Baumgartner's Bombay (15 page)

‘Hunf, what does it matter?’ Lotte shrugged. ‘If I have to change my nationality I can marry him and change at once. Don’t you see me as an Indian bride, Hugo?’ She left the window and came towards him, prancing. ‘In a gold sari, with a red dot here in the middle of my forehead, and a diamond nose-ring?’ She began to leap around the room with laughter and excitement.

‘
Du bist verrückt
, you’re mad, Lotte. He must be married and have a family – how could he not? Here they marry at fourteen, fifteen –’

‘Then he should have a change – to Lola, whoopee!’ she screamed, flinging the sequinned bag clear across the room.

It was in Prince’s, at a table where Baumgartner alone of the men was not dressed in khaki and where Lotte and Gisela alone provided colour by their costumes, that Baumgartner raised his glass to the two of them when they came up after their performance and said, ‘
Prosit!
’ The next instant there was a hand on his shoulder, a khaki cuff before his eyes. ‘Jerry, eh? Jerries, you all?’

Someone shouted, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool. These are the
dancers
. You want to stop the show?’

But the hand did not let go, it held harder. Baumgartner tried to shake free. Commotion broke out. In the uproar, Baumgartner lost Lotte, lost Gisela. He kept looking over his shoulder, searching the heaving mass for a glimpse of pink or blue silk, saw them just as they were whisked away by the hotel manager. He tried to follow but was held fast. He heard his sleeve rip. ‘Now look,’ he began to protest when someone hit him on the back of the neck. For a few moments he could not see clearly, everything became a squirming mess of red
before
him, then he struck out with his fists and heels as he had not done since he was a schoolboy, trapped in a corner of the schoolyard while everyone chanted:

‘
Baumgartner, Baum
,

Hat ein Nase

Wie ein Daum!
’

He even found himself so far back in infancy that he actually bit into a hand that was clapped over his mouth. He tasted blood – warm, sweet, disgusting. Three men jumped on top of him, feet first. When he came out from under them, he found a policeman bending over him – just in time for someone had broken a bottle and was flashing that at him. All around them, skulls were cracking under batons, crisply. He covered his own head with his hands, defensively. But the policeman lifted him up by his elbow and called him ‘
Sahib
’.

In the police station a man with great rings of tiredness under his eyes, and stains of perspiration on his back, apologised, ‘I have to arrest you, sir. War is declared and we must take you into detention camp. Very bad, sir, very bad.’ Looking abject, he added, ‘British make rules here, sir, not Indians.’ Baumgartner, feeling the salt of blood on his lips with his tongue, smiled in relief at being in his hands, not a white man’s. ‘Will my letters be forwarded?’ he asked. ‘Will you deliver mail at the camp? Can I write a letter before I go?’

He was still asking the same question of everyone he met in the improvised camp in Fort William to which he was taken with the other ‘enemy aliens’. They threw him uncomprehending looks but one man put his index finger to his temple and turned it like a screw. ‘
Mensch
,’ he said, ‘here we are in a military prison – and you are wanting to know when the postman will come?’ Some blurted into laughter, but were quickly silenced by a shouted order from a camp guard.

This shout woke them next morning in their tents. ‘Here, what’s this? Get up and make your beds, will yer?’ The red face at the opening roared. Falling off his canvas cot in fright, Baumgartner – like his fellow inmates – tried hastily to pull the
blankets
across the tumbled, tossed sheets, feeling exposed and ridiculous in the underwear in which he had slept, not having brought pyjamas, and which was being regarded with such a ferocious sneer. Every stain, every hole seemed to be studied and noted as he bent and bowed and performed all the actions expected of him before the guard moved on from his cot to the next. There, instead of roaring, he stood with his chest and stomach protruding in an attitude of satisfaction, because Baumgartner’s neighbour was performing a miracle, turning that camp cot into an envelope, neatly turned and finished so that it hardly looked made by the hand of man. ‘Hmm,’ said the guard, sticking out his baton to tap the unwrinkled surface of this model of competence, ‘this –
this
is how I want the beds to be made.’ He stalked out, very much the cock of the coop, but only after a glance at the maker of that model, a blond and silent man called Schmidt, who then turned to Baumgartner, passing on to him his own version of the guard’s sneer, making Baumgartner see that they were of a kind – the ruling kind.

Every morning their tents and beds were examined; even after Baumgartner learnt to get up and prepare for
Appel
on time, he could never master the technique required of him even if the guard roared, ‘Can’t you see how Schmidt does it? Can’t you try and be like him? Eh?’ and that glance would pass between the two men, the rulers, and in passing it on to Baumgartner it would undergo that same shift, that same change.

Yet the exasperated man at the folding table in another, larger tent, refused absolutely to see them as different, separated individuals. In reply to Baumgartner’s mumble about his name, his Jewishness, he snapped, ‘Stop that whining and show me your passport, will you? That’s all yer asked for – yer passport, hear?’ Baumgartner, sweating profusely, managed to find it and hand it over with slipping, slippery fingers; he stood waiting while it was studied, page by page, thumbed through with the new ferocity that had been let loose and become the
new
regime. It did not take long before it was thrown back at him with a snap: ‘German, born in Germany,’ and Baumgartner was still trying to form the English words in his mouth, ‘Yes, but of Jewish origin, therefore a refugee –’ when he was caught by his sleeve and propelled out of the tent into a queue waiting to be handed into a truck stalled in the mud of the churned football field. Heaved into it, he found himself pressed against Schmidt who drew himself away to the extent he could in that overcrowded vehicle, but by his silence conveyed to Baumgartner the utter disgust he felt at being placed in the same category as him. Baumgartner felt only fear.

The railway station swarmed with soldiers, and with coolies bent under tin trunks and olive-green bed-rolls. The clink of army boots, the snap and slither of leather and khaki cotton. The clipped British voices giving commands, the snapping salutes and whistles being blown. The cat-faces of the Gurkhas inscrutable under their floppy hats, holding on to their fixed bayonets. Incongruously, the
chai
-wallah wandering through the crowds with his kettle of sweet, smoky tea and a milky glass at the end of each finger, ‘
Chai, garam chai
’ his lugubrious cry. Indians peering through the dark at the foreigners with curiosity. Refusing to accept the prospect of spending years together in captivity, they would not look at each other except when the need for a cigarette or a match overcame their reluctance.

It was while Baumgartner was lighting a cigarette for one of his fellow prisoners that the man, a thin and evidently ill fellow with a beard, said to him under his breath, ‘That Schmidt – you need to keep away from him.’ Baumgartner looked at him questioningly and was told, ‘A Nazi.’

‘How do you mean?’ Baumgartner asked, also in an undertone. ‘Party member?’

‘Of course. There are many. Those are the ones we’ll have to watch out for. They’re keeping their eyes on
us
, you may be sure.’

Baumgartner shifted uneasily, as if he felt the impulse to break and run, but a Gurkha stepped forward and pressed him back with the tip of his bayonet.

In the central internment camp in Ahmednagar where the ‘hostile aliens’ from all over the country were poured like ants from a closed fist into a bowl of dust, and swarmed there in a kind of frenzy, it became daily more clear that a system was being devised to screen them and find reasons and ways to keep them in captivity. Baumgartner had more than one interview: he spent many hours waiting in a line outside a hut, slowly moving up, clutching whatever papers he had with him – his passport, visiting-cards of business associates, a few letters from his mother that he had folded and slipped into his wallet – placing them before the officer at his camp table, certain they would see he had been arrested for no reason, being harmless, no enemy, merely a refugee from Nazi Germany who wished only to pursue his business interests in India. The papers were thumbed with expressions and gestures of rage and exasperation. ‘What am I to do then?’ the man bawled when Baumgartner again protested at being labelled a German and ‘hostile’. ‘Got a German passport, says you were born there – then what am I supposed to take you for, a bloomin’ Indian?’ The papers were flung at him, and he retreated, baffled, wondering what magic word he might find that would release him from what was a monstrous mistake, or madness.

‘They don’t understand a thing,’ the small, sick-looking man with a beard told him, with bitter sympathy. ‘They don’t even know there are German Jews and there are Nazi Germans and they are not exactly the same. All you can do is hope to get a chance to speak to someone who does know – some Englishman.’

A few did – appeals to the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay, and to British civil servants who were more humane and informed than the guards at the camp, seemed to be of use to them and they walked out of the camp with expressions of
disbelief
and incomprehension, but others, like Baumgartner, who had no one to appeal to or on their behalf, were left to feel the net tightening over them. They were to remain in captivity for six years.

It was at the final internment camp, to which they were taken after passing through the initial and the intermediate ones, that Baumgartner had his first glimpse of the Himalayas. There they were – an uneven line of smoke wavering against the pale glass of the sky, leaving upon it a faint smudge. The Himalayas. He thought he could smell them: sap, resin, wood-smoke, a tingling freshness, from that immense distance and height sending down some hint of ice and snow and streams.

He became aware that others were standing and staring, too, when he heard a mixture of German and Italian voices and turned to see two or three men in lederhosen, thick boots and woollen stockings, standing in a group and talking of the mountains – Nanga Parbat, Nanda Devi, Kanchenjunga – in strangely technical terms, and he gathered they were actually mountaineers who had climbed some of those peaks before being arrested in Karachi where they had been waiting for a boat back to Europe. They talked as if they would be setting off for the mountains as soon as they had laid their strategy and completed the preparations which they had already begun to make.

Baffled by the mountaineers’ terminology, Baumgartner withdrew and from a distance eyed their hefty shoulders and muscled legs, feeling himself by comparison soft and feeble. But he wondered at their naïveté, their unshaken belief that they would climb the mountains again. Baumgartner, looking about him, seeing the barbed wire fencing, the gates guarded by guardhouses on stilts, the barracks and the cinder paths and water tanks, knew that no one would leave, that they would all be staying.

During the first few days while everyone milled around like a herd of cattle in a cloud of dust that would not settle but got
into
their eyes, hair, mouths, throats and lungs, making itself the basic component of their camp lives, Baumgartner saw efforts being made at imposing some order, some kind of discipline. Timetables were pinned to the notice-boards, whistles were blown and sirens sounded. The men queued up in order to collect blankets, tin spoons and plates, work tools. They queued up again to have their tin plates heaped with coarse rice and lentils ladled out of buckets; then they lined up on benches in a great draughty hall to eat the stuff. At the sound of another whistle, they were all in the bathhouse, washing themselves with cold water. Another whistle and they sank into their bunks, expected to sleep, like schoolboys. In different circumstances, it might have seemed an insane but all the same highly comical dream – grown men finding themselves returned to their school, a rigorous and not uncharacteristically vicious one.

But in between the whistles and the sirens and the flurried activity that they set into motion, there were too many empty spaces and these proved the more difficult to accept. The British commandant who faced them across the parade-ground every morning, stared at them as if in despair. He seemed to flinch from giving orders and to hurry away as soon as he had done so, as from something distasteful. Baumgartner ought to have felt reassured, to have sensed that no severe hardships were in store, no excessive or unreasonable demands were to be made of them, but unfortunately the looseness, the laxness of the regime really meant that empty spaces were allowed into which others could step.

There were of course the lesser functionaries of the camp to whom the commandant left the daily routine. It was these who made their presence felt, strongly and unpleasantly. They took a particular pleasure in rounding up the men and undressing them, then separating them according to size and appearance, like cattle, making jeering remarks as they did so. Baumgartner found himself standing with his hands dangling, his knees buckling, while they looked him over and joked; he found himself trying to join in the laughter, uncertain whether
to
do so would help or worsen matters. It turned out that this marked him something of an idiot. The stick jabbed into his ribs meant further laughter but ended in relief – he was not to join the ones who were to carry bricks, from one end of the camp to the other, solely for the sake of carrying bricks, but those who were to labour in the fields, which at least had some point.

Besides, this had for Baumgartner a certain romance. Why? He could not have said. His childhood in Berlin and youth spent keeping accounts at his father’s desk had certainly given him no introduction to the soil, to Mother Earth, or even a facility for handling tools. To himself he admitted the need to escape from the constant and oppressive company of his compatriots, the chance it offered to be in the open, forget for a while what captivity meant, and have no one to ask how he came to be there, where he had been and what he had been doing before his arrest, what he would do after his release . . . One could only answer such questions so often, and although for others this initial interrogation often led to friendship, in his case it never did. The habits of an only child, of an isolated youth in an increasingly unsafe and threatening land and then of a solitary foreigner in India had made Baumgartner hold to himself the fears he had about his mother, about what was happening in Germany, allowing it to become a dark, monstrous block. Of course the same fears were known to the other internees but on them it had the effect of making them seek company, pour out their anxieties and obsessions into willing ears, and then even forget them in the pleasure of society, while Baumgartner watched and marvelled at this gift for passing on or even shedding whatever was burdensome: it seemed to him he shed nothing, that – like a mournful turtle – he carried everything with him; perhaps it was the only way he knew to remain himself.