Rising Sun, Falling Shadow (7 page)

Charlie's eyelids flickered a few times before opening. The rice wine combined with three drops of anaesthetic that Sunny scavenged from the bottom of a discarded bottle of ether had turned out to be more than enough to sedate the gaunt young man, who had been unconscious for almost four hours since his surgery. Sunny suspected that the raging infection contributed to his post-operative stupor.

Charlie's face remained remarkably placid as his eyes focused and then shifted from Ernst to Sunny. Sunny knew that he must have been suffering intense pain from his wound, but he didn't show it. Instead, he summoned a rubbery smile. “My leg,” he croaked in English. “I can still feel it.”

“Largely because it is still attached to the rest of you,” Ernst said through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Sunny shot her friend a sharp look before turning back to Charlie. “We removed the bullet and drained a lot of pus from the site of the infection. We had to excise—to cut out—a fair bit of flesh around your thigh.”

“You did not have to amputate,” Charlie said in an almost detached tone.

“No.” Sunny hesitated. “But we do not yet know how the wound will heal or, Charlie, if it will.”

“I understand.” Charlie shifted slightly.

Sunny lifted the glass syringe she had been clutching in her palm and held it up to the light. She tapped it with her fingernail, knocking the air bubbles to the top and expelling them. “A dose of painkiller,” she explained as she pinched the skin over his shoulder and injected the morphine.

Charlie was stoic. “Today I still have two legs, which is more than I expected.”

Ernst sucked heavily on his cigarette. “And really quite advantageous from the point of view of balance.”

“Ernst, please,” Sunny said.

Charlie waved off her concern with a chuckle. “Without Ernst, we would have little opportunity for laughter in our village.”

“Marxists.” Ernst rolled his eyes. “Never will you meet a more sanctimonious or humourless bunch. They will stamp out every last trace of irony and sarcasm long before they get around to addressing the class system.”

Charlie viewed his friend straight-faced. “That's entirely possible.”

Sunny wondered again where Charlie had learned his flawless English. She could tell from the few words he had uttered in Mandarin, together with his features and darker complexion, that he was not Shanghainese. She suspected that he came from somewhere much further north. Although his heritage remained a mystery, she could not shake the sense of familiarity she felt looking at him.

The curtains parted and Franz approached the bed wearing a lab coat that had begun to fray at the sleeve from repeated washings. “Ah, Charlie, good afternoon. No doubt Sunny already informed you. The operation went as well as it could, all things considered.”

“Thank you. Both of you.” Charlie struggled to raise his head and shoulders but, exhausted by the effort, flopped back down to the bed. He looked over to Ernst. “An hour or two, and I should be ready.”

“Ready for what, Charlie?” Sunny asked.

“To go home.”

Franz squinted at him. “Home? That is out of the question. You will not be leaving the hospital for weeks.”

“I am afraid I must,” Charlie said.

Franz folded his arms across his chest. “If you leave now, you will surely lose your leg. Provided you survive long enough for even that to happen.”

“Dr. Adler, I have the highest regard for your medical opinion, but I can assure you that my life will be in even more danger if I remain here.”

Ernst sighed. “Sadly, Franz, he might be correct.”

“Besides . . .” Charlie yawned as the morphine took effect. “The sooner we leave, the better for your hospital.”

“Our staff is capable of extreme discretion,” Sunny said. “No one else need ever know that you are here.”

“Trust me . . .” Charlie yawned again. “They will find out.”

“Find out what?” Sunny grimaced. “None of us even know who you are.”

Charlie's eyes drifted shut. “They will,” he murmured.

They watched him doze for a few moments before Franz motioned toward the door. “Maybe a good sleep will bring him to his senses.”

Ernst and Sunny followed Franz through the ward and into the deserted staff room. An empty cup, dried tea leaves stuck to the bottom, stood on the table as testament to the last time a nurse or doctor had had an opportunity for a rest. As soon as Franz had closed the door behind them, he wheeled around to face Ernst. “Who is he?”

Ernst shrugged. “I told you—”

Franz stabbed a finger at him. “Nonsense. We need to know who we are dealing with here.”

Sunny touched his elbow. “Please, Ernst.”

Ernst looked at each of them in turn before pulling out another of his hand-rolled cigarettes and igniting it with the lighter that never seemed to leave his hand. “His name is Bao Chun. More precisely: General Bao Chun.”

“The Boy General, of course!” Sunny almost slapped her forehead. “That's why he looks so familiar.” She could picture old newspaper articles and their grainy photographs of the young officer.

“He can't even be thirty years old,” Franz pointed out. “How is it possible that he's already a general in the Chinese army?”

“There is no Chinese army per se,” Ernst said. “There are the Kuomintang and the Communists. And despite the so-called Unified Front, the two sides expend far more energy, bullets and lives fighting each other than they do the Japanese.”

“So Charlie and you are both Communists, then?” Franz asked.

“Me a Communist? Bite your tongue, Franz! I'm just a queer painter. A lapsed bohemian. Nothing more.” His cheeks flushed. “Most nights I fall asleep on a dirt floor praying that I will wake up on my lumpy old bed in my studio in Vienna. Before the Japanese, the Nazis and the Communists conspired to banish me to a village—not even—a camp, really—a thousand miles from the nearest whiff of civilization—” He stopped mid-tirade. The storm left his eyes and a more familiar devil-may-care expression settled on his face. “As for Charlie, he fights for the Communist army. Whether he is truly a Marxist at heart, I cannot say. But he is the exception to the infighting rule among the Chinese. He never wastes a bullet on the Kuomintang. He focuses all of his effort on the Japanese.”

“Charlie is from the north, isn't he?” Sunny asked.

“Manchuria. He was just a boy when the Japanese first invaded in '31. But according to his men—at least the ones who speak anything other than that rural mumbo-jumbo—he was born for the fight. Fearless. A natural leader and a brilliant tactician.” He took another long drag on his cigarette. “The men worship him. Most Chinese divisions—entire armies, even—survive months at best on the front. Staggering losses. Not Charlie. He has kept his battalion together for five years. Even the Japanese fear him.”

“Fear him?” Sunny said in disbelief. “The Japanese?”

Ernst pointed his cigarette at the windowless wall. “It's so different out there. Once you get beyond the city, the countryside goes on forever. The Japanese cannot control Charlie or the other partisans. At most, they can contain them. Even in the regions that the Japanese have conquered, they only truly control the points and lines.”

Franz grimaced. “What are those?”

“Just markings on a map—the cities and the railroads. The Japanese cannot police the whole countryside. It's far too vast. All they will ever capture are their precious points and lines.” He snorted. “And for those, they have killed millions. Millions!”

“Where is Charlie's army based?” Sunny asked.

“We often hunker down in the little village where Shan is now. But Charlie's army has no real base per se. It's the reason for their success. Most of the time, they live behind enemy lines,” Ernst explained. “They ambush Japanese patrols and sabotage the railway, disrupting transport and lines of communication, before retreating back into the forests and mountains. It's a game of cat and mouse—lethal sometimes—but Charlie plays it very well. He is a legend among the partisans.”

Franz turned to Sunny, his face suddenly pale with concern. “If the Japanese learned Charlie is here . . .”

“What's that silly term Simon used to use?” Ernst snapped his fingers. “Public enemy number one.”

“And we are sheltering him in our hospital,” Franz said quietly. “Our Jewish hospital. Can you imagine what the Nazis would do if they were to ever find out?”

“The Nazis?” Ernst groaned. “When it comes to Charlie, those louts should be the least of your concern.”

“On the contrary, Ernst,” Franz said. “Last year, after you were already gone, the SS tried to persuade the Japanese to annihilate us Jews. The Nazis argued that we were a security risk. They almost had the Japanese convinced. Certainly the local Kempeitai. If we are caught harbouring a hero of the Chinese army in our hospital, imagine how that would bolster the Nazis' argument.” He turned back to Sunny. “At the very least, the hospital would be finished.”

Sunny's heart ached for Franz. The weight of the responsibility of running the hospital since Simon's departure had worn her husband down as much as the war itself. Grey hair and crow's feet had appeared almost overnight. He was a changed man, and Sunny longed to see more of the old Franz, the one whose passion extended beyond the walls of the hospital.

“This is precisely why refugees cannot participate in any form of resistance,” Franz continued. “We cannot afford to give the Japanese a reason or excuse to follow through on the Nazis' plans for us.”

“So you agree then, Franz,” Ernst said. “Charlie must leave the hospital. Premature discharge or not.”

Sunny saw the conflict in her husband's troubled eyes. She wanted to reassure him somehow, but she shared his torn feelings: it would be best for everyone—except the patient himself—if Charlie left.

Franz ran a hand through his hair. “Charlie will never reach home alive. Not in his current condition.” He squared his shoulders. “No. He has to stay. And, Ernst, you must find a way to persuade him.”

* * *

Sunny left the hospital an hour later, telling Franz that she was off to the market to gather food and supplies. But this was only part of the truth.

Joey insisted on accompanying her, intending to track down one of his black market contacts who had “a line” (another phrase he had picked up from Simon) on a fresh supply of ether. Invariably, that meant his contact had stolen the anaesthetic from another woefully undersupplied civilian hospital. The refugee hospital had been victimized by similar thefts, and it sickened Sunny to think that she might be indirectly complicit in such activity. But she couldn't stomach the thought of performing another emergency surgery while a patient stared up at her in ashen-faced agony, or the idea of her husband marginalized to the point of uselessness by a lack of basic medication. So she swallowed her misgivings and reluctantly endorsed Joey's illicit trading.

Outside, the afternoon sun seemed confused about the date. Although it was still only spring, the sunshine beat down upon them as though trying to melt the pavement the way it would at the height of summer. Sweat beaded on Joey's brow, and Sunny could feel her cotton dress becoming damp under her arms and around her neck. The heat intensified the stench of the rotting garbage that had been dumped on the sidewalks and the buckets that passed for toilets in the decrepit lane houses.

Once they reached Chusan Road, the smells of espresso and baking came as a welcome relief. As they headed along the ghetto's main street, they passed cafés, a newspaper office and a dance hall. The theatre in the middle of the block still performed revues three nights a week in both German and Yiddish.

Sunny felt a surge of pride at the refugees' remarkable resilience. They faced constant, often deadly, threats: overcrowding, disease, starvation and hostility from two world powers. Yet, somehow, the refugees not only persevered but also managed to foster culture, the arts and a sense of community. Sunny, who had never met a German Jew until her first day volunteering at the refugee hospital, found it all quite beautiful. She had grown up largely in the Chinese world, where family meant everything but community mattered little. And while she had never before experienced anything close to the bickering and complaining that seemed normal among the refugees, neither had she ever witnessed such generosity and compassion between strangers connected only by their religion and language. When Sunny married into this eccentric society, they had accepted her as one of their own, as though she had been born to a kosher butcher in Munich or a cantor in Leipzig. As a Eurasian, Sunny had grown up feeling like a perpetual outsider, never fully accepted by either Shanghailanders or Shanghainese. The sense of belonging she had found among the refugees was unexpected and precious, and it heightened the protectiveness she felt toward them.

Sunny and Joey approached the guard posted at the ghetto's exit, a beanstalk of a man with a yellow rag tied around his rolled-up sleeve. As Chinese citizens, they were exempt from the restrictions imposed on the refugees. The guard gave them only a cursory glance as they bypassed the queue of Jews waiting to leave the Designated Area.

As they walked away from the ghetto, Joey remarked, “The hospital doesn't see many Chinese patients.”

“We do from time to time,” Sunny said.

“Not really.”

“You know what the Shanghainese are like, Joey. Most would never go to a hospital in the first place, and those who do choose the Shanghai General or the Country Hospital. Most of the locals are not even aware that we run a hospital.”

Joey stopped. “Charlie is not a local.”

Sunny slowed, then came to a halt. “No, I suppose not.”

“He's from Manchuria.”