Baumgartner's Bombay (20 page)

Baumgartner nodded dutifully, and Farrokh felt he could go on.

‘So I just go back to café, say nothing, and what these damn fool people of Colaba do? They
pick up that boy
,’ Farrokh roared, his voice expanding and lifting so that it struck the ceiling and bounced back, ‘they
PICK UP
that boy and
BRING HIM BACK HERE
!’ He gestured violently at the figure in the corner. Although it nodded, it was clear the boy was too drugged to have heard, perhaps asleep in that rigidly upright position. ‘Here he is again,’ Farrokh cried in despair, ‘and
now
what I do?’

Baumgartner looked away from the boy, from Farrokh, from his own hands bunched on the table. He was not interested in the boy, he was not responsible for him, why did Farrokh imagine he was? All he wanted to do was scrape up the last of the
dal
and rice on his plate and then collect the bag of scraps and go home to feed his cats. This he could not do in Farrokh’s café unless he first satisfied Farrokh. ‘Perhaps ask him where he lives, Mr Farrokh?’ he suggested sadly.

Farrokh gripped the two edges of the table as if he wanted to break it in two. ‘I ask already,’ he bellowed. ‘I
ask
and I
ASK
. But no reply. What I can do? Mr Bommgarter, pliss, go speak to him in his language – ask him what he
want
? Why he sit in the Café de Paris when he have no money for food, for tea? Why he not go? When he get up and go? Please spick, Mr Bommgarter, and tell him
GO
.’

Baumgartner looked desperately for some way to refuse. He had not the slightest wish to involve himself with the fair young man who might not be from his country and, if he was, very likely an Aryan who would not want to take any help from him. How to explain this to the good Farrokh? He sat looking helplessly at the oddly tortured position of the young man, crammed into a corner of the green-painted walls of the Café de Paris, and told himself, ‘Perhaps he is Scandinavian – looks like a Swede – a Viking,’ and very reluctantly raised himself from his chair and walked down the length of the
empty
café, watched by the determined Farrokh and an interested waiter at the counter.

At the corner table, Baumgartner came to a standstill, trying to think of something to say. Clearing his throat brought no response. Finally he bent and placed his hands on the table, and said softly, ‘Is anything wrong? Can I help?’

He spoke unconsciously, without forethought, in German.

The boy opened his eyes. They were inflamed and unfocused. He closed them again. Baumgartner added in English, ‘If you are ill, I can call a doctor. You need help?’

Without opening his eyes, the boy parted his lips sufficiently to snarl, ‘Get out.
Raus
.’

Baumgartner instantly retreated. It was as he feared – the boy was German, a fair Aryan German, and wanted nothing to do with him. Well, that was that, then. With a clear conscience, he returned to Farrokh with a light step, shrugged his shoulders and explained, ‘He say no, no help wanted.’

Farrokh frowned, his dark hairline, dark eyebrows, dark moustache all coming together in a ferocious black scowl. ‘Then why he not get up and go?’ he spat out, fiercely. ‘What he sitting here for? Tell him get out.’

‘He won’t listen, Mr Farrokh,’ Baumgartner pleaded, with a look at the remains of curry and rice on his plate, now congealed and uneatable. The sight of the food reminded him that he had to collect the bag of scraps for his cats. Perhaps it was necessary to make another effort for Farrokh before he could ask for it and leave. ‘You want that I push him out for you?’

‘Yes, I want,’ Farrokh agreed fervently. ‘My evening customers coming in, I don’t want foreign junkie lying in corner. Not in my café. This family café. What they think? You think I have no
standards
?’ He arrived at this impressive word by sheer pressure of rage and despair. Himself impressed by it, he continued, ‘Other junkies will follow. This will become drug den. Not high-class two-star Irani restaurant for good families.’ He was raving now, carried away by his highly coloured version of things to come.

Baumgartner began to feel aggrieved. Why was he being made responsible for Farrokh’s status, for the Café de Paris’s status? He came here only for the leftovers. Getting annoyed, he said shortly, ‘Then let us go together and talk to him.’

The two approached the table in the corner together – one warily, the other threateningly – and Farrokh’s heavy tread made the boy turn his head and look at them with a wan, uncaring air. ‘I have said already,’ he said in an unnaturally high-pitched quaver, ‘I cannot pay bills. I am ill. I want only to sit here.’ His teeth showed between his lips, like an animal’s, in warning.

‘No,
no
sit here if you are ill,’ Farrokh began to roar, lifting his arms in the air. ‘Hospital for ill people, not café.’

‘Hospital is not for me,’ the boy replied with something of a laugh that bared more of his teeth. Then he closed his eyes and leant his head against the wall.

Baumgartner found his concern aroused in spite of himself. The boy was not so different from a sick cat, he told himself in order to overcome the revulsion he felt from contact with this fair-haired boy that was instinctive and uncontrollable. To think of Nazi Germany now, after all these years, in faraway Bombay, it was absurd after all. Swallowing that revulsion, he asked, ‘Shall I bring the doctor here?’

The boy seemed to be thinking it over and Farrokh stood and seethed. The café was quite silent, the street noises kept at bay by its thick shadows. Then the boy rolled his head from side to side in stubborn dissent. It clearly cost him a great deal to make that dissent.

‘You need some medicine I can get for you?’ Baumgartner tried again. He found himself pronouncing ‘medicine’ in the German way, and was irritated.

The boy opened his mouth, then chewed his lip, without any sound. His face became gradually clenched in a grimace, Baumgartner could not tell whether in a spasm of pain or at their enforced presence.

‘You have a place I can take you to?’ he ventured, remembering a charitable clinic where he had sometimes
taken
families of kittens he could not keep or those cats that needed surgery. Perhaps there was one for such strays as this boy here.

The boy laughed at that, spitting out the laugh coarsely, insultingly. He did not bother to answer, it was eloquent enough.

Baumgartner sagged. He was so tired, it was so hot, he wanted only to get home. ‘Perhaps I better take you to my home,’ he sighed sadly.

Immediately he felt Farrokh’s large heavy hand clap him on his back with approval and heard him boom, ‘Very good, Bommgarter
sahib
, very good. Maybe you spick same language. Maybe he tell you all his trouble. You help him, eh? You take him, eh?’

The boy struggled to raise his eyelids a millimetre or so and glare from under them at Baumgartner, again with the yellow flash of a sick cat. Baumgartner glared back. ‘Come with me. It’s not far,’ he growled, in German.

When they stepped out of the café, Baumgartner lifted his head and sniffed a bit. The magic moment had come: it was four o’clock and at last the sea, the invisible sea of Bombay, had stirred, woken from its heavy, lethargic afternoon siesta and given off a faint wavering evening breeze. Although the heat still stood solid and livid between the walls of the buildings and on the soft, muddy tar, there was a quiver in the air, a scent of salt and freshness, and it was bearable again. One could look forward now to the whipping wind of evening and then the soft, muzzy night, and darkness.

Most of all, Baumgartner looked forward to coming home, and to bringing his cats some food. What had made him spend the whole day away from them? Such a fool. To sleep like that in Lotte’s house, in Lotte’s bed, all afternoon, he must be getting old, stupid. He shuffled forwards with the plastic bag of scraps he had been given hitting against his leg – Farrokh had filled it to the brim – and emitting odours that made passers-by stare. The boy plodded behind him, breathing
heavily
as though he were struggling up a mountain, and keeping his eyes on the ground and on his bare feet.

‘Oh, I am sorry.
Entschuldigen bitte
,’ Baumgartner apologised, stopping for him. ‘Did not see – you have no shoes – the feet must hurt.’

The boy did not make an answer or look at Baumgartner but lifted his arms to adjust the rucksack on his back. Although he was tall and big-built, with the heavy square bones of an ox or a sportsman, he was clearly in very bad shape so that every movement caused him more effort than it should. Baumgartner found he had to slow down his shuffle in order to keep step with him. He found himself babbling, ‘Just down the road – we turn the corner – we come to Hira Niwas. My flat is small – no sea-view like Bombay millionaires have – but is all right. So many years now it is my home, and I have place for everything, my cats including –’

The boy made no answer and eventually Baumgartner’s babble ran out. In silence he trudged beside him, only putting out his hand to make him turn at the corner. The family that lived on the pavement outside Hira Niwas had gathered for the evening and looked at Baumgartner returning with a stranger. The boy seemed not to notice they were in his way and Baumgartner was terrified that he might knock over one of their pots and pans or trip over and break one of the strings that held up their shack. He drew himself in, tried to shrivel up and take the least amount of living space away from them who had already so little. As always, he felt his hair stand up on the back of his neck, and sweat break out as he passed them.

The mother was as usual washing her tin pots and pans in the thickly moving water of the gutter, with her sari twitched up over her knees and the knees jutting up over the ears as she squatted on the pavement. The child with the pot-belly of malnutrition and the light hair that stood up in twists, was beside her, sucking something brown and slippery in its hand. The flies crawled over the lip as well as the stuff and Baumgartner wondered if she had not swallowed a few. She flung it down in a fit and began to cry. At once the mother
raised
her hand and struck her across her head, screaming in the language Baumgartner had never learnt to understand. Now the child shrieked in outrage and the father, who had been sitting or sleeping inside the rag shack, pushed two of the rags aside and stuck his head out. From the inflamed pupils of his eyes and his dishevelled hair it was clear he had already started the evening’s drinking. He flung some oaths at his wife in the language that was like pieces of stone, like gravel to Baumgartner’s ear. She screamed back at him but also grabbed the child by its arm, pulled her over to her side and rapidly wiped her streaming eyes and nose with the end of the sari. Then she picked up the brown lump from the pavement and popped it back in the child’s mouth. The man gave a roar and came out on his knees to jerk the child over to him and dig the lump out of its mouth and fling it away again.

By then Baumgartner had steered his guest past them and safely into the doorway of the building – one step lifted them from anarchy to security. As he led him in, he gave a furtive look over his shoulder to see who was responsible for the new screams that seemed to slash along the whole length of his back and enter the sensitive point in the back of his head: was it the outraged child or the infuriated mother? He hoped they had not noticed him or his guest. Although he barely acknowledged this to himself, it was true that he had fears – nightmares – of their coming after him one night. Why should they not? They saw him bring bags of food, knew he had a wallet in his pocket, wore a watch on his wrist, good shoes on his feet – old, patched, yes, but still shoes, more than they had or ever could buy – and he wondered what prevented them from grabbing him by his neck and stripping him in the dark. The nakedness of their street lives made him feel overloaded with belongings, and he felt their accusation whenever he passed.

Now he had to manoeuvre his guest past the watchman who looked on insultingly and refused to move his legs out of the way, and then guide him up the narrow wooden stairs with their uneven surface to which he was accustomed but
others
were not, and stumbled. ‘On the third floor is my flat,’ Baumgartner apologised. ‘Quite high. Very dark here. You can see?’

The boy made no answer, might have been both deaf and dumb, but followed Baumgartner stolidly up the stairs, taking harsh, deep breaths as he negotiated the climb. What could the young man have been doing to be in such bad shape? Baumgartner wondered, and alternatives trooped up the stairs and into his mind, noisily. Drugs, drugs, drugs, they all said. Baumgartner shook his head. One should not say till one knew.

The cats knew his step. They seemed to hear it on the bottom step in the entrance hall, began springing off their chairs and beds and various roosts and by the time he was on the first landing, outside the Parsi family’s flat with its daily renewed string of marigolds and its ricepowder picture of twinned fish on its doorstep, they began thudding against the door and yowling through its cracks in a frenzy. It was the sound of a welcome he so enjoyed that he began to smile and to hurry, but bumped into his leaden guest, apologised and forced himself to mount the last flight of stairs slowly.

The boy seemed sunk too deep in his private world, enclosed and stony, to react to the eager scratching and miaowing at the door while Baumgartner fumbled with a bunch of keys, but he could hardly ignore the furred, fighting presences that burst out as Baumgartner opened the door a crack and hurled themselves at all the legs and feet they could find.

Baumgartner was bent over them, crooning in German, ‘Fritzi,
du alte
Fritzi,
komm
, Fritzi,’ and ‘Miess, Miess, let me go – I give you, Miess –’ and ‘
Ach, Liebchen
, Lise, Lise,’ and only after a moment of confusion became aware that they were spitting and snarling and the boy was kicking them off like so many fur slippers. ‘Pliss, pliss,’ Baumgartner protested, getting off his knees to take the boy’s arm. ‘No need to be frightened – they only welcome us – you do not like them?’