Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  Finally she opened the door a cautious crack and looked out, suspiciously pinching together her lips, nose and eyes in a tight lock of denial. Then, ‘Ach, du lieber Gott, Hugo,’ she said disgustedly, and dropped her hands to her hips, letting the door swing open. The slack flesh hung from her arms like two legs of mutton veined with blue. She was dressed in a slip and stood barefoot.

  ‘Now, Lotte, do you receive guests in this costume?’ he chided her, walking in past her, letting his side bump into and press against her as he did so – such clumsiness being permitted the old, surely. If she did not bump back at him, she did not press away from him either.

  ‘Guests are all I need after a night like the last one,’ she groaned, following him after locking and bolting the door securely although not before the children on the landing above had screamed several of their names for her, all filthy.

  ‘What kind of night was it then? Up dancing in the Café de Paris till dawn, eh?’ he teased, lowering himself on to his favourite chair, a bucket of cane that had over the years sagged to fit his shape. Besides, it had a small flat cushion covered in the same bright material as the curtains. He eased it up against his back, grateful for its support.

  Lotte flung herself on to the kitchen chair at the table, spreading out her legs to make a generous meaty triangle, and then flinging up her arms to repeat the attitude over her head on which her hair stood in a reddish frazzle. ‘Dancing he talks about,’ she groaned. ‘In this bloody heat and in this bloody graveyard? What a joke.’

  ‘Come, Lotte, there is enough life in it, you know.’

  ‘Life, what life? Mosquito life, yes, I know – millions and millions of bloody mosquitoes, all coming to nest in my hair, I think –’ she ran her fingers through it so that it stood up like orange grass – ‘they think I am Mama Mosquito and drink my blood like milk. All night at my ears, crying and crying for more. See how I’ve scratched myself everywhere –’ she leant towards him, exposing the scratches, relishing the harsh gashes she had drawn through her raw skin.

  Baumgartner drew back, flinching. One could have too much of Lotte. ‘A little coffee may help,’ he suggested.

  ‘What, on the skin? Are you meshuggeh?’

  ‘Down the throat, Lotte, down the throat,’ he waggled a finger, raising and opening his lips to it like a fish on a hook.

  But she scowled, clapping her hand to her head and groaning, ‘With the sun so hot, it fries you like an egg in a pan? Coffee is not for this land. Better you have a drink with me,’ and she gave him a look that was close to a wink, then got to her feet and padded around the table to the kitchen end of her single room.

  It was not what Baumgartner wanted at all – he did not care for gin in the morning and with Lotte one could not even be sure it would be that and not the local brew Ramu brought her, a poison called feni that stank. He felt despondent as he watched her take a bottle from behind a row of tins in which she kept her rice and sugar, and pick out glasses from the basin in which dirty dishes were heaped. ‘So, you want?’ she called aggressively and he gave a reluctant, resigned nod, then watched her rinse the glasses perfunctorily under the brass tap that ran into a plastic bucket. ‘Ramu brought it up last night,’ she told him as she poured out the colourless fluid. ‘Real stuff – from the consulates – not that stuff they make of cashew-nuts in the courtyard.’

  ‘Ach, Lotte, how can you trust Ramu?’ he sighed, trying to reconcile himself to the fiery drink he did not want. ‘You will be lucky if it is cashew-nut. Not so many cashew-nuts in the courtyard – but many dog turds in the drain.’

  She splashed some gin on the table, she had set down the bottle so violently. ‘Nein, was ist das? What’s that?’ she spat at him. ‘You need the soap to wash out the mouth. Don’t talk dirty about the food – or drink – in my house, hörst du? Good food – good drink – don’t spit on it, Hugo, sei dankbar.’ She splashed some water into the glasses from another bottle, then limped across to the small grey refrigerator that stood shuddering and rattling irately in a corner and got out a tray of ice.

  Seeing the ice-cubes slither out of it on to a plate, Baumgartner began to feel refreshed, and mopped his neck with his handkerchief, preparing to feel cooler and to rest. ‘Of course is good, Lotte,’ he pacified her, ‘but not Grand Hotel, hah, not Prince’s exactly.’

  ‘Prince’s!’ she snorted, picking up a handful of ice-cubes and throwing them into a glass. ‘Grand Hotel!’ She tossed some into the other glass. ‘So that is what mein Hugolein has come to talk about.’ She brought his glass across to him, curtseying before him and managing to splash a little on to his knee.

  ‘Careful, careful with the Herr Consul’s gin, Lotte,’ he warned. ‘Too early in the morning for falling down.’

  ‘Early in the morning I know it is,’ she snapped, sinking back on the kitchen chair with her glass of gin. ‘The crack of dawn, like the English say.’

  ‘And how is it you are being so English today? Some new friend? Last night’s party?’ Baumgartner laughed, having taken a sip and found the drink both cold and fiery in a pleasurable way he had not anticipated.

  ‘Party, party,’ she groaned, wiping her mouth after a long drink. ‘Only party I know was going on downstairs in that madman’s flat. I tell you, Hugo, is driving me meshuggeh, this place. Downstairs, party. Upstairs, puja – priests, bells, hymns all night. Is a madhouse.’ She pulled down the corners of her mouth, two deep gashes formed in the soft floury cheeks on each side, and she looked as worn as she claimed to be.

  ‘I told her not to move,’ Baumgartner reminded her. ‘Such a nice flat she had, that one in Napoli. Free gift, given for life. Some don’t know when they are lucky. Just for money, she gave it up.’ He shook his head, again regretting the loss of that little flat in which Lotte had once lived, incredibly enough, looking out at the steeple of the Afghan Church and with the smell of fresh fish from the Sassoon docks sweeping in through the window when the catch came in. ‘Nice doorman to keep place safe, sweeper to keep all clean, and breeze at the window – but you wanted money.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ she exploded. ‘Without money, one can live?’ She slammed down her glass and refilled it immediately. ‘You can’t be memsahib without money. I did try, Hugo, but no, without money, I was only poor old Lotte, not grand memsahib.’ Unexpectedly she began to laugh, her face turning maroon with each splutter. ‘You remember your Lotte in those memsahib days, Hugo?’ Without waiting for his corroboration, she went on: ‘That was when my Kanti was living. Everything had to be nice then – silver dishes for the nuts on the table, plastic lace curtains in the windows, plastic lace for tablecloths – he liked that. And the servant he engaged for me, that useless boy Raju. Raju understood everything. When I was alone, I never saw him – he would sit outside on the landing, playing cards with all the servants in Napoli. So many people lived there, so many servants they had, and all played cards all day on the landings. But once a month we could be sure the telegram would come from Calcutta, a pink telegram with white paper stuck on it – that meant Sahib was coming. Then we would both jump – Raju and I,’ she laughed to remember, smacking both hands together to denote action. ‘Quick, quick, I would shampoo my hair, dress, go out and buy something nice – a piece of pretty cloth – then run to the durzee – I had such a clever man then – he could copy from the magazines, so nicely. And I would find shoes to match – or sandals anyway because stockings there were not. And I would get Raju to leave the cards and come away from his friends. He knew when Sahib came he had to behave – they all knew that. I would make him clean the whole kitchen, scrub it all with Vim, catch and kill every cockroach. Yes, Hugo, you do it once a month and you can be free of them – even you, in that dump of yours. And I would order soda and put it in the fridge, and beer. Buy stores. Raju would put on a clean shirt. Then he would cook – all Kanti’s favourite food he knew how to make. Not mine: never did he learn to make Kartoffelpuffer or Leberknödel, however much I tried to teach him. But dal, sabzi,
khichri, roti, all that, Raju could do just the way Kanti liked. And then I would become memsahib in his eyes. Perhaps because I went out in a taxi to fetch Kanti from the station. For that, I would put on a dress,’ she snickered at Baumgartner, not at all unaware of how his eyes watched her knees, her thighs. ‘All those nice dresses fitted me then. Ja, Hugo, I had a green silk one, and that yellow print – and my hair was still blonde then – I really must have looked a memsahib in the taxi going to the station, going to meet his train. Then he told me not to because sometimes he might travel with his relations, or with other businessmen from Calcutta, and he did not want them to see me.’ Her face was still maroon but her eyes and lips had begun to lose their animation and droop so that her voice slurred. ‘So after that I stayed in the flat and waited. Not the same thing. Made me sloppy, like this –’ she tugged at the frayed strap of her slip. ‘But I had the beer cold, the soda and ice ready, and when he came I could give him a little party. He loved it, that old Kanti. Made me sing all my old songs, and tell jokes – he just laughed and laughed. I suppose no one ever sang or laughed in his home, no one made him laugh there. He had daughters, made them take singing lessons like all the daughters in Calcutta take, but he really couldn’t stand their singing. “Graveyard music”, he called those songs they all sing in Bengal. He liked mine – with a bit of leg, hee hee. Told me that. Old men like it, don’t they, Hugo?’ She gave him a wink, but with some difficulty; she could not quite control her eyelids. ‘Then he became too sick to laugh. It hurt him to laugh. He wanted to go straight to bed and have his drink there. That was all right, I could understand, but he wouldn’t get out. Whole weekend spent lying in bed. That was not fun, after all it was what I did all week. Raju would bring a whisky and soda to the bedroom. Always made a face as if he smelt something. Rude boy. Made me so angry, I wanted to kick him, but Kanti would stop me, say I must not shout at Raju, he was looking after me. He, looking after me? Who looked after me? Nobody. Except Kanti.’

  Baumgartner watched her slosh more drink, more ice into her glass, tried to remember the nondescript figure of the Marwari businessman from Calcutta. Dry as a twist of tobacco, shrivelled inside the elaborate folds of his white dhoti and coloured turban, the smell of snuff buried inside them, while from his mouth, full of discoloured teeth, the scent of the silver-coated betel nuts he liked to chew made one reel back – it was like a perfumery – how had Lotte stood it? Even then, when they were both young – when they were all young – he had wondered how Lotte stood it.

  She extended her arm to him in a royal, languid gesture, her movements slowed by the gin. ‘See, each bangle here is from Kanti. Solid gold, twenty-two carats like Indian women wear – no European would believe, heh?’ She jingled them on her wrist in a melancholy way, like bells in the wind. ‘Now I’m afraid these thieves will murder me for it – like that drunkard Ramu downstairs, or those – those –’ she jabbed with her finger at the ceiling, not able to bring herself to speak the unspeakable name of the neighbours in that region – ‘but I can’t take them off and put them in the bank. It is like taking off your wedding-ring. Hindu women do it when they become widows but I won’t – they are not a wedding-ring, after all, only presents. Presents from Kanti.’ She turned the bangles round and round on her wrist, making that jangling sound that jarred Baumgartner. This Hindu widow act, couldn’t she stop it?

  ‘That ulcer,’ she was brooding aloud, ‘I told him don’t drink, Kanti – just have the soda, no whisky, but he would lie in my bed, his teeth in a glass on the table – and he would say, “What did I come to Bombay for then? You, and a drink, that is my life, that is what I live for. Give me more whisky,” and I knew how he felt, I also would feel the same, would you not, Hugo?’ She glared at him sharply till he nodded in assent, not at all agreeing. ‘So drink, drink, drink – then one day – phut! The ulcer went, like the doctors said. In Calcutta. I was not even there to hold his hand. His family was already fighting over the property – no one even to hold his hand, there in the hospital. Dogs die like that, in the street. This is how we go, Hugo,’ she wagged her head. ‘In the end – alone.’

  ‘Oh, Lotte,’ Baumgartner protested, but did not elaborate because he could not.

  ‘And then the court cases begin. The long, long court cases. How many years that has taken, and all my savings, all Kanti’s gifts. It has ruined my health, Hugo.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he nodded cynically, ‘I see how your health is ruined,’ and ogled her fat arms, her solid thighs, her round belly.

  ‘It is ruined,’ she insisted, ‘only this –’ waving her glass at him – ‘only this keeps me going. Like Kanti.’

  ‘Be careful,’ he warned, suddenly worried. ‘Perhaps we should eat, Lotte. A sandwich maybe.’

  ‘Oh, I never eat Mittagessen.’ She made a face at the suggestion, and lit a cigarette instead. ‘No breakfast, no lunch. At night, perhaps, a little, if I can force myself to go and shop –’ she walked her fingers across the table – ‘downstairs.’

  Baumgartner became alarmed. That was not how he lived, and his stomach was demanding what it was used to, quite vociferously. ‘Just some bread and cheese, Lotte,’ he pleaded, for his own sake more than hers.

  ‘Bread and cheese?’ she screamed. ‘He thinks he is in Deutschland, hah? Or in der Schweiz? Choice between Roquefort, Camembert, and Brie perhaps? And bread – Weissbrot, Schwarzbrot, Pumpernickel maybe?’ She became red in the face with indignation.

  Baumgartner withdrew, ashamed. ‘I only thought – it is so late – too much gin is not good, Lotte. Why not beer instead – in the daytime?’

  ‘Hah!’ she snorted. ‘Better than the beer in this country. Beer only gives the germs food to grow. You need something strong to kill them – like gin.’

  ‘Ach, Lottchen, you have lived here fifty years and no germ has got you yet. Just think how many germs – and mosquitoes, and bugs and lice you have murdered in this time, hah?’

  ‘You remember that family that lived in Napoli, at the top of the house? How they used to send me, sometimes, a tray with food when they had a special puja for a grandchild or a wedding or whatever it was? I always gave it to Raju, I knew it was full of germs. Funny,’ she added in an afterthought, ‘that they sent it to me, no? They must have thought – they must have thought Kanti and I – that it was all right. But when he died, all that stopped. Then they sided with his sons, then they too said I was not married, could not keep the flat. So what could I do, Hugo, but give up my beautiful flat in Napoli? They offered to settle out of court – quite a lot of money it seemed to me – so I took it. After all, I had this place; it used to be my shop, my little factory –’

  Baumgartner stared at her as if he suspected her of having gone soft in the head with all that gin. What was she talking about now?

  Seeing his disbelief she grew shrill. ‘You don’t remember? My hat business that Kanti set up for me? Just after the war? You don’t remember he bought this room for me – for making hats?’ She reached out to give him a push with her hand, forcing him back into his cane bucket. ‘Hugo, du bist ja so dumm, so silly – can’t remember Mother Braganza and the two daughters, they used to sit here and make the hats I would design – just after the war?’

  He swung his head slowly in a way that could mean yes or no – whatever she wanted of him; a tactic which had often proved useful in his long life with its complicated demands. Staring down at Lotte’s feet which were surprisingly pale and narrow on the stained and discoloured floor, he was seeing again his mother’s cheek white under the black netting of the veil and the fresh violets pinned to her little black cape for a Sunday morning walk on the Kurfürstendamm. He could not say this to Lotte who was unlikely to have come across such an apparition in her life on the stage or in a circus tent, and so for a moment they stared at each other in angry incomprehension.

  Then Lotte decided to spell it all out for her poor, fuddled, senile old friend. Swinging one leg over the other so as to give her loose flesh a more
closely packed arrangement, bulging with maturity, with experience, she drew on her foul-smelling cigarette and reminded Baumgartner, ‘I had told Kanti I wanted to do something – to be busy, not to be always waiting for him in the flat – and that I could make a business out of hats, European hats. So he bought me these magazines – European magazines, I loved them, looking at all those elegant clothes, like one sees in Europe –’

  Baumgartner gave a small snort, wanting to ask her if she expected him to believe that she came from a world of haute couture, from Paris, but Lotte refused to listen, or to be stopped.

  ‘And I found Mother Braganza and her two daughters. I found they could copy very well. I would show them a hat with feathers, a hat with beads, a hat with a veil. Once I had them make a little one like a Chinese coolie hat, and under it this veil, black net, and on that little-little beads, Hugo – ach, it was élégante.’