The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  John came in. He was muffled in jerseys and his cheeks red with cold.

  “You’ve been crying,” he accused, and put the puppies in my lap. They were cold too. Stampie found us later still huddled in blankets and trying to untie parcels with our numbed fingers.

  The bell kept on being rung by our poor old beggars. Lotte kept a pot of soup constantly on the simmer, and we gave all we could a cup with a piece of bread. Many British women now brought me all their left-over bread and many little extras for those old people, as well as helping with food for the children. Had it not been for Stampie arriving I would really have given in to my despair.

  He wanted some rum for old Herr Altmann, who had a very bad cold on his chest.

  As I fetched the bottle I asked if they had any fuel. Yes, they still had a little of what he had managed to take them, but their electricity ration was finished and they could not use any more. Outside the Naafi building in Reichskanzler Platz there were always a gang of unfortunate people clearing away debris, guarded by police. Their only crime was that they had used more than their ration of electricity. Some of them were pitifully old to be doing such work, and it was dreadful to see such a penance.

  “What you want is some of this,” said Stampie; “you’re all in with the cold—what about a little swig?” opening the rum bottle persuasively. I declined, but begged him to help himself. Rum agreed with him, for he asked permission to entertain John at the piano and was soon vamping a song of which he was very fond called “Why did she always say no?” and then one of his own composition, “My mother should have warned me about blondes!” He played from ear, and could remember anything once he had heard it. John adored his rollicking songs, as did the girls Lotte and Gisela. We were soon all laughing at the puppies who barked madly every time Stampie roared out the refrains.

  We had a dinner party that night—and I had trouble with my staff because there were several Russian guests coming. I quite understood their reluctance to serve Russians when they had all three been raped by Russians, but I explained to them that I had to entertain the Russians as well as the French and Americans, and that if they felt they could not oblige me I would have to get other staff. Gisela had not liked serving our German guests, the von R.’s, when they had dined with us the previous week. Working for the Allies was quite another thing to waiting on Germans. I had been horrified when Frau von R. had left a tip for the staff which would have bought her an excellent dinner on the Black Market. Lotte explained to me that Frau von R. had been a great lady and that it had always been the custom to leave large tips for one’s hostess’s staff.

  I found it even more difficult to keep my attention on Gisela’s shaking hands as she served the Russian officers because of what Stampie had rushed in to tell me just before the dinner.

  Fritz was in serious trouble and was on the run. I asked what the trouble was.

  “This time it’s pretty bad,” he said glumly; “the bloody young fool took part in a food lorry hold-up on the autobahn yesterday.”

  The police had come upon the scene and the raiders had opened fire. Fritz had escaped, but two of the gang had been caught, and they had told the police that it was Fritz who had opened fire.

  It was a criminal offence, punishable by death, for a German to be in possession of a weapon—how had Fritz got the gun?

  “You’d be surprised what a racket is going on in guns as well as in every other commodity,” said Stampie.

  I could not ask him any more because the Russians were arriving. When going to any party, official or private, they invariably arrived en masse. They did not have the same lavish transport facilities as had the other three Powers, and shared conveyances. Quite high-ranking Soviet officers could often be seen in the German trams and buses, strictly forbidden to us British.

  The next day I went to Frau Altmann. Stampie had told me that Herr Altmann was no better, that the cold on his chest was worse, and that they were trying to keep this new trouble of Fritz’s from him. She looked pale and strained, but was overjoyed to see me, pulling me anxiously into the room and begging me to stay with her a little—she was so worried and upset that she scarcely knew what she was doing.

  I didn’t like the look of old Oskar at all. He was in bed muffled in blankets, with the door open between the two rooms to allow a little warmth into the freezing bedroom. The draught from the unglazed window was awful—I was surprised that the poor old man hadn’t been ill before.

  Frau Altmann shut the door quickly and told me she was sick with anxiety about Fritz. The police had been to the house twice the previous night, but he had not been seen. The Altmanns only knew of the incident from them. Fritz had never returned home at all.

  I asked where Lilli was. She had gone out to try and get some Black Market glass for the window in Pappi’s room. There was glass to be had, but it came, like everything else, from the Russian Zone, and cost a small fortune by the time it passed through so many hands. I decided to ask Stampie to get some. I knew he had a contact, for he had somehow provided glass enough to repair the greenhouses of an old friend, Heinrich, who had a nursery garden.

  Lilli was coming down the street as I was leaving. She had not been able to get any glass. Stampie told her not to worry, the glass would be in that evening.

  I asked about Fritz. Her mouth tightened and her eyes hardened.

  “He’s wanted by the police. And this time it’s something awful that he’s done. He’s no good. What will happen now?” she cried.

  She wasn’t sorry for him, she said, and I found this unusual. German girls usually worship their brothers. Neither Lilli nor Ursula worshipped theirs. They both had some deep resentment against him. I asked her to come back with me so that I could give her some Ovaltine and Bovril for her father. As we were driving along the Hohenzollerndamm I thought I saw Fritz. He had his face muffled up with a scarf, but I was sure it was him.

  “Stop!” I shouted to Stampie, “Look there! Isn’t that Fritz?”

  We slowed down and I jumped out. It was Fritz, but when he saw us he started running, and although Lilli shouted to him he disappeared among the ruins. Lilli began to cry, and I told Stampie to drive us home quickly.

  “The young fool! Why can’t he have the sense to face up to things?” said Stampie. “What’s the use of running away?”

  I reminded him that if he had really had a gun and fired at the police there would not be much chance of his getting away—they would get him somehow.

  “There are ways of getting away here,” said Stampie grimly, “but no one knows that he did actually have a gun yet—it’s only what the police say—and you know what I think of those four-letter men!”

  I took Lilli up to the flat while Stampie set about getting in touch with Hermann. She wore a black coat with a little black astrakhan cap on her shining hair. Her woollen gloves were darned in several places. She looked unutterably weary and dispirited, and sank with an exclamation of delight into an arm-chair. It was one of the days when our block was partially heated and she remarked on it, saying, “How lovely it is to be in a comfortable apartment again!”

  I asked if she thought Fritz would come home.

  She shook her head. She was sure he would not—she had been astounded to see him near the Hohenzollerndamm. She though he might be going to Uncle Hermann’s. The police were surely watching their own house and he would not dare to come home. Her father had been too poorly to take in what the police wanted when they had come yesterday to question her mother. The doctor had forbidden him to be worried.

  “Mutti always makes excuses for Fritz.” she said. “She has spoilt him since Kurt has been missing. This time it won’t be so easy to excuse him. If she knew what he is really like she would not be so ready to shield him.”

  There was something so vindictive in her usually gentle voice that I was brought up sharply by the fact that there was something I did not yet know about Fritz. I looked straight at her, but her small pointed face was a mask. “He is a J
udas!” she said fiercely, becoming suffused with colour.

  It was extraordinary that this child should be sitting here telling me, a stranger and an “enemy,” that her brother was a Judas—but life was so fantastic here that nothing surprised me any more. She said abruptly that she must go, and I gave her the things for her father. Suddenly she burst out, “Forget what I have just said about Fritz, please. I am no better than he is!”

  She cried silently for a minute, and Gisela appeared with some coffee which pulled her together. I didn’t like her terrible pallor, or the blue shadows under her eyes.

  I changed the subject by asking her to tell me the story of Nikki the parrot. I had seen the bracket where the parrot’s cage had hung. There had been many references to Nikki, and Stampie had told me that the Russians had taken him. I asked her now, when she was sitting there cuddling Soda in her arms.

  The parrot had really belonged to Fritz, she said. A friend in the Navy had brought it home to Fritz when he was quite a boy; it was one of the family. During the last few weeks of the war Fritz had been out fighting with the Home Guard defending the capital. He had rushed home frantically one day to tell them that it was all over and that they had been told to surrender to the Russians. At his mother’s command he had put on his civilian clothes and hidden his uniform. It was good that he did so, for many of his friends had been taken prisoner. The two girls had been hidden up on the roof by Frau Altmann. The Russian troops had come and begun ransacking the house. They opened every cupboard and drawer and threw all the contents into the garden, when a lorry collected it. They had found Herr Altmann’s wine cellar and had come back into the house very drunk. The parrot Nikki had greeted them with “Guten Morgen!” They had been astonished, and clustered round the cage dumbfounded. None of them had ever heard of a bird that talked. Fritz had quickly seen the advantage of this, and had made Nikki go through his entire repertoire with the exception of “Heil Hitler.”

  When one of the Russians had exclaimed, disbelieving his eyes and ears, “niet, niet,” the parrot had repeated the words after him. The simple men were as delighted as children, made signs that they wanted the bird, and had gone off in triumph with poor Nikki in his cage. They had not taken any more loot. Poor Nikki had saved them from losing many more possessions and from any further search for the two girls. No more troops had come, and they had been left in peace. One day one of the soldiers who had taken Nikki came to try and make them understand that they wanted food for the bird. Frau Altmann had given the man a bag of seed and written down the address where he could obtain more. Nikki was apparently well, and still a treasured possession.

  As if still thinking of the incident, Lilli asked suddenly, “How much do you think nationality matters?”

  I said that it depended on the person concerned—that it could nowadays be a matter of life and death—or that it did not matter at all. She said that surely as an artist I would agree that art should be international. I said that the Nazis hadn’t thought so, and pointed out that she had assumed a Russian sounding name for her dancing because probably she had thought that it would help her as a ballet dancer.

  “It has,” she said quietly, “but not quite in the way I thought it would.”

  The question interested me. Here in Berlin, a city divided into four sectors by the Allies, it was impossible to avoid the question of nationality—every road traffic notice was in four languages, and one could not get away from the notices on so many buildings and bus shelters and waiting rooms. “Forbidden to Germans,” “No entrance for Germans,” “Not for German Use,” confronted one everywhere. Frau von R. had been particularly bitter about them. Even if the Germans must be treated as pariahs, surely it was carrying things too far to refuse them shelter from the elements and the use of the lavatories at stations.

  I did not think that it was this aspect of nationality with which Lilli was concerned, but a more personal one. I told her that nationality was a question which had never bothered me—that having travelled so much and mixed with so many nationalities I had found them all much the same at heart.

  She was dancing that evening in Traviata, and had asked me to come back-stage afterwards, as the friend with whom I was going wanted to be introduced to her.

  I quite forgot the Fritz affair during the opera which, beautifully staged and excellently sung, gained seventeen curtain-calls from the delighted audience. I would have enjoyed it more if the Russian officer next to me had not continually dug me in the ribs with his tommy gun in his enthusiasm. I was afraid that it might go off at any minute, One never saw them anywhere without these guns.

  When we went back-stage Lilli was not there. Her friend Susi made her apologies. Lilli had fainted after the second act and had gone home.

  XI

  THE NEXT morning Stampie came to me in a great state. There had been a terrible scene at the Altmanns’ last night and old Oskar was very ill indeed—he had had a stroke.

  I was too astonished to say anything. He had looked the last man to have a stroke. He had seemed too quiet, too pale and too apathetic. He had certainly had a nasty cold last time I had seen him, but that was all. It was definitely a stroke, Stampie told me, and it was his second. He told me then what had happened last night.

  While I had been at Traviata, Stampie had been at Hermann’s off duty. They had been drinking, but not a lot, because the doctor had warned Hermann that if he did not go a bit slower he would soon develop cirrhosis of the liver. They had been sitting there chatting over old times when suddenly Fritz had arrived, ringing violently at the bell. He had rushed in excitedly; he was filthy and desperate.

  “You must get my parents to come round here!” he shouted to Hermann. Stampie reminded him that his father was too ill with his bronchial cold to get out of bed, and said that Frau Altmann would not be able to leave him alone.

  “They’ve got to come!” Fritz cried violently, thumping the table.

  Hermann, who was at the quarrelsome stage of drinking, had flown at the boy and ordered him out of the house. He didn’t want any trouble with the police, he had shouted. Fritz could damn well get himself out of the trouble, the same way as he had not into it.

  Fritz guessed that the police were after him—but did not know until Stampie told him that his friends had denounced him.

  “I did not fire the gun!” he insisted angrily. “It’s a filthy lie! I did not open fire!”

  “Will you swear to that?” Stampie asked him.

  “I’ll swear by anything you like!” Fritz cried, and Stampie said that he believed him.

  “I don’t believe you,” Hermann said bluntly.

  Fritz had become hysterical, cursing the police—both German and British—his former friends, and the Occupation, who he shouted, were to blame because he and his friends were starving. It was all their fault and especially the fault of the British. Stampie had lost his temper too and said that unless Fritz pulled himself together he would give him up to the police himself. This brought Fritz to his senses and he accepted a drink and calmed down a bit.

  His uncle again ordered him out; he wanted him gone. Fritz insisted that he must see Ursula. He needed money to get away and Ursula had the money.

  Stampie asked where he intended going. It was all planned, he said, but he refused to say where he was going, except that it was somewhere out of reach of the British.

  “You don’t need to tell me where that is, you bloody young idiot!” Stampie cried, and he had begged Fritz to give himself up and face his trial.

  “I’m not going to be shot or hanged,” Fritz shouted. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Hermann pointed out that the possession of a gun was a criminal offence, of which every German was well aware.

  “What the hell do you mean by saying that you haven’t done anything?” he cried, “It’s enough that you had a gun—without taking part in an armed hold-up. Are you mad?”

  Stampie saw that argument was useless. The boy was in a frightful state
of nervous excitement and believed that he was being persecuted. His short spell in prison for something he hadn’t done had embittered him so much that he wouldn’t hear a good word about the British and screamed that they wanted to starve Germany.

  Stampie, thoroughly worked up now, had roared that the Nazis hadn’t bothered to feed any of the countries they had invaded. That was different, said Fritz.

  Stampie said he would have handed the young fool over to the Military Police himself, had it not been that the boy trusted him implicitly in spite of his tirade against the British—and he had such a high regard for the old Altmanns. He had, as usual, plenty of money on him, but he could not bring himself to offer Fritz the means of escape—even if Fritz would have taken it. But if he could have foreseen the tragedy which ensued over the money, he would have emptied his pockets in spite of his qualms.

  He was furious with Fritz for bringing this trouble on his parents. He telephoned Ursula. She agreed to meet Stampie at her parents’ home in twenty minutes’ time. They could not talk much on the telephone, but she absolutely refused to come to her uncle’s.

  Hermann, under pressure, agreed to allow his wife to give Fritz a meal. He was starving, not having eaten since the previous day, and his aunt was concerned at his appearance. Hermann was horribly afraid of the police—he didn’t like this affair at all, and showed Fritz plainly what he thought of him.

  Stampie found Lilli there when he reached the Altmanns’. She had come home early from the theatre, she explained; she hadn’t been well. The old man was very poorly and lay in the adjacent room. Frau Altmann was nervous and tense, and Stampie had to whisper that he had seen Fritz, for old Oskar’s ears were very sharp. She was horrified at his trying to escape, but said at once that she was sure he had not fired the gun—and that they had only the word of the two friends who, she said, were just wastrels. She was almost demented with anxiety about Fritz.