fingers.
He finishes the examination and gestures for her to take the baby from the exam table and sit down. She presses the infant to her breast. “Four day no chow,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Please, wait,” he tells her, and leaves the room to think.
In the bedroom he fills Zappe’s dish with seed. The mynah was a gift from an elderly Chinese patient he had treated last year for opium addiction. A caged bird? The poor creature’s wings had been clipped. He called it Zappe after the character from his play Improvisations in June. And the little black bird speaks—pidgin! No can do, no can do. He’s taught it some German, too—Brüderlein fein, Brüderlein fein.
It is getting hot, the air damp and heavy. It rained all June, but nothing compared to the heavy floods of two summers ago, when 200,000 bodies floated down the Yangsee. He puts Zappe’s cage on the windowsill. The bird bobs its head, ruffles its feathers. He lights his first cigarette of the day. Three Castles, usually. Chesterfields “when there is company”—as the enormous new billboard across the road proclaims. A row of idle rickshaws stands against the curb, the pullers gathered around a steaming tea cart. Yesterday he had photographed a young mother on the sidewalk feeding her child from a dirty bowl, shoveling scraps of food into the little mouth with chopsticks. He’d treated the child some weeks earlier for scarlet fever and was pleased to see it so well recovered. The rickshaw pullers laughed as he took the pictures. He clowned for them a little, dropping to one knee, then standing up; backing away, then coming forward to snap a quick set of pictures. There is something comforting about the mask a camera provides: the photographer’s intentions so plain to see, yet also inscrutable. Standing at the window now, he can hear the voices of the rickshaw coolies blending in with the steady roar of traffic. Vogel is always urging him to move, find someplace quieter. He has offered to lend whatever money it will take; an old China hand, as the British say. But Vogel isn’t British. He’s a Jew from Berlin, and displays all the affectations of having lived in Shanghai for too long, most notably a big Packard, an armed driver, and a mysterious web of connections reaching like tentacles up and down the social ladder.
Mohr glances at his watch. He’s due at the Country Hospital on Great Western Road at eight o’clock. Finishing there, he’ll go straight to Lester Hospital on Shantung Road and work there until two. The hospital work is an important supplement to his income from the practice. Shanghai is crowded with doctors of every nationality, but the Germans all want Aryan doctors. “A Jewish doctor getting started has only so many options in this city,” Vogel explained to him the very day he arrived. “In Shanghai it’s scrape scrape scrape, friend.”
And that is what Mohr does. He scrapes and supplements and spends half of what he needs on the practice and loses half of what he manages to send back to Käthe through transaction fees, inflation, and other rogue factors. It’s ridiculous—both what he needs and what he’s able to send. He needs clean towels and linen and medicine and cotton bandages, too. But how to explain to Käthe, to whom he managed to send only two hundred dollars last month, that he now has a car? Does he really need it? Bussing and rickshawing to and from the hospital was exhausting. He hates to complain and accounts for every last dollar in letter after letter.
He finishes the cigarette and returns to the woman, whose baby is probably going to die. She is sitting where he