Baumgartner's Bombay (5 page)

Hugo, sitting on the window-seat under them, did not know what made him bite his knee, lifted up to prop his chin, and give a shiver as if he had bitten on a stone when she sang. The cause lay somewhere within the precarious sweetness of her thin voice singing:

‘
Kommt ein Vogel geflogen
,

Setzt sich nieder mein Fuss
,

hat ein Brieflein im Schnabel
,

von der Mutter ein Gruss
.’

Not always was it like spun sugar, like sugar being drawn out of him, in glossy threads. When he brought home the hedgehog in his pocket, having found it struggling through the rank grass and soiled newspaper on a roadside verge, it had become a lament. Ach,
du kleiner Dummkopf
, you little silly, how could you take it away from its poor
Mutti
? And what are we to do with it? How can we keep the smelly thing in Berthe’s beautifully cleaned house? Who will clean, who will feed – ? I, I, I, he howled, drumming his heels on the shining parquet floor and beating his chest like a wild man of the jungles. And he did. With a dropper, steaming with warm milk, he fed and fed the infant hedgehog in its cradle of cottonwool inside a matchbox till it swelled like a football being pumped with air. Its very quills filled with milk. Milk was oozing out of the limp, unprotesting bag of flesh when Berthe proclaimed it dead, killed by overfeeding. Then all the sweetness in the air had shattered into splinters of glass. Everyone had screamed; in the midst of all the screams, the hedgehog disappeared – into the dustbin? Out of the window? Hugo howled and howled but they would not tell him. His mother only scolded and scolded: ‘See what you did,
du kleiner Affe
, killed Mama Hedgehog’s baby. So silly,
so ungehorsam
. . .’

And Hugo bit the muddy flesh of his knee to keep from crying out when she sang, with such ineffable sweetness,

‘
Lieber Vogel, flieg weiter
,

Nimm ein Gruss mit, einer Kuss
,

Denn ich kann dich nicht begleiten
,

Weil ich hierbleiben muss
.’

Yes, that was what was wrong, he shivered – the sweetness always ended in a quaver. It drew together and produced a teardrop. The teardrop hung suspended, glinting in the light from the window, and Hugo watched, mesmerised, waiting for it to explode and drop. Tear-drop, pear-drop. Silver-light, gold-flesh. And then – the fall.

‘Hugo,
Liebling
, here is a little money; will you run and buy a pat of butter for our supper.’

He pushed out his lower lip in ready protest: why could he not stay with her, why could Berthe not go instead? Because Berthe had left – on what was said to be her annual holiday in the Harz from where she came but from where she had not returned. (In the way in which his mother’s lips became tight and pale when he questioned her, he sensed that she knew more about the disappearance than she said.) So he reluctantly slid off the window-seat, the warm, perspiring backs of his knees making a rude sound as they came unstuck from the wood, held out his hand, ‘
Gib mir dein kleines Pfötchen
’, for the money, and dawdled down the stairs into the street, reluctant even when she laughed over the banister, ‘And buy yourself a little chocolate with the change to make the errand sweeter.’

The street was not the sunlit, delicate, precious scene it had seemed when framed by their window upstairs. Coming loose from the window-frame, it had crashed two storeys into darkness. Down between the shut houses with their chocolate and liver-coloured façades, it was already twilight. The only figures to be seen on it were somehow threatening – the collars of their overcoats turned up and caps pulled down low over their eyes as if they wished to be faceless; a man who abruptly withdrew into the doorway of a closed warehouse, ostensibly to open a newspaper out of the wind but looking steadily over
the
top at Hugo; a woman with a raddled puce face who walked by without noticing him but muttering to herself crazily while waving invisible flies from her mouth . . . how was it that Hugo never saw such people when he was out walking with his father or hand-in-hand with Berthe, by daylight? He kept his eyes on the shop windows as he passed them, hoping to draw comfort from the familiarity of the objects displayed season after season, but found them lacking in colour and interest – it might have been a trick of the light but they all seemed covered by a layer of dust. The bared fangs of the denture, so pink and white, seemed fierce rather than comic now, and the mouth-wash disgusting with the line of sediment rimming the jar in which it had stood for so long; at the tobacconist, the row of pipes were held choked and throttled by a wooden stand like a vice between the tins of tobacco that smelt musty and damp even through the pane of yellow glass; the newspaper kiosk had no flowers today, for some reason.

Hugo was hurrying faster than he knew, the coins slipping inside his fist wet with perspiration, and as he rushed into the grocer’s shop he bumped into a woman coming out with an armful of parcels from which the top of a celery and the neck of a goose protruded grotesquely. ‘
Kannst nicht sehen
? Can’t you see?’ she scolded as Hugo disentangled himself from the swampy odour of her damp loden coat and edged past the two stands loaded with boiled sweets to the counter where he handed over the money entrusted to him. ‘Two hundred grammes of butter, please,’ he managed to croak, but could think of no further qualifications when the grocer demanded, ‘White or yellow? Salty or unsalted?’ He stood silent, shamed, till the man finally said, ‘You are Frau Baumgartner’s little boy? Ah then, I know,’ and sighed as he shifted his pink and porcine bulk to the stand where he kept butter, cream and eggs. He wore woollen socks that were unravelling around the pressed-down heels of his slippers and gave off an odour very like eggs.

When Hugo came out into the street with the brown paper
parcel,
already disagreeably greasy in his hands, it had grown darker, and the darkness continued to congeal as he made his way back, heaving for breath as if against obstacles although he could not have said what they were. Strangely, the young man with the
Welt am Abend
newspaper was still hiding in the doorway, still looking furtively over the top. And worse, the madwoman who imagined flies had not disappeared but instead collapsed on a bench under a plane tree where she sat with her legs so wide apart that she could only mean Hugo to see her torn and ragged undergarments. She let out a sudden shriek as he walked past that could have been a curse, he could not tell. The lamps were lit to look like thumbprints of butter on the blackness but threw no light, only created shadows.

By the time he returned to No. 56, he was so unnerved that he did not notice the state of the butter in his hand which had become one with the scrap of brown paper. He was clutching at its oily ooze as if it provided some kind of security. And the worst was to come – the staircase, from the hall to their apartment over the showroom. In the dark, it was no longer a place to linger; there was no light and nothing to watch. There was a switch by the door, placed conveniently for him to switch on so that the bulb over the landing in its Chinese hat of pink china lit up but he knew its habit of going out before he could reach his own door, no matter how fast he pounded up the stairs. He knew it always went out when there were still half a dozen steps to the landing, and then he would have to grope his way up that last flight to his apartment door.

This evening it went out so soon and so abruptly that Hugo was convinced of its malevolence, of its connivance with some evil conspirator who sat by some hidden spyhole on the staircase and watched. He knew about those men who lurked in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to fling the noose, whip out the knife, bring down the cosh . . . he had even seen the man waiting – much further down the road, with his newspaper, but he could have followed Hugo – Hugo never turned to look back over his shoulder – or even
overtaken
him in the dark. Now he would be waiting at his own door, barring his entry into safety, protection and light. Waiting for Hugo. Hugo knew he was waiting – and lunged forward with a howl, throwing himself at the door and feeling his hands close not upon its solid brass knob but instead on something soft, warm, yielding. Instantly, his hands recoiled – and the object loomed up at him, pale, round, loose, dead; there had been no feel of life at his fingertips, the face was as flabby and relaxed as in death, when rot has set it.

At last a sound emerged from Hugo’s open mouth – like a train emerging from a tunnel, it roared and shrieked into the open. The door flew open, a shaft of yellow light slanted through in which his mother stood, thunderstruck, and the cloth bag that hung on the door knob for the baker to fill with rolls in the morning swung hilariously from side to side.

How she laughed when she understood what had happened, how she twittered and chuckled. She was still chuckling when she undressed him for bed that night, unbuttoning the viyella vest from the viyella underpants with her quick, cold fingers. ‘And the butter!’ she exclaimed again. ‘And the coins rolling down the stairs – pit, pit, pit! Did not even buy himself a bar of chocolate with the change, my little hero. Your tongue lost its taste for sweets in the dark, did it?’

‘
O du lieber Augustin
,

alles ist hin!

Geld ist weg
,

Beutel ist weg
,

Augustin liegt auch im Dreck
,

O du lieber Augustin
,

alles ist hin!
’

Yet she was there holding the traditional cone of bonbons, wrapped in gold foil and decorated with rustling silver streamers, at the door of his school at the end of the first day. He had been so afraid she would not be. All the other children had talked of the bonbons their parents had promised to bring
to
school – already ordered, already bought, they said ecstatically – and he had stood silent, so consumed by fear that she would not meet him with a similar prize that he could not concentrate on building blue blocks into one tower and red ones into another or listen to the story about the wolf and the seven little kids told by the long-toothed teacher whose hair kept escaping from its tortoiseshell clasp and dangling beside her ear like a misplaced tail. So he had not run out after the others, but stayed to the last and sidled out, hoping the others had all left before he came out to face his ignominy. Then there she was, with violets pinned to her new blouse, holding out to him a gilt cone with silver streamers, smiling the smile she smiled for no one but him. ‘
Mein kleines Häschen
,’ she said, ‘Here’s my little rabbit’. Before she could shame him with an embrace, he had snatched the cone out of her hand in jubilation and held it up for the others to see. But there was no one, the other children were vanishing down the street in a flood of chocolate and toffee, licking and smacking their lips and oozing with spittle. No one saw his triumph.

His mouth full of toffee, his tongue blamed his mother. ‘You came so late,’ and then, ‘You don’t look like everyone else’s mother,’ he complained. ‘Why don’t you look like the other mothers?’

Left alone with her, left behind by his father, he kicked at her with savagery, pummelled her chest with his fists, furiously. He blamed her, blamed her entirely. When she put her arms around him and tried to draw him to her, it was that encirclement of soft, sweet-smelling arms that he blamed for his imprisonment in this flat, this house.

‘I want to go with Papa!’ he roared, drumming his heels on the floorboards. ‘I want to see the
horses
,’ and struck at her with his fists, ‘not
you
.’

‘I know, I know, I know,’ she murmured, trying to make her voice soothe him since her touch could not.

‘You don’t!’ he shouted. ‘You
don’t
know!’

So she was quiet.

The whole flat filled with quiet like a well in which they sat drowning.

That was the end of his pleading, his demanding. It would not have come about if Herr Pfuehl had not come the evening before, if Hugo had not heard them make plans to go to the races together. He would not have known what they were, but he heard them speak the horses’ names: Summer Lightning, Tutankhamen, Turkish Delight, Carolina, Prince de Galles, Puerto Rico, Sweet Sensation . . . The names like flags, or streamers, the cigars, the laughter, the tinge of red coming out on his father’s face, the gleaming shoe tapping, more laughter, more names – Abyssinia, Trocadero, Indian Chief, Marzipan . . . and Hugo was gripping his father’s knees, staring at his father’s face, saying, ‘Take me, Papa,
take
me.’

His father’s knee gave a twitch, his kneecap moved out of Hugo’s grasp. ‘Mutti,’ he called, ‘take the child away, why is he still up?’

‘But Papa, I want to go,’ he lunged again before being carried away. He brooded that night, planning his plans under the tent of his quilt, certain the night would yield and tomorrow would come, with horses. How could it not when he had performed all the magic he knew? Held his left thumb in his right hand, his right toe in his left hand, said, ‘Mick-muck-mo, Make-it-so,’ even knelt by his bed and said a prayer as he had seen the Christian children in school pray to ‘
Lieber
Jesus’?

When his father left the apartment, dressed for the races, in his hat and with his ivory-topped cane, Hugo could not believe. For a long time, his mouth remained open, and he watched the door, certain it would open again and his father would come to fetch him. How could he not be taken to share a treat? The minutes passed, the footsteps on the stairs receded till they could not be heard any more. The door slammed. Then Hugo moved, with a roar. He ran to the window and beat on the glass as if to break it, so that his mother had to hold him away even if she were kicked and beaten.

‘Hugo,’ she said at last, kneeling there with her hands in her lap, ‘Hugo, I have never been either.’

He looked at her with the hatred of one prisoner for another.