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 left her. He squats down, holding on to one arm of the chair for support, and looks directly at her. “Diphtheria.” He pronounces the word slowly, as best he can in English. He doesn’t know the Chinese word for the disease but assumes it’s more descriptive than Corynebacterium diphtheriae or KlebsLöffler. The ethereal vocabulary of medicine has always been difficult.
The woman stares back, uncomprehending.
“Wong!” he calls, and stands back up.
Wong appears almost instantly.
“Catchee car, Wong.”
“Car bottom-side, Master.”
He slips the stethoscope from his neck, goes to the sink, and begins to scrub. Speechless and cold, the woman holds her baby in her lap. He glances at her, then down at his stained white coat, his cracked and spotted brown leather shoes. The pipes chatter when he shuts off the water. He wrings his hands—once, twice—over the basin, dries them with a clean towel. The woman is watching. Without really looking, she is watching; in watching, she is telling him she knows there is nothing he can do. Nothing. He drops the towel into the laundry bin. It isn’t the small, measured movement of the herbalists he has observed in the old Chinese City, rich with age and patience, but just the crumple, crumple, snip, snip of modern medical practice, so big and powerless it makes him want to whistle.
THE COUNTRY HOSPITAL is for foreigners only, but 1937 has been a good year for epidemics and overcrowding is forcing an uneasy egalitarianism on all Shanghai hospitals. In early June, the Country Hospital began admitting Chinese cases of scarlatina, meningitis, and diphtheria. Seventy-six at last count. As of a day ago, seventeen have died. Over at the Chinese-only Shantung Road hospital, 2,412 cholera cases have been admitted since the first of the month. As of yesterday, 735 have died. Mohr can’t help taking note of these numbers. Statistics have never interested him much, but life in the International Settlement is nothing but numbers: commerce, nationalities, frightened people.
The car makes its way through morning traffic. Mother holds her baby tightly, pressing herself into the farthest corner of the backseat. Mohr sits silently, taking in the view. Rickshaw traffic, roadside commerce. Tea, rice, sugarcane, watermelon and sunflower seeds, candy, fruits, vegetables, full-course meals bubbling on kerosene stoves, ear cleaners (who keep him supplied with a steady stream of patients with infections), astrologers, letter writers, tailors, beggars, monks, cripples. Red silk banners hang from every shop front, billboards and neon lights in every direction. The war in the north has not altered the pace of the city. Every morning he scans the headlines in the North China Daily News. He would like to meet the mordant White Russian cartoonist who signs his name “Sapajou.”
Cigarette smoke curls up between his fingers. He glances again at the young mother and her baby and suddenly recalls a dream he had had the night before about Wolfsgrub. Very detailed. He flew over Tibet, swooped down over the forest edge, and landed. Everything was very still. He stood on the hill looking down at the house. The meadow was plowed. Everything as it always was—and very, very distinct. Eva wasn’t there. She was in school. The sofa stood before the front door, the old green one. Käthe had just finished cleaning. She was wearing a kerchief, and the dog was lazing on the ground. Sunshine, plowed earth on the high, steep fields, and blue delphinium, row upon row of them, top-heavy, in full bloom. His shoes grew heavier and heavier as he walked downhill. Käthe was dusting the sofa and looked up but didn’t see him. His guilt became overwhelming as he drew closer. He told himself that now everything would be good again. He’d come from Tibet, run back home. Wutzi growled. As he took Käthe in his arms and saw her blue eyes shining, he woke up. Wong was standing there with the morning paper and tea and warm milk. His clothes were laid out; the bath water was running. Outside, the sound of an argument on the street, some rickshaw pullers from Yates Road, moving in on the ones who are regularly encamped here . . .
WONG OPENS THE car door. The mother glances nervously across the vast plateau of backseat, unsure, then steps from the car, clutching her bundle. Mohr leads her past the two Sikh policemen standing guard at the front entrance to the nursing station on the first floor. After a brief flurry over what to do, he watches as the young woman and her baby are taken through the doors and into the isolation ward. She glances over her shoulder just as the doors begin to close. He smiles, offers a halfhearted
