Rising Sun, Falling Shadow Read Free Page B

desire, he already had a twelve-year-old daughter. Did he really need a newborn? Besides, with their existence growing more precarious by the day, was it fair to anyone to consider it now? She had yet to feel certain enough to leave the issue to chance in the bedroom.
    Franz scanned the street. “Can you imagine, Sunny? Another ten thousand of us forced to live here in Little Vienna.”
    Half the city’s Jewish refugees already lived in the square mile that replicated the Austrian capital right down to cafés and bakeries; according to most, it even smelled like home. The Jews shared the cramped space with a hundred thousand Chinese, who had proven remarkably tolerant of their new neighbours. “It will be tight,” Sunny said. “At least the refugee hospital is already inside the borders.”
    Franz shrugged. “Perhaps that will just be one more luxury we have to forego.”
    She pulled her hand free of his. “We can’t give up now, of all times! The hospital is going to be needed more than ever.”
    â€œYes, I suppose it will.” His expression fell somewhere between apologetic and resigned.
    As they approached the footpath that led to the hospital, Sunny experienced a familiar sinking feeling. Involuntarily, her eyes shifted toward the abandoned building across the street. The weeks of rain had helped cleanse the walls, but she could still make out reddish-brown streaks. The slaughter of the two boys and Irma flashed to her mind so vividly that it felt as though the execution were unfolding in front of her all over again.
    She had never learned what the teenagers had allegedly stolen. Summary executions were so commonplace in Shanghai that she had come to expect such violence from the Japanese. Still, her cheeks burned with shame. Never had she felt more helpless or cowardly than in the aftermath of that impromptu firing squad.
    Franz gently tugged at her sleeve. “Poor Irma. So brave, but so rash. And for what? Thank God you kept your head, Sunny.”
    Sunny understood that his reassurance was meant kindly, but it only exacerbated her self-disgust. She broke free of him and headed down the pathway to the hospital.
    From the outside, the single-level structure looked as uninspiring as ever. Inside was a different story. Since opening in 1938, the hospital had weathered a world war and a hostile occupation without ever turning away a patient. The single open ward, with its twenty-one beds, housed anywhere from a handful of patients to a hundred at a time, as during the cholera outbreak of the previous spring. The staff consisted of nine nurses—all, aside from Sunny, middle-aged or older refugees—and seven doctors, whose specialties ranged from dermatology to psychiatry. Sometimes the staff tripped over one another in the small ward, while other times a single nurse managed the entire hospital on her own. Many lives had been saved inside the hospital, not a few of them in the operating room, where Franz and the others had performed surgeries that should have been impossible to successfully conduct in such a rudimentary facility.
    In recent months, the Japanese had actually helped to supply the hospital. A year earlier, four critically injured Japanese sailors had been rushed there after the Chinese Underground had allegedly detonated a bomb at the wharf nearby. Three of the four victims survived. Ever since, the Japanese had used the refugee hospital as a backup facility for their injured and ill. Sporadically, and always unannounced, canvas-covered trucks would rumble up to the sidewalk, and soldiers would dump crates, often marked only in Japanese, outside the doors. The supplies, a hodgepodge of bandages, non-perishable food and medications (some long past their expiry dates), rarely corresponded with the hospital’s needs, but Simon and his second-in-command, Joey, managed to trade them on the black market for what was most urgently required.
    As Franz and