Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  The railway station swarmed with soldiers, and with coolies bent under tin trunks and olive-green bed-rolls. The clink of army boots, the snap and slither of leather and khaki cotton. The clipped British voices giving commands, the snapping salutes and whistles being blown. The cat-faces of the Gurkhas inscrutable under their floppy hats, holding on to their fixed bayonets. Incongruously, the chai-wallah wandering through the crowds with his kettle of sweet, smoky tea and a milky glass at the end of each finger, ‘Chai, garam chai’ his lugubrious cry. Indians peering through the dark at the foreigners with curiosity. Refusing to accept the prospect of spending years together in captivity, they would not look at each other except when the need for a cigarette or a match overcame their reluctance.

  It was while Baumgartner was lighting a cigarette for one of his fellow prisoners that the man, a thin and evidently ill fellow with a beard, said to him under his breath, ‘That Schmidt – you need to keep away from him.’ Baumgartner looked at him questioningly and was told, ‘A Nazi.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Baumgartner asked, also in an undertone. ‘Party member?’

  ‘Of course. There are many. Those are the ones we’ll have to watch out for. They’re keeping their eyes on us, you may be sure.’

  Baumgartner shifted uneasily, as if he felt the impulse to break and run, but a Gurkha stepped forward and pressed him back with the tip of his bayonet.

  In the central internment camp in Ahmednagar where the ‘hostile aliens’ from all over the country were poured like ants from a closed fist into a bowl of dust, and swarmed there in a kind of frenzy, it became daily more clear that a system was being devised to screen them and find reasons and ways to keep them in captivity. Baumgartner had more than one interview: he spent many hours waiting in a line outside a hut, slowly moving up, clutching whatever papers he had with him – his passport, visiting-cards of business associates, a few letters from his mother that he had folded and slipped into his wallet – placing them before the officer at his camp table, certain they would see he had been arrested for no reason, being harmless, no enemy, merely a refugee from Nazi Germany who wished only to pursue his business interests in India. The papers were thumbed with expressions and gestures of rage and exasperation. ‘What am I to do then?’ the man bawled when Baumgartner again protested at being labelled a German and ‘hostile’. ‘Got a German passport, says you were born there – then what am I supposed to take you for, a bloomin’ Indian?’ The papers were flung at him, and he retreated, baffled, wondering what magic word he might find that would release him from what was a monstrous mistake, or madness.

  ‘They don’t understand a thing,’ the small, sick-looking man with a beard told him, with bitter sympathy. ‘They don’t even know there are German Jews and there are Nazi Germans and they are not exactly the same. All you can do is hope to get a chance to speak to someone who does know – some Englishman.’

  A few did – appeals to the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay, and to British civil servants who were more humane and informed than the guards at the camp, seemed to be of use to them and they walked out of the camp with expressions of disbelief and incomprehension, but others, like Baumgartner, who had no one to appeal to or on their behalf, were left to feel the net tightening over them. They were to remain in captivity for six years.

  It was at the final internment camp, to which they were taken after passing through the initial and the intermediate ones, that Baumgartner had his first glimpse of the Himalayas. There they were – an uneven line of smoke wavering against the pale glass of the sky, leaving upon it a faint smudge. The Himalayas. He thought he could smell them: sap, resin, wood-smoke, a tingling freshness, from that immense distance and height sending down some hint of ice and snow and streams.

  He became aware that others were standing and staring, too, when he heard a mixture of German and Italian voices and turned to see two or three men in lederhosen, thick boots and woollen stockings, standing in a group and talking of the mountains – Nanga Parbat, Nanda Devi, Kanchenjunga – in strangely technical terms, and he gathered they were actually mountaineers who had climbed some of those peaks before being arrested in Karachi where they had been waiting for a boat back to Europe. They talked as if they would be setting off for the mountains as soon as they had laid their strategy and completed the preparations which they had already begun to make.

  Baffled by the mountaineers’ terminology, Baumgartner withdrew and from a distance eyed their hefty shoulders and muscled legs, feeling himself by comparison soft and feeble. But he wondered at their naïveté, their unshaken belief that they would climb the mountains again. Baumgartner, looking about him, seeing the barbed wire fencing, the gates guarded by guardhouses on stilts, the barracks and the cinder paths and water tanks, knew that no one would leave, that they would all be staying.

  During the first few days while everyone milled around like a herd of cattle in a cloud of dust that would not settle but got into their eyes, hair, mouths, throats and lungs, making itself the basic component of their camp lives, Baumgartner saw efforts being made at imposing some order, some kind of discipline. Timetables were pinned to the notice-boards, whistles were blown and sirens sounded. The men queued up in order to collect blankets, tin spoons and plates, work tools. They queued up again to have their tin plates heaped with coarse rice and lentils ladled out of buckets; then they lined up on benches in a great draughty hall to eat the stuff. At the sound of another whistle, they were all in the bathhouse, washing themselves with cold water. Another whistle and they sank into their bunks, expected to sleep, like schoolboys. In different circumstances, it might have seemed an insane but all the same highly comical dream – grown men finding themselves returned to their school, a rigorous and not uncharacteristically vicious one.

  But in between the whistles and the sirens and the flurried activity that they set into motion, there were too many empty spaces and these proved the more difficult to accept. The British commandant who faced them across the parade-ground every morning, stared at them as if in despair. He seemed to flinch from giving orders and to hurry away as soon as he had done so, as from something distasteful. Baumgartner ought to have felt reassured, to have sensed that no severe hardships were in store, no excessive or unreasonable demands were to be made of them, but unfortunately the looseness, the laxness of the regime really meant that empty spaces were allowed into which others could step.

  There were of course the lesser functionaries of the camp to whom the commandant left the daily routine. It was these who made their presence felt, strongly and unpleasantly. They took a particular pleasure in rounding up the men and undressing them, then separating them according to size and appearance, like cattle, making jeering remarks as they did so. Baumgartner found himself standing with his hands dangling, his knees buckling, while they looked him over and joked; he found himself trying to join in the laughter, uncertain whether to do so would help or worsen matters. It turned out that this marked him something of an idiot. The stick jabbed into his ribs meant further laughter but ended in relief – he was not to join the ones who were to carry bricks, from one end of the camp to the other, solely for the sake of carrying bricks, but those who were to labour in the fields, which at least had some point.

  Besides, this had for Baumgartner a certain romance. Why? He could not have said. His childhood in Berlin and youth spent keeping accounts at his father’s desk had certainly given him no introduction to the soil, to Mother Earth, or even a facility for handling tools. To himself he admitted the need to escape from the constant and oppressive company of his compatriots, the chance it offered to be in the open, forget for a while what captivity meant, and have no one to ask how he came to be there, where he had been and what he had been doing before his arrest, what he would do after his release . . . One could only answer such questions so often, and although for others this initial interrogation often led to friendship, in his case it never did. The habits of an only child, of an isolated youth
in an increasingly unsafe and threatening land and then of a solitary foreigner in India had made Baumgartner hold to himself the fears he had about his mother, about what was happening in Germany, allowing it to become a dark, monstrous block. Of course the same fears were known to the other internees but on them it had the effect of making them seek company, pour out their anxieties and obsessions into willing ears, and then even forget them in the pleasure of society, while Baumgartner watched and marvelled at this gift for passing on or even shedding whatever was burdensome: it seemed to him he shed nothing, that – like a mournful turtle – he carried everything with him; perhaps it was the only way he knew to remain himself.

  Joining the land labour crew, he found that once released into the fields of tall, susurrating sugar-cane, the internees would fan out with their hoes and, as long as they gave the impression of being at work, the guards did not supervise too vigorously. It was the work that was much harder than he had expected, especially in the damp, steaming heat that followed the monsoon, and the sugar-cane was a sharp-bladed, rough-surfaced plant that made its hostility felt so that dealing with it was no green idyll. But there were breaks, there were moments when he could break through the smothering wall of green, find a flat stone and sink down to smoke a cigarette under the colourless sky where a fishing eagle circled vigilantly, watching him without losing a single turn of the spiral for his sake.

  He found he was sitting beside a ditch in which weeds stood dejectedly in mud and scum, the area being too poor for there to be any garbage that could be thrown in to enrich it, and a stretch of unpaved road leading to a village that sat low in the fields. Even though his cigarette stank – it was a local one, wrapped in a tendu leaf, fierce enough to make his head swim – he could smell the distinctive Indian odour – of dung, both of cattle and men, of smoke from the village hearths, of cattle food and cattle urine, of dust, of pungent food cooking, of old ragged clothes washed without soap and put out to dry, the aroma of poverty.

  Sometimes when he sat there, women would come out of the village, flat baskets on their heads, and seeing them approach Baumgartner would tremble slightly with the sensation of communicating with the outside world even if only by sight. The women themselves never gave away their consciousness of his presence by so much as a glance or a giggle. Talking to each other, they swayed past him on their way to an enclosure where they squatted on their heels and began to make pats out of the dung they had brought from their cowsheds in the village.

  Baumgartner had watched at first disbelievingly when he saw their long nimble brown fingers dig casually into the wet, gleaming stuff, patting and rolling the handfuls into balls, then flattening them out on the dry sand or on the red rocks, pressing their fingers into the cakes so their impression would be left behind. Then they would drift back to the village, empty baskets hanging from their hands on which heavy silver bracelets and thin glass bangles slipped and clinked pleasantly while they talked to each other with an absorption that excluded Baumgartner – a mere foreigner, a firanghi.

  If he returned to the spot in the evening, he would see them again, squatting to turn over the cakes, test them by breaking off bits to see which were the driest and could be collected and carried back to the village in their flat baskets. It was these dung cakes that accounted for the pungency and pervasiveness of the smoke that rose through the old, mouldy thatch of their roofs. It was this matter of feeding the cows, collecting their dung, turning it into fuel and using it to cook their meals that seemed to rule their lives – at least that part Baumgartner watched with such bewilderment and fascination.

  When he overcame and left behind his initial horror at the sight of women carrying excreta on their heads, and digging their hands into it as they might into wet dough or laundry, and his initial bewilderment at lives so primitive, so basic and unchanging, he began to envy them that simplicity, the absence of choice and history. By comparison, his own life seemed hopelessly tangled and unsightly, symbolised aptly by the strands of barbed wire wrapped around the wooden posts and travelling in circles and double circles around the camp.

  Trailing back past the barracks with his hoe, he heard a violin playing with too much quivering emotion. ‘Guten Abend, Gute Nacht’. In that unusual and unnatural stillness when the day paused before it fell headlong into the night, the violin string struck his ear and vibrated as his mother’s singing had, making him shiver and long for her to stop. What he had wanted was her voice – normal, sensible, everyday, just as now he wanted news that was believable, acceptable. He got none, nothing. Letters came to the camp and were distributed on certain gala days – they were rationed, of course – but there were none with German stamps. He had never received any replies to the cables he had sent to Berlin; Herr Pfuehl had remained silent, so had the boarding-house landlady. Now he wrote letter after letter to Habibullah, to Lotte, asking for his mail to be forwarded, but since he heard nothing from them he wondered if these letters ever left the camp. He could not help studying the ‘Hut-father’, who collected the mail, with suspicion, and discovered that the other Jews, too, wondered if their letters were censored or destroyed by this grim and powerful character even before they reached the British censors. Their complaints were given the terse reply that no internee could address the commandant directly; if they had any complaints, these must be made through the Hut-father. The attempts to do so only led to some severe punishments and Baumgartner was left listening, intently, trying to catch sounds in the air, receive answers. Anything, but not this silence – this whining, humming silence that seemed to come from the sky that had no colour, and the dust of the earth, its particles grating upon each other, torturedly.

  Winter came, and should have been a season of health and vigour for this European community: the air became dry; from the mountains an ice-tinged wind blew down. The barracks had no insulation and draughts blew through them, along with the choking dust from the trampled, grassless grounds. With no insulation and no fuel for heating, the cold weather was not the delight it might otherwise have been. In their thin, inadequate clothing, and with the insufficient and monotonous food in them – only those who had managed to get work in the canteen, serving the officers, had anything like good, adequate food – they found themselves shivering, hating the cold water with which they washed, the damp sweat of the cement floors, the dusty winds that swept over the parade-grounds, the total lack of Gemütlichkeit of which fond memories insisted on staying alive to torment them.

  Huddled under their blankets by night, they listened to the voices raving on the radios they hid there.

  The Athenia, bound for Canada with 400 passengers and crew, torpedoed by German submarines, sank 250 miles west of the Hebrides: 112 lives lost.

  ‘Where is that wine you made, Finckel? Come on, out with it! No, tonight!’

  Brest-Litovsk overtaken on 18 September by German forces from the west, Russian forces from the east. A German – Soviet pact.

  ‘Come on, bring out the Zigarren, Zigaretten, folks!’

  The HMS Courageous torpedoed and sunk in the British Channel on 17 September – 500 men lost.

  ‘Knorke! Splendid!’

  24 October. Danzig. Von Ribbentrop’s diatribe, like thunder, like battle fire.

  ‘Listen to him! Mensch! Did you hear? Have you heard? Ach, er sprach prima, nicht wahr? Wonderful speech!’

  7 November, in Munich, and Hitler this time, his voice even more stratospheric. No one could understand, but never mind, the secretly brewed liquor and the secretly rolled cigarettes were passed around by the Nazis in the group with such vigour that even the guards took notice and confiscated the radio. Another was made. The Jews watched and listened in silence.

  30 November, and the Soviets attacked Finland.

  ‘Allerhand! Ganz allerhand! Fine show!’

  14 December, and the Graf Spee tackled the British warships in the South Atlantic. On 17 December she steamed into the sunset off Montevideo and went up in a bomb blast.

&nbs
p; ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!’

  12 March, Finland capitulated and ceded territory and independence to the Soviet Union.

  19 March. The RAF raided the German air base on the Isle of Sylt.

  ‘What do they think they can do, the Schweinhunde? We will show them.’

  9 April – yes, Germany showed them. Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.

  11 April. Churchill on the air. Churchill in the House of Commons. Churchill at ‘the first clinch of war’.

  ‘Shut him up with a cigar.’

  ‘Ja, the biggest cigar you can find.’

  Allied troops in Norway, out by May.

  ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!’

  10 May. The invasion of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Britain on her knees. Churchill on his knees. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

  ‘Hörst du? D’you hear? Ist das nicht prima?’ The Nazis in the gathering slapped each other on the back till the guards threatened to invade the barracks again. The Jews exchanged looks and dispersed silently.

  15 May. The German advance upon the Channel, upon France.

  21 May. The British attacked at Arras, driven back through the Somme.