Part 4 (2/2)
”Yes,” she muttered into her book. ”We Jews are the most fortunate people in the world.”
Franz exhaled slowly as he fought the temptation to react to her sarcasm with some of his own. ”Among German Jews, we probably are, yes,” he said evenly instead.
Hannah only nodded.
”Of course, knowing it does not make our situation much easier, does it?” Franz allowed.
”Not really, no.”
Franz climbed over the ladder's last rung and into the loft. He hunched forward, pressing his back against the slanted ceiling as he sidled along to the end of Hannah's mattress. He sat down and placed a hand on his daughter's arm. ”Is it the move, Liebchen?”
She shrugged.
”You miss your old school, don't you? Your British and American friends? The ones in the internment camps.”
”I do, yes,” she said noncommittally.
”Is there something else?” Franz squeezed her arm. ”Perhaps a boy?”
”My school, my teachers, my friends-I miss them all,” she said irritably. ”But most of all I miss the way things were before.”
”Before the j.a.panese came?”
”That, too, I suppose.”
”I don't understand.”
”It's not important, Papa.”
Franz frowned. ”Hannah, do you mean before Sunny and I were married? Before we all moved in together?”
Hannah shrugged again. ”It's not Sunny, really.” Her eyes fell to her book. ”When we were in our old home on Avenue Joffre . . . everything was simpler.”
Franz had never before sensed the slightest tension between Hannah and Sunny. The evidence suggested they shared a closeness that transcended a typical stepdaughterstepmother relations.h.i.+p.
Before Franz could probe further, Hannah rolled away to face the wall. ”Papa, I'll come down and eat breakfast soon. Do you mind if I rest another few minutes? I did not sleep well last night.”
Franz stared at her back for a moment before he nodded to himself. ”All right. I have to leave for the hospital now. But, please, Hannah, you must eat. Do you understand?”
As Franz stepped onto the ward, he was greeted by the sight of Berta draping a sheet over the man in the nearest bed. ”Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha'olam, dayan ha-emet,” the nursed murmured the Jewish prayer of mourning.
Franz surprised himself by echoing the refrain. He had arrived in Shanghai a committed atheist and, like his father before him, distrusted all religions. However, over the past four years, Judaism had crept back into his life. He was still not convinced that he believed in a higher power, but he had even begun to attend Sat.u.r.day Shabbat services, something he never would have dreamed of doing in Vienna.
”So Herr Liffmann is finally gone,” Franz said as much to himself as to Berta.
”Amazing the poor man hung on as long as he did,” Berta said.
The typhus had ravaged the fifty-year-old cobbler's body, and he had been no more than skin and bones in recent days. ”Ja, he was a fighter,” Franz agreed with a pang of unexpectedly profound sorrow.
Before the j.a.panese Proclamation, the Liffmanns had lived relatively well in the International Settlement. As the May relocation deadline drew near, Liffmann lost his job and couldn't secure accommodation for his family inside the ghetto. Rather than move into one of the undersupplied hostels, the heime, alongside the crowds of impoverished refugees, Liffmann chose to ignore the deadline. Two days after the proclamation went into effect, the Kempeitai rounded up the Liffmanns and the others who had refused to move. The soldiers dumped the women and children at the Ward Road heim and dragged the men to Bridge House for interrogation. Those who survived the week of torture emerged from prison overwhelmed by typhus, acquired in the lice-infected prison cells. The staff at the refugee hospital tried everything, but without antibiotics or adequate intravenous fluids, it was futile. Liffmann had been the last one to survive. He never once showed a flicker of regret for his defiance. Even as he lay on his deathbed, he joked, ”I fled the n.a.z.is in Munich to Shanghai. Since I have no way of getting to the North or South Pole, I think my only other possible refuge will be a hole in the ground.”
Franz felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Sunny. Suddenly angry, he motioned around the ward with a frustrated wave. ”What is the point of all this?”
”At least Herr Liffmann's suffering has ended.”
”But what do we do here anymore?” he demanded. ”Who do we help?”
”Have you forgotten that we saved Hannah's life in that very bed?” Sunny released his elbow and pointed to the stretcher where they had brought Franz's daughter back from a near fatal brush with cholera the previous year. She turned her finger toward herself. ”And don't forget, you saved my life in our operating room.” Sunny had required emergency surgery, four years earlier, after being stabbed in the street by a j.a.panese sailor. ”And what of Esther and Jakob? Where would they be without this hospital?”
Franz waved away her arguments. ”That was before, Sunny. When we still had surgical supplies. We ran out of anaesthetic weeks ago. Every day we watch people suffer and have nothing to offer aside from empty words.” He shook his head. ”I am as good as useless.”
”You're still a doctor, Franz.”
”No, Sunny, I'm a surgeon. That is the only kind of medicine I know.”
”You run this hospital.” Sunny folded her arms. ”Besides, look at Wen-Cheng. He cannot perform surgery either, but he still works as hard as any other doctor here.”
Dr. Wen-Cheng Huang and Sunny had worked together at Shanghai's Country Hospital since before the Adlers arrived in the city. Franz knew that Sunny and Wen-Cheng had once shared an attraction that could have evolved into much more, had the married surgeon been willing to leave his wife. Wen-Cheng's wife had since died in a traffic accident, and Franz was convinced that the only reason the Chinese surgeon volunteered at the Jewish hospital was to be near Sunny. He tried to quiet his suspicions, but they had resurfaced the previous week when he stumbled upon Sunny and Wen-Cheng huddled in a corner of the ward, locked in a hushed conversation in Chinese. There was nothing uncommon about a doctor conferring with a nurse, but their reaction to his presence struck him as unusual: Sunny turning red with embarra.s.sment, and Wen-Cheng slinking away after a few hasty words of excuse.
Franz eyed Sunny for a long, cool moment. ”Dr. Huang is a man of many talents.”
Sunny held Franz's gaze. ”You are just as capable, Franz. We all have to adapt. There is no choice.”
Franz opened his mouth, but a sudden commotion stopped him before he could speak. Two men were approaching them, both wearing drab grey suits. One man was dragging the other along, propping him up with an arm around his companion's waist. The man on the verge of collapse was Chinese; the other, who had long, unruly hair and an uneven beard, looked European.
Franz gawked at the bearded man as though seeing an apparition.
”My G.o.d, Franz, are you a sight for sore eyes!” Ernst Muhler cried.
”Ernst! How is this possible?” Franz said in surprise.
He had not seen or heard from his friend in over a year-not since the painter and his lover, a Chinese man named Shan, had escaped Shanghai, with the Kempeitai in full pursuit. The authorities had discovered a series of oils Ernst had painted based on reports of the ma.s.sacre in Nanking. One painting in particular still haunted Franz: a woman impaled on a j.a.panese standard, naked from the waist down, staring plaintively out from the canvas as the life seemingly drained from her. The paintings had so enraged and embarra.s.sed the j.a.panese that execution would have been a mercy had Ernst been captured. He and Shan had fled west, to Free China, in search of the mountain villages where the Communist Resistance congregated, but Franz had no reason to believe that they had reached their destination or survived the journey.
A hundred questions ran through Franz's head, but the condition of Ernst's companion was his immediate concern. Franz slid a hand behind the man's back. Together with Ernst, he shuffled him to a nearby vacant stretcher. The man was too weak to climb onto the bed, so Franz and Ernst had to hoist him. As his fingers brushed over the man's sweaty brow, Franz instantly recognized a high fever.
”Thank you,” the man gasped in English as his head flopped back on the mattress.
Sunny hurried over to join them at the bedside.
”Look at you, Soon Yi!” Ernst exclaimed. ”What a delicious vision you are.”
Sunny gave him a quick smile but kept focused on the ill man. ”Where is the infection?” she demanded.
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