“Eva!” Käthe reprimanded in a stern voice.
Eva held up a fistful of wildflowers, gentians. Lawrence accepted them with a smile, then stood up. “You must show me where you found these,” he said, and they toddled off into the meadow together.
“Do you think it’s all right?” Frieda asked when they were out of earshot.
“Is what all right?”
“Should I tell him to keep his distance? He’s infectious.”
Käthe looked to Mohr. He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. “No harm can come from Lorenzo,” he said and went inside, knowing it was not true and wanting, suddenly, to be alone.
BEING ILL DOESN’T suit Mohr. On the other hand, it suits him just fine. Strange how the same verb applies to infirmity and desire: a passing illness, a passing fancy. When transitory states become permanent, do they also become malignant? Is being in love different from being sick? Or being in exile? Cliché questions.
He should ask Käthe.
No, he shouldn’t.
Is something wrong with his heart?
Mohr manages to remain in bed reading until just after nine o’clock, when Wong announces the first patient. After Mohr sees the man—a Russian with advanced cirrhosis—the Clinic Closed sign is put out and he returns to bed. By midday he is restless and uneasy. He feels wide awake, just fine. There’s nothing wrong, no need for prolonged idleness, so he reports for his regular shift at Lester Hospital—only to discover it is Nurse Simson’s day off.
The rounds go smoothly enough. Nevertheless, he can’t help feeling a mild disappointment. He tries his best to ignore it, but it’s not easy, and by the end of the afternoon Nurse Simson is still very near the center of his thoughts. No, she is not a thought, but a well-veiled feeling. How strange to want to fend it off, like trying to hide from oneself. Somehow, he feels compromised. Yet what has he done?
On returning home, he is surprised to find Nagy waiting outside the apartment building. He steps from the shadow of the front entrance. “Good evening, Dr. Mohr!”
“Good evening,” Mohr stutters, glancing at his watch. Embarrassed, he grips his medical bag tightly.
“I owe you an apology.”
“And I as well.”
“No, no,” Nagy insists. “You have every right to be angry for not having been paid. Checks were supposed to have been delivered by now. It was thoughtless of me to ask for a personal favor under the circumstances.”
Nagy’s apology comes as a surprise. “I hope I haven’t given you a shock,” he says and delivers a gregarious pat to Mohr’s shoulder.
Mohr loosens his grip on the bag. “I don’t get many visitors.”
“I came to invite you to tiffin.”
“Tiffin?” An odd gesture. Mohr glances up at the windows of his flat. Accepting invitations is awkward. He doesn’t go out to eat very often. It isn’t just a question of expense. Mainly, he prefers his modest diet and Wong’s cooking. He’s never been an adventurous eater and lately has been putting on weight, has had to let his trousers out twice in the past year. Bread, cheese, a cutlet. For salad, a tomato and cucumber, lightly peppered. He’s also come to enjoy Wong’s preparations of rice and vegetables, sprinkled with soya. Wurst from the German butcher on Hankow Road is one of his guiltiest pleasures. It is stupidly expensive, but their bratwurst is almost better than back home.
Nagy produces an envelope from his pocket and offers it. Mohr accepts with a nod of thanks, slips it directly into his pocket.
“I took the liberty of advancing you next month’s salary. There is so much uncertainty these days.”
It takes a moment to register. A month, plus the two weeks he is owed, comes to nearly seven hundred Shanghai dollars. Not counting the diamond in Vogel’s safe, this is more wealth than he’s had on hand since his arrival. “Come upstairs with me,” he says. “I must first see if any patients are waiting.”
He leads the way up the dark staircase. The sign on the door reads: Dr. Max Mohr, M.D. General Practitioner, Specialist in Nervous and Mental Diseases, Homeopathy. Fumbling with keys, he describes the overflowing wards at the Shantung Road hospital. “The situation is severe. No medicine. Not even ether.”
An agitated Wong pulls open the door—“Cheu kan kan! Cheu kan kan!”—and points to the open examination room.
A man is lying doubled up on the floor. Mohr kneels to examine him and immediately recognizes his neighbor from downstairs. He has been badly beaten, is bleeding. There is no odor of alcohol on his breath, nor does he seem under the influence of opium. He is young and Jewish—from Frankfurt, Mohr guesses. To call him shy would be an understatement. Mohr has spoken to him only in passing on the stairs.
“What happened?”
The man groans. His nose lies flat across his face, eyes badly swollen. Nagy rolls up his shirtsleeves, helps the man onto the examination table, then holds him down firmly as Mohr cleans the blood from his face, sets the broken nose. “You may have a fractured skull,” Mohr tells the man in English when he is done. “You should go to hospital for observation.”
The man shakes his head. “No. No hospital,” he sputters back in English.
Mohr switches to German. “You could have a concussion,” he says. “Let me take you to hospital.”
The man shakes his head, gets down from the table. He is unsteady on his feet. His face is raw and badly swollen. Mohr feels a sharp pang of recognition and regards him carefully, knowing all he cares to know. He’s had enough of this story and that story, his story and her story, the whole seasick world floating in an ocean of hate. His skin has grown thicker here, and he admits to being used to it, used to the way life here rubs up against life, a blur of struggle. Sometimes he wishes he’d accepted the offer to work in the mission hospital at the Tibetan frontier station. High up in the mountains. But is there any place beyond trouble? The rickshaw coolies here drop dead of heat prostration in summer and freeze to death on the streets in winter while he tries to keep his shirts clean, gives injections, sets limbs, pumps stomachs, and writes letters home to Käthe.
“Do you know what happened to you?”
“Bandits,” the man says somewhat unconvincingly.
“Then we must call the police.”
“No!” The man shakes his head, touches his bandaged nose.
Nagy turns away with an exasperated shrug.
“Can we at least help you down to your flat?”
The man refuses.
“Do you know him?” Nagy asks when the man has left.
“Only in passing. He came in January.” Mohr remembers seeing him in the Chocolate Shop down the street, and was a little surprised to see him sitting at the counter, calmly reading a book in the midst of a throng of noisy English children. A birthday party was under way with cake and candles. For a moment, he felt the strongest urge to join it.
A SHORT WHILE later, Nagy and Mohr are sitting in the Wing-On rooftop garden restaurant, at a table with a view up Nanking Road toward the Bund. It is cooler up here than down at street level. The red-tiled floor glistens with water, sprinkled by little boys who pass between the tables carrying brass pails. Wet tiles, a cool breeze. The lighted tower clock of the Customs House—Big Chin—dominates the nightscape. Nagy orders tea and some rice and dumpling dishes. “Have you been up here before?” he asks.
“Never.”
“It was the first modern department store in Shanghai. Built just after the war.”
“Like KaDeWe in Berlin.”