Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  ‘Oh no, no,’ Baumgartner protested, not wanting the sugar-sweet Julius to turn out rotten at heart. ‘No, what makes you think he is a thief?’

  ‘I know it.’ Emil waved a piece of bread in the air, then threw it to the crows that waited in a ring a few feet away from the palm tree and the two men; immediately they fell upon it, hoarsely cawing and struggling with their black wings. ‘He used to show them to me in the beginning, till I began asking him too many questions. “Is this not from a Khajuraho temple? Is this not a Gupta head? And that looks like a Kushana.” When he saw that I knew, he stopped showing them to me. Better so.’ Emil gloomily watched the crows snatching at the piece of bread. ‘A grave-robber, that one. He does not know the meaning of Indian art, only its value, in rupees. If you talk to him of iconography, of symbolism, of religion itself, be knows nothing – nothing.’ Emil had himself been arrested in – some said a hermitage on the banks of the Ganges, others said the University of Benares; certainly either could have been his natural home and setting. It was strange how he turned even the internment camp into one by sheer strength of his brooding, uncompromising personality.

  Although Baumgartner was impressed by it and attracted to it, he found himself spending more time in the company of the affable Julius. True, Julius treated him as if he were one of the facilities of the camp provided if you knew how to use them, but at this stage Baumgartner found any relationship at all a relief from the oppression of solitude, the tyranny of solitary thought. Good-humouredly, he shared his small ration of cigarettes with Julius, hung around the kitchen and begged for some of their soap so that Julius’s shirts could be kept as immaculate as that dandy wished, and strolled with him down that central road that the homesick Germans had nicknamed the ‘Bummel’, talking of furniture and furnishing styles while the white-hot sky softened into an evening grey, flared briefly into sunset flames, then blacked out till the stars and the lights of the small hill-stations on the Himalayan heights began to glimmer. It amused Baumgartner to think that here, in this square of dust enclosed by barbed wire and watched by armed guards, he was, with Julius’s help, recreating his father’s elegant, well-lit, stylish showroom. He might have been out strolling with his father on a Sunday afternoon, humouring him, keeping up with him, basking in the other man’s attention and condescension. When Julius occasionally gave way to irritation – ‘Oh, Baumgartner, but you are too, too ignorant; how can one speak to you of Byzantine, of classical, rococo and gothic art? Mensch, can we not have a little learning, a little culture around here?’ – Baumgartner became suitably remorseful, as if his parent had delivered the scolding. ‘I will try and find a book in the library,’ he promised, but Julius found the idea amusing and began to laugh. Baumgartner brightened too – laughter was such a rare and valuable commodity; it might have seemed slight but, in that situation, it proved enough of a base for friendship. Their neighbours in the barracks were amused by this odd pairing; if they passed the two sitting on the veranda steps and smoking together, they would joke, ‘How are the classes going? Will he make a good valet, Julius?’ Emil caused Baumgartner a twinge by saying, sourly, ‘So, the two of you have found something in common, eh? I wonder what it can be?’

  Of course Baumgartner was not alone in searching for some ways to alleviate the burden, the tedium, the emptiness of the waiting days. Everyone in the camp was trying to fill, somehow, the emptiness of the space into which they had been swallowed. The Hut-fathers and the Camp-father who were elected by ballot had seen to that, and everyone had been assigned to a group, or a team. Apart from the physical labour to which they were consigned by the British authorities, they all became involved in some occupation that might give them the sensation of continuing the life that they had led in the world outside. Some had ordered and obtained books and were studying Sanskrit, Arabic, astronomy or homeopathy; they organised a series of lectures and demonstrations of eurythmics, theosophy as preached by Madame Blavatsky, the Mary Wigmore style of dance, aerodynamics, or anything at all. Those who had any qualifications were teaching others and those who had never felt the need for an education and did not do so now, worked in the carpenter’s shed, making babies’ cradles that rocked, music stands for the camp orchestra, bookshelves and ice-boxes. Apart from these legitimate and above-board activities there was an intense underworld of nefarious activity as well – the making of secret radios, or of objects for sale and barter like clocks and coffee filters. Baumgartner could not for the life of him see what use it was to make money or have money in the camp, but most were passionately devoted to the making and earning of what they believed indispensable to life.

  It tired Baumgartner even to watch such activity. He found himself physically deteriorating, growing old at a rapid rate. There were the recurrent bouts of malaria from which everyone suffered, and the almost chronic dysentery. The doctors handed out quinine with only a glance at the sallow faces, the shaking and shivering patients; they hardly needed to take blood tests, and had not enough time for them. Dysentery left everyone pale and pinched in the face. Overcome by another bout, Baumgartner lay in a huddle, feeling the pain go through him in waves, leaving him sweating and exhausted. It was then that the pressing, stabbing anxiety about his mother became most urgent and his defences against it most weak.

  Heaving himself off the bunk, he tried to carry it away into some place where he could mourn over it unwatched by the others, like a sick animal. He discovered that if he found a hoe, he could go into the vegetable fields as if he had official permission to do so, and try to calm himself with some mindless action of the hands like the opening and shutting of the channels that watered the potatoes at the farthest end of the field. He could no longer get to the ditch and the road that led to the village. He missed the sight, the friendliness of the scene.

  It made him draw near to the fence that divided their section from the women’s, and when he saw the pale blonde young woman in the adjoining enclosure bending to lift wet laundry out of a basket, then unbending to pin it to a washing line, he realised that it was for this form of living that he pined: simple, routine, repetitive, calm. Only later did he notice that she was also pretty – with the kind of looks that had been considered pretty in the Germany of his childhood: Teutonic, her hair almost fairer and finer than her blanched skin, the eyes somewhat bulging and of a glass-clear grey, the lips such a pale shade of pink that they were barely differentiated from the skin. An utterly Nordic type of beauty, Baumgartner said to himself. The movement of her waist as she bent over the basket of washing and then straightened herself again, and of her arms as she stretched a garment over the line had first drawn his attention; now he found himself walking up and down, up and down the same length of barbed wire fencing, looking furtively every few seconds to see if she would emerge with her tub of washing, then lingering to see her deal with it, eyes narrowed against the white flood of the sun. She wore faded cotton print dresses, the kind country girls might wear in the lost Germany, and her bare feet were slipped into the kind of slippers known as ‘Burmese’, although they were as commonly worn by Indians. He dared not look at her face for fear of bringing a frown to it, but kept his eyes lowered to the feet going back and forth over the stubble of dried yellowed grass, and the stocky, straight legs. He had not known women like her in Germany, he had never lived in the German countryside, and yet she seemed to embody his German childhood – at least, he chose to see her as such an embodiment, it was so pleasant to do so, like humming a children’s song.

  Further back in the family enclosure, a young girl was organising a game of Backe, backe Kuchen’ with the small children who bawled back:

  ‘Der Bäcker hat gerufen,

  Wer will guten Kuchen backen,

  Der muss haben sieben Sachen:

  Eier und Schmalz,

  Butter und Salz,

  Milch and Mehl,

  SAFRAN MACHT DEN KUCHEN GELB!’

  making it seem that Deutschland, the Heimat, was alive here, on this dusty
soil, in the incredible sun, even if it no longer lived in its native home.

  Baumgartner listened to them with half a mind, watching the woman, wondering about her. What was her name? Who was her husband? Children she had. Sometimes they came out with her, a small straw-haired child whose nose ran over a sore lip and who wailed piercingly, clinging to her knees, lifting the print dress up as she did so, and an older boy who stood vacantly, sucking his thumb, his eyes roving over the field as if to make sure no one was watching or taking any part of this fair prize, his mother. Had his father set him to guard her? Where were they from, this German family that might have come from some village in Germany with a church, a bakery, a pond, geese, an oak tree?

  When driven beyond endurance, he bent to break some small cucumbers off a vine and thrust them through the wire fencing. ‘Here,’ he muttered to the boy, ‘d’you like gherkins? Ask your Mama to pickle them for you.’ The boy stood frozen, staring at him and past him. The little girl stopped wailing and stared too. Then the woman said, in a voice so flat and harsh that Baumgartner quailed, ‘Bring them to me, Rudi.’ Then she turned to the girl and spoke to her in a language Baumgartner could not recognise at all.

  As he backed away, having handed over the cucumbers to the child’s sticky hold, one of his fellow prisoners brushed past him with a slop bucket, laughing. ‘The missionary Bruckner’s young wife – she’s quite a plum, isn’t she?’ he snickered. ‘Forgotten her German, speaks some heathen language these missionaries pick up in the wilds, but easy to catch.’ He winked at Baumgartner. ‘Was it with two cucumbers, or one?’

  Baumgartner withdrew, offended, and tried to keep away from the fence, but lay on his back on his bunk, eyes closed, humming, fantasising about the missionary Bruckner’s wife. Which church did they belong to? When had they set about converting the natives? He made up a picture of her touching the bowed heads of naked tribal men and women in grass skirts, and at night dreamt of her holding a great glass globe between her fingers in which candlelight was reflected and flickered. He was most surprised when one day, walking surreptitiously by, he saw a woman come out on the veranda of the family barracks and shout, ‘Annemarie, O Annemarie,’ and the young woman, about to pin a wet tablecloth on the line, lower it and turn around. Annemarie – he licked his lips to taste it, and found that, yes, Annemarie was perfect for this Norse goddess of the camp.

  Perhaps the close proximity in which they lived made the men mind-readers. How else could they have guessed Baumgartner’s reveries on those summer afternoons when he lay on his back, drugged by the heat, drawing whatever sweetness could still be drawn from the image? But gradually he became aware of the sniggers, the innuendoes behind their joviality. ‘Something about these forest nymphs when they come out into the world, eh, Baumgartner? Can’t speak a civilised language any more, more like the jungle folk with whom they have lived, but that’s not bad, eh? A garland of flowers for the head, a little less clothing, and –’ Baumgartner was jolted into attentiveness and stared with such shocked eyes that they all laughed.

  He began to notice the photographs that they all pinned over their bunks, which he had previously avoided looking at for fear of offending anyone. Now he realised that they were only too willing to hear questions which would release the memories that these photographs held in increasingly faded and smudged form. But Baumgartner would not go so far – he only glanced furtively as if looking in through windows, fascinated by what he saw, but certain it was not for him to share.

  Trying to imagine the backgrounds of the different inhabitants of the camp was a popular pastime, no matter how often such carefully constructed scenes were sent crashing by the truth. Dr Herschele, who held the whole camp together, Jew and Aryan both clamouring for his attention rather than any other doctor’s, so renowned was he for his diagnostic skills – ‘he pulls up the eyelid, looks into the eye, and there he sees it – the disease – and is never wrong,’ they said admiringly – became a kind of god to them. They were certain he had the most successful practice in Berlin, or Vienna. It was years before the truth broke – that he was really a veterinarian employed by a mission dairy to take care of the pigs.

  It became the camp joke of course. After that, they laughed at their own gullibility and naïveté by building up the most unlikely, the most preposterous stories about each other’s past: Julius was said to have been a transvestite, dressed in women’s clothing and danced in bars in Hamburg, for instance – but what shocked them, and Baumgartner too, was the discovery that some of the prisoners had not only a past but a future too, outside and beyond the camp.

  Baumgartner had somehow found his way into the vegetable field again, and was standing still and staring over the furrows at the sugar-cane growing beyond the fence when he noticed some of the camp guards, in their uniforms, walking along the path at the end towards the guard house. He shrivelled into himself, trying to become less visible, but they did not look his way. They were carrying a ladder and some paint pots and from the way they examined the fence posts, he could see they were there to do some of the perpetual repairs that went on. He stood still, staring through the shimmer of heat at the barbed wire, and watched as they turned out of the gate, past the guard-house into the dust road. Perhaps they had been assigned work on the outer fence, Baumgartner thought, and turned to trail back to the barracks.

  But that evening, whistles were blown, guards running, searchlights turned on, the whole camp in an uproar. Hüber, Galitsino and the others in that group of hardy Austrian mountaineers Baumgartner had first noticed regarding the Himalayas with such strange professionalism, had escaped! Pretending to be workmen, just coolly walked out under the guard’s nose! Baumgartner gasped when he heard – the shock brought water to his eyes and made him blink.

  Posses were sent out in search all through the valley, the forests and the rice fields and the mountains.

  No one slept, talking of the exploit or, in silence, imagining that escape through the dark forests, past tigers, on elephant backs, through rivers – who knew what, where?

  When the commandant appeared unexpectedly at a meeting called one night and informed them that the escapees had been caught, and brought back, no one gasped or said anything. There was silence, the kind that follows a blow on the solar plexus, a kick in the stomach.

  They learnt the details later. The men were given twenty-eight days in solitary confinement. That was not too bad, they thought, typical of that boneless British commandant. Everyone sniggered, delighted. The sniggers became roars of laughter when the men reappeared with their heads bald because the black dye they had used for their disguise had made their hair fall out. They were laughed at, but affectionately, even proudly. Everyone tried to get close enough to clap one or the other of them on the back, say a word or two. Baumgartner basked in momentary glory, having actually witnessed the escape.

  When they broke out again the next year, there was no one to see them and they were not caught. That was more chilling. The rumours were wild, fearful. They had been eaten by tigers in the forest, trampled by elephants. They had drowned crossing a river, fallen off cliffs and been killed. What was frightening was that they had disappeared without a trace. It was like death. How many men in the camp would have chosen that? Baumgartner wondered, knowing he was certainly not one. He huddled on his bunk, finding its familiarity a comfort. He knew it was craven not to desire freedom, but it was true that captivity had provided him with an escape from the fate of those in Germany, and safety from the anarchy of the world outside.

  As long as the news came in of German and Japanese victories, Baumgartner and the others in the Jewish quarter had good reason to feel thankful for the protection of the British-run camp, however sick with sorrow over the fate of their relations or of Germany, however restless and frustrated and bored by the lifeless monotony of the camp. At least it was a refuge, even if temporary.

  Sitting beside Emil Schwarz on the veranda in the dark, waiting for a cool breath of air to make it
possible to lie down and sleep, Baumgartner murmured something inaudible and incomprehensible about their contradictory situation. Schwarz, restlessly wringing his hands because there was no light and he could not read, seemed surprisingly to understand. ‘Baumgartner, you should read – it is not such a bad thing to read, you know. Then you would see how Mann has described it all, all, just as you say, in The Magic Mountain.’ But Baumgartner was not attracted by the title, it seemed to have no relevance to this flat, dust-smothered camp, and he thought it was just like Schwarz to refer everything in life to books as though that were the natural solution and end of it all. While Schwarz droned on about a sanatorium in the mountains, about the sick and the healthy, about sanity and lunacy, Baumgartner sighed, shuffled, smoked, slapped at mosquitoes and wondered when it would be cool enough to go inside and sleep.

  The restlessness everyone felt built up into a tension as the news of the war veered and changed. The Russians held at Stalingrad; America entered the war; there were the British victories that made the Nazis at the other end of the camp sullen, so ferocious that it was not safe to go near them. The possibility of a German defeat began to be whispered about in the Jewish quarter, secretly – and gradually less secretly, more surely. Baumgartner found himself shivering on a hot summer night, as abjectly as a dog who senses he is about to be turned out into the street. He wondered if the long internment had not incapacitated him, made him unfit for the outer world. And what would they find outside? Germany destroyed – no possibility of returning, so that he would have to accept India as his permanent residence. He wondered at his ability to survive in it, reduced as he was to such an abject state of helplessness, and the knowledge besides of being alone. He began to fear the time when he would no longer be in the company of Julius, of Schwarz, of the others in the camp who had become so familiar. It was not that any of them regarded him as a friend; it was that with them he could pretend he was not solitary. Outside, he would be that – a man without a family or a country. He could not stifle his unease and wondered if there was not that under the others’ seething impatience.