Free Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai

had come out for the Emperor Franz Josef’s coronation in 1906; she pointed out to him the gold-embossed portrait of the Kaiser, then closed its thick brown covers, ran her hand lovingly – even pridefully over the imperial motto in its flowery scroll:
Viribus Unitis
. But when he took it in his hands, Hugo thought it looked and felt exactly like a coffin, the coffin into which they had closed his father. Instead of poring over it with her nostalgic fascination, he took recourse to the schoolboy’s totem – his penknife – and spent the silent hours whittling instead. Sometimes on the window-seat by the piano, sometimes on his bed, sometimes out on the landing, simply to be out of the house. Whenever he heard a step, he got up and went back into the flat that was beginning to resemble that Kaiser-coffin of a book.
    Their lives fell into a groove and remained there: they might have been an old married couple, Hugo and his mother, seldom leaving the apartment, looking after each other with stricken concern. Some of the neighbours dropped in occasionally, bringing them magazines, bringing them rolls, or jam they had made. Never butter; there was no butter. Never newspapers, it was better not to see them. The Gentleman from Hamburg installed himself in the shop downstairs, his own name – his good, sound, Teutonic name – painted on the new shop-window in letters of black, edged with gold. When he came up to call on them, he was concerned, polite, helpful over the tea Frau Baumgartner served on a tray. Then she would go to the roll-top desk, open it and go through the papers in it with him, her voice a murmur Hugo could barely overhear from his corner by the bookshelf. Generally, after such a visit, some object or the other would be removed from its place and carried downstairs – the Prussian helmet in the shape of an ashtray, the pistol-shaped barometer from between the french windows, and even the wooden negro who held umbrellas in the hall – the ivory-topped cane had already vanished. Hugo was astounded to see it uproot itself after so many years of standing stock-still and inscrutable, and watched its shining black head bob down the stairs in disbelief. Eventually the piano went too. When Hugo opened his mouth to protest, his mother laid her finger on her lips and whispered the old saying, ‘Stepchildren must behave doubly well.’ Silently he turned the words over in his mind: ‘
Stiefkinder müssen doppelt artig sein
.’ The apartment became strangely empty, and this emptiness matched the silence into which they sank.
    The Gentleman from Hamburg began to bluster. ‘A young man who is not pursuing his education, what chance has he in this world?’ he demanded of Hugo after drinking a cup of coffee with them, the coffee ground from bitter beans that made their mouths pucker and gave their speech an edge. ‘Frau Baumgartner, you cannot imagine he will be fit for employment –’
    ‘What employment, Herr Pfuehl? What employment can you think of for him?’ she replied with some asperity. She used her coffee cup only for warming her hands.
    Herr Pfuehl continued to bluster. ‘At least send him down to learn something in the office. We can’t have the late Herr Baumgartner’s only son grow up uneducated and unemployed, can we?’
    ‘That,’ said Frau Baumgartner, setting down her coffee cup, ‘he can certainly do. Thank you, Herr Pfuehl, I will see that he does that,’ and left Hugo gaping at his first lesson in the stiffening effect of hardship.
    It seemed to Hugo that he entered the small office at the back of the showroom and never left it again. To begin with, he sat at his father’s old desk, going through the bills, endlessly doing calculations or tapping out business letters on an ancient typewriter, and then he brought blankets down so that he could sleep on the sagging green sofa by the radiator and a kettle so that he could boil himself some soup or
ersatz
coffee on the gas ring.
    Eventually