Nightfall Over Shanghai (14 page)

There was no rest at the field hospital. Franz's first seven days had blended into a blur of exhaustion. In some ways, he felt as though he had been reliving the same day: wakened by a bugle blast at four thirty, performing rounds and changing dressings on patients for an hour or two, followed by twelve or more hours of operating—sometimes as the only surgeon, other times as Suzuki's assistant—and then more post-operative care. He didn't return to his tent until well after midnight. Franz ate his meals with the lowest-ranking soldiers, and only if he could find time to get to the canteen between duties. Aside from the people who worked in the operating tent, the others at the camp treated him like a ghost; he half suspected he could walk naked down its pathways without anyone noticing.

The work taxed Franz more than anything he had ever experienced, even more than his busiest days as a surgical intern at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the general hospital in Vienna. His fractured rib had healed to the point of painlessness, but his knees and back ached from all the time he spent on his feet. And alarmingly, the bouts of dizziness had recurred. He had almost collapsed twice, and he had started to keep track of the nearest
available support posts he might prop himself up against in case of sudden light-headedness.

As Franz now stood beside the operating table waiting for the next battle victim to be carried in, he noted that Captain Suzuki's mood was particularly sour. Then again, it had been a grizzly day, even by the field hospital's standards. It felt to Franz as though most patients who reached the table left with one less limb than they'd had on arrival. Worse, some patients were beyond salvaging.

The orderlies carried in a stretcher bearing an unconscious man, his eyes open but rolled back in their sockets. His hands were draped across his belly, and it took Franz a moment to realize that the man had been holding in his own intestines. Before the orderlies could transfer the patient onto the operating table, Suzuki shouted in Japanese and snapped his fingers wildly at them. Their heads bowed, the two orderlies hurriedly carried the doomed man out of the room.

Suzuki glowered at Franz. “Banzai charges.”

“Excuse me, Captain?” Franz said.

“Why we are seeing such carnage today. Banzai charges.”

“Is that some kind of weapon?” Franz asked.

Suzuki snorted in disgust. “I suppose it's best described as a military tactic. But not a particularly good one.”

Franz shook his head in bewilderment, feeling the room spin a little as he did so.

“
Tenno Heika Banzai!
” Suzuki said. “Or, ‘Long live the Emperor!' What the soldiers cry as they launch a wave of human assault against the enemy line. In olden days, when guns or bows and arrows took time to reload, it made some degree of strategic sense to storm the enemy with swords drawn. Less so now when they are charging with sabres at men who point machine guns back at them.”

“Oh, that's awful,” Helen piped up.

“
Awful
loses its meaning in times of war, Mrs. Thompson. But the banzai …” Suzuki shook his head. “Those are wasteful.”

Franz only nodded. The last five years had numbed his capacity to be shocked at the extent of human stupidity, cruelty and waste.

The orderlies returned, carrying a new patient. This man's entire upper body was covered in a sheet and, for a confused moment, Franz wondered if they had brought in a corpse. But then he spotted movement under the sheet and recognized the acrid smell of burned flesh.

The sheet fell away as the patient was transferred onto the operating room table. His face was blistered and distorted beyond recognition. The man's clothes were blackened and singed, and every exposed inch of skin on his arms and torso were burned as badly as his neck and face. One of his eyes was swollen completely shut, and the other opened little more than a slit, revealing a pale brown eye that moved watchfully around the room.

Franz glanced over to Suzuki, assuming he would chase the orderlies back out along with the patient. But instead, Suzuki stepped up the table and spoke to the man in a calm voice. The man answered so hoarsely that Suzuki had to put an ear to his mouth to understand him. After a short conversation, Suzuki turned to the anesthetist and nodded for him to put the patient to sleep.

Franz turned to Suzuki with a quizzical expression. “What happened to him?”

“The truck he was driving flipped over. He was trapped inside. The engine, it caught fire.”

“I see. But, Captain, his injuries …”

“We will debride the blisters,” Suzuki snapped. “Only then can we know whether the skin might heal.”

Franz nodded, catching Helen's skeptical eye across the table.

They worked in silence, removing layers of blisters and destroyed flesh from both sides of the patient's body. Suzuki must know how hopeless the man's condition was, Franz thought, but he carried on as if it were routine surgery. After the operation was finished and the man was wrapped in bandages—the only gap an opening for his one working eye—Suzuki announced that he was leaving Franz to finish the rest of the cases.

With Helen's assistance, Franz operated on several more casualties. None of the others was burned but their wounds were horrific, and Franz doubted that even half of them would survive to see the next morning.

After the day's last surgery had been cleared from the operating room, Franz joined Helen out in front of the tent, where they had stood on his first night at the camp. The tip of her cigarette radiated in the fading twilight. “Do they provide you with cigarettes?” Franz asked.

“Not officially,” Helen said. “The captain gives me his supply.”

“That's generous of him.”

“Not really. He has no interest in them. He calls it a ‘filthy habit.'” She coughed into her hand again and then laughed. “I suppose he might be right too.”

“When did you take it up?”

“In Shanghai. Shortly after my husband left.”

“Left?”

“When they took Michael to the internment camp.” It was first time Franz had heard Helen mention her husband by name. She hardly spoke of him at all. “I was never much of a knitter.”

“A knitter? I do not understand, Helen.”

“The smoking. I needed something to do with these.” She wiggled her fingers. “Idle hands and all.”

“Ah.”

They stood quietly together before Helen asked, “Your daughter, Hannah. How old is she?”

Franz felt a slight pang in his chest. “Fourteen.”

“Practically a young woman.”

“She can be so grown up at times, yes. After all, she has experienced more … change than some people see in a lifetime.” He paused, remembering how Hannah had clung close to his side in the days after he had been allowed to return home from the Country Hospital. “And yet, other times, I still see the child in her.”

“Sounds like a teenager.” Helen chuckled. “I remember what that was like.”

Franz smiled to himself. “I am too old to remember any of that.”

“I knew about change back then too. My family moved to Tokyo just before my thirteenth birthday. Come to think of it, I am an only child, just like your Hannah.”

“Yes, well, Hannah might not be an only child anymore.”

Helen angled her head. “What could that possibly mean?”

“Sunny, she
—we
have adopted a child. It was all rather unexpected.” Franz went on to tell her about Joey's sudden appearance in their lives.

Helen must have sensed his reticence about the adoption. “You didn't want another child?” she asked.

“I would do anything for Sunny.”

She inhaled again from her cigarette before dropping the stub to the ground. “You don't sound like the most exhilarated of new fathers.”

“How can I possibly be?” He shook his head. “I'm a prisoner here. Held at the front lines. I doubt I will ever see my wife or
daughter again, let alone this baby. How will she be able to feed another mouth while living inside that miserable ghetto?”

Helen turned away. The silhouetted outline of her shoulder began to bob up and down gently and Franz heard soft sobs. He stepped closer. “Helen, I am so sorry. Don't listen to my doom and gloom. I'm exhausted, you understand.”

She held up a hand to stop his approach. “It's not that,” she said.

“No?”

“Michael and I, we were going to have children.” She sniffled. “And then he left … he just left.”

Hands dangling uselessly by his side, Franz felt tongue-tied, at a complete loss for words. By the time he stupidly blurted “So the Japanese didn't intern your husband?” Helen had already disappeared back into the tent.

***

An hour passed before Franz caught up to Helen inside the convalescence tent that passed for a surgical ward. Ten full beds ringed its perimeter. Helen's eyes were dry, and she even mustered a collegial smile for Franz, but her demeanour made it plain that she had no interest in continuing their discussion.

With Helen translating for Franz and the patients, they moved from bed to bed, adjusting dressings and examining sutures, looking for signs of infection or gangrene. Franz was struck again by the patients' stoicism. Despite their massive wounds, broken bones and missing limbs, he didn't hear a single peep or groan of pain. Even their expressions were remarkably calm, ranging
from impassive to deferential. It wasn't until Franz reached the third-to-last bed that he encountered an exception.

The skinny patient wore thick, round glasses and looked more like a shop clerk than a solider. Franz had earlier removed two bullets from his back. One had been lodged only a fraction of an inch from his spinal cord. The young man was sweating, and his head swung from side to side as though he was expecting someone to sneak up on him. Franz assumed he was suffering from post-operative delirium, possibly even hallucinating. He ran the back of his hand across the patient's forehead but detected no fever to suggest an infection.

Helen laid a hand on the boy's arm and spoke to him in Japanese. The man shook his head frantically as he answered. Helen turned to Franz. “I don't believe he's delirious, Franz,” she said. “He knows where he is.”

“Is he in pain?”

“He says not.”

“What is it, then?”

“He just keeps repeating that he had to turn back. He had dropped his glasses and he couldn't see.”

“What does he mean ‘had to turn back'?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

The room began to swim around Franz, and he instinctively spread his legs wider and reached for the nearby intravenous pole to steady himself. He pretended to study the IV bottle until the light-headedness passed a few seconds later.

If Helen had noticed the episode, she didn't acknowledge it. “Maybe the poor man is reacting to the morphine?” she asked.

“Perhaps.” It was possible. Some medications, especially narcotics, were notorious for causing behavioural side effects. “Let's hold off the painkiller for a while.”

The patient in the next bed was trembling under his covers too, but his shaking came from fever, not anxiety. He had lost one leg just below his knee, and as soon as Franz pulled back the dressing, he appreciated how badly infected the wound already was. Franz saw from Helen's eyes that she also recognized the gravity of the situation. “We will start him on sulpha drugs, of course, but he's going to lose the rest of the leg,” he said. “There is no doubt.”

Helen explained this to the patient, who nodded as calmly as if he had just been told that he was going to need to change his socks.

They moved on to the last bed in the tent, where the badly burned man lay wrapped like a mummy. Franz was surprised to see him alive, let alone breathing comfortably and staring up attentively with his one exposed eye. Helen spoke to him in gentle tones, and he replied in a croak. “He claims not to be in any pain,” she told Franz.

“The fire must have burned away his nerve endings. Fortunately.”

She nodded. “Should I remove any of his dressings?”

“There's no point, Helen.”

The flap to the tent folded open noisily. Two young officers walked inside, followed by Major Okada. None of them acknowledged Franz or Helen, but the two officers fell behind Okada as he limped over to the bed at which Franz had begun his rounds. The major spoke briefly to the patient in his soft voice before moving on to the next bed, leaning heavily on his cane and dragging his right foot behind him as he went.

Franz had seen Okada only twice since the first night at the camp, and only from a distance. The major was young, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with sharp features—more aristocratic than handsome—and a bearing that commanded deference despite his hushed voice. Okada moved from bed to bed, spending no more than a minute with each patient.

Franz noticed that the scrawny, bespectacled patient grew more restless as Okada's entourage made its way closer. When the major reached his bed, he simply stared down at the agitated soldier. Finally, the major spoke to him in his usual quiet tone. The patient shook his head adamantly and answered in a fearful voice. Franz glanced over to Helen, hoping for an explanation, but she was riveted by the conversation.

“
Okubyōmono
,” Okada said, deliberately enunciating each syllable.

The man responded with a flood of panicky words.

“
Okubyōmono
,” Okada repeated, raising his voice slightly.

“What does that mean?” Franz whispered to Helen.

“Coward,” she said softly without taking her eyes off them. “The major is accusing the boy of running away from the banzai attack.”

Again, the soldier tried to argue his case. The major cut him off with a shriek. “
Okubyōmono!
” In one motion, the major hoisted his walking stick and swung it down, the carved wooden handle smashing into the side of the patient's head.