The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  I assured him that we were staying at home for once that evening.

  “Did you get this old thing from Hermann?” asked Stampie, looking up from the machine.

  Frau Altmann nodded.

  “I got it with the desk for Pappi and the small wardrobe for Lilli. Just fancy, Mr Stamp, I’d been hunting for a wardrobe for Lilli for such a long time, and Hermann had that one all the time!”

  “He won’t have much left soon if he goes on as he is now,” commented Stampie dryly.

  Herr Altmann sighed and explained that his brother had always been fond of the bottle. He had been a very rich and successful business man, and since he had lost everything he seemed to be finding consolation in spirits.

  On the way to Reichsstrasse I learned from Stampie that Hermann was exchanging all his old family silver, porcelain and carpets for spirits. “Far better if the Russians had taken it as they did poor old Oskar’s,” he said. “Hermann’s so keen to get drink that he’s like a madman sometimes.”

  I asked with whom he made the exchanges. Stampie looked sheepish. “It’s all right—I don’t want to hear,” I said hastily.

  “Well—it’s all wrong I know—but he takes it out on his poor wife if he can’t get schnapps,” he muttered.

  I changed the subject. I knew from my husband that Stampie went on an occasional “blind”—and I concluded that it was probably with Hermann. Hermann had been an ardent Nazi and was waiting to get his de-nazification through before he could find employment.

  “There’s such a queue that Hermann’ll have to wait a long time—and it’s no use telling him to save up the money to pay the fine,” Stampie said gloomily.

  No one could be employed by the Allies until he or she had been “de-nazified.” I was always hearing this word, and after the whole complicated business had been explained to me I agreed with Stampie that it was a lot of nonsense, and that anyone could just pay the fine imposed by the Court and still remain a Nazi at heart.

  I had soon discovered that Stampie, although constantly chiding me for becoming upset at the misery round me and my inability to help more than a few sufferers, was himself supporting several whole families. His Black Market activities indeed were done solely for this purpose and did not benefit him at all. He could not bear to see suffering any more than I could. “Don’t take on so,” he would beg me; “you can’t help it—there’s nothing you can do.”

  But he always managed to do something about it himself. It was incredible to me how he achieved it, but he did, quietly and with very little fuss. I heard again and again from families whom he had helped. A Cockney born and bred, he had a wonderful gift of mimicry and would “take off” anyone. His speech varied according to his companions—from American and Australian accents he ranged to the B.B.C. “plummy” unctuousness and the clipped military speech. His German was fluent but atrocious, and delighted his friends.

  He had a habit of quirking one eyebrow, indicating either amused tolerance or incredulous horror, and he was extraordinarily sensitive to one’s moods. He would take a quick look at me—quirk one eyebrow and say whimsically, “Now don’t take on so—come on—we’ll drive to Moscow!”

  There was an unfinished part of Hitler’s autobahn on the Soviet border where the road ended with a barrier and a notice said, “To Moscow”. And he would drive me there—chat with the Russian sentries, and throw them cigarettes—and make me take over the wheel.

  This was strictly forbidden, but Stampie would get over that by telling me that there was nothing to stop him dropping dead at the wheel one day and where would I be if I couldn’t drive the car? On the deserted and unused road, watched with interest by the Russians, I would drive and turn the unwieldy car to his satisfaction. If this failed to disperse my gloom—and it seldom did—he would invariably suggest a “pick-me-up” at his Mess, and here he would solemnly go through the ceremony of the two glasses. The second glass was, I had discovered, meant for his former Eighth Army pal Jim, whom he had left buried at El Alamein.

  He was a careful and conscientious driver, and his occasional failure to turn up when most needed was due to drowning his sorrows—his married life had been unhappy—too thoroughly. This caused me on more than one occasion to be glad of the lessons he gave me on the road to Moscow.

  IV

  MY LITTLE son John had not settled down well in Berlin. The journey had been a shock to him and the sight of these miles of ruins seemed to bring back some memories of the Blitz. He would not sleep—being afraid that the house in which we lived would fall down in the night as had all those round us. I had sent him to the Military School in which I myself was teaching, hoping that it would distract him, but in spite of the great kindness of Frau Pfeiffer, a charming old lady in charge of the kindergarten, he was terribly unhappy there.

  It was Stampie who suggested a dog to replace the one we had been obliged to leave in England. He knew a lady who had a litter of dachshunds, he said.

  One afternoon on coming in from a walk in the Grunewald I was told that there was a lady waiting to see me in the salon. The woman who rose from a chair by the window and introduced herself as the Baroness B—. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. A brunette, with skin of a thick camellia-like texture but with the warmth of a peach, her great dark eyes were set under a rounded childish forehead, and her full pouting mouth was exquisitely modelled under a short upper lip and a straight little nose. When she smiled she showed perfect teeth.

  “I have brought the dogs,” she explained, “and I have also brought my daughter Heidi.”

  A small plump girl with curly blonde hair, her fat legs encased in white gaiters and wearing a white fur coat, came running in at her mother’s call.

  Heidi curtsied to me and solemnly greeted John. “Here are the dogs, John,” said the Baroness, pulling two tiny golden puppies from a capacious bag.

  “The mother had five. But of course she could not feed them. There is no milk in Berlin,” said the Baroness as she put the adorable little creatures down on the floor. The other three were ill. I asked what illness? “Hunger.” She said simply.

  I looked at the magnificent mink cape she was wearing, at her nylon stockings and at the child’s fur coat. They were neither of them thin—indeed they were the first healthy-looking and well dressed Germans I had yet seen, but one never knew in this fantastic city.

  She discussed the price after we had sent the children and the puppies to John’s playroom. She didn’t want marks. But that was nothing new. No one wanted marks if they could get cigarettes or coffee. She didn’t want either of these. She wanted milk for Heidi and a pair of afternoon shoes for herself in exchange for two dogs. She had a son in the Russian Zone where he got plenty of milk in a children’s home, but Heidi got no milk in the Russian sector. I asked her why her son should be in the Russian Zone. His father was a Russian colonel. He loved the child and provided everything for him. The son, Ivan, was now ten months old. Heidi was her husband’s child. He was a Guards officer—she had no idea where he was now.

  And the Russian colonel then, I asked, did she love him?

  She looked at me with those great dark eyes and said simply, “He is a magnificent lover.”

  Later she asked permission to telephone to a British friend or “protector” as they were called by many German women, and to my astonishment asked for an officer whom we knew quite well, addressing him on the telephone most familiarly and telling him to pick her up later on the Hohenzollerndamm when she had left me.

  “And your British friend, are you fond of him too?” I asked curiously.

  She regarded me again with those heavily fringed eyes.

  “He is a much nicer man than the Russian,” she admitted, “and I like him very very much; but as a lover he is a failure.”

  She had been an actress—a serious and successful one too, but now there was work only for opera singers and ballet dancers, she explained. I asked her if she knew Lilli Altmann. I used the name under wh
ich Lilli danced. She knew her name. She was considered one of the most promising of the younger ballet corps.

  “She is so light, that one,” she said, “and she has looks too.” I asked her if she went frequently to the opera and ballet. Her Russian friend adored both and she accompanied him several times a week.

  The room was rather warm, the autumn sunshine streaming in from the lovely coloured maple trees outside the windows, and as she kept on half-pushing her fur cape from her neck I suggested that she might like to take it off as tea was coming in shortly. With a smile of thanks and an apology she flung back the cape. She was quite naked from the waist upwards. A string of lovely pearls was round her throat and a satin skirt hung loosely round her slim waist, but her two exquisitely formed breasts were quite bare.

  If this were how she received her Englishman, Bill, then I could understand his collecting her in his car, although it was strictly forbidden. And the Russian colonel could hardly be blamed for having given her a son.

  I had shared a cabin on the Military Ship on the way out with a woman who wore nothing at all under her dress and who kept her stockings up with garters adorned with portraits of Mr Churchill and diamond V-signs, so that this exhibition was not such a shock as it might have been. I seized the opportunity to say that I should like to paint her. Would it be possible for her to sit for me?

  She was flattered, telling me that she had been painted by several artists and that she liked sitting. The difficulty would be coming into the British sector. She lived in the Russian sector with the Russian colonel. He did not like her coming into the British one—but she would see what could be done about it.

  Lotte my housekeeper came hurrying back from the canteen to see that I got a square deal over the dogs, Stampie having told her that the Baroness would be coming. Her jaw dropped at the sight of the half-naked visitor. She was speechless.

  We arrived at a satisfactory arrangement about payment for the dogs, but I did not like to commit myself over the milk. Milk had to be got from our American friends who were very good at helping me over desperate cases. Heidi was one of the most healthy looking children I had seen in Berlin. I told her that Lilli got a small milk ration because the Staatsoper was in the Russian sector, so why couldn’t the Russian colonel get milk for Heidi?

  She shrugged her bare shoulders. Heidi was the daughter of a Nazi officer; why should the Russian do anything for her? It seemed pointless to remind her that she was the wife of that same officer.

  When she had gone with her mink wrap fastened over her nakedness Lotte and I laughed heartily. Neither of us had had the courage to ask her outright if she had forgotten her blouse or if it had been done deliberately to shock me.

  The puppies were sweet, but after three days it was clear that they were sickening for the illness from which the remainder of the litter had died. A woman veterinary surgeon recommended by the Baroness came and pronounced that they had distemper. She admitted that the others had died of that disease. These would die too, she assured me. There were no medicines in Berlin and they were too weak already to respond to anything even if she had it.

  John, who had brightened up wonderfully with the advent of the puppies, was heartbroken. I determined that these dogs should not die. Lotte and I wrapped them in old flannel nightgowns of John’s and nursed them day and night. They were terribly ill with pneumonia in both lungs. The vet came again and pronounced cheerfully that both would die. Whiskey the dog would die first and Soda the bitch shortly after, she said.

  I had some M and B tablets left over from John’s attack of pneumonia of the previous winter, and I began giving the puppies half a tablet every two hours. The result was miraculous.

  Whiskey, who had certainly been almost dying, with loud rattling breathing and a burning hot body, began to improve after two doses. Soda responded more slowly, but she did recover completely too. I could not resist telephoning that vet. She came and was astounded. She pronounced the pneumonia to be gone and begged me to give her some of this miraculous drug, but I felt guilty at having given this precious medicine to an animal when there were so many sick children needing it. My only excuse was that the tablets were rather old and I had not known that they would still be efficacious.

  Stampie, who had helped in the nursing, was so indignant with the Baroness for having sold us the dogs knowing that the others had died of distemper, that he implored me not to pay for them. But when she came, as arranged, for the money and my best afternoon shoes, smiling and elegant as before, I could not resist her apologies about the poor puppies. Heidi looked like a fairy princess in her white furs. It seemed that mink and pearls were more easily obtainable in the Russian sector than soap—for the Baroness asked me for some, explaining that Bill, who usually supplied her, had used all his ration until next month.

  She was a fascinating creature with the thing which we call glamour, and I determined to ask the Altmanns about her. I thought it probable that Lilli anyhow would know what kind of an actress she had been.

  V

  THE ALTMANNS’ house lay on my route to the Study Centre, and as I went back and forth several times a day taking classes of children and troops, I got into the habit of dropping in there frequently.

  The family had managed to keep quite a number of books, and I was soon reading Goethe, Heine and Schiller, and discussing them with the old people. Frau Altmann was tireless at gently correcting my German, and improving it on every possible occasion. I read Karl Haushofer’s Macht und Erde and Weltpolitik von Heute, and Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum. Frau Altmann did not approve of these last, but helped me go through them, telling me in no uncertain terms her opinions of their writers. One of the things I enjoyed most was reading the German Bible with her. I took my English one and we compared them and found alternative words for the translations and in this way I learned many rare and unusual words in German.

  She was, I found, devoted to her Bible and could and did find the answer to everything in it.

  The whole family were avid readers and the girls in particular liked English books. Fritz, they told me, adored thrillers and detective stories.

  They were intensely interested in the arts and were delighted to find that I was a painter. Frau Altmann, a deeply religious woman, was a voracious reader of theological literature in English and French as well as her own language—and yet where Fritz was concerned she was completely blind. She adored him—for her and in her eyes he could do nothing wrong, and yet she was terribly worried about him and discussed him often with me. It was his future which worried her. What was going to happen to him? Not what was going to happen to her, to the girls or to old Oskar, but to Fritz—always to Fritz. She told me how his whole life had been interrupted and his education ruined by his fanatical membership of the Hitlerjugend. During the last fantastic months before the capitulation of Germany he had been fighting in the defence of the capital. He had been barely seventeen. Since then, there had been no more schooling, nor had he shown any desire to resume his studies even if they could have found the money for the fees or the books.

  One morning Stampie brought me a note from Frau Altmann. It was an invitation to a little festivity for old Oskar’s birthday. The note did not tell me about the birthday; Stampie did. Herr Altmann was to be sixty-eight. I had not realized that he was so old. He was a very quiet man and talked so little about himself that I only knew he had held a very high position in a bank, and simply could not realize that he now had nothing. All his life’s savings were now valueless—as were thousands of other old people’s. He was always asking why they had no money from his various stocks and shares.

  Stampie told me that he had evidently had a slight stroke about the time of the sack of Berlin and had never been the same since. “The poor old boy just couldn’t take all those last horrors,” said Stampie; “I think it turned his brain a bit.”

  I liked him. He was so gentle and courteous and occasionally one got a glimpse of what must have once been a brilliant mind and
a calm philosophy which had not quite left him. He seemed at a loss over his strange and violent youngest offspring, Fritz, and asked me quite pathetically whether the young men in Britain were finding life so difficult. I assured him that they were finding it difficult to settle down after the war. I thought that some of Fritz’s resentments and hates came from the lack of one square meal a day. He was almost six feet in height and at his age must always have been ravenous.

  There were a lot of youths like Fritz going about Berlin with the same long hair, pallid faces and too bright sunken eyes. They were the German equivalent of our London “spivs.” They operated in gangs from ruined houses and could be seen in the evenings at corners of Kurfürstendamm and Kaiserdamm quite openly carrying on their nefarious deals.

  Fritz belonged to this type. He had no work, nor could he find any, for he refused to work for the British or the Americans. His two sisters worked hard, as did Frau Altmann. Thanks to the Major, she had several pupils now, and a small class of British children. Old Oskar was past work even if there had been any—and he kept house in the absence of the others, but what did Fritz do all day?

  They were horribly poor, and always short of the barest necessities, but with the exception of Fritz they took it all as a joke and made fun of the ridiculous exchanges and “wangles” which they were obliged to engage in, to obtain some infinitesimal thing such as an onion or an apple.

  I noticed that Fritz never joined in the general laughter when Frau Altmann related how she had spent an hour haggling with the grocer in exchanging a pound of flour for some dried fish which had turned out to be quite uneatable, or how she had joined a huge queue—only to find that it was to buy tickets for the afternoon’s performance of The Wonderful Box of Dr. Mabuse.

  I asked Fritz that evening, when we were all sitting round the birthday table by the light of two candles, what he did all day. On the table was a cake, baked by Frau Altmann, with Oskar written on it in melted chocolate, and I had brought a bottle of wine and some sandwiches which Lotte had made for the occasion. There was a silence when I asked Fritz this question, and I felt that it had been a tactless one.