I
In my last year with our group of young Socialists, we organised dancing lessons in my hometown in Austria. Most of us were in our late teens. I had attended dancing instructions a year earlier and felt confident that I could show beginners the steps of the then fashionable Tango, Foxtrot, English Waltz, and Rumba. For the traditional Austrian dances, a man and a woman, both party-comrades and good dancers volunteered their assistance.
Our Sunday night sessions became a success with the Party's meeting room cleared for dancing, a record player, and a stack of records organised. The girls did not need to be told to turn up in their finery, and the boys, after an initial show of reluctance, proved eager to partner them on the floor.
For me, there came an unwished-for reward. I fell for the first time seriously and, as it turned out, painfully in love.
Our group averaged, over the years, about twenty members. There was a core of fifteen or so regulars besides some that came for a short time or drifted in and out.
Inge was one of the core members. She had joined at the beginning and had always participated in everything our group had done. Although Inge and I knew each other well, we had formed no close attachment.
Not that romances within the group did not happen. For a while, Inge had been noticeably keen on Otto, a tall, good looking guy and one of our champion skiers. His long-time girlfriend in our group, however, fought Inge off tooth-and-claw. So, after a few tense weeks, Inge gave up on Otto. I, with the others, had watched developments with detached amusement. I was not yet stricken!
It is hard to believe, but I 'saw' Inge for the first time at the start of our learning-to-dance sessions! Like the other girls, for our dancing sessions, she decided to dress for going out. At only seventeen, she knew already what suited her long-legged, well-proportioned figure best. With just a touch of make-up on her not just girlish-pretty face, the girl that I thought I knew had changed into, I thought, a gorgeous young woman.
I hoped that it would not be noticed, but I sought to dance with her much more often than with the other girls. I wanted to hold her in my arms, even if it was only in the way that dancing etiquette then prescribed.
Dancing came easy to Inge; she was light on her feet. She was almost as tall as I, but she moved with sinuous grace while I, nominally the teacher, seemed to lumber. I was smitten, and Inge knew it. She accepted it, sometimes with easy grace, at others with a pronounced show of indifference.
I had recently completed my apprenticeship. Although wages were low, I was living at home and now had some money to spend. During the next six months or so, Inge and I saw much of each other. I, anyway, thought that we were going steady. We went to the pictures and quite often to our favourite café up the valley, some way out of town. A local three-person band provided dance music on Saturday nights, regularly until morning.
I was seriously in love. Therefore, I respected what I thought was Inge's hesitancy to go further than the occasional kissing and our fully clothed embracing.
The closest we came to 'sleeping together’ happened twice on weekend excursions we made into the mountains. As in most small mountain-huts at that time, sleeping space was provided on an extended, raised platform along a wall, covered with thickish matting. People bedded down next to each other, wrapped up in the sleeping bags and blankets they had brought.
On these two occasions, Inge and I, both of us in tracksuits, bedded down close to each other. When the last lamp was extinguished, covered by our blankets, we embraced, and Inge was quite willing to cuddle full-length against me. We kissed; time and time again. Inge did not struggle or resist, but my love's shyness, and the presence of strangers, stopped me from doing more. I wanted to but did not even dare to press her closer, much less to slide my hands under her clothing. When eventually we fell asleep, it took me much, much longer than her.
On what finished up as our last date, Josef had accompanied Inge and me to our café. He and I were childhood friends. Josef worked in seasonal hotels as a waiter; in summer in holiday-resorts and ski-resorts in winter. The spring and autumn breaks he spent, briefly unemployed, at home.
This year he had returned from a summer on Sark, a Channel Island, flush with money, newly fitted out, and brimming with confidence. We had little in common at this stage in our lives and should have drifted apart. However, Josef unfailingly sought me out whenever he returned home for his breaks.
Josef and I had shared a somewhat unusual childhood. We had started work at twelve years of age as bell-boys in an international hotel for the summer seasons. This premature exposure to the adult world had not produced uniform results. Josef and I had become almost opposites. While I found it easy to establish contact and freely talk with strangers, I was shy with girls in becoming intimate. Josef was the opposite.
In going out together, Josef often left it to me to make the first move on girls that he fancied. Unlike myself, in asking a girl for a dance, he could not bear being refused. With that first hurdle cleared by me as his wingman, Josef switched quickly with the newly met girls into, what I thought, was physically intrusive behaviour. He stood close, sat close, found opportunities for the purely accidental touch. He would embrace girls as tightly as the steps allowed in dancing, and his hands would wander. Josef's approach was to invade a girl's private space quickly and to assume, thereby, a possession-taking intimacy. I was surprised how often his, in my eyes, crudely invasive behaviour was crowned by success.
On this November Saturday night, Josef came with Inge and me to our café. Inge and Josef had never met. I had told him that she was my steady girlfriend. I am sure the way I spoke about Inge left no doubt how I felt about her.
We had a good night. Josef was in high spirits talking about his experiences on the Channel Islands and in France. As always, after a season, Josef was temporarily affluent. So, he plied us with French wine and rounds of Cognac and Cointreau with our coffees. Josef showed off his sophistication, and, no doubt, it impressed Inge.
We also danced, and Josef danced quite often with her, holding her, as was his proven fashion, intimately close. When the music stopped at about five in the morning, tired but merry, we were on our way to catch an early morning bus.
The bus stop was the usual roofed, three-walled structure with a bench. Inge and I had walked holding hands. On reaching the shelter, she pulled away and threw herself on the seat. Laughing and almost shouting, she declared, "God! I think I am drunk!"
Josef immediately sat down next to Inge and put an arm over her shoulder. Neither he nor she looked at me. Then Josef stood up, unbuttoned his new camelhair coat and drew one arm out of the sleeve. Then he sat down close to Inge and wrapped half the coat tightly around her. He muttered something like, "One has to keep pretty girls warm."
I just stood and watched. I saw that Josef's hand had slipped under Inge's arm and was cupping – unresisted – her breast.
I turned and walked a few steps away, looking up the road where the bus was supposed to come. No lights were in sight. When I turned to face them to say something, they were tightly locked together. Inge had turned towards him. She looked smiling down at his hand under her skirt as it moved up and down her thigh. They were silent. I was no longer there for them.
Although there was anger welling up, I most feared that I would start to cry. In blind confusion, I began to walk away, not looking back. They did not call out for me to stop. On the dark road, a third of the way from home, I was passed by the bus. I did not look up at its lighted windows.
So, my first falling-in-love had ended. My no longer wanting to be with Inge was not because Josef behaved as he always did with freshly met girls, nor was it because I thought Inge violated by his touch. It was because Inge could have stopped Josef's advances with a word, a shrugging off. Even a belated getting up and walking away with me would have done.
What I could not bear was that Inge had freely chosen to make me watch. I believed Inge deliberately tested her power to shame and hurt me. And she succeeded. In staying with her, the knowledge of what she had done and could do to me would have permanently festered.
I never asked and found out if anything more happened between Josef and Inge. Josef refrained from seeing me again on this break, and I did not want to see him. A few weeks later, he left for the winter season in Kitzbuehel.
The little, if anything, I had been to Inge ended that cold morning. We continued to see each other in our group but barely spoke with each other. I even tried not to look at her. In the coming winter, I no longer took part in the group's skiing adventures. I so avoided the intimate togetherness of evenings and nights in the huts. I hurt – badly.
And in writing it down now – sixty-one years later – it is hurting still.
II
In January of that year, I turned twenty, without a girlfriend and still a virgin. However, with the carnival coming to town, there was always hope. In our city, over the four weeks that straddled January/February, quite spectacular masked balls were held in some of the largest hotels.
These balls were predominantly attended by us locals, and for one carnival's night, the town’s international hotels catered for us natives and not strangers. Besides serving meals, snacks, and drink, there were often as many as four different bands playing in the hotel's function rooms: a Glen Miller type band in the ballroom, a brass band in the beer cellar, and smaller ensembles in the terrace-café and salon.
The often five-hundred plus guests, many in elaborate disguises, could circulate at will through the generous expanse of a grand hotel. It gave these balls the free ambience of a street carnival without the inconveniences of the latter. People of all ages attended. I had gone to my first such ball at sixteen, with my father. We met each other a few times during the night in passing. He always stopped to ask whether I had run out of money! He knew what a young man required to have a good time.
This year I went to the Miners' Ball. As I could not think of a suitable disguise that suited my personality, I just turned up nicely combed in my best suit. I had circulated already and danced with a few women I knew when a female Mask grabbed my arm and asked me to dance with her. At carnival balls, Masks, male and female, had the right to ask anybody for a dance and, according to custom, could not be refused.
Not that I wanted to refuse her invitation. She wore only an eye mask. I could see that she was pretty and young. Also, her regional Dirndl dress advantageously highlighted a nicely shaped figure. She was a brunette and relatively short, not more than about one-sixty centimetres. I had already found out that many small girls liked tall men.