‘It’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull it out sometime. Maybe today.’
Then a car horn hooted outside the building. Dot went to the front door with her father. Mr Hollack, the chauffeur, saluted her and she saluted him back. She did it just the same as the chauffeur, putting one hand to the peak of her cap, even though she wasn’t wearing a cap. Her father got in the car, it drove away and her father waved. Dot waved back.
When she wanted to go back inside the apartment building, Gottfried Klepperbein was standing outside the door. He was the son of the couple who were caretakers of the building, and he was a total lout.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘if you give me ten marks I won’t tell on you. If you don’t I’ll tell your father.’
‘Tell him what?’ asked Dot innocently.
Gottfried Klepperbein barred her way threateningly. ‘You know perfectly well what, so don’t act so stupid, sweetie.’
Dot wanted to get indoors again, but he wouldn’t let her by. So she stood beside him, put her hands behind her back and looked up at the sky in surprise, as if the Zeppelin airship were flying overhead, or she’d seen a maybug with skates on, or something like that.
Of course the boy looked up at the sky too, and then Dot shot past him like lightning, leaving Gottfried Klepperbein with nothing for his trouble, as they say.
ABOUT DUTY
We met rather a lot of people in the first chapter, didn’t we? Let’s see whether we can remember them all.
There’s Mr Pogge the director; his lady wife; there’s Dot, their daughter; thin Miss Andacht; fat Berta; Gottfried Klepperbein; and Piefke the little dachshund. That’s to say, we’ll have to leave Piefke out. Dachshunds aren’t really people, more’s the pity.
And now I’ll ask you the following question: which of those characters did you like, and which didn’t you like so much?
If I may tell you my own opinion, I like Dot a great deal, and fat Berta too. I haven’t made up my mind about Mr Pogge yet. But I can’t stand Dot’s mother.
There’s something about the woman that bothers me. She doesn’t look after her husband, so why did she marry him? She doesn’t look after her child, so why did she have a baby? She’s neglecting her duty, don’t you agree? No one will mind her liking to go to the theatre or the cinema, or even watching six-day bicycle races for all I care. But first and foremost she’s Dot’s mother and Mr Pogge’s wife.
And if she forgets that she can go take a running jump.
Can’t she?
Chapter Two
Anton Can Even Cook
After lunch Mrs Pogge had a migraine. Migraines are headaches when you don’t actually have a headache. Fat Berta had to let down the bedroom blinds so that it was all dark, like real night. Mrs Pogge lay down in bed and told Miss Andacht, ‘Go for a walk with the child, and take the dog with you. I need peace and quiet. And I don’t want anything to happen!’
Miss Andacht went to Dot’s room to collect Dot and the dog. She arrived in the middle of a theatrical performance. Piefke was lying in Dot’s bed, with only his nose showing. He was playing the part of the wolf who has eaten Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. He didn’t know the story, but he acted his part quite well. Dot was standing beside the bed wearing her red beret and with Berta’s shopping basket over her arm. ‘Oh, Grandmother,’ she was saying, ‘what big teeth you have!’
Then she switched to a different, deeper voice and growled, ‘All the better to eat you with.’ She put the basket down, went up to the bed and whispered to Piefke, like a prompter, ‘Right, now you have to eat me.’
Piefke, as I said before, didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood yet, so he turned over on his side and did nothing of the kind.
‘Eat me!’ Dot ordered him. ‘Come on, eat me up this minute!’ Then she stamped her foot and cried, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Are you hard of hearing or what? You’re supposed to be eating me!’
Piefke got cross, came out from under Dot’s quilt, sat on the pillow and barked as loud as he could.
‘He doesn’t have a clue,’ said Dot. ‘He’s a rotten actor.’
Miss Andacht put the clueless wolf’s collar and lead on him, made sure that Dot was wearing her blue coat with the gilt buttons, and said, ‘Get your linen hat. We’re going for a walk.’ Dot would really rather have kept her beret on, but Miss Andacht said, ‘If you do that, then you can’t go to see Anton.’ The threat worked.
They left. Piefke sat down in the road so that Miss Andacht had to tug at his lead. ‘He’s going for a sleigh ride again,’ said the governess, picking him up. He draped himself over her arm like a handbag that had been in an accident, darting her nasty looks.
‘What street does Anton live in? Did you notice that?’
‘Artilleriestrasse, fourth floor, on the right,’ said Dot.
‘What number is the building?’
‘A hundred and eighty divided by five,’ said Dot.
‘Why don’t you just say thirty-six and be done with it?’
‘It’s easier to remember my way,’ claimed Dot. ‘And incidentally, I think Berta smells a rat. She says someone must be positively devouring matches, she keeps buying more and they always go missing. I hope she won’t find us out. And Klepperbein’s been threatening me again. He says he wants ten marks or he’ll give us away. Suppose he tells the director, then what?’
Miss Andacht didn’t reply. For one thing she wasn’t naturally talkative, and for another she didn’t like this conversation. They walked along beside the River Spree, crossed a small iron bridge, went up the Schiffbauerdamm, turned left down Friedrichstrasse, right at the corner, and then they were in Artilleriestrasse.
‘It’s a very old, ugly building,’ remarked the governess. ‘Watch out; there could be trapdoors in it.’
Dot laughed, picked Piefke up and asked, ‘Where shall we meet later?’
‘You can pick me up from the Café Sommerlatte at six.’
‘Are you going dancing with your fiancé again? Give him my regards, and have a nice time!’ Then their ways parted. Miss Andacht went off to go dancing, and Dot went into the strange apartment building. Piefke howled. He didn’t seem to like the place.
Anton lived on the fourth floor. ‘It’s great that you’ve come to see me,’ he said. After they had said hello they stood in the doorway for quite some time. The boy was wearing a large blue apron.
‘This is Piefke,’ Dot explained.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Anton, patting the little dachshund. And once again they stood there saying nothing.
‘Go on, then, invite me into the sitting room,’ Dot said at last.
Then they laughed, and Anton went ahead. He took Dot into the kitchen. ‘I’m just cooking,’ he said.
‘You can cook?’ she asked. Her jaw dropped, and stayed like that.
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘What else are we to do? My mother’s been ill for such a long time, so I do the cooking when I get back from school. We can’t go hungry, can we?’
‘Please don’t let me disturb you,’ said Dot. She put Piefke down, removed her coat and took her hat off. ‘Go on cooking, and I’ll watch. What are you cooking today?’
‘Boiled potatoes with salt,’ he said, picking up an oven cloth and going over to the stove. There was a pan standing on it. Anton took the lid off the pan, stuck a fork into the potatoes and nodded, satisfied. ‘But she’s much better now,’ he said.
‘Who is?’ asked Dot.
‘My mother. She said she’ll get up for a couple of hours tomorrow. And she may go back to work next week. She works as a cleaning lady, you see.’
‘Yes, I see,’ agreed Dot. ‘My mother doesn’t work at anything. At the moment she has a migraine.’
Anton took two eggs, broke them into a pan, tipped the last of the eggs out of their shells and then threw the shells away in the coal scuttle, poured some water into the pan, put something white into it on top of the eggs and the water, and then took a little whisk and s
tirred the mixture up with it. ‘Oh no!’ he cried. ‘It’s going lumpy.’
Piefke trotted over to the coal scuttle and visited the eggshells.
‘Why did you put sugar in that pan?’ asked Dot.
‘It was flour,’ Anton told her. ‘I’m making scrambled eggs, and if you add flour and water to the eggs you get bigger helpings.’
Dot nodded. ‘How much salt do you add to the boiled potatoes?’ she asked. ‘A whole pound of salt or only half a pound?’
Anton laughed out loud. ‘Much, much less than that!’ he said. ‘We want them to taste nice. Only enough salt to cover the tips of two knives, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Dot, watching him. He took a small saucepan, melted some margarine in it and put it over the second gas flame, then he tipped the whisked eggs into it. They hissed. ‘Don’t forget the salt, Anton,’ he reminded himself, taking a pinch of salt and sprinkling it over the yellow mixture in the small saucepan. When it began thickening he stirred it with a wooden spoon. There was an appetizing sizzle.
‘So it’s called scrambled eggs because they’re all scrambled up,’ Dot worked out.
‘You go on stirring it for a bit, please,’ asked Anton, handing her the spoon, and she stirred the mixture for him. He took hold of the handles of the pan of potatoes with two woollen cloths and tipped the simmering water down the sink. Then he divided the potatoes between two plates. ‘You have to be terribly careful with boiled potatoes or they go all mushy,’ he said.
But Dot wasn’t listening. She was stirring the eggs so hard that her arm hurt. Meanwhile, Piefke was playing football with the eggshells.
Anton turned the gas off, divided the scrambled eggs fairly between the two plates, washed his hands and took off the big apron.
‘We couldn’t come yesterday evening,’ said Dot. ‘My parents had guests, so they stayed at home.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said the boy. ‘Just a moment. I’ll be right back.’
He took the two plates and pushed his way through the door. Dot was left alone. She tried balancing an eggshell on Piefke’s head. ‘If you learn to do that,’ she whispered, ‘you can perform in the circus.’ But the dachshund seemed to have some kind of objection to the circus. He kept throwing the eggshells off his head again. ‘All right then, don’t, you silly dog,’ said Dot, looking round. Goodness, what a tiny kitchen this was! She had seen at once that Anton was a poor boy, but she was astonished to find that he had such a minute kitchen. You looked down from the window into a grey yard. ‘What do you think of our kitchen by comparison?’ she asked the dachshund. Piefke wagged his tail.
Then Anton came back. ‘Would you two like to come into the bedroom while we eat?’ he asked. Dot nodded, and took Piefke by the scruff of his neck.
‘She still looks rather ill,’ said the boy, ‘but do me a favour and don’t seem to notice, all right?’
It was a good thing that he had prepared Dot in advance. Anton’s mother was sitting up in bed, looking very pale and unwell. She gave Dot a friendly nod and said, ‘How nice of you to come to visit.’
Dot bobbed a curtsey and said, ‘Enjoy your meal, Mrs Anton. You’re looking very well. How is your esteemed health today?’
The boy laughed, put another pillow behind his mother’s back and said, ‘My mother’s name isn’t Anton. Anton is me.’
‘Honestly, men!’ said Dot, exasperated, rolling her eyes. ‘What a lot of trouble they are, don’t you agree, dear madam?’
‘I’m not the sort you have to call madam,’ explained Anton’s mother, smiling. ‘I’m Mrs Gast.’
‘Gast,’ repeated Dot. ‘That’s right, it says so on your door. It’s a pretty name, too.’ She had made up her mind to like everything she saw here, so as not to hurt the feelings of Anton and his mother.
‘Does it taste all right, Mama?’ he asked.
‘It’s delicious, my boy,’ replied the sick woman, and she ate heartily. ‘I’ll be able to cook again myself tomorrow. You aren’t getting any time to play, my dear, and your school work is suffering as well. Do you know, he even cooked ground-beef patties yesterday?’ she told the girl. And Anton bent over his plate so as not to show how pleased he was by the praise.
‘I don’t understand the first thing about cooking,’ Dot admitted. ‘Fat Berta does it for us at home; she weighs a hundred and eighty pounds. But I can play tennis.’
‘And her father has a car and a chauffeur,’ said Anton.
‘We’ll take you for a drive in it if you like,’ Dot told him. ‘The director is a nice man. The director’s my father,’ she added.
‘It’s a big Mercedes, a real limousine,’ Anton explained. ‘And their apartment has ten rooms, too.’
‘But yours is a lovely apartment as well, Mrs Gast,’ said the girl, putting Piefke on the bed.
‘How do you two come to know each other?’ asked Mrs Gast.
Anton trod on Dot’s toes and said, ‘Oh, well, we just said hello in the street one day. We liked each other at once.’ Dot nodded in agreement. Then she glanced at the dachshund and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I think Piefke needs to go out.’
Mrs Gast said, ‘You could all go for a little walk, couldn’t you? I’ll have a nap for an hour or so.’ Anton took the plates into the kitchen and went to fetch his cap. When he came back into the bedroom, his mother said, ‘Anton, you ought to get your hair cut.’
‘Oh no!’ he protested. ‘All those little hairs fall down the back of my neck, and they tickle horribly.’
‘Give me my purse. You’re going to get your hair cut,’ she ordered.
‘All right, if you’re so keen on it,’ he said. ‘But I have the money for it myself.’ And when his mother looked at him in an odd way, he added, ‘I’ve been helping to carry people’s luggage at the railway station.’ He kissed his mother on the cheek and told her to sleep well, not to get up, to keep warm, and so on.
‘Anything you say, doctor,’ said his mother, offering Dot her hand.
‘Goodbye,’ Dot said. ‘But now we must go. Piefke can’t wait any longer.’
The dachshund was sitting by the door, looking hard at the handle as if he were trying to hypnotize it. That made all three of them laugh, and then the children went happily out.
ABOUT PRIDE
I wonder what you think. Do you think it’s all right for a boy to cook? Put on his mother’s apron, peel potatoes, put them in a pan and add salt to the water, and goodness knows what else?
I was talking to Paul about that, and he said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t cook. I’ve got no intention of cooking.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘but suppose your mother was ill in bed, and the doctor had said she needed to eat well and at regular intervals, or she might die?…’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Paul hastily, ‘then I suppose I’d cook, like your friend Anton. But if you ask me, I’d be ashamed of myself all the same. Cooking’s not something that boys do.’
‘If you’d been playing with a dolls’ kitchen, that might be some reason to feel ashamed of yourself,’ I said. ‘But if you were cooking to make sure your sick mother had food at the right time, you could be proud of that. You could be even prouder of it than you are of doing a long jump of four metres…’
‘Four metres twenty,’ said Paul.
‘There, you see,’ I said, ‘you’re really rather proud of that!’
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ said Paul after a while, ‘and maybe I wouldn’t be ashamed if someone caught me cooking. But I’d rather no one did. I think I’d bolt the kitchen door. And anyway my mother isn’t ill. And if she was we’d get a cleaning lady to come, and she could cook for us!’
Paul is a fathead, don’t you think?
Chapter Three
Shaving a Dog
Piefke stopped at the first lamp post they came to. When the children wanted to go on, he wouldn’t. Dot had to drag him. ‘He’s going for a ride on a sleigh again,’ she said.
‘Let me try,’ said Anton. ‘We
’ll soon get him moving.’ He took hold of the dog’s lead, and pulled his handkerchief far enough out of his pocket for a white corner of it to show. Then he called, ‘Piefke!’
The dachshund raised his head, looked at the white corner of the handkerchief with interest, and thought: that could be something to eat. So when Anton walked on he waddled hastily after him, watching the handkerchief all the time and snuffling.
‘Terrific!’ said Dot. ‘A brilliant idea. I must remember that.’
‘What did you think of our apartment?’ he asked. ‘Not very nice, is it?’
‘It looks a bit dilapissipated,’ she said.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Dilapissipated!’ she said. ‘Do you like that word? I made it up. I sometimes discover new words. Warmometer is another of them.’
‘Warmometer instead of thermometer?’ he said. ‘So you didn’t mean what you said badly?’
‘Not a bit,’ she said. ‘Shall we play at laughing?’ She didn’t wait for his answer, but took his hand and murmured, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t feel at all like laughing, I feel so deeply, tragically sad and sorrowful.’ Anton looked at her, baffled. She opened her eyes very wide and frowned. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t feel at all like laughing, I feel so deeply, tragically sad and sorrowful,’ she repeated. Then she nudged him in the ribs and said, ‘Your turn!’
Anton did as she wanted. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t feel at all like laughing, I feel so deeply, tragically sad and sorrowful.’
‘Me too, oh, I feel so sad,’ she murmured back. ‘I don’t feel at all like laughing, I feel so deeply, tragically sad and sorrowful.’ And because they were looking at each other with such utterly miserable expressions, they started roaring with laughter.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t feel at all like laughing,’ Anton began again, and they laughed more than ever. Finally they dared not look at each other any more. They laughed and chuckled, they couldn’t stop, they could hardly get their breath back. People were stopping to look at them. Piefke sat down. Now they’ve gone right out of their tiny minds, the dachshund thought. Dot picked him up, and the children went on. But they were careful to look in different directions. Dot chuckled to herself a few more times, and then it was over.
DOT AND ANTON Page 2
