Baumgartner's Bombay (7 page)

‘
Eija, Popeija
,

was raschelt im Stroh?

Die Gänse gehn barfuss

und haben kein Schuh
.

Der Schuster hat Leder
,

kein Leisten dazu
,

drum gehen die lieben Gänschen

und haben keine Schuh
.’

In the night the noises on the street were so hideous that Hugo stirred but only to slip deeper into his bed. He woke when his mother sank silently down at his bedside. ‘Don’t look,’ she told him, ‘don’t get up’, and he obediently pulled up his quilt, burrowed under its protection and breathed in the darkness. Next morning he saw the letters
JUDE
painted in red on the showroom window. His father was standing in the hall and staring out, immobile. He made no move to wipe it off. When Hugo spoke to him, he answered in a kind of hiss that frightened Hugo so much, he ran.

The next night the noise increased – glass splintered, crashed, slid all over the floor in slanting, shining heaps. Men lifted tables, commodes,
armoires, chaises-longues
and the mirrors off the walls: it sounded as if the house, the whole street were being evacuated. His father stood at the window upstairs and watched, cursing, but his mother held Hugo by his arm and would not let him go near. ‘If they see you, they will stone you,’ she warned, sternly enough to stall him. ‘Hide, we must hide, Siegfried.’ Hugo found himself
shamefully
willing to do so, even the broom cupboard seemed a haven on that night.

Herr Weiss from upstairs rang their doorbell. When they did not open the door, he called through the letter-box, ‘It is only I, Weiss. Frau Baumgartner, have no fear. Will you not come up to us? My wife has sent me to fetch you, you will be safe with us.’ Frau Baumgartner looked to Herr Baumgartner for a reply; he made none but stood at the window as if turned to salt.

The next day they came to take him away. It happened very quickly, very efficiently – the police car drew up at the curb, stilling its honking hooter, the stormtroopers in brown walked in, simply lifted Herr Baumgartner off his chair and carried him out; the hooting began again and the police car disappeared. Hugo might have been playing a game with his toy soldiers, marching them up, then marching them down. It was only that his father had disappeared that was not play, not accountable. For two weeks there was no news. All day Hugo waited in the flat while his mother ran from one police station to another to find him, or news of him, returning with her face and hands blue with cold. Hugo boiled water in the kettle so she could hold a mug with hot water in it. To warm her fingers. They did not speak, or look at each other.

Till he returned, a fortnight later, from Dachau. In that early year, it was still possible to leave Dachau. His mother ran to greet him with her arms thrown up in an abandon of relief, but his father turned away, he did not want her embrace, or Hugo’s. He turned his back to them, shoulders hunched in his thin green jacket, and did not want to speak. He would say nothing about Dachau. When they came near him, he began to shiver – the shiver started in the back of his neck, making his head jerk like a hen’s, and then ran down into his shoulders so that they shook. He had to go to bed and they pulled on quilt after quilt, trying to make him stop shivering. Even his face twitched on the pillow, pulled in every direction. Eventually he turned on to his side and stared at the wall. Now and then a
remnant
of that shiver made the quilts suddenly heave, subside.

The Gentleman from Hamburg came. He sat in the chair beside the Prussian helmet ashtray and the onyx cigarette-case that everyone knew was the father’s chair. His right leg lifted over his left knee, he made expansive gestures as he explained it all to Frau Baumgartner, smoothing the air before him with his manicured hands. When his voice boomed too loudly, Frau Baumgartner looked worriedly at the door to the bedroom, and he dropped his voice in consideration. ‘You see?’ he said softly, leaning forward. ‘You agree? You will persuade him to sell?’

‘
Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen
,

gib sie wieder her!

Sonst wird dich der Jäger holen

mit dem Schiessgewehr
.’

They sat together on a narrow seat at the back of the tram, surrounded by coffin-faces, watery and grey from having been indoors all winter. While his mother drooped, as though still weak from the lack of sunshine, Hugo himself was ebullient, excited by the names of the streets on their white signposts – Larchenweg, Terrassenstrasse – by seeing new foliage a pale yellow on the roadside trees, the women in elegant coats walking their dachshunds on leather leashes, the delivery boys on bicycles with baskets loaded with goods, the bells ringing as clear and sharp as cracked glass in the spring air. Here the sun was not only tangible but visible, a jolly blur both circular and incandescent over the rooftops, as it never was in their own dreary street. The warmth of it on the tram roof made him itch inside his coat that had in any case grown too small for him and felt like diseased fur after a winter’s perpetual use. ‘Don’t be so impatient, child,’ she warned, ‘it is a long way to the Grünewald.’

They were both travel-sick when they got there, but the Friedmanns seemed to have anticipated that: on the wooden
table
under the cherry tree in their small garden stood a tray with tall glasses and a jug. They were made to sit there in the sunshine that slanted in through the flowering branches (‘Come and see the cherry tree flowering once more,’ they had written) while the young Frau Friedmann ran to fetch cakes and the old Frau Friedmann sat with her mittened hands on her lap and smiled at him coaxingly, saying, ‘In a little while Albert will come home and he will take Hugo to see the swans.’

Hugo did not want to be taken away; he wanted to sit under the black twigs and the white blossom, and drink slowly from the glass of blackberry wine and nibble another biscuit dusted with cinnamon, and see the remarkable sight of his mother flowering in the company of her friends, the friends who she had been in the habit of slipping off to see and visit alone when his father would take Hugo out for a few hours; somehow she had not liked them to meet these friends of her girlhood, from her home town where they had been neighbours and old Dr Friedmann a colleague of her father’s at the university. Then Hugo had not cared; he had revelled in the masculine atmosphere created by his father – the somewhat roguish, slightly inebriated air of gentlemen on the town. Today he sat on the garden bench, taking in the sight of a pair of white butterflies lighting upon a grey bush, the cherry blossoms falling silently on the table, and listening to his mother’s voice lift and fly with lightheartedness and relief, and he wondered why she did not come oftener if it made her so happy. Laughing, she was saying, ‘And Adele, the time we went to the Max Reinhardt production together – it was
Lohengrin
wasn’t it? And we had gone straight from school, in our navy blue pinafores, and were sitting up with the pigeons, in the cheapest seats, when that gentleman in tails and a top hat came running up the aisle, gave us two tickets and said’ – she imitated his voice – ‘“Excuse me, Fräulein – I am forced to leave early – my seats are free – will you not kindly take these tickets and enjoy the music from a good seat.”’ Adele joined her in the disbelieving laughter, and nodded. ‘
Ja
,’ she told
Hugo,
‘and we went up, up, up, right to the front, right up to the stage nearly, and sat there amongst the ladies in their furs and the men in their tails, wearing our navy blue pinafores. And mine had chalk dust all over it.’ She raised her hands to her red cheeks as she laughed at the remembered embarrassment, now become a treasure. Hugo, instead, remembered the figure of his father, left behind in a wrapping of blankets; he felt uneasy, sensing a rift, a break between his parents that might have existed for all these years but of which he was only now really aware. He kept his eye on his mother, suddenly so much younger and, he felt, exposed and vulnerable.

Then the son Albert appeared and, at old Frau Friedmann’s insistence, took Hugo and their beautiful King Charles spaniel, who was of course called Charles, out of the little gate at the bottom of the garden and down a sandy path crisscrossed by the roots of the pine trees to the lake to see the swans. Hugo was a little hurt by the way his mother eagerly saw him off and turned to her friends as though she had been waiting for this moment. By the lake’s edge he watched Albert break some stale rolls and toss them over the water towards the swans that swerved and glided towards them and noted the way their feathers knitted together like chain-mail, holding off the drops of black and icy water, but somehow they reminded him of his father’s rococo mirrors, gliding as they did upon the shining glass of their reflections in the still water, and he was silenced by the knowledge of their transience. Strangely, Albert’s thoughts seemed to have run on the same lines for he told the swans, ‘
Ja
, take these rolls – they may be the last we have to give you.’ Then he turned to Hugo and said, a little sharply, ‘Your shoes are getting wet – don’t go so close to the water,’ and Hugo realised he was bored with his company and therefore refused when asked, ‘Shall I take you out in a boat? Would you like to row?’ For a while they clambered over the rocks and roots around the lake, a streaming Charles running ahead of them, tearing their trouser legs on blackberry thorns while Albert told him of the deer that came to drink at the lake and the hares in the forest. To Hugo it seemed he was
stumbling
through the illustrations of a book of fairy stories, the forest where Hansel and Gretel followed a trail of breadcrumbs, or in which Sleeping Beauty lay hidden by a wall of thorns – beautiful, hushed and vaguely sinister.

Holding aside a thorny branch, Albert stood still, looking at the lake on which the fir trees had laid their long shadows in strokes of black paint. He said, as if making conversation, ‘But if we will ever see them again, I – really – don’t – know,’ and then led the way up the sandy path to the garden gate, his shoulders sloping and looking as dejected as the wet and muddy dog.

They found the garden overtaken by a chilly shadow; the ladies had gone in. Inside a room that seemed to Hugo like a peasant’s with its rough timber furniture, its bowls of garden flowers, its painted china and worn rugs, he found his mother in a flushed state of animation at a cottage piano on which she was playing a duet with the young Frau Friedmann, a dark woman with two long plaits of red hair over her shawl. She smiled at Hugo when he came in but did not stop playing. Instead, she sang, together with her friend:

‘
Kennst du das Land

wo die Zitronen blühn?

Im dunkeln Laub

die Gold-Orangen glühn
. . .

Dahin! Dahin!

Möcht ich mit dir
,

O mein Geliebter ziehn!
’

Hugo stood under the globe lamp of red paper that hung from the ceiling, transfixed by the reckless gaiety in her voice, the words that had a wild gypsy ring to them and filled him with unease and foreboding.

Later that evening, when they sat at the peasant table, eating a potato soup and some rather watery rolls for which old Frau Friedmann apologised over and over again while the younger simply laughed deprecatingly, the talk that lapped around the stolidly munching Hugo turned to new poets and their work. Frau Friedmann described a strange Indian poet whose work
she
had been reading, a sage with a long white beard and long hair and piercing, hypnotic eyes. ‘A sage from Bengal,’ she explained to Hugo’s entranced mother, while Hugo puzzled over the name which he associated with
bengalische Lichte
, the fireworks he had seen exploding in the dark on some festive night while wrapped comfortingly in his father’s arms. After the table was cleared, a book of poems was brought for them to see; it had a pale blue cover and its title was meaningless to Hugo –
Gitanjali
– but he leant across to look at the photograph to which they turned and found the poet-sage’s face as the old lady described. Somehow its outlandishness connected with the song he had just heard his mother singing, and Hugo squirmed at the unfamiliarity of it all. He thought it had to do with poetry – an element in his mother’s life that he understood as little as his father did, something they put down to her youth in a university town while they were two masculine city-dwellers. Reminded of his father, he felt an urge to return to him, to what was his own world – or what remained of it – but heard his mother say, ‘Now Adele, show me your own work, your new verse, it is yours I want to see, and Albert’s’, and then ribbon-bound portfolios of their verse were brought out and read aloud, verses about linden trees in spring, about swallows in autumn skies, about butterflies, frost, children playing and, of course, the flowering cherry tree.

They might have gone on all night, intoxicated by their views of spring and beauty and art – one poem was dedicated to the Indian sage and was called ‘On Reading Tagore’ – while Hugo stood at the window, watching the greying of the light till a desperation overtook him: he could not allow his mother to continue with her pretence that she had returned to her youth, that her adulthood could be ignored. Seeing her so childishly irresponsible and irresponsibly blithe, he was driven to an adult decision. Turning around, he saw them listening admiringly to Albert reading a poem about the deer by the lake that he called ‘The Kaiser of the Woods’, and blurted out ‘Mama,
komm
, we must go back to Papa now.’

In the tram, lifting her face out of a fold of her cape, she accused him in mortified tones, ‘How could you, Hugo, in the middle of such a beautiful poem?’

Then, the door opening, her scream: ‘
Was ist los
? What’s happened? Hugo,
das Gas
!’ They ran, shedding coats and capes on the way, down the passage to the kitchen. The door was shut but there was no doubt, the sickening, sweet, cloudy odour poured through its cracks. They threw themselves on it as though the gas were a physical, concrete barrier, and were astonished when the door burst open. The gas was like cushions and quilts of anaesthesia piled up, all around, swaddling the limp figure that sprawled on the linoleum, the body sagging out of the open oven door. When they lifted him, the head waggled helplessly out of their arms. For a moment, his open eyes misled them to cry out in relief but in a moment it turned to a wail.