altered, as if the changes that will come over him in time are already rising to the surface. He has been smoking heavily, and his pallor is not healthy in spite of six weeks of fresh air and outdoor work. The flab he put on in Berlin is gone. In the last month they plowed and prepared a whole new field for planting. Käthe now has nearly half a hectare of delphinium under cultivation, and enough hay cut to last the animals well into the winter.
“Are there elephants in China?” Eva asks.
Mohr puts down his cup. “A very good question. If I find any, I promise to send you one.”
“An elephant? How?”
“By post, of course. Trans-Siberian.”
“You can’t send an elephant by post.”
“Why not?”
Eva stands up. “They’re too big.”
“Have you ever seen a Chinese elephant?”
Eva shakes her head.
“Indian elephants, African elephants, they’re big. Maybe Chinese elephants are small—the size of a little dog.”
Käthe gets up to put another log into the stove. The speculation about Chinese elephants continues. “In China there are dragons, and monkeys, and silkworms, and giant panda bears that live in bamboo forests.”
“There are dragons?”
“That’s what I hear. So why not miniature elephants?”
“Tiny ones?” Eva cups her hands. “Like this?”
Mohr begins to clear the table. “Yes, little tiny ones.” Eva follows him into the kitchen, and afterward they all go outside together to say good-bye to Minna. The cow comes loping over to the fence. Mohr strokes and pats her nose. “Good old Minna von Barnhelm. I remember the day we first saw you.” He turns to Käthe. “Remember how skinny she was? We thought she’d never produce a single drop of milk.” He cups Minna’s wet nose in his hand, then turns and gazes down toward the house. He fishes a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt, lights it, and they stand there quietly for a time. It is just after nine o’clock. The whole day lies ahead: the taxi, the train to Munich, the final good-bye.
Back inside, Mohr sits beside Käthe on the old green sofa. She puts her head on his shoulder. Eva looks on, uncertain. The room has never seemed so small, the ceiling so low, the stove so warm, the floor planks so creaky, the windows so narrow, the sofa so musty, their fourteen years together in this three-hundred-year-old farm house so quickly vanished. It can’t be recaptured, only evoked . . .
. . . IN PHOTOGRAPH after photograph as you review them late one night, one by one. There are moments when you can imagine them suddenly appearing beside you, breathing the same air. Max and Käthe Mohr, little flecks of captured light. What is it that moves you so? Why do they seem so familiar? Their gaze is all that remains—looking out, far beyond the frame of each photograph, straight into your heart.
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
