“I’d like to see it, please,” she said quietly.
I showed it to her.
“Yes, it’s Fritz,” she said at length. “Promise me that if you ever see him you will give him a message from me.”
It seemed highly unlikely that Fritz’s path and mine would ever cross again and I gave the promise.
“Tell him,” she said slowly, “this: No matter what flag he marches under or fights for—whether it be the swastika, the hammer and sickle, or any other—when death comes to him—as it comes to us all—he will need only the Cross. Tell him to heed what his mother says, because she knows.”
It was so lovely in the Weser valley that May. The beauty of the blossoming orchards and the great hills covered in a new and tender wash of green was incredible after the grey ruins of Berlin. The sides of the hills were carpeted with Windblumen, or anemones, and blue violets made lovely splashes of colour among the green and white. The lilies-of-the-valley would soon be out; they grew in great profusion on the shady sides of the hills. Lotte and I were watching for them; we had promised the first bunch to Frau Altmann, who had gathered them on these very hills as a girl.
One afternoon, it was the 12th of May, we climbed Great Wilhelm, the highest hill of all those round us, and we found the lilies in full bloom. They were growing in profusion and we gathered them in great bunches.
When we got home there was a telephone message from the hospital. Frau Altmann was worse.
She was lying there looking out of the windows when I reached the hospital. Her face, which had become very ethereal, now had a luminousness which did not come only from the light. It had been a glorious day, and the sun, a ball of flame, was just beginning to sink a little behind the range of hills. Its light flooded the river below, and she was watching it.
The sister brought tea, and beckoned me outside.
“I am glad you have come,” she whispered. “She is very weak and has been rambling a little. She is having a lot of drugs now.”
Frau Altmann drank some tea, and pushed her face into the sweet-scented flowers. I told her how they lay in a great carpet up on the hills.
“It is strange,” she said with a very sweet smile, “that it is you who are here with me now. Do you remember when you first saw me? I remember it so well—that heavy cart and all those things falling in the road—how kind you were—like an angel. I would like to thank you for everything—but between us no words of thanks are necessary, we understand each other, nicht wahr? Gott wird Dich belohnen.”
I could not speak, my throat ached so much. This woman meant a great deal to me. She stood for something rapidly disappearing—something precious.
“Give me your hands,” she said, releasing the flowers suddenly, her face twisting with pain, “and tell me what you see from the window.” She had often asked me to do this.
I wanted to call sister. Her hands were so cold, and her face so terribly pale, but she begged me not to.
“Tell me what you can see from the window,” she said again, “for I am too weak to raise myself now—I feel sleepy.”
I said: “The river is turning from gold to red as the sun sinks—it is like a sheet of flame. The hills are dark and rugged against this fiery background. A flight of duck are coming home . . .”
“It is good that they are coming home,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper, “for it is surely getting very dark now.”
Her head fell back suddenly, and I called loudly for sister, who came running in. She removed my hands very gently from Frau Altmann’s and rang the bell. A nurse came running in.
“Ask the Herr Professor to come immediately,” she said sharply.
When he came he took me away.
“She went easily, thank God,” he said. “It could have been agony for her.”
The sister was putting the lilies in her hands as we left the sun-filled room.
At one minute past midnight, on May 13th, 1949, the blockade of Berlin was lifted. Lotte, who had been listening to the radio in her room, came running down to me in her dressing gown.
“It’s over,” she cried. There were tears in her eyes. “It’s over.”
British and American lorries and military vehicles crossed the zonal frontier that night from Helmstedt and proceeded without mishap to Berlin. A few days later the first Allied trains ran from Bielefeld and Frankfort, without interference, to Berlin. The blockade was really over.
After Frau Altmann’s death Max was at a loss what to do about the house. With Ursula so far away, and Fritz where he could not be got at, there were only Hermann and his wife. Max himself was only a second cousin, but Frau Altmann had loved him as a son, and I had noticed the charming way he had looked after her and the deference he invariably showed her. It was touching to see the way this tall well-built man would take her out, treating her as if she were a piece of valuable china which might break at any moment. He knew only too well that her days were numbered and had treasured them. She had told me how good he had been to her, how nothing was too much trouble for him to do for her when she was first too ill to do things for herself.
“He will make a wonderful husband,” she had sighed; “not like most of our men, who will not do anything at all.”
“That is partly the fault of the German women,” I said. “You do not like your men to help in the house, you like to wait on them. Max has seen the British way in which some, at least, of the menfolk help a great deal.”
He had written constantly to her while she was in the hospital, but the end came so suddenly that it had not been possible to summon him. He had come to the funeral.
She had asked, to my great surprise, to be buried in the churchyard under the great hill.
“How silly I was to make all that fuss about Pappi,” she had said. “I know now that death doesn’t matter at all—it is but a passing to a new life and the means of getting there, and the means of disposal of the body can have no possible influence on the soul. You’ve always thought that, haven’t you?”
I said, “I wish I had your faith.”
“You must suffer and suffer—and you will discover that there is no other answer than God,” she replied simply.
“If, later on, Ursula or the boys wish to put me beside Pappi and Lilli, that is their affair. I am content to lie up there under the great hill which I have loved looking at.”
We buried her there. She lay between an old man from East Prussia and a little child from Breslau. The professor had done his best for them too.
I told Max about this conversation. He was cynical and sceptical.
“Surely you don’t believe in all that stuff about the soul,” he scoffed. “You are an intelligent woman. But she belonged to the old school and if it gave her comfort I am glad.”
“You would be better for a faith like hers,” I said, “as we all would.”
“Perhaps I have it,” he said surprisingly, “but not for Christianity.”
We were sitting in the lovely May sunshine with the pastor, who was a great friend of ours, and who had visited Frau Altmann frequently. He had been in a Russian prison camp, and she had listened eagerly to all he could tell her. She had thirsted for news of her son Kurt, and had questioned him in vain. All around us lay the most exquisite wide landscape. Our house in the valley had a wonderful view across the Weser.
“You are seeing a lot of misery and many deaths,” said the pastor to me, “but you also see all this”—throwing out his arms in the direction of the landscape—“and that is surely a compensation of the Creator.”
Many of my refugees from the East Zone had died that winter, and we were trying to get the local authorities to grant the survivors the right to accommodation in place of the miserable huts and caves in which they now lived like animals.
“Why do you do it? Why don’t you just let them die?” asked Max angrily. “What’s it got to do with you? Death is easy—it’s much more difficult to go on living in this mess here.”
“Why di
d you do all you could for Frau Altmann?” I asked him.
“Tante Maria was different—besides she was a relative, and I loved her, but these wretched people are not only strangers to you, but they are still enemies—as I am. You British have not yet made peace with us. Isn’t that true?”
He was angry and miserable. I asked him what he intended to do now. He didn’t know. His uncle wanted him to finish his examinations and then come to him in Bavaria.
“And will you go?” I asked. The uncle was obviously a man of substance; he had sent money for the funeral, and money several times for Frau Altmann. He had sent it to me through American friends, Bavaria being in the U.S. Zone.
“I shall go as soon as the exam is over and the house is arranged. Ursula will have to say what she wishes done about it.”
“Have you written to her?” I asked him.
“I got the lawyers to write,” he said stiffly.
“Her baby is due very soon now,” I said. “Otherwise she would come over, I think.”
“A baby?” he said in surprise. “Ursula is going to have a baby? How very funny!” And he began to laugh in such a bitter way that I checked him angrily.
Frau Altmann hadn’t told him. She had seen much more than one would have thought. Perhaps the lesson of her blindness over Lilli had taught her something. She had known that he loved Ursula.
I said to him: “Go and talk to some of the young farmers round here. You will find them very interesting. They are close to the earth and have no illusions about anything.”
“It is said that many of them are still interested in the Nazi Party, and that there is of revivalist movement in these parts,” observed the pastor.
“So I gather from my son, who has the run of the farms,” I said. “The farmers are very good to him and he is having a wonderful life here, but they do not realise how much German he understands. He takes in a great deal, and repeats it all to me.”
“And do you mix much with them?” asked Max.
I told him I was making friends rapidly with several of the wives of the big farmers round us. He was interested, and before he returned to Berlin I sent him to visit some of the ones I knew.
AUTUMN
1949
IT was October 1949, and Berlin was in a ferment of excitement over the huge demonstration planned by the Soviet to celebrate the election of Wilhelm Pieck as President of their newly formed German Democratic Party.
The West, expecting ugly incidents again, had rushed large drafts of police to Berlin. The Military were ready. Leave to Berlin had not been encouraged. Anything might happen. The Berliners were tense and furious about the whole thing.
Berlin had changed but little outwardly, yet underneath there was a great difference in the whole feeling and set-up. Since the end of the blockade there had been plenty of smaller troubles: the railway strike, which had left the poor citizens without transport again for six weeks; the constant hopes through the three-Power meetings with Stalin of a settlement of some kind of way of life for Berlin—and their death through the further demands of Molotov, in a fresh deadlock. It seemed as if the very air of Berlin was uneasy and cast some antagonistic spell over all negotiations, for the talks which had seemed so hopeful in London had come to grief as soon as they moved to Berlin.
The West was beginning to get on its feet again; we could see that all round us. There was a new feeling. No longer was the German to be treated as an outcast. We were no longer forbidden to be friends with them—on the contrary, it was now being encouraged.
“We have been very naughty boys,” said a farmer to me with a sly grin, “and now we have worn sackcloth and ashes Mother Britain is patting us on the head and saying: ‘Now, now, we can’t forget what you have done, but we can forget it conveniently enough for you to help us against the Russians, with whom we are no longer so friendly as we were.’”
This was apparent in the attitude of the women with whom we were now asked to try and make friends. It was too late. They had wanted to be friends as soon as we came. They had been repulsed. The wife of a very prominent German politician expressed herself to me on the subject after we had been listening to a talk on the British and Germans getting together now and being friends.
“You British are very sporting-minded,” she said. “After a fight you shake hands publicly—if it is football, tennis or boxing—but now after this fight, what happened? You came as conquerors. Good. We expected that. We had earned it ourselves. But you have put up too many degrading notices, too many ‘Germans Keep Out’ everywhere, for it to be easy for us to fall in with your desire for friendship now. Had you held out your hand when you first came we would have taken it gladly.” This lady was a Hanoverian, and bitterly resented our first attitude. She said: “Your Royal Family came from here, you have our coat of arms. You should at least have treated us Hanoverians differently—we even fought for your kings in the past.”
The Berliner was different. Through privations under the Russians and the joint endurance with the British of the blockade, they had formed a far better understanding of our actions. They had shared everything. They were grateful to us, and, what is more, they depended on us for their very existence as a free city.
Max had been astonished at the different feeling in the West, just as I had been. In the West they didn’t care at all about Berlin.
“But it’s your capital,” I would say. “You must care—it stands for freedom.”
“You are making a new capital,” they replied, “further away from the Russians. Why all this fuss, why don’t you let the Russians have Berlin? This air-lift is still costing us taxes—why should we pay for the Berliners?”
“I am very glad to have gone out, if only to see the difference,” said Max when I met him that autumn in Berlin. “Here we live in a private world, on our island, and we are apt to forget how small we are.”
He had finished his examinations successfully, and was going to Munich to be near his uncle. Hermann and his wife were living in the Altmann house and Max was with them, paying his share.
“But I can’t stand it,” he told me. “Hermann is impossible. He is always drinking and I can’t get on with him. I try to protect Tante Luise as much as I can. I am strong and can knock Hermann out when he gets tiresome.”
I asked where Hermann got the drink.
“He has bartered all the furniture and silver now. They were glad to come and live here, for their own flat was practically empty, but I see that he doesn’t start that little game with Tante Maria’s things in this house.”
“And what will happen when you are gone?” I asked.
Max said that he would not be able to help then, but he intended to put the fear of God into Hermann before he went, and Stampie had promised to keep an eye on them.
“He will; he is devoted to Hermann,” I said.
We were going that evening to the Unter den Linden to see the celebrations for the new Democratic Party. I wanted to see this new Free German Youth movement, about which I had heard a great deal from Lotte, whose sister’s children in the East Zone were always talking of it. They were still young, but Barbel, John’s friend, and the eldest of them, would soon be obliged to join. These girls and boys were to form a huge procession, and later have a torchlight parade in honour of Herr Pieck, and they had come from all over the East Zone to Berlin for this great day.
There was no difficulty in seeing the procession. The Soviet authorities wanted everyone to see it—especially the West. All factory workers had been given a holiday to see the demonstration, and the place was crowded. It was raining a little, but it was not enough to damp the ardour of the young people in the parade. They marched with their huge pictures of Pieck and Stalin with their flags and banners, and they were fine and strong and they looked fit and happy. Useless for the Western press to say next day that they were spiritless. Impossible not to be horrified and at the same time impressed. There were so many, and they were so well drilled.
Stampie ha
d been angry that he was not free to come with us. He had been back on normal driving duties since the air-lift ended, and he did not like it. He liked lorries; he had got used to them, and he had liked the free and easy life among the R.A.F. men.
He couldn’t come with us that evening because he had to take his boss to a dinner party, and he resented my going without him to look after me.
“Supposin’ that Max takes it into his head to tear down another piece of flag—there’ll be plenty of hammers and sickles about. What will you do if he goes off and the crowd gets rough? Tell you what—I’ll try and get a pal to drive for me tonight. I can always have a headache—I’m entitled to be ill same as anyone else.”
I assured him that Max would not do anything silly, and also that I could look after myself.
“Does the Boss know you are going to it?” he asked me.
I shook my head. The Boss did not.
And here we stood, Max and I, watching this enormous Rally of Youth. Column upon column of fine young people, heads up, shoulders back, chests out, banners and portraits held proudly as high as the flags. Into my mind there swept the picture of the Nuremberg Rally all those years ago. Only the colour of the uniform distinguished them from those others who marched under the Swastika. Here was the same ardour, the same proud march, the same intoxicating sense of power. I looked at the spectators: they were absolutely thrilled. I looked at Max: he was dead white, and a small muscle in his cheek twitched in his emotion. It was terrifying, and it went on and on and on—more and more of these strong young limbs moving in perfect unison, and as they marched one heard in one’s mind the roll of drums and the thunder of guns and the roar of planes.
I thought of Frau Altmann’s words. I had commented on the resentment of the Germans that in the British zone any kind of uniform was banned.
The Dancing Bear Page 21
