Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  He had lived in this land for fifty years – or if not fifty then so nearly as to make no difference – and it no longer seemed fantastic and exotic; it was more utterly familiar now than any other landscape on earth. Yet the eyes of the people who passed by glanced at him who was still strange and unfamiliar to them, and all said: Firanghi, foreigner. For the Indian sun had not been good to his skin, it had not tanned and roasted him to the colour of a native. What was the colour of a native anyway? To begin with, everyone had seemed to him ‘dark’ but after all these years he separated them into boot-black like the juice-wallah with his oranges and pith and pulp, sallow yellow like Farrokh in his tubercular café, dusky chocolate, coffee-bean, tea-leaf, peanut-shell, leprous purple, shade merging into shade till all blurred into brown. He was none of these: his face blazed like an over-ripe tomato in the sun on which warts gathered like flies. His hair would not turn dark; it stood out around the bald centre like a white ruff, stained somewhat yellow. Even if he had used hair-dye and boot-polish, what could he have done about his eyes? It was not that they were blue – far from it; his mother, holding him on her knee and clapping hands in a game, had called them ‘dark eyes, dunkele Augen’, but Indians did not seem to think them so. Their faces sneered ‘firanghi, foreigner’, however good-naturedly, however lacking in malice. Still, the word, the name struck coldly and he winced, hunching his shoulders and trying to avoid the contact he knew they hated because contact contaminated. Accepting – but not accepted; that was the story of his life, the one thread that ran through it all. In Germany he had been dark – his darkness had marked him the Jew, der Jude. In India he was fair – and that marked him the firanghi. In both lands, the unacceptable. Perhaps even where his cats were concerned, he was that – man, not feline, not theirs. He nodded thoughtfully; ja, the cats, they always knew. Still, it was a long time since he had felt so acutely aware of his outlandishness. It had come to him at some moments, in a drenching of terror that he could remember even now, but for a long time it had not been as it was today. Today he was disturbed in a new way. Strangely, his over-familiarity with the scene had served to wipe out its colours, its effects, leaving it dull, unworthy of notice. On it was imposed an image with a marvellous sharpness – the image of the boy, the sick boy slumped across the table. He did not know why. He was not concerned about him, why should he be? What did the boy mean to him with his filthy yellow curls and his ridiculous silver bracelet? There was no reason why he should be stirred by his fairness or his filth, or his misfortune. Let Farrokh boot him out on the street to make his way to the docks, to the railway station, to the consulate, or even go back to Goa for another round of hashish. If things were worse, let the police deal with him, or call an ambulance. Baumgartner would not involve himself with any of it, Baumgartner knew better than to do that. Then why should he continue to think of that fallen head, that helpless posture when there was so much to distract him, so much colour and sound and business and life to demand his attention?

  Well, he knew. He might try to hurry away and rid himself of the fact but it was there: the boy was German, was he not? Yes, that was it. A German from Germany. He had sensed, he had smelt the German in him like a cat might smell another and know its history, its territory. Farrokh had told him nothing – to Farrokh they were just firanghi. No one had mentioned Germany – and had not needed to; one German could tell another always. In the camp, they had looked at each other covertly, and not only was German-ness stamped like a number on each, but further information as well – that one was a Jew, another Aryan. The looks they had exchanged had been the blades of knives slid quickly and quietly between the ribs, with the silence of guilt.

  There had been no such exchange in the café, there was no longer a reason for such an exchange, Baumgartner reminded himself, hitting his thigh with his fist as he hurried. That fair hair, that peeled flesh and the flash on the wrist – it was a certain type that Baumgartner had escaped, forgotten. Then why had this boy to come after him, in lederhosen, in marching boots, striding over the mountains to the sound of the Wandervogels Lied? The Lieder and the campfire. The campfire and the beer. The beer and the yodelling. The yodelling and the marching. The marching and the shooting. The shooting and the killing. The killing and the killing and the killing.

  Baumgartner was running. Beginning with a march, as ordered, left-right, left-right-left, he broke and ran – or would have had he not been bumped into and shoved aside and hindered. The crowd opposed him, opposed his escape, but protected him too, covered up for him as well. He blundered through it, without seeing it any more. Colaba Causeway, its crowds and smells and noise, all drew back into a morning shadow. A grey and hazy sea rose and obliterated them, draining them of colour and substance. Out of the grey wash, other images emerged.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS FATHER. WHEN he walked, there was no obstacle, and no hesitation. He strode, he paraded – his head held high, his hat gleaming like the wing of an airborne beetle. His waistcoat gleamed too, now black, now green, like a bottle of dried ink, and the spats on his shoes were like the ears of a soft animal laid close against the leather. His walking-stick with the ivory knob tapped the Berlin streets with authority – pleasantly, light-heartedly on a Sunday afternoon, but still with authority. Hugo tried to ally himself with that by touching the signet ring on his father’s finger as he allowed his hand to be rolled into a round moist ball like a half-eaten roll, and held – again lightly but with authority. He tried to match his steps to his father’s, and did not even notice as they passed the familiar landmarks of their street – the apothecary’s bow-shaped window in which sat a paste-pink denture and a jar of blue dentifrice; the bakery with its baskets of croissants and rolls dusted with salt or with poppyseeds, the tea cakes decorated with pieces of walnut or of orange; the dwarf in the white raincoat and the dark glasses who mumbled, ‘Zigarren, Zigaretten’, in a monotonous undertone beside the newspaper kiosk which had buckets of flowers on its floor – and went further and further out of their own territory.

  He realised they were out of it when they sat on a tram, when he heard the bell ping, the wheels slither, and felt himself reeling through the Sunday streets, as empty as the ocean. At Roseneck the light turned yellow, turned green. It was as thin as beer, then thick as honey. ‘Hurrah’, he shouted – that was what little boys shouted, he knew – as he broke away from his father’s hold and ran down the sandy path under the birch trees. It was the foliage on the birches, and their bark that affected the light so botanically – but Hugo did not notice; his feet in the square brown boots were pounding the sand now that he knew where his father was taking him. It could only be on fine Sundays – on such a Sunday – that they would sit at one of the wooden tables outside the café, at some distance from the band which played, invisibly, the medley of Strauss waltzes that trickled through the leaves on to their table like pollen sifting through the sunlight, like honey circulating through the hive. Then the waiter brought a mug of hot chocolate for Hugo, flakes of chocolate flecking the cream that floated like an island on its dark surface, and for his father a mug of beer. Smiling at the disbelieving look in his eyes, the hesitation that held his upper lip rigid, his father slid the mug of beer towards him. ‘No one’s looking,’ he said with a wink, ‘quick now’, and Hugo climbed on to his knees – they were fat and the edge of the bench made two welts across them – and bent over the pewter mug to draw the froth in through his lips. It was cold, bitter, smelt of wet straw and tasted of steel. Its gleaming metal knife cut across his tongue and made him gasp and withdraw, froth-moustached, to make his father laugh as he never laughed at home. He seemed to need to come away in order to laugh out loud – coarsely, perhaps – to push his hat back from his forehead and turn terracotta with laughter. Hugo was a little frightened by its loudness, its coarseness, and sat back, subdued, first licking the froth off his lips and then turning to the hot chocolate, dipping into and sipping its richness, its sweetness as secretly, as privately as a
mouse. He had been made a fool of, he had been the butt, but it had turned out well and the reward was sweet.

  It was late when they walked back towards the tram-stop, and even his father’s feet were slow and unsure in the shadows of the pines that lay like long strips of felt on the sandy path. Twilight stood blue between the tree trunks, and around the café the trees were already wearing garlands of coloured lights although night was still far away – ‘Of course you will be home by bedtime, you booby,’ his father said contemptuously – and the band was swirling through Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow in reckless, intoxicated circles. His father had still not done with laughter but, to top it off, suddenly removed his hat from his head and, snatching the cap off Hugo’s, exchanged their headgear so that Hugo’s small head almost vanished, turning him into a headless gnome while his little cap flew up and perched like a saucer between his father’s scarlet jug-ears, as he tittered with mirth.

  ‘Hopp, hopp, hopp,

  Pferdchen lauf galopp’

  sang his father irrepressibly and his knees jumped up and outwards to reproduce the sound in action. Hugo was awed by so much of the ridiculous and when passers-by, a gentleman with a lady on each arm, hurrying, almost running towards the music and the dance, burst into shrieks and bellows of laughter, turning again and again to look at the comic pair, Hugo was glad for the hat tilting over his eyes and concealing his face from the brassy world.

  ‘Über Stock und über Steine,

  Aber brich dir nicht die Beine!

  Hopp, hopp, hopp,

  Pferdchen lauf galopp.’

  When they walked down their own street, there was only decorum in his father’s behaviour. Pride, ownership, status, yes, but above all decorum. He held his arm stiffly in a triangle at his side for his wife to hold with the lightest touch of a gloved hand, her feet whispering along in shoes like two grey velvet mice, and when they stopped at the flower stall to buy her a bunch of Parma violets – violets were said to be ‘her’ flowers, Hugo did not know why but accepted the undeniable – she would protest in her lowest murmur, then smile the same smile weekly as she pinned them to the lapel of her cape. That, too, was one of her distinctive marks – that she did not wear a coat but that sweeping, enfolding black cape – in winter with a length of fur wrapped at the neck. Like the bunch of violets, they were as much ‘her’ as the signature that she wrote in long, spidery flourishes with the steel nib of her long green lacquered pen.

  At home, Hugo skittered back and forth between the apartment and his father’s showroom, the staircase in between a place of perilous choice, the no man’s land where he might be summoned and drawn by either. Downstairs there was the large, open, unnerving space of the showroom in which elegantly languorous chaises-longues in carved mahogany or consoles in blonde wood with gilded scrolls basked in the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows, while the more sober, less opulent pieces of furniture stood quietly along the walls as if biding their time. Here his father was ruler, moving gracefully from one piece to another with the pride of a connoisseur or artist – putting out his hand to smooth the satined surface of a sofa here, spreading out his fingers and pressing them into a pouffe of buttoned velvet there. As clamorous of attention as the ‘Empire suites’ and the ‘boudoir sets’ that occupied the floor space were the mirrors that hung on the walls in their gilded rococo frames and the lamps shaded with mosaics of glass, cut and patterned. Mystifying and alarming were the three-piece mirrors that sat on the dressing tables and showed you unfamiliar aspects of your head, turning you into a stranger before your own eyes as you slowly rotated to find the recognisable.

  The opulence of the interior made Hugo hesitate on the stairs, hug the newel post and fear to descend. From between the banisters he watched his father’s employees polish and dust and shift according to his father’s orders, or carry out pieces into the delivery vans that waited at the curb, events that made his father fold his hands behind his back and hum with a special air of prosperity and satisfaction – like a bee that has stored much honey, Hugo thought.

  His mother did not like him to watch these commercial transactions. Whenever there was such a sale or delivery going on, she would send Berthe out on the landing to call him. He thought it was because she feared the delivery men in their large, navy blue, wool coats as he too, a little, feared them. He went up with a mixture of relief and reluctance that gave him a stoic air.

  ‘Upstairs’ was her realm even if invaded and occupied to a large degree by his father’s merchandise – or ‘creations’, he corrected himself – so that the objects could be divided, even by a child, into ‘his’ belongings and ‘hers’. Obviously the ashtray in the form of a Prussian helmet and the onyx case that held cigarettes were ‘his’ and so of course was the barometer shaped like a pistol that hung on the wall between the two french windows, and less obviously the great mirror in its scrolled and convoluted gilt frame that held the whole room slightly tilted on its calm and shining surface. The table lamps with their domes of orange silk, fringed, bobbled and tasselled, that susurrated as one walked past, the shelves of leather-bound volumes of Goethe, Schiller and Heine – his or hers? The engraving of Rembrandt’s self-portrait on the green wall of the drawing-room might have been chosen by his father but Hugo was certain that of Dürer’s hands that hung in their prayerful attitude, grey and blue, in the arch formed by the two swathes of silk that hung over their brass bedstead in the bedroom could only be hers, his mother’s. He mused often on how, when one came down to it, ‘her’ objects were actually few but for Hugo they were the ones that contained a living quality that prevented the rooms from becoming showrooms: the lamps and the books could be brought to life by her touch, just like ‘her’ piano at which she sat and played on Sunday evenings when they had returned from Roseneck and she from visiting her friends in Grünewald. And the rubber tree in its pot, military as it was in its erectness and the manner in which it put one leaf to the left, then one to the right, all the way up to its wick of shocking, naked pink, became hers because she tended it, while the more graceful and wayward tendrils of ivy in baskets above the window were quite naturally and obviously hers.

  Hugo, sitting on the window-seat under them, did not know what made him bite his knee, lifted up to prop his chin, and give a shiver as if he had bitten on a stone when she sang. The cause lay somewhere within the precarious sweetness of her thin voice singing:

  ‘Kommt ein Vogel geflogen,

  Setzt sich nieder mein Fuss,

  hat ein Brieflein im Schnabel,

  von der Mutter ein Gruss.’

  Not always was it like spun sugar, like sugar being drawn out of him, in glossy threads. When he brought home the hedgehog in his pocket, having found it struggling through the rank grass and soiled newspaper on a roadside verge, it had become a lament. Ach, du kleiner Dummkopf, you little silly, how could you take it away from its poor Mutti? And what are we to do with it? How can we keep the smelly thing in Berthe’s beautifully cleaned house? Who will clean, who will feed – ? I, I, I, he howled, drumming his heels on the shining parquet floor and beating his chest like a wild man of the jungles. And he did. With a dropper, steaming with warm milk, he fed and fed the infant hedgehog in its cradle of cottonwool inside a matchbox till it swelled like a football being pumped with air. Its very quills filled with milk. Milk was oozing out of the limp, unprotesting bag of flesh when Berthe proclaimed it dead, killed by overfeeding. Then all the sweetness in the air had shattered into splinters of glass. Everyone had screamed; in the midst of all the screams, the hedgehog disappeared – into the dustbin? Out of the window? Hugo howled and howled but they would not tell him. His mother only scolded and scolded: ‘See what you did, du kleiner Affe, killed Mama Hedgehog’s baby. So silly, so ungehorsam . . .’