No Refuge for the Wanderer
FALKENBERG, BETTY
No Refuge for the Wanderer Baumgartner's Bombay By Anita Desai Knopf. 230 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review, " New York "Times Book Review" Anita...
...Ultimately, Habibullah can only advise Baumgartner to leave for Bombay, where he might resume business with another Indian, Chimanlal...
...Apart from Lotte, a German cabaret dancer he first met in Calcutta prior to the outbreak of the War, who now leads an equally unhappy existence, he has no close friends...
...Why couldn't the hippie—if it had to be a hippie—have been American, Dutch, Scandinavian, whatever...
...Increasingly bowed down by an accurate appraisal of his own powerlessness, Baumgartner starts to resemble a beggar...
...He would remain an outsider, a fair-skinned/;'ranghi, just as in Germany "his darkness had marked him the Jew, der Jude...
...Not long after his arrival in "tropical green" Calcutta, a British soldier places his hand on Baumgartner's shoulder at a cabaret...
...The religious war shatters Baumgartner's efforts to rebuild his life...
...The blood ran, ran over the floor and down the stairs, soaking his feet which stood in it helplessly...
...On one level at least, Baumgartner's Bombay might also be described as a mathematical problem set and solved in exquisite prose...
...None of that strengthens Baumgartner for an encounter years later outside his Bombay dwelling, where a street family has appropriated the pavement...
...In the darkness, it continued to chase the train, chase Baumgartner...
...Back in Calcutta, when a riot broke out among the other tenants of the house he was living in and a Marxist youth was killed in an attic room, Baumgartner had become conscious of his inability to act...
...What to do...
...Desai describes his arrival on the subcontinent in all its dazzling, daunting detail: "It had seemed bedlam when he disembarked and walked on to what he was assured was Indian soil—the crowds, of Indians, Britons, Americans, Gurkhas—coolies carrying their luggage...
...There the global struggle is replaced first by a colonial war, then by a religious one raging in the streets...
...Besides, the Indian is merely carrying out British orders...
...They have no money," the café owner laments, "...in Afghanistan, in Nepal already it starts to go, so they can buy hashish, buy ganja, all those powders they have to take like babies take milk...
...Returning home one night, he finds the husband savagely beating his wife to the amused indifference of onlookers...
...So when they come here nothing is left...
...Half relieved that he no longer has a business to go to, he rarely washes his clothes...
...Thus, inadvertently, he contributes to his own demise...
...Defeat has been a steady, slow accretion...
...Baumgartner's entreaties to call the police are ignored...
...He cannot read the faces, nor can he understand the confusion of tongues...
...But he questions his ability to survive in India, " reduced as he was to such an abject state of helplessness...
...In having these characters shift rapidly between ironic distance and empathy, Desai gives them a rich complexity...
...Grudgingly, Baumgartner agrees to take the blond-haired wonder home...
...But for Anita Desai, whose mother's family was destroyed in Nazi Germany, the balanced equation may serve an inner need...
...To impose this kind of "meaning" on his life, however, seems almost to rob him of his own meaning...
...Searching out his former business partner, Habibullah, he finds that the Muslim is about to flee to what will become, after partition, East Pakistan...
...Surveying his options, he realizes that he will never return to Germany...
...What troubles is not so much the "necessary" violence of the murder, but rather the "necessary" agent of the act...
...Pushing past them was the little landlady in white...
...Eliot: "In my beginning is my end...
...When the man began to beat his wife's head against the pavement so that the blood spilt and gushed he [Baumgartner] hurried up to him and caught him by his shoulder only to be flung off and hurled against the wall...
...A gentle soul, Baumgartner had no overriding ambitions...
...Tcch,' shesaid, ? always knew this boy was bad.' 'Madam,' Baumgartner stammered, 'the boy is dead.'" In a recurring nightmare, the blood becomes that of his mother, who perished in a German concentration camp...
...officers stiff with laundry starch and gleaming with Brasso and boot polish —hawkers and traders scurrying around with baskets and trays—memsahibs and blonde children with lopsided basinshaped topis on their bleached hair— Indian women in shapeless garments squatting passively with their baskets or babies—and over it all, congealing them into one restless, heaving mass, the light from the sky and the sea, an invasion of light such as he had never known could exist—and heat like boiling oil tipped out of a cauldron on to their heads, running down their necks into their collars and shirts...
...He is spirited of f to the police station, where the Indian in charge tells him, "I have to arrest you, sir...
...For Baumgartner—as Desai has gone to such loving pains to demonstrate—does not so much survive as endure in heroic silence...
...The story begins at the end...
...He will feed him as he would a cat, although he likes him less...
...It helps explain why Baumgartner, like a figure in a Greek tragedy who seems to elude his destiny, must die at the hands of a German...
...Bommgarter sahib, what to do...
...He did nothing more, knowing himself incapable of anything...
...In terms of the novel's own inner logic, there seems to be no reason...
...War is declared and we must take you into detention camp...
...Baumgartner is the quintessential refugee, haunted by his past and frustrated in his desire to achieve a sense of belonging...
...The city is a pivotal point, poised between West and East...
...Very bad, sir, very bad...
...All he has is cats—maimed, repugnant creatures that he brings home to feed and heal...
...Upon his release at the War's end, the outsider returns to once-verdant Calcutta...
...In Bombay the European's downward slide soon accelerates...
...Hesaw "the boy lying face down on the floor...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review, " New York "Times Book Review" Anita Desai opens her beautiful new novel with a quote from T.S...
...He had similarly been incapable of aiding the mother he left behind...
...During one of his subsequent regular visits to a café that gives him leftovers for his cats, the proprietor shows Baumgartner a hippie asleep with his arms curled up "like a bag of pale fur on the table"—a Teutonic "angel-child...
...The blood streamed...
...The drug-crazed boy kills him in his sleep for a few silver trophies won years ago at the races...
...After Chimanlal's death, his son forces Baumgartner out of the firm...
...Women came up the stairs, wailing...
...If her narrative tone occasionally sounds prim and stilted, her dialogue is deliciously spiced with indigenous, peppery humor...
...The camp affords Baumgartner a kind of peace, a welcome retreat into solitude...
...It is a stunning accomplishment...
...Hugo Baumgartner, a Berlin Jew who had escaped to India on the eve of World War II, lies dead in his Bombay flat, brutally murdered by a German hippie...
...Yet there is something disturbing about this very neatness, especially with regard to the death that begins and ends the novel...
...Baumgartner is stricken by panic and doubt...
...More important, it contains a symbol: "...the great San Giorgio looked to him like an equation immaculately worked out in stone, a mathematical problem set and solved...
...He sets out for Calcutta, but "alongside the train was always the shadow of the past...
...Or why not a street person...
...For each disparate voice and foreign-sounding language, the author finds a unique cadence...
...He even wears his shoes "slit at the sides for comfort...
...Languages sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked words from it without knowing if they were English or Hindi or Bengali...
...Baumgartner tottered to his feet and allowed them to push him away...
...There is a passage of singular beauty early on in the book that describes, in redolent detail, Baumgartner's brief stopover in Venice...
...An animal like a jackal in the day, a hyena in the night...
...To this she might have added Paul Celan's nowfamous refrain: "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschtand" ("Death is a master from Germany...
...Such fine distinctions as between Nazis and refugees from Nazism do not exist here...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 8
