Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  And Hugo bit the muddy flesh of his knee to keep from crying out when she sang, with such ineffable sweetness,

  ‘Lieber Vogel, flieg weiter,

  Nimm ein Gruss mit, einer Kuss,

  Denn ich kann dich nicht begleiten,

  Weil ich hierbleiben muss.’

  Yes, that was what was wrong, he shivered – the sweetness always ended in a quaver. It drew together and produced a teardrop. The teardrop hung suspended, glinting in the light from the window, and Hugo watched, mesmerised, waiting for it to explode and drop. Tear-drop, pear-drop. Silver-light, gold-flesh. And then – the fall.

  ‘Hugo, Liebling, here is a little money; will you run and buy a pat of butter for our supper.’

  He pushed out his lower lip in ready protest: why could he not stay with her, why could Berthe not go instead? Because Berthe had left – on what was said to be her annual holiday in the Harz from where she came but from where she had not returned. (In the way in which his mother’s lips became tight and pale when he questioned her, he sensed that she knew more about the disappearance than she said.) So he reluctantly slid off the window-seat, the warm, perspiring backs of his knees making a rude sound as they came unstuck from the wood, held out his hand, ‘Gib mir dein kleines Pfötchen’, for the money, and dawdled down the stairs into the street, reluctant even when she laughed over the banister, ‘And buy yourself a little chocolate with the change to make the errand sweeter.’

  The street was not the sunlit, delicate, precious scene it had seemed when framed by their window upstairs. Coming loose from the window-frame, it had crashed two storeys into darkness. Down between the shut houses with their chocolate and liver-coloured façades, it was already twilight. The only figures to be seen on it were somehow threatening – the collars of their overcoats turned up and caps pulled down low over their eyes as if they wished to be faceless; a man who abruptly withdrew into the doorway of a closed warehouse, ostensibly to open a newspaper out of the wind but looking steadily over the top at Hugo; a woman with a raddled puce face who walked by without noticing him but muttering to herself crazily while waving invisible flies from her mouth . . . how was it that Hugo never saw such people when he was out walking with his father or hand-in-hand with Berthe, by daylight? He kept his eyes on the shop windows as he passed them, hoping to draw comfort from the familiarity of the objects displayed season after season, but found them lacking in colour and interest – it might have been a trick of the light but they all seemed covered by a layer of dust. The bared fangs of the denture, so pink and white, seemed fierce rather than comic now, and the mouth-wash disgusting with the line of sediment rimming the jar in which it had stood for so long; at the tobacconist, the row of pipes were held choked and throttled by a wooden stand like a vice between the tins of tobacco that smelt musty and damp even through the pane of yellow glass; the newspaper kiosk had no flowers today, for some reason.

  Hugo was hurrying faster than he knew, the coins slipping inside his fist wet with perspiration, and as he rushed into the grocer’s shop he bumped into a woman coming out with an armful of parcels from which the top of a celery and the neck of a goose protruded grotesquely. ‘Kannst nicht sehen? Can’t you see?’ she scolded as Hugo disentangled himself from the swampy odour of her damp loden coat and edged past the two stands loaded with boiled sweets to the counter where he handed over the money entrusted to him. ‘Two hundred grammes of butter, please,’ he managed to croak, but could think of no further qualifications when the grocer demanded, ‘White or yellow? Salty or unsalted?’ He stood silent, shamed, till the man finally said, ‘You are Frau Baumgartner’s little boy? Ah then, I know,’ and sighed as he shifted his pink and porcine bulk to the stand where he kept butter, cream and eggs. He wore woollen socks that were unravelling around the pressed-down heels of his slippers and gave off an odour very like eggs.

  When Hugo came out into the street with the brown paper parcel, already disagreeably greasy in his hands, it had grown darker, and the darkness continued to congeal as he made his way back, heaving for breath as if against obstacles although he could not have said what they were. Strangely, the young man with the Welt am Abend newspaper was still hiding in the doorway, still looking furtively over the top. And worse, the madwoman who imagined flies had not disappeared but instead collapsed on a bench under a plane tree where she sat with her legs so wide apart that she could only mean Hugo to see her torn and ragged undergarments. She let out a sudden shriek as he walked past that could have been a curse, he could not tell. The lamps were lit to look like thumbprints of butter on the blackness but threw no light, only created shadows.

  By the time he returned to No. 56, he was so unnerved that he did not notice the state of the butter in his hand which had become one with the scrap of brown paper. He was clutching at its oily ooze as if it provided some kind of security. And the worst was to come – the staircase, from the hall to their apartment over the showroom. In the dark, it was no longer a place to linger; there was no light and nothing to watch. There was a switch by the door, placed conveniently for him to switch on so that the bulb over the landing in its Chinese hat of pink china lit up but he knew its habit of going out before he could reach his own door, no matter how fast he pounded up the stairs. He knew it always went out when there were still half a dozen steps to the landing, and then he would have to grope his way up that last flight to his apartment door.

  This evening it went out so soon and so abruptly that Hugo was convinced of its malevolence, of its connivance with some evil conspirator who sat by some hidden spyhole on the staircase and watched. He knew about those men who lurked in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to fling the noose, whip out the knife, bring down the cosh . . . he had even seen the man waiting – much further down the road, with his newspaper, but he could have followed Hugo – Hugo never turned to look back over his shoulder – or even overtaken him in the dark. Now he would be waiting at his own door, barring his entry into safety, protection and light. Waiting for Hugo. Hugo knew he was waiting – and lunged forward with a howl, throwing himself at the door and feeling his hands close not upon its solid brass knob but instead on something soft, warm, yielding. Instantly, his hands recoiled – and the object loomed up at him, pale, round, loose, dead; there had been no feel of life at his fingertips, the face was as flabby and relaxed as in death, when rot has set it.

  At last a sound emerged from Hugo’s open mouth – like a train emerging from a tunnel, it roared and shrieked into the open. The door flew open, a shaft of yellow light slanted through in which his mother stood, thunderstruck, and the cloth bag that hung on the door knob for the baker to fill with rolls in the morning swung hilariously from side to side.

  How she laughed when she understood what had happened, how she twittered and chuckled. She was still chuckling when she undressed him for bed that night, unbuttoning the viyella vest from the viyella underpants with her quick, cold fingers. ‘And the butter!’ she exclaimed again. ‘And the coins rolling down the stairs – pit, pit, pit! Did not even buy himself a bar of chocolate with the change, my little hero. Your tongue lost its taste for sweets in the dark, did it?’

  ‘O du lieber Augustin,

  alles ist hin!

  Geld ist weg,

  Beutel ist weg,

  Augustin liegt auch im Dreck,

  O du lieber Augustin,

  alles ist hin!’

  Yet she was there holding the traditional cone of bonbons, wrapped in gold foil and decorated with rustling silver streamers, at the door of his school at the end of the first day. He had been so afraid she would not be. All the other children had talked of the bonbons their parents had promised to bring to school – already ordered, already bought, they said ecstatically – and he had stood silent, so consumed by fear that she would not meet him with a similar prize that he could not concentrate on building blue blocks into one tower and red ones into another or listen to the story about the wolf and the seven little kids told by the lo
ng-toothed teacher whose hair kept escaping from its tortoiseshell clasp and dangling beside her ear like a misplaced tail. So he had not run out after the others, but stayed to the last and sidled out, hoping the others had all left before he came out to face his ignominy. Then there she was, with violets pinned to her new blouse, holding out to him a gilt cone with silver streamers, smiling the smile she smiled for no one but him. ‘Mein kleines Häschen,’ she said, ‘Here’s my little rabbit’. Before she could shame him with an embrace, he had snatched the cone out of her hand in jubilation and held it up for the others to see. But there was no one, the other children were vanishing down the street in a flood of chocolate and toffee, licking and smacking their lips and oozing with spittle. No one saw his triumph.

  His mouth full of toffee, his tongue blamed his mother. ‘You came so late,’ and then, ‘You don’t look like everyone else’s mother,’ he complained. ‘Why don’t you look like the other mothers?’

  Left alone with her, left behind by his father, he kicked at her with savagery, pummelled her chest with his fists, furiously. He blamed her, blamed her entirely. When she put her arms around him and tried to draw him to her, it was that encirclement of soft, sweet-smelling arms that he blamed for his imprisonment in this flat, this house.

  ‘I want to go with Papa!’ he roared, drumming his heels on the floorboards. ‘I want to see the horses,’ and struck at her with his fists, ‘not you.’

  ‘I know, I know, I know,’ she murmured, trying to make her voice soothe him since her touch could not.

  ‘You don’t!’ he shouted. ‘You don’t know!’

  So she was quiet.

  The whole flat filled with quiet like a well in which they sat drowning.

  That was the end of his pleading, his demanding. It would not have come about if Herr Pfuehl had not come the evening before, if Hugo had not heard them make plans to go to the races together. He would not have known what they were, but he heard them speak the horses’ names: Summer Lightning, Tutankhamen, Turkish Delight, Carolina, Prince de Galles, Puerto Rico, Sweet Sensation . . . The names like flags, or streamers, the cigars, the laughter, the tinge of red coming out on his father’s face, the gleaming shoe tapping, more laughter, more names – Abyssinia, Trocadero, Indian Chief, Marzipan . . . and Hugo was gripping his father’s knees, staring at his father’s face, saying, ‘Take me, Papa, take me.’

  His father’s knee gave a twitch, his kneecap moved out of Hugo’s grasp. ‘Mutti,’ he called, ‘take the child away, why is he still up?’

  ‘But Papa, I want to go,’ he lunged again before being carried away. He brooded that night, planning his plans under the tent of his quilt, certain the night would yield and tomorrow would come, with horses. How could it not when he had performed all the magic he knew? Held his left thumb in his right hand, his right toe in his left hand, said, ‘Mick-muck-mo, Make-it-so,’ even knelt by his bed and said a prayer as he had seen the Christian children in school pray to ‘Lieber Jesus’?

  When his father left the apartment, dressed for the races, in his hat and with his ivory-topped cane, Hugo could not believe. For a long time, his mouth remained open, and he watched the door, certain it would open again and his father would come to fetch him. How could he not be taken to share a treat? The minutes passed, the footsteps on the stairs receded till they could not be heard any more. The door slammed. Then Hugo moved, with a roar. He ran to the window and beat on the glass as if to break it, so that his mother had to hold him away even if she were kicked and beaten.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said at last, kneeling there with her hands in her lap, ‘Hugo, I have never been either.’

  He looked at her with the hatred of one prisoner for another.

  ‘Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter,

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.

  Fällt er in die Hecken,

  fressen ihn die Schnecken,

  fällt er in den Klee,

  schreit er gleich: O weh . . .’

  Another time, when triumph had come his way, he had not been able to accept. The school was holding its Christmas party. For days before, the class had cut out stars of silver paper, linked chains of pink crêpe paper, fashioned figures out of blonde straw and raffia, and watched Fräulein Klutke pin them to the tree on the dais. The night before the party, however, fairies had come with gifts, she informed them, and there were the unexpected presents hung from the branches of the fir tree in wrappings of red and yellow tissue paper. Now the children stood in rows beside the piano, threw back their heads and roared:

  ‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

  Wie grün sind deine Blätter!’

  Then there were the buns, the mugs of cocoa to be downed, if the tight little muscle in the throat allowed such a passage. For Hugo’s part, it did not; he held the bun in one hand, the mug of cocoa in the other, but his eyes and heart and mouth remained fixed on the tree glittering in its finery, the candle flames darting at the shiny surfaces, turning it to a thing of fire and stars fallen out of the sky. Most of all, they remained fixed on its topmost ornament – a great ball of red glass in which all the light gathered together and danced, tantalising him as nothing else ever had, this ball that was made of fire, that could not be played with, only regarded. He clutched his thumbs inside his fists, thinking that if he owned that red glass globe, then he was the owner of the whole world, like a magician.

  Uneaten, undrunk, his treat had to be replaced on the table for now all the children were being ringed around the tree, and Fräulein was climbing on to a stool to unpin and hand out the gifts. ‘Walter Loewe!’ she called, holding out a bulky parcel from which a horse’s head on a long stick looked at its new owner with a long-lashed wink, and then, ‘Annelise Hauptmann!’ So the children were called out one by one to receive the presents that their parents had sent in for them – though this neither Hugo knew nor his parents. He stood waiting to the end of the whole roll-call, locked into a terrible urgency to pass water, and now Fräulein was looking at him, the only one without a Christmas gift, and now she was reaching up to the top of the prickly fir tree, now she had her hands around the glass globe, quite delicately as if she too saw its extraordinary worth, now she was smiling directly at him and calling – yes, she called, ‘Hugo Baumgartner’, she did.

  And Hugo could not move. Not one step. Not even his hands would stretch forwards. Instead, he locked them behind his back. Then, when the other children began to chant, ‘Hugo, it’s for you – it’s yours, Hugo,’ he hung his head and stared at his shoes, for nothing, nothing would persuade him that the twinkling glass globe was his. He knew that it was not – that Fräulein Klutke had made it up on seeing that there was no other gift for him. The other children began to push and shove him towards the waiting Fräulein but this brought him so close to tears that she was obliged to call out, ‘Stop pushing him, children. If he doesn’t want it, we shall find another child to take it. Who is the smallest? Elizabeth Klein?’ and she handed it to her favourite.

  Then the agony was over and he could collapse into the dark ditch of his shame. What was the shame? The sense that he did not belong to the picture-book world of the fir tree, the gifts and the celebration? But no one had said that. Was it just that he sensed he did not belong to the radiant, the triumphant of the world? A strange sensation, surely, for a child. He could not understand it himself, or explain it. It baffled him, and frightened him even – as if he realised that at that moment he had wilfully chosen to turn from the step up and taken the step down.

  ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf!

  Da draussen gehn zwei Schaf!

  Ein schwarzes und ein weisses,

  und wenn das Kind nicht schlafen will,

  dann kommt das Schwarz und beist es

  Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf!’

  It would have been difficult to return to school after such an ignominious scene. Of course there were the Christmas holidays in between, when the children might have forgotten, but Hugo had not and that was what mattered.

&n
bsp; Then, as it happened, he never returned to that school. In the new year, speaking to him with an artificial, brittle lightness of manner, his mother took him on the tram a long, long way into the city instead, on a grey, grizzling morning, with office-goers and shop and factory-workers hemming them in with folds of dark, damp wool, all the way to the other end of the city, he felt, and then delivered him up to what seemed a warehouse with no windows or lights, only a mass of squirming, frantic children and a teacher who had a face like curdled milk in a pan and was called Reb Benjamin; Hugo recoiled from his grease-lined collar and patched and odorous jacket; strange, large volumes lay open on his desk from which he read in a harsh and melodramatic tone in a language Hugo had never heard before. The boys who shared a wooden bench with Hugo spent the morning trying to shove him off so that he had to grip the edge of the seat to keep from falling off. ‘Was ist los, Baumgartner? What’s the matter?’ the teacher asked. ‘Is it the bathroom you need already?’ and the children grew pinched and blue in the face with laughter.

  It was in this school for Jewish children, oddly enough, that Hugo first had a remark directed at his nose. When he went out into the yard where the mud was frozen and broke under his shoes, he heard around him a chant that came from all the children as they jumped, hopped and clapped their hands to keep warm: ‘Baumgartner, Baum, hat ein Nase wie ein Daum! Baumgartner’s dumb, has a nose like a thumb!’

  He fell to fingering it nervously, trying to discover the relation between his nose and his thumb, a habit that never left him.