Authors: Ariana Franklin
City of Shadows (9 page)
“It means people spit when they say it.”
Natalya nodded. “My pa and ma did.”
“That was Russia. This is Germany.” They might as well get the rules straight.
Natalya cut into her chicken. “Say this for you,” she said. “You pro
vide a nice boiled baby.”
They toasted each other from a bottle of vodka—another of Nick’s provisions.
“Za nas.”
“Za nas.”
“To my career in Hollywood.”
“To your career in Hollywood.”
Anna was standing in the kitchen doorway watching them.
Esther said in German, “Nasha, this is Anna Anderson. Anna, this is Natalya Tchichagova. She used to work at Czarskoe Selo.”
Natalya got up and bobbed a curtsy. “Your Imperial Highness. How are you?”
“She doesn’t answer to Russian,” Esther said.
Natalya repeated what she’d said in her accented German.
Anna looked her over. “I do not remember you.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? But my pa was footman, Vassiliev, fourth in command to Trupp—you remember him. And Ma was maid to the czarina’s personal maid.”
Anna nodded. “Demidova.”
“That’s right, to Demidova. Ma’s name was Lili.”
Anna nodded again. “I eat now,” she said. She got a tray, charged it with the plate of food that Esther had kept warm for her, procured a knife and fork, and disappeared with them back to her bedroom.
I’ll let you get away with it tonight, Esther thought, but it’s bad for you. After this you eat with us. There were times when she found Anna’s self-imposed isolation heartbreaking, others when she wanted to shake her. Pandering to the grand-duchess fallacy was not helping
the girl, was in many ways a criminal act. On the other hand, two years in Dalldorf hadn’t cured her either, and to send her back to an asylum would be worse. Obviously she couldn’t cope in the outside world alone; she was dependent on Nick for her survival—all three of them were. For each of them, this charade was now the only game in town.
“Why don’t she use Russian?” Natalya asked.
“Nick says it’s because she doesn’t want to be reminded of the bad time,” Esther said levelly. “Well? What do you think?”
“Could be,” Natalya said slowly. “Looks like her, apart from she’s missing her teeth. Same coloring, same blue eyes.” She made up her mind. “Could be, but I got my doubts.”
“Why?”
“The grand duchesses were polite.” She lit a cigarette and put it in a holder. “I’m not staying in Berlin much longer neither,” she said. “Think I’ll do well in the films?”
“Very well, I should think,” Esther said, and meant it.
“Yes, well, I got the looks,” Natalya said. She regarded Esther. “And you should do something about that scar, if you’ll pardon my saying so. They do miracles with plastic surgery nowadays. You got nice eyes and figure—you don’t have to go around looking like the Phantom of the Opera.”
Esther laughed.
Natalya blinked. “Well, you don’t.”
“I can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong. People take you for what you look like; you mustn’t let yourself go.”
The evening ended with Natalya manicuring Esther’s nails. Buffing away, she said, “I heard there was a to-do at the Hat Saturday night.”
“Yes.” Esther told her about it. She said, hoping it would amuse, “Nick thinks it was a Cheka assassin out to bump Anna off.” She’d for
gotten that the Cheka was every White Russian’s nightmare.
“Cheka?” Natalya said immediately. “Does he know she’s living here?”
“I hope not. We’ve been careful.”
Natalya thought about it. “If the Bolshies are after her, she
must
be Anastasia, mustn’t she?”
“If it
was
the Bolshies. I believe it was someone after Nick’s cash.”
Natalya said, “You don’t think she is Anastasia, do you?”
“No.” She wasn’t going to begin this friendship with a lie.
“It’s a con, ain’t it?”
“In my opinion, yes.”
“Might work, though, mightn’t it?”
Esther was surprised by how unshocked Natalya was, thus realizing
how shocked she had expected her to be and, therefore, how shocked she found herself at her own part in the exercise. Where had legality gone for her and Natalya and Nick? Swept away, perhaps, in the flood that had carried off everything the three of them had known, leaving them so stripped that trickery was the only tool left to them.
“Could be,” Natalya said when Esther didn’t answer. “It could work. Nick knows a thing or two.” She considered. “She’d be famous. Heir to All the Russias.” The phrase commanded the room for a moment, as it had commanded an empire.
“Well, actually . . .” Esther began.
Natalya wasn’t listening. “I’d do it better,” she said.
Anna and Natalya
didn’t get along from the first. Anna affected to look down on Natalya as a servant—an attitude that Natalya, sometimes prepared to believe that Anna was the grand duchess and sometimes assured that she wasn’t, resented in both moods. “I ain’t going through that again,” she said. “I don’t care if she’s the Holy Ghost with knobs on. I had enough bowing and scrap
ing as a girl.”
The revolution had done Natalya one good turn in uprooting her from the sweeping and polishing and subservience at which she’d fretted. By leaving Russia she’d found space and opportu
nity that its claustrophobic class system would never have al
lowed her. She was ambitious; stripteasing, while enjoyable, was merely a rung on the ladder to an ill-defined future that con
tained fame in one form or another.
“Ma and Pa’d be horrified,” she said. “What they wanted was for me to work my way up the household like they did. Serving the Romanovs was enough for them. Wasn’t enough for me.”
She hadn’t been close to her parents, she said. “They always put the family first.” But she worried about them. After the czar’s
abdication, the battalions of men and women who served his many palaces had been ejected into a world suddenly hostile to anyone who’d worn the imperial livery, seventeen-year-old Natalya among them. “It was like the world flipped over,” she said. “Like everybody’d hated us and never shown it till then.”
At that point the Romanovs were being treated not unkindly by the new Duma that had taken over government of the country led by Alexander Kerensky. They were confined in Czarskoe Selo, a reduced suite of servants with them. Natalya’s father and mother had volun
teered for it.
“I wanted them to leave, but they wouldn’t. ‘We’re not deserters,’ they said, as if I was. But I wasn’t given no choice—us small fry were told to go. It all happened so sudden in the end, I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.” She hadn’t seen her parents again.
She’d been lucky in having an aunt in Czarskoe Selo village with whom she could take refuge, and had hidden in her roof space when a detachment of revolutionary soldiers had arrived from Petrograd, where Kerensky was struggling to prevent a Bolshevik takeover of the country.
“They wanted to kidnap the Romanovs for their Soviet and take them to prison,” she said.
Thwarted by Kerensky’s guard on the palace, the soldiers had ravaged the surrounding area. “They found liquor and went wild. I’d have been raped for sure—some of our women were. They broke into the chapel where Rasputin was buried. They dug him up and set the corpse on fire.”
She’d attached herself to the family of one of the palace cooks who had relatives in Poland, and together they’d made for the border through a Russia disintegrating into civil war. “Wasn’t much better in Poland nei
ther,” she said, “so I thought, blow this, and headed for Berlin.”
She made the terrible journey sound easy, a glossing-over Esther had noticed in other émigrés. As in crowd-trampling panics, situations had arisen, things had been done, viciousness shown, principles and virtue abandoned in the struggle to breathe free air—memories, like Esther’s, not to be remembered.
Nick came around the next evening. “Making progress?”
“No,” Esther told him. Anna was still refusing to leave her room. “She won’t have anything to do with either of us. She thinks there’s
somebody watching the place, which there isn’t, because I have to keep going out to look before she’ll settle down.”
“And you can ask her till you’re blue in the face what she’s afraid of. She won’t tell you,” Natalya said.
“Oh, and she wants a dog, which she can’t have because you seem to have overlooked the fact that Frau Schinkel doesn’t allow pets.”
He stamped into Anna’s room, slamming the door behind him. The words “Your Highness,” “Dalldorf,” and “bloody back to” were audible several times before he lowered his voice.
He came out saying, “And if you’re a good girl, I’ll buy you a whole damn kennel.” To Esther and Natalya, he said, “She’ll cooperate now. I told her it’s either this or back to the loony bin.”
“Let’s hope she can tell the difference,” Esther said.
“If she doesn’t want to be the grand duchess, we can’t make her,” Natalya said. “Why don’t you use somebody else? I could do it. I’ve al
ways fancied wearing a diamond kokoshnik.”
“What are you talking about, idiot?” His hands beat the air; he was at his most Russian when angry. “
Want
to be Grand Duchess Anastasia? She
is
Grand Duchess Anastasia, and no lèse-majesté from you two.” He peered at Natalya. “You believe she is, don’t you?”
“She looks a bit like her, from what I remember,” Natalya said reluc
tantly. “That’s if Anastasia had been a crackpot that was rude to her ser
vants, which she wasn’t, and bit her nails, which she didn’t.”
“She’s changed,” Nick said. “She’s been through a lot. Just you think what she’s suffered. But now her loyal subject Prince Nikolai Potrov
skov is going to put her back on the throne.”
“There isn’t a throne anymore,” Natalya pointed out.
“And women can’t inherit it,” Esther said.
“Can’t they? What about Catherine the Great?” His knowledge of his country’s history had been more concerned with its battles than its politics.
“They changed the system after her.”
“Did they?” He barely listened; he was already invading Russia. “I wonder if I ought to marry her.”
“Definitely,” Esther said.
“I would,” said Natalya.
He frowned at them. “I’m serious. I’m not paying out all this money so some other bastard can get her fortune. Well, we’ll have to see how we go.” He went to Anna’s door and poked his head in. “As for you, Highness, one more tantrum and it’s back to Dalldorf. Understood?”
There was a weak assent, and he turned again to Natalya and Esther. “In the meantime you two minxes can start earning your keep.”
While unprepared to
foster Anna as a grand duchess, Esther saw no reason the girl shouldn’t at least be taught social graces. With this ob
ject she piled books on Anna’s head to make her walk without slouch
ing, made her sit upright with her knees together, and stopped her biting her nails by painting them with bitter alum.
If she’d ever had them, Anna had forgotten her table manners. “Will you
please
hold your fork like this, Anna?” Esther would say. And, “One dips one’s spoon into the soup, then away from the front of the bowl, like this.” And, “It’s not done to chew with your mouth open.” And, “You shouldn’t yawn when someone’s talking.”
“Why not? I’m tired.”
“Ladies are never tired in company.”
“I am.”
Esther found the stubbornness intriguing. If the woman really be
lieved herself to be Anastasia, why did she not behave as Anastasia had been known to behave? If she knew herself to be a fraud, the same question applied. There was something almost admirable in her atti
tude of I-know-best, the only truly royal thing about her.
“Listen,” Natalya told her, “it ain’t enough to look like Anastasia, you got to act like her. People who knew her well are going to judge you.”
“Aunt Olga?” asked Anna immediately. “Aunt Xenia? They will come?”
Natalya was taken aback. So was Esther. This was aiming high, but undoubtedly it would be the testimony of the grand-duchess aunts that mattered most.
“Maybe,” Natalya said. “You got a lot of work to do till then.” Mo
ments like this shook her skepticism, if not Esther’s. “She must be,” she said in Russian. “Otherwise how’d she know about the royal aunts?”
“She could have read it.”
The tragedy of Ekaterinburg had touched the world, and an interna
tional industry telling the story of the doomed family showed no sign of declining. Anna was avidly reading the books, magazines, and newspaper articles on the subject that Nick provided her with. “So I remember the happy time,” she explained.
“Yes, but how’d she know about when she hit Tatiana with a snow
ball with a stone in it?” Natalya said. “I never read about that. You read about that?”
Esther admitted she hadn’t. On the other hand, she didn’t have time to read everything—she still had Nick’s secretarial work to do.
Inevitably, she was drawn in; the line between teaching Anna to be graceful and teaching her to act like a grand duchess became increas
ingly blurred.
What weighed against Anna’s authenticity most heavily with Natalya was the girl’s slovenliness. She left the bathwater in the tub, she’d get up from the table leaving her dirty plate on it, she made crumbs, she wouldn’t pick up her clothes.
Forced to remedy these sins, she would do so, but the effort of in
sisting on it was wearying, and the other two usually ended up doing it themselves.
Natalya, trained to neatness by her upbringing, was driven mad by Anna’s negligence. “I don’t care how Imperial your bloody Highness is,” she said on one occasion. “I’m not cleaning the damned lavatory af
ter you’ve been. I had enough of that with the maid-in-charge at Seloe. Here’s the brush and there’s the pan—next time I’ll put your head down it.” To Esther she complained, “Sure as hell, she ain’t Anastasia. She’s a slob.”
Esther thought the slobbishness wasn’t deliberate, more absent
mindedness or an incipient and unconscious protest against a regime that had once been forced on her. What happened to you? she’d won
der. It was no good asking—like hygiene, her past was another thing Anna had abandoned.
They had trouble getting her to the dentist because she showed real fear of going out into the street, even if a taxi waited. Eventually the mountain came to Mohammed when Nick bribed his dentist to bring
equipment to Bismarck Allee and provide Anna with a set of dentures that declared falsity with their whiteness and regularity every time she smiled, but which, since she hardly ever smiled, nevertheless improved her appearance and would, it was felt by Natalya, account for any dissimilarity with Anastasia’s looks.
Anna’s refusal to speak Russian was another factor against her au
thenticity. “Nick says it doesn’t matter,” Esther said.
Natalya was unconvinced. “Seems to me she don’t speak anything much. The Romanov girls talked all languages—German like their ma, French, English. Where do you reckon she’s from if it ain’t Russia?”
“I’m wondering if she’s Polish. She called me a damn
Z
˚
ydach
this morning, and that’s Polish.”
“Well, that’d account for why she’s such a pain in the ass.” Like most Russians, Natalya had no opinion of the country that her own had held in thrall for much of its history.
On Nick’s instructions Esther had begun to give Anna English con
versation lessons. His own researches had revealed that the Romanovs spoke English to one another in private. “She’ll latch on quick when she remembers. It’ll impress the customers. And open up the American market.”
Anna was capable of surprising them both. She learned English quickly, and she could recount faultlessly the genealogy of both the czar and the czarina as well as practically every other crowned head in Eu
rope. She knew the progress of the young czarevitch’s hemophilia and the names of the two sailors who were set to guard him from the falls and knocks that brought on the agony of his condition. More than that, presented with photographs in the album that the czarina had pub
lished before her death, she could identify without prompting not only individual members of the immediate family but uncles, aunts, cousins, governesses, friends, personal maids, even pets, embellishing each pic
ture with personal detail.
Natalya was once more spurred into reconsidering. “How’s she know these things?”
Esther held up a book that Nick had just sent over that morning with Big Theo. “It’s in here.” It was Peter Gilliard’s
Thirteen Years at the
Russian Court.
Gilliard, a Swiss, had been the Romanovs’ tutor and had married Anastasia’s nursemaid.
Natalya was still doubtful. “Looks kind of heavy for her to read. When did that come out?”
“In 1921. Last year.”
That was the trouble: Anna had been in Dalldorf for the book’s pub
lication. Either she’d got hold of a copy, which argued considerable dedication for an asylum patient, or she knew someone who had. “Or,” as Natalya said, doubtfully, “she was there.”
Natalya’s recollections of the imperial children were painful. “Lovely girls, the four of them, dressed in white mostly. Olga was the scholar. Tatiana—she was really elegant. Marie was the prettiest. Anastasia was the sassiest—she got into more trouble than the others. Never cried when she was slapped, never. And so polite—you didn’t hear them say
ing, ‘Do this, do that.’ It was always, ‘If you don’t mind . . .’ But it was the czarevitch who was everybody’s favorite—we all loved little Alexei.”
It was late. The summer was extending a blazing sun into Septem
ber, and the heat of the day had soaked into the apartment, making its stuffy furniture seem stuffier. Esther switched on the light to dispel the memory of the darkness that had lain in wait for the royal children out
side their bright, innocent arena of snowball fights, toboggan rides, toys, pets, and all-encompassing affection.
“He wasn’t allowed to ride a bicycle,” Natalya said of Czarevitch Alexei, “case he fell and set off his condition, but he was all boy, and I remember the day he sniped one of the gardener’s bikes and wobbled across the parade ground—”
I can’t listen to this.
Natalya was resurrecting a child who was going to die, as thousands and thousands had died under the Romanov regime.
Esther got up and went into the kitchen, taking the day’s newspaper with her. She sat down to try to read it, then pushed it away. Its head
lines were of the rioting and strikes, crime and poverty, the spreading tuberculosis, the malnourished children, that lay outside the cocoon of this apartment where the three of them led what seemed to her as pe
culiar and unworthy a life as had the unheeding Romanovs in their en
chanted palace.
The air was so still that she could hear the rushing rattle of trains on their way to and from the Anhalter, sounding to her like the shriek of a wind building up—the same red wind that had whirled her Russia into dust.
Oh, God, don’t let it happen here. Not like that.
The telephone rang. She went into the living room to answer it.
“That you, Esther?”
“What’s the matter, Boris?”
“It’s Olga. Somebody beat her to death in her flat. Can you come?”
Olga’s body had
lain undiscovered for three days, possibly four. It wasn’t until Monday and then Tuesday had gone by without her making an appearance at the Green Hat that Boris went around to inquire at her flat in Polenstrasse.
“Not until then?” Esther asked. She’d have checked earlier had she known about it; for Olga to take a day off, let alone two, was unheard of.
Boris was stung. “Look, Esther, I don’t know what you’re up to because Nick won’t tell me, but
we’re
busy. Nobody’s going abroad for a holiday what with the mark at rock bottom—cheaper to stay in Berlin for your nightlife.” He added, “Except His bloody Highness Prince Nick, mind you—
he’s
sunning himself in the South of France, so I’ve got three clubs to run, and the new secretary’s useless.”
Boris could sound harassed even when he wasn’t, but this time, Esther had to admit, he had cause.
He’d been waiting for her outside Olga’s place with its key in his hand, a thin, gloomy, bowler-hatted figure, more like an
accountant than deputy manager of one of Germany’s most lavish and raciest clubs.
So far they hadn’t gone in. Boris was bringing Esther up to date in the street rather than revisiting the scene that had met him on Wednesday.
It was quiet enough. They were within walking distance of the Green Hat—Boris had come on foot, Esther by tram as far as Pots
damer Platz—but here most of what was once an area of light industry had been torn down to make way for the advance of the new West End. Like everything else in Berlin, the project had run out of money, and Polenstrasse was now part of an empty, rubble-strewn plot of land with unexpected views. All that was left standing of the busy street Olga must have once known was a furniture repository and, next door, a square box of a building, its downstairs housing a printing works from which issued the clack of compositors at their keyboards.
“Where’s the flat?” Esther asked.
Boris pointed to an open wooden flight of steps leading up the side of the printing works. “Up there.”
“How did you get in?”
“The bastard left the door open when he’d finished with her. Seems he didn’t break in—the police reckon either he was waiting for her or he followed her home.”
“And nobody noticed?”
Boris inclined his head toward the printing works. “Police ques
tioned the boys in there, but seems they come to work, go home, so it’s deserted around here at nights. They rent the place off the owner— Olga did the same, never had much to do with them. Police gave me her key. They’ve finished up there, done the fingerprinting.”
He looked down, twiddling the key—the police had given it to him, having found it in the flat. It was attached to a ring sporting a leather tab with a green top hat embossed into it—Nick had dozens displayed in a large brass pot on the reception desk for his customers to take.
Esther put a hand on his arm. “Bad, was it, Boris?”
“They’ve got to get this bastard, Esther.” He was still looking at the key. “Really, they got to. She ...he tied her to a chair. What he did... I didn’t recognize her....And her hair. You know how tidy she kept her hair....”
Always. Plastered back into a tight bun.
“He’d torn bits of it out,” Boris said. His protuberant Adam’s apple jerked as he swallowed. “Why didn’t she tell him right away where she kept her savings? That’s what I can’t understand. Why didn’t she just let the fucker take it?”
“
Did
she have savings?”
“Don’t know. Maybe she had jewelry. He must’ve thought so. Broke her neck to top it off. I tell you, Esther, I’ve seen some things but ...I don’t know what’s happening to this bloody country, I don’t.”
She took the key out of his hand. “What do you want me to do?”
He was relieved. “Nick’s telegram said for you to make the funeral arrangements. See when the police are releasing the body.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if she had relatives.”