Baumgartner's Bombay (21 page)

The boy spat out a vicious ‘No!’ and reached down to scoop up the most obstreperous of them, the battle-scarred Fritz, and hurl him away violently.

Baumgartner felt inside him the somersault of fear, of alarm. The cats, too, were like a swarm of pigeons in a feathery flutter. All of them milled around, trying to get at Baumgartner’s bag of scraps and at the same time scramble out of the young man’s way. Baumgartner was hard put to it to keep them separated. Distractedly, he put the bag down on the kitchen table, then swung around in an effort to be hospitable, saying, ‘Sit down, please – if you like, lie down a moment – I will – I will have some tea ready – please excuse – first my cats must dine –’ and then swung around again to tend to their feeding.

He emptied the contents of the bag across the table, got out the kitchen knife and began to separate the curried fish from the mutton fat and bones, the bread crusts from the rice and chapatis, flustered by their impatience and by his guest’s sullen attitude in the middle of the riotous floor.

‘Ugh,’ spat the boy, ‘it is –
stinking
.’

‘Oh, one moment – one moment – I open the window,’ Baumgartner put down the knife and turned to the window and undid all the rusty, difficult bolts and swung it open on to the lane which did not smell very much better. Then returned to his work, energetically cutting and chopping with the long knife while the boy stared angrily. At last the bagful of scraps was separated into small piles and Baumgartner could pick them up in his hands and put them on to the plates. The cats wound themselves around his legs, arching and rubbing and making small, scolding sounds, then gradually settling down to nosing through it all till they arrived at the delicacies they decided to accept.

The boy watched with a kind of stern disapproval. ‘Something like I saw in the burning ghats of Benares,’ he finally said from a corner of his unsmiling mouth.

Baumgartner looked up, puzzled, not comprehending such an allusion. Unlike the youths who came from the West
now,
Baumgartner had been to none of the tourist spots, not even Benares, never been drawn to temples or ashrams, an alien world to him, something he had walked past quickly, not entered, not even glanced at. So he could not understand the boy’s reference but sensed in it hostility and censure.

‘When the fires died, the man in charge of the burning, he took up a big stick – this big – and pushed it in the fire – and took out bits of meat – human meat – that was not ash and threw it down to the riverside. All the dogs waited there – and pounced – and fought – and ate these meats – these human meats – like
that
,’ the boy laughed, jerking a finger at the cats. His laughter spluttered from lips that were out of control, were trembling. ‘And in the temples – where the priests fed the beggars – you could see some fun. I have seen even a leper with no legs, no hands, fighting a woman with his teeth – that was fun!’

Baumgartner turned away. He carried Mimi back to her corner, laid her carefully in the nest made of his old shirt. He spent a long time arranging its folds around her so that they supported her chin, her head, and made her comfortable. Then he turned back to his guest, as to a bitter duty. ‘Pliss, give me that rucksack. And sit down. I will cook a meal. You will have? Something to eat?’

‘Eat?’ the boy exploded. ‘In the middle of dis – dis stinking –’ he gestured at the room, the mess spread and heaped everywhere.

Baumgartner was struck into silence. He was not unaware of the smell: other guests had shown uneasiness and an eagerness to leave, at a time when he still had guests. Now, no one came any more. Still, he had not thought of it as repellent, unfit for the acts of life. Rather, it was to him a kind of fertiliser, with a fertilising action upon human behaviour. At least, it helped him to be comfortable, to survive, live, enjoy companionship. He felt his cats glide around his feet, wind themselves about his legs, heard their murmurs of recrimination, welcome, questioning, communicating, and wondered why he had
introduced
this lunatic into their midst, polluting it, threatening its rich, warm, natural life.

The boy was pulling off his rucksack. Flinging it on to the floor, he looked around the small room, almost dark with all but one of the shutters closed against the afternoon light, saw the divan with the faded print coverlet, and threw himself on to it. He lay there on his stomach, his legs sticking out at one end. Baumgartner could smell his body in its unwashed rankness; the cats sniffed, too, delicately, the small triangles of their noses creasing with distaste, perhaps mistrust.

There was no further movement, or sound from the visitor. Baumgartner stood waiting for a while, then turned around with a sigh and went to the kitchen end of the room. He began to clear away the remains of the cats’ meals, rolling them all up in a paper bag and carrying them over to a plastic bucket under the sink where he dropped them. Immediately, the livelier of his cats – a scrawny rascal called Leo, and his black rival, Teufel, ran to the bucket, stood on their hind legs, dropped in their noses and pulled out the fish tails and strips of raw lights that he had bundled away. Spreading them on the floor, they ate with greater gusto than they would from china saucers.
Ach
, such naughty ones, Baumgartner smiled indulgently.

He washed the steel knife and put it back in its place on the breadboard. He wiped the table-top with a damp napkin. The familiar labour calmed him, and he glanced at the sleeping boy, thinking he must be overwrought: if he had been walking barefoot through India and seeing such sights as the one he described in Benares, then it was only to be expected. The boy needed sleep, a bath, and then perhaps he would want to eat. After all, the room was not stinking so badly as to keep him from sleeping in it, Baumgartner noted wryly, and went across to a cupboard made of wire-netting in which he kept his own foodstuff free from the cats and the flies. He rummaged around in a basket of vegetables to see what he had. Ah-ha. Yes, some bits of vegetables left from his last effort at marketing, and in the tins – he picked them up and shook them
– a
little rice and lentils rustled reassuringly: enough, perhaps, for two plates of food. He would wash them and cook them and be very quiet so the boy would not be disturbed but sleep and get all the rest he wanted.

Then he caught himself: why did he bother about this stranger, unknown to him till this morning? He had felt no slightest stir of nostalgia when Farrokh had pointed out his fair head lolling helplessly on the table, or when he had glimpsed the blonde hairs gleaming on the wrists under the metal bracelet. He was not fair himself, nor had his mother been; only his father had had light hair of that kind. Baumgartner did not search out Europeans in Bombay for company. Why, he could not tell, but it was years since he had ceased to crave the sound of his own language, the feel of it on his tongue. Truth to tell, his years in confinement with fellow Germans in the internment camp had killed that need, or desire. Looking back, he saw that it was then he had decided that he would not wish to live in a pack, that he did not need the pack. Gradually, the language was slipping away from him, now almost as unfamiliar as the feel and taste of English words or the small vocabulary of bastardised Hindustani that he had picked up over the years. It was only Lotte who kept him in touch with the German tongue – but that was not why he went to see her. He saw Lotte not because she was from Germany but because she belonged to the India of his own experience; hers was different in many ways but still they shared enough to be comfortable with each other, prickly and quick-tempered but comfortable as brother and sister are together. But from other Europeans in Bombay – and there was a fair-sized population – he kept away, discreetly. He did not like their probing questions, their determination to discover his background, his circumstances, his past and present and future, before they accepted him. Why should Baumgartner be so secretive about his circumstances? He did not know – he shrugged – but it was so. He felt a fastidiousness about his private affairs and preferred to be either with someone who took it entirely for granted, as Lotte did, or else showed no comprehension and
no
curiosity, like his Indian friends – Indian acquaintances, he corrected himself, because – to be perfectly truthful – they stopped short of being ‘friends’. To be quite candid, had he any at all?

The need to be candid made Baumgartner look down into his lap – he was sitting on a kitchen chair, waiting for the
pish-pash
to cook, and now he bent down and picked up the nearest cat – there was always one nearby. Holding its fur to his chest, he closed his eyes as a young man might with a photograph of his beloved held close. Here was all the friendship he needed – or wanted. ‘Mmm, mmm,’ he nuzzled into the grey fur, ‘
du Alte, du Gute, du
.’ The cat growled a little, then began to purr, kneading his thighs with its claws, eyes narrowed into slits, and Baumgartner, laughing because the claws tickled, rumpled his fur the way he liked, drawing out louder and louder purrs till they almost deafened.

He sat there, quite contentedly, seeing the afternoon light at the kitchen window dim and withdraw, the building across the lane impress its shadow over it like a blind. The sound of the traffic rose to a crescendo as crowds left offices and went home in a cacophony of sound that entered the high room and reverberated.

Baumgartner got up and began to lay the table. It seemed very unnatural to him to put down two plates, two spoons, search for napkins, for a bottle of beer and an opener. This was not how he lived, Baumgartner the solitary. He had had enough of communal living in that camp to last a lifetime, he explained to himself and the cats. And yet he had led home this unlikeable lout in the disgracefully short shorts and the frayed shirt he wore tied at the waist like a girl. He had even permitted him to lie down on the divan and cooked a meal for him. Not because he was German, no, but simply because he was in need. Well, the man on the pavement downstairs, the family that lived there, was in need too; did he think of asking them up here and cooking for them? Baumgartner, Baumgartner, he reproved himself, tired and hungry and sad at the way the day had gone, picking open a scab long formed,
revealing
the rawness, the ugliness underneath. Farrokh had taken the boy for a German – correctly – and taken it for granted that Baumgartner, another German, would volunteer to take care of him – again correctly, for Baumgartner had. Or had he? He did not remember volunteering, and yet the boy was here. Certainly he had not refused Farrokh or prevented the boy from entering. As he would have had the drunk in the street been concerned. Why? Baumgartner, Baumgartner, he sighed, ask your blood why it is so, only the blood knows.

And that was stupid. Baumgartner slapped himself on the wrist, hard. Stupid, stupid, to talk of blood, thinking it was blood he had in common with this ruffian. It was not so. And he would turn the boy out to prove it was not so. Give him some food, then turn him out. What, at night? But why not? The boy was evidently used to living in the streets, would feel at home on them, would not need Baumgartner or the domesticity which he had insulted – so why suffer him?

The cats stirred at the sound of spoons and plates, some set up a plaintive miaowing as though they had not been fed already, complaining in the calculated tones of street beggars, or spoilt children. Baumgartner only smiled fondly at these sounds he loved, but they made the boy on the divan stir. After throwing himself around for a while, with grunts of protest, he finally sat up on the edge of the divan, his head hanging down on to his lap, rubbing his eyes ferociously.

After watching for a while, Baumgartner ventured to ask, ‘Had a little rest? You would like to eat something now? I have a little food here ready –’

The boy made a grinding sound with his teeth, ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it in strands. ‘Is a bathroom here?’ he asked.

Baumgartner pointed at the door in the corner by the divan and the boy stumbled off. Then re-emerged to pick up his rucksack which he carried in, to Baumgartner’s astonishment. After a while, he came out once more and asked for a box of matches in a low, distracted mumble. Snatching it from
Baumgartner,
he returned to what seemed to be turning into his fortress. Baumgartner was a little puzzled, then felt impatient, knowing his
pish-pash
to be drying up to a point beyond the stage when it would still be edible. He busied himself like a housewife, adding bits of butter to it, going around opening windows, turning on lights, smoothing out the coverlet on the divan, but still the boy would not appear.

He tried to ignore the ominous silence that grew and expanded in the bathroom. He sat down at the table with the dish of
pish-pash
and the bottle of beer, clasping his hands together and determined to be firm and get rid of the boy as soon as he appeared. ‘
Ja, raus, raus
,’ he was muttering to himself and to the cats, when the door was flung open and the boy strode out, seeming somehow a foot or two taller, his shoulders broader, his hair and eyes flashing, in every way increased, grown more vivid and insistent. He seemed lit up, electrified, so that whatever had been dormant now seemed awake – and screaming.

Baumgartner had lifted the beer bottle when he heard the door open, ready to pour out, but now he put it down and gaped in astonishment as the boy swung himself over to the table, laughing, his arms flapping on either side, then threw himself on to a stool across from Baumgartner and sprawled there in all directions.

‘Ah-ha, so is the old man’s dinner party, eh?’ he snickered, slurring his words as though he had been drinking behind the door, and yet there was no odour of liquor and Baumgartner had to conclude that was not what it was. He smiled uncertainly, reached out for the boy’s plate and filled it, apologising, ‘A little
pish-pash
only. It will do? I have some more – and beer.’

The boy lunged forward and snatched the bottle from Baumgartner’s hands, then – to his dismay – slammed it down on the table so hard that froth spewed from it and flew everywhere over the table like suds. His hand remained clenched around the bottle as though he wanted to crush it into a handful of splinters.