City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  Esther had to admit she’d bought it ready-made from the Russian delicatessen near the Inselbrücke. “I’m no cook, I’m afraid.”

  “You can afford to buy it cooked, you don’t have to be. I ain’t eaten chicken in a year.”

  Esther, honest to a fault, explained that the money came from Nick. His insistence that Anna must be well fed meant that Esther herself was eating better than she had done for a long time, though the sight of the lines at the food shops and of starving beggars on the streets flavored every mouthful with guilt. Without telling Nick, she was giving some of his money to the Salvation Army canteen around the corner in Cauerstrasse.

  “Kotlety pozharskie,” Natalya said fondly. “Maybe this job won’t be so bad.”

  “Did you think it would be?”

  It appeared that Natalya hadn’t wanted the job of coaching Anna Anderson. Her removal from the stage of the Purple Parrot had caused disappointment to an appreciative audience and inspired her resentment. She’d enjoyed stripping. “I’m an artiste,” she said. “One of my regulars says I’m a natural entertainer. He’s going to put me in his next film.”

  However, like Esther, she owed her livelihood to Prince Nick and had been persuaded to do the work of tutor by a doubling of her salary.

  “Gloomy old area, this,” she said, though. “What am I going to do for nightlife?”

  “You aren’t,” Esther told her.

  “Yep, that’s what Nick said.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said”—Natalya squeezed her eyes shut—“I was to help Her Imperial Highness remember everything as happened at Czarskoe Seloe, who did what and where everything was, and if I was a good girl and the grand duchess got what was coming to her, he’d buy me my own film studio, but if I ever said a word about it, he’d cut my tongue out.”

  She opened her eyes. “Is she Anastasia? Nick says she is, but Nick’d say the moon was green cheese. Way I heard it, nobody escaped Ekaterinburg.”

  “I heard that, too,” said Esther. Natalya was going to have to make up her own mind.

  “Wouldn’t it be peachy if she was?” For a moment, Natalya’s face softened. “Near broke my heart, Ekaterinburg. Where is she?”

  “In her room.” Actually Anna was sulking; more and more she was spending her time in isolation.

  “Ain’t she going to eat with us?”

  “It’s me,” Esther said. “She’s decided she doesn’t like taking her meals in the kitchen, especially with a Jew.”

  “I heard you was a Jewess,” Natalya said cautiously.

  “I’m a Jew,” Esther told her. “I don’t eat pork, but I’m partial to the occasional boiled baby, and I don’t like the word ‘Jewess.’ ”

  “Why not?”

  “It has derogatory connotations.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “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 provide 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 forgotten 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 th
rough that again,” she said. “I don’t care if she’s the Holy Ghost with knobs on. I had enough bowing and scraping 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 opportunity that its claustrophobic class system would never have allowed her. She was ambitious; stripteasing, while enjoyable, was merely a rung on the ladder to an ill-defined future that contained 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 volunteered 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 neither,” 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 always 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 reluctantly. “That’s if Anastasia had been a crackpot that was rude to her servants, 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 Potrovskov 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 object she piled books on Anna’s head to make her walk without slouching, 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 believed 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 attitude 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.” Moments 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 international 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 snowball 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 secreta
rial 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 increasingly 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 insisting 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 after 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 absentmindedness or an incipient and unconscious protest against a regime that had once been forced on her. What happened to you? she’d wonder. 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 authenticity. “Nick says it doesn’t matter,” Esther said.