Mohr Read online

  Praise for Mohr: A Novel

  Named a Notable Book of 2006 by The San Francisco Chronicle

  “His aerialist’s sense of history, his sleight of hand, his animal knowledge of political practice, his silver tact and his cool tenderness make his performance nothing less than Orphic. Listen to it.”

  —John Berger, Booker Prize winner

  “Painful and beautiful. … Reuss … writes with Jamesian complexity about states of mind and character … [and] of their days and dismays with brilliant understanding and a painter’s rich detail. … [W]ithout underlining the point (he subtly circumnavigates it instead), [Reuss] makes evident that the self-eviction practiced by Mohr stands for the national eviction of his fellow Jews. … With Käthe and Mohr, Mr. Reuss has unforgettably juxtaposed two figures: the rooted and the uprooted. Unlike the twin compasses of Donne’s “Valediction”—lovers joined even in death—they move not in parallel but in a tragic opposite.”

  —The New York Times

  “A quiet triumph … what he has done—first by following his own curiosity and then a trail of photographs and letters—is re-embody a couple pulled apart by a world of conflict. His book almost heals that rupture, though in the end all it can do is give it a voice.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Reuss writes with mesmerizing grace, sacrificing neither leisure nor romance to what is, essentially, a thriller.”

  —flakmag.com

  “Using the innovative format of speculative fiction based on a newly-discovered cache of fifty 1920s and ’30s vintage family photographs from playwright Max Mohr, novelist (Horace Afoot, The Wasties) Reuss weaves a story of loss and longing, switching between Mohr, a German Jew who exiled himself to Shanghai, and his wife Käthe and daughter Eva still in Germany as the Nazis are coming to full power … Told with skill and beauty and haunted by the duo-toned photographs, Reuss captures the distanced writer bounding between heroics and fatalism, his spirited wife and child, and their lives both separate and apart during a time of the world gone mad.”

  —Historical Novels Review

  “Mohr, as imagined by Reuss, is not a gloomy character. He has wit, charm, elegance, and existential lightness, as does the novel. It is a story about love without being a love story, and a novel about politics whose central character is apolitical: quite an achievement. How true all this is to the ‘real’ Mohr is for others to say, but I was convinced and engaged by Reuss’s creation.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[An] unusual and thoughtful novel.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Reads like the best of Graham Greene, with the happy difference that Reuss does not wear his politics on his sleeve. He is more concerned with how circumstances magnify the virtues and flaws of his well-drawn characters. He imagines a life for Mohr which, if not verifiably factual, has the ring of deepest humanity.”

  —The St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “An unusually close collaboration between fiction and fact. The book is driven, on one level, by a psychological conundrum the documents cannot resolve. Mohr was Jewish, and for him to want to leave the encroaching darkness of Nazi Germany seems understandable enough. And yet: How could he possibly have left behind a beloved wife and daughter? But Reuss chose to highlight a different level of question, as well. For he didn’t just use that trove of photographs to inspire his storytelling—he layered them into the novel itself. “Mohr” is constructed around a selection of almost 50 images through which the story flows.”

  —The Washington Post

  “In 1934, facing Nazi persecution . . . Mohr packed his bags, said goodbye to his loyal wife and daughter, and [left]. … Reuss has spent 20 years trying to figure out why.”

  —Washington City Paper

  “An elegant, beautifully written book … This is a novel that readers will find easy to consume. Yet the story stays with you long after the last pages are turned. I could not let go of a lot of this book, particularly those passages which dwell on Käthe and her struggle. She is left to love Mohr, even though she lost him the moment he found his distant dream.”

  —Colleen Mondor, bookslut.com

  “Sensitive … poignant. This is not a conventional love story with a happy ending; it is rather a tragic love story that is sympathetically set forth. The backdrop looms ominously—Nazi Germany, Japanese aggressors, Chinese communists, and Chinese nationalists. Reuss has succeeded admirably in combining actual history and facts about Max Mohr with his imaginative re-creation of a vivid story that generates unanswered questions about human behavior and human motivations. It is to Reuss’s credit that he has accepted the enigmatic nature of these issues, leaving his readers to ponder them as they muse about the mystery of Max Mohr.”—Jewish Journal of South Florida

  “[An] unusual wartime love story. … I was truly taken with the story’s beautiful dreamlike descriptions and haunting foreboding of tragedy.” —Jewish Book World

  Mohr: a novel

  Frederick Reuss

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All photographs and postcards used in the creation of this book are from the collection of Nicolas Humbert and are used here by permission. All rights to these photographs are reserved.

  The Morgenstern poem that appears on pages 57–58, “Sieh Nicht, Was Andre Tun,” is by Christian Morgenstern, translated by Eileen Hutchins and Ursula Grahl. Reprinted from Anthology of German Poetry from Hölderlin to Rilke (New York: Doubleday, 1960), ed. Angel Flores.

  Unbridled Books

  Denver, Colorado

  Copyright © 2006 Frederick Reuss

  Originally pubished as an Unbridled Books hard cover.

  First paperback edition, 2007

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reuss, Frederick, 1960–

  Mohr : a novel / Frederick Reuss. p. cm.

  Hardcover Edition ISBN 1-932961-17-8

  Paperback Edition ISBN 10: 1-932961-35-6

  Paperback Edition ISBN 13: 978-1-932961-35-5

  1. Mohr, Max, b. 1891—Fiction. 2. Authors, German—Fiction. 3. Jewish authors—

  Germany—Fiction. 4. Physicians—China—Shanghai—Fiction. 5. Germany—Fiction.

  6. Shanghai (China)—Fiction I. Title.

  PS3568.E7818M64 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2005037958

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book design by Claire Vaccaro

  First Printing

  To my mother

  Schwer zu entdecken sind nämlich die zwischen den Schiefertafeln eingelagerten geflügelten Wirbeltiere der Vorzeit. Seh ich aber die Nervatur des vergangenen Lebens vor mir in einem Bild, dann denk ich immer, es hätte dies etwas mit der Wahrheit zu tun.

  For it is hard to discover the winged vertebrates of prehistory embedded in tablets of slate. But if I see before me the nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to do with truth.

  –W.G. Sebald

  Part One

  In early morning, when the house is silent and the sun has not yet risen above the eastern ridges of the Tegernsee valley, it is tempting to think that the heartache that once filled these rooms is gone, vanished with another era. Open the front door, step outside into the morning air—crisp and frosty in winter, moist with dew and the smell of cows at pasture in summertime, walk the gravel path around to the side of the house, sit down on the bench, and watch the shifting hues of da
wn on the steep slopes of the Wallberg. The cross on top of the mountain, like the one on the peak of the old farmhouse, has been there for so long that nobody notices it. This morning, you want to take in every detail: the crow calling from a tree at the forest edge, the vapor rising from the sun-warmed treetops, leaning fence posts, peeling paint on the shutters and condensation on the windowpanes, the distant ringing of a bell. The morning gradually brightens and with it a sense that each of these details is crucial; none is more crucial than the simple fact of your presence here. You grip the edge of the wooden bench with your hands, breathe in and out. Your breath condenses and the billowing steam makes you want to go inside and get your cigarettes, but, no, you also want to savor the first tobacco-free moment of the day, so you remain.

  Feeling slightly absurd for all this heightened self-consciousness, you smile to yourself; then your smile fades because, no, there is nothing funny or false about this feeling of connection. There is nothing wrong with it, just as there is nothing wrong with supposing you belong to a continuum of human events that links you to a vanished past, part of which you may come to know, and all of which you are free to imagine.

  I say you, but I also mean me. In novels, personal pronouns can be misleading. This is not an easy idea to express, and some will call the notion absurd. But why not? Why can’t I be you? Or him or her? At least here, for now, sitting on a bench outside this old Bavarian farmhouse called Wolfsgrub early one October morning in 1934? And if I can be Max Mohr, I can be his wife, Käthe, too—whom he has left sleeping to come downstairs and light the stove.

  Picture it. There are, after all, photographs. A great many photographs, piles of evidence that stand for something a little different with each viewing: so lovely, and not at all out of date.

  Last night, you went up to the attic to sit for a time at his writing table. On it was a note from Käthe written on an old scrap of saved stationery. The desk is set between two narrow windows and faces the wall. He always wrote at night, so there was no need for a view. You sat down, adjusted yourself on the wooden chair. Once upon a time he kept his empty ink bottles lined up like little soldiers at the edge of the desk. One day, he gave them all to Eva to play with. You held Käthe’s note to your nose. It was not scented, which caused a twinge of regret. It would have been just the perfect gesture. Like you, he was here and not here. He was going away and not going anywhere. She was sad—but also, perhaps, happier than you have ever been.

  Liebster. Please know how much I love you. There is nothing more to say. Think how happy we were here together. Try to remember what a lovely place this was. K.

  Mohr folded the note and slipped it into his pocket. Käthe must have put it there sometime during the afternoon—when he and Eva were bringing Minna in from the field. His fingers felt thick, his hands large and clumsy. He wanted to go downstairs right away, to be with her until the very last minute. But something kept him. He had passed so many hours at this little desk under the eaves. The larchwood paneling was dark with time. Late at night when the house fell silent, he listened to the creaking rafters, could hear the woodworms boring their tiny holes in the old beams.

  TUCK YOUR HANDS, palms flat, underneath your thighs. A shiver of cold concentrates your thoughts of what might have been.

  Glance up.

  THE PATH LEADING up into the forest stands out clearly in the early morning light. It cuts through frosted grass and disappears into the trees. How much wider might it have become with Mohr tromping up it to work every day? A little cabin to write in. Would he have been thrilled, gone happily off to work deep in the rustling forest? An image flashes, of smoke curling from the cabin chimney, and Käthe down at the house, seeing it rise up through the treetops, and sending Eva up with a freshly baked loaf, some apples, and a piece of cheese to tide him over.

  No. That would never be. On his last day in Wolfsgrub, Mohr doesn’t want to think of what will never be, however lovely. He can’t hold on hold on hold on; never give anything up. That would be fatal. Knowing when to let go is more important than fretting about what’s been left behind.

  Impatient, you jiggle your legs, shake your head once again at the idea of him scribbling away in a little cabin deep in the forest. You recall Lawrence’s description of the crucifix-studded Bavarian uplands, the wooden Christs presiding over the whole countryside. When Lawrence spoke about Germany and Germans, Mohr always had the feeling he was addressing his Jewish nature, as if he knew what it was better than Mohr did; some secret voluptuousness he engaged in. The trouble with their friendship was not that Lawrence asserted so deep an understanding of Mohr but that he asserted it to everyone except Mohr himself. If he were an anti-Semite—and there were times when he seemed so—he never forswore any friendships because of it. It didn’t seem to matter to him that his opinions could inflict pain. Remember how you felt when you read his first impression of Mohr? A last man, who has arrived at the last end of the road, who can no longer go ahead in the wilderness nor take a step into the unknown.

  If only he’d lived to see the unknown that Mohr would come to face.

  And not just Max, but Käthe, too.

  WHEN SHE CAME downstairs and saw his packed bags neatly stacked in the hall, and the front door slightly ajar, she stepped outside, walked around to the side of the house, and sat down next to him.

  “Let’s not be glum,” he said and put an arm across her shoulders, drew her closer. “I will always remember what a lovely place this is.” He smiled and patted his breast pocket, where he was keeping the note she’d written yesterday. “Thank you,” he said and kissed her forehead.

  Now they are sitting at breakfast, trying to put the best face they can on the day.

  “Can I take a picture?” Eva points to the camera on the table.

  “If you promise me one thing.” Mohr draws her onto his lap, whispers into her ear. Eva slides off his lap and picks up the camera again.

  “Promise,” she says.

  “Promise what?”

  Eva glances at her father. “Can I tell?”

  “Of course,” he says emphatically.

  “That we will come to China soon.”

  “Sooner than soon,” Mohr corrects.

  “Of course we will.” Käthe’s voice sounds weary. How many times can she repeat such a promise? It isn’t empty, just hopelessly abstract and distant, like China itself.

  They sit for Eva’s photograph. Mohr makes a funny face, which causes Eva to laugh. She takes a second one, and this time nobody laughs. Käthe has felt observed by Mohr all morning, lost in her own quiet nowhere, counting down the hours until Zibert comes to drive them all to the train station. The breakfast plates on the table are empty; a few cold sips of coffee remain at the bottom of each cup. They are waiting, but the wait is already over.

  All this determined cheerfulness isn’t easy. Eva had come downstairs crying. Mohr swept her up in his arms and they went to the hen-house to fetch some eggs; then he took her upstairs and drew his bath. Käthe watched as Eva stood over him in the bathtub. He sank slowly under the surface of the water, wetted his hair. Then he resurfaced, brandishing an egg. “Voilà, Mademoiselle! Bitte schön!” He handed the egg to Eva with a grin and bowed, offering the crown of his head. Tap tap tap, the egg was broken, and Eva stepped back giggling while he massaged the gooey mess into his scalp, singing, “Eeenie beenie suplameenie deevi dahvi domineenie.”

  As the shampoo was concluding, Nanni’s voice rang from downstairs to say that she was leaving the butter inside the door.

  “Tell her to wait!” Mohr sputtered from the tub.

  Käthe ran downstairs and called to Nanni, “Dr. Mohr is leaving today! He wants to say good-bye!”

  Nanni hung her woolen cardigan on the hook inside the door and waited in the kitchen. She was the eldest of the Berghammer girls, simpleminded, good-hearted, and she adored Mohr.

  “Is that Nanni I hear?” Mohr called down the stairs. “You were going to let me go without saying good-bye?�
�� He came into the kitchen, hair tousled, still shiny and wet. He put a hand on Nanni’s shoulder and gave her a friendly shake, then hugged her. Nanni blushed, and when he released her she drew back and punched him with her fist.

  “Ouch!” Mohr gripped his arm. Nanni was momentarily uncertain; then Mohr laughed, snatched her back, and hugged her tightly once again.

  “Papa is going to China,” Eva announced from the doorway.

  Nanni glanced about. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because it’s there,” Mohr said.

  “Where?” Nanni inquired after a short pause.

  Mohr reached into his trousers pocket and took out an imaginary compass, held it in the flat of his hand. “Well, let’s see.” He turned and pointed. “It’s over there.”

  “That’s the stove!” Nanni objected.

  “He means that’s the way you have to go,” Eva said.

  “If my compass is correct,” Mohr said, slipping the imaginary instrument into his pocket.

  KÄTHE SLICES THE bread, and begins to set the table as Mohr entertains Nanni and Eva with one of his nonsense stories. His manner is a little forced, but only Käthe would notice. She passes in and out of the kitchen three times with the breakfast tray, pausing to listen. Mohr leans against the stove, fills the room with his presence. He cleans his glasses on his shirt, twists them back onto his ears, combs his wet hair with his fingers, all the while expanding on a complicated tale of a lost school of Mexican dancing fish and a band of robbers.

  She can’t listen, nor can she bring herself to interrupt. She goes into the next room to wait at the breakfast table. Through the closed door she can hear Mohr’s voice, the giggles of Eva and Nanni. Is this last little burst of storytelling meant to be remembered? One final thing left behind?

  She pours herself a cup of coffee and stares through the windows at the frost-covered meadow that slopes up steeply behind the house, every blade of grass stiff and glistening with ice. Yesterday it was still warm, and they were all outside in shirtsleeves. The temperature dropped sharply overnight. Several times she was awakened by gusts of wind rattling the windows.