Nightfall Over Shanghai (2 page)

The door opened again and Esther stepped in, holding Jakob in her arms. In Vienna, Esther had been married to Franz's younger brother, who had been murdered on Kristallnacht. Even though she had since remarried, Franz still considered her to be his sister-in-law.
Sunny thought of her as one too. Esther had always been skinny, but after a year of forced separation from her second husband, Simon, she had lost so much weight that she swam in her simple grey dress. Her narrow features and deep-set eyes were more sunken than ever, making her look older than her thirty-eight years.

As soon as Jakob saw Sunny and Hannah, the toddler struggled free of his mother's grip and tottered over to greet them. Hannah swept him up in her arms. “Look, Jakob, you're not the youngest anymore.”

“Baby, baby,” Jakob repeated.

Esther turned to Sunny with a look of quiet concern.

“I was as surprised as you.” Sunny went on to explain what had just happened, safe in the knowledge that Feng Wei couldn't understand German. “Look at her, Essie. I've never seen anything like this. She is resisting the maternal instinct.”

Esther nodded in an understanding way. “Under the circumstances, I don't think the girl has much choice.”

“So what will become of him?”

Esther sighed. “An orphanage?”

Sunny had no idea which, if any, of the orphanages in the city were still operating since the Japanese occupation had begun. She thought, with a shudder, of those little packages wrapped in bamboo that she had passed on the streets over the years—babies who died at birth or were abandoned soon after.
Never
, she vowed to herself. She would never let that happen to this precious one.

“What then?” Esther eyed her quizzically. “Sunny, you're not suggesting …”

All her exhilaration and wonder drained away. Sunny felt utterly defeated. “How could I … we?”
What would Franz say?
But she kept that thought to herself. “Besides, what would I even feed him?”

Esther studied the nursing baby for a long moment without comment. Finally, she nodded to herself. “I'm still feeding Jakob. I have plenty of milk to share.”

Dr. Franz Adler shot out a hand and grabbed the stretcher's railing, fighting off another wave of light-headedness. Lately, the episodes had been striking more often. Back in Vienna, he'd been able to stay up for nights on end performing surgeries with little difficulty. But nowadays, a single sleepless night in the refugee hospital was guaranteed to incite multiple bouts of dizziness.

Franz's approach to his own symptoms, like that of so many other doctors he knew, was to minimize or to ignore them. After all, he was almost forty-three years old. How could he possibly expect to possess the stamina he once had as a young surgeon? He considered telling Sunny, but he couldn't bring himself to compound her worries.

Franz glanced around the open ward, the hospital's only one, to see if anyone had witnessed his spell. The two nurses—the dependable and maternal head nurse, Berta Abeldt, and the sweet but skittish Miriam Weinstein—were busy tending to patients, oblivious to his struggles. None of the patients paid him any attention either. Franz had no concern that the man on the stretcher below him might have noticed. Herr Steinmann's glassy and unfocused gaze suggested that he was still drifting somewhere
between consciousness and coma. Franz was surprised that the seventy-year-old lawyer had even survived surgery.

Steinmann had stumbled into the hospital the night before, his skin the colour of slate and his belly as rigid as a board. In the operating theatre, Franz had a found a coin-sized hole where an ulcer had eaten through the stomach's lining and leaked acid throughout the abdominal cavity. Surely only willpower and obstinacy had kept the old lawyer alive.

Franz had come to know Steinmann through the Refugee Council, a loosely organized association of representative refugees that helped support the ghetto's three
heime
, or hostels, where the poorest Jewish families lived. Franz had felt an immediate kinship with the elegant and fastidious Berliner—no doubt because, as Esther had pointed out, Steinmann bore so many similarities to Franz's father, who had died in Vienna shortly before the outbreak of war, not long after Franz, Hannah and Esther had fled the city. Not only did Steinman physically resemble Adler senior, he also shared his profession, his meticulousness and his dim view of all religions. Steinmann even possessed the same fatalistic sense of humour.

Franz's dizziness passed and was replaced by elation. He was relieved, of course, that Herr Steinmann had survived the surgery and now had a legitimate chance of recovering, though it would be a long and challenging road. But there was more to Franz's upbeat mood. In the past two weeks, he had rediscovered a sense of professional purpose. For months, the hospital had been hopelessly low on almost all supplies, including ether for general anesthesia. Without these resources, Franz had felt neutered—a surgeon with nothing to offer his patients but stopgaps and half measures. But a few weeks earlier, several Russian Jews had arrived at the hospital
unannounced, bearing cartons full of supplies. The boxes were all marked in Cyrillic, but it hadn't taken Franz long to dig through them and find five bottles of ether buried at the bottom of one.

Shanghai's Russian Jewish community, which numbered over five thousand, still enjoyed rare personal and economic freedoms because of the neutrality pact between the Soviets and Japanese. The attack on Pearl Harbor had made it impossible for any British and American financial aid to reach Shanghai's expatriate communities, so the Russian Jews were the only potential benefactors the refugees had left. The Russians had proved to be a fickle and unpredictable group, separated by tradition, language and, for the most part, culture from the other European Jews in the ghetto. Almost a year earlier, Franz had appeared before a group of Russian elders and appealed for medical supplies and financial aid. He had long since given up hope of their help, so he was shocked and delighted when the provisions materialized.

Franz gently smoothed the bandages down over his patient's abdomen. “All things considered, the surgery went better than expected, Herr Steinmann,” he said, more to himself than to the unconscious patient. He was about to step over to the next bed when he heard a commotion somewhere down the hallway. His shoulders and neck tensed. More than the frantic voices, it was the sound of boots pounding the floor that set off his internal alarm. He would never mistake those footfalls for anything other than the harbinger of a raid.

Seconds later, the first soldier stormed down the corridor. A half dozen or so others followed after in their brimmed caps and khakis. The only two who didn't have rifles slung over their shoulders carried bulky wicker boxes in their arms.

Steadying his breathing, Franz went out to meet them at the
ward's entry. They breezed past him without a word of explanation. On the ward, the soldiers split up. The two with the boxes headed straight for the small supply closet at the back. Franz followed after, but Berta reached the closet first. The head nurse filled the doorway, so Franz had to peer over her shoulder to watch the soldiers inside. They stood back to back, facing the shelves. Each man swept an arm along a shelf, knocking the bottles into the waiting boxes. Within seconds, they had emptied half of the cupboard.

Berta put her hands on her hips. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded. “You have no right to—”

The soldier nearest to her dropped his box, spun and punched Berta so hard in the chest that she toppled backwards. Franz caught her out of reflex, but her substantial weight almost knocked him off his own feet. He struggled to right the heavy woman in his arms. When she was finally supporting her own weight, he grabbed her by the shoulders and asked, “Are you all right, Berta?”

Face flushed and struggling for air, she buried her distress behind a stoic expression. “I only need a moment, Herr Doktor,” she gasped.

Just then, shouting from within the ward drew his attention. Franz looked over to see a white-haired patient, Frau Adelmann, waving her right arm desperately while her left limb lay stiff and unresponsive on the mattress. A stocky soldier was shrieking at her in Japanese while he yanked a blanket away from her body.

“I cannot get up,” Frau Adelmann cried. “I have suffered a stroke only last week.”

Undeterred, the soldier grabbed the sheet underneath her and jerked it off the bed, hauling Frau Adelmann along with it, until she rolled off and landed on the floor with a sickening thud.
She screamed in pain, but it had no effect on the infantryman. He bunched up a corner of the sheet and dragged her along with it toward the hallway. All around the ward, soldiers were scaring, prodding and dumping patients out of their beds. Those who could walk were herded toward the exit in their gowns. Those who couldn't, like Frau Adelmann, were being dragged out—in the case of one man, by his ankle.

When Franz spotted a soldier pulling the sheet out from underneath Herr Steinmann, he rushed over to him. He had managed only two or three strides before another soldier stuck out his leg, sending Franz sprawling to the ground. Just as he started to push himself up, a jolt of pain ripped through the right side of his chest. The soldier kicked him a second time, harder, and Franz heard his rib crack before he even felt the stab of pain. Air whooshed out of his lungs. Desperate for breath, he pushed himself up by the elbows. Then a boot slammed into his jaw, throwing him onto his side. The taste of blood filled his mouth, and he felt his jaw agonizingly snap out of place before clunking back in with a grinding crunch.

The soldier grabbed Franz by the collar of his shirt and started to pull. Breathless and in pain, Franz had no strength to resist. All he could do was pant for every molecule of oxygen as he was hauled along the floor and heaved out the front door onto the ground in front of the hospital.

He lay on his side on the cold, damp dirt and gasped for breath as patients accumulated around him. Some were seated on the ground, others curled in heaps, including Herr Steinmann. A few of the more robust patients stood up, leaning against one another for support. Out of the corner of his eye, Franz saw two soldiers nailing boards across the hospital's entrance while the men carrying
boxes walked down the short pathway to trucks at the curb. After a minute or two, a panicky voice asked from somewhere above him, “Herr Doktor Adler, please, can you hear me?”

He nodded to Miriam but regretted it immediately as pain shot up the side of his jaw and into his ear.

Berta knelt down beside him, looking remarkably composed. “Say something, Dr. Adler. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he croaked. “The soldiers?”

“They have left,” Berta said. “Can you stand?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Let's try, shall we,” she encouraged as she placed a hand gently under his shoulder and began to lift.

Franz managed to get to his knees and, holding on to Berta, rose shakily to his feet. He was terrified that an inopportune dizzy spell might topple him back to the ground, but thankfully none came, so he released Berta's arm.

Miriam stared at him, panic-stricken. “What now, Herr Doktor? The hospital is closed. Finished.”

Finished.
The word hurt Franz more than his injuries. He and Sunny had dedicated the past five years of their life to the refugee hospital. Somehow, the chronically undersupplied, decrepit old site had always defied the odds. Franz had saved Sunny's life there after she had been attacked by a Japanese sailor. Sunny had nursed Hannah through a near-fatal bout of cholera. Together, they had rescued Esther and her baby from certain peril with an emergency Caesarean section. How many other lives had been saved inside the hospital? How many people had been allowed to die in dignity, their pain mitigated through medication and compassion? Too many to remember them all.

“The patients, Dr. Adler.” Berta sighed. “Where shall we take them?”

Franz looked around at the patients piled on the ground or standing in clusters, shivering in their light gowns. Earlier in the day, he had counted twenty-one. Some were recuperating, but others were in the throes of illness.

Berta was talking again, but Franz couldn't concentrate on her words. His eyes fixed on the ramshackle grey building across the street, its front windows still boarded up more than five years after a Japanese aerial bombardment had blown them out. He raised his hand toward it but pain in his ribcage stopped him halfway. Instead, he motioned with his head. “There. We will take them there.”

“That old heim?” Berta asked.

“There are several rooms inside.”

“But they use every last bed and then some,” Miriam said with a wild shake of her head. “The families, they sleep in bunks on top of one another.”

“They will have to make space,” Franz said.

“And what about supplies? The Japanese—they took everything.”

“We've coped with our cupboards bare before, Berta.” But Franz doubted the head nurse believed his reassurance any more than he did.

Berta eyed him silently before she finally nodded. “It's the only way.
Ja.
I'll go gather some young men from the heim to help us carry the patients.”

Franz nodded. “See if you also can find some boards to carry them on.”

With a crisp nod, Berta marched off toward the heim, as composed as if she had never been attacked. Franz hobbled over to
Herr Steinmann, who lay on the ground, his hips bent and rotated and his gown pulled halfway up his thigh, exposing veiny legs. His eyes were open and more focused than earlier. He appeared to be mouthing words, but Franz couldn't make him out.

Splinting his own chest with his elbow, Franz carefully crouched down beside the man.

“The operation, Dr. Adler,” Steinmann breathed. “It's over?”

“Yes, Herr Steinmann. It went well.”

“My back, it feels so wet and so cold.” His lips curled slightly, but Franz couldn't tell if they formed a grimace or a smile. “Am I … am I still alive?”

Franz nodded. “You are, yes. The Japanese raided the hospital. They dragged us outside.”

Steinmann's only response was to shut his eyes and mutter “I see.”

Franz looked over to the door of the hospital. It was nailed shut with at least four boards. Something caught his eye: a single sheet of paper that had been tacked onto the planks. He rose gingerly to his feet and shuffled over. Scanning past the Japanese writing, he read the German words printed at the bottom of the page: “By the decree of the Empire of Japan, these premises have been order closed. No one is permitted to enter. Anyone breaching this order will be considered as to be trespassing. Such trespassers will be treated with the heaviest and most immediate of responses.”

The proclamation was unsigned, but Franz had no doubt who had drafted it. He could think of only one person who could be behind such flowery, non-grammatical phrasing. The man who lorded over the ghetto, and the Jews inside it, like the raja of some remote Indian province. The same little tyrant who was responsible for the scars that criss-crossed Franz's back.
Ghoya.