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.

Despite our height difference, we moved and danced well together. I liked how my Mask wanted to be held close. We soon were interested enough in each other to spend, with an occasional drifting apart and then finding each other again, most of the night together. We kissed a few times, and her mouth tasted sweet and slightly eager. I asked her if she wanted to go to the pictures the following evening.

Sitting in the dark cinema, only half-watching the film, our hands soon found each other, and she warmly snuggled against me. After the pictures, in a nearby café over coffee and cakes, I learned that Erna came from Tirol. Looking closely at her friendly face, I realised that she was a few years older than I. She worked as live-in domestic help for the elderly owners of one of the large hotels closed for the winter.

Late that Sunday evening, I accompanied Erna to her residence. She unlocked a side door and pulled me into a small hallway. She drew the door closed but did not turn on the light. It was cellar-like cold. We pressed against each other in the dark and searched for each other's lips.

With Erna, I experienced something new. She did not disguise what she wanted. She liberated me from the moment she chose me at the ball, from my inhibiting shyness. There, in the ice-cellar-like dark, we revealed all in the urgency, growing frenzy of our kissing.

We moaned out, unashamed, our sexual greed while clawing at each other, frustrated by the hindrance of six layers of winter clothing. We wanted to touch each other's skin and feel the bodily heat. I buried my face into her neck. My nose dug in under the cloth, and I could draw in the warm smell welling up from her body.

Inexperienced as I was, my want recognised and drank in her need. For both of us, it was torture hard to bear. Eventually, Erna tore herself free. She almost pushed me out the door with a half-angry, "O my god. This isn’t good. Fred, you better go!"

We saw each other on every one of the following five evenings. It was early February, roads and paths covered in snow, the nights many degrees below freezing. We could, of course, and did meet over coffee and cake in the warmth of a café, and we met like lovers of long-standing. Late in the evening, we again ended up, in shared frustration, in Erna's stairwell.

We were victims of climate and the times. We had neither the shelter of a car nor the refuge of a motel. Neither could boys or girls from decent families bring lovers home for the night. Respectable employers as well did not allow their live-in staff any dalliances on site.

At the end of our first week together, we again went to the pictures. After, in the warmth of the café, Erna suddenly stopped talking about the film we had seen. She reached across the table, took both of my hands and, looking down on them, said quietly, "Fred, let's go back a bit later tonight. My bosses will be asleep; you can come to my room."

She looked up at me with a smile, and I thought Erna even blushed a little. The extra hour of waiting passed minute by minute. Both of us watched the clock on the café's wall and then, getting caught doing so, grinned at each other only half-embarrassed.

When we entered the dark stairwell, Erna took my hand and, step by careful step, guided me up the stairs. Still in the dark, she unlocked a door and led me through another long dark space to another one. Erna opened it, we stepped in, and she released my hand. Still in the dark, I leaned against the door. Then there was light: Erna switched on a small lamp on a bedside commode. And there she stood, with a broad, happy smile.

We had, she must have thought, made it. Her eyes held me firmly as I stood still leaning against the door. She started to walk towards me in small, almost dance-like swaying steps. Whispering my name, she pulled down my face and kissed me, her tongue pressing into and swirling in my mouth. Then, commanding me to stay, she moved towards the bed.

Facing me, with one finger on her lips demanding my silent attention, Erna began to undress. Slowly, never looking away, she undressed, putting each piece of shed clothing neatly on a chair. Finally, swaying sexily in her tiny panties and bra, she waved me close and pressed her shivering body against me. Even clothed in my winter gear, it promised so much!

As I bend down to kiss her, Erna's tongue found my ear. She whispered that it was my turn now and that she'd be waiting. With a wriggle of hips, she turned and slipped under the covers in her high, old-fashioned bed.

I undressed while Erna watched with the doona pulled up to her eyes. The room was icy cold. Quickly naked, I hurried to join her in bed.

What followed was not what both of us expected and so eagerly wanted. What stopped us was a combination of natural but perverse circumstances.

In modern societies today, few people know what beds were like before the innerspring-mattress became the only way to bed down.

Erna's bed was the bulky type that furnished the luxury hotels of the late nineteenth century. On my retrospective count, it consisted of thirteen different pieces that could be disassembled for transport or storage. While these beds appeared solid, even the best ones creaked under restless sleepers. They became alarmingly noisy under lovers because they were held together by only four joints. These loosened over time.

As stated, I was naked. The room was bitterly cold, and I hurried too much in jumping into bed to join Erna under her doona. Before I got my head on the pillow, we had crashed through the bed's sides to the floor. Two of the four slats on which the heavy steel frame under the mattresses rested had slipped. Erna and I were trapped with our feet in the air and heads on the ground. The foot-end of frame and mattress had stayed on the slats while the head-end had crashed to the ground.

Erna and I – she tried to suppress a fit of nervous laughter – managed to clamber out.

The loud crash woke Erna's boss. A streak of light appeared under the door, and a sleepily hoarse male voice asked what was wrong and whether she was OK. Erna, standing there in panties and bra, with a remarkably steady voice, told him not to worry: she had crashed into the chair in the dark and was not hurt. We heard him mumble something, followed by his slipper-shuffle and the closing of a door. Erna hurried to the door and turned the key. In the excitement of our arrival, we had left the door unlocked. Her boss could have just walked in.

The job that faced us was to restore our bed. As a cabinet-maker, I knew, of course, what needed to be done. I tried, however, to improvise and do it quickly. Erna, in her sexy smalls, was almost, and I totally, naked. What had happened had not yet discouraged either her or me. I desperately wanted her in my arms and both of us in the restored bed. I thought I could lift the iron frame by reaching under it and then, by Erna holding it up, slide the slats in position. Naked as I was, I lay down on the cold, bare parquetry floor and reached in to lift the frame, mattresses and bedding in one go.

At this point, in remembering and telling what occurred, I have often been tempted to invent an ending different from what did happen. The fictional version would have been that I lifted all, after some heaving, to be nicely in place. Then I would relate in triumph how Erna and I, shivering with cold, slipped under the covers to embrace. Not stopped by this ridiculous accident, we quickly warmed up for a night of hot sexual abandon.

What happened lacked the sensual heat of my fictional scenario. Lying on my back as close to the side of the wrecked bed as I could go, I reached under it and tried to lift the frame. I could not move it. As one end had fallen, the structure had slightly twisted and was now firmly wedged. However hard I tried, and I did for about ten minutes or more, it would not shift.

I got up from the floor. It felt as if the sweat had frozen on my skin. I reached for Erna's clothing on the chair and handed it to her. Both of us got dressed, I as quickly as my shivering allowed. Once we were dressed, Erna and I disassembled the wrecked bed. We threw the sheets, pillows and the three parts of the mattress on the floor. We pried loose the heavy metal frame with some effort and lifted it on the now properly placed slats. Then we remade the bed again: first the three parts of the mattress, then sheets, pillows, doona. All this happened in furtive silence. Erna's employers were not to be woken again.

I briefly hesitated with the bed restored and looked at Erna; she smiled a little regretfully. I sat down to put on my boots. I had hurt my hand, and my fingers were frozen numb. I could not tie my laces. Erna knelt and did it for me. When we stood up, she took my hand. As in our coming, Erna led me through the dark hallway, then down the stairs to the entrance. In the doorway, in the dark, Erna hugged me and pressed her face against my chest. Then she turned, and the door closed behind her. I can't remember us saying a single word.

Both of us knew, without ever speaking about it, that something had gone wrong beyond repair. Erna never asked me again to come to her room. I doubt whether I would have gone. Both of us were sad that this, not talked about happening, had extinguished the flame that had promised to burn so brightly for us.

Over the following two months, we still saw each other at least once a week. As before, we went to the pictures, sat in our café, talked at our ease, held hands. On parting at her door, we still kissed and briefly hugged, but both of us knew, I believe, that there never would be more.

One evening I told Erna that I was planning to go to Australia. She silently accepted that this signalled an ending. It came sooner. In mid-April, I argued with my boss, left his employ, and started work in a town eighty kilometres from home.

On my first visit home, Erna and I decided to part. We did so gently, with no recriminations, and with a final hug and a kiss that only remembered what should/could have been.

A worn-out phrase keeps ringing in my ear. It stops me from finding a better way to speak of this parting. I was then a young man whose heart was not so much a lonely hunter but a blind one. It failed to see that what it had accidentally trapped was of much higher value than the prey it had desired and hunted.

Unlike with Inge, between Erna and I, there existed a natural and warm affinity. Our meeting, coming and being together rarely required words and explanations; and never excuses. I still remember her, can hear her voice with its Tyrolian lilt and visualise her soft, calm face.

Most of all, unforgotten, is the promise of her lithe body as she waited for me then in the semi-darkness of her cold room. She wanted me, would have welcomed me as her lover.

But then, I did not allow it to become love. My heart and still virgin body ached for another.