The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  Anyway, how did this come to be about my shortcomings? You are the one who committed the marital faux-pas of dipping your pen in another woman’s inkwell. I’d like to throw this discussion right back at you and ask first of all whether you want an open marriage? If you don’t, how can you convince me that you would never do this again, either with Ms Karren Bayliss or some other woman? What if you miss out on a promotion at another job? What if you even get sacked? I don’t know how this works but perhaps you have concocted some plan in your therapy sessions. (Please spare me the counsellor-speak in your reply.)

  I will be back in London in a couple of weeks and I suppose we should meet to talk. I don’t feel quite ready to see you yet but …

  She stopped. This email was all wrong. She didn’t feel angry with Tom any more. It felt as though there had to be some kind of reprimand in her first communication, but not like this. When she thought about seeing him, she knew she would want to run straight into his arms. She was dying to sit down and chat to him, properly chat like they used to do in the old days. There was so much to tell him. But where should she start? She saved the email into her drafts folder and decided to return to it later, perhaps on the way back from the shops.

  At the supermarket she picked up another crate of Chardonnay. The check-out girl didn’t comment any more, just scanned it through with tight lips. On the drive home, the white wine was calling out to Kitty: she needed a dose of liquid anaesthetic, so she drove straight to the cabin, took her shopping indoors and opened the bottle. She felt better already when she heard the glug-glug sound of the golden liquid swirling around her favourite glass. Over the lake, the sunset seemed more vivid than ever, like some kind of exaggerated hyper-reality. She sat on the jetty to watch, listening to the birds and frogs winding down like clockwork toys with the fading of the light. She felt entirely present in the moment, but somehow it was as though she was a visitor in someone else’s life – Dmitri’s maybe – rather than a protagonist in her own.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Berlin, 1930

  One day Rosa brought home a women’s magazine called Das Blatt der Hausfrau with an article about the many people scattered around Europe who claimed to be missing Romanovs. There were dozens of them now, but the magazine profiled the main contenders, with photographs of several. Dmitri had heard that there were such folk but none of their stories had sounded convincing enough for him to pursue. Now that Rosa opened the magazine in front of him, with a quizzical look, he stopped to look, pausing over the German text.

  •Michelle Anches, who claimed to be Tatiana, was said to have escaped Russia via Siberia in 1925 and arrived in Paris, where she took a small apartment. After she wrote to Tsar Nicholas’s mother in Denmark, saying that she was preparing to come and visit, she was shot dead in her apartment, friends blaming the Bolshevik secret police. Dmitri did not doubt that the Cheka had killed her, but looking at the photograph she was plainly not Tatiana: the face was broader, the chin more pointed, the eyes not so intelligent.

  •Marga Boodts claimed that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany himself had recognised her as Olga when she arrived in that country after a long journey through eastern Russia and China. She gave interviews to many journalists about the brave Red Guardsman who rescued her from the Ipatiev House, but the story was laughable since she did not even slightly resemble Olga.

  •Nadezhda Vasilyeva had been arrested in 1920 trying to escape from Siberia into China and was now being held in an insane asylum in the USSR, from which she wrote regular letters to monarchs around Europe proclaiming herself to be Anastasia. She had an angular face and looked much older than Anastasia would have been, so Dmitri moved on.

  •Eugene Nikolaievich Ivanoff, who lived with a parish priest in Poland, claimed to be Alexei and explained that an old Cossack had helped him escape from Russia. Dmitri paused over this story because the photograph did look similar to Alexei and it seemed he suffered from haemophilia, unlike most other Alexei claimants. Could it be? Should he travel to Poland to meet him? He couldn’t help thinking it would be a wasted journey. Somehow the story didn’t quite add up.

  The article made Dmitri wonder what Tatiana could do to make herself known if she ever managed to find her way out of Russia. She would most likely go to one of her relatives but what if they failed to recognise her, or weren’t sure? She wouldn’t know where to look for him but he was certain that twelve years on he would recognise her in an instant. She would be thirty-three years old now; she might have wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and perhaps her hair would have streaks of grey. Would her slender figure have thickened? No matter; he would know her anywhere.

  Thinking about her brought on a weight of sadness and he turned to stare out the window. Rosa brought a cup of coffee and sat beside him, her hand on his arm.

  ‘Why do people pretend to be Romanovs?’ she asked. ‘Does it make them feel important? Do they hope one day to sit on the throne of Russia?’

  Dmitri shrugged. ‘There is talk that Tsar Nicholas kept vast amounts of money in overseas banks and a successful claimant could access those funds. There are many reasons to try, but in truth they all seem poor creatures who struggle with their sanity.’

  Rosa squeezed his leg. ‘It must be hard for you … But I brought the magazine because I thought you might like to see … Did I do the right thing?’

  ‘It’s fine.’ He shook his head as if to dispel the memory.

  Nicholas and Marta were sitting on the floor playing at being shopkeepers. Nicholas put a single potato into Marta’s basket and said, ‘That will be twenty marks and I’m not giving you any more because you don’t even like potatoes.’

  Marta handed back the potato saying, ‘It is too expensive. I think I will shop elsewhere today.’

  Dmitri and Rosa laughed, but it was a sensitive point. The German economy was once again in trouble; the Great Depression that hit America the previous year had caused mass unemployment and business failures around the globe. Every street corner in Berlin had a woman in rags begging for a pfennig or two to feed her children. Men got up at dawn to queue for poorly paid labouring jobs. Dmitri still earned just enough from his articles for Rul plus royalties on his books to pay for their food and cover the rent but there was no surplus and he knew Rosa haggled with the best of them when she shopped for food. All the same, it was bittersweet to hear their four-year-old daughter doing the same.

  For someone who worked as a journalist, Dmitri mused, he had twice failed to spot emerging political apocalypse until it became unmissable. In Russia, he had been aware of the grumblings against the monarchy and knew that revolution was in the air, but the November coup led by Lenin and Trotsky had seemed to him to emerge from nowhere. Similarly in Berlin, he was aware that men in brown shirts, known as the Sturmabteilung, were stirring up street brawls, and that they attacked anyone who did not support a minor fringe party known as the National Socialists, but he was astonished when that same minority party won eighteen per cent of the vote in the 1930 elections.

  Burtsev asked him to write an article for Rul about the National Socialists’ claim that Communism was part of an international Jewish conspiracy, and Dmitri had no trouble at all in rubbishing that notion. In Russia the grass roots Bolshevik movement had gained strength from the disgruntled poor of all religions. Trotsky might have been Jewish but Lenin and the new leader, Stalin, were not. Who was supposed to be organising this Jewish conspiracy? None of it made sense, and he was scathing in his critique.

  Rosa was worried when she read his article. ‘Perhaps it would be better not to draw attention to ourselves. It leaves you open to accusations of bias since I am Jewish.’

  Dmitri had never given a thought to Rosa’s religion because she did not practise, and their children were not being raised in any particular faith. He had long since decided that organised religion was an absurdity and she agreed with him.

  ‘I can’t temper my journalistic opinions because of our personal circumstances,�
�� he replied. ‘Someone needs to stand up and point out the dangers of this new creed.’

  Rosa was worried though. ‘Adolf Hitler is rapidly gaining supporters because he is restoring German pride. He needs scapegoats to blame for the economic ills and Jews and Communists are easy targets.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! He looks Jewish himself! There might be a few unscrupulous Jewish moneylenders, but he can’t blame an entire race.’

  Dmitri soon realised how short-sighted he was being as the political landscape mutated rapidly and street fights turned some districts of Berlin into battle zones. Brown-shirted Sturmabteilung and the so-called Hitler Youth, young boys in leiderhosen spouting the party message on purity of race, were suddenly everywhere. The neighbours’ sons, who had previously seemed nice young men, mutated into snarling bullies full of hatred.

  Dmitri did not realise that Rosa had become a target of this vitriol until their son Nicholas asked him over dinner one evening: ‘Papa, what is a hure?’

  Rosa tutted and tried to hush him, her face flushing.

  ‘Where did you hear that word?’ Dmitri demanded.

  ‘Mama said it to Mrs Brandt.’

  Rosa shook her head, and motioned to Dmitri that she would tell him about it later, before saying, ‘Mama was wrong to use that word and you must forget about it and never repeat it.’

  Later she told Dmitri that Mrs Brandt had spat in her face and called her a ‘filthy Jew’ as she walked home from the butcher’s holding the children by the hands. ‘I lost my temper,’ she said, ‘and yelled “At least my mother wasn’t a hure.” And then I remembered the children and their big ears.’

  ‘How does she know you are Jewish?’ Dmitri asked. Rosa used his surname, Yakovlevich, and her dark looks were more Southern European than Jewish.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. People talk. My sister has lost her job and she is sure it’s because she is Jewish, although her employer didn’t say as much.’

  ‘You must tell me if it happens again,’ Dmitri insisted. ‘I will not stand for this.’ The thought of Rosa being subjected to such treatment was painful to him. She was a good person who never harmed a soul; on the contrary, she went out of her way to help others. She collected shopping for an elderly neighbour who could no longer walk, and she often looked after a friend’s children so she could work, going to her apartment so as not to disturb Dmitri.

  But one Sunday afternoon when Dmitri took the family to the zoo, he became intensely aware of whispering and pointing in their direction. Rosa ignored it, and the children were only interested in seeing Sammy, the giant sea elephant, at feeding time. As the day went on Dmitri’s temper became increasingly frayed so when a man approached and said to Rosa, ‘Your sort shouldn’t be allowed in here’, Dmitri pulled back his fist and punched him hard in the face. There was a cracking sound and blood spurted. The children began to cry, and he knew he should not have done it, but at the same time he was glad to take action, proud that at the age of almost forty he could still produce a punch like that.

  Rosa bustled them away before there were any repercussions. ‘It doesn’t help,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve found it’s best to ignore them.’

  But Dmitri couldn’t ignore this new movement that had turned his peace-loving girlfriend into a social pariah. It made him sick to his stomach and he decided to take a writer’s revenge, by writing a novel about it. Ostensibly it would be about the rise of Bolshevism within one particular village in Russia, and the way it affected ordinary villagers who had previously lived together in harmony – but actually it was about what was happening on the German national stage. As he wrote, the ideas flowed and he could feel in his fingertips that this was going to be the most important book he would ever write. He wanted it to have a mythical quality but at the same time show readers the lunacies of a system that favours one racial group above another.

  His novel was published in February 1933, just two weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, with the title The Boot that Kicked, an obvious allusion to the jackboots worn by the Sturmabteilung. Several newspapers interviewed Dmitri and publicly he always maintained that it was about the rise of Bolshevism in Russia rather than Nazism in Germany, but he added that if people wished to draw parallels, that was their prerogative.

  Almost overnight, the level of harassment Rosa experienced in their street increased until she was afraid to go out of doors. She sent Dmitri to buy food and if she took the children out for some fresh air in the park, Dmitri had to accompany them. He wasn’t a particularly tall man but he had learned how to handle himself during his imperial guard training. In response to taunts, he squared up and stared the perpetrator directly in the eye in a way that left no doubt he was ready for a fight, and they invariably backed down.

  ‘We can’t live like this. Perhaps we should go to stay near my mother in the country,’ Rosa suggested.

  ‘It will happen in the countryside as well,’ Dmitri argued gloomily. ‘Mein Führer is encouraging anti-Semitism and everyone wants to curry favour.’

  One evening, they returned from a day out to find the front door of their apartment smashed in. They looked inside to see a chaos of destruction. Pages had been ripped from Dmitri’s books and scattered like dead leaves on the floor. Clothes were strewn around and a bag of flour had been emptied over them. Limbs had been torn from Nicholas’s toy animals and Marta’s dolls. Dmitri’s typewriter had been smashed to pieces and his reporter’s notebook stolen. Cups and plates were broken, furniture overturned. Dmitri rushed to the bedroom and was relieved to find that they had not opened the brown leather suitcase in which he kept Tatiana’s diary. He couldn’t bear anything to happen to that.

  When he returned to the front room, the children were in tears and Rosa had sunk to her knees to comfort them.

  ‘Who did this?’ Marta lisped through her tears, and Rosa hugged her before replying, ‘Bad people.’ Nicholas’s lip trembled. Dmitri looked at the three of them huddled together in the midst of the carnage and felt a wave of primal emotion. He couldn’t bear for his family to be upset, couldn’t stand them being hurt. And he realised that, although he still clung to the memory of the exquisite love he had experienced with Tatiana, this feeling was just as true a kind of love. He would lay down his life to protect these three souls.

  The atmosphere in Berlin, of whispering and bullying, mistrust and betrayal, reminded him powerfully of St Petersburg in 1917. Back then he had been too slow to react. If he had arranged to have the Romanovs rescued when they were under house arrest in St Petersburg, just a few hundred miles from the safety of Denmark, they would be alive today. Instead he had hesitated, with tragic consequences. This time he was determined he wouldn’t delay.

  Later, when the children were asleep, he said to Rosa, ‘We have to leave Germany until this madness is over.’

  She looked sad: ‘But where would we go? This is our home.’

  ‘We both speak good English, so it makes sense to go to an English-speaking country. I won’t go to Britain because I can’t forgive them for abandoning the Romanovs. How about America?’

  Rosa was astounded. ‘It’s so far! When would I see my family? My mother and sister?’

  Frankly, Dmitri didn’t much care if he never saw her mother and sister again but he offered, ‘They could come too, if you like.’

  ‘Would America accept us? How do you go about applying?’

  ‘I’ll ask at the consulate tomorrow. I can’t have my family subjected to this.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘There’s something I’ve never said to you before, Rosa. I want you to know that I do love you. You and the children mean the world to me.’

  She gasped, and the joy that shone from her eyes made him feel guilty that he had never said it before. They had been lovers for eleven years, had created two children together, and he had made her wait all this time to hear the words she yearned for. He didn’t deserve a woman as patient and good as her – but he was determined somehow to become worthy of her
love.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Lake Akanabee, New York State, 4th October 2016

  With only ten days to go before she had to leave the States, Kitty drove to Gloversville to collect Tatiana’s notebook from Vera and to return the books about the Romanovs she had borrowed. Over a cup of coffee she shared the information she had gleaned about Dmitri’s life after he left Russia.

  ‘I assume he went to Berlin because it was a meeting point for White Russians after the civil war. He met his wife Rosa and they had two children, but perhaps they left in 1934 to escape the Nazis, because Rosa was Jewish. Dmitri would have been forty-eight when the Second World War began, so wouldn’t have been called up to fight, but I have no idea how he earned a living or why he only wrote two more novels after coming to America.’ She took a bite of the home-baked cookie Vera had put on a plate beside her. It was gooey with peanut butter.

  Vera couldn’t help. ‘You assume in this day and age that you can find anything you want to know on the Internet but it’s simply not true.’

  ‘Are you working on anything interesting now?’ Kitty’s mouth was gummed up with peanut butter, making her words sound indistinct.

  ‘I’m translating a novel from Russian. It’s very gloomy, although with undoubted literary merit. The characters endlessly analyse their motivations till you want to shout “Get on with it, buddy!”’

  Kitty smiled in recognition: ‘Yes, the same is true of Dmitri’s novels. His characters are incapacitated by guilt – except in his anti-fascist novel The Boot that Kicked, where they are energised by fury. I rather like the introspection. I wish more men were introspective.’ Of course, that’s what Tom was doing with his counsellor: trying to understand what made him tick. Kitty admired him for the effort. It couldn’t be easy.