Baumgartner's Bombay (16 page)

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.

‘
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.

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.