The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  My small son John formed an instant liking and admiration for this hardened “old soldier” and put his hand shyly in his with the request that he might sit in front with him. Stampie had turned to me.

  “Glad to have you here, M’m,” he said, “and as the Boss has told you, anything you want—and I mean anything—just you ask Stampie. That’s me, John. Everyone calls me Stampie—there’s literally nothing I can’t get you if you ask me. I know my way around.”

  He soon proved how true this was. In any domestic crisis one could rely on Stampie to come to the rescue with anything from a soup tureen to a clockwork train, which he provided with the minimum of trouble and expense. It was he who took me round Berlin pointing out the four sectors and all the ruins with an almost ghoulish glee until he noticed how it upset me . . . then he would suggest taking me to his Mess for a “pick-me-up” as he said.

  “Doesn’t it give you any satisfaction or pleasure to be riding down the Kurfürstendamm as one of the Conquering Powers?” he had asked with a quirk of one eyelid.

  “None,” I replied shortly—and it was true. I had come to Germany prepared to hate the Germans, wanting vengeance for the loss of many friends, and for our own Chelsea home which had been blitzed. I and my unborn son had lain in its ruins.

  It was curious to find that one was filled only with horror and despair at the depths to which civilization could sink.

  “I felt just the same,” Stampie had agreed. “We used to cheer each other up on some of Monty’s long treks with just this very thought—of riding into Berlin as a conqueror—but when we got here and saw this bloody mess and these poor devils with all the stuffing knocked out of ’em—we felt only pity.”

  And this from a man who had seen how the Germans had treated the civilians in the countries they had invaded and occupied. I was to find that many British soldiers, even those who had been prisoners of war under the Germans, felt pity for them.

  And no one could have been quicker to exploit this innate decency and feeling for the underdog than the Germans.

  We were sitting in Stampie’s Mess where he had taken me after observing that I was “all in” as he described it—and no wonder, for he had conducted me on one of his sight-seeing tours which had begun with the memorial to his beloved Desert Rats and ended up with the Reichskanzlei, Hitler’s headquarters, and each devastated stark ruin seemed worse than the last.

  “Sorry I can’t take you over Adolf and Eva’s bunker,” he had apologized. “We used to be able to go in—but now the Russians have taken a fancy to it we can only see it on Sundays in company with the Comrades on their conducted tours.”

  It was the last straw when he said ghoulishly, “There are thousands of bodies still in these ruins! But it’s over a year ago now, they can’t be much more than bones. When we first came the stench was awful—sweet and sickly like cancer—but it’s much better now. You’ll notice it sometimes after the rain though. We’ll just see the Schloss now and the Dom, they both make grand ruins ...”

  But I had had more than enough. The sight of this appallingly savage devastation produced a sick trembling in my stomach, a nausea so violent that I was afraid of being physically ill.

  “Stop it for heaven’s sake!” I had cried, and Stampie had taken a careful look at me then turned the car regretfully back through the Brandenburger Tor.

  “You’ll soon get used to them,” was his only comment. “Why, I like them now.”

  I was puzzled when he ordered three drinks from the German bartender in his Mess, thinking that perhaps someone was to join us, but no. He put two glasses in front of himself and the third before me.

  “I am honoured, M’m,” he said gravely as we sat down, and he raised one of his glasses to me, “Here’s to you! And a pleasant life in this old ruin, Berlin!”

  We clinked glasses. I had chosen sherry, but he drank Steinhager. He lifted the second glass to himself.

  “Well, here’s to you, Stampie, old cock,” he said, and the second Steinhager went the way of the first.

  “Why do you have two?” I asked curiously.

  “Oh, that’s nothing. Just a habit of mine—I hate drinking alone, so I usually have two at a time and drink them in turn,” he said sheepishly.

  I felt he was evading my question. There had been something of a ritual in the way he had lifted the second glass. Something he didn’t want to tell me about.

  “You should have had brandy,” he said reproachfully. “Sherry’s nothing of a pick-me-up—makes me feel worse.”

  He had shouted this above the blare of the radio which was playing Hörst du mein heimliches Rufen? which, with the Capri Fischermann was all the rage at present in Berlin. One heard them everywhere, in every café, club and bar, just as one heard “Stardust,” “Roll me over in the Clover” and the Blues.

  “The last Brigadier I drove in this Horch,” he told me as we turned towards Grunewald where we lived, “sat with a girl on each knee, one at his feet, and one with her feet round his neck—and all of ’em full of champagne. He took ’em all home, every one of ’em!”

  I said I was glad that at least he took them home, but did Stampie mean to their homes or to his?

  “Theirs!” he replied in a shocked voice. “We don’t have women in our Messes here. We’re not like the Yanks: they’re allowed ‘frats’ until eight o’clock in the morning, and all the week-end if they like.”

  “Not,” he added thoughtfully, “but what some of our chaps don’t get round our rules too.”

  I asked if there were much fratting. He nodded. “The German girls are all right,” he said firmly. “We all like them. They knock spots off the men.”

  The girls in the streets were strikingly attractive in spite of the lack of soap and cosmetics. Many of them stayed in bed most of the day and in the evenings went in search of the cigarettes with which to buy their food.

  We were going to a French reception the evening I had met Frau Altmann, and when Stampie came to fetch us to drive us to Frohnau I told him about Frau Altmann and asked him if he would take a small parcel to her.

  “Altmann,” he said thoughtfully; “I knew an Altmann too, but mine doesn’t live at this address—but Hermann, my friend, has relatives here in Berlin, I know.”

  When he fetched us after the reception he told us that he had taken the parcel, that Frau Altmann was much better. She had written me a little note which he handed me.

  “She is a relative of old Hermann’s,” he said. “She’s his sister-in-law . . . now isn’t that extraordinary? There’s old Hermann always telling me about his sister-in-law—he thinks the world of her . . . and you go and meet her like that!”

  The note was written in beautiful German script.

  “Sehr Geehrte Gnädige Frau,” it ran, “please accept my most heartfelt thanks for your kind help yesterday. I stupidly did not ask your name. I also thank you a thousand times for the parcel of tea, milk and sugar, and the biscuits. God will show me some way to repay you.

  “Maria Altmann.”

  I asked Stampie if she had been able to make some tea.

  “They were boiling the kettle with some wood which Fritz found in the Grunewald,” he replied. “I’ll look in again tomorrow and see how things are. I wish you could have seen her face when she opened your parcel—she burst into tears.”

  I discovered afterwards that Stampie, bless him, had gone out and bought her a loaf of bread, some butter and meat from one of his many black market contacts.

  “She was really starving,” he said simply, when I thanked him. “I just couldn’t take it. Couldn’t eat my dinner for thinking of what you told me.”

  I asked if Fritz was the only son of the Altmanns. There was another older son missing in Russia, and two daughters, said Stampie. They were both extremely pretty, and the little one, Lilli, who danced at the Staatsoper Ballet, was a real beauty. He knew all about her from her uncle, his friend Hermann. She was a small slim blonde, absolutely nothing of her, said Stampie—lo
oked as if a puff of wind would blow her away.

  I adored ballet and had spent a lot of time drawing at rehearsals at Sadlers Wells and at the ballet in Paris. I was at once very anxious to make Lilli’s acquaintance.

  III

  A WEEK later, having an hour to spare between my classes at the British school, I went to call on Frau Altmann.

  There had been something I liked in her face. It wasn’t anything which one could define, but something I should like to have in my face when I am an old woman. She interested me enormously, and had left an impression of goodness and integrity which was unmistakable. I wanted to see the rest of this family and get to know them.

  She was busy trying to get the sewing machine to work, its fall in the street not having improved it. There was, so she said, always a lot of sewing to be done for Lilli, and Fritz had been trying to get it to work without success.

  It was obvious from the welcome on her face that she was glad to see me, as she begged me to sit down. She had the most naturally perfect manners, and great dignity. There were only four chairs in the room, two of them wooden kitchen ones, the other two padded arm-chairs. All were the worse for wear, as was the cushion on the wooden box obviously used as a seat. The cardboard that took the place of glass in the windows kept out the light but not the draught.

  A young girl with a pointed oval face sat on one of the wooden chairs mending a ballet shoe as I came in. Herr Altmann, who was sitting by the stove, rose hastily from his chair, as did she, and greeted me warmly.

  “This is my daughter Lilli,” said her mother as the young girl curtsied in the old manner and then held out her hand, “she is a dancer at the Staatsoper and must mend her shoes. You will have noticed how acute is our shoe problem in Berlin.”

  The hand which Lilli held out to me was so thin that one could see all the blue veins in it. Stampie was right, she was beautiful. A natural blonde, her hair was of that very rare silvery fairness which one finds in the nordic races, her eyes astonishingly dark, almost violet blue. Her young body was as straight and slim as a young sapling; too thin, for the shoulder blades stuck out sharply from the tight jersey and her breasts were almost as flat as a boy’s. She wore her lovely hair drawn back severely in a ballerina’s knot.

  I had brought some of the almost only unrationed thing in the Naafi with me—some cakes plastered in synthetic cream and some biscuits. The stove was sulking, and Frau Altmann raked it briskly and gave an exclamation of delight as the kettle on it began to boil. They had used up all their gas ration and had no coal, and the wood which Fritz collected from the Grunewald was damp. I said I could lend them an electric kettle, but was told politely that the electricity ration was so small that it just managed for the light, if they were very careful.

  She made the tea and added some of the tinned milk which I had sent in the parcel. It was luxury indeed, she said, though Lilli got a little milk sometimes in the Russian sector.

  “The Russians are very good about the theatre and opera performers,” said Frau Altmann.

  I thought Lilli looked as if she needed a great deal of milk; she was alarmingly frail for anything so strenuous as ballet dancing.

  We sat down ceremoniously at the table to drink the tea. The cups, although all odd, were of very fine old china, the lace cloth which Frau Altmann had spread on the table was of the finest kind and immaculately ironed. The tea-pot was of old family silver with their initials entwined on it, and gave me a little indication of how they must once have lived.

  I tried not to see the plain hunger on their faces as Frau Altmann put the large plate of cakes on the table. She said grace, quite simply, adding, “Today we really have something to be very thankful for, haven’t we, Pappi?”

  A minute later Fritz burst into the room. He did not seem at all pleased to see me there, bowed stiffly, and looked round for a chair.

  “I suppose I have the honour to sit on this extremely comfortable box?” he remarked in an unpleasant voice.

  “You can see that all the others are occupied,” said his mother serenely.

  He subsided with an ill grace, took a cake and ate hungrily.

  “This is the first thing I’ve eaten today,” he said, snatching another one almost before he had finished the first.

  “None of us has eaten since breakfast,” said his mother mildly, “If you missed that, it was your own fault, and is it necessary to remind you, liebling, that we need not discuss our private affairs before a guest?”

  Old Herr Altmann looked doubtfully at his untidy son and I took a careful look too. He was, like Lilli, painfully thin, his cheeks sunken and his skin dry and yellowish. He wore his hair, which was fair but darker than Lilli’s, as long as did many girls. His father’s, in strange contrast, was so short as to be almost shaven. Fritz’s shirt, of a bright green, was open at the neck, and his dark red pullover had several stains on it. Looking at the immaculate neatness of his parents in their worn but carefully mended and pressed clothes, it didn’t seem possible that they had produced this strange, restless, untidy son. Perhaps he was hungry—his eyes were never still, nor were his hands, and he had a trick of jogging his foot against the wooden box which became quite maddening.

  Lilli, on the contrary, was very still as she sipped the tea which Frau Altmann had made so weak as to be almost unrecognisable. I noticed her slender hands and feet, and the grace of her thin young neck. She moved beautifully when getting up to help her mother, and I could imagine her dancing well.

  We chatted of pre-war Berlin, and the present-day troubles, of the food problems and the unemployment position. They were rather guarded—they didn’t know me yet, I was the wife of an Occupation official; they had to be careful. One got the impression, though, that they had all learned to be careful of their tongues, and afterwards when I knew them better I found this was so—that in the last fateful months of the war the Gestapo had been ruthless.

  I liked the old people. They were well read, well informed on literature, art and music. Not on the moderns, of course, they said, as they hadn’t been allowed anything foreign since the Hitler régime. They had been cut off completely, as they had been in medicine. I promised to take them some British papers and art periodicals. Lilli was very quiet, but she smiled sweetly at me several times as she resumed her shoe-mending.

  Just as I was about to leave the door was flung open, there was a rush and flurry of feet, and a gay laughing girl came in, dropping things all over the place in her haste. She was of a stronger physique than Lilli, but charmingly pretty and clearly her sister. Her coat, of a pale blue angora wool, swirled round her, a gay scarf fluttered from her full throat as she glanced round for a chair, then seeing me in the one which was obviously hers, curtsied as her mother introduced her.

  With her arrival the somewhat stilted conversation took on a new life. She was bursting with news and her pockets were stuffed with titbits for her family—two cigars for her father, a bag of sweets for Lilli, a packet of needles which threw her mother into exclamations of joy, and a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes thrown neatly across to Fritz.

  While she drank her tea and ate a cake for which she thanked me very charmingly in excellent but Americanized English, she made them all laugh with her account of her day’s work. This was her free afternoon, she explained to me. She worked for four American gentlemen who shared a house in Dahlem. There was a cook and herself. She hadn’t been there long, before that she had been employed in an American Mess, but it had been too hard. All food not consumed by members had to be burned while she and her fellow workers were starving and would gladly have eaten the wasted scraps. This was done by the order of the U.S. authorities and had nothing to do with the Mess supervisors. Some of the American men had managed to slip food out for the girls, but everything left on the tables was burned.

  The four gentlemen for whom she now worked were very considerate. She was certainly not as thin as her sister and brother, and had twice as much vitality. Looking at her dancing hazel eyes
and wide generous mouth I wondered just how much she was paying for all the small luxuries she brought home. As it was, her mother and Lilli kept staring at the very new-looking blue coat which looked out of place in that shabby room. Finally Frau Altmann could stand it no longer, and with an apology to me, burst out, “Ursula, where did you get that new coat?”

  “Bought it, of course,” replied the girl, without looking at her mother.

  “But, Ursula, a coat like that costs thousands of marks.”

  “Well, I didn’t steal it; so don’t look so worried, Mutti; it’ll be paid for all right.”

  “I suppose one of your dear Yanks gave it to you!” said Fritz nastily.

  “Shut up!” snapped his sister, “and if he did, it wouldn’t be any of your business. You don’t mind smoking their cigarettes!”

  Frau Altmann sighed and admonished them sharply. She had looked anxiously at me when Fritz made the remark about the Americans. “You must please excuse them,” she apologized. “I’m afraid our nerves and our manners are not what they used to be!”

  I hated the way Fritz looked at his sister Ursula, and got up to take my leave. I could hear the car at the door and knew that Stampie had come to take me to the Study Centre.

  He came in at Frau Altmann’s invitation and was warmly greeted by them all—even Fritz smiled and thawed a little as Stampie slapped him on the back, saying, “Well, how are things, Fritz old chap?”

  They had already accepted him as one of themselves. He was an old friend of their Uncle Hermann’s whom he had known apparently for several years before the war. I was curious to know how these two had first met, and meant to ask Stampie.

  To Frau Altmann’s joy he sat down at the sewing machine and examined it carefully.

  “I can do that for you,” he announced cheerfully. “Tell you what, if the Boss doesn’t want me tonight, I’ll come back after eight and fix it for you—I’ll bring my tool bag along.”