by Anita Desai
‘Mutti,’ he pleaded, putting out his arms to touch her, but she held out her hand to keep him at a distance, saying, ‘No, you get your work done that Herr Pfuehl has given you, and then come quickly home again.’
So that was what was decided by them when he left her – standing with her hand on the chest of drawers with yellow cut-glass handles on which she had placed her volumes of Goethe, framed by two puce curtains and a pattern of steam-pipes painted to look like bronze. In the midst of all that, her head looked especially small and grey. Out on the landing the landlady, who had undoubtedly been listening to all that was said, assured him she would get Anna the maid to take her a cup of tea. It was not so easy to get tea any more, she said, but she liked to make her guests feel at home. Hugo murmured something about having to go away on business to India and let himself out while the woman went to see about the tea, muttering, ‘And a very fine business it is going to be.’
‘Hopp, hopp, hopp!
Pferdchen lauf galopp!
Über Stock und über Steine,
aber brich dir nicht die Beine!
Hopp, hopp, hopp!
Pferdchen lauf galopp!’
The boat to the Orient was not due to arrive in Venice for at least another week. Having with the greatest difficulty acquired – and understood – this information from a small window that usually had its shutter pulled down and was scarcely ever known to open, Hugo felt a lurch of fear, found he had to accept it – the prospect of at least seven days in this strange city, not only the first in which he had ever found himself alone but one so palpably foreign as to make him feel he was already transported to the East, it had so little relation to the Europe of the north.
True, the weather was European, it could be nothing else – these lowering clouds of melancholy grey, the fine rain that came down like a soft, clinging net to settle on head and shoulders and dampen them – and yet it was not Europe after all: there was here a magical, a poetical quality he had never known in Berlin. He walked in the narrow lanes till his shoes were soaked, his feet wet, his new suit drenched, and then entered the nearest chiesa to sit in a velvet-covered pew and try and get some warmth from the candles that flickered under a crucified Christ, a weeping Madonna or a gaudily bleeding heart, from lamps of coloured glass in which light glowered like embers from a fire, and breathed in the swirling clouds of smoking incense, watching the candlelight play on a bit of gilt here, a piece of Murano glass there, and asked himself if he was not actually in Tartary or in Persia, in some magical fairyland not only south but far, far east of Germany and everything he had known in his life till then.
Since the most urgent and immediate problem was how to stretch the small amount of money he had been loaned by Herr Pfuehl to cover this unforeseen week in Venice, he found himself a room in a cheap lodging-house – or, rather, half of it, for he shared it with a medical student who was out all night and returned to claim the one bed in the morning, snarling at Hugo to be out and off if he overslept. A maid in the kitchen who wore black and had a moustache gave him coffee in a large bowl before he left the house, washing the tiles of the floor around his feet while he stood drinking it. The door opened on to a courtyard where someone had stacked empty bottles; if he kicked one by accident, the heaps of brown and green and bubbled glass slithered and clattered and made a woman on an upper floor stick her head out of the window and scream at him. She would also come staggering out with buckets of refuse to throw into the canal, scattering bloodied newspapers and chicken feathers across the intervening cobblestones. At all times of the day, the house reeked of frying oil, hissed with the sounds of cooking, and emitted the mutters and grumbles of scores of lodgers hidden up and down the decaying staircases, in stone cells and wooden stalls. Only their groans and their washing gave them away. Parting a wet tablecloth from a dripping apron, Hugo let himself out and remained out all day to let the medical student sleep his share of sleep.
He walked to escape his fear and apprehension. Everywhere the sound of water lapping stone, of footsteps striking stone, so that when he heard a sound that belonged to neither stone nor water, while crossing an empty campo, he stopped and searched for its source till his eyes found it – cage upon cage blocking up a tall window above, filled with canaries that trilled and sang because a little light was shining on them from out of all the grey.
At San Marco he paid a coin to see the pala d’Oro and imagine, when close to the gems encrusting the gold sheet, that he was already in an Oriental potentate’s palace for such riches could only belong to the East, could not be of the West with its greyness, its rain, its lodging-houses and black and brown garb. He climbed up in the basilica and walked through the marble maze, the thin soles of his cheap shoes slipping on the glassy mosaic underfoot. The throngs in the chapels below, the incense, the candlewax, the flickers of light and colour in the furry dark, all oppressed him and seemed to repulse him till he was thrust out of the door into the piazza. Stumbling in its lighted space, he tried to avoid the pigeons and the pigeon-feeders who teemed together, and seemed to him equally gluttonous in their taking and receiving: was this not how beggars were said to behave in the East, beggars and their patrons who gave them alms for their own sakes? Sometimes the easternness of the city disturbed him so much, he wondered if he would be able to face India.
How many feast days could there be in a week? Almost every day shops closed, shutters down, offices shut, while the cathedrals glimmered with candlelight and the bells rang, holiday-makers hurried across the campos with festive cakes packed in golden hat-boxes, stopping to buy flowers at the stalls where they bloomed with a tropical luxuriance. Hugo found himself drawing closer, trying to pick out a bunch of violets for his mother, of his mother. Without making any purchase he wandered on to breathe in the odour of newly baked rolls at the baker’s and the pastries and the rich dark chocolates he had known only as a small child. Then he felt himself to be inside a chocolate box, surfeited with sweetness and richness, and tore away to breathe freely.
Crossing the wooden Giudecca bridge to the news-stand where he might buy a newspaper in a known language, he stopped because the sun was briefly out, and leant over the rail to look down at the Grand Canal, its green glass waves rocking in the wake of a passing vaporetto that broke up the reflections of the pink and yellow palaces into coloured strips and ribbons that shook and shimmered. On the green bank a young man, red-haired and fair-skinned as so many were here where Hugo had expected them to be swarthy, sat down in the sun to unpack his sandwiches from a piece of paper and eat them on the grass. Hugo would not have stayed to watch if first one head, then another had not arisen out of the coarse, tall grass which then began to stir as if it were a tropical jungle and release the lean, striped, feral bodies of a grey and a black cat, their green eyes watching the man eat from their pointed corners rimmed like actresses’ eyes with kohl. The man was looking out over the canal, he did not see them, and they gathered stealthily behind him – slipping closer, their whiskers faintly twitching, and yet alert, ready to leap and vanish like thieves, like the scavengers they were. Hugo, who had owned no animal but a doomed infant hedgehog, hung over the railing and watched as the city cats appeared and took up poses of calm reflection behind the oblivious picnicker – some licking their fur to show their indifference, others waiting to pounce. For a few moments, all held their poses – Hugo on the bridge, the man on the green bank with his sandwich, the cats in their attitudes of expectation and alertness. Then a boat passed under a bridge, its bargee wielding his pole and giving a warning cry; the man flung the crusts over his shoulder and rolled up the brown paper into a ball and the cats – in an instant they were at the greasy paper, the limp crusts, growling and spitting over the feast. Hugo walked away.
The ball of fortune shone in a moment of sunlight, and the golden sail that the boy held up for a weathervane seemed to fill with an eastern breeze. Hugo stood at the tip of the Dogana, hands in his pockets, collar turned up so that no one could have t
old that he was drawing comfort from the light, the warmth. Across the lagoon were the islands and on one the great San Georgio looked to him like an equation immaculately worked out in stone, a mathematical problem set and solved.
He walked down the Zattere where people had come out to walk in the pale sunlight while the great vaporettos swept by, leaving in their wake a wash of froth and foam. When he was hungry, he began to peer into trattorias he passed and finally found one that did not look too forbiddingly expensive for it had prams with babies and families gathered at the tables. He went and sat down in the thick, heated air that reminded him of the Bierkeller at home. The menu posed a problem, every item on it being unfamiliar, and he looked into the waiter’s face – for once swarthy and foreign – in despair. The waiter made no response but a young woman at a neighbouring table leant across to recommend the cannelloni. ‘Is good, good,’ she nodded at him reassuringly from over the top of a newspaper printed in Hebrew. Seeing him stare at it, she smiled, shook the sheets slightly and told him she lived in the Jewish quarter of the city where such papers were available, why did he not come and visit it? A fine place, she had her studio there, was a painter. At that, Hugo began to shift in his chair in unease. She noticed, and shrugged her shoulders, making a moue. ‘Staying here long?’ she asked, before she returned to her paper.
Hugo burst out, ‘I – I am leaving – for India.’
‘India!’ It had the expected effect. The newspaper was lowered, her face appeared, looking suspicious. ‘But whoever goes to India? If you are not a sailor?’
Hugo shook his head, laughing. The cannelloni arrived. Politely she turned her face away so he could eat it. Before he had finished it, she left, squeezing past his table with her thin hips swivelling in the shiny orange material of her dress. ‘Good luck!’ she murmured, still with a suspicious twist to her lips, and he rose to his feet, dropping his napkin and bumping into the table so that his coffee spilt. He considered leaving his meal and following her, to the Jewish quarter and her studio, but the waiter came up as if he sensed Hugo’s intention, and presented the bill. His unfamiliarity with the Italian notes detained Hugo and, when he came out, she was gone.
Thinking to follow her, he ran out on the fondamante but, apart from a small dog on a long leash held by a man in a large coat and a purple muffler, there was no one to be seen. The golden light of an hour ago had thinned to an icy wine-like substance close to freezing. It made the bare trees and the rooftops and walls stand out like a steel engraving. Hugo walked along, thinking he might find the Jewish quarter she had spoken of; if he did not see her there, he might see other Jews. Strange, in Germany he had never wanted to search them out, had been aware of others thinking of him as a Jew but not done so himself. In ejecting him, Germany had taught him to regard himself as one. Perhaps it was important to find what she had called their ‘quarter’. Perhaps over here he would find for himself a new identity, one that suited him, one that he enjoyed. The air quivered with possibilities, with the suspense of quest and choice.
For a large part of the afternoon he wandered up one calle, down another, crossing slimy black canals by little stone bridges, stopping at corners, crossing courtyards, sidling around the brick sides of a cathedral, stopping in the doorway of a chiesa to blow his nose and wonder if he were not hopelessly lost. For a while he even followed a cat on the prowl, a grey cat with a wicked, watching eye, but it leapt over a wall and vanished amidst a clatter of tin cans where Hugo had no wish to follow. He did come across more populated quarters but in the fading light of the late afternoon and the cold crystallising in the air, there were in general not many people about – old ladies in rusty black painfully hobbling home with their market bags, boys in loud boots with books in their bags whistling as they clattered along, but that was all. Overhead washing hung faded and ragged. When Hugo came to a calle half-submerged in water and realised the tide was rising, he lost heart and turned around to retrace his steps.
He did so wrongly and found himself in the Rialto with its sudden flurry of sound and activity, crates of oranges standing about, stallholders shouting, women screaming, money ringing, and all around a profusion of design, of arabesques in stone and colour, and for a moment or two he was fooled into believing that his wrong turning had led him straight into the East, into an eastern market, and he stood there, as entranced as he was alarmed. Venice was the East, and yet it was Europe too; it was that magic boundary where the two met and blended, and for those seven days Hugo had been a part of their union. He realised it only now: that during his constant wandering, his ceaseless walking, he had been drawing closer and closer to this discovery of that bewitched point where they became one land of which he felt himself the natural citizen.
It made him forget the Jewish woman, the painter, and when it grew dark, he got on to a vaporetto with a crowd of other home-goers. He found himself standing-place and let himself be carried up the canal, believing himself to be on the sea, to be on his way. He had not found the Jewish quarter or the Jewish girl but he had seen another world; perhaps it was where Jewry was located but to him it was the East, and he was both in it and travelling to it, at a distance and yet one with it.
On returning to his lodging-house, he was handed a letter from the shipping company – the boat had arrived, and passengers were requested to embark before midnight.
Packing his valise, he ran out into the moist dark.
CHAPTER THREE
G APPAA.ORG
BUT THE LIGHT was different here.
His eyes streaming from the glare, Baumgartner stopped to wipe them with his large handkerchief – one of those squares of checked cotton one bought for fifty paise on the pavement – and noticed how far down Colaba Causeway he had come, missing all the cafés and Irani restaurants where he normally stopped for scraps for his Familie at home. No tasty Parsi fish in mint sauce, no slops of custard or bits of mutton cutlets for them today. How foolish, how forgetful. How old he was today. Letting out a groan, he was brought up short by the kit and tools of a bicycle repair shop and realised he had only to go down a narrow lane between two buildings and he would be in the courtyard overlooked by Lotte’s room. Why not drop in on Lotte and so retrieve something of the day? She was the only one he could tell about the odd encounter with the fair-haired boy, about the flood of memories of old Berlin it had let loose. Not that Lotte knew his Berlin. He grinned at the absurdity of the thought, using the handkerchief to mop his neck. It was unthinkable that Lotte had occupied the same Berlin he had, that she could ever have been in the company of his mother, of her friends the Friedmanns, or even the Gentleman from Hamburg. He nearly laughed when he wondered what they would have made of her – disgraceful Lotte with her fat legs that always contrived to show so much of themselves under her skirts, her hair that she dyed a livid, foxy red with henna, her gin-drinking, her dancing, all her disreputable ways. Could she ever have lived in Berlin as she claimed when she was feeling particularly intimate with Baumgartner? Of course at other times she claimed to have been a gypsy who had followed her artiste parents all over the globe. Baumgartner had wondered if they had been circus artistes but there was nothing in Lotte’s physique or skills to suggest such an athletic background. She liked to claim that her mother had been a singer of light opera (‘I was in her belly, up there on the stage, when she was singing Madame Butterfly – hasn’t it had an effect on my eyes?’ she would leer, pulling up their corners with her painted nails). But what did it matter – she spoke German, had his language, nicht wahr? Putting his handkerchief away in his pocket, he walked up the lane, straddling the drain in which unsightly objects blocked the flow of the soapy slush, causing it to smell unbelievably on this hot morning; he felt drawn to the idea of spending a litle time with Lotte, perhaps drinking a cup of coffee with her, listening to a little German, however foul her accent, coarse her expressions and jarring her voice – yes, it had to do with that boy, that boy.
He stopped in the courtyard and looked up to see
if her window was open (she always locked it when she went out because ‘Everyone is a thief here; we are living in a thieves’ den, Hugo, we are surrounded –’) and saw that the shutters were, but the curtains were drawn, pink and red and blue flowers stamped all over them. Lotte slept late – he knew that – a habit from her days in cabaret, but it was late enough, and how could she not be awake now when in the garage below her room a mechanic was beating upon the steel rim of a tyre with his hammer – clang, clang, CLANG? And in another room that opened on to the courtyard a man had hung his transistor radio on a nail in the doorway where he sat on a stool, nursing callused feet drawn out of rubber-thonged slippers, a cigarette hanging from his lip – Ramu the bootlegger; Baumgartner recognised him – he supplied Lotte with liquor, country liquor probably brewed from kerosene or insecticide that would one day surely kill her, he had warned her. Suddenly the mechanic flung his hammer into a steel drum and shouted to his assistant for a spanner. An invisible but always audible parrot – perhaps it lived in the room that had a row of money plants growing out of a row of beer bottles on a window-sill – screeched its harsh note over and over again. In the lane, a woman selling bananas tried to raise her voice above that of a woman vending fish with equal ferocity. ‘Pomfret, pomfret – jheenga, jheenga!’ screamed the fish-vendor, only to have the banana-seller triumph with the long-drawn screech, ‘Ke – laah!’ And out on Colaba Causeway, the traffic poured relentlessly on, an all-devouring monster on the move.
No, no one could sleep in this hell of noise and glare, Baumgartner decided, not even a drink-sodden Lotte, and began to climb the stairs to the floor above the garage. At the door – he remembered when the paint had been fresh, a fresh fire-engine red, now flaking, peeling brown – he knocked and knocked. The air was suffocating with cooking smells on the closed landing, and he felt the children of the family upstairs staring at him through the banisters, silent except for their noses that ran with clogged, choking sounds; they were the children, he knew, who had thrown fish scales and prawn tails on Lotte’s head when she returned drunk one night, setting off fifteen minutes of such hysteria that even the garage hands were impressed and sent for the police; two hours of Konkani and Yiddish abuse later, they had left in helpless defeat. Baumgartner too began to feel defeated and was about to turn and go down the stairs, coffeeless, when he heard Lotte lurching past the furniture inside, then rattling at the chains she had had fixed to her door after Ramu the bootlegger had followed her and attempted to knife her for an unpaid bill. He knew she was staring at him through a spyhole and it made him smile because through the spyhole everyone looked like a burglar, a murderer. He tried to reassure her by winking and thumbing his nose at her.