Baumgartner's Bombay (14 page)

The unease only increased, till one day the letter he was handed at the desk on his return from yet another journey, turned out to be his own stamped ‘
Adresse Unbekannt
’.
Address
Unknown? Now what was this? Had she moved? Where to? Why? He must send a cable, to Herr Pfuehl, to the landlady of the boarding-house on Grenadierstrasse, to his mother. Rushing out of the hotel, he ordered the taxi-driver to take him to the nearest post office. It was shut. They dashed to the main post office on Dalhousie Square. At a grimy counter, watched by a betel-chewing clerk, he filled in one telegraph form after another, perspiring profusely.

Gratefully he let himself be taken to a club that night by some of the other inhabitants of the hotel. At the round table in a room almost pitch-dark but brilliant with the noise of the band, he drank gin, not beer. Someone brought a big blonde woman in a white dress to the table. ‘Here, someone from your own country,’ was the introduction and they looked at each other warily. ‘Lola, from Prince’s,’ laughed the young men who jumped to their feet in excitement. She raised a round, plump arm and patted her hair which was thick, frizzy and yellow, a straw mat on her red, ringed neck. In those raw, sore rings of her neck, so like his own, he saw their kinship. When they put her on a chair next to his, he stammered, ‘How came you here?’ in the German to which he was no longer accustomed. But hers was worse.

Prince’s. The band played music that was like treacle, or tinsel. It filled the eyes and ears and suffocated. In that drowning well of sly, subdued light and raucous, unmodulated music, Lola danced, blonde and pink and white like a tattered doll. She danced with a trim bony woman who had orange hair, violet eyelids and purple nails. Together they danced and made eyes at the men who crowded around the dance floor as if it were a circus ring. The men climbed on to the tables, on to each other’s shoulders, whistled and clapped till they fell over. Like possessed marionettes the girls struck the floor with their heels, swung their hips and gestured with their hands, the one with yellow hair and the one with orange, singing together:

‘Lola and Lily

are fifteen and free,

Lola and Lily –’

and, together with the bandleader, all the men in the audience roared:

‘O give them to me!’

The first time she visited him in his hotel room, she flung herself on to his bed, kicked off her red sandals, twiddled her brightly painted toes, and laughed, ‘Lola! They call me that, those
Dummkopf
people – don’t even know a Lola has to have black hair, black eyes, skin like a magnolia flower. To them, you can have blonde hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks and still be Lola.’

‘What were you at home then?’ he smiled from the chair by the window where he sat smoking, both pleased and uneasy at her intrusion, ushered in by the smirking waiter from downstairs. He found himself enjoying the feel of German in his mouth, as familiar a taste as brown bread or beer, but puzzled by her accent, to his Berliner ear slurred and rasping.

‘What was I at home?’ she laughed, lifting up the mat of strawy hair from her neck in that characteristic gesture which he now saw she made to show off her plump arms and the line of her breasts, raised under the cotton material printed with red flowers and green parrots. ‘Lulu – in Germany, I was Lulu.’

He gave her a wink. ‘Lulu is not German.’

She turned on him angrily. ‘What Germany are you speaking of, you turnip-nosed
Jude
? My mother might have named me Lotte but once I became a dancer, I was Lulu.’

‘And when was that?’ he asked, willing to forgive her her little outburst for the sake of her friendliness, her German tongue.

‘
Ach
, I was ten, twelve, daughter of show people, part of a show team.’ She pointed her toes, showed him the arc of her foot, with a kind of professional pride. ‘My mother sang opera – she was Madam Butterfly when I was in her womb. Can you
not
guess? Of course I wanted to be someone in my own right, wanted to act. In a theatre. But once any director saw me dance, he forgot about my acting. I could have played any role – always was a monkey,
ein Affe
– Sarah Bernhardt was my goddess, but my parents had taught me to dance and dance I had to. So Lulu I remained. A good name for a dancer,
nicht wahr
?’

He smiled in agreement, and got up to pour her a glass of gin from a bottle on his dressing-table: it was too early to go down for a beer, the waiters in the garden below were dragging the chairs off the tables with loud crashes, laughing and abusing each other in a friendly way, like noisy birds. Handing the drink to her he asked, ‘And the other – who is your partner? What is
her
real name?’

‘My partner? Who – that Lily-of-the-valley?’ Lotte made a grotesque face, then drank a gulp of gin that made her smile again. ‘Lily-of-Shanghai she was in the past. And before that, at home, she was – she confessed to me when I saw it on a letter that came for her – just Gisela. Gisela the Goose Girl, I teased her when I handed her the letter. She was
furious
, I can tell you. She had told everyone in Calcutta she was Giselle from Russia, but then I popped up and told everyone I had seen her show advertised on street posters in Shanghai where she was Lily, one more Lily amongst hundreds of Lilies in hundreds of cabarets and bars, ha-ha!’ Lotte flung her legs up in the air and did a little flutter of her feet in mid-air. ‘But when I went to the Grand Hotel for a job –’

‘How? What brought you here, to Calcutta?’ Baumgartner could not help interrupting.

‘
Ach
, don’t ask me that – if I start telling you we will be sitting here all night, all day. I was on a boat, it brought me up that drain they call the Hooghly and it dumped me here in the mud of Calcutta. I had to earn a living,
nicht wahr
? How? By dancing, as I had done since I was ten, twelve. Some sailors I met in a bar took me to the Grand. There was Gisela. She didn’t like me barging in, I can tell you, but the proprietor, he was getting a little bored with the Dying Swan, he wanted
something
new. What is better than one girl?’ She poked Baumgartner’s leg with her toe, playfully. ‘Huh? Tell me. You don’t know?
Ach, du
poor
Dummkopf
–
two
girls, of course. Even that idiot proprietor knew that. He thought at once: ah-ha, now I will have two dancers, twins, one in pink, one in blue, like that, and everyone will love it of course. And poor Gisela, she had to put up with me if she wanted to keep her job. She wanted it all right – a good job to have in this city.’ She closed one eye in a wink as loud as a smack. ‘Give me a cigarette, Hugo.’

Baumgartner ordered cakes for both of them, at a table in Flury’s. The proprietor was Swiss, they said, and the pastries were very fine. The girls wolfed down one after the other, licking cream off their fingers, quarrelling over the cherries, rolling their eyes at the chocolates. Baumgartner watched, over a cigarette, pleased even if they paid him no attention, eating and talking only to each other, almost incomprehensibly.

No sooner were the pastries gone than Gisela started to hum in a bored way and look around the restaurant for some more interesting patron. (In the ladies’ room at the back, adjusting her garters, she had said, ‘Now, really, Lotte – this is going too far. German he may be but who wants a German just when war is going to break out? And such a turnip, Lotte – a
Jiddischer
turnip too.’) Even at that hour of the morning, she had painted her eyelids violet, her cheeks carmine, her lips purple and wore on her wrists and fingers a collection of intricately cut glass – yellow, blue, green. Baumgartner, stealing glances at her, felt she could not possibly be from Germany, she was altogether a product of the tropics, the overheated East, a parakeet or macaw. But when she glanced across at an immense Russian at the next table and said, ‘
Wo kauft sie dann ihr Brot
– I wonder where she buys her bread?’ he had to laugh, it was a remark straight off the Berlin streets.

In no time she had spotted an acquaintance from the night before, a wealthy race-going Marwari businessman. ‘
Excusez-moi, mes amis
,’ she hissed at Lotte and Baumgartner, ‘but he
gave
me a pearl once – this size – and has the best tips for the races,’ and sliding away from their table, she flew across the restaurant to join more promising company.

‘That Gisi – Goose Girl she may have been but now she is Gisi the Gold-digger,’ Lotte remarked wryly, with both envy and rancour.

That was the crowd the girls gathered around them – meeting them at the Three Hundred in the evening before they moved on to Prince’s for the cabaret, or else reversing the order and going to the Three Hundred after the cabaret. The place – a mouldering villa with porches, shuttered windows, night-flowering creepers, malevolent-looking watchmen – was kept in pitch-darkness, only cigarette lighters and diamond rings flared, briefly. In the murk swirled the lucrative aura of bankers, traders, racehorse owners, landowners from small northern states who were not quite rajas although occasionally the Maharaja of Burdwan or the Maharani of Cooch Behar were excitedly pointed out to Baumgartner, and stories of elephant hunts, tiger shoots and fabulous banquets were told over the gins and whiskies in the secretive dark. There were also some more daylit characters – young men from the mercantile firms, mostly Englishmen, who dealt in jute, tea or coal and talked of rugby and squash, a few Indians amongst them. There was a Russian adventurer, a great tall man with a face like a sledge who told laughingly of all the hotels he had bought and run, only to lose them to pay the debts he ran up at gambling tables, and – less plausibly but more entertainingly – the errands he had run for czars, Mongol chieftains, Chinese drug-peddlers and wealth-crazed rajas, while the crowds at his table plied him with more and more drink so that he should embroider his stories still more lavishly than the time before. Always there was a point in the evening when he would go down on the floor, strike out with his legs and sing ‘Galinka’ till he fell over, dead drunk, too large and too heavy to be lifted and carried out; then he became a kind of ceremonial altar for the night’s celebrations which only came to an end when he
woke
and called for a pink gin. There was an Italian traveller who had been to more wonderful places – the Himalayan passes, Tibet, Bhutan, Ceylon, the Andaman, Laccadive and Nicobar islands – but he told less, held back more so that rumours surrounded him like a black net. There were game hunters resting after the ardours of
shikar
in the forests of Cooch Behar and the Sunderbans. There were also, less colourfully but more ominously, an increasing number of soldiers, in khaki, much more dour and subdued than the others till it was time for the sundowner and after that they were the most uncontrolled and the most alarming of all.

Baumgartner had very little to contribute to the conversation in those gatherings – trade and business practices were too commonplace to flaunt – but in the company of the men in khaki he found himself going absolutely silent, listening in a strained way, losing his smile. Even if they were not responsible for the silence from Germany, the complete absence of any response to his telegrams, of the news of his mother for which he was still waiting, he knew they were caught up in the same blind chaos, an active part of it, and he feared them instinctively. At times he caught a reflection of his own attitude in Lotte and Gisela, even though they disguised their disquiet with laughter and foul language. They would leave early, pleading a headache or work at Prince’s. Sometimes one or two of the soldiers would accompany them. Then Baumgartner would leave alone, stopping under the dim streetlamp to pour some coins into the bandaged stump proffered by the leper who waited legless on his little cart for the generosity of the drunks. As he strolled back to his hotel in the liquified heat of the August night, Violet and Rosie would detach themselves from the urine and betel-stained wall and pout, ‘Very big
sahib
you have become. No more time for old friends, eh?’ and pull at his sleeves, demand money, demand cigarettes.

‘Lotte, is not good, to be with these British soldiers,’ he protested one morning when she came into his room to show
him
an armful of shopping she had done on Park Street. She had not told him who had paid for the gold sandals, the silk scarf or the sequinned bag that she flaunted before him, but he guessed.

‘Poof, what does it matter? Is a British soldier worse than a German soldier or an American soldier? Soldiers are everywhere the same,
mein
Hugo – free with money when they are in port!’ She did a few dance steps to make the gold heels flash and click. ‘
Ach
, what a port is Calcutta! Could Shanghai be better, or Hamburg even?’ The shopping had gone to her head, Baumgartner thought, that was what the feel of money did. While he fumed, she swung the sequinned bag on her wrist and laughed to see it glint in the heavy morning light that poured in through the open window. Outside were red and yellow canna lilies, loudly chattering mynah birds, a flowering tree. She seemed delighted to take her part in these cockatoo colours, this macaw setting.

‘Will soon be war between our countries,’ he warned.

‘You still read newspapers?’ she pouted at him. ‘As if war in Europe will have anything to do with us here in Calcutta. Hugo, how silly you are.
Sei doch nicht so blöd
.’

‘How will it not?’ he argued. ‘We are in British territory, and we are German nationals –’

‘You are, but I am not,’ she interrupted.

‘No? What do you mean? What nationality have you?’

‘
Ach
, what does it matter? I can change any day that I want. Many men are wanting to marry me – that Kanti Sethia, he is always asking and asking.’ She was standing still now, at the window, looking out, swinging the little bag on her wrist; it flew round and round her like a bright bird.

‘Kanti Sethia?’ Baumgartner was speechless for a few minutes, his lips moving soundlessly. The faces of Lotte’s admirers passed before him in rapid succession, so rapid that they blurred. The handsome tea-planter with the small moustache over his big, square teeth who came from his tea-garden in Assam once a month to see her dance? The dashing attaché of the Maharaja of Burdwan? Or the jeweller
who
took her and Gisela to the races? Could it be the jeweller – the small brown monkey of a man who took snuff and blew it into a bandana, carried a walking-stick, wore a white dhoti and a small black cap and became insensible after drinking two whiskies? ‘
Ach
, Lotte, who?’ he cried in pain. ‘The jeweller? Fifty years old or perhaps more?’