The Far Side of the Sky

by Daniel Kalla

  “Mrs. Reuben has kindly offered to look for a position at the Jewish school for Hannah,” Esther added.

  Clara pinched Hannah’s cheek. The girl smiled back dutifully, but Franz felt her stiffen in his arms. “Do not worry, we will find somewhere suitable for little Hannah,” Clara said. “Of course, I cannot promise the Shanghai Jewish School. We do offer a limited number of scholarships and bursaries, but there is frightful competition for those positions.”

  “Any help you can provide us would be greatly appreciated,” Franz said.

  “There is more—” Esther began excitedly.

  “I understand you are a surgeon,” Clara cut her off. “A professor, no less.” “I was, yes. At the University of Vienna.”

  “Perhaps you have heard of my husband, Dr. Samuel Reuben?” Clara paused a moment, waiting for Franz to show a glimmer of recognition. “He is the chief of surgery at the Country Hospital. The most reputable hospital in Shanghai, of course.”

  Franz nodded, though he had never heard of her husband.

  “I will speak to my husband. He trained in London, of course,” Clara said with a tinge of superiority. “But his grandparents were German. He might be able to find work for you.”

  Despite her condescending tone, Franz relished the prospect. “I have agreed to help out where I can at the refugee hospital, but I would welcome the—”

  “Yes, of course.” Clara fluttered her bejewelled hand toward the sky. “I am speaking now of a real hospital, capable of performing major surgeries.”

  Franz’s spirits soared. “That would be wonderful, Mrs. Reuben.”

  She viewed him intently. “Your sister-in-law tells me that you are widowed.”

  “For quite some time, yes,” Franz said.

  Clara nodded with satisfaction. “Perhaps we can discuss this further over dinner at our home. My lovely niece, Charlotte, lives with us. I would very much like for you to meet Lotte.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Sunny and Simon sat bundled up on a wooden bench outside the refugee hospital. The December sun had just dipped behind the city’s western outskirts, where most of Shanghai’s wealthiest foreign executives lived behind walled estates. Sunny had known the outspoken New Yorker for less than two months, but they had fallen into a warm friendship that felt years old to her.

  Simon held out a pack of cigarettes, but Sunny waved it away. He tucked the pack back into his pocket without lighting up. “I don’t even know how old you are, Sunny,” he remarked, apropos of nothing.

  “I will be twenty-five in March,” she said.

  “And no brothers or sisters, huh?”

  She shook her head. “My mother died when I was a little girl.” “That can’t have been easy.”

  Sunny shrugged. “I am fortunate to have the father that I do.”

  “I have a big family,” Simon said. “Four brothers and two sisters. I’m second in age, the oldest boy. Growing up, my little brothers drove me crackers. Those brats. Now, I miss them all. Especially Fridays, and our Shabbat—our Sabbath—dinners with the whole family jammed around the table. They’re so loud you can’t even hear yourself think.”

  Sunny smiled. “Sounds like a loving family, Simon.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. My parents have been married thirty-four years.” He sighed. “Of course, they argue a lot. Like cats and dogs, sometimes.”

  She chuckled. “Many of my friends say the same about their parents. Chinese women are supposed to honour, respect and obey their husbands, but they can make very demanding wives.”

  “I’m beginning to think the Chinese might be the lost tribe of Israel. Or maybe vice versa?” Simon grinned. “My parents might argue like crazy, but they still go dancing every week.” He went quiet for a moment. “That’s what I want, Sunny. To find a nice Jewish girl who would still want to go dancing with me after thirty years, despite the bickering.”

  Sunny realized, for the first time, that her upbeat companion was lonely. “You’ll find her, Simon.”

  He nodded to himself. “You know what? I think I already have.”

  “Would I know her?”

  “Jeez, I don’t even know her myself. I’ve just met her.” “Is she one of the refugees?”

  He nodded. “She’s not even my usual type. Not flashy or anything. It’s just … one glimpse and I knew. She is the one.” “You see.”

  “Ah, I’m just full of hot air, as my pop would tell you.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the cigarette pack again. This time, he slid out a smoke and lit it. “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  He flashed a grin. “A smart, pretty girl like you. How come you’re not already married?”

  She felt her face flushing. “I … I never …”

  He viewed her keenly. “You ever been in love, Sunny?”

  A vision of Wen-Cheng popped into her head but she brushed it aside. “I am working two jobs. My country is at war. And my city torn apart.”

  He nudged her gently with his elbow. “Too busy for love, huh?”

  She could see that he was fighting back a smile. She was thankful for the weak light, aware that her face had reddened.

  Someone cleared his throat behind them. “Good evening, Miss Mah, Mr. Lehrer.”

  Sunny glanced over her shoulder to see Franz Adler standing a few feet behind them. She looked away, embarrassed that he might have overheard their conversation.

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Franz said.

  “Not at all.” Simon rose unhurriedly to his feet. “We’re chit-chatting about love and marriage. I was just asking Sunny why no one has snapped her up yet.”

  Simon! Sunny wanted to crawl out of her skin.

  “Oh, I … see,” Franz said. “Dr. Feinstein is expecting me, so I’d best be on my way—”

  Simon held up a hand to stop him. “Esther is your sister-in-law, isn’t she, Dr. Adler?”

  “She was married to my brother, Karl. Yes.” “So you’re both widowed now?”

  “Simon, please!” Sunny interjected. “Dr. Adler is in a hurry.”

  “I apologize, Dr. Adler. Sunny’s right. I am being rude.” Simon chuckled without a trace of self-consciousness. “But I’m a Jew from the Bronx. They don’t come any nosier than us.”

  “I understand, of course,” Franz said with a stiff smile. “I lost my wife just days after our daughter, Hannah, was born. Almost nine years ago. But my brother died during Kristallnacht.”

  “So … so recently?” Simon muttered.

  “The storm troopers.” Franz folded his arms over his chest and shifted from one foot to the other. “During the night of the riots, they came for Karl. We found him … hanging from the street lamp outside his office.”

  Sunny forgot about her embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Adler. To find your brother like that—I cannot even imagine.”

  “Karl used to say that for every Nazi brute there are ten decent Gentiles, but most are too scared to act. My faith in people is not as charitable. But, Miss Mah, I know my brother would have admired you for the selfless way you are helping us refugees.” He stared at her with disarming sincerity. “I certainly do.”

  Sunny was about to reply when she saw her father’s sedan pull up to the curb with his driver, Fai, at the wheel. Kingsley had never learned to drive. A passionate walker, he had bought the used car only after it became clear that his patients were scattered too far across the city for him to manage his practice on foot. Sunny never told her father about the run-in with the two drunken Japanese sailors, but he worried about her walking alone, especially after dark, and so came to pick her up after most evening shifts. If Kingsley was too busy, he would usually send his driver ahead to fetch her.

  Kingsley hurried up the pathway toward them.

  “Hello, Father,” Sunny said as she motioned to Franz. “This is Dr.

  Adler.”

  Kingsley shook Franz’s hand. “My daughter tells me you are quite a famous surgeon, Dr. Adler.”

  “Only wi
thin the walls of my own home, I am afraid, Dr. Mah,” Franz said.

  Kingsley nodded. “Will you be operating here at the hospital?”

  “I would like to,” Franz said. “As of now, we do not have the equipment or facilities to perform much more than the most basic of procedures.”

  “The new operating room is going to be finished any day now,” Simon pointed out.

  Franz nodded. “And when the equipment arrives, I might be able to offer the patients a little more than simply moral support.”

  Kingsley touched his chest. “If I can help in any way …” Like his daughter, he had become attached to the refugee hospital. He offered his advice on managing the blood sugars of diabetic patients and regularly donated any supplies he could spare, including insulin.

  “Dr. Mah, you’ve already helped a ton.” Simon nodded at Sunny. “And your daughter is nothing short of a godsend. Our own angel of mercy.”

  “You are too kind, Mr. Lehrer.” Despite Kingsley’s impassive tone, Sunny sensed his pride and she beamed inwardly. He motioned toward the car. “Please excuse us, gentlemen, but Soon Yi and I really must depart. I am late for a rather urgent house call.” “Don’t let us hold you up,” Simon said.

  “One day, Dr. Mah, I would enjoy learning more about your practice.” Franz turned to Sunny with an almost imperceptible smile. “Good night, Miss Mah.”

  Sunny held Franz’s gaze for a moment before turning to follow her father to the car. In the back seat, Sunny was still thinking about the Austrian surgeon when Kingsley asked, “What is a pulsus paradoxus?”

  Her mind only half on the question, she replied, “The physical finding whereby a patient’s pulse becomes measurably weaker during exhalation than inhalation.”

  “Is that so?” Kingsley said.

  “I mean vice versa.”

  “Correct. In which diseases does one—”

  “It can be seen during cardiac tamponade, emphysema and pericarditis.” She reached out and touched her father’s sleeve. “Did you and mother ever used to go dancing?”

  “Dancing?”

  “Yes, after you were married?”

  “How does that expression go?” Kingsley considered for a moment. “I have two left feet.”

  “So you never danced with Mother?”

  “No, we did.” He turned to look out the window. “Your mother loved to dance. She would even put up with my graceless stomping.” He laughed quietly. “Her poor toes.”

  Sunny had always sensed that her father adored her mother, but he rarely spoke of her. She was somehow comforted by the idea of her parents going out dancing.

  Kingsley cleared his throat. “How does one distinguish pericarditis from cardiac tamponade?”

  Sunny fielded a few more questions before Fai slowed the car to a stop in front of a nondescript lane. Kingsley grabbed his bulky medical bag as they got out. They walked past several longtangs before stopping in front of a black door that resembled the others in the lane.

  A middle-aged man in navy pyjamas met them at the door. His eyes were frantic but his tone was calm and respectful. “Ni hao, yi sheng,” he said, bowing before Kingsley. “Thank you for taking the time to come, Doctor.”

  “I am pleased to be here,” Kingsley said, matching his politeness. “Mr. Lung, how is the boy?”

  Lung shook his head gravely. “Please.” He turned and trotted down the corridor into an open bedroom, Kingsley and Sunny following.

  A young boy, about seven or eight years old, lay on a low bed covered to his chest by a light sheet. He was comatose: his glassy eyes stared up at the ceiling, and dried tears crusted his cheeks. His face was so sunken that ridges of his orbital bones stood out. He was still except for his chest, which pumped up and down like a piston firing.

  At the foot of the bed, a little girl sat with legs crossed. Rocking back and forth with quiet worry, she did not take her eyes off the boy to even glance at the visitors.

  Kingsley’s lips tightened. “Mr. Lung, you told me little Bai was still awake.”

  “He was when I went out to the neighbour’s to telephone you, Doctor,” Lung rasped from the doorway. “By the time I returned, he was in this state.”

  Kingsley lowered his bag to the floor. He removed a stethoscope and listened to the child’s chest while feeling for the pulse at the neck. After a moment, he pulled the stethoscope from his ears and turned back to his bag. As he rummaged inside it, he asked Sunny in English, “Do you smell his breath?”

  “Acetone.” Sunny named the sickly fruity aroma. “He’s in a diabetic coma. That is why he’s breathing so deeply.”

  “Yes, he suffers from diabetic ketoacidosis. His body is attempting to breathe off carbon dioxide to reverse his blood acidity.” Kingsley pulled out a vial of insulin and large syringe. “Insulin will help but will not alone suffice. We need to rehydrate him urgently, Sunny. Can you search for a suitable vein?”

  Sunny hurried to the far side of the bed, across from her father. She knelt down and touched Bai’s arm. His skin felt dry to the point of leathery. She barely palpated the thready pulse at his wrist but could not see or feel any veins below the skin. “Father, there’s nothing,” she murmured.

  Kingsley finished drawing up the insulin without comment. He tapped a few air bubbles from the tip of the syringe. Then he pulled the sheet down, pinched the skin around the boy’s navel and injected the insulin. The boy did not register a flicker of a response.

  Kingsley turned his attention to Bai’s other arm. He ran his fingers up and down the arm, rolling the skin. “I will have to try this blindly,” he said as he extracted more supplies from his bag. He attached rubber tubing to a bottle of clear intravenous fluid.

  After Sunny snugly tied a tourniquet around Bai’s upper arm, Kingsley applied a hollow needle to the skin at the crease of Bai’s elbow. He poked it through the skin, sliding the tip slowly back and forth and rotating it at various angles in search of a vein. Sunny watched intently, hoping to see a drop of blood from the hub that would confirm the needle had entered a vein. But it remained as dry as the boy’s skin.

  Kingsley withdrew the needle. Fingers still steady, he moved the tip farther up the arm and tried another spot, without success. After a third futile attempt, he released the tourniquet and looked up at Sunny with concern.

  “Would you like me to try, Father?”

  Kingsley shook his head. “The boy’s veins have all collapsed. He is too dehydrated.”

  She glanced over to Bai’s little sister, who was still rocking. “What else can we do?”

  Kingsley shrugged slightly.

  “There must be something,” Sunny said.

  “There is one other approach.” He frowned in thought. “It is entirely experimental. I have only read about it. However, I do carry the necessary equipment.”

  Sunny viewed Bai again and saw that his skin had mottled, suggesting death was near. “There is nothing to lose, Father.”

  Kingsley turned and dug even deeper in his bag. From inside a cloth-wrapped package, he extracted a massive needle the size of a carpentry nail. For a moment, Sunny wondered if her father intended to jab it directly into the boy’s heart.

  Kingsley moved a few feet down the bed and tossed the sheet off the boy. He felt along the boy’s leg until his fingers came to rest at a prominence just below Bai’s knee. “The tibial tuberosity,” he said.

  Measuring two fingers below the bony prominence, Kingsley applied the needle directly to the skin overlying the tibia. He gripped the dull end of the needle against his palm and leaned down onto it with all his weight. The needle pierced the skin and bone with a nauseating crunch. He let go of the needle and it stayed upright, vibrating like a sword thrust into stone.

  Kingsley reached for a glass syringe, attached it to the needle and slowly pulled back the plunger with his thumb. The syringe filled with a reddish gelatinous and flecked substance. “Bone marrow,” he announced. Satisfied, he uncoupled the syringe and secured the tubing to the e
nd of the needle. He lifted up the intravenous bottle and held it high in the air. Fluid began to flow in a steady drip.

  “How does the fluid run from the bone marrow to the heart?” Sunny asked.

  “It passes through the network of veins lining the marrow,” he said. “Or so I have read.”

  Kingsley insisted on holding the bottle himself as the fluid ran into Bai’s bone marrow. No one spoke. Sunny knelt down beside Bai’s sister. “What is your name, little one?”

  “Hua,” the girl said in a shy voice.

  “Ah, like the flower. How fitting.” Sunny moved a little closer and the girl stopped rocking. “You are a good sister to stay with Bai like this.” “I don’t want the ancestors to take him away,” Hua said. Sunny smiled. “Nor do I.”

  “It will be harder for them to take him if someone watches,” Hua said matter-of-factly. “Yes, it will.”

  Hua gestured to the needle sticking out of the leg. “Will that nail him to the ground, so the ancestors can’t take him?” Sunny stifled a laugh. “I hope so, yes.”

  The girl turned her attention back to her motionless brother.

  Five or six minutes passed. Sunny became aware of a new silence that had descended on the room. The boy’s respirations had quieted; he was breathing more easily.

  The intravenous bottle had emptied. Kingsley disconnected it from the far end of the rubber tubing. As he was reaching for a second full bottle, Hua suddenly yelped. Sunny’s eyes darted from the little girl to her brother. Bai blinked a few times and smacked his cracked lips together, as though trying to wet them.

  Sunny looked over to Kingsley. With only a trace of a smile, her father turned his attention back to exchanging the old intravenous bottle for a new one.

  Sunny touched Hua’s shoulder. “The ancestors won’t be able to take your brother now.” “I’m glad,” Hua said.

  “I am too, little one.” Sunny glanced at her father again, her heart swollen with pride and affection.

  CHAPTER 18

  DECEMBER 16, 1938, SHANGHAI

  A week after the Adlers and Ernst had moved into the cramped third-floor quarters on Avenue Joffre, Franz’s disorientation had still not cleared. The non-stop street noises and the ubiquitous peddlers, beggars and corpses abandoned on sidewalks only compounded his sense of culture shock. And food tasted different, even familiar delicacies from the French bakeries and cafés.