Bears at Parties
WRITTEN FOR THE BERLINER TAGEBLATT MAY 5, 1924 SOCIETY COLUMN (UNPUBLISHED)
It’s Saturday night at the Hotel Adlon and the party’s just getting started. The hotel, a green-roofed behemoth, hulks at the corner of Pariser Platz, broadcasting songs and shouts from its liquid-light windows. Berlin’s swell and famous—its White Russian princesses, its auto magnates, its pouty actresses—strut or swan towards the flung-wide door, ready to Charleston the night away, and among them slouches yours truly: Mareike Moser, humble party correspondent.
You may be wondering, where’s the usual rotation of Annas and Gertruds writing up my society news? Who is this Mareike character? Yes, my readers, I’m usually just a coffee slinger and copygirl at the Tageblatt. But this week all the Annas and Gertruds were preoccupied—what poor timing, for a week when there’s a party at the Adlon!—and so my big-shot boss Franz Jacobs swiveled around the newsroom and jabbed a finger at me. You do it, sweetheart. Just change your clothes first.
Well, I never change my clothes, and so I slunk into the Adlon wearing my usual costume: high-buttoned blouse and ankle-hiding skirt. I climbed the thick marble stairs to the second-floor ballroom where the party was starting to swing. The ballroom: a gleaming parquet floor, already glammed up by a few overeager couples Charleston-ing and Lindy-hopping. Red-and-gold Oriental screens lining the windows. A five-piece brass band howling in the corner. Bejeweled barbed laughter. I clutched my notepad, navigated through this mess, and posted up at a table in the room’s hinterlands. From there, I could keep an eye out for new arrivals.
I must admit I had an ulterior motive when I agreed to cover the party at the Hotel Adlon. When Jacobs shoved the guest list onto my desk, I scanned the oh-so-important names, and one pair jumped out at me: Karl and Liselotte Acker, the financier and his wife. That financier’s wife is Lise Teppen to me, and she’s back in Berlin, after five years in New York City. When I saw that name, I knew that I would go to the party, despite another fact, my readers, that I must admit, which is that I absolutely hate parties.
I’ve always hated them. Why, Lise and I first became friends because of a shared scorn for parties. You see, growing up in our village on the plains sweeping east into Russia, Lise had a certain reputation. When she was a girl, she and her brother got into a quarrel, a normal childish squabble, really, but she jabbed him in the forearm with her fountain pen, harder than she meant to. The pen broke; her brother burned his way through an infection and lost the arm above the elbow. Did I mention the Teppens are blacksmiths? After that, hounded by her bitter mother, Lise spent most of her time avoiding the rooms above the silent forge. Whenever I saw her roaming the streets, provoking whispers (that strange lost angry Teppen girl), I always thought she looked as though she were possessed by every evil curse that ever flew through those windswept lands. I told my best friend Ida Werner that I hated Lise Teppen. But even Mareike Moser at seventeen was canny enough to know that I was terribly jealous of her.
Anyway, one potato-blossom day in early summer, six years ago, I was roaming about with Ida—lead soprano in the Lutheran Church Choir, cleverest in our class, prone to moody silences—when we noticed Lise, peering through a window of one of the farmhouses past Neumarkt. Ida gave me her church choir soprano look (“It’s Lise Teppen, be careful”), but Lise said, without glancing at us, “Come see this.” We obliged. Inside: twenty or so farmers and their wives, ham and jugs of beer, a coin wrapped in paper pressed into the hand of a muslined bride, her eyes cast down beneath her veil.
“Everybody knows,” Lise said, “that she’s got a baby under that white dress. Something tells me she didn’t plan this wedding.”
Lise grimaced, then grinned, and then she whistled one of those tunes that monkeys play on coin-operated organs. Dah dah dah DAH dah dah. A mocking tune. Half the wedding guests looked up fast, and Lise ducked away, doubled over laughing. Ida grabbed my wrist. I stared at Lise. So this was how she operated. Poking little holes in the fabric of our rose-garden village.
Was that the same day when Lise brought us into the forest, when it all started? I seem to remember her beckoning us—
But look at me, lost in my reminiscences. You are here for the party at the Hotel Adlon. So, back to that swellest of places. While I sat daydreaming, the brass band picked up and the party surged towards the dance floor. Ladies slipped their slinky arms into their jovial men’s, ain’t we got fun? I watched them, taking notes for this very column: how do they all know when to head towards the floor? How do they know the right number of sequins for their drop-waist dresses? Or the right number of teeth to show when they laugh?
Well, after a few minutes of this, I fled to the gilded washroom. I leaned on the counter and listened to the soft rush of water through the pipes, which I could pretend was the stream from back home if I closed my eyes. At that point, I was sure that Lise hadn’t even come to the Adlon. The wild girl who whistled that monkey song to disrupt a wedding party did not become the sort of woman who suffered this kind of—what’s the phrase I’m searching for?—meretricious nonsense. I resolved to catch my breath, then take one more page of notes and leave.
But just then, the washroom door swung open, and who should appear in the mirror but Lise, six years older, wearing a fringed silver dress (you’re probably wondering whether it was Chanel, my readers, but truth be told I don’t care). Her right hand flew to the side of her bobbed hair.
Look at those fakers out there, Lise. Can you believe we’re supposed to hobnob with characters like that? Can you do the Charleston, because I certainly can’t. No, me neither, Mareike, let’s get out of here and run into the Tiergarten, and from there it’s not far to Grünewald, and then—
“Mareike.” Lise said my name in the tone of voice you might use when you’re saying, “easy, easy” to a hackles-up dog. “You—what are you—”
She stared at me and I knew exactly what she was doing: taking stock of me, my clothing, my long teeth. Assembling conclusions. Oh, I’ve seen that look before. It’s more fashionable than checkered stockings these days. What’s the matter with that girl? I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Look, I may have seen that look plenty of times, but I never expected to see it on Lise. It shocked me more than hearing her say my name as though I were a rabid dog about to attack.
Her mouth twisted up, she muttered a perfunctory excuse me, and she retreated towards the stall, rummaging in her clutch. I didn’t notice what brand of clutch it was. Instead, I slunk out of the washroom, my face burning. I couldn’t help it: I thought of the afternoons when Lise wore not silver fringe, but fur. Could that woman really be the same girl who once galloped through the forest on all fours, dodging red cedar pines and snuffling down deer morels? Had the girl who left our village six years ago, whose return was supposed to slice into my life and change everything, really become a rich man’s accessory, sneering, cold? I steadied myself against the wall as I contemplated this, this truly unbelievable transmogrification.
Certain of you—indeed, probably all of you, if you’re reading the society section of the Tageblatt—will know this already. But I was surprised to learn, two minutes after my encounter with Lise in the washroom, that it is, in fact, not only acceptable but even fashionable this season to bring bears to parties.
I almost didn’t stay long enough to discover this. After the washroom encounter, I was eyeing the staircase, strongly inclined to head home and pretend I’d never seen Lise. But just then, a new smell wafted out of that over-perfumed, over-smoked ballroom: the smell of berry scat and clean animal breath. I pivoted towards it.
A man, his hair waxed into a fashionable mess, was presenting a simpering woman with a leash, which trailed from a collar and muzzle restraining a black bear cub. The cub stumbled up on two legs and pawed the air, snuffling, his ears twitching. I wager Jacobs would tell me it’s not good practice to give voices to bears in fashion columns, but I’ll tell you anyway that I stared right into that bear’s desperate kohl-colored eyes, and I imagined he was thinking, Where is my mother, where is my forest?
“Dance,” shouted someone, and “Let’s hope the manager doesn’t know you brought a bear in here, Grimsey.” Jack Grimsey, the American stockbroker, who was holding the leash, snapped his fingers, and the bear made a pitiful little hop on the parquet floor.
I slipped into the ballroom, lurking between columns and shining windows. I said to a gawker next to me, “European mythology is full of stories about people who turn into bears and back again, you know,” but she kept staring at the bear as though I hadn’t spoken at all.
I was right, though. I’ve heard stories of arrogant Russian boyars transformed into bears, forced to perform three tasks. Scottish princesses married to bears, bears carrying the baggage of saints over mountains, Finnish peasants becoming bears on crescent-moon nights.
That summer, was the soldier who gave us the pendant Russian, maybe Finnish? I don’t know. I know he wasn’t German. You can tell plenty by someone’s clothes, and his background was crystal-clear to me from the prisoners’ uniform that he wore when we found him wheezing blood into a bed of ferns behind the military hospital. I stroked the hair off his waxy forehead—I’m touching a dying person, I thought, and I had never imagined at seventeen touching someone about to tip over into death. Lise twirled on her heel, scanning the forest as though she wanted to call for help, but Ida laid a hand on Lise’s forearm. Lise jerked back, as though shocked that Ida had dared touch her, but Ida surprised us all sometimes. She was also the cleverest of us, and although she didn’t say that there was no help for this man, when she squeezed Lise’s arm and shook her head, we all knew.
The soldier rummaged under his saggy uniform and produced a dented bronze pendant, bearing a crude outline of a bear. He dropped it at Lise’s feet, then fell back, his breath shallow and quick and then nothing. The smell of latrines rose through the birch trees.
We stared down at him. Then Lise darted forward and pressed his eyes shut. Ida mumbled a prayer. Lise hesitated, then snatched up the pendant. We walked in circles through the forest, trampling plants, the lake glittering through the trees, debating what to do about the man, whether we could tell our mothers. I reminded them that he had been an escaped prisoner, and wouldn’t people ask questions, if we told? Let them ask, Lise said, but she sounded unconvinced, and in the end, we headed back to the clearing and covered the body with loose dirt and a handful of white daisies.
We were terrified by our first brush with death, strung thin and frightened, and hungry, of course, as everyone was in those days. If it had just been me and Ida, we would have fled home, curled in blankets under her dormer window and replayed the details of the dying soldier, nursing them and nursing them.
But it wasn’t just me and Ida. Lise was there too. And she grinned, and slipped the pendant chain over her neck.
When Lise swept into the ballroom, I edged further back between the columns. A waiter shoved a glass of wine into my hand (Bordeaux—only the best at this party, of course) and I gulped half of it, then kept on my retreat. I wanted to escape without another encounter with the woman Lise had become. My heart was pat-pat-patting in my throat as I imagined what she might say if I had to talk to her again. Something to stomp right on my deepest wish, my fondest dream.
While I was edging backwards, I bumped into a lurid man eating parfait with a spoon. He glared at me, the frumpy girl with the strange teeth. Then he returned his hungry gaze to the skinny girl next to him. An heiress, I believe, but I can’t tell you to what. Her checkered stockings were rolled down just perfectly over her knees. She was proclaiming that she simply couldn’t stand Thomas Mann’s new book, it was too old-fashioned, she read ten pages then itched to put on her dancing shoes. As she performed this monologue she slowly but deliberately retreated from the man, who was staring at her as though he would rather be jabbing his spoon into her than into the parfait, if you catch my drift. I thought about how sometimes Jacobs presses his thumb against the collarbones of the Annas and Gertruds in the office to check them for sunburn, while they titter uncomfortably. He’ll press his big thumb against my cheek and joke that he’d check my chest too if there was any chance that the sun had touched me there recently. And although the hair on my back always rises up like hackles, what am I supposed to do? I can’t bite my boss.
If only Lise were here, I’d thought so many times. She’d show Jacobs. She’d show this rude man, or that cruel woman, or both. But as I stared at the girl and the lurid man, I remembered that I couldn’t default to that dream anymore.
“Mareike.” Lise was headed towards me, calling over the band’s din. I backed up a few steps, but she’d seen me, and she knew I’d seen her. She looked me up and down, wrinkling her nose. Then she seized my elbow and steered me along the back wall and onto a balcony. Below us glinted a hundred thousand neon lights—Schokolade! Wurst!—that illuminated even the void of the Tiergarten beyond the Brandenburger Tor. We turned night into day. What an achievement.
“I want to ask you something.” Lise, who smelled of the Bordeaux, touched her mouth as though her rose-colored lipstick might have bled. Once I saw Lise with fish-grease smeared all around her snout, halfway up to her wild eyes. “Do you still, that is. . . .”
Her palms pressed against her rhinestoned chest. “Are you still—is it still part of . . . Are you still part. . . .”
Well, my readers, I had to bite back a grin. Liselotte Acker, wife, flapper, and socialite, still carried around a little something from that summer. My mind gyrated and somersaulted, spinning out the possibilities. Could it be that she would still consider—
“You are, aren’t you.” Lise checked the French doors leading back to the ballroom, then extracted the tip of a tortoise-shell-sheathed razor from her wrist-bag. “It’s disgusting,” she breathed. “I have to shave it off every hour. Karl thinks I’m obsessed with smooth armpits. But I can’t wear sleeves all summer, can I?”
I tugged my long sleeves further over my wrists, bracing myself hard against the railing. She stared out at the Unter den Linden below us, where a girl was leaping around in a circle of revelers, trailing long scarves. “It’s madness, isn’t it, the way something horrid you did a few times as a child stays with you forever, isn’t it?”
“A few times?”
Lise returned her gaze to me. She reached her hand towards her bob, then dropped it. You know, her hands haven’t changed. They’re still the same hands that I watched explode into fur and sinew and claws. “A few times, five, six, who knows? It was one summer, at any rate, and it was so long ago, and still. . . .”
That summer was creeping up on me as though it had only happened ten minutes ago, that summer of sneaking out every night to run into the forest, disappearing for lazy afternoons so my mother started to believe we were sneaking around with soldiers. But it wasn’t something ordinary like that. It was Ida snatching fish from the stream, clambering up trees, Lise leaping on a deer, opening it from tail to neck.
Listening to Lise’s take on that summer, I felt as though I’d missed a step descending out of my familiar flat. What had I misremembered? What shame, what horror had I failed to notice? Was there any? Or had Lise simply spent the last six years fitting herself into Karl Acker’s world, scraping away our adventures the way she scraped fur off her skin?
“Have you heard about Ida?” Lise said, and because of the disapproving and eager cant to her voice, I knew she was about to gossip. “You know what she does? She dances . . . she dances in one of those. . . . establishments in North Berlin. Called Papagai. What she does afterwards I don’t like to think, but she dances . . . she’s naked except for her fur. Little pious Ida. They say people like it. Can you believe it?” Lise’s mouth twisted.
I hadn’t heard. I’d lost touch with Ida too, just as Lise had stopped answering my letters after she’d moved to New York. I imagined Ida’s moody gaze transposed from a provincial forest into a smoky strip club. I tried to imagine her in only bright nipples and fur.
“I can’t,” I said. “I really can’t.” I struggled back through the conversation, to what Lise had said about that summer. My readers, I wanted her to acknowledge that it meant something, once. “You know, I do think we became bears more than a few times.”
Lise’s hand clenched tighter around her razor. “Does it matter? All I can say is that I’m glad we stopped when we did. As it is—the last time did us in. Don’t worry.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t blame you, exactly.”
Did us in? The last time pushed us over the edge into disgrace, made us the kind of women who had to spend our lives hiding in unfashionable blouses or concealing razors in our expensive clutches? That’s what Lise thought, wasn’t it?
“Did us in? Is that how you’d—”
“Wait, Mareike. You . . . oh. You miss it, don’t you?”
At that moment, my readers, I hated this woman who had stolen the body of my friend. I wanted to rip the sequins off her expensive dress. I wanted to roar in her face.
Instead, I said, “How exactly did you hear about Ida, anyway?”
Lise lowered her lids, as though she wasn’t sure where I was heading.
“Did Karl tell you? Does he leave you alone, often, to go to North Berlin strip clubs? Of course you’ve had plenty of practice with being left to your own devices.”
Lise stared at me.
“And how,” I said, “is your brother?”
Just then, a cluster of swell gents and flappers burst out onto the balcony, all sharp angles and soft cigarettes. Lise shouted their names as though they were her own personal saviors.
“And this, dearests, is Mareike Moser, a columnist for the Tageblatt. She was just telling me that she wishes that she were a bear.”
The gents and flappers laughed, then looked at me, as though expecting me to banter with a witty comment about how bears had such nifty leashes this season. I didn’t say a word.
“I mean, she really, honestly wishes that she were a bear. Isn’t that cute?” Lise smiled at me, a grim smile. The flappers and gents were going quiet, fiddling with loopy necklaces.
“Well, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it?” said one heart-faced flapper, bravely, but the others exchanged looks—the look—then tittered and talked about other things, and the whole time Lise smiled and smiled and smiled.
My readers, in the past six years, I’ve often awoken confused from a dream. But it’s not a dream, is it? It’s a memory. A crescent-moon night. But let me start earlier. That day, Frau Teppen told Lise she was sending her to Darmstadt, to live with her cousin and train to be a secretary.
Lise told us this in a small and steady voice. Ida and I exchanged looks, the kinds of looks that can only pass between girls who have known each other since childhood, and I said, “You can’t go, you won’t be happy there, you can’t leave us,” and Lise said, “What do you suggest I do, Mareike?” And I said, “Talk to your mother, you can stay here with us, I’ll ask Mama, anything—” And Lise said “My mother wants me far away, and maybe it’s better,” and I opened my mouth to argue when Ida laid her hand on my arm, and that’s when I realized, Lise didn’t want solutions. She wanted to go.
And then, that night, we transformed, and Ida snuffled around the lakeshore and Lise swam through deeper water, her fur decorated with moonlight. I was craning my neck up at the stars—bears have different constellations than humans, they find elkspire and forest pine in the heavens—when something rustled on the shivery forest path.
From between the trees, a few boys emerged. I never saw their faces, but whoever they were, they stared at Ida. What might have happened, my readers, if Ida had been not a bear but a girl? But it didn’t matter, not that night. Lise and I roared out of the lake, burst onto the silty bank next to Ida and the three of us growled around our night-black tongues, and then Lise opened her jaws and a roar ripped through the reeds, and then we all roared, shaking the night. The boys scuttled away, and we forgot them, and we roared and roared, galloped through the reeds. My belly and back were caked with mud, my hackles up, my teeth long and blinding-white, and we were hungry, so very hungry, and we were loud as though we owned the night, as though we owned everything, but—
I knew, somewhere, that this was the last time, that Lise was leaving, she wanted to leave, and my claws flashed, my weapons, carving the air towards Lise, who snarled and recoiled, and then I was ripping through undergrowth, tearing through ferns in pursuit of her scat-smelling shadow, and I lunged and connected and the shadow tumbled, and I swiped, and I was laughing, I think I was laughing, I think she was too, because bears can laugh, you know, we were fighting, but we were also playing a game, a game called, don’t leave me.
But she did, of course. The next day, I stood in the window as a girl, blood oozing from the four slits on my left arm, hair spreading down my chest and back, watching Lise lug her cardboard suitcase towards the station. And she never answered my letters. Not even a single one.
Bears might be popular at parties this season, but long-teethed women who want to be bears are not. I edged towards the coatroom, playing the confrontation with Lise over and over as though it was the only record I owned. Lise with her razor. Lise, ashamed.
As I dodged around some pouty girls doing a hand-swingy dance, I cycled back to the beginning of the conversation. Lise had said she didn’t blame me, exactly, for that last night, the night that she imagined had kept us part bear forever. But why would she blame me? She had transformed first, as always. She had led us until she didn’t want to anymore. How could she possibly blame me for that?
She was glittering on the dance floor, laughing with Karl (I must say, I think her teeth, too, are still slightly longer than human teeth). Should I bother asking her, I wondered? Did it matter now? She certainly wasn’t going to lead us anywhere anymore.
I stood by the door for a long time, but eventually, Lise made my decision for me. She noticed me, touched Karl’s arm, then wove through the crowd.
“Why would you blame me?” I shouted over the music.
Lise cocked her head. She did that as a bear, often. I remember. That, I’m sure of. “I said I didn’t exactly blame you.”
“You know perfectly well that when someone says that, they really mean that they do blame somebody else. So tell me, why would you—”
“Because it was that last night that did it, Mareike. The last night, when you transformed first, that kept us all with this.” She shook her clutch at me, the shape of the razor straining against its beaded side.
I thought right then that her memory had gone loose, or else she had had too much champagne. “Me, transform? That’s—”
“How can you not remember? You galloped to my window that night. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I thought it had gone on too long. And you—”
Me? The woman who doesn’t protest when Jacobs calls me Gertrud or Anna or honey, the woman who came meekly to the Adlon even though she hates parties? The woman who’s been waiting years for Lise to come back and save her? Could it be that I once transformed first, my nails lengthening, my leg-hair thickening into coarse fur?
These past six years, had I, too, undergone a transmogrification greater than that of girl to bear and back again?
“I’ll see you, Mareike,” Lise said, in a voice that suggested that she wouldn’t. She shimmied back to Karl and never looked at me again. I watched them all laughing and singing and bobbing and weaving in a pattern that I really couldn’t see. And I realized something, readers: they looked happy. Maybe Lise’s silver dress carries its own power, analogous to that of bear fur—and after all, our mothers and grandmothers would have loved the freedom to dance in spangles, to flirt and drink champagne. Maybe this is all that Lise, the unloved girl, ever would have wanted.
But still. Still! Jacobs, his big thumb on my cheek, and the lurid man with the parfait, and look, how Karl lays his hand on Lise’s as though it belongs to him—
My readers, it’s fashionable to bring a bear on a leash to a party, but it’s not fashionable to show your long teeth at a party, and it’s definitely not fashionable to transform into a bear at a party.
And so I didn’t. I left her there, in her new life. I burst into the night and I inhaled cigarettes and asphalt and my fingers lengthened into claws, my blouse split apart and the thick fur that always spreads between my breasts and covers my navel spread further, grew coarse, thick, my eyesight dulled and my nose sucked in the bitter smell of neon, my ears pricked to crows crying, trumpets wailing, trams rattling on their silvery tracks—
I dropped to all fours and I ran, through trailing lights, past frantically beeping automobiles, over stone bridges spanning the flat silent river, into the narrow crooked streets leading north, where the smell of onions and spilled milk blossomed from windows and the stink of semen and blood bloomed from stone foundations. A blurred group of men stumbled at the end of a block and at first they didn’t hear me roar but then, oh then, they heard, and they scuttled away like leaves in the wind. Then the name Papagei loomed up before me in blurry black and white, and I burst through the front door, upsetting the bored bouncer who smelled of morphine balls, and thundered into the hooting audience, the floor sticky beneath my paws, and she was onstage, strutting in feathers and fur, and then she saw me and grinned, and, my readers, I whispered to her, in the secret language of bears: I’m hungry, Ida, I’m hungry in the way we used to be, will you come be hungry too?