Baumgartner's Bombay (9 page)

It was the Gentleman from Hamburg who took everything into his hands, as he explained to everyone, and found Frau Baumgartner a room as a paying guest in the house of some ‘influential’ people, quite a nice house, on Grenadierstrasse, warm and comfortable even if not in a quarter one would have chosen – but at least it was amongst ‘safe’ people. It was here that Hugo said goodbye to her, putting his new valise down on the wool rug in the middle of the pine flooring that smelt of disinfectant, and putting out his arms in the sleeves of his new white linen suit to embrace her. His cheek against hers, he said as he had said every night for the last week, ‘And when I am in India, I will make a home for us. How will you like that? I will have servants for you and drive away the snakes and bring you gold oranges –’

‘What are you talking about, you silly boy?’ she rubbed her cheek, like a piece of crumpled velvet, against his. ‘What is this fairy story –
diese Märchen
– you are making up for old Mutti?’

‘I am not making it up at all, Mü. Don’t you remember you sang the song about the country where lemons flower, where oranges glow in the dark foliage? I remember it, see.’

‘Silly Hugo, that was written by Goethe, it was about the Mediterranean, not about some dangerous land in the East,
mit den Schwarzen
. I told you I won’t live where there are spiders and snakes,’ and she pushed him away from her. Her mouth was jerking in all directions, uncontrollably, making her look drunken, or witchlike.

‘Mutti,’ he pleaded, putting out his arms to touch her, but she held out her hand to keep him at a distance, saying, ‘No, you get your work done that Herr Pfuehl has given you, and then come quickly home again.’

So that was what was decided by them when he left her – standing with her hand on the chest of drawers with yellow cut-glass handles on which she had placed her volumes of Goethe, framed by two puce curtains and a pattern of steam-pipes painted to look like bronze. In the midst of all that, her head looked especially small and grey. Out on the landing the landlady, who had undoubtedly been listening to all that was said, assured him she would get Anna the maid to take her a cup of tea. It was not so easy to get tea any more, she said, but she liked to make her guests feel at home. Hugo murmured something about having to go away on business to India and let himself out while the woman went to see about the tea, muttering, ‘And a very fine business it is going to be.’

‘
Hopp, hopp, hopp
!

Pferdchen lauf galopp
!

Über Stock und über Steine
,

aber brich dir nicht die Beine
!

Hopp, hopp, hopp
!

Pferdchen lauf galopp
!’

The boat to the Orient was not due to arrive in Venice for at least another week. Having with the greatest difficulty acquired – and understood – this information from a small window that usually had its shutter pulled down and was scarcely ever known to open, Hugo felt a lurch of fear, found
he
had to accept it – the prospect of at least seven days in this strange city, not only the first in which he had ever found himself alone but one so palpably foreign as to make him feel he was already transported to the East, it had so little relation to the Europe of the north.

True, the weather was European, it could be nothing else – these lowering clouds of melancholy grey, the fine rain that came down like a soft, clinging net to settle on head and shoulders and dampen them – and yet it was not Europe after all: there was here a magical, a poetical quality he had never known in Berlin. He walked in the narrow lanes till his shoes were soaked, his feet wet, his new suit drenched, and then entered the nearest
chiesa
to sit in a velvet-covered pew and try and get some warmth from the candles that flickered under a crucified Christ, a weeping Madonna or a gaudily bleeding heart, from lamps of coloured glass in which light glowered like embers from a fire, and breathed in the swirling clouds of smoking incense, watching the candlelight play on a bit of gilt here, a piece of Murano glass there, and asked himself if he was not actually in Tartary or in Persia, in some magical fairyland not only south but far, far east of Germany and everything he had known in his life till then.

Since the most urgent and immediate problem was how to stretch the small amount of money he had been loaned by Herr Pfuehl to cover this unforeseen week in Venice, he found himself a room in a cheap lodging-house – or, rather, half of it, for he shared it with a medical student who was out all night and returned to claim the one bed in the morning, snarling at Hugo to be out and off if he overslept. A maid in the kitchen who wore black and had a moustache gave him coffee in a large bowl before he left the house, washing the tiles of the floor around his feet while he stood drinking it. The door opened on to a courtyard where someone had stacked empty bottles; if he kicked one by accident, the heaps of brown and green and bubbled glass slithered and clattered and made a woman on an upper floor stick her head out of the window and
scream
at him. She would also come staggering out with buckets of refuse to throw into the canal, scattering bloodied newspapers and chicken feathers across the intervening cobblestones. At all times of the day, the house reeked of frying oil, hissed with the sounds of cooking, and emitted the mutters and grumbles of scores of lodgers hidden up and down the decaying staircases, in stone cells and wooden stalls. Only their groans and their washing gave them away. Parting a wet tablecloth from a dripping apron, Hugo let himself out and remained out all day to let the medical student sleep his share of sleep.

He walked to escape his fear and apprehension. Everywhere the sound of water lapping stone, of footsteps striking stone, so that when he heard a sound that belonged to neither stone nor water, while crossing an empty
campo
, he stopped and searched for its source till his eyes found it – cage upon cage blocking up a tall window above, filled with canaries that trilled and sang because a little light was shining on them from out of all the grey.

At San Marco he paid a coin to see the
pala d’Oro
and imagine, when close to the gems encrusting the gold sheet, that he was already in an Oriental potentate’s palace for such riches could only belong to the East, could not be of the West with its greyness, its rain, its lodging-houses and black and brown garb. He climbed up in the basilica and walked through the marble maze, the thin soles of his cheap shoes slipping on the glassy mosaic underfoot. The throngs in the chapels below, the incense, the candlewax, the flickers of light and colour in the furry dark, all oppressed him and seemed to repulse him till he was thrust out of the door into the piazza. Stumbling in its lighted space, he tried to avoid the pigeons and the pigeon-feeders who teemed together, and seemed to him equally gluttonous in their taking and receiving: was this not how beggars were said to behave in the East, beggars and their patrons who gave them alms for their own sakes? Sometimes
the
easternness of the city disturbed him so much, he wondered if he would be able to face India.

How many feast days could there be in a week? Almost every day shops closed, shutters down, offices shut, while the cathedrals glimmered with candlelight and the bells rang, holiday-makers hurried across the
campos
with festive cakes packed in golden hat-boxes, stopping to buy flowers at the stalls where they bloomed with a tropical luxuriance. Hugo found himself drawing closer, trying to pick out a bunch of violets for his mother, of his mother. Without making any purchase he wandered on to breathe in the odour of newly baked rolls at the baker’s and the pastries and the rich dark chocolates he had known only as a small child. Then he felt himself to be inside a chocolate box, surfeited with sweetness and richness, and tore away to breathe freely.

Crossing the wooden Giudecca bridge to the news-stand where he might buy a newspaper in a known language, he stopped because the sun was briefly out, and leant over the rail to look down at the Grand Canal, its green glass waves rocking in the wake of a passing vaporetto that broke up the reflections of the pink and yellow palaces into coloured strips and ribbons that shook and shimmered. On the green bank a young man, red-haired and fair-skinned as so many were here where Hugo had expected them to be swarthy, sat down in the sun to unpack his sandwiches from a piece of paper and eat them on the grass. Hugo would not have stayed to watch if first one head, then another had not arisen out of the coarse, tall grass which then began to stir as if it were a tropical jungle and release the lean, striped, feral bodies of a grey and a black cat, their green eyes watching the man eat from their pointed corners rimmed like actresses’ eyes with kohl. The man was looking out over the canal, he did not see them, and they gathered stealthily behind him – slipping closer, their whiskers faintly twitching, and yet alert, ready to leap and vanish like thieves, like the scavengers they were. Hugo, who
had
owned no animal but a doomed infant hedgehog, hung over the railing and watched as the city cats appeared and took up poses of calm reflection behind the oblivious picnicker – some licking their fur to show their indifference, others waiting to pounce. For a few moments, all held their poses – Hugo on the bridge, the man on the green bank with his sandwich, the cats in their attitudes of expectation and alertness. Then a boat passed under a bridge, its bargee wielding his pole and giving a warning cry; the man flung the crusts over his shoulder and rolled up the brown paper into a ball and the cats – in an instant they were at the greasy paper, the limp crusts, growling and spitting over the feast. Hugo walked away.

The ball of fortune shone in a moment of sunlight, and the golden sail that the boy held up for a weathervane seemed to fill with an eastern breeze. Hugo stood at the tip of the Dogana, hands in his pockets, collar turned up so that no one could have told that he was drawing comfort from the light, the warmth. Across the lagoon were the islands and on one the great San Georgio looked to him like an equation immaculately worked out in stone, a mathematical problem set and solved.

He walked down the Zattere where people had come out to walk in the pale sunlight while the great vaporettos swept by, leaving in their wake a wash of froth and foam. When he was hungry, he began to peer into trattorias he passed and finally found one that did not look too forbiddingly expensive for it had prams with babies and families gathered at the tables. He went and sat down in the thick, heated air that reminded him of the
Bierkeller
at home. The menu posed a problem, every item on it being unfamiliar, and he looked into the waiter’s face – for once swarthy and foreign – in despair. The waiter made no response but a young woman at a neighbouring table leant across to recommend the cannelloni. ‘Is good, good,’ she nodded at him reassuringly from over the top of a newspaper printed in Hebrew. Seeing him stare at it, she smiled, shook
the
sheets slightly and told him she lived in the Jewish quarter of the city where such papers were available, why did he not come and visit it? A fine place, she had her studio there, was a painter. At that, Hugo began to shift in his chair in unease. She noticed, and shrugged her shoulders, making a moue. ‘Staying here long?’ she asked, before she returned to her paper.

Hugo burst out, ‘I – I am leaving – for India.’

‘India!’ It had the expected effect. The newspaper was lowered, her face appeared, looking suspicious. ‘But whoever goes to India? If you are not a sailor?’

Hugo shook his head, laughing. The cannelloni arrived. Politely she turned her face away so he could eat it. Before he had finished it, she left, squeezing past his table with her thin hips swivelling in the shiny orange material of her dress. ‘Good luck!’ she murmured, still with a suspicious twist to her lips, and he rose to his feet, dropping his napkin and bumping into the table so that his coffee spilt. He considered leaving his meal and following her, to the Jewish quarter and her studio, but the waiter came up as if he sensed Hugo’s intention, and presented the bill. His unfamiliarity with the Italian notes detained Hugo and, when he came out, she was gone.

Thinking to follow her, he ran out on the
fondamante
but, apart from a small dog on a long leash held by a man in a large coat and a purple muffler, there was no one to be seen. The golden light of an hour ago had thinned to an icy wine-like substance close to freezing. It made the bare trees and the rooftops and walls stand out like a steel engraving. Hugo walked along, thinking he might find the Jewish quarter she had spoken of; if he did not see her there, he might see other Jews. Strange, in Germany he had never wanted to search them out, had been aware of others thinking of him as a Jew but not done so himself. In ejecting him, Germany had taught him to regard himself as one. Perhaps it was important to find what she had called their ‘quarter’. Perhaps over here he would find for himself a new identity, one that suited him, one that
he
enjoyed. The air quivered with possibilities, with the suspense of quest and choice.

For a large part of the afternoon he wandered up one
calle
, down another, crossing slimy black canals by little stone bridges, stopping at corners, crossing courtyards, sidling around the brick sides of a cathedral, stopping in the doorway of a
chiesa
to blow his nose and wonder if he were not hopelessly lost. For a while he even followed a cat on the prowl, a grey cat with a wicked, watching eye, but it leapt over a wall and vanished amidst a clatter of tin cans where Hugo had no wish to follow. He did come across more populated quarters but in the fading light of the late afternoon and the cold crystallising in the air, there were in general not many people about – old ladies in rusty black painfully hobbling home with their market bags, boys in loud boots with books in their bags whistling as they clattered along, but that was all. Overhead washing hung faded and ragged. When Hugo came to a
calle
half-submerged in water and realised the tide was rising, he lost heart and turned around to retrace his steps.