Baumgartner's Bombay (6 page)

‘
Hoppe, hoppe, Reiter
,

wenn er fällt, dann schreit er
.

Fällt er in die Hecken
,

fressen ihn die Schnecken
,

fällt er in den Klee
,

schreit er gleich: O weh
. . .’

Another time, when triumph had come his way, he had not been able to accept. The school was holding its Christmas party. For days before, the class had cut out stars of silver paper, linked chains of pink crêpe paper, fashioned figures out of blonde straw and raffia, and watched Fräulein Klutke pin them to the tree on the dais. The night before the party, however, fairies had come with gifts, she informed them, and there were the unexpected presents hung from the branches of the fir tree in wrappings of red and yellow tissue paper. Now the children stood in rows beside the piano, threw back their heads and roared:

‘
O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum
,

Wie grün sind deine Blätter!
’

Then there were the buns, the mugs of cocoa to be downed, if the tight little muscle in the throat allowed such a passage. For Hugo’s part, it did not; he held the bun in one hand, the mug of cocoa in the other, but his eyes and heart and mouth remained fixed on the tree glittering in its finery, the candle flames darting at the shiny surfaces, turning it to a thing of fire and stars fallen out of the sky. Most of all, they remained fixed on its topmost ornament – a great ball of red glass in which all the light gathered together and danced, tantalising him as nothing else ever had, this ball that was made of fire, that could not be played with, only regarded. He clutched his thumbs inside his fists, thinking that if he owned that red glass globe, then he was the owner of the whole world, like a magician.

Uneaten, undrunk, his treat had to be replaced on the table for now all the children were being ringed around the tree, and Fräulein was climbing on to a stool to unpin and hand out the gifts. ‘Walter Loewe!’ she called, holding out a bulky parcel from which a horse’s head on a long stick looked at its new owner with a long-lashed wink, and then, ‘Annelise Hauptmann!’ So the children were called out one by one to receive the presents that their parents had sent in for them – though this neither Hugo knew nor his parents. He stood waiting to the end of the whole roll-call, locked into a terrible urgency to pass water, and now Fräulein was looking at him, the only one without a Christmas gift, and now she was reaching up to the top of the prickly fir tree, now she had her hands around the glass globe, quite delicately as if she too saw its extraordinary worth, now she was smiling directly at him and calling – yes, she called, ‘Hugo Baumgartner’, she did.

And Hugo could not move. Not one step. Not even his hands would stretch forwards. Instead, he locked them behind his back. Then, when the other children began to chant, ‘Hugo, it’s for you – it’s yours, Hugo,’ he hung his head and stared at his shoes, for nothing, nothing would persuade him that the twinkling glass globe was his. He knew that it was not – that Fräulein Klutke had made it up on seeing that there was no other gift for him. The other children began to push and shove him towards the waiting Fräulein but this brought him so close to tears that she was obliged to call out, ‘Stop pushing him, children. If he doesn’t want it, we shall find another child to take it. Who is the smallest? Elizabeth Klein?’ and she handed it to her favourite.

Then the agony was over and he could collapse into the dark ditch of his shame. What was the shame? The sense that he did not belong to the picture-book world of the fir tree, the gifts and the celebration? But no one had said that. Was it just that he sensed he did not belong to the radiant, the triumphant of the world? A strange sensation, surely, for a child. He could not understand it himself, or explain it. It baffled him, and
frightened
him even – as if he realised that at that moment he had wilfully chosen to turn from the step up and taken the step down.

‘
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf!

Da draussen gehn zwei Schaf!

Ein schwarzes und ein weisses
,

und wenn das Kind nicht schlafen will
,

dann kommt das Schwarz und beist es

Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf!
’

It would have been difficult to return to school after such an ignominious scene. Of course there were the Christmas holidays in between, when the children might have forgotten, but Hugo had not and that was what mattered.

Then, as it happened, he never returned to that school. In the new year, speaking to him with an artificial, brittle lightness of manner, his mother took him on the tram a long, long way into the city instead, on a grey, grizzling morning, with office-goers and shop and factory-workers hemming them in with folds of dark, damp wool, all the way to the other end of the city, he felt, and then delivered him up to what seemed a warehouse with no windows or lights, only a mass of squirming, frantic children and a teacher who had a face like curdled milk in a pan and was called Reb Benjamin; Hugo recoiled from his grease-lined collar and patched and odorous jacket; strange, large volumes lay open on his desk from which he read in a harsh and melodramatic tone in a language Hugo had never heard before. The boys who shared a wooden bench with Hugo spent the morning trying to shove him off so that he had to grip the edge of the seat to keep from falling off. ‘
Was ist los
, Baumgartner? What’s the matter?’ the teacher asked. ‘Is it the bathroom you need already?’ and the children grew pinched and blue in the face with laughter.

It was in this school for Jewish children, oddly enough, that Hugo first had a remark directed at his nose. When he went
out
into the yard where the mud was frozen and broke under his shoes, he heard around him a chant that came from all the children as they jumped, hopped and clapped their hands to keep warm: ‘
Baumgartner, Baum, hat ein Nase wie ein Daum!
Baumgartner’s dumb, has a nose like a thumb!’

He fell to fingering it nervously, trying to discover the relation between his nose and his thumb, a habit that never left him.

When his mother, standing and waiting at the gate for him, asked him how it had been, he said nothing. He pushed out his lip, frowned and looked away. One morning in the school had taught him the tactics for surviving,

‘
Hänschen klein, geht allein
,

in die weite Welt hinein
,

Stock und Hut stehn ihm gut
,

ist ganz wohlgemut
.

Doch die Mutter weinet sehr
,

hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr
. . .’

She woke him in the mornings, a grey shawl over her shoulders, switching on the harsh white electric light and making him wince. She brought him his shoes that she had polished because Berthe had not returned and not been replaced either. At night, his mother’s gentle stories of the Red Rose and the White Rose lulled him to sleep too quickly so that he woke a little later and missed Berthe’s stories of war and violence that had kept his nights lively. She would have been able better to share his experiences at the new school, he felt. His mother was in any case too busy doing Berthe’s work; he resented seeing her arms red with the soapwater in the tubs of washing, and he was distracted by seeing her leap up from the table to fetch dishes from the kitchen and carry them out. His father, too, frowned and fidgeted when she did that. ‘Can’t you sit through a meal?’ he complained, and she threw him an exasperated look that said, as clearly as words, ‘And who will serve us then?’

‘
Es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

in unserem Haus herum, didum
,

es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

in unserem Haus herum
.

Er rüttelt sich, er schüttelt sich
,

er wirft sein Säckchen hinter sich
,

es tanzt ein Bi-ba-butzemann

in unserem Haus herum
.’

Perhaps because she could not cope with all the work, the apartment gradually lost its waxy gloss, its air of comfortable opulence. So many small economies combined to construct a shabbiness that one could not quite put one’s finger on what was at fault – everything had lost, everything seemed diminished. When Hugo loudly sucked a stick of barley sugar he had bought on the way back from school, no one objected – there was no dark expensive chocolate to give him instead. When he pulled out an old red woollen cap she had not allowed him to wear earlier, he found no one objected to it any longer, and was mystified – studied the loose knitting and the mothy texture to see what transformation had taken place to make it acceptable now.

Downstairs in the showroom all was not well either. Hugo was not aware but his father knew that the wealthy Jews who had patronised the place, buying whole suites of furniture when a daughter married or a son set up house, no longer were interested in anything so difficult to transport as furniture. They had put their money into moveable assets, or else emigrated – to England, to Holland, to Canada. As for the ‘Aryans’, they must have had their own shops and dealers to patronise, they did not come to Baumgartner’s. The long yellow vans no longer lined up at the door for deliveries, and the delivery boys and the cart drivers vanished from Hugo’s boyhood, taking with them the secret pleasures of terror and suspicion. There was no one to flick the dust out of the gilt scrolls around the mirrors or keep the table-tops of mahogany glowing. In Hugo’s dreams, the brilliant mirrors tipped
out
their highly coloured and illuminated reflections like pools of water from unsteady basins, then slipped out of their frames and crashed. But on the floor there were no shards of glass, only soft heaps of dust, like cloth bags filled with baker’s rolls, on which he trod warily for his father was angry if he wandered in with questions that he could not answer. He sat at his desk in the backroom, biting his moustache with anger. The telephone no longer rang.

Almost his only visitor was the timber merchant from Hamburg who had always supplied Herr Baumgartner with quality wood for his furniture. Once or twice he was brought up to supper. Hugo’s mother would be pale with the effort to cover the table with dishes and lift off their lids to reveal meat and fish in gravy and sauces. The Gentleman from Hamburg, far from being impressed, wagged his finger at her and said, ‘
Nein, nein
, this is not the way to live any longer. We must learn to save, to be sparse, to prepare – hah? You understand? It is no longer easy to find customers for Herr Baumgartner’s beautiful furniture, and let me tell you – it will not grow easier.’ But he did not like Frau Baumgartner to look dismayed or frown with worry. When she did, he would spring up and go to the piano and say, ‘Come, play for us. Let us have a song as in the old days. All might still go well.’ How could she sing after that? She sat with her napkin pressed to her mouth, choking, and Hugo stared at them as though they were actors on a stage, he the uncomprehending spectator.

Yet they were not as poor as others were. Unlike the men who searched the dustbins for chicken bones and slept on benches under sheets of
Berliner Zeitung
, or the women who stood on the streets because there was nowhere else to go, their scent reeking of cheapness, the Baumgartners did not starve. Somehow Herr Baumgartner brought in money; sometimes from the racecourse to which he still went, whenever the Gentleman from Hamburg came and sometimes even without him – but without that debonair air of twirling his moustache or his ivory-topped cane – merely thoughtfully, worriedly or
guiltily.
Hugo no longer asked to accompany him; he did not like the looks their neighbours threw them when they left the house, and knew it would be worse on the racecourse; he wished his father did not go. He sat on the window-seat, watching, till he returned, and then left the room so as not to hear his parents’ conversation.

‘But Siegfried,’ he once heard his mother whisper, ‘in this we are not alone.’

‘Who is there? Who is there?’ his father asked dramatically, not whispering at all. He was opening and closing his fists as though to catch a fly.

His mother named them but, like flies, they seemed to escape and disappear. Her own parents had left years ago, her father to take up a chair in German in a university in a northern country. Hugo had known them on those brief visits his mother made to her home town, and thought them like two flakes of grey ash upon their hearth, weighed down by the weight of the books they read to him. They had a great fondness for reading aloud, Hugo none for listening. Once when he cried in protest, his grandmother rose, went to the kitchen and returned with a tomato. She held it out with a smiling certainty that a small boy could not but like a tomato. Her daughter, knowing better, smiled and took it from her hand, saying she would keep it for later. In the garden, tomatoes glistened like bubbles of rusty paint on the blackened stalks that held them up in the rain. At the
shabat
dinner, candles stood aslant in the pewter candlesticks and wax ran like a gutter on to the tablecloth. Hugo was pleased when he heard his father refuse to join his book-reading, prayer-saying parents-in-law in their provincial university in a distant country.

‘What – you think they will have room for me?’ he answered, pawing the ground as if to break through the boards and gallop off.

He did go, on a visit, to his own parents, still on their farm which he had fled as a boy, only to return and inform them that the times were bad there as well: the land was stripped, they
were
starving, eating roots now that the potatoes had gone; no wonder his sister Esther had left, with her husband, a horsedealer, for Paris where she was trying to get tickets for America. His mother, who had told Hugo about the churns of butter, the pans of milk – could not believe. ‘And their hens, Siegfried? The eggs? The cows? The horses? And wheat?’ and Hugo joined in by asking, ‘Have they been robbed? Or was there a fire?’ till his father shouted an order for silence.