The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  Ursula had arrived like a whirlwind and had behaved as furiously as one. She absolutely refused to hand over the money to Fritz. It was hers, she insisted. Fritz had taken more than his share already—she believed that he must have used it to buy the gun. She had stormed and shouted that her brother was no good, that it was useless her mother trying to talk him out of this one. She hoped he would be caught and imprisoned for a very long time.

  Frau Altmann had rebuked her sharply, reminding her that her brother’s life was at stake and he was still so young.

  “Your own life is by no means blameless,” she reminded Ursula coldly, “and I am not so easily deceived as you think.”

  Ursula was adamant. She would not part with the money. She would not help Fritz to escape.

  “And don’t you do anything to help him either!” she cried to Stampie. “He’s not worth it! He is worthless!”

  Her mother had ordered her to hand over the money at once.

  Ursula turned on her and screamed, “You’re a fool, Mother, Fritz is a filthy little traitor. Who do you think it was who betrayed you to the Gruppenleiter when you hid the Rosenthals? It was your darling Fritz! Yes! Fritz whom you adore! Now do you still want to excuse him?”

  Frau Altmann had taken the blow between the eyes. She had looked calmly at Lilli and asked her if it were true. Her lips were trembling but she controlled herself magnificently. Lilli had nodded miserably.

  “We have always known,” she whispered, “but we never meant that you should know.” She looked reproachfully at Ursula. “Ursi! How could you?” she said, and burst into tears.

  At her mother’s agonized expression, Ursula, already sorry for what she had done, flung herself upon her mother, crying that of course she would give Fritz the money, that she would take it to him herself.

  Frau Altmann pushed her away quite abruptly.

  “You should have told me, both of you,” she said quietly. “Fritz was only a child—but I would have known better how to handle him had I realized how deep was his loyalty to that wretched Hitlerjugend.”

  A noise in the doorway attracted Stampie’s attention. He had been wishing himself a thousand miles away from this horrible scene. They saw to their consternation that old Oskar had got out of bed. His face was flushed to a dark red and his hands shook as he tried unavailingly to speak—the words would not come out although his lips moved. Finally he burst out that he had heard everything and that Fritz was never to enter his house again. It was monstrous! Monstrous! . . . His voice rose to a scream, and suddenly he had collapsed on the floor.

  When they raised him they saw that one side of his face and one arm were paralysed, and that he was muttering incoherently in a strange, slurred voice. Stampie had helped lift him back to bed, and had rushed off for the doctor. When at last he had come he had said that Herr Altmann had had a stroke, that he was dangerously ill, and must be kept absolutely quiet until they could get him into hospital.

  Ursula, tight-lipped and silent now that her father was unconscious, pulled a wad of notes from her bag.

  “Here’s the filthy money! It’s vile. Money, money, money! I never hear anything else. I hate it, hate it, hate it!” And she flung the notes on the table.

  “Control yourself!” said her mother sharply. “Haven’t you done enough with your shouting tonight?”

  “I’ll take them to Fritz,” offered Stampie, jumping up.

  He said the misery on Lilli’s face was more than he could bear, he couldn’t stand any more.

  “No!” said Ursula firmly. “I will take it myself. I don’t trust Fritz. He is quite capable of dragging you into this if he is caught. It would be a serious offence for you to be mixed up in helping a criminal to escape.”

  “He is not a criminal!” said Frau Altmann sharply. “He is just a foolish boy. Tell him to come home and face his punishment—tell him I beg him to come home.”

  They took the money. They saw no sign of the police, and Stampie said he was astounded. Maybe the intense cold had something to do with there being no watch on the house.

  Fritz had behaved just as Stampie thought he would. He refused to go to his mother, although they told him how ill his father was. He was not risking returning to the house, he said. He had in any case to run the risk of Ursula giving him away to the police.

  At this she had struck him across the face. “You little swine!” she cried. “You of all people to talk about giving people away!”

  He had looked murderous, but Hermann, now completely out of patience and very drunk, had put an end to the scene.

  “Get out of this house! Get out!” he had shouted so loudly that they were afraid the neighbours would hear.

  Fritz went—cursing and muttering that he’d get even with everyone over this.

  It was a horrible story, and poor Stampie was thoroughly upset. “Fair turned me stomach over,” he said glumly, “him going off like that. Human nature can’t half give you a turn.”

  I asked him if Fritz would really be sentenced to death if he were caught. Stampie was dubious. “The Boss’d know better than me,” he said thoughtfully, “but I doubt it. He would plead hunger for the reason of the hold-up, he’s very young; and the food position is giving the Allies headache enough without death sentences like that.”

  The Russians, he said, would make propaganda out of this sort of thing. Already there was a lot of trouble going on underground with the Communists trying to win the political battle for Berlin.

  “And that’s where that young idiot has gone,” said Stampie dryly “He’s full of Karl Marx and Wilhelm Pieck.”

  I asked how Herr Altmann was this morning, did Stampie know?

  He was still unconscious, and had not recognized anyone in the few minutes when he had regained consciousness.

  XII

  FRAU Altmann paid me the first visit she had ever made me on the day after this scene. I was going down to see her, but Gisela announced her before I left.

  She was looking terribly ill and was so agitated that she found it difficult to speak at first. She had walked, and on the frozen ground it had taken almost an hour.

  Her husband was dying and she wanted Fritz back. Kurt was lost in Russia and there was no man in the house.

  I couldn’t see that Fritz had been anything but a worry to her—the only money he had ever brought into the house had been at the risk of police discovery—and she knew now that it was he who had betrayed her to his party and caused her imprisonment. I wondered how I would feel if John later on did such a thing to me—would I be as forgiving as she was?

  I had spoken to my husband on his return about Fritz. He had been emphatic that there was nothing we could do. Fritz had chosen his own path and had burned his boats so far as returning to the British Zone was concerned.

  Frau Altmann did not believe that he had gone into the Russian Zone, as we did. She had come to ask me to help her find him and make him face the police. I asked her bluntly if she had any idea where he was, but I could tell from her face that she had not.

  “Isn’t there some way that you can use to find him?” she begged me, “and some way in which he would be treated with leniency if he gave himself up?”

  I told her that there was absolutely nothing I could do, and indeed I had again contacted my nice major at Military Government House. He had said that there was only the word of members of the gang that Fritz had been there at all—he had not been seen by the police themselves—but the fact that he had run away was proof enough that he had been concerned in the hold-up. The other youths who had given him away were now in prison awaiting charge.

  I told Frau Altmann that it had really been Stampie’s duty to turn him in to the police himself—but as that gentleman said, the police having been conspicuous by their absence that evening, it had served them right that Fritz had got away. Stampie did not love the police, as I knew.

  Frau Altmann’s face was heart-rending in its utter despair. I knew that it must have cost her a great de
al to come here and plead for Fritz. I must not mind that the boy sometimes used disrespectful words and made silly remarks about the Allies, she pleaded—he was in such a muddled state that he didn’t know what he was doing.

  I said that I minded his open criticism and hostility far less than the sly digs and covert remarks of many others whose belts had been tightened since the end of the war.

  “If I thought that it would help Fritz I would go down on my knees to you,” she said, weeping in a terrible silent way.

  I was obliged to tell her that it was useless. Fritz had gone—no one knew where—because of his inability to face up to his crime. She defended him as a tigress does her young, insisting that it wasn’t his fault—that he had been deeply influenced by the Hitlerjugend in spite of all her efforts against it, that he was bitter, and felt the shame of the defeat of Germany far more than many others did.

  She seemed to think that we could perhaps get a pardon for him if only he would come back. She protested passionately that Fritz could not be a Communist, as his sisters said he was. It was scarcely the time to point out that Fritz was an opportunist and would probably be just as fanatical in the Communist party as he had been in the Hitlerjugend, especially if he thought that the Soviet was likely to be the winner in the bitter political battle being waged for Berlin.

  In the loft above the hall in our flat, I had found a number of children’s toys, obviously left behind by the German family turned out when the building had been requisitioned by the British. One of these interested me very much. It was a game played with dice and small aeroplanes on a map. It was called Wir kämpfen gegen England, and there were all kinds of obstacles in the bomb-dropping before the aeroplane finally reached London. Stampie had brought me another one in a similar vein, and in a toy shop we had coaxed the owner to show and sell us the very latest of such games. Played on a map representing the four sectors of Berlin, it was a kind of halma with each Power playing against the other.

  I fetched these now and showed them to her.

  “Is it any wonder that our young people are so violent?” she said after studying them; “they are taught to kill.” She told me how shocked she had been by a broadcast by the Nazi Minister for Education to Berlin schoolchildren in 1940. “God created the world,” he had said, “as a place for work and battle. Whoever does not understand the laws of the battle of life will be counted out—as in the boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them.” Fritz, Ursula and Lilli had been three of the children listening.

  “I cannot understand how Fritz has become like this,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I tried so hard to fight against all this Nazi teaching, and to bring them up as God-fearing, upright citizens.”

  “Come and look out of this window,” I said, taking her by the arm.

  There were seven British boys in our block—there was not one little girl. All seven, including my little son, were playing with toy pistols in the open bombed space they used as a playground. Bang! Bang! Bang! they were shouting as they took aim at each other, and one after another would fall to the ground and feign death. Useless to take away the pistols—they found more, and the endless battles went on—every day our block echoed to the Bang! Bang! Bang! and their shouts. Any kind of toy weapons were forbidden by the Allies to the German children who looked on in envy and admiration at the British ones. I felt sick suddenly—and shouted to Gisela to go and bring John in.

  I remembered Stampie telling me how Monty had urged his men to learn to hate the Germans—that they had got to learn to want to kill them.

  XIII

  THERE had begun to be cases of kidnapping by the Russians of men they needed as skilled and trained mechanics—as well as of professional men. A friend of the Altmanns’ had come to me in great distress having actually seen her husband forced into a Russian lorry at the point of a gun just as she was watching him come up the road to his home after the day’s work at his factory.

  I took her down to Military Government House where they were very interested, but said regretfully that beyond making a protest to the Soviet authorities there was nothing they could do. The Russians, said the officer speaking to us, would simply deny the incident ever having taken place, or that they knew anything whatsoever of the man in question. His wife never saw him again.

  At the Study Centre the sergeants on the teaching staff told me of three Servicemen who had disappeared when returning on the autobahn from the Zone. The second lorry travelling with theirs had missed them after some Umleitung, or road diversions, and they had never been seen again.

  The city was a haven to those who wanted to disappear, for no one went near the dangerous roped-off buildings. The most dangerous ruins were gradually being blown up, as were the deep air-raid shelters. To destroy these shelters which housed many thousands of homeless people, because of the Disarmament Plan, added to our unpopularity. These “bunkers,” as the Germans called them, were amazingly well built and planned, and many of them were almost impossible to destroy. They had saved thousands of lives, and remained standing when every other building round them had disintegrated. It seemed a pity not to be studying their manner of construction instead of depriving people of a place in which to sleep.

  The cold continued without any sign of a change. In Britain they were experiencing Arctic conditions too, and the fuel question there was causing the British Government a headache. The Germans said that the Russians had imported their climate with them.

  The soup kitchens were doing all they could, the Innere Mission and the Heilsarmee were doing magnificent work on practically nothing, but there were too many stomachs to feed. One went to bed with the two words, Cold, Hunger, ringing in one’s ears, and awoke to them again in the morning.

  It was at the Altmanns’ that Stampie told us the most horrible story of hunger of this time. I had gone down to inquire for old Oskar. He was still at home—the doctor could not get him into hospital—beds were needed for those who had at least a chance of life. He lay in the cold bedroom unconscious and helpless, watched over in turn by the girls and their mother.

  Ursula was quiet and tense. Lilli looked like a little ghost sitting in her favourite place by the stove, her hands clasped in her lap and her fair head bent. I sketched her as she sat there with half her face and body in shadow. We were not talking very much—the shadow of death could be sensed in the atmosphere. Ursula had told me that her mother had not spoken to her since the scene when her father had collapsed. Frau Altmann was sitting by her husband’s bedside reading her Bible and watching for his slightest movement.

  I closed my sketchbook—it was too poor a light to draw. Lilli asked to see the sketches and exclaimed in delight as she recognized the lovely ruined Gedächtniskirche and the Brandenburger Tor through which she passed so often on her way to the Opera House.

  “I love the Gedächtniskirche as a ruin,” said Ursula, leaning over Lilli’s shoulder and looking too; “it was really very ugly as a building.”

  “Proper horror!” agreed Stampie who had just come in, having left his friend Ernie in charge of the car.

  The Brandenburger Tor, which now marked the Soviet sector and from which flew the Red Flag, was his favourite sketch. “I like the old Tor,” he said, “but what I’d like you to do for me one day, if it’s not taking a liberty to ask you, would be a sketch of the old Desert Rats’ Memorial.” It was a very simple stone which marked the end of the Eighth Army’s long trek, but as Stampie said, it made one think, for the names engraved on it were the ones which had been household words during the war and would be the history of tomorrow.

  “Here’s the history of the whole bloody war!” he had remarked when he showed it to me, “and these gaping ruins are the results of one man’s mania.”

  “We used to walk in the Unter den Linden on Sunday evenings,” sighed Lilli. “It was lovely, especially when the lime trees were in blossom, and people said that the nightingales sang there at nig
ht—Mutti has heard them.”

  The Unter den Linden was now one of the most desolate streets in Berlin, and the once famous limes blackened skeletons. Huge photographs of Stalin and Lenin adorned its once gay and fashionable length.

  “I am very hungry,” said Ursula suddenly. “I believe Mutti has forgotten that we’ve had no food since we came in—she’s so taken up with Pappi.”

  Stampie pulled two large meat pies out of his capacious pocket and offered her one. She took it eagerly, breaking it in two and handing half to Lilli.

  “You’ve had nothing all day, have you Lilli?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you been dancing?” I asked.

  Lilli shook her head. “I had a free day today,” she explained. She took the pie, but I noticed that she ate it very slowly as if it hurt her to swallow, while Ursula ate hers with the delight of a hungry child.

  “When one is very hungry,” said Lilli slowly, “the food just won’t go down.” She put the pie down on the table as if food nauseated her, telling Stampie sweetly that she loved it and would finish it later on.

  It was then that Stampie told us his story. He had been spending the evening with a German girl who lived in a dubious house in a street off the Kaiserdamm. During the evening they heard the most terrible noise going on in the room next door—as if some very heavy person were being dragged across the room. He questioned the girl and found her peculiarly evasive and anxious to take his mind off the noise.

  She used all her charms, which according to Stampie were considerable, but the sudden crash of furniture and the terrified neighing of a horse brought Stampie to his feet and had him pounding on the door from which the commotion was coming. He shouted to them to open up for the British, and when they did not obey, rushed out and fetched a Military Policeman on duty in Kaiserdamm. They were ordered to open up or a shot would be fired through the keyhole.