Natasha's Dream

by Mary Jane Staples

  The young woman swayed, her head in pain from the blow, her dizziness returning. He steadied her. She pushed him off. She was shocked and hurt, but she was also fierce. She gave him an angry and disbelieving look. It was always difficult to believe there were men who would rob people as poor as she was, but it happened, and frequently. The only consolation was that the robbers themselves were frequently victims of their own kind.

  Her head hurt. This man had hit her. No. No, perhaps not. She realized then that there had been another man, different from this one: a man who had passed her in a casual way, only to turn and strike her head with something hard and solid. The blow had knocked her hat off and felled her. She remembered a long dark raincoat, the collar turned up, and a hat with its brim turned down. This other man was wearing a warm-looking black coat, with an astrakhan fur collar, and a fur hat.

  ‘What do you want? Go away.’ She was nervous and tense, but ready to fight if she had to.

  ‘Fräulein, are you all right?’ He felt concern. He felt, because of what he had seen, that he could not let her go on her way alone. She was obviously shaken, but just as obviously unaware of exactly what might have happened to her. ‘He hit you hard. So I struck at him and he ran off.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ She was dizzy and uncomprehending.

  ‘I hit him, Fräulein.’ The man spoke slowly, to get through to her. ‘I had to or he would—’ But he was not sure if he should tell her it had looked as if she was going to be pitched over the bridge and into the river. Should a young woman be casually told that someone had seemed intent on drowning her? Though why anyone should want to dispose so callously of such a sorry creature was a mystery. In the faint light of the lamp, she was not only desperately shabby, she was thin, pale and hungry-looking. There were smudges of dirt on her right cheek, and her dark-rimmed eyes were huge in her painfully thin face. She looked as if she might have been discarded by life, but not as if she ought to be drowned. One drowned unwanted kittens, but not young women, however wretched their appearance. ‘Can you swim, Fräulein?’

  She stared in vague amazement at such a question at such a moment.

  ‘Swim?’ she repeated.

  ‘If you can’t, you should learn to.’ It was the nearest he could get to a broad hint concerning the fate she had narrowly escaped.

  ‘Now what are you saying?’ Her voice was faint because of weakness. But she was at least now aware that this man meant her no harm. It reached into her dizzy mind, the fact that he was a saviour and not another of Berlin’s countless thieves and footpads. She took her first real look at him. He had a firm and pleasant countenance, and an air of quiet reassurance, and his expression was one of kindness and concern. She had to thank him. She made an effort. She drew herself up. But her head throbbed and her limbs felt dangerously weak. Her condition was not helped by her hunger. She was badly in need of food. She sagged a little, and he at once put a hand on her arm.

  ‘Fräulein?’

  ‘I – I—’ She fought a sudden feeling of nausea. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very well.’

  He thought there was something engaging about that little admission, something almost piquant, bravely piquant, and it touched him.

  ‘I believe you, Fräulein. You were struck very hard.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and gingerly fingered the back of her head again. There was no one else about, no one, and she experienced a strange little moment of wistful longing. It was a longing to have someone care about her, a longing born of this man’s kindness and concern, and his apparent inclination not to leave her until he was sure she was all right. He seemed a very distinguished person, and she desperately hoped that a new surge of nausea did not mean she was going to be sick in front of him. From out of the dark pit of hunger and weakness she dug up a further hope, a hope that he would not go away. It was an impossibly absurd hope, but it arrived and would not depart. ‘Life is so sad, mein Herr. It is very sad when a thief strikes a woman so that he can make it easier to rob her. It is even sadder when a woman has nothing but her papers, for such people will even steal those.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ He had been in Berlin less than a week, but was already aware that identity papers were precious to people. It worried him that he knew what she did not, that there had been no attempt to rob her, only an obvious attempt to drown her. ‘The world has not been a pleasant place for many years, Fräulein. Where do you live? You must allow me to see you home. Your family will be worried about you.’ His German was a little erratic in its grammar, but still passable. ‘Take my arm.’

  She could not trust herself to walk yet, even with the aid of his arm. She was sure she would be sick. She saw him looking around. But it was very late, and there were neither trams nor taxis about.

  ‘I have no family,’ she whispered. ‘I have a corner in the passage of a house, where I’m allowed to sleep at night. I have one blanket, which I have to hide by day, or it would be taken. Isn’t that a sad thing, mein Herr? Oh, my head hurts each time I speak, and I think I’m going to be miserably sick.’

  Her suffering stomach heaved then, empty though it was. She staggered to the parapet, leaned over it and gagged. It was fiercely humiliating, being so sick, and it racked her weak body. Her head seemed to burst with fiery light.

  When she came to, she felt she was on a slowly moving swing. The sensation induced a return of the sick feeling for a moment. But almost at once it was replaced by a feeling of comfort, and of a warmth that protected her from the damp coldness of the November night. She opened her eyes. The man looked down at her. Her head was resting against his shoulder. He was carrying her, his warm coat wrapped around her, his arms bearing her thin body without effort.

  ‘What is happening?’ she asked faintly.

  ‘I’m taking you to my apartment. I’m afraid you aren’t very well at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry I am such a nuisance.’

  ‘And I’m sorry the world is treating you so badly,’ he said. ‘You need something a little better than a corner in a cold passage. To start with, let’s say cognac and some hot soup.’

  ‘Oh, mein Herr, how kind you are.’ Her voice was a sighing ecstasy because of the promise of hot soup. She did not feel in the least afraid. He was a stranger with a foreign accent to his German, and he was taking her to his apartment. Wrapped in his coat, she felt very comfortable, and no, not in the least afraid. ‘I’m sorry I was so sick.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and gave her a smile.

  It was a warm smile, filled with reassurance. His eyes looked dark, because of the night, but she could just discern the warmth, and the kindness.

  Her heart turned over, painfully, and she felt very sad that shabbiness and privation had made her so unlovely.

  It was well past midnight. The workers of Berlin were asleep, except for those who laboured by night. There were other people, however, rich and restless people, who were wide awake. They were the kind who preferred the excitement of night to the grey realities of day. They took themselves off to the clubs, the cafés and the restaurants, in company with gaudily attired female butterflies. The night lights of post-war Berlin drew the butterflies and scorched them, and when dawn came some lay in the ashes of their once bright wings.

  While the compassionate man carried the suffering young woman through empty residential streets, the fashionable quarter of the city pulsated with life that was as artificial as tinsel, but as addictive as cocaine. And it had the same exhilarating effect as the drug. The cabaret shows glittered with fresh greasepaint and stardust. The satire was brilliant, brittle and irreverent. Whatever else had perished in the aftermath of defeat, cabaret had survived. It flourished. It was wicked and outrageous, and, in some clubs, uproarious.

  There were also night haunts with a special appeal for Russians. There were a hundred thousand Russian émigrés in Berlin. Berlin had received them sympathetically but sighingly, like a broad-bosomed hausfrau whose cupboard, unfortunately, was bare. Most of these Russia
n émigrés were either hoping for the Bolshevik regime in Moscow to collapse or actively plotting to speed its downfall. The monarchists were the strongest and most powerful faction, and the Supreme Monarchist Council represented the interests of all émigrés desiring a restoration of the Romanov dynasty. Following the murder of the Tsar seven years ago, his cousin, Grand Duke Kyril, had declared himself the rightful heir to the throne.

  There was, however, a nuisance at large, and one whom Grand Duke Kyril chose to ignore. In 1920, a scarred and sick woman had surfaced in Berlin, and after two years of being a nameless mystery and curiosity to the nurses and doctors who did what they could for her, she had suddenly declared herself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicolaievna, youngest daughter of the dead Tsar. She had survived the massacre? Impossible, said exiled and aloof Romanov relatives, and refused to acknowledge her. There were some people, however, including several who had known Anastasia in the old days, who supported her claim.

  She was still in Berlin. For three years, since 1922, she had been the centre of gossip and speculation. She was still physically fragile, still sick from shattered nerves, and among the people interested in the mystery of her true identity was the man who had saved a hungry and penniless young woman from being tossed over a bridge into the river.

  Chapter Three

  Reaching his rented apartment on the second floor of a block in a quiet residential neighbourhood, the man set the young woman on her feet and fished out the door key. She clutched his arm for support. He opened the door and took her in. The warmth and comfort of the apartment were an immediate rapture to her, the living room a welcome haven. He removed the coat he had wrapped around her, seated her on a sofa and drew her feet up. She sighed and lay back, head on a cushion. He saw that her shoes were old and cracked, the soles badly worn. Her face looked pinched in the light of an electric lamp. Her eyes, so darkly blue they were almost violet, were rimmed by privation, her facial hollows a sign that she was indeed near to starving. She looked as if she had been existing only on what she could get from a soup kitchen.

  He went to a sideboard and poured a large cognac for her. He handed her the glass.

  ‘Sip it slowly,’ he said, ‘while I get you some hot soup and bread.’

  He disappeared. She sipped the cognac, a little at a time. Its fire hit her throat. She coughed. She looked around. The comfortable atmosphere of the room was not diminished by the fact that it looked a little untidy. It was a masculine untidiness. Books had been left on a chair, a notebook perched precariously on the rounded arm of the chair, a pair of dried-out shoes lay close to a porcelain heating stove and a jacket was carelessly draped over another chair. There was a newspaper on the floor beside the sofa. She rose to her feet to test herself. Immediately her head swam and she sat down again. It was not nausea this time, but simply weakness.

  The man brought the soup to her after a while, a large bowl of it. On the tray there was also a plate containing a large amount of dark brown bread, bread that looked fresh and was not of the cheap black kind. It was even buttered. She sat up. Butter on bread to be eaten with soup? Oh, such extravagance, and such rapture. She took the tray on to her lap and looked up at the man. His hair was a deep brown and his eyes were warm. His smile was friendly and encouraging.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, and seized a portion of the thickly cut bread. Its fresh feel and glistening butter galvanized her hunger and she brought it ravenously to her mouth. Her white teeth tore at it. She chewed and swallowed, demolishing the entire portion. The smell of the soup assailed her nostrils. She quickly swallowed the bread in her mouth and picked up the soup spoon.

  The man sat down in an armchair. He took up the newspaper and glanced through it, tactfully keeping his eyes off the starving girl.

  ‘There’s more if you want it,’ he murmured.

  She gulped the nutritious soup, pushing in bread with each mouthful. ‘You will forgive my manners?’ she said, suddenly embarrassed.

  ‘Oh, manners,’ he said, murmuring the words in English, ‘they’re the indulgence of the well fed, not the starving.’ In German, he added, ‘Don’t worry.’

  She was staring at him. ‘English? You are English, kind sir?’ she said in that language.

  ‘Yes.’ He looked up from the paper. ‘Do you speak English, Fräulein?’

  Her pale, smudged face and her dark, hungry eyes were suddenly transformed by a delighted smile. He felt that if she were not so painfully thin, she would be a very attractive young woman.

  ‘Do I speak English? But am I not doing so?’ The language was clear and fluent on her tongue, with scarcely the faintest hint of an accent. ‘I speak it to perfection. My—’ She stopped, and her moment of brightness faded. Her face became full of shadows. ‘I mean, in my school there was an English lady who taught English. She was married to Peter Gregorovich Alexeiev, who was the headmaster. They—’ Her mouth trembled and she bent her head. ‘I speak German well, but not as well as I speak English.’

  ‘Shall we communicate in English, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ A little of the brightness returned, and she resumed her meal, attacking it with the unaffected relish of one who considered it a banquet. ‘How kind you are, dear sir.’

  ‘Dear sir?’ repeated her host.

  ‘That is English, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ he smiled.

  ‘Then, dear sir, I—’ She put soup and bread into her mouth. She chewed, swallowed and went on. ‘I wish to say how fortunate I am in having met you. In Berlin, there are a thousand thieves in every dark doorway at night. The world is so unhappy, and people have turned away from God.’

  ‘Perhaps they feel God has failed them.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and gazed at him over the dripping spoon. ‘Oh, you are not a heathen, are you?’

  He laughed. It was a richly comforting sound to her.

  ‘No, I don’t think I’m a heathen,’ he said, and she was plainly relieved to hear that. He watched her then. For all that she was devouring the food ravenously, she had little touches of gracefulness. But she was desperately thin. Her ankles were thin, her wrists thin, her facial bones thrusting and sharp. Her right cheek, smudged, showed a slight bruise from contact with the parapet. She had been handled with lethal brutality. ‘You haven’t finished your cognac,’ he said. ‘Put the rest of it in the soup.’

  ‘Cognac in soup?’ she said in amazement, but did as he suggested. It gave a royal flavour to the soup. ‘Kind sir—’

  ‘My name is Gibson. Philip Gibson. Mr Gibson, or Herr Gibson, will do. And what is your name?’

  She cast a hesitant glance at him. In his suit of charcoal grey, he seemed to her a distinguished-looking man. His own eyes were very direct, his mouth firm, his smile still encouraging.

  ‘I am Natasha Petrovna,’ she said.

  ‘Natasha Petrovna? You’re Russian, then?’

  ‘Yes, but not Bolshevik,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure you don’t have bombs in your pocket,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘Natasha Petrovna are your given names? What is your other name?’

  ‘Chevensky,’ she said, after a moment.

  ‘So, Natasha Chevensky, you’re Russian and you speak excellent German and perfect English. May I ask what you’re doing in Berlin?’

  ‘I am a goose,’ said Natasha.

  ‘A goose?’ he said gravely. ‘Why are you a goose?’

  ‘Because there are too many Russians in Berlin.’ Natasha became sad. ‘There is no work here for thousands of Germans, so how can there be any work for Russians? I should have gone to a small town, where there are only Germans. One Russian would not have mattered too much, and might have found work.’

  ‘Why did you leave Russia?’

  Natasha finished the last portion of bread. She had consumed a whole loaf. She looked down at the empty plate.

  ‘Bolsheviks,’ she said, and there was pain in her voice.

  ‘I’ve heard they can be rather unpleas
ant,’ said Mr Gibson.

  ‘Thousands of Russians have left,’ said Natasha, head still bent. ‘Millions more would leave if they could. Kind sir, you do not know. They said the Tsar was a terrible man, a tyrant of evil and cruelty. But he was not evil and cruel to me. They were. They would have murdered me. I was young. I have never been young since.’

  ‘Why would they have murdered you?’ asked Mr Gibson.

  ‘Who can tell with Bolsheviks?’ Natasha did not lift her head. ‘They have murdered millions of people, yes, millions, and yet they still say it was only the Tsar who was cruel. They—’ Her voice was full of pain. ‘They murdered my family, my mother and father and my two brothers. I escaped. But I have since thought – oh, many times I have thought – that I should have stayed and let them put me to death beside my mother and father. God would have received all of us together.’

  Mr Gibson sensed her pain was unbearable.

  ‘I am sorry, Natasha,’ he said, ‘I am very sorry. And I’m not helping by asking questions, am I? But why did they do such a thing? Your whole family? Why?’

  ‘Because they are afraid for their Revolution, because they hate everyone who does not think as they do,’ said Natasha. ‘To disagree with one of their commissars is to commit yourself to death. The Revolution is more important to the Bolsheviks than ten million Russian lives. Twenty million. I know, kind sir. I hid for two years, in many different places, and many times with good people. Then I escaped into Poland, but in Poland the Bolsheviks are everywhere. I managed to get to Germany, and came to Berlin four years ago. I tried on my way to get work on German farms, but German farmers chase Russians away, and who can blame them? If they have work to offer, they must first offer it to their own.’

  ‘You grew up on a farm?’ asked Mr Gibson, absorbed.