Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  After Nanni leaves—with tearful promises of letters, though she can neither read nor write—they come in and sit down to breakfast. Mohr’s spark fades, a silence falls. Butter and marmalade, coffee and milk, eggs in little cups, late-October air, woolen sweaters, the crackle and pop of wood in the stove. All at once, he puts down his knife, looks up, and says, “I won’t be pushed out. I’d rather just leave.”

  Käthe puts her hands in her lap and waits for him to continue. Eva meticulously dips little pieces of bread into her egg, licks off the yolk. Mohr cleans his glasses once again.

  “Can I sit in the front of the taxi?” Eva asks.

  “You can sit on the roof if you like.” Mohr pinches her cheek. The resemblance between father and daughter is remarkable. Dark hair, light hazel eyes, sharp, square jawline, and an impatient, impulsive nature prone to veer in all directions at once. Eva has grown several centimeters in just the last few months. Käthe can see the lineaments of the future woman emerging, not in fragments but whole, and not a Westphal but a Mohr.

  The telephone rings. Mohr rises to answer but changes his mind and sits down again.

  “Aren’t you going to answer, Papa?”

  Mohr shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk.”

  The bell clangs several more times and then falls silent. For the past week, calls have been coming in from friends and acquaintances. His story, The Diamond Heart, had been serialized a year ago in a Hamburg daily. The editor, Jahn, had telephoned the other day to say good-bye and they had talked for over an hour. The last call, and the one he had least wanted to take, had come from his sister, Hedwig. A letter had preceded it in which she tried to argue that he should allow himself to be baptized, as she and her husband had done—many years ago. After handing it to Käthe to read, he tore the letter to pieces.

  “A little severe, don’t you think?” she said.

  “Not nearly as severe as her stupidity.” He glanced at the strewn bits of paper and flushed. She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. The redness in his face dissolved. When she began to gather up the scraps from the floor, he made as if to help, then stopped himself and left the room.

  That Mohr was a Jew had never been an issue of any significance between them until these last few years; no more than her Hamburg Protestant origins. If anything, they both considered themselves refugees of the horrible and confining Bürgertum they had both been brought up in—of which Hedwig’s letter was such an unwelcome reminder.

  Yesterday, up on the roof, she’d tried one last time to engage him. He was replacing some broken tiles and she climbed up to take in the view and keep him company. It was a sunny day and the slopes of the Wall-berg stood out clearly and in full autumn color. As she made her way gingerly across the gently pitched rooftop, it felt as though they’d always been together here, and would always remain so. She sat next to him on the roof ridge, tucked her skirt up. It was pleasantly warm. He slid a new tile into place and hit it with the hammer. It broke. He turned to her with a strange smile and said, “Voilà! The world resolves itself in twos.” After a short pause he said, “We should keep that in mind.”

  “Keep what in mind?”

  “That we can be apart and not apart. Together and not together.”

  “You think that sort of talk makes things any easier? Why don’t you try to see things a little more simply?”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing simple about anything.”

  She watched as he fitted in the next tile. It was not a job he was familiar with. The last time the roof had needed repairing, they’d hired somebody; but Mohr had insisted on doing this job by himself, and worked as if he knew just what he was doing. “Why China, Max?”

  He didn’t answer, and continued working.

  “Why not someplace closer? Like Prague? Or Vienna?”

  Mohr stopped and leaned back on his haunches. She knew he understood what she meant. He tapped the edge of the tile into place with the rubber hammer. There was nothing she could think of to say, so she kept him company up there until he was finished. Strangely, she wasn’t frustrated or impatient. Not at all. It was nice to sit quietly together. Theo Seethaler appeared in the yard below.

  “What are you doing back here?” Mohr called.

  “I came to say good-bye.”

  Mohr tossed his tools down into the yard. Käthe sensed that there was something he still wanted to tell her, and also that he was glad for this sudden distraction. Seethaler held the base of the ladder as she descended, talking the whole time about having had to leave school to come home and help his father, who had fallen ill. The boy—no longer a boy, but already twenty—made no attempt to hide his disappointment. Mohr came down right behind her, jumped from the ladder several rungs before the bottom. He marched into the middle of the yard to survey his work. “Perfect!” He lit a cigarette, and pointed to the roof. “You can’t even tell they’re new.”

  Seethaler helped Mohr carry the ladder and tools to the barn. Käthe went inside to take down the wash from the upstairs balcony. The low slant of the sun cast everything in a golden light. They returned from the barn, and Mohr invited Seethaler to sit with him on the bench. She folded clothes and listened as they talked. There was something sweet in the trust the local boys placed in Mohr, the way they telegraphed so much of themselves in conversations about ski bindings or bicycle racing. Seethaler was clearly upset about having to help in the family plumbing business.

  “So, you prefer life in the big city,” Mohr said.

  “Don’t you?”

  Mohr didn’t answer right away, then he said, “If being comfortable means having your fat behind padded, then I guess the city’s the place. But upholstery costs money.”

  Seethaler laughed. “It’s better than being stuck out here.”

  “What is it that you like better in the city?” Mohr asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Go back, then. People who want money should stay in the city. It’s the people who want to get away from money who should come here.”

  She heard him stand up and go around to the side of the house. A moment later he walked out into the yard carrying a wooden chair. He set the chair down on the grass, flashed a grin, then took a few steps back, rubbing his palms together—one, two, three—and with a loud yell leaped over the chair and landed on his feet on the other side.

  Eva appeared at the top of the meadow where she and Lisa had been playing, and the two of them ran down to join the game. Mohr beckoned to Seethaler and stood aside, hands on hips, beaming. “Come on down,” he shouted up to the balcony.

  “I can see just fine from here,” Käthe called back.

  Seethaler failed to clear the chair and fell in a heap. He insisted on a second try, and when he failed, Mohr urged him to take his time and try again. When he failed a third time, Mohr lifted him up from the ground and took him inside for a farewell schnaps.

  In those last autumn days and weeks, they were conscious of marking time. It grew cooler; the trees blazed with colors and dropped their leaves. They slept late, took their time around the house, went on longer and longer afternoon walks. They prepared the house for winter, split and stacked wood, filled the cellar with beets and onions and potatoes. At night, after Eva went to sleep and Mohr went upstairs to his attic room to work, Käthe would read or knit by the stove. If the calm that had settled on her was comforting, the clarity of it was frightening. She would look up from her knitting or her book, acutely conscious of the passing moment.

  On one of their last walks together, Mohr told her how anxious he was to get going. It was painful to hear. “How can you say that?”

  “I’m going to start a new life for us in China.”

  “But everything’s being uprooted, torn apart.”

  Mohr shook his head. “Plants have roots. The world is big and we’re still young and life is long.”

  Did he really think he could escape the problems of the day just like that?

  They were on
the footpath that led across the valley toward Kaffee Angermaier, the inn where the Lawrences had stayed when they’d come to visit just a few years earlier. Lorenzo’s death had contributed much to Mohr’s crisis. It wasn’t merely the loss of a friend but a feeling of irrelevance, of time wasted. The famous Englishman had cut a wide and deep swath in the short period of their friendship. He had always been harsh in his judgment of Mohr’s work. A strong and mutual affection compensated for the harshness, but even that became complicated as Lawrence’s health deteriorated. Mohr saw his friend’s long, drawn-out illness and death as a sign. He said he needed to find a new direction. Käthe watched the change come over him gradually, and for a time felt a tinge of resentment toward Lawrence. There is something awful in making a legacy of a friendship, but that was what Lawrence had left Mohr with in the end.

  They stopped walking. “What do you call this?” Käthe asked, trembling. “What is this, if it isn’t home? Our home?”

  Mohr dug his hands into his pockets and looked at her with a slightly shamed look. “I don’t know what to call it anymore. I don’t think I even recognize it.” He turned slowly, hands in his pockets, as if taking in the entire panorama of the valley, hatless, hair tousled in the breeze. The fields were plowed up on all sides and smelled strongly of newly spread manure. She tried to imagine what lay ahead in the years to come—when they were reunited in China. Would they live in a big, modern apartment? Go riding in the countryside, learn Chinese and English, and be healthy? Eva could take singing lessons. They would go to concerts.

  But China was so far away, another world entirely.

  EVA IS WATCHING her mother. Käthe bites into a slice of buttered bread and chews with a soft click click in the left side of her jaw. Mohr is all bunched up in his tweed traveling jacket and bow tie. He seems physically 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 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.