Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

Prince’s. The band played music that was like treacle, or tinsel. It filled the eyes and ears and suffocated. In that drowning well of sly, subdued light and raucous, unmodulated music, Lola danced, blonde and pink and white like a tattered doll. She danced with a trim bony woman who had orange hair, violet eyelids and purple nails. Together they danced and made eyes at the men who crowded around the dance floor as if it were a circus ring. The men climbed on to the tables, on to each other’s shoulders, whistled and clapped till they fell over. Like possessed marionettes the girls struck the floor with their heels, swung their hips and gestured with their hands, the one with yellow hair and the one with orange, singing together:

  ‘Lola and Lily

  are fifteen and free,

  Lola and Lily –’

  and, together with the bandleader, all the men in the audience roared:

  ‘O give them to me!’

  The first time she visited him in his hotel room, she flung herself on to his bed, kicked off her red sandals, twiddled her brightly painted toes, and laughed, ‘Lola! They call me that, those Dummkopf people – don’t even know a Lola has to have black hair, black eyes, skin like a magnolia flower. To them, you can have blonde hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks and still be Lola.’

  ‘What were you at home then?’ he smiled from the chair by the window where he sat smoking, both pleased and uneasy at her intrusion, ushered in by the smirking waiter from downstairs. He found himself enjoying the feel of German in his mouth, as familiar a taste as brown bread or beer, but puzzled by her accent, to his Berliner ear slurred and rasping.

  ‘What was I at home?’ she laughed, lifting up the mat of strawy hair from her neck in that characteristic gesture which he now saw she made to show off her plump arms and the line of her breasts, raised under the cotton material printed with red flowers and green parrots. ‘Lulu – in Germany, I was Lulu.’

  He gave her a wink. ‘Lulu is not German.’

  She turned on him angrily. ‘What Germany are you speaking of, you turnip-nosed Jude? My mother might have named me Lotte but once I became a dancer, I was Lulu.’

  ‘And when was that?’ he asked, willing to forgive her her little outburst for the sake of her friendliness, her German tongue.

  ‘Ach, I was ten, twelve, daughter of show people, part of a show team.’ She pointed her toes, showed him the arc of her foot, with a kind of professional pride. ‘My mother sang opera – she was Madam Butterfly when I was in her womb. Can you not guess? Of course I wanted to be someone in my own right, wanted to act. In a theatre. But once any director saw me dance, he forgot about my acting. I could have played any role – always was a monkey, ein Affe – Sarah Bernhardt was my goddess, but my parents had taught me to dance and dance I had to. So Lulu I remained. A good name for a dancer, nicht wahr?’

  He smiled in agreement, and got up to pour her a glass of gin from a bottle on his dressing-table: it was too early to go down for a beer, the waiters in the garden below were dragging the chairs off the tables with loud crashes, laughing and abusing each other in a friendly way, like noisy birds. Handing the drink to her he asked, ‘And the other – who is your partner? What is her real name?’

  ‘My partner? Who – that Lily-of-the-valley?’ Lotte made a grotesque face, then drank a gulp of gin that made her smile again. ‘Lily-of-Shanghai she was in the past. And before that, at home, she was – she confessed to me when I saw it on a letter that came for her – just Gisela. Gisela the Goose Girl, I teased her when I handed her the letter. She was furious, I can tell you. She had told everyone in Calcutta she was Giselle from Russia, but then I popped up and told everyone I had seen her show advertised on street posters in Shanghai where she was Lily, one more Lily amongst hundreds of Lilies in hundreds of cabarets and bars, ha-ha!’ Lotte flung her legs up in the air and did a little flutter of her feet in mid-air. ‘But when I went to the Grand Hotel for a job –’

  ‘How? What brought you here, to Calcutta?’ Baumgartner could not help interrupting.

  ‘Ach, don’t ask me that – if I start telling you we will be sitting here all night, all day. I was on a boat, it brought me up that drain they call the Hooghly and it dumped me here in the mud of Calcutta. I had to earn a living, nicht wahr? How? By dancing, as I had done since I was ten, twelve. Some sailors I met in a bar took me to the Grand. There was Gisela. She didn’t like me barging in, I can tell you, but the proprietor, he was getting a little bored with the Dying Swan, he wanted something new. What is better than one girl?’ She poked Baumgartner’s leg with her toe, playfully. ‘Huh? Tell me. You don’t know? Ach, du poor Dummkopf – two girls, of course. Even that idiot proprietor knew that. He thought at once: ah-ha, now I will have two dancers, twins, one in pink, one in blue, like that, and everyone will love it of course. And poor Gisela, she had to put up with me if she wanted to keep her job. She wanted it all right – a good job to have in this city.’ She closed one eye in a wink as loud as a smack. ‘Give me a cigarette, Hugo.’

  Baumgartner ordered cakes for both of them, at a table in Flury’s. The proprietor was Swiss, they said, and the pastries were very fine. The girls wolfed down one after the other, licking cream off their fingers, quarrelling over the cherries, rolling their eyes at the chocolates. Baumgartner watched, over a cigarette, pleased even if they paid him no attention, eating and talking only to each other, almost incomprehensibly.

  No sooner were the pastries gone than Gisela started to hum in a bored way and look around the restaurant for some more interesting patron. (In the ladies’ room at the back, adjusting her garters, she had said, ‘Now, really, Lotte – this is going too far. German he may be but who wants a German just when war is going to break out? And such a turnip, Lotte – a Jiddischer turnip too.’) Even at that hour of the morning, she had painted her eyelids violet, her cheeks carmine, her lips purple and wore on her wrists and fingers a collection of intricately cut glass – yellow, blue, green. Baumgartner, stealing glances at her, felt she could not possibly be from Germany, she was altogether a product of the tropics, the overheated East, a parakeet or macaw. But when she glanced across at an immense Russian at the next table and said, ‘Wo kauft sie dann ihr Brot – I wonder where she buys her bread?’ he had to laugh, it was a remark straight off the Berlin streets.

  In no time she had spotted an acquaintance from the night before, a wealthy race-going Marwari businessman. ‘Excusez-moi, mes amis,’ she hissed at Lotte and Baumgartner, ‘but he gave me a pearl once – this size – and has the best tips for the races,’ and sliding away from their table, she flew across the restaurant to join more promising company.

  ‘That Gisi – Goose Girl she may have been but now she is Gisi the Gold-digger,’ Lotte remarked wryly, with both envy and rancour.

  That was the crowd the girls gathered around them – meeting them at the Three Hundred in the evening before they moved on to Prince’s for the cabaret, or else reversing the order and going to the Three Hundred after the cabaret. The place – a mouldering villa with porches, shuttered windows, night-flowering creepers, malevolent-looking watchmen – was kept in pitch-darkness, only cigarette lighters and diamond rings flared, briefly. In the murk swirled the lucrative aura of bankers, traders, racehorse owners, landowners from small northern states who were not quite rajas although occasionally the Maharaja of Burdwan or the Maharani of Cooch Behar were excitedly pointed out to Baumgartner, and stories of elephant hunts, tiger shoots and fabulous banquets were told over the gins and whiskies in the secretive dark. There were also some more daylit characters – young men from the mercantile firms, mostly Englishmen, who dealt in jute, tea or coal and talked of rugby and squash, a few Indians amongst them. There was a Russian adventurer, a great tall man with a face like a sledge who told laughingly of all the hotels he had bought and run, only to lose them to pay the debts he ran up at gambling tables, and – less plausibly but more entertainingly – the errands he had run for czars, Mongol chieftains, Chinese drug-peddlers and wealth-crazed rajas, while the crowds
at his table plied him with more and more drink so that he should embroider his stories still more lavishly than the time before. Always there was a point in the evening when he would go down on the floor, strike out with his legs and sing ‘Galinka’ till he fell over, dead drunk, too large and too heavy to be lifted and carried out; then he became a kind of ceremonial altar for the night’s celebrations which only came to an end when he woke and called for a pink gin. There was an Italian traveller who had been to more wonderful places – the Himalayan passes, Tibet, Bhutan, Ceylon, the Andaman, Laccadive and Nicobar islands – but he told less, held back more so that rumours surrounded him like a black net. There were game hunters resting after the ardours of shikar in the forests of Cooch Behar and the Sunderbans. There were also, less colourfully but more ominously, an increasing number of soldiers, in khaki, much more dour and subdued than the others till it was time for the sundowner and after that they were the most uncontrolled and the most alarming of all.

  Baumgartner had very little to contribute to the conversation in those gatherings – trade and business practices were too commonplace to flaunt – but in the company of the men in khaki he found himself going absolutely silent, listening in a strained way, losing his smile. Even if they were not responsible for the silence from Germany, the complete absence of any response to his telegrams, of the news of his mother for which he was still waiting, he knew they were caught up in the same blind chaos, an active part of it, and he feared them instinctively. At times he caught a reflection of his own attitude in Lotte and Gisela, even though they disguised their disquiet with laughter and foul language. They would leave early, pleading a headache or work at Prince’s. Sometimes one or two of the soldiers would accompany them. Then Baumgartner would leave alone, stopping under the dim streetlamp to pour some coins into the bandaged stump proffered by the leper who waited legless on his little cart for the generosity of the drunks. As he strolled back to his hotel in the liquified heat of the August night, Violet and Rosie would detach themselves from the urine and betel-stained wall and pout, ‘Very big sahib you have become. No more time for old friends, eh?’ and pull at his sleeves, demand money, demand cigarettes.

  ‘Lotte, is not good, to be with these British soldiers,’ he protested one morning when she came into his room to show him an armful of shopping she had done on Park Street. She had not told him who had paid for the gold sandals, the silk scarf or the sequinned bag that she flaunted before him, but he guessed.

  ‘Poof, what does it matter? Is a British soldier worse than a German soldier or an American soldier? Soldiers are everywhere the same, mein Hugo – free with money when they are in port!’ She did a few dance steps to make the gold heels flash and click. ‘Ach, what a port is Calcutta! Could Shanghai be better, or Hamburg even?’ The shopping had gone to her head, Baumgartner thought, that was what the feel of money did. While he fumed, she swung the sequinned bag on her wrist and laughed to see it glint in the heavy morning light that poured in through the open window. Outside were red and yellow canna lilies, loudly chattering mynah birds, a flowering tree. She seemed delighted to take her part in these cockatoo colours, this macaw setting.

  ‘Will soon be war between our countries,’ he warned.

  ‘You still read newspapers?’ she pouted at him. ‘As if war in Europe will have anything to do with us here in Calcutta. Hugo, how silly you are. Sei doch nicht so blöd.’

  ‘How will it not?’ he argued. ‘We are in British territory, and we are German nationals –’

  ‘You are, but I am not,’ she interrupted.

  ‘No? What do you mean? What nationality have you?’

  ‘Ach, what does it matter? I can change any day that I want. Many men are wanting to marry me – that Kanti Sethia, he is always asking and asking.’ She was standing still now, at the window, looking out, swinging the little bag on her wrist; it flew round and round her like a bright bird.

  ‘Kanti Sethia?’ Baumgartner was speechless for a few minutes, his lips moving soundlessly. The faces of Lotte’s admirers passed before him in rapid succession, so rapid that they blurred. The handsome tea-planter with the small moustache over his big, square teeth who came from his tea-garden in Assam once a month to see her dance? The dashing attaché of the Maharaja of Burdwan? Or the jeweller who took her and Gisela to the races? Could it be the jeweller – the small brown monkey of a man who took snuff and blew it into a bandana, carried a walking-stick, wore a white dhoti and a small black cap and became insensible after drinking two whiskies? ‘Ach, Lotte, who?’ he cried in pain. ‘The jeweller? Fifty years old or perhaps more?’

  ‘Hunf, what does it matter?’ Lotte shrugged. ‘If I have to change my nationality I can marry him and change at once. Don’t you see me as an Indian bride, Hugo?’ She left the window and came towards him, prancing. ‘In a gold sari, with a red dot here in the middle of my forehead, and a diamond nose-ring?’ She began to leap around the room with laughter and excitement.

  ‘Du bist verrückt, you’re mad, Lotte. He must be married and have a family – how could he not? Here they marry at fourteen, fifteen –’

  ‘Then he should have a change – to Lola, whoopee!’ she screamed, flinging the sequinned bag clear across the room.

  It was in Prince’s, at a table where Baumgartner alone of the men was not dressed in khaki and where Lotte and Gisela alone provided colour by their costumes, that Baumgartner raised his glass to the two of them when they came up after their performance and said, ‘Prosit!’ The next instant there was a hand on his shoulder, a khaki cuff before his eyes. ‘Jerry, eh? Jerries, you all?’

  Someone shouted, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool. These are the dancers. You want to stop the show?’

  But the hand did not let go, it held harder. Baumgartner tried to shake free. Commotion broke out. In the uproar, Baumgartner lost Lotte, lost Gisela. He kept looking over his shoulder, searching the heaving mass for a glimpse of pink or blue silk, saw them just as they were whisked away by the hotel manager. He tried to follow but was held fast. He heard his sleeve rip. ‘Now look,’ he began to protest when someone hit him on the back of the neck. For a few moments he could not see clearly, everything became a squirming mess of red before him, then he struck out with his fists and heels as he had not done since he was a schoolboy, trapped in a corner of the schoolyard while everyone chanted:

  ‘Baumgartner, Baum,

  Hat ein Nase

  Wie ein Daum!’

  He even found himself so far back in infancy that he actually bit into a hand that was clapped over his mouth. He tasted blood – warm, sweet, disgusting. Three men jumped on top of him, feet first. When he came out from under them, he found a policeman bending over him – just in time for someone had broken a bottle and was flashing that at him. All around them, skulls were cracking under batons, crisply. He covered his own head with his hands, defensively. But the policeman lifted him up by his elbow and called him ‘Sahib’.

  In the police station a man with great rings of tiredness under his eyes, and stains of perspiration on his back, apologised, ‘I have to arrest you, sir. War is declared and we must take you into detention camp. Very bad, sir, very bad.’ Looking abject, he added, ‘British make rules here, sir, not Indians.’ Baumgartner, feeling the salt of blood on his lips with his tongue, smiled in relief at being in his hands, not a white man’s. ‘Will my letters be forwarded?’ he asked. ‘Will you deliver mail at the camp? Can I write a letter before I go?’

  He was still asking the same question of everyone he met in the improvised camp in Fort William to which he was taken with the other ‘enemy aliens’. They threw him uncomprehending looks but one man put his index finger to his temple and turned it like a screw. ‘Mensch,’ he said, ‘here we are in a military prison – and you are wanting to know when the postman will come?’ Some blurted into laughter, but were quickly silenced by a shouted order from a camp guard.

  This shout woke them next morning in their tents. ‘Here, what’s this? Get up
and make your beds, will yer?’ The red face at the opening roared. Falling off his canvas cot in fright, Baumgartner – like his fellow inmates – tried hastily to pull the blankets across the tumbled, tossed sheets, feeling exposed and ridiculous in the underwear in which he had slept, not having brought pyjamas, and which was being regarded with such a ferocious sneer. Every stain, every hole seemed to be studied and noted as he bent and bowed and performed all the actions expected of him before the guard moved on from his cot to the next. There, instead of roaring, he stood with his chest and stomach protruding in an attitude of satisfaction, because Baumgartner’s neighbour was performing a miracle, turning that camp cot into an envelope, neatly turned and finished so that it hardly looked made by the hand of man. ‘Hmm,’ said the guard, sticking out his baton to tap the unwrinkled surface of this model of competence, ‘this – this is how I want the beds to be made.’ He stalked out, very much the cock of the coop, but only after a glance at the maker of that model, a blond and silent man called Schmidt, who then turned to Baumgartner, passing on to him his own version of the guard’s sneer, making Baumgartner see that they were of a kind – the ruling kind.

  Every morning their tents and beds were examined; even after Baumgartner learnt to get up and prepare for Appel on time, he could never master the technique required of him even if the guard roared, ‘Can’t you see how Schmidt does it? Can’t you try and be like him? Eh?’ and that glance would pass between the two men, the rulers, and in passing it on to Baumgartner it would undergo that same shift, that same change.

  Yet the exasperated man at the folding table in another, larger tent, refused absolutely to see them as different, separated individuals. In reply to Baumgartner’s mumble about his name, his Jewishness, he snapped, ‘Stop that whining and show me your passport, will you? That’s all yer asked for – yer passport, hear?’ Baumgartner, sweating profusely, managed to find it and hand it over with slipping, slippery fingers; he stood waiting while it was studied, page by page, thumbed through with the new ferocity that had been let loose and become the new regime. It did not take long before it was thrown back at him with a snap: ‘German, born in Germany,’ and Baumgartner was still trying to form the English words in his mouth, ‘Yes, but of Jewish origin, therefore a refugee –’ when he was caught by his sleeve and propelled out of the tent into a queue waiting to be handed into a truck stalled in the mud of the churned football field. Heaved into it, he found himself pressed against Schmidt who drew himself away to the extent he could in that overcrowded vehicle, but by his silence conveyed to Baumgartner the utter disgust he felt at being placed in the same category as him. Baumgartner felt only fear.