Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  When his mother, standing and waiting at the gate for him, asked him how it had been, he said nothing. He pushed out his lip, frowned and looked away. One morning in the school had taught him the tactics for surviving,

  ‘Hänschen klein, geht allein,

  in die weite Welt hinein,

  Stock und Hut stehn ihm gut,

  ist ganz wohlgemut.

  Doch die Mutter weinet sehr,

  hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr . . .’

  She woke him in the mornings, a grey shawl over her shoulders, switching on the harsh white electric light and making him wince. She brought him his shoes that she had polished because Berthe had not returned and not been replaced either. At night, his mother’s gentle stories of the Red Rose and the White Rose lulled him to sleep too quickly so that he woke a little later and missed Berthe’s stories of war and violence that had kept his nights lively. She would have been able better to share his experiences at the new school, he felt. His mother was in any case too busy doing Berthe’s work; he resented seeing her arms red with the soapwater in the tubs of washing, and he was distracted by seeing her leap up from the table to fetch dishes from the kitchen and carry them out. His father, too, frowned and fidgeted when she did that. ‘Can’t you sit through a meal?’ he complained, and she threw him an exasperated look that said, as clearly as words, ‘And who will serve us then?’

  ‘Es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

  in unserem Haus herum, didum,

  es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

  in unserem Haus herum.

  Er rüttelt sich, er schüttelt sich,

  er wirft sein Säckchen hinter sich,

  es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

  in unserem Haus herum.’

  Perhaps because she could not cope with all the work, the apartment gradually lost its waxy gloss, its air of comfortable opulence. So many small economies combined to construct a shabbiness that one could not quite put one’s finger on what was at fault – everything had lost, everything seemed diminished. When Hugo loudly sucked a stick of barley sugar he had bought on the way back from school, no one objected – there was no dark expensive chocolate to give him instead. When he pulled out an old red woollen cap she had not allowed him to wear earlier, he found no one objected to it any longer, and was mystified – studied the loose knitting and the mothy texture to see what transformation had taken place to make it acceptable now.

  Downstairs in the showroom all was not well either. Hugo was not aware but his father knew that the wealthy Jews who had patronised the place, buying whole suites of furniture when a daughter married or a son set up house, no longer were interested in anything so difficult to transport as furniture. They had put their money into moveable assets, or else emigrated – to England, to Holland, to Canada. As for the ‘Aryans’, they must have had their own shops and dealers to patronise, they did not come to Baumgartner’s. The long yellow vans no longer lined up at the door for deliveries, and the delivery boys and the cart drivers vanished from Hugo’s boyhood, taking with them the secret pleasures of terror and suspicion. There was no one to flick the dust out of the gilt scrolls around the mirrors or keep the table-tops of mahogany glowing. In Hugo’s dreams, the brilliant mirrors tipped out their highly coloured and illuminated reflections like pools of water from unsteady basins, then slipped out of their frames and crashed. But on the floor there were no shards of glass, only soft heaps of dust, like cloth bags filled with baker’s rolls, on which he trod warily for his father was angry if he wandered in with questions that he could not answer. He sat at his desk in the backroom, biting his moustache with anger. The telephone no longer rang.

  Almost his only visitor was the timber merchant from Hamburg who had always supplied Herr Baumgartner with quality wood for his furniture. Once or twice he was brought up to supper. Hugo’s mother would be pale with the effort to cover the table with dishes and lift off their lids to reveal meat and fish in gravy and sauces. The Gentleman from Hamburg, far from being impressed, wagged his finger at her and said, ‘Nein, nein, this is not the way to live any longer. We must learn to save, to be sparse, to prepare – hah? You understand? It is no longer easy to find customers for Herr Baumgartner’s beautiful furniture, and let me tell you – it will not grow easier.’ But he did not like Frau Baumgartner to look dismayed or frown with worry. When she did, he would spring up and go to the piano and say, ‘Come, play for us. Let us have a song as in the old days. All might still go well.’ How could she sing after that? She sat with her napkin pressed to her mouth, choking, and Hugo stared at them as though they were actors on a stage, he the uncomprehending spectator.

  Yet they were not as poor as others were. Unlike the men who searched the dustbins for chicken bones and slept on benches under sheets of Berliner Zeitung, or the women who stood on the streets because there was nowhere else to go, their scent reeking of cheapness, the Baumgartners did not starve. Somehow Herr Baumgartner brought in money; sometimes from the racecourse to which he still went, whenever the Gentleman from Hamburg came and sometimes even without him – but without that debonair air of twirling his moustache or his ivory-topped cane – merely thoughtfully, worriedly or guiltily. Hugo no longer asked to accompany him; he did not like the looks their neighbours threw them when they left the house, and knew it would be worse on the racecourse; he wished his father did not go. He sat on the window-seat, watching, till he returned, and then left the room so as not to hear his parents’ conversation.

  ‘But Siegfried,’ he once heard his mother whisper, ‘in this we are not alone.’

  ‘Who is there? Who is there?’ his father asked dramatically, not whispering at all. He was opening and closing his fists as though to catch a fly.

  His mother named them but, like flies, they seemed to escape and disappear. Her own parents had left years ago, her father to take up a chair in German in a university in a northern country. Hugo had known them on those brief visits his mother made to her home town, and thought them like two flakes of grey ash upon their hearth, weighed down by the weight of the books they read to him. They had a great fondness for reading aloud, Hugo none for listening. Once when he cried in protest, his grandmother rose, went to the kitchen and returned with a tomato. She held it out with a smiling certainty that a small boy could not but like a tomato. Her daughter, knowing better, smiled and took it from her hand, saying she would keep it for later. In the garden, tomatoes glistened like bubbles of rusty paint on the blackened stalks that held them up in the rain. At the shabat dinner, candles stood aslant in the pewter candlesticks and wax ran like a gutter on to the tablecloth. Hugo was pleased when he heard his father refuse to join his book-reading, prayer-saying parents-in-law in their provincial university in a distant country.

  ‘What – you think they will have room for me?’ he answered, pawing the ground as if to break through the boards and gallop off.

  He did go, on a visit, to his own parents, still on their farm which he had fled as a boy, only to return and inform them that the times were bad there as well: the land was stripped, they were starving, eating roots now that the potatoes had gone; no wonder his sister Esther had left, with her husband, a horsedealer, for Paris where she was trying to get tickets for America. His mother, who had told Hugo about the churns of butter, the pans of milk – could not believe. ‘And their hens, Siegfried? The eggs? The cows? The horses? And wheat?’ and Hugo joined in by asking, ‘Have they been robbed? Or was there a fire?’ till his father shouted an order for silence.

  ‘Eija, Popeija,

  was raschelt im Stroh?

  Die Gänse gehn barfuss

  und haben kein Schuh.

  Der Schuster hat Leder,

  kein Leisten dazu,

  drum gehen die lieben Gänschen

  und haben keine Schuh.’

  In the night the noises on the street were so hideous that Hugo stirred but only to slip deeper into his bed. He woke when his mother sank silently down at his bedside. ‘Don’t look,’ she t
old him, ‘don’t get up’, and he obediently pulled up his quilt, burrowed under its protection and breathed in the darkness. Next morning he saw the letters JUDE painted in red on the showroom window. His father was standing in the hall and staring out, immobile. He made no move to wipe it off. When Hugo spoke to him, he answered in a kind of hiss that frightened Hugo so much, he ran.

  The next night the noise increased – glass splintered, crashed, slid all over the floor in slanting, shining heaps. Men lifted tables, commodes, armoires, chaises-longues and the mirrors off the walls: it sounded as if the house, the whole street were being evacuated. His father stood at the window upstairs and watched, cursing, but his mother held Hugo by his arm and would not let him go near. ‘If they see you, they will stone you,’ she warned, sternly enough to stall him. ‘Hide, we must hide, Siegfried.’ Hugo found himself shamefully willing to do so, even the broom cupboard seemed a haven on that night.

  Herr Weiss from upstairs rang their doorbell. When they did not open the door, he called through the letter-box, ‘It is only I, Weiss. Frau Baumgartner, have no fear. Will you not come up to us? My wife has sent me to fetch you, you will be safe with us.’ Frau Baumgartner looked to Herr Baumgartner for a reply; he made none but stood at the window as if turned to salt.

  The next day they came to take him away. It happened very quickly, very efficiently – the police car drew up at the curb, stilling its honking hooter, the stormtroopers in brown walked in, simply lifted Herr Baumgartner off his chair and carried him out; the hooting began again and the police car disappeared. Hugo might have been playing a game with his toy soldiers, marching them up, then marching them down. It was only that his father had disappeared that was not play, not accountable. For two weeks there was no news. All day Hugo waited in the flat while his mother ran from one police station to another to find him, or news of him, returning with her face and hands blue with cold. Hugo boiled water in the kettle so she could hold a mug with hot water in it. To warm her fingers. They did not speak, or look at each other.

  Till he returned, a fortnight later, from Dachau. In that early year, it was still possible to leave Dachau. His mother ran to greet him with her arms thrown up in an abandon of relief, but his father turned away, he did not want her embrace, or Hugo’s. He turned his back to them, shoulders hunched in his thin green jacket, and did not want to speak. He would say nothing about Dachau. When they came near him, he began to shiver – the shiver started in the back of his neck, making his head jerk like a hen’s, and then ran down into his shoulders so that they shook. He had to go to bed and they pulled on quilt after quilt, trying to make him stop shivering. Even his face twitched on the pillow, pulled in every direction. Eventually he turned on to his side and stared at the wall. Now and then a remnant of that shiver made the quilts suddenly heave, subside.

  The Gentleman from Hamburg came. He sat in the chair beside the Prussian helmet ashtray and the onyx cigarette-case that everyone knew was the father’s chair. His right leg lifted over his left knee, he made expansive gestures as he explained it all to Frau Baumgartner, smoothing the air before him with his manicured hands. When his voice boomed too loudly, Frau Baumgartner looked worriedly at the door to the bedroom, and he dropped his voice in consideration. ‘You see?’ he said softly, leaning forward. ‘You agree? You will persuade him to sell?’

  ‘Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen,

  gib sie wieder her!

  Sonst wird dich der Jäger holen

  mit dem Schiessgewehr.’

  They sat together on a narrow seat at the back of the tram, surrounded by coffin-faces, watery and grey from having been indoors all winter. While his mother drooped, as though still weak from the lack of sunshine, Hugo himself was ebullient, excited by the names of the streets on their white signposts – Larchenweg, Terrassenstrasse – by seeing new foliage a pale yellow on the roadside trees, the women in elegant coats walking their dachshunds on leather leashes, the delivery boys on bicycles with baskets loaded with goods, the bells ringing as clear and sharp as cracked glass in the spring air. Here the sun was not only tangible but visible, a jolly blur both circular and incandescent over the rooftops, as it never was in their own dreary street. The warmth of it on the tram roof made him itch inside his coat that had in any case grown too small for him and felt like diseased fur after a winter’s perpetual use. ‘Don’t be so impatient, child,’ she warned, ‘it is a long way to the Grünewald.’

  They were both travel-sick when they got there, but the Friedmanns seemed to have anticipated that: on the wooden table under the cherry tree in their small garden stood a tray with tall glasses and a jug. They were made to sit there in the sunshine that slanted in through the flowering branches (‘Come and see the cherry tree flowering once more,’ they had written) while the young Frau Friedmann ran to fetch cakes and the old Frau Friedmann sat with her mittened hands on her lap and smiled at him coaxingly, saying, ‘In a little while Albert will come home and he will take Hugo to see the swans.’

  Hugo did not want to be taken away; he wanted to sit under the black twigs and the white blossom, and drink slowly from the glass of blackberry wine and nibble another biscuit dusted with cinnamon, and see the remarkable sight of his mother flowering in the company of her friends, the friends who she had been in the habit of slipping off to see and visit alone when his father would take Hugo out for a few hours; somehow she had not liked them to meet these friends of her girlhood, from her home town where they had been neighbours and old Dr Friedmann a colleague of her father’s at the university. Then Hugo had not cared; he had revelled in the masculine atmosphere created by his father – the somewhat roguish, slightly inebriated air of gentlemen on the town. Today he sat on the garden bench, taking in the sight of a pair of white butterflies lighting upon a grey bush, the cherry blossoms falling silently on the table, and listening to his mother’s voice lift and fly with lightheartedness and relief, and he wondered why she did not come oftener if it made her so happy. Laughing, she was saying, ‘And Adele, the time we went to the Max Reinhardt production together – it was Lohengrin wasn’t it? And we had gone straight from school, in our navy blue pinafores, and were sitting up with the pigeons, in the cheapest seats, when that gentleman in tails and a top hat came running up the aisle, gave us two tickets and said’ – she imitated his voice – ‘“Excuse me, Fräulein – I am forced to leave early – my seats are free – will you not kindly take these tickets and enjoy the music from a good seat.”’ Adele joined her in the disbelieving laughter, and nodded. ‘Ja,’ she told Hugo, ‘and we went up, up, up, right to the front, right up to the stage nearly, and sat there amongst the ladies in their furs and the men in their tails, wearing our navy blue pinafores. And mine had chalk dust all over it.’ She raised her hands to her red cheeks as she laughed at the remembered embarrassment, now become a treasure. Hugo, instead, remembered the figure of his father, left behind in a wrapping of blankets; he felt uneasy, sensing a rift, a break between his parents that might have existed for all these years but of which he was only now really aware. He kept his eye on his mother, suddenly so much younger and, he felt, exposed and vulnerable.

  Then the son Albert appeared and, at old Frau Friedmann’s insistence, took Hugo and their beautiful King Charles spaniel, who was of course called Charles, out of the little gate at the bottom of the garden and down a sandy path crisscrossed by the roots of the pine trees to the lake to see the swans. Hugo was a little hurt by the way his mother eagerly saw him off and turned to her friends as though she had been waiting for this moment. By the lake’s edge he watched Albert break some stale rolls and toss them over the water towards the swans that swerved and glided towards them and noted the way their feathers knitted together like chain-mail, holding off the drops of black and icy water, but somehow they reminded him of his father’s rococo mirrors, gliding as they did upon the shining glass of their reflections in the still water, and he was silenced by the knowledge of their transience. Strangely, Albert’s tho
ughts seemed to have run on the same lines for he told the swans, ‘Ja, take these rolls – they may be the last we have to give you.’ Then he turned to Hugo and said, a little sharply, ‘Your shoes are getting wet – don’t go so close to the water,’ and Hugo realised he was bored with his company and therefore refused when asked, ‘Shall I take you out in a boat? Would you like to row?’ For a while they clambered over the rocks and roots around the lake, a streaming Charles running ahead of them, tearing their trouser legs on blackberry thorns while Albert told him of the deer that came to drink at the lake and the hares in the forest. To Hugo it seemed he was stumbling through the illustrations of a book of fairy stories, the forest where Hansel and Gretel followed a trail of breadcrumbs, or in which Sleeping Beauty lay hidden by a wall of thorns – beautiful, hushed and vaguely sinister.

  Holding aside a thorny branch, Albert stood still, looking at the lake on which the fir trees had laid their long shadows in strokes of black paint. He said, as if making conversation, ‘But if we will ever see them again, I – really – don’t – know,’ and then led the way up the sandy path to the garden gate, his shoulders sloping and looking as dejected as the wet and muddy dog.

  They found the garden overtaken by a chilly shadow; the ladies had gone in. Inside a room that seemed to Hugo like a peasant’s with its rough timber furniture, its bowls of garden flowers, its painted china and worn rugs, he found his mother in a flushed state of animation at a cottage piano on which she was playing a duet with the young Frau Friedmann, a dark woman with two long plaits of red hair over her shawl. She smiled at Hugo when he came in but did not stop playing. Instead, she sang, together with her friend:

  ‘Kennst du das Land

  wo die Zitronen blühn?

  Im dunkeln Laub

  die Gold-Orangen glühn . . .

  Dahin! Dahin!

  Möcht ich mit dir,