Baumgartner's Bombay (28 page)

‘Hugo, old man! If it isn’t Hugo! My old companion from those unspeakable days –’

‘
Ach
, Julius,’ Baumgartner murmured, shaking hands that were sweating with discomfort and dismay, ‘they were not such bad days –’

‘Not such bad days!’ Julius’s high-pitched voice rang out, scandalised, making several heads turn their way and Lily frown as lightly as a pencil sketch, so well bred had she become. ‘To be virtually in a prison for six years – and he calls that “not bad”! If that isn’t just like you, Hugo – to you even prison is all right and nothing is really bad, eh? But Gala, my dear, he helped me survive, you know – he was someone to talk to in the wilderness. And we must talk of so many things, Hugo,’ he babbled. ‘Did you know that the man who escaped, that fellow Hüber, he wrote a book about the whole experience? But, Hugo, it must be read – a man we knew, shared the camp with, he goes and writes a book about it – is it not fantastic?’ His companion’s hand on his arm evidently began to exert more pressure than normal. Breaking off, he looked
down
at her taut face worriedly and what he saw made him trail off. ‘Gala, my dear, let us have Hugo over to the house – we can have a proper talk then, can’t we?’ She turned her face to him bluntly, closed her eyes and nodded as if under torture. ‘Tonight, eh? At tonight’s party? We have a few friends coming – it will be delightful – my dear man, here is my card. You see, I run a little art gallery now. And you? Your address, your telephone number?’ and Baumgartner, hastily pulling out one of his business cards from his pocket, pressed it into his hand, mumbled goodbye, and fled.

After drinking a celebratory beer with Chimanlal and returning to his flat, he found that the telephone that so seldom rang was ringing and ringing when he opened the door. Apologetically pushing past the cats that came to greet him with scolding cries, he picked it up and held it to his ear. Lily’s icy tones came over to him like steel needles entering his ear.

‘Mr Baumgartner? This is Gala von Roth. I am afraid my husband made a mistake at the Turf Club this evening. He was not aware of my guest list. I already have one unattached gentleman to make up my table, and cannot have two since only one unattached lady is coming, the Maharani of Bitnore who is here on a visit. I regret very much – I feel so ashamed – but you will understand. Another time, of course. Very soon perhaps.’

Baumgartner was smiling to himself, listening to Lily’s voice. He was remembering that cold, tuneless voice singing, at Prince’s, with such abandon, such determination:

‘Lola and Lily

Are fifteen and free,

O Lola and Lily –’

and suddenly burst into a laugh he could not help.

It made her break off her polite nonsense and gasp at his audacity. But it had startled her, prevented her from slamming down the telephone, and in that moment of shocked silence Baumgartner laughed, ‘
Ach
, Lily, it was nice to see you today at the Turf Club. It does not matter about tonight, of course. But when I saw you, I wanted to ask you something.
You
know perhaps where is your old friend from Calcutta, our Lotte?’

The silence grew and thickened. Baumgartner half-expected her to slam down the telephone but the shock seemed to have made Lily clasp it as if she were paralysed. He smiled, thinking of her frozen face, her eyes half-closed in torment, the black kohl gleaming wildly around them. Painted hussy, he thought, chuckling, Shanghai Lily, that is who you are and I know it, when she said, in a clipped cold tone, ‘You have a pencil and paper? This is the address. Take it down, please . . .’

‘Hugo,
mein Geliebter
?’

‘Lotte,
Liebchen
, where are you?’

She told him and he groaned to find it was only down the road from his flat, at the other end of Colaba Causeway. ‘I can come on my feet, running,’ he said, ‘is so near, Lotte, so near, and we did not even know.’ ‘Come, come,’ Lotte shouted over the telephone. ‘I am waiting, my Hugo.’

There she was, in a cotton dress with red and pink and violet flowers all over it, her red hair even redder now with a generous dyeing with henna, her toenails and fingernails painted a livid pink, all beckoning him eagerly as he came up the stairs to find her standing at the door, laughing. They embraced with a warmth that had no hesitation and no embarrassment about it, was made ardent by their long separation and by all they had shared in pre-war Calcutta. Lotte patted Baumgartner’s cheeks, held him by his shoulders and laughed with joy as she looked at him.

‘So long since I see
ein Deutscher
, a German. So long since I see
anyone
in this prison house Kanti keeps me in,’ she explained, drawing him in.

‘Very nice prison house,’ he teased her, looking around. Flowered curtains flapped wildly in the sea breeze, a servant boy came in on silent bare feet and put a tray with glasses on a brass table by a set of cane chairs on which cushions and magazines lay carelessly scattered. ‘Kanti is kind.’

‘Kind, he says!
Mein Gott
, you call that
kind
? To keep a woman locked up alone and waiting for him?’

‘It saved you from the prison camp, Lotte,’ Baumgartner reminded her, standing by the table, waiting to be asked to sit down.

She did not ask him; she grabbed his wrist and pulled him down on the sofa beside her. ‘Tell me, tell me, Hugo,’ she begged, ‘and I will make you a gimlet like I make for Kanti –’

‘Where is he?’

‘
Ach
, don’t ask me where he is. He leaves me here like a widow and lives in Calcutta himself – he has business there, you know,’ she said vaguely as she leant over the table to mix drinks. ‘You met him there? He told you where I was?’

Baumgartner explained how he came by her address after more than five years in Bombay. She clapped her hand over her mouth and giggled till her eyes ran with bright tears.

‘Gala – Gala von Roth!’ she choked. ‘Is it not too fine! Is it not wonderful!’

‘He was only Julius Roth when I knew him in the camp,’ Baumgartner smiled.

‘
Ach
, it is wonderful –
von
Roth! And he is not any more Julius – too Jewish – so he is Julian. Very English, you see. Not a bad thing to be English here in India, you know, Hugo. And first he started with an antique shop in a hotel lobby, and that Gisela, she went around saying it was her collection of Chinese art they were selling, that those plates and dishes were left to her by her father, a collector in China he was supposed to be. Of course I knew she bought it all in auction houses in Calcutta, on Russell Street and Middleton Row. All those English people leaving the country, in forty-seven, the auction shops were full of fine furniture, fine china, everything selling real cheap, and our Gisi, clever Gisi, buying and buying. Clever she is, that one. Then she and Julian – that is how she calls him, Julian – they sold it all in the hotel lobby. And the profits went into an art gallery – that is what they call it: “art gallery”. All these new young Indian painters – no one knew any Indian painters, before, eh, Hugo? There was that crazy Margarethe
Bumuller
who painted all the politicians in Delhi, made them look like Roman emperors, and there was Fritz Langheim up in Darjeeling, painting monks and monasteries – but where were the Indian painters? But now they are there, you know, and they like hanging up their pictures in a foreigner’s gallery, that makes their art so
international
, like they are artists of the world. And Gisi tells me Julian is selling a lot – Indian people are buying Indian art now like they used to import from Europe before. So they are making money – the von Roths.’ She bent over with giggling. ‘One day let us go together, Hugo. We will go and have coffee in the hotel lounge, eh, and just stroll by the gallery, eh? If Gisi won’t let you come to the house and have you talk with him, no matter, we will have our talk in the gallery. I think he will like it better – if
she
is not there. Most of the time of course Gisi keeps a sharp eye on her Julian – and on the sales. Let us go and see them
both
. What can she do? She cannot throw us out, can she, with all her young Indian painters watching? She likes to be their patron, pats them on the heads and calls them by nicknames, and tells me, “
Ach
, Lola, they
love
me, these Indian painters, they know how much I help them, they know I can make them famous
internationally
.” “Famous where?” I asked her,’ Lotte cackled, ‘in Shanghai?’ She swilled her drink about the glass so that the ice cubes clinked and the gin splashed. In her delight at gossiping, her delight at having such trusted and familiar company as Baumgartner, she swung her bare legs on to the sofa and over on to his lap, wriggling her toes luxuriously. ‘We will make a nice pair in the von Roths’ gallery, you and I, Hugo,’ she drawled. ‘Let us go tomorrow, eh?’

‘When will Kanti come again?’ Baumgartner asked her, eyeing her feet in his lap and wishing she would remove them. So many years of seeing women who were clothed from head to foot and who even drew their garments over their faces rather than look at him directly or be looked at by him had had their effect on him, he found. He now found Lotte’s behaviour bizarre.

‘Kanti?’ she huffed. ‘Who knows when he comes? Business,
business
, nothing else matters to the man. Then he gets tired, then he needs a change. Then he wants a little song and dance, a little drink with Lola, and one fine day he turns up at my door and wants me to go down on my knees and touch his feet, so grateful I am supposed to be for his visits.’

‘You, on your knees?’ Baumgartner chuckled at the unlikely picture.

‘Yes, yes, but not so often. Mostly I am alone. All, all alone.
Ach
, Hugo, but now I have
you
.’ She leant over and nibbled at his ear. ‘Never did I think I would see my Hugo again – and here he is, here he is,’ she cried with such genuine, such open delight that Baumgartner put his hands over her toes and squeezed them in silent response.

The tenants of Hira Niwas received notice to quit. The landlord, a choleric old gentleman whose face expressed an animal frenzy at being thwarted in his aim of pulling down the old, four-storeyed house to build a new twenty-storeyed structure and so become a millionaire, tramped from flat to flat, waving the notice he had received from the corporation, stating that the building was unsafe and must be vacated before the next monsoon.

No one paid the slightest attention. Monsoon after monsoon washed over Hira Niwas, leaving it more slimy, green, decayed and odorous but still standing – even if propped up with a forest of bamboo poles on the ground floor. The family that lived there had the bamboo poles growing out of the chipped terrazzo floor of their living-room, their bedrooms, and weaved their way in and out between them nonchalantly; the sweeper swept around them, the children raced their pedal cars and scooters amongst them. Sometimes a little plaster fell, occasionally a whole brick, but miraculously – not more.

Baumgartner learnt to confront the landlord, now severely handicapped by a stroke, with the same sneering equanimity that the other tenants displayed, and did nothing to find himself another flat. How could he, in Bombay, where the rents were fixed by racketeers, smugglers and film stars? It
was
out of the question. He shrugged at the landlord’s shrill hysteria and turned back into his room before the old man caught a glimpse of the family of cats that stirred and pullulated in its damp green confines like a blanket of living grey mildew. Baumgartner could contemplate homelessness for himself but not for his cats. ‘
Mein Kätzchen
,’ he crooned, picking one up and gazing ardently into its face.

His room filled and overflowed with them, with their scrawny progeny; daily he made the rounds of nearby cafés and restaurants where the kitchen staff got to know him and kept aside scraps for him, making faces at each other behind his back and sniggering, ‘
Pagal sahib, billé-wallah sahib
,’ for Baumgartner grew shabbier as he grew older, no longer noticing if his shoes had soles that flapped or if the buttons on his shirt were missing or even if they were clean and washed any more; after all, the cats greeted him exuberantly whether they were or not.

Lotte sometimes wrinkled her nose and tugged at a torn collar, saying, ‘
Ach
, Hugo, can’t you buy a new shirt sometimes?’

It was not that he could not, but he had simply got out of the way of shopping, of spending money. And although the years were jogging by now at a comfortable pace and with an evenness that he had not known at any other stage of his life, it was partly because he did so little business for Chimanlal now. It was not only that he disliked leaving his cats to go on business trips but also because Chimanlal’s son was growing up and spending more time in his father’s office, learning the business, and there did not seem much for Baumgartner to do any more. Baumgartner marvelled that such a youngster should be trusted with so much work already but Chimanlal sighed, ‘If I do not trust my own son, Hugo
bhai
, who can I trust?’ Baumgartner noted that he did not sound as if he meant the words – they were wrenched from him. Chimanlal was not well. He had a bad colour and Baumgartner told him he should see a doctor whereupon Chimanlal turned to the oleograph on the wall, still hung with a fresh
garland
and wreathed in clouds of incense, and said, ‘This is my doctor, Hugo
bhai
, it is Lakshmi alone who will look after me.’

He went away frequently on pilgrimages, taking his wife, daughters and daughter-in-law, to visit temples and saints in distant caves or mountain-tops and in ashrams. He returned small, starved, wretchedly ill but ecstatic – he had had the
darshan
of yet another deity, yet another holy man, and how could that not have a good, a benign effect on him, he asked Baumgartner whose expression stated grave doubt. Chimanlal expressed regret that he had never been able to make any dent in Baumgartner’s wary agnosticism. Baumgartner’s fumbled, embarrassed replies to Chimanlal’s questions about Judaism, about how a Jew could believe in the same Moses, Abraham or Jacob that the Christians did, had brought about an early end to anything like the theological discussions in which Indians revel – and he never went so far as to ask Baumgartner to accompany him to a temple or on a pilgrimage – to his profound relief.