Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  28 May. Belgium surrenders to Germany.

  ‘Allerhand! Knorke!’ The Jews kept to themselves, in a herd, the need to defend having arisen. Some spoke of suicide, others hissed ‘Ssh!’ The wine and the liquor, the subdued splendour under the blankets.

  4 June. The fall of Paris. The French Government’s retreat to Bordeaux.

  10 June. Pétain in power, applying to Germany for a truce.

  22 June. The truce is signed.

  ‘Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Nun wer ist der Kraut, now who’s the Jerry? Ah-ha’ sang the Nazis, and the Jews watched and listened and were silent.

  17 June. Der verfluchter Hund Churchill raving and appealing to the French, to the British. ‘Upon all the long night of barbarism will descend . . . unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as conquer we shall.’ What hope had he of that now?

  3 July. None. So he blows up the whole French fleet, the madman. The whole bloody fleet.

  August, and the Battle of Britain.

  The Luftwaffe and yes, casualties. Of course, casualties. What could one expect? It was a war.

  It was summer again. The parade-ground was an inferno of sun, heat, dust, glare. The camp commandant was seen to wilt. Drooping on his dais, he faded before their eyes. Retreating more and more into his own company – perhaps somewhere in the bowels of the comfortless prison he had a cool den, shaded, watery, where he went to revive – he had allowed the Hut-fathers and the Camp-father to take over the camp. Baumgartner watched how a certain group, a certain kind of German took over – and ran it efficiently, ruthlessly. Perhaps he had ‘gone native’ in his brief time in India, perhaps that was what made him aware for the first time of what was meant by ‘German efficiency’, ‘Gründlichkeit’. One had to admire it – the way everyone was kept occupied, how everyone and everything was put to use. The utilitarianism of the system – yet, admirable. But with it went an authoritarianism that really came into its own, really triumphed on that hellish parade-ground under the summer sun. Whereas the British commandant had only half-heartedly carried out what was a mere formality, almost a mockery of a true ceremony, the Nazis seized upon it with an authority that was awesome. To Baumgartner, at least, awesome. In no time, the men were lined up, the lines straightened, the men straightened, mouths opened, and a sound drawn out of them that seemed to answer the force of the summer sun, the force of the dust winds, with an equal force.

  ‘Then comes a call like thunder’s peal,

  Like billows’ roar and clash of steel

  The Rhine, the German Rhine so free,

  Yes, we will all thy guardians be,

  Dear Fatherland, sweet peace be thine,

  Dear Fatherland, sweet peace be thine.

  Firm stands the Watch and free,

  The Watch on the Rhine . . .’

  Before this onslaught, the British quailed. When winter came round again, they were running – running from Malaya, from Singapore, from Burma, and it was not only the Japanese who were after them, it was the Germans in the camp. Singapore fell on 15 February, Rangoon on 8 March, the Andaman Islands on 23 March. The eagles that glided in the air above the camp flapped in astonishment at the volume of sound that rose from the flattened earth:

  ‘Heute gehört uns Deutschland,

  Morgen gehört uns die ganze Welt.’

  But the Russians did not flee. They stood firm too. At Stalingrad.

  The secret radio seemed to have suffered a blow, dealt all the way from Stalingrad. It grew fainter, grew garbled, died. It was confiscated. Another appeared, but this one had a demon in it: it gave only the English news, the English version. This was disturbing. To the Nazis in the camp in one way, to the Jews in another. Looking at the faces of the latter in the dark, Baumgartner saw how they caught each other’s eyes, then glanced quickly away. Could the war possibly be ending now? Could it end in defeat? What would the defeat of the Nazis mean for them – and for those at home? The others began to keep them out, push them roughly out of the ring, muttering words that sounded like ‘Jude, hin!’ although that might have been the imagination. Baumgartner was willing, even eager, to give them the benefit of the doubt. If there was doubt, then there was hope – a little.

  On the parade-ground, it was not enough that they had to stand in a line, stand straight and sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.’ Now the German flag was being flown, and now the order rang out: Raise your right arm, say ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Baumgartner was willing to go along with all these absurdities in the resigned, half-hearted way taught him by years of helpless submission to bullying, first in Germany, then in the camp, which was an extension of the former. But there were others who were not willing to submit. Kept out of the ring that gathered around the radio at night, they muttered, ‘Didn’t you hear? Didn’t you hear what is happening to the Jews in Germany, in Europe?’ They made a ring of their own, run by the younger, more volatile and impassioned members of their community, of whom the faded, disheartened, fear-engulfed Baumgartner was not one. One day this group of the excluded ones would not line up on the parade-ground, or straighten up. When they were ordered to raise their arms in salute to the flag, they put their hands behind their backs. When the others roared, ‘Heil Hitler!’ they were silent. Baumgartner gratefully joined their silence. He realised at that instant that silence was his natural condition.

  At once other men broke out of the ranks and came up behind them to manhandle them, wrench their arms, give a few kicks and blows ‘to bring them to their senses’. The younger and abler of the dissenters hit back – they had taken the vow of silence but not inaction. The roughness grew rougher. Baumgartner felt himself being dragged one way, kicked another. He was on his knees, his mouth full of dust, perhaps also blood from a cut lip, when the whistles began to blow and the guards to come rushing up with their batons.

  The next day the scenario was repeated.

  It took the reluctant commandant several days before he admitted action had to be taken. It was no longer enough to say, as he was reported to have said when first informed, ‘Why is everyone so excited? This happens all the time in our public schools – it doesn’t mean much, just a thrashing.’ The Jews were now separated from the Nazis, in barracks at another end of the camp. There they sat on their new bunks, hands hanging between their knees, and looked at their camp-mates with bemused looks.

  ‘And what shall we call our new home?’ one said finally, stroking his beard. ‘Auschwitz or Theresienstadt?’

  Excluded from the morning assembly, they were excluded from most camp duties as well. The Nazis amongst the Germans, who seemed to be running the camp – on behalf of or in collaboration with the British – said they were willing to have the Jews do the menial work for them, but the Jews declined. Now they were idle and sat or lay on their bunks, staring up at the pinholes in the corrugated iron sheets of the roof through which the sun drilled white-hot needles of light. There was too much time and emptiness now, and into that vacuum thoughts flooded in that it would have been better not to have – the roughest labour, the worst manhandling would have been preferable.

  Baumgartner lay with his arms across his eyes, shutting out the probing needles of sun and heat, wishing there were some way of shutting out the voices as well. How, why were the others so much better informed than he? Although a part of him greedily, hungrily took in every morsel of information that came his way of the situation of the Jews in Germany, of their disappearance, of the labour camps, of Nazi propaganda, another part frantically built a defensive barrier against it. It was as if his mind were trying to construct a wall against history, a wall behind which he could crouch and hide, holding him to a desperate wish that Germany were still what he had known as a child and that in that dream-country his mother continued to live the life they had lived there together.

  He was able to live, ostrich-like, under the sands of this illusion, because although the letters written by the Jews were now taken in and posted – so they were assured – there was still
no word in reply. He wrote again to Mr Lobo, the hotel manager with whom he had left his few belongings and whom he had asked to keep his things till he returned to Calcutta and collected them. He asked once more for his mail to be forwarded – but received nothing. What could this continuing silence from his mother mean? Had she been swept up into the horrors of which the others in the barracks whispered and muttered in the dark? The terrible thoughts flooded in, an invading army that his closed eyes would not keep out, could not stop; they advanced like a nightmare to the inevitable.

  It was when he reached screaming point, flung away his arm and opened his eyes wide in terror that he tried to tear his mind from the nightmare by focusing it on whatever he saw – sometimes the wasps that were building a nest in the rafters, watching them fly out into the light and return with balls of paper pulp hanging from the ends of their hair-fine legs, using their jaws to build the intricate little paper puffs like dried grey flowers. Or, if he rolled on to his side with an irrepressible groan, he could watch the columns of ants, each carrying a moist, soft, white egg into the dark cave in a crack between the floor and the wall.

  The trouble with such fascinating sights was their silence, their tedium, the endless repetition of forms and actions that blurred and turned into an endless labour of human forms – bent, driven into black caves from which they did not re-emerge.

  Nacht und Nebel. Night and Fog. Into which, once cast, there was no return. No return. No return.

  Then he would heave himself up, search for a cigarette, go and look for a match. Extraordinary how a cigarette could retrieve a man from the lip of hell and insanity. Drawing upon it for his life, he watched the others, lying on their bunks, smoking, playing cards, talking and talking, incredibly enough, of food, always of food. How was it possible in this situation to think and talk of food? It was not that there was not enough food in the camp – there was. True, the meat was uneatable mutton that stank, and instead of eggs there was a dry yellow powder that looked like mustard gone mouldy and tasted of dust. There was no fresh coffee: the prisoners who worked in the kitchen experimented with all kinds of beans, roasting and grinding them, trying to persuade the others that what they made was drinkable, only no one ever agreed. But there were fresh vegetables, even illicitly brewed wines and fruit liqueurs. Yet their thoughts, their taste-buds, lingered over the food at home as if these comestibles were keys to the past, and in talking of victuals they were not just reminiscing over but actually eating, masticating the past, over and over to extract the last drops of juice, the last drop of flavour. Someone had only to mention marinated herring for them to start salivating, taste it again on their tongues, close their eyes and sigh, ‘Ach, rollmops – and gherkins – do not forget the gherkins.’ Arguments raged as they discussed the relative merits of roast herring and herring-in-aspic. Others said that before they died they hoped to eat one more meat pie, or Wienerschnitzel. Some pined for Leberknödeln, others for Kartoffelpuffer. Baumgartner’s stomach rumbled as loudly as anyone else’s but he was too ashamed to contribute to such talk. At least, he thought he was too ashamed and chewed a shred of tobacco when others talked, till one day someone mentioned salt rolls with poppyseed and he found his lips falling apart as he added, ‘And butter – auch Butter’, stuttering so that everyone laughed. That was the day when another roused himself to say, ‘Butter? In Germany? They have no butter. They are starving. Our people are starving.’ They would gladly have murdered him. Baumgartner would gladly have murdered too.

  As the days filed past and seasons slowly evolved and died, the weight of time grew immense, crushing. To escape from it, Baumgartner began to search out company. He watched, to begin with, the fine long fingers that fluttered over a sketchpad held on the bony knees of Julius Roth when they sat together on the veranda steps, at the end of a devastatingly dry summer, to catch the evening air that they imagined might wander down the mountains that were invisible in the still-standing dust. Getting up to stretch his legs, he glanced at the sketchpad and felt an instant curiosity: they were not drawings of the landscape as one might have expected, or of the men who strolled around, but of objects and artefacts so far removed from their actual environment as to seem bizarre and fantastic – pieces of jewellery, oriental in their weight and lavishness, curios of brass and wood or glass, with no discernible purpose, even pieces of period furniture. Roth seemed to be furnishing some private museum in his fair, narrow head bent over the pad. Eventually Baumgartner could not quell his curiosity, and excitement. Pointing at a curved chaise-longue on which Roth was lavishing a wire netting of criss-cross shading, he spluttered, ‘Like that there were many in my father’s showroom – in Berlin. He would make like a fringe, small wooden bobbles here –’ he pointed with his nicotine-stained thumb – ‘to follow the curve. Just for – for decoration.’ He laughed guiltily, hoping he had not offended.

  Julius peered at Baumgartner with his very pale, myopic eyes that were shaded by blonde lashes. ‘Where? Along here? Mmm, yes, you are right – once I had one like that, sold it to the Maharani of Gwalior when she came to my showroom.’

  ‘You had one – where?’

  ‘The Maiden’s Hotel, in Delhi. Have run it for years,’ Julius replied with some pride, then went on sketching. Baumgartner could not tear himself away and, seeing his interest, Julius continued, in a high-pitched, tremulous voice like a pipe’s, ‘Mine I had upholstered in crewel embroidery from Kashmir – autumn colours. But the Maharani, she’s probably changed it to brocade, or velvet. Oh, these rich customers, what can one not sell them!’ He put down his pencil and began turning the pages to show Baumgartner. ‘See, once I was asked to design the entire dowry for a princess from Rajasthan – carpets, furniture, carriage, costumes, jewellery. I am trying to remember everything – make a record of it – see.’ He caressed the drawings with his fingers, delicately, with infinite approval.

  ‘Is marvellous,’ Baumgartner breathed heavily, ‘marvellous,’ meaning it.

  ‘They came to me at Maiden’s – rajas, memsahibs, all people with money. And taste. Of course, taste – that I demanded.’ Julius put his lips together severely but then laughed. ‘I wanted to catch the Viceroy. I must have the Viceroy here in my showroom, I decided. He was a keen shikari, I knew – so I ordered tiger skins, crocodile skins, elephant tusks. The tusks I had carved in a procession motif – you know, all elephants and howdahs in a line, smaller and smaller, so – so – so,’ he showed Baumgartner with his hands. ‘This, I thought, would bring the Viceroy himself. Or the Vicereine. Even better, no? They are so much more extravagant. But what happens? War! War is declared by these lunatics. And my poor elephant tusks and tiger skins are collecting dust –’

  ‘Where? In Maiden’s Hotel? In Delhi?’

  ‘Ach, how can one know? How is one to find out anything?’ Julius tossed his long hair distractedly. It was very light, flossy hair, Nordic in its fine spun silver fairness. There was not much of it – there was in fact very little, leaving pink patches of his scalp to show through. Julius complained it was the bad soap in the camp that was causing his hair to fall out. His white linen coat suffered the same indignities, but he kept it washed and mended and wore it over a succession of striped shirts that he somehow managed to have stitched in town and brought in on the tailor’s bicycle. Constantly pressing down the tips of the white collar, or pulling at the cuffs, or stroking the fuzzy hair, Julius kept himself looking like a figure from a pre-war Sunday picnic, or coffee party, accidentally strayed into the dusty shambles of the camp.

  Yet, when Baumgartner tried to picture his background, his antecedents, it proved impossible – he knew he would never have seen such a figure in Germany himself; where could he have sprung from and how had he come to be here?

  In order to find out, Baumgartner felt he should begin by volunteering something himself. ‘Like that –’ he pointed delicately at a drawing with his small finger – ‘Like that glass bowl I saw in a window in Venice once –’

  Julius
looked up and beamed at him for a whole minute before he spoke. ‘Baumgartner,’ he said finally, ‘you look like a beetroot farmer but you are – you are a gem. In Venice, he says!’

  Baumgartner stumbled away, he could not bring himself to say more, for the time being at least overcome.

  ‘Have you seen Julius’s pictures?’ he ventured to ask the barracks’ scholar, Emil Schwarz, the bearded man to whom he had first spoken in Fort William, as they sat tearing off pieces of bread and dipping it into lentil soup in the shade of a miserable palm tree that had very little of it to offer; the heat of that summer was so great that the camp discipline had collapsed and melted and the internees could sit wherever they found some shade or a draught; there had already been several cases of heatstroke for the camp doctor Herschele to treat. ‘He makes fine pictures, Julius – he was showing to me.’

  He thought Emil Schwarz might be interested; not an artist but one who pored over books night and day, Sanskrit and Pali dictionaries, Buddhist scriptures, the Vedas, and Upanishads, and even more esoteric and lesser-known titles that he ordered through the library and were brought to him by the librarian’s assistant, an impudent fellow who would throw them down in a cloud of dust, brush his hands and say, ‘Carrying these in this heat is bad enough – but to read them also, you must be mad.’ Emil would not smile; he never smiled – a painfully lean young man, his skeletal system visible as in a sculpture of the Buddha during his fasts and meditation, but with a beard of tar-black hair and mournful black eyes that were as Semitic as Baumgartner’s and Julius’s were not. Although he refused to smile, he was not unfriendly, and although he never initiated a conversation, he was willing to answer when Baumgartner made overtures, which was seldom.

  To Baumgartner’s astonishment, Emil pulled a face. ‘I have seen them,’ he admitted. ‘What does he draw but objects he has stolen from temples and palaces and then sells for a profit? They are a thief’s account book, a ledger that he keeps.’