Mohr

by Frederick Reuss

  Now his ashes are sunk—beyond the reach of German laws—at the bottom of the North Sea. Abgefahren, der schwarze Ritter.

  After Eva has been put to bed, Brehm helps Käthe drag the trunk and suitcases up to the attic. It is a dark night, with no moon. She lights a fire in the stove to take the chill out of the air, then fetches the newspaper clipping from the drawer in the writing table where she has been keeping it. The captain brings out a bottle of Irish whiskey. She allows him to pour her a small glass. He reads the clipping, then puts it aside in disgust. “Fuchs,” he says.

  “Who is that?”

  “A minister at the embassy.” He sips his whiskey. “It’s his job to spread this kind of shit.” Brehm shakes his head again, his face now slightly red and distorted. He reaches for his pipe. She can sense that there is more to the story, but isn’t sure she wants to know it. Deep down, she already knows everything she cares to know. Without knowing, she knows. As he speaks, she feels as if she is shrinking, physically getting smaller, her arms, her legs, her head and torso becoming smaller and smaller while her clothes remain the same size. She leans forward, crosses her arms on the table to prop herself up. Is this what happens when there is nothing left? When everything is lost? You vanish into yourself?

  “When did you last see my husband?”

  “Just before he went to Japan.”

  “How was he? How did he look?”

  “As good as ever.”

  “I mean, did he seem healthy?”

  Brehm nods, slides his pipe to the corner of his mouth. “A little tired—which is why he went to Japan. He had a pet bird. A mynah.”

  She waits for him to say more, but he doesn’t. He puffs on his pipe and sips his whiskey, gradually dissolving into alcoholic wistfulness. It is silent for a time. He pours himself another whiskey. “I can get you out of here,” he says at last, looking directly at her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can take you with me. You and Eva.”

  “Take us? Where to?”

  “I sail back to Shanghai in ten days. I can take you with me, if you like.”

  She searches the captain’s face. His features have softened, seem sad now, no longer agitated. She stands up. “I am very tired, Captain.”

  Brehm stands. “Please pardon me. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She pauses for a moment at the door.

  “Good night, Captain. Thank you for all you have done.”

  She goes upstairs to her bedroom and closes the door. She can’t fall asleep, and so she lies in the darkness listening to the captain rattling around downstairs. She can hear the steady uncorking of the bottle, the clink of his glass, his smoker’s cough. The window is open. A slightly damp but refreshing breeze blows into the room, and she turns to it. How many nights has she lain here? In this one place? The presence of the captain downstairs isn’t nearly as distracting as the thought that she has spent nearly half of her life in this house—alone. And, until now, unafraid. She has her memories. Upstairs, in the attic, are all that remain of Mohr’s—so different from hers in the end, but rich and full and also wonderful. It occurs to her that she hadn’t asked Brehm what he’d done with the ashes. Had they been scattered on the surface of the water? Or had they been sunk in the urn? Two conflicting images crowd her thoughts, of ashes dispersing on the surface of the ocean, and of remains plunging in a capsule to the bottom of it. Which was it? The difference seems crucial.

  She wakes up just before dawn, gets dressed. Vivid dream fragments crowd her thoughts: A bare room. The old Hamburg stationer’s shop in the Postgasse, Grandmother Kämmerer taking her by the hand and saying, “Grüss immer recht freundlich wieder, wenn du nicht weisst wer Dich gegrüsst hat!”—Be always right friendly, when you don’t know the person who has greeted you.—And Mohr’s accordion. She must remember to ask Brehm if it is among the things that were packed into the trunk.

  “Are we going up to the Alm today?” Eva is standing in the kitchen doorway, rubbing her eyes.

  “Up already?”

  Eva nods sleepily.

  “Maybe. Let’s see first if Berghammer is going.”

  “You’re coming with me, Mama. Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “But you said.”

  “Today is Saturday. You can go to Lisa’s in the afternoon.”

  She finishes loading the tray, gestures for Eva to take the milk pitcher. They go into the next room, set the table for three. The room grows slowly brighter as the sun burns off the morning mist. She sets the captain’s glass and whiskey bottle on a side table, empties the ashtray. His overcoat hangs on a hook by the door. The room feels altered by the stranger’s presence, narrower, less cozy. Eva butters a slice of bread, pours herself a glass of milk. Through the window, Käthe can see Minna standing patiently by the fence. “Bring Minna in today,” she tells Eva.

  “I can milk her in the field.”

  Käthe shakes her head. “No, bring her in.”

  Eva shrugs, and turns to look out the window. “So, we’re going then? Up to the Alm?”

  “I don’t know.” She sips her coffee. When the captain’s footsteps sound on the stairs, she sits up, reaches for and hastily begins to butter a slice of bread.

  “Guten Morgen!” The captain is in a deliberately cheery mood. He is wearing a clean shirt and his hair is combed straight back.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Like a child.”

  Käthe fills his coffee cup.

  “Do you like raspberries?” Eva wants to know.

  The captain leans down to her, eyes glistening with hangover. “Do you have raspberries?”

  “I know where to find them. Want me to show you?”

  “First Minna,” Käthe reminds her daughter.

  “Then I’ll show you afterward.”

  Brehm nods and Eva runs from the room. A few moments of silence follow. The captain sips his coffee. Käthe takes a nervous bite of bread. That she’s lost some measure of composure is annoying. Finally she puts down the slice of bread, turns directly to Brehm. “I have been thinking all night about your offer, Captain.”

  Brehm puts his coffee cup down gently. “I didn’t mean to upset you by it. Please, I hope you haven’t taken offense.”

  Käthe pushes her chair back, drops her hands into her lap, and looks squarely at Brehm. “No, Captain. I didn’t take offense. But even if it were possible, I couldn’t imagine what I would do all alone in China. Thank you for your offer. It was very kind.”

  The captain looks down for a moment. “He always talked about bringing you. But the war…”

  She cuts him off. “Yes. We had plans.”

  “What will you do now?”

  She stands up.

  “Now we will stay here,” she tells him, and leaves the room.

  Eva is just leading Minna into the stall as Käthe enters. She ties the cow to a post. “Is Captain Brehm going back to his ship today?”

  Käthe strokes Minna. The warmth of the animal is reassuring. “Yes. The captain is leaving today.” Then she gathers Eva into her arms, holds her tightly.

  Eva squirms free and regards her mother curiously, then slaps Minna’s hindquarter and says, “Don’t worry. Minna will be fine without us for a few days.”

  The words hang for a moment. She watches Eva pull the stool up alongside the cow, set the milking bucket into place. She is smiling. “What’s so funny?” Käthe asks.

  “You’re so funny,” Eva says, and begins milking. “We shouldn’t have guests anymore, Mama.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because every time a guest comes, you begin acting funny.”

  Brehm enters the barn, approaches slowly. “I have upset your mother,” he says to Eva, then turns to Käthe. “I apologize.”

  She puts a hand on Eva’s head. “Captain Brehm is just discovering how easily I cry these days.”

  She leaves Eva to finish milking, and beckons the captain
to come outside. Pausing at the bottom of the earthen ramp that leads up to the doors of the barn, she says, “All night I’ve been wondering, what if we had gone to Shanghai? What would our situation be now? Would we be trying to come back here? Everything looks different, depending on where you are standing.”

  The captain says nothing.

  “We live for ourselves here. It’s the way we’ve always lived—even before Mohr left.”

  Brehm takes out a cigarette, lights it.

  “Your children, Captain? If they were half-Jewish, as Eva is, would you take them away?”

  Brehm puffs on his cigarette, contemplating for a moment. “The country has become stupid. If I could spare my children, yes, I would.”

  “It must be painful to be separated from them for so much of the year. But at least you’ll see them again when you return.”

  Brehm shakes his head. “I won’t be returning. I’ve taken a job with a Canadian shipping company. They’re coming with me.”

  “You’re going to Canada?”

  “My wife is blind. I can’t leave her and the children anymore.” He is interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up at the front gate. “My taxi,” he says, with some relief.

  Käthe struggles to keep up with everything the captain has just told her. That he is emigrating—with his family—leaves her feeling even more desolate. Why hadn’t he said anything about it last night? Should she reconsider? A sudden panic seizes her. She is cut off from the larger world, and also a hapless victim of it.

  The driver honks the horn.

  “I must get my things,” Brehm says, stepping away.

  “Wait!” Käthe calls him back, but can’t formulate what is in her thoughts. Eva appears at the barn door. “Are you going now?” she asks. As Brehm ascends the ramp to bid her good-bye, a flood of images—of the ticking away of those last hours before Mohr’s departure, down to the agonizing last few minutes at the train station. There had been no question then of going with him to Shanghai, only of joining him there at some later date, a resumption of things under different conditions. Still, there had been hope. A rearrangement of priorities, renewal. Those were Mohr’s own words. How he had repeated them, in letter after letter. Let’s put everything behind us. Everything. The good, the bad. To be forgotten. Start over. The world is big and life is long.

  In the end, everything they did, they did together—even parting.

  Brehm goes inside with Eva to fetch his bags. The taxi driver has opened the trunk of the car, is leaning against the rear fender. “Grüss Gott,” he says. Käthe returns the greeting; recognizes the man but can’t remember his name. She hears Eva’s voice inside the house, her footsteps on the stairs. When she and Brehm at last emerge, the driver hurries to help with his bag. Brehm is wearing his captain’s hat and an overcoat with the insignia of the Norddeutsche Lloyd company. He seems already returned to a bigger, wider world.

  “I was asked to give you this before leaving,” he says, producing an envelope from the inside pocket of his overcoat.

  She accepts the envelope, turns it over in her hands. It is thick and sealed on the back with red wax. “It’s from a woman.”

  Brehm says nothing, and with a tip of his cap gets into the taxi and rolls down the window. “I have left my cable address on the table for you.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” They step away from the car as the driver starts the motor. Käthe slips the envelope into the pocket of her apron, but continues to hold onto it, waving good-bye with her free hand. Eva holds her mother around the waist until the car disappears around the bend.

  “He was nice,” Eva says, returning to the house.

  “Yes. He was nice.”

  THE SUN IS climbing toward its midday peak. Sitting on the bench at the side of the house, she closes her eyes, tilts her face to it. She holds the envelope in her lap. The captain has been gone just over an hour, but it already feels as though an age has passed. Immediately after he left, they cleared the breakfast table and cleaned the kitchen. Käthe kneaded dough to make bread, and is now waiting for it to rise. Eva has gone over to Berghammers’. Having swept and cleaned out the stalls, watered the flower pots hanging from the upstairs balcony and underneath the windowsills, Käthe can now sit down.

  The envelope contains a long, handwritten letter. As she slides it out, she notices a small lump of tightly crumpled tissue paper at the bottom of the envelope. She shakes it out, unfolds it, and stares in astonishment at the familiar little gem in her palm. She holds it up to the sunlight, an utterly surprising little object, dropped from the sky.

  She sets it on the bench beside her, closes her eyes, and turns again to face the sun.

  She once thought that with memories, a person had everything; not a ruptured then and now, but a gift ready to be opened anytime. With memories, it is always today and yesterday at the same time. But how does memory speak to disappointment? To what you had hoped would be and never was? Now she realizes it doesn’t. So much of who we are is also all that never was.

  In another day, Eva will go up into the mountains with Berghammer and she will be alone for the rest of the summer. She is relieved and slightly fearful of this double life they are about to commence, another separation with no purpose other than to see themselves through these uncertain and threatening times. The cows are grazing up in the meadow. She can almost hear their teeth ripping the grass, the grinding caverns of their mouths. She hears the stalls slamming at Berghammers’, the scrape scrape scrape of Eva’s shovel against the cement, the peck peck pecking in the henhouse, the tinkling of a single cowbell in the breeze. She opens her eyes, glances again at the diamond beside her on the bench.

  YOU PICK UP the letter. It is long, many sheets of paper, neatly folded and written in English. You turn to the last page. Tomorrow I will leave Shanghai for Hong Kong with my elderly mother. …

  Stop reading and return the letter to the envelope.

  Pick up the diamond, hold it in your palm. It twinkles like a distant star. You put the tiny gem back into the envelope along with the letter, press the flap down, firmly, with the heel of your hand. You will put it back upstairs with the rest of Mohr’s things.

  I say you, but I also mean me—anyone who has imagined the receding past, or returned its passing glance in a photograph. An ambiguity exists between narrator and narrated, yes, but this matter of pronouns and subjects should not become too great a distraction. To appear in a photograph is to be depicted in relationship to what once was. To appear in a novel is to unfold in the mind of the reader.

  To be you is to imagine points of contact between them.

  SOMETIMES, LATE AT night, you like to go up into the attic and look at these old objects. You have looked at them many times, and can recall every image at will, but there is something especially satisfying in knowing which photograph you would like to see in advance, then going upstairs to look at it. Paradoxically, this makes it more spontaneous. Yes, you go upstairs to look, but what you see is different every time.

  Hold a photograph up to the light.

  Wong pouring Mohr a glass of water. There are several of these, taken in a series. Mohr and Wong standing in front of three silk scroll paintings. They look casual and comfortable in their light cotton clothes, a picture of easy colonial living. Mohr is holding a towel in one hand. It had been late November 1937 when Brehm arrived back in Shanghai. Cold weather. Wong would not have been dressed in that thin cotton tunic as he ushered the captain into Mohr’s apartment. Trunks and cases had been packed by Agnes. Wong was downcast and sad. He spoke in a soft, mournful voice. He brought tea. Brehm made a quick inventory of everything. At one point a young boy poked his head into the room, eyed the captain curiously, and was called away by a woman’s voice. . . .

  Imagine what happened to all of them. You have formed your own mental images from scattered photographs of the setting: Chinese scroll paintings, medical cabinets, porcelain cups, a modern apartment with picture windows. An old farmhouse in upper Bav
aria, a broad field, Käthe raking hay. She is alone now, truly alone.

  The day after Brehm left, she took Eva up to the Alm with Berghammer. She will go with him again to fetch her when the cows are brought down from their summer pasture. It is beautiful up there this time of year, with the cows grazing on the mountainsides, puffs of breath condensing in the silvery morning light. But she is looking forward to winter snows, to being closed up quietly inside the house again with Eva. . . .

  Late at night, with the full light of the risen moon shining through the window, you feel an intimate sense of company. The house is so familiar, its setting, its entire architecture—not just the beams and rafters and creaking floorboards, but the hidden architecture of the past that echoes within. How much night there is here. And life.

  But as the hours pass, you grow tired of pictures.

  Look out the window and see that the moon has already begun its descent.

  An elk calls from high up on the mountain. A slight breeze begins to blow. The first birds have started to sing. As dawn begins to break, you turn off the lamp, gather up the photographs, and return them to their envelopes; the envelopes to their boxes; and the boxes to the trunk where they are stored. You are glad to know they are here—Max, Käthe, Eva—not locked away in a separate past, but real people in real places, joined again and again in future light, by a master-glance of seeing.

  Acknowledgments

  Iinherited a photograph from my grandfather, a portrait of his favorite uncle, Max. It was taken in 1911 and shows, in three-quarter profile, a handsome young man in a cadet uniform, wearing a pincenez and the stolidly neutral expression of that doomed epoch. My grandfather, a slightly younger member of that same generation of German Jews, would only say that his uncle Max had been a doctor and a writer, had fought in WWI, been decorated with the Iron Cross, and died in Shanghai in 1937. That was all he ever said. In my grandfather’s house, all talk of the past was strictly on his terms, and because he had lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he was rarely criticized or challenged for his brevity.