by Anita Desai
O mein Geliebter ziehn!’
Hugo stood under the globe lamp of red paper that hung from the ceiling, transfixed by the reckless gaiety in her voice, the words that had a wild gypsy ring to them and filled him with unease and foreboding.
Later that evening, when they sat at the peasant table, eating a potato soup and some rather watery rolls for which old Frau Friedmann apologised over and over again while the younger simply laughed deprecatingly, the talk that lapped around the stolidly munching Hugo turned to new poets and their work. Frau Friedmann described a strange Indian poet whose work she had been reading, a sage with a long white beard and long hair and piercing, hypnotic eyes. ‘A sage from Bengal,’ she explained to Hugo’s entranced mother, while Hugo puzzled over the name which he associated with bengalische Lichte, the fireworks he had seen exploding in the dark on some festive night while wrapped comfortingly in his father’s arms. After the table was cleared, a book of poems was brought for them to see; it had a pale blue cover and its title was meaningless to Hugo – Gitanjali – but he leant across to look at the photograph to which they turned and found the poet-sage’s face as the old lady described. Somehow its outlandishness connected with the song he had just heard his mother singing, and Hugo squirmed at the unfamiliarity of it all. He thought it had to do with poetry – an element in his mother’s life that he understood as little as his father did, something they put down to her youth in a university town while they were two masculine city-dwellers. Reminded of his father, he felt an urge to return to him, to what was his own world – or what remained of it – but heard his mother say, ‘Now Adele, show me your own work, your new verse, it is yours I want to see, and Albert’s’, and then ribbon-bound portfolios of their verse were brought out and read aloud, verses about linden trees in spring, about swallows in autumn skies, about butterflies, frost, children playing and, of course, the flowering cherry tree.
They might have gone on all night, intoxicated by their views of spring and beauty and art – one poem was dedicated to the Indian sage and was called ‘On Reading Tagore’ – while Hugo stood at the window, watching the greying of the light till a desperation overtook him: he could not allow his mother to continue with her pretence that she had returned to her youth, that her adulthood could be ignored. Seeing her so childishly irresponsible and irresponsibly blithe, he was driven to an adult decision. Turning around, he saw them listening admiringly to Albert reading a poem about the deer by the lake that he called ‘The Kaiser of the Woods’, and blurted out ‘Mama, komm, we must go back to Papa now.’
In the tram, lifting her face out of a fold of her cape, she accused him in mortified tones, ‘How could you, Hugo, in the middle of such a beautiful poem?’
Then, the door opening, her scream: ‘Was ist los? What’s happened? Hugo, das Gas!’ They ran, shedding coats and capes on the way, down the passage to the kitchen. The door was shut but there was no doubt, the sickening, sweet, cloudy odour poured through its cracks. They threw themselves on it as though the gas were a physical, concrete barrier, and were astonished when the door burst open. The gas was like cushions and quilts of anaesthesia piled up, all around, swaddling the limp figure that sprawled on the linoleum, the body sagging out of the open oven door. When they lifted him, the head waggled helplessly out of their arms. For a moment, his open eyes misled them to cry out in relief but in a moment it turned to a wail.
‘O du lieber Augustin,
alles ist weg!
Geld ist weg,
Beutel ist weg,
Augustin liegt in Dreck,
O du lieber Augustin,
alles ist hin!’
They never left each other, or the flat. Nothing was said, but Hugo understood his mother wanted him beside her, he could not leave her, and so he stopped going to school. It was a relief to him that this meant the end of those endless tram rides, the mud and the ice in the yard into which the children pushed each other, the hysterical teacher who tore out his own hair and theirs by the handful, the strange language in which he recognised only every third or fourth word, and the forbidding sound of the Torah. Unfortunately it also meant the end of the friendships he had begun to make: he was sorry not to see Eddie Wallfisch any more, or go skating with him. He realised now that the school had had an element of robust reality that appealed to him, that he had been learning to deal with and even enjoy, and that he missed in the hushed pallor of his own home.
He spent too many hours with old tattered copies of Der Gute Kamerad which now seemed pure fantasy, its stories of camping in the forest and journeys on the sea no more relevant to his life than a dream is to daytime. His mother gave him her own copy of the Kaiserbuch which she said had come out for the Emperor Franz Josef’s coronation in 1906; she pointed out to him the gold-embossed portrait of the Kaiser, then closed its thick brown covers, ran her hand lovingly – even pridefully over the imperial motto in its flowery scroll: Viribus Unitis. But when he took it in his hands, Hugo thought it looked and felt exactly like a coffin, the coffin into which they had closed his father. Instead of poring over it with her nostalgic fascination, he took recourse to the schoolboy’s totem – his penknife – and spent the silent hours whittling instead. Sometimes on the window-seat by the piano, sometimes on his bed, sometimes out on the landing, simply to be out of the house. Whenever he heard a step, he got up and went back into the flat that was beginning to resemble that Kaiser-coffin of a book.
Their lives fell into a groove and remained there: they might have been an old married couple, Hugo and his mother, seldom leaving the apartment, looking after each other with stricken concern. Some of the neighbours dropped in occasionally, bringing them magazines, bringing them rolls, or jam they had made. Never butter; there was no butter. Never newspapers, it was better not to see them. The Gentleman from Hamburg installed himself in the shop downstairs, his own name – his good, sound, Teutonic name – painted on the new shop-window in letters of black, edged with gold. When he came up to call on them, he was concerned, polite, helpful over the tea Frau Baumgartner served on a tray. Then she would go to the roll-top desk, open it and go through the papers in it with him, her voice a murmur Hugo could barely overhear from his corner by the bookshelf. Generally, after such a visit, some object or the other would be removed from its place and carried downstairs – the Prussian helmet in the shape of an ashtray, the pistol-shaped barometer from between the french windows, and even the wooden negro who held umbrellas in the hall – the ivory-topped cane had already vanished. Hugo was astounded to see it uproot itself after so many years of standing stock-still and inscrutable, and watched its shining black head bob down the stairs in disbelief. Eventually the piano went too. When Hugo opened his mouth to protest, his mother laid her finger on her lips and whispered the old saying, ‘Stepchildren must behave doubly well.’ Silently he turned the words over in his mind: ‘Stiefkinder müssen doppelt artig sein.’ The apartment became strangely empty, and this emptiness matched the silence into which they sank.
The Gentleman from Hamburg began to bluster. ‘A young man who is not pursuing his education, what chance has he in this world?’ he demanded of Hugo after drinking a cup of coffee with them, the coffee ground from bitter beans that made their mouths pucker and gave their speech an edge. ‘Frau Baumgartner, you cannot imagine he will be fit for employment –’
‘What employment, Herr Pfuehl? What employment can you think of for him?’ she replied with some asperity. She used her coffee cup only for warming her hands.
Herr Pfuehl continued to bluster. ‘At least send him down to learn something in the office. We can’t have the late Herr Baumgartner’s only son grow up uneducated and unemployed, can we?’
‘That,’ said Frau Baumgartner, setting down her coffee cup, ‘he can certainly do. Thank you, Herr Pfuehl, I will see that he does that,’ and left Hugo gaping at his first lesson in the stiffening effect of hardship.
It seemed to Hugo that he entered the small office at the back of the showro
om and never left it again. To begin with, he sat at his father’s old desk, going through the bills, endlessly doing calculations or tapping out business letters on an ancient typewriter, and then he brought blankets down so that he could sleep on the sagging green sofa by the radiator and a kettle so that he could boil himself some soup or ersatz coffee on the gas ring.
Eventually his mother moved in as well, the apartment upstairs surrendered to Herr Pfuehl when his family arrived from Hamburg. ‘It is too big for us now,’ she apologised to Hugo, looking away. She tried to keep out of his way. ‘But where do you go, Mutti?’ he wanted to know, and she laughed and told him how she had been visiting her favourite pictures in the museum – ‘One must make sure they keep the helmet well polished for Herr Rembrandt,’ she joked – or insisted it had been a fine day in the park although the rain had streamed down the office window. She tried to keep out all day while he was working and returned only when the showroom closed and the delivery boys left and Herr Pfuehl mounted the stairs to dine with his family. What did it matter if his wife, Frau Pfuehl, who wore a hat made of two birds’ wings, one over either ear, and hid her eyes behind a strip of netting, spat after her when they met at the entrance, one shaking her umbrella on entering and the other shaking it open on leaving? ‘Hugo, Frau Pfuehl, she spat at me! Sie hat auf mir gespuckt!’ his mother cried, coming in with her face flushed. ‘Ja, gespuckt – like a guttersnipe. Can you believe it of Herr Pfuehl’s wife?’ Hugo looked up from the accounts, his eyes so blurred by the endless figures that he could not see or interpret her expression. Frau Pfuehl? For a moment he could not take in who she meant and, when he did, his mother had already started talking of something else, the eggs she had managed to buy in the market, and their absurd, idiotic price. ‘For two eggs,’ she mocked, holding them up in her hands, ‘the size of a pigeon’s. A very small pigeon’s,’ she laughed, and boiled them for their supper that they ate sitting side by side on the sofa.
‘Why not go and spend a day with the Friedmanns again, Mutti?’ Hugo suggested, wiping his mouth of egg. She said nothing. ‘You should keep in touch, Mutti,’ he urged. ‘How?’ she replied, and told him they had gone to the countryside in the belief they would be safe there.
‘Haslein in der Grube sass und schlief.
Armer Haslein, bist du krank,
dass du nicht mehr hupfen kannst?
Haslein hupf!’
‘In India he may begin a new life!’ the Gentleman from Hamburg thundered, walking up and down with his hands under the tails of his new, striped coat. ‘Yes, you may think of it as an ancient and backward land, my good Frau Baumgartner, the land of snakes and fakirs, but have you not heard of the British Empire? Don’t you know, Hugo, that it is a colony of our neighbours in Britain? I have reasons for thinking of it as a promising place and so should you, Hugo, now that you have taken over my clerical work. You ought to know how much of my timber comes from there, all the finest mahogany and rosewood, and all the fancy pieces of sandalwood – where else but from the East, from India and Burma and Malaya? So don’t dismiss my suggestion with that look,’ he warned them, removing his hand from under his coat and giving it an admonitory wave, having noticed how the two on the sofa had exchanged looks and how Frau Baumgartner had raised her handkerchief to her lips to conceal her laughter. ‘I can get him a passage on a boat of the Peninsular and Oriental Lines that leaves for the East from Venice. We will get him on to a train to Venice – quickly, before the trains stop –’
‘The trains stop?’ she spluttered.
He gave her an exasperated look; what was one to do with these hysterical Jewesses? ‘Not easy to get a ticket any more, but I will manage it, and also give him a letter of recommendation to my acquaintance in the timber trade in India – I have been doing business with him for many years now, always satisfactorily. Why not think over it, Hugo, before you say no? I have heard that “no” enough.’
‘Herr Pfuehl,’ Hugo’s mother murmured then, ashamed of her mirth for which she herself could not account. ‘At times, it is best to say no, to stay quietly in one place so that no one notices, so that everyone forgets – till things become better again . . .’
He wagged his finger at her again, the one that wore a blood ruby in a ring. ‘Totschweigentaktik, playing dead, is all very well, in its own time – and place – but not here, not now. You must wake up, you two, and act. You should know when to wake up, and act. Have you not heard of what became of the Nussbaums from the haberdashery? How the police came in the night for him, how he threw himself from the window?’ Herr Pfuehl’s hands acted out the scene, tumbling through the air like two pouches. ‘And how nevertheless they seized and carried away Frau Nussbaum? Yes, she had painted the swastika on her window, she had dyed her hair yellow, but did that help? Nein, sie war nach dem Osten verschleppt, deported to the East, you know that.’
‘If it did not help her, Herr Pfuehl, then what does it matter what we do? It will not help either.’
Herr Pfuehl gave an exasperated roar. ‘You are not illiterate, you Jews, you are not peasants – then why are your minds so closed?’ He rolled up the pouch of his hand and squeezed it. He hardly knew why he bothered about this pair stuck in his office room like obstinate mice who turned up their noses at the cheese. Yes, he wanted them out, he wanted to be rid of the past history of the firm and of the Baumgartner name – but it was not only that. He was worried. He was afraid of being accused of harbouring Jews when Hitler was trying to rid the sacred fatherland of them – so his wife had said and she was not so stupid. Nor was Pfuehl entirely in disagreement with the Fuehrer’s plans and ambitions, not at all – there were many points on which he agreed with him such as the need for seizing the power of commerce and industry from their unscrupulous hands – but, Donnerwetter, there were ways of doing these things. And then, who could consider this miserable pale Jewish boy with his grotesque nose, or his tiny dark sparrow of a mother, as fit for work in those factories that the Fuehrer had set up? No, one had to be human in such matters and admit that a paint or steel factory or a salt or coal mine was no place for the late Herr Baumgartner’s widow or son, so delicately brought up in the old Germany with their piano-playing and singing and reading of the classics. They were not the Jews of the Shtetl after all, of kosher and Hanukkah and Cheder and God knew what other Galician horrors. ‘Think about it,’ he warned, ‘and quick.’
‘It is for your own good, I am telling you,’ he pleaded late at night, returning from a meeting in the Alexanderplatz where the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ had been sung and everyone had seemed to be wearing a swastika on an armband and his blue suit had stood out oddly in all that brown. ‘I cannot protect you much longer. You must be gone –’ he glared at them, and at last thought he saw a look of alarm in the boy’s eyes. Ah-ha, so the dim blind worm has let a new idea enter his head at last, he rejoiced, and pressed his point with renewed vigour.
Finally Hugo came out of the office room to see him in his own enclosure. He stood there, amongst the pieces of shining new furniture of the kind his father would never have tolerated, looking much too big for that absurd corduroy suit he still wore, his big hands hanging out of the shrunken cuffs, and saying, ‘But what of my mother, sir? She won’t come to India.’
‘Won’t come to India?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Have you talked to her, tried to persuade her?’
Hugo nodded, slowly, not at all surely. He had not been certain if his mother took it seriously when he tried clumsily to paint a picture of their new beginnings in the East – a crude picture, all tigers and palm trees and sunsets, and perhaps it was only to be expected that she did not believe in it. ‘After all, they are not so primitive,’ he had tried Herr Pfuehl’s method on her. ‘You saw that they are educated and have their own literature. You saw the picture of the great poet in the Friedmanns’ house, mother,’ he reminded her, but she burst out laughing, in her newly unnatural way, gave him a little push with her hand, now twisted with ar
thritis, and cried, ‘Ach Hugo, don’t be ridiculous. Why should your mother read a bengalische poet when I can read the beautiful verses of our own dear Friedmanns?’ The mention of them gave a twist to her mouth and her eyes turned liquid and threatened to spill over – she had not heard from them since they had left. A little later she returned to her half-jocular, half-petulant manner. ‘And what about the snakes and the tigers? How will mein kleiner Mann protect me from them? You know how frightened I am even of a little German mouse, Hugo.’
‘A German mouse, Mutti? We are not talking of little German mice, you know.’
It was no good: she either turned it into a joke, or she turned her back on him, rubbing and rubbing her twisted, purple fingers, and would only grimace at anything that he said.
It was the Gentleman from Hamburg who took everything into his hands, as he explained to everyone, and found Frau Baumgartner a room as a paying guest in the house of some ‘influential’ people, quite a nice house, on Grenadierstrasse, warm and comfortable even if not in a quarter one would have chosen – but at least it was amongst ‘safe’ people. It was here that Hugo said goodbye to her, putting his new valise down on the wool rug in the middle of the pine flooring that smelt of disinfectant, and putting out his arms in the sleeves of his new white linen suit to embrace her. His cheek against hers, he said as he had said every night for the last week, ‘And when I am in India, I will make a home for us. How will you like that? I will have servants for you and drive away the snakes and bring you gold oranges –’
‘What are you talking about, you silly boy?’ she rubbed her cheek, like a piece of crumpled velvet, against his. ‘What is this fairy story – diese Märchen – you are making up for old Mutti?’
‘I am not making it up at all, Mü. Don’t you remember you sang the song about the country where lemons flower, where oranges glow in the dark foliage? I remember it, see.’
‘Silly Hugo, that was written by Goethe, it was about the Mediterranean, not about some dangerous land in the East, mit den Schwarzen. I told you I won’t live where there are spiders and snakes,’ and she pushed him away from her. Her mouth was jerking in all directions, uncontrollably, making her look drunken, or witchlike.
