“That’s still blind,” said Hani, leaning her head on his shoulder and holding him as if he might float away. “I hate the way your eye just sits there still, like a marble. Oh Froschi,” she said, starting to cry, a daily activity for her since Leo was injured. “All this way and then you are attacked by an SS officer. Here. In China!”
“For the last time,” said Leo, sitting up slowly, his ribs still feeling bent backward, “I attacked him. Felix Pohl. I left Liwei’s on my own accord and chased him and Agatha through the streets. She is not to blame; she even tried to stop me. But I wanted to hit him, so desperately. From the moment I saw him in Liwei’s, his hands on Agatha, wearing that uniform in this city, something just took off in me. I was not going to let the night turn to day without attacking Pohl. It was something bigger than being rational or irrational; it was me finally doing something about what happened in Vienna.”
“But why?” asked Hani incredulously. “We fled Vienna, only for you to chase after danger here?”
“Aren’t you hearing me?” asked Leo, starting to wheeze.
The Hartmanns had urgently wanted to take Leo somewhere other than their apartment to convalesce in, as winter had only exacerbated their leaking ceiling with mold. Their neighborhood was so crowded that there seemed to be residents falling out the windows.
“I hit him for you, for me, for our abducted factory manager, for what they did to Father in Vienna, for what they are doing to our relatives, our friends. That is why I attacked him. It wasn’t just for Agatha.”
“Oh, Leo. I didn’t raise a foolish boy, a brute carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. We don’t even know what they are doing in Europe,” said Hani, frustrated. “We are so isolated from the news here.”
“The Nazis? Come, Mother,” said Leo, motioning for her to sit with him. “We have a pretty good idea, don’t we?” He knew Hani read the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle, which was printed in German and distributed to the community.
“I still blame the girl,” said Hani, her arms around her son again.
“You must stop,” said Leo, peeling her away from his torso. “Pohl would not have hit me if I hadn’t followed them. I’m to blame, only me. Don’t you understand, after all our years away from Vienna? I had to win at something. Just one thing.”
“Is this how you won?” she asked, looking like she didn’t know what to do with her arms if they weren’t around Leo. “By going blind?”
“I’m alive, am I not?” he said, exhaustion starting to get the better of him. “I wouldn’t be if I had done the same thing in Austria.”
“No, you would not be,” said Hani sighing. She threw her hands up in frustration and turned to leave for her piano lessons but stopped at the door.
“I only say this for you, Leo,” she said, pausing.
“Say what?” he replied.
“Agatha can start taking care of you instead of Meifen,” she said of the nurse who had been tending to Leo during the day. “We’ve accepted enough of Liwei’s money.”
With Hani’s reluctant permission, the days went from Leo being fussed over by a caring nurse, to Leo being warmly embraced—flesh-to-flesh when he had grown strong enough—by Agatha Huber.
The return of his health—and of his lust for Agatha, finally played out on his makeshift bed—moved in with the spring. Shanghai was coming alive again, with the death toll from the cold and starvation beginning to decline. News of the Red Army pushing the Germans out of Crimea was bringing a ray of hope to the Jewish residents of Shanghai.
Leo and Agatha, who themselves were restricted to making love during daylight hours, spoke of the war, but more often, spoke of each other, and eventually, of them together.
“The night you first came to work at Liwei’s, I thought you were the funniest thing,” said Agatha. It was the first hot day of April and she was stretching her bare legs out in the apartment that she’d become a fixture in. As Leo’s bruises had gone from blue to yellow, and his eye had stopped aching, Agatha’s guilt—which Leo assured her was misplaced—started to wane. Joy, and an appreciation of their time together, firmly took root. “I remember the expression on your face,” she continued, “like a ten-year-old boy who had no idea that such things went on. The dancing, the sex. Liwei and Jin were oblivious to your shock, but we, all the girls, noticed. It was a welcome change,” she said, smiling and showing off her pretty teeth. “Innocence and Shanghai seldom go together.”
“I didn’t look that surprised, did I?” said Leo. He wanted to blurt out that he had lost his innocence long ago, many times over with Emi, but compared to the men Agatha was used to, he was exceptionally green.
“You definitely did,” said Agatha laughing, her body wrapped in Leo’s worn-out bedsheet and nothing else. “The girls all used to call you luchik. It means sunbeam in Russian—but we say it to mean sweetheart, or baby.”
“I’m offended,” said Leo, laughing. He grasped for his chest, which was still strained by sudden movements.
“Don’t, luchik,” said Agatha, trying to get him to lie down. “Your poor lungs.”
“You’re making me laugh,” said Leo, taking her arm and pulling her next to him. “But I bet that SS officer never laughs again. Not after being punched by a Jew and losing you.”
“He never had me,” said Agatha, reaching for Leo’s bare torso, as thin as it was during his first year in Shanghai. “Not in that way.”
“But in the other way,” said Leo jealously.
“Yes, in this way,” she said, touching his body. “You’ve known that since the day Pohl walked in. Jin told you. He’s a bigger gossip than any of the girls at Liwei’s.”
“Is he?” asked Leo, who never noticed any of Jin’s faults. “He told me because he knew how much I would care.”
“Because you’re Jewish?” Agatha asked, her hand moving to Leo’s face. “And Pohl . . . is not,” she added.
“Is not!” said Leo, pulling away from her. “Felix Pohl is an SS officer. That makes him not only not Jewish, but actively trying to eradicate an entire race of people.”
“He never spoke about it to me,” said Agatha, apologizing. “I left Germany many years ago. I was a child. I didn’t pay attention to any of the political talk.”
“And you don’t pay attention to it now, either?” asked Leo, surprised by Agatha’s ignorance.
“A little bit,” she said. “Of course. But I don’t care that you’re a Jew. I care that you are being persecuted, that you had to leave Austria, but your religion doesn’t bother me. I haven’t believed in God in a very long time. It makes my job easier.”