by Ingrid Pitt
The apartment was largish but, like most flats of that period and in that time, gloomy and badly in need of repair. The woman led me through to the kitchen, put a knife, some black bread and cheese in front of me, and left. I was into my second sandwich when a young girl came in and introduced herself as Nelli. She told me she’d been there when the Americans had brought me in. I told her my story and she was suitably impressed. Other women came into the kitchen, so I had to tell the tale again. They all thought it was hilarious.
I was beginning to get the idea that my rescuers hadn’t dumped me in a seminary for young ladies. The women’s speech was too colourful, sprinkled with English swearwords that they could have picked up only by frequent and intimate contact with the forces of occupation. I was too prudish to ask them what they did for a living, but they soon told me anyway. I was in the greatest little whorehouse in the West – well, West Berlin, anyway.
I thought it was terribly exciting. The girls started recounting fantastic stories about the tricks they had pulled and I sat there, bug-eyed, screaming with laughter. It was the best therapy I could have had and within the hour I’d forgotten how terrified I had been the night before.
When my mother walked in, the room fell silent and, feeling guilty by association, I hastily borrowed some clothes and followed her out into the decrepit street, without daring to look back. Matka wasn’t exactly talkative as we made our way across the city. When we got home she insisted that I take off my borrowed finery and go to bed. It sounded good to me. For one thing weariness had hit me again and for another it put off the hour of reckoning with Matka.
The next morning she brought me a cup of tea. She was in a better mood now. She gave me a hug, held my hand and sat beside me on the bed. I knew what was coming – I could see typewriter ribbon in her eyes – but I wasn’t worried. I had thought up what I believed to be a cunning scheme.
At the Berliner Ensemble, I’d overheard some of the actors talking about the Burgtheater in Vienna. I hadn’t paid much attention because I’d assumed that I would be staying with the Ensemble for the foreseeable future. Now that that had all come to an abrupt end and the office door was in front of me, it was time to clutch at clouds. So far, I hadn’t impressed Matka with my life-style, so I knew I had to be a bit devious and decided to tell a slight fib. Well, a whacking great lie. I told my mother that in East Berlin I had been approached by a representative of the Burgtheater to go to Vienna for an audition. He had practically guaranteed me a job, I assured her. I don’t suppose she believed me for a minute but I think she was getting bored at home so she let me persuade her that Vienna was the answer to all my problems – and said she would come with me to the audition. That really hit me between the eyes. I’d hoped merely to distract her from the secretary idea until something better came up. Before I knew where I was, I’d been swept up in my own web of deceit.
We didn’t have much money to spare so we decided that we would take to the road and hitch-hike wherever possible, and hoard what money we had for whenever the going got too tough. It meant travelling light. We packed a few bits and pieces, put our pennies together and made our way to the entrance to the Avus, the motorway leading to Helmstedt, the American-Russian control point. At first I received plenty of offers of lifts but the drivers suddenly had to be elsewhere when I produced my mother. We even tried the standing-behind-a-tree ploy. I’d get a car to stop and then she’d come out. It didn’t work. Before we could get in the driver would drop the clutch and the car would speed off.
Finally, a milk truck stopped for us. At lunch-time we drew into a busy truckers’ caff, loud and cheerful, with beer and cigarette ash like a wet sponge carpet on the floor. Suddenly there was a lot of shouting and laughter. Matka asked a driver what was going on and he told us a bloke at the bar had bet a hundred marks that he’d swallow a live mouse. Our driver was up for that and tried to get my mother to chip in but she hated betting. I think she thought life was enough of a gamble without taking on side bets.
Everyone craned forward to see what was happening. A young, good-looking man was holding a grey mouse by its tail, displaying it for everyone to see. I forced myself to watch. Someone banged on a tin plate and the show began. The man held the wiggling mouse high above his head and slowly lowered it into his mouth. Everybody was shouting and laughing. The poor mouse seemed to know what was coming and made a last desperate effort to get away. Too late. The man put it in his mouth and then walked around the yelling audience with the still wriggling tail hanging out. I felt ill. Seeing the effect he was having on me the young man turned to give me the finale. The tail disappeared as the mouse slid down into his stomach. That did it for me. I puked all over his boots and ran outside.
Matka came after me and said that the driver of the milk truck wanted to get on but perhaps we should wait a while until I felt better. I croaked that I wanted to go home. I felt too sick to go anywhere. Mascha nodded solemnly and put her arm round me. ‘Right!’ she said with an air of finality. She didn’t have to remind me what I was going back to but I kept seeing the tail disappear in the man’s mouth and retched and retched again. So that was the end of the Burgtheater.
It was a long time before we found a ride back. There seemed to be no one on the road crazy enough to want to go to Berlin. Then it started to rain and the few cars that came along refused to stop for two sopping-wet passengers. Eventually a trucker took pity on us.
As we waited at the border at Marienborn to get the truck’s load checked, the driver started talking about the war. He’d been at Sobibor concentration camp. Matka told him a bit of our experiences and they talked all the way back to our home. The driver asked if he could visit when he next came to Berlin but we never heard from him again. I don’t think my mother minded. She wanted nothing to do with those years. Neither did he, I suppose. Talking about our past opened the floodgates of memory for Mama and I never heard her mention them again. She didn’t want to hear others talk about it, she didn’t want to be reminded. She locked it up in the recesses of her brain and threw away the key.
The next day I tried to hide from my mother by again staying in bed. Eventually, she brought me a cup of tea and sat down beside me. She asked me how I was and I said all right. I asked her how she was and she said she was fine. She didn’t push it. I guess she thought I had agreed to fall back on my diploma and type for the rest of my life. As daunting as the prospect was I was beginning to think it was the only option.
Mama drew in a deep breath – and the doorbell rang. We looked at each other, startled. Someone ringing the doorbell was a bit of a novelty. Matka got up and answered the door. The US lieutenant who had fished me out of the Spree stood on the doorstep with a bunch of flowers and a shiny cake tin with a picture of Father Christmas on it. He’d rescued me once more.
Fifteen
We were married six months later, in May: a white wedding with a white carriage and horses. It had created a bit of a problem since my husband-to-be was a Christian and I was not attached to any church or synagogue. When one mentioned faith in God to my mother she’d get up and leave the room and I wasn’t far behind. My husband-to-be and I had one or two rows over the God question but I let him see a few pictures that were for ever engraved on my brain . . . After that, my future husband left me alone about religion, but he still wanted our union sanctified and whatever he desired I wished him to have. It made no difference to me. My wedding was great fun, though. We had a hilarious ceremony with a vicar who stuttered – in a mosque. Not a lot of people can say that.
As we prepared to leave on honeymoon, everything packed into the car, I started to say goodbye to Matka and suddenly I couldn’t go. She stood in the doorway and looked pathetic and unhappy, and terribly alone. I told my husband that we’d have to stay. He thought I’d gone off my rocker. We had a brief discussion, sotto voce, and he suggested that we took her with us. That’s the kind of person he was.
Although Mama pretended for a while that it was a bad idea and
she would be fine on her own, she eventually gave in and joined us in our ’49 Oldsmobile. We travelled around Italy, visiting Rome, Venice, Pisa, Viareggio – where I was crowned Queen of the Night in a beauty contest – Sorrento and Sicily. Early each evening Mama would claim to be tired and leave us to dine alone, though I often wondered how tired she really was. She loved the trip madly, and so did I.
On our return I immediately began teaching myself to drive, practising in our driveway, and passed my driving test three days later. I thought I was a natural and should be a racing driver. That would be a smashing career, I told myself, better than acting as it wouldn’t involve learning lines. I practised racing on the autobahn and out of boredom started going to Helmstedt in the car. At the checkpoint I would exchange my Lucky Strike cigarettes for rotten Russian papirosi and chat with the soldiers in Russian. It gave me a real buzz to talk to people who were in many ways regarded as the enemy. I found I related to them more easily than a lot of the officers and wives I met in camp. I would race back to pick up my husband from his barracks for dinner. I’m sure he thought my Russian control-point rendezvous were rather naff but he indulged me and joked about my being a ‘secret agent’. I’m not sure which side he thought I was on, or why. My fraternising with the future enemy didn’t seem to do any harm and it kept my Russian in top gear.
I liked being married and decided the time was right to have a baby. I wanted to see if I could be as good a mother as the one I had. But before I could put my plan into action we learned that my husband was to be transferred to America. ‘Don’t you worry,’ I told my mother. ‘You’ll come and join us soon.’ When I have my baby, I thought, you’ll have to come.
My husband was stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado, and I was delighted with our new life, so different from my earlier experiences. We were allowed to rent a flat anywhere in the vicinity of Fort Carson and took the most glorious apartment overlooking Pikes Peak. From the large french windows there was an astonishingly beautiful view of the snow-capped mountain, a little puffy cloud at its peak. I took my husband to the Fort at six every morning, then went to the commissary, bought food and cleaned the flat. In the afternoons I would go down to the river and read Shakespeare, and wonder where I would have been if I hadn’t been fished out of that other river by my knight in a shining patrol car.
Shortly after we moved to Colorado I started feeling sick and to my delight Doctor Kennedy confirmed I was having a baby. I sat on the stones in the Garden of the Gods and gave thanks for this great gift to whom I was going to dedicate my life. From that day on I felt I was finally a complete person.
Politically, things were going badly with the Russians. Following the Bay of Pigs débâcle in Cuba my husband was constantly on stand-by with his unit in Florida, keeping watch for possible Soviet manoeuvres. I was terrified. I fretted that my baby could be without a father before it was even born. I couldn’t bear to be in the apartment without him and decided to go to a shack we rented in the mountains near the little village of Silverton until the baby was due. I took long walks through the snow and the forest, which reminded me of the partisan camp in Poland, and sat in the shack by the fire, eating steaks and salads. I had all the books I’d always wanted to read and lived for my growing baby.
One night, a week before the baby was due, when I was watching Rawhide and Rowdy Yates was about to be hanged, my waters broke. I didn’t panic. I’d worked for a gynaecologist for a short while and had learned one or two things about childbirth on call-outs. I rang the hospital at Fort Carson and they sent an ambulance to come and get me. However, it continued to snow and when they reached the pass it was impossible to get through. They had to send for a snow plough. By the time they’d cleared the pass I’d followed in my mother’s footsteps and had my baby virtually by myself. They got there just in time to cut the cord. They showed her to me and I swear she winked at me. I called her Steffanie.
My husband was still away and couldn’t get back to us until Steffanie was three days old. When he arrived we celebrated, delighted with ourselves and our daughter, and he took us straight home. We sat on the balcony and I showed Steffanie Pikes Peak and the snow and the valley and the river and she giggled, then I tucked her up in the crib, with a silk heaven over it, which I had made for her.
Her poor dad, who was a captain by now, had to be away a lot but he loved the army. It meant a lot to him to be successful and gain promotion. He had gone to paratrooper school because he had been afraid of heights. I was not lonely, however, because Mama had come to visit us. She was potty about little Steffka and we travelled around sightseeing. She loved it.
Matka had been with us only a couple of months when she fell ill. She had the most horrendous stomach pains and couldn’t keep anything down. I had no idea what to do and the doctors couldn’t tell us what the problem was. We had millions of tests done at a Denver hospital but to no avail. When things eased a little Matka decided to go home. I told her that given time they’d cure her in America but she was adamant. I missed her and hoped desperately that she would soon get better in her own home and come back to us.
My husband was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. We decided to drive all the way there from Colorado in the Oldsmobile. It was one of the most wonderful trips I have ever made and we always thought of it as our second honeymoon. We lived on the base in a little house of our own in the way I’d always dreamed of: mother, father and little dotschka.
Alas, it was not to last. Steffka had just learned to stand up and taken her first tentative steps and I was besotted with her incredible achievement. That night my husband declared that he had volunteered to go to Vietnam. I couldn’t believe what he had done. How could he go to war when he didn’t have to? It was so stupid. He told me that I didn’t need him now I had the baby. I thought that was unfair since he was never there anyway. The army seemed more important to him than we were. We had a blazing row. Things were said that couldn’t be recalled. He said he’d be back and I said probably not. He said, wait for me and I said certainly not! I had been so delirious playing happy family that I hadn’t recognised the fact that my husband had become an extra. Without doubt, Steffanie had become the leading lady. But then he was a soldier and he obviously wished to do some soldiering. It left us with nowhere to go. We decided to write and to review the situation in two years’ time when his tour of duty was over. Shortly after he left for Vietnam.
With my husband gone, there seemed little point in staying in Maryland. I packed my things, strapped Steffka in a car seat beside me in the Oldsmobile and went in search of new pastures. I still had the acting bug and decided to have another shot at pursuing my dreams.
I had read in one of the trade magazines that the Playhouse was putting on a series of plays. The Playhouse was what is called in America a ‘stock company’, the equivalent to Rep in Britain. It seemed like a good place to start. I gave the director all the crap about my exploits as a lead player with the Berliner Ensemble, casually mentioned my Chekhov with the Schiller Theatre and waxed extravagant with the truth about my connection with the Burgtheater. I don’t think that impressed him half as much as my ready acceptance of the miserable wage he offered.
My high moment was playing Blanche du Bois on tour. That sounds pretty exalted. ‘Tour’ conjures up a grand procession through the theatres of America. In fact, what we did was duck and dive through any old hall or decaying auditorium that would have us. The Playhouse was so strapped for cash we even had to provide our own costumes and I certainly had no funds to waste on digs so I frequently lived in the theatres where we worked. Predictably, it all came to a sticky end. I’d been with the Playhouse for seven months and had been paid for about four of them, which just about covered Steffanie’s baby food. She was talking now and trying hard to have a meaningful conversation with her idiotic mother. I’d asked the owner of our latest venue whether he minded if I slept in what was laughingly called my dressing-room. He’d volunteered to install a couch and on the
first night, after the show, came round to see if everything was all right and to invite me out to dinner. His friendly demeanour paled perceptibly when I brought Steffanie along. After the meal, he made some mumbling reference to coming back to his place but Steffka was out on her feet so I cried off. He drove us back to the theatre with bad grace.
The next evening there were more people in the cast than in the auditorium and the proprietor, in an ill-tempered outburst, blamed the company and railed that it was against fire regulations for me to sleep in the theatre. I was amazed at the turn-around. I suppose he had expected to get more out of our association than a peck on the cheek and a thank you.
I moved into a local boarding-house that I couldn’t afford. I begged the director to give me some of my back pay but he didn’t have it. He couldn’t even pay for my accommodation. It was the end of the road. When I left the boarding-house on the Friday I made sure I had everything with me. I reckoned I wouldn’t be allowed out with my cases the following day unless I threw some dollars on the counter. It meant that I would have to let the company down on the Saturday but I didn’t care. ‘The show must go on’ is a great standby in Hollywood movies but when you haven’t been paid for weeks and you have a baby to take care of, it sounds pretty daft.
