The Far Side of the Sky (21 page)

“They must have changed mattresses since I tried to sleep there two nights ago.”

Sunny’s face lit. “Dr. Adler, the new surgical equipment is supposed to arrive today!”

“I have scheduled a hernia repair for tomorrow.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but inside he bordered on euphoric.

Sunny’s smile widened. “You must be very pleased at the thought of returning to the operating room.”

He sighed happily. “You have no idea, Miss Mah.”

She cleared her throat. “Would you mind, Dr. Adler, if I … I were to observe?”

“Mind? On the contrary, I would appreciate your assistance.”

“Oh, yes, I would like that. Thank you.”

“Dr. Adler?” someone called from halfway across the room.

Franz looked over to see a tall man approaching, his lab coat flapping with each step. Franz recognized Dr. Samuel Reuben by his tortoiseshell glasses and bow tie that fit with his wife’s description.

Sunny turned for the staircase. “I had best get back to my ward duties. Goodbye, Dr. Adler,” she said over her shoulder.

“Dr. Adler, I hope I did not keep you waiting long.” Reuben shook Franz’s hand firmly. “I was dealing with a particularly scarred gallbladder that was loath to leave the liver bed.”

“They can be such a struggle,” Franz said.

“Not so much a struggle, Dr. Adler, as simply meticulous timeintensive work.” Reuben’s eyelids narrowed, and he pointed a long finger toward the staircase. “Do you know Nurse Mah?”

“We recently met at the refugee hospital.”

“Then you have probably already experienced how headstrong she can be,” Reuben huffed. “She belongs to
that
breed of nurses. Women who fancy themselves as doctors. Deprived by fate of their rightful calling. I’m sure you have seen the same type in Austria.”

Sunny had never struck Franz as anything other than a caring and capable nurse, but he did not comment.

“As a result of that gallbladder,” Reuben continued, as though the organ were the patient, “I am running late this morning. Would you mind if we chatted while I perform my rounds?”

“Of course not. A pleasure, I am sure.”

As Reuben bounded up the two flights of stairs, he recited his own resumé, stressing his medical and surgical training at King’s College in London and twice mentioning that he was the chief of surgery. He didn’t inquire about Franz’s background or experience, but at one point he said, “I understand you held a university position in Vienna.”

“Until the Nazis dismissed all Jewish faculty.”

“Well, you will soon discover that Shanghai is not Vienna.”

They arrived at the men’s surgical ward. Franz noticed Sunny attending to a patient on the far side of the room. He tried to catch her eye, but she did not glance in his direction. He wondered if he might have said something earlier to offend her.

Reuben walked over to the first bed, where a pale, middle-aged man with hollow cheeks lay. Reuben grabbed for the chart hanging from the foot of the bed. “Good day, Mr. Fife,” he said as he studied the chart. “How are you feeling?”

Fife looked at him with frantic eyes. “About the same as yesterday, I think, Doctor.”

Reuben turned to Franz and spoke as though the patient were not present. “Mr. Fife came to me with an advanced cancer of the rectum. The
tumour obstructed his bowel and adhered to the pelvic wall. I managed to fashion a very workable colostomy despite the bulk of cancer.”

From his fellowship six years earlier at St. Mary’s Hospital, Franz was familiar with the British tendency to hold frank discussions in front of patients, but he still felt uneasy.

Reuben pulled back the sheet and, without warning, exposed Fife’s abdomen. The scent of feces wafted to them. Wrinkling his nose, Reuben studied the half-full rubber colostomy bag. After a moment, he draped the covers back over Fife’s chest and turned to leave.

“Dr. Reuben, excuse me,” Fife said tentatively. “Does everything look all right?”

“Mr. Fife, you cannot expect to bounce back so rapidly from a surgery as major as yours,” Reuben said with a hint of exasperation. He placed the chart back on the bed railing and moved on. “Have a little patience, man. That’s the spirit.”

Moving from bed to bed, Reuben assessed his post-operative patients, cataloguing their histories, surgeries and prognoses but interacting minimally with the people themselves. Franz saw that Reuben belonged to the class of surgeons who tended toward aggressiveness—the “when in doubt, cut it out” approach that was so common in their profession—but Franz also recognized him as an able diagnostician and surgeon.

They stood at the bedside of the last patient, a young red-headed Scot. “A difficult case, Mr. Stewart,” Reuben sighed as he retracted the sheet to expose a bulky dressing over Stewart’s right groin. “I have repaired his hernia twice, but the abdominal wall defect is too big and the inguinal ligaments too lax to support the stitches. They keep tearing through. And the hernia has relapsed for a third time.”

“May I?” Franz asked.

After Reuben and Stewart nodded their consent, Franz peeled the bandage back to reveal a grapefruit-sized bulge over the right groin, blanketed by a row of stitches. “Which approach did you use, Dr. Reuben?”

“The Bassini approach, of course,” Reuben said.

Franz smoothed the bandage back into place. As soon as they had
stepped out of the patient’s earshot, he said, “A colleague of mine in Vienna showed me how the McVay modification can make a huge difference to the outcome in challenging recurrent hernias such as Mr. Stewart’s. I have been astounded by the results.” “Have you indeed?” Reuben said coolly.

“Yes, Dr. McVay described it only four years ago but—” Franz stopped in mid-sentence.

Reuben’s cheeks had turned splotchy, and his dark eyes burned behind his glasses. “Dr. Adler, I did not invite you here for a second opinion.” “Of course, I was merely—”

“Nor do we require more staff surgeons at the Country Hospital.” Reuben clasped his hands together. “I appreciate that you have come from a more established background in Vienna. However, you and your compatriots have arrived in Shanghai as
refugees.”

Franz swallowed back his rising indignation.

“My wife and I are trying to help as best we can,” Reuben went on. “However, I need you to understand that I am seeking only an assistant to help in surgery and with the post-operative care.”

You mean your own intern.
“Of course, Dr. Reuben.”

“If you are interested in the position, I can pay a wage that—while perhaps not what you are accustomed to—will, I am hopeful, help support your family. However, we need to be crystal clear on the scope of your duties and my expectations. There will be only one lead surgeon between us. Do you understand?”

“I do, Dr. Reuben.”

“Are you interested in the position as described, Dr. Adler?”

Franz was not, but he also realized he could not afford to turn down the financial security the job might offer his family. “Yes, I am. Thank you, Dr. Reuben.”

“Excellent,” Reuben said with a wisp of a smile. “I have to visit my clinic now. I will meet you here tomorrow morning at six-thirty.” He turned to leave. “Oh, and Dr. Adler, if you don’t mind, the nurses are terribly busy. Would you please remove Mr. Fife’s colostomy bag and clean him up?”

“I will never get used to this,” Wen-Cheng commented as he and Sunny strolled down Rue Montauban toward the North Gate of the Old Chinese City.

Sunny’s stomach flipped, assuming Wen-Cheng was referring to their ill-defined relationship. “Used to what?” she asked.

“Visiting a ‘Chinatown’ in my own country.” He pointed toward the maze of buildings ahead of them. The once-walled Old Chinese City was the original site of Shanghai but had since become an open market, largely run to overcharge Shanghailanders and Western tourists who came seeking a glimpse of “authentic” Chinese life.

“Yet you find it perfectly natural that two Chinese people should converse in English in their native country,” Sunny teased.

Wen-Cheng laughed. “I realize that Shanghai is not and never will be truly Chinese. I am not a rabid nationalist, but I do find the whole idea of this Chinatown a little condescending.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Because the Old City is still beautiful in its way. Besides, you can find some of the best tea in China here.”

They entered through the gate and continued past the Tsung Woo Day temple. As they walked the long street toward the centre of the Old City, they passed numerous sidewalk shops selling everything from ivory, sandalwood, jade and porcelain to Chinese medicines. The pitches and calls from merchants filled the air, accompanied by the scratchy chords of Chinese music that emanated from gramophones inside the shops. Some artisans stood out front of the stores, sweating over workbenches as they fashioned jewellery, sewed fans or engraved grains of rice.

Happy childhood memories flooded back to Sunny, and she smiled to herself. Wen-Cheng raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“I used to love to come here, especially in summer.”

“Me too,” he agreed. “When the blue canopies are all up like one long tent.”

“And the street turns into a bazaar with the jugglers, musicians and magicians. My father used to bring my best friend, Jia-Li, and me here. He would let us each choose one toy to buy from the toy makers. There were too many options. It was the hardest choice imaginable.”

“Perhaps for a child.” Wen-Cheng nodded knowingly. “I can think of harder ones now.”

Sunny broke off the eye contact. “Are we having tea?” She pointed ahead, where the famous Woo Sing Ding tea house sat on stone pillars in the middle of a man-made lake. The elegant two-floor, eighteenth-century building—connected to land on either side by distinctive zigzag bridges—was one of the most identifiable and visited tourist sites in Shanghai.

“I thought we could walk the gardens first. Unless, of course, you prefer tea now?”

They circled the picturesque tea house and headed toward the entrance to Yuyuan Garden. The market’s noise died away as they stepped inside. The walled gardens consisted of reflecting pools, rockeries and lacquered pavilions that were connected by bridges and walkways. The tranquility of the place always put Sunny in a pensive, almost spiritual, mood. With no one in sight, they stopped on the terrace of a pavilion overlooking a pond.

Across the water stood the garden’s celebrated rockery that jutted twenty feet up the north wall, resembling a choir cut of stone figures.

Wen-Cheng pointed to it. “Five hundred years ago, they dragged those rocks here from thousands of miles away. It is supposed to recall the peaks, caves and gorges of southern China.”

“It must be beautiful there.” Sunny sighed. “I have never been.”

“I have. I don’t remember any caves or gorges.” He shrugged. “Did you know that these gardens were built in the sixteenth century by a highranking official in the Ming dynasty, just so his father could have a quiet place to meditate?”

“I would do the same for my father,” Sunny blurted.

Wen-Cheng’s brown eyes shone. “He is a lucky man, your father.”

“Not necessarily.” She broke free of his gaze. “A more dutiful daughter would not dream of coming here with you.”

“Now you sound like a traditional country girl with bound feet,” he said laughingly. “I thought you possessed more of your American mother’s ‘free spirit.’”

“My mother came to China as a Christian missionary,” she snapped. “I doubt she would have accepted
our
circumstances any more than my father might.”

He held up his hands. “Sunny, I meant no offence.”

Sunny accepted his apology with a small smile. For the next few minutes, they stared wordlessly into the green pond below, watching the carp skim under the water’s surface. Wen-Cheng finally broke the silence. “How are things at that refugee hospital?”

“They manage somehow.”

“Are you running low on any provisions?”

“We are running low on everything, I am sure. Keeping the apothecary supplied is always a challenge, particularly for the sulpha antibiotics.”

Wen-Cheng squinted, deep in thought. “I know where I can borrow some more medications and dressings for you.”

“Borrow?”
Sunny frowned. “You are not risking trouble to get us these supplies?”

Wen-Cheng shook his head. “I want to do this. For you, Sunny. I know how much it means to you.” He tilted his head. “There is something I do not quite understand, though.”

She braced for another intimate inquiry. “Oh?”

“There is so much poverty and need here among the local Chinese. The coolies, the beggars, the sampan families … Why do you choose to work at a Jewish refugee hospital?”

She shrugged. “They are in need too, Wen-Cheng.”

“I realize,” he said. “Why them in particular? Why cross the bridge every day and face the taunts and threats from the
Rìben guazi
—” he used the Shanghainese pejorative for “Japanese devils”—”for people you do not know and have no connection to?”

She hesitated a moment. “The hospital is so basic and the need so great. And I speak their language. I love my work at the Country Hospital, but I am one of many nurses there. At the refugee hospital, sometimes I am the
only
nurse on duty. It feels good to make a little difference.”

“It seems to me that you make a big difference.”

“There is more to it, Wen-Cheng. Those refugees … they don’t belong here.”

“Why not?” he asked. “Shanghai already has an established Jewish population.”

“Yes, but the German refugees are not like the other Jews. They don’t call Shanghai home. They don’t even have a home. They’re outcasts.” Her voice dropped to near a whisper. “I know a little about how it feels not to belong.”

Wen-Cheng stared at her for a long moment. He reached out and laid his hands on her shoulders. Sunny did not resist as he pulled her closer. His warm breath tickled her face as his lips skittered across her cheek. She hungered for the taste of his mouth and the feel of his body pressed against her, but just as his lips touched hers, the cold reality of their circumstances doused her arousal. She stepped back and wriggled free of his grip.