The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  On the third day that she was in hospital I went to see her. She had asked her mother to beg me to come.

  She lay flat in the bed looking as if the wings of death were already hovering over her. Great shadows under her eyes, her small face shrunken and of a bluish pallor. The delicate tapering hands busy with the bedclothes showed me how ill she was.

  She had refused to answer any of the doctors’ questions and she was too far gone to be bothered by them.

  I laid some snowdrops on her pillow. They were just appearing in the shops and could be bought for the eternal cigarettes. She smiled a little, murmuring that it was good of me to come—there was something she wanted to ask me to do for her; but although I stayed some time by her bed, she kept on drowsing off into unconsciousness, murmuring occasionally in her sleep, and she did not tell me what it was she wanted. The head doctor came in and I asked him if there was any chance for her. He shook his head.

  “It was too late for the penicillin,” he said sadly.

  I had managed to get some from an American friend and they had tried it in vain.

  I told the sister, whom I knew quite well, that I would come back again in the morning, but Lilli died that evening.

  Ursula and her mother were with her when she died, but she told them nothing at all. Frau Altmann had brought the old pastor who had known Lilli from childhood, and he had said that she was not to be worried and had simply said a prayer for her. She had just said that she was so very very tired, and how nice it was to be in hospital. The last word on her lips was “Vova.” Just nonsense of delirium, said her mother, who thought that she was imagining herself to be back on the stage. Frau Altmann had prayed steadily until the end, said Ursula.

  “Vova” was the same word which she had murmured over and over again in her sleep when I was with her. I had once had a very dear Russian friend who liked to be called Vova, which was the shortened or pet form of his name, Vladimir.

  XVIII

  LILLI’S death was a terrible blow which shook the ground from under Frau Altmann’s feet. Not only her death, but the causes which had accelerated that death. That she could have been so blind to her child’s state of mind and health did not astonish me at all. German women are brought up to worship the male members of the family. All her concern had been for Fritz, the missing Kurt, and her husband, despite the fact that her daughters had taken over the job of breadwinners for the family.

  She had not noticed the fatigue on the girls’ faces when they came home from a long day’s work on insufficient food, and she had taken it for granted that they would automatically wait on their father and brother. British and American films were already influencing the German women about the position of the woman in the home. Frau Altmann deplored this. It was unnatural, she thought, to see a man helping in the house. His place was in the office, or sitting by the fire with pipe and slippers. But she listened with interest to my views on the subject—one of her nicest qualities was her willingness to admit that her opinions were not always right. She was the most honest person I have ever met. The fact that it was now far easier for women than for men to obtain employment and earn money spoke for itself. She was beginning to see that it was causing a revolution in many homes.

  I collected all the drawings I had made of Lilli and took them to her. There were only two which I kept; one was a sketch of her resting in a chair; this I made on the day when she had been too tired to pose for me—the other was a drawing of her poised on her toes in her balled dress. I liked this one—it had caught something of the extraordinary fragility and the quality of lightness which Lilli had always shown. Among the heavily built German women she had looked as if she had been accidentally blown in by the wind.

  Stampie had been away on a few days’ leave, and knew nothing of Lilli’s illness. He returned the day after her death. The news was a terrible shock to him. He was, in fact, completely bowled over when I told him, and broke down in his grief.

  I had had no idea that he was so fond of Lilli. It was Ursula whom he had at first admired and lately grumbled over so much. He had, it seemed, adored Lilli always, but never told her so. In his queer off-hand way he had been devoted to her, and many of the kindnesses he had done this family had been done for Lilli’s sake more than Hermann’s. Unknown to me, he had gone again and again to the opera just to see her dance in the corps de ballet, and before she had acquired a “friend” he had frequently escorted her home afterwards.

  She was, he told me, very like his daughter had been before she had got “snooty” and above her station. What exactly he meant by that, I don’t know—both his children had been born before he was twenty-two—he was only forty or so now. His feelings for Lilli, however, had clearly not been entirely fatherly, even if she had reminded him of his daughter Margaret.

  I did my best to console him, but he was inconsolable—more so when he learned what had accelerated her death. He said bitterly: “I knew it was Lilli I saw that afternoon. Poor kid, why didn’t she tell us if she dared not tell her mother?”

  I could think of many reasons why she could not tell me—although I think she tried on several occasions. For instance, that conversation about nationality—had it been in her mind then? She had wanted me to do something for her just before she died, but it was too late then. She could not break through the barriers of her innate reticence about herself, and knowing Stampie’s feelings for her—for a woman always knows when a man loves her—she could not tell him either.

  That evening he and I went to the Staatsoper and went round to see her friend Susi. They were all terribly upset—but not communicative. Susi obviously knew a good deal, but she was not telling. Did she know whose child it had been? If so she never told. Frau Altmann was positive that Lilli had been raped by one of the Russians who frequented the theatre. She would not contemplate any other explanation. Susi told me that Lilli had been terribly in love with someone, but she refused to say any more.

  Stampie said that one evening he had seen her with a tall Russian officer—they were dining at the new restaurant which the Russians frequented in their sector. Her usually placid immobility had been transfigured, he said, as if a light was burning inside.

  “I knew that he was the one,” he said sadly, “because, you see, when you love a person you get a sort of second sight; and when I saw those two together I knew that there was no place for me in her heart.”

  What was he like? Very good looking, very dark. He could have been a Celt with his blue eyes, said Stampie. He was a very smart immaculate officer, and he and Lilli had been so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t even seen Stampie.

  That was all we ever knew about Lilli’s love affair. She had been so secretive about it that it had cost her her life.

  It was only six weeks since Herr Altmann’s death but the ground was no longer so hard. There had been rain, and the snow was no longer so frozen, although it still hung about. There were days now when one felt that the wind would surely soon be bringing us a faint scent of spring.

  They buried Lilli with her father in the family plot. They had managed to dig the double grave, and Herr Altmann’s coffin had been brought from its temporary resting-place.

  A great many friends from the Opera House and many former school friends attended Lilli’s funeral, and in spite of the dearth of flowers there were innumerable wreaths and flowers.

  As Lilli had died in the hospital, the transport to the cemetery was all arranged with far less bother this time than there had been over poor Herr Altmann’s funeral cortège.

  One was constantly astonished at the German love of giving and receiving small gifts. It is one of their more endearing traits. Gifts are always beautifully tied, and usually decorated with a spray of greenery or a flower; but at funerals they show an over-indulgence in the macabre which contrasts with their usually artistic flower arrangements. The wreaths for the ethereal and light-footed Lilli were mostly of huge heavy evergreens tied with hideous black and purple ribbons and
deep black bands. Among them stood out the simple flowers which Stampie and I had sent, and a great sheaf of lilies-of-the-valley. They had come, said Frau Altmann, that morning, from the most expensive flower shop in the Russian sector near the theatre.

  There was no black-edged card attached, but the sheaf was tied with a silver ribbon with the word “Lilli” on it. The flowers had been addressed to “Fräulein Lilli Altmann,” just as if she were alive, not dead. Her mother had been shocked at this, but the lilies were so lovely that she had put them on the coffin, and they were buried with her.

  They must, said Ursula, have cost a fortune, and she had gone herself to the shop from which they had come, to try and find out who had sent them. They had been ordered by telephone, and the money sent round by a child messenger in a sealed envelope.

  Who had sent them? Fritz? He loved lilies-of-the-valley, and had twice given them to me. The Russian lover? Or an unknown admirer—of whom dancers have many? No one would ever know.

  I liked to think that they came from her lover, and knowing her, and having heard the caress in her voice when she murmured his name, hoped that she had sometimes found happiness with him.

  XIX

  ALTHOUGH it was now March the bitter winds were still bringing hail and snow; normally by this time the spring was well advanced, the Berliners told us. This had been the worst winter for over a hundred years—and the spring would be late.

  John had not recovered completely from his serious illness and the doctors at Spandau had advised me to take him out of Germany for at least a month. Somewhere, suggested our nice lieutenant, where he would get fresh fruit and vegetables—things we never saw in Berlin now. In Brussels, the previous November, we had enjoyed every pre-war luxury. The contrast between its overflowing abundance and starving Berlin had been quite horrible; but in Brussels there was plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and the doctors asked me to take John to the Army Leave Centre there.

  On the first really lovely day in March we went out to Gatow. The snow was actually beginning to disappear, except in the deep ditches and dark valleys of the woods. The lake glistened and scintillated like a butterfly’s wings in the sunshine. Birds were chattering excitedly in the trees and the children were beginning to shed some of their cocoon-like winter wrappings. I loved this place in spite of the poverty of the little colony of homeless people who were living in shacks round its shores; the relief of the absence of ruins and the beauty of the lake itself were always a solace.

  Lilli’s death had upset me profoundly. I felt somehow that I had failed her. Every time I played Chopin I saw her little figure in its transient grace flitting across the floor. She had loved to improvise steps while I played.

  We walked round the lake to visit Frau von R. and her husband. She had written me an extraordinary note when John was ill.

  “If I were logical,” it ran, “I would wish that your son should die as mine have done, but on searching my heart I find that I do not wish this—indeed I love your little boy who brings back to me something of the childhood of my Peter and Ernst. It is a bitter world—and for myself I wait only for death to take me out of it. If I believed in God—which I do not—I would pray that He spares your son, but believe me when I say that I wish it with all my heart.”

  With this note had come some new laid eggs from her few hens and some apples which she had stored from the previous year’s crop. I had not seen her since John’s illness and was anxious to thank her for her gifts.

  They were at home. The packages which we had brought were, as usual, put on a table and deliberately ignored. Dr von R. was still having trouble in getting his de-nazification through the courts.

  There was, complained Frau von R. bitterly, a great deal of corruption going on over those courts. If one could pay large bribes one was automatically purged of one’s former offences. No honest people could have large sums of money in these days. It was said, she continued, that the Nazis had been corrupt—probably some of them were—but how much worse it was now without them! Had I heard that the Russians had done away with all this de-nazification business? They were far more conscious of the future than we were.

  We told her that things would sort themselves out, that it was inevitable in this chaos that corruption flourished, but that the Allies were trying to bring in a currency reform which would soon put an end to the racketeering and black market.

  Frau von R. doubted it, and said gloomily that by the time it was brought in, all decent honest people would be dead of starvation and Germany would be peopled and ruled by the corrupt ones.

  I had brought her some English periodicals and papers. She thanked me perfunctorily for them, but I knew from her husband that she was really delighted with literature of this kind. She had the same intense interest in our Royal family as had Frau Altmann and Frau Pfeiffer. They considered the German blood in it entitled them to this interest. Princess Elizabeth and the possibility of her marriage to Prince Philip were burning subjects to them.

  John was playing with her little dog, and she was asking him about our dogs and the kitten, Puffin.

  When we got up to leave she went to a cupboard, and put a flat box in my hands.

  “This,” she said, “is my greatest treasure, but if it were found in this house now that my husband is trying to get his de-nazification through, it might cause trouble for him. We are forbidden to possess these books, you know.”

  I took the box without opening it.

  “I can’t like you,” she went on; “life is too bitter for that—but I respect you—and I want you to have this and no one else.”

  I did not know what “this” was until we got home. It was a beautifully bound book with the gold title, Adolf Hitler, and depicted in photographs the entire life of the former Führer, from childhood to his rise to fame.

  It was a most interesting document, and as my husband said, probably one of very few now in existence, as the Allies had ordered them all to be burned.

  We spent the evening poring over the face of this man born to rise with such speed to such heights, and after causing havoc and misery all over the world, to crash to such an ignoble end. A small man—and not a handsome one—but with eyes which, as many Germans said, were magnetic.

  I had been going round the wards again with Dr Annemarie. There were many new little faces, but not so many cases of frostbite and cold. Crates were beginning to arrive from Canada now, and the car in which I had come had been filled with blankets, tinned milk, vitamins and cod liver oil, as well as nappies and woollies. Dr Gaupp was making her round of saying good-night to every child.

  I thought how much homelier and easier it was for those small mites, coming into a strange place away from their mothers, to be able to address all the doctors as Tante and Onkel. The contrast in the way the small patients were received on admittance was striking to the way my five-year-old son had been treated in the Military Hospital. I had also been struck with the kindness and gentleness with which Lilli had been nursed. Strange that these people, who could be so gentle and soothing to the sick and could help the dying so mercifully on their last journey, could belong to the same nation as those who had been so revoltingly cruel in the concentration camps. Were they really two-faced? Had they two sides to their character? These questions were forcing themselves upon my mind.

  The Berliners could laugh easily like Londoners, and some of the ironical notices they had put on their ruined homes reminded me very much of the days of our London Blitz.

  “All my own work—Adolf Hitler” was one I saw, and “Give me ten years and you won’t recognize Berlin, Oh yeah!” was another on a completely demolished home. In spite of the acute shortage of food and fuel and the hopelessness of the future their spirits rose as the cold gave way to milder days with the promise of spring.

  The complete absence of shops was something which the Allied and German women felt. There was scarcely a single shop left standing in Berlin. The great stores and emporiums lay in dust, as did the
great blocks of flats. One could not get the simplest articles except on the Black Market, and then only in exchange for cigarettes and coffee which had taken the place of money. One heard the most witty jokes and verses about the lack of everything. One of them ran something like this: “If I had an onion, I could make some soup. If I had the soup I could put some bread in it. But as I haven’t got the onion or the soup I must just live on the smell of them; and watch my stomach shrink!” Ursula had told me of many such verses—she was always well up in the latest Berlin jokes.

  We had to receive many of our quadripartite friends before John and I were to leave for Brussels. I had wanted to invite the lovely Baroness B. She was often in the night clubs with her handsome Russian Colonel and I saw her sometimes with her English Bill. Apparently she was quite capable of handling them both. I wrote and invited her, but no answer came. On the day of the party she telephoned me, asking if any Russian guests were coming. I noticed that her voice was a little anxious, but was obliged to tell her that there would be several Russian guests. She said that she was sorry—she would adore to come—no one could regret it more than she—but she could not accept—it might make trouble for her if she came.

  It was perhaps significant that after this I was rung up on several occasions by some Soviet official who, after asking my name and verifying the number, would apologize and ring off without giving any name or reason for the call. Gisela became quite worried after this happened. I think it was probably the Russian Colonel who had seen the invitation card.

  XX

  I HAD not seen much of Frau Altmann since Lilli’s death. She had seemed so utterly immersed in her grief that I had hesitated to intrude on it.