Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Mary Morrissy
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
The Pretender
Note
Acknowledgements
Copyright
A Lazy Eye
Mother of Pearl
For Sinéad, sibling without rival
Didn’t you once glimpse what seemed your own
inner blazonry in the monarchs, veering
and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Galway Kinnell, ‘Why Regret’
Charlottesville, Virginia, 1978
‘EGGS,’ SHE CRIES, ‘eggs!’
Jack Manahan stands in the summery doorway, a fat man framed in a lozenge of ferny green light. The voice from inside the purblind house is his wife’s. Slowly he steps inside, his bulk eclipsing the sun-bleached portal. The faint shiver of leaves on University Circle and the throbbing purr of an idling car engine are the only other sounds to counter the lazy tick of the high summer afternoon until Anastasia’s shrill command.
‘Eggs!’
Jack picks through the debris of the living room, an obstacle course he has learned to navigate carefully. Dreg-tided cups, plates with pools of congealed food, the sour tang of cat piss. There are cats everywhere. Gingers, toms, tabbies, strays all. As he moves towards Anastasia (she is always in the same spot, sunk in a crestfallen yellow armchair near the ivy-shaded window), there is an angry hiss as he treads on Pushkin’s tail. Not that he knows the cats by name; in latter years they are all called Pushkin. Their revenge for such anonymity, or so Jack thinks, is to leave their individual claw marks on the furniture. The door jambs are scored so deeply they would feel like the bark of a tree to a blind man. Anastasia loves the cats but is exasperated by them. When they rub up against her legs she swats them away, yet the house has been completely abdicated to them.
‘Coming, my dear,’ Jack calls out to her as he rummages among the books piled in waist-high, teetering towers. She has of late grown terribly deaf, so even his reassurances have taken on the air of barked caricature. He riffles through the piles of newspapers which lie in a grimy tide at ankle level, then turns to their companions stacked around the room, giving the walls the texture of mille-feuille.
Years of Anastasia’s imperious shorthand have taught him to anticipate her every whim rather than suffer hours of her cranky displeasure. Most of the time he gets it right. Just now she is thinking of the egg book. An illustrated catalogue of the extant collection of ornamental eggs made for the Russian imperial family by the master jeweller, Fabergé. Fashioned intricately in gold and enamel (some no more than three inches high), each egg contained a surprise, sometimes a singing bird or a music box. The Imperial Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, for example, contained a foot-long model of the royal train, featuring seven carriages made of platinum and gold which ran when wound up with a golden key. The First Imperial Egg is Anastasia’s favourite. Perhaps because it was the first. (Jack finds the Imperial Cross of St George Egg more poignant. Dating from 1916, the final one of the series, it features a portrait of the Tsarevich Alexei on its pale green, opalescent surface. Oh doomed child, Jack thinks.) Of all Fabergé’s Easter gift creations, the First Imperial was the plainest and the one that most resembled a real egg, being not much larger than life size and finished in unadorned white enamel. Inside, the shell was coated in gold and housed a golden yolk. The yolk opened to reveal a tiny ruby-eyed hen sitting on a nest of golden straw. The hen was also hinged and could be opened. It was said to contain a replica of the imperial crown, but like so much else this surprise, Jack notes sorrowfully, has been lost.
The book is often produced when there are guests. It pacifies Anastasia and if she is being difficult it provides a welcome diversion. When he bought it, Jack hoped the book would act as an aide-mémoire for Anastasia, evoking the long dormant memories of her early, happy years at the Winter Palace. The scenes of his own childhood are so close at hand. This house, the farm in Scottsville, the leafy campus where his father was the dean, these landmarks remain. As do his father’s stern landscapes in oil, though now they are eclipsed behind towers of books, while his mother’s china figurines are swamped by Anastasia’s idiosyncratic memorabilia. (In Anastasia’s scheme of things a doughnut carton has as much value as an icon of the Madonna; nothing, absolut nichts, must be thrown away.) But Jack feels acutely the loss of Anastasia’s childhood trappings. There has been too much upheaval for anything to remain intact; in this way he tries to explain away her fractured memories to people who call at the house. Too many calamities have intervened; too much dirt, as she says herself. And while Anastasia had been awed and fascinated by the book and the demented opulence, the magnificent craftiness of the eggs, there had been no rush of sentimental memory. She had merely pored silently over the colour plates like a forensic child.
‘Eggs,’ she hollers again, beating the arm of the chair with her hand and eyeing him crossly.
He searches among the papers lapping at her feet. She is shod in a pair of his carpet slippers, which are ridiculously big for her crooked feet. She wears a battered straw hat, a plum-red winter coat over several layers of ill-assorted clothes – there is a grey, pinstriped waistcoat from a suit of Jack’s which no longer fits him over a floral print summer dress. Underneath is a brown, cowl-necked sweater and unseen beneath that are a number of vests and slips. She dresses as if she is still on the run. And in a way she still is, Jack thinks. It is this thought which softens his irritation with her.
‘I can’t seem to find your book, Princess.’
Her clenched face opens into an impish smile, showing her teeth, a slightly menacing false set, of which she is inordinately proud. The slangy royal soubriquet, which she would not tolerate from anybody else, never fails to charm.
‘Hans,’ she says softly.
She has always called him Hans. In the early days he thought it a pet name, the sort of appellation couples late to love might bashfully employ, and it pleased him. Now since Anastasia spends so much of her time steeped in an irretrievable past, he imagines she is mistaking him for some long-dead royal cousin from the house of Hesse.
‘Two eggs, sunny side up. And some coffee.’
Wrong again, Hans.
Anastasia has a weakness for coffee, peppering it with four or five sachets of sugar pocketed from the cafeteria where they lunch daily. She is a magpie, always stealing. Plastic spoons from the diner, handfuls of coasters from the Farmington Country Club. Any unwanted food she orders to be wrapped in foil and taken home to the animals. A lifetime of charity has made her thrify in small things, although she is extravagant by nature. After ten years with Anastasia this self-imposed privation still humbles Jack. When he looks at her what he considers absurd is not that this bent-up old woman is a member of the royal house of Romanov, the only surviving daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, but that she is Mrs Jack Manahan.
They always sit at the same booth in the cafeteria. The corner window seat with its red leatherette banquette and spangly Formica table top. Anastasia orders the same bizarre collection of food every day. Cottage cheese and mashed potato followed by an ice-cream sundae. Baby food. As Jack watches her spoon the melting concoction into her mouth, dribbling slightly as she does, he can almost see in her darting blue gaze the mischievous child who earned the nickname Schwibsik. Imp! Jack likes to keep an eye on the other diners. It is a watchfulness he has inherited from his wife, this constant fear of ambush as if the past might suddenly and clamorously intrude. He half-expects to look up one day and find a troop of Reds on horseback shattering the plate-glass window and crashing through.
The regulars pay little heed to them. Their indifference is an indulgence, Jack realises, and one that Anastasia welcomes after years of avid scrutiny. But every so often he wants to still the juke-box music. He wants to hush the squealing laughter of the high-school girls who gather in clutches, six to a booth; halt the gloomy mastication of the lightly dusted workmen sitting at the counter; silence the cheery banter of the bustling waitresses. He wants the patrons of this common little diner to rise as one and bow down before her. He knows how foolish this is, but Jack has grown accustomed to his own foolishness; he has spent a decade treading a fine line between devotion and ridicule. He knows how they see Anastasia – a crazy old dame who should be locked up. What he sees is a woman of noble birth stranded in a cheap, democratic modernity that will not recognise her.
He makes his way to the small kitchen and starts to brew the coffee. Anastasia likes it hangover strength and black. Jack stands at the sink and gazes out across the driveway at the large colonial house which they have recently had to abandon. There was not enough room for them, the animals and the junk. (Since they’ve moved the dogs have been banished to the garden. The garden, he mocks quietly to himself, peering out at the overgrown yard.) He and Anastasia are now in the servant’s quarters, where the butler lived until his death. James had been with the Manahans since Jack was a boy, and he treated Anastasia’s arrival in their household as a catastrophe. Jack looks around the once spartan and neat quarters of his patient servant. Now it is going the same way as the main house. Outside is a thicket of bramble and creeper. Jack likes the green gloom it lends the house, as if they were living in a medieval castle within which a princess slumbers. The vine has wound its way around the trees and up the walls of the house, weaving towards the gutters, clinging to masonry and timber alike. What the realtors once described as an elegant property has become a rank wilderness littered with dog shit.
Only the kitchen escapes the squalor because Anastasia rarely ventures in there. Here the last vestiges of an ordered life are evident. The ill-stocked fridge of a bachelor, the wipe-down surfaces, the sturdy tubular table. Bare and clean as a monk’s cell. Jack fishes out the frying pan from the cupboard beneath the sink. His back locks momentarily as he bends and it takes him some moments to straighten. He chastises his own stiffness. He cannot afford to give in to the indignities of old age with Anastasia to care for. What on earth would she do without him? He rarely asks himself what he would do without her. He cracks the eggs on the skillet rim. They fall with a satisfying splat. As they sizzle he sets out a tray with a plate, napkin and cutlery. He opens the window and plucks a milky trumpet of convolvulus from the green confusion and drops it into a slim-necked vase. He still persists with such gestures though Anastasia barely notices. He does it for himself, a way of counteracting his helplessness in the face of Anastasia’s excesses. Alone, he would never have lived like this, but the effort of resisting her is too much. She attracts filth and chaos as if exotic misery was the price exacted for her enormous pride. She almost welcomes it, he suspects; it is somehow proof that she was born for something better but has been reduced to this. It is a lesson to the world.
It is not that he would swap his life with Anastasia for the life he had before. No, he has willingly embraced this ruin. It is an intoxicating and enviable madness. But here in this kitchen he catches glimpses of the old notion of himself, the man who was once a professor of history and political science, a southern gentleman, a respected member of the community. He gazes across at his former home and he can smell it rotting, like his reputation, into the foetid undergrowth.
Under the circumstances their alliance was unlikely to have a fairy-tale ending – plain Jack Manahan marries a princess. He was twenty years her junior for a start and neither of them were spring chicks. There were those who considered him a gold-digger despite the fact that he was doing very nicely, thank you, before the Grand Duchess Anastasia entered his life. He didn’t need the whiff of Romanov gold in his nostrils. A mature bachelor (he was forty-nine when he married), Jack had family money to sustain him. What would he have gained by marrying Anastasia? A lot of rumour and innuendo, notoriety certainly. But no loot, as the newspapers had so ungraciously put it. The court case had decided that. After thirty-two years, the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe finally reached a verdict on Anastasia’s identity in 1970. Not proven. By which stage she and Jack were already married.
It was two years before the judgment that Gleb Botkin, Anastasia’s childhood friend, first told Jack about his future wife. She was still in Europe then, courtesy of Prince Friedrich, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg at Unterlengenhardt in the Black Forest. Gleb spoke of the crumbling barrack rooms she lived in, her continuing illness, the ongoing legal process and the unwanted attention of the press. She was the ‘milch cow of journalists’, she had written to Gleb. Jack had been touched. He offered Botkin the price of Anastasia’s passage to the United States, appalled that a royal personage of such import should be reduced to filth and penury.
He did not know then Anastasia’s propensity for squalor, her appetite for it. She had insisted that the front yard be covered in cardboard, for example, and once he had found a large tree stump she had dragged in, sitting in its pocket of earth in the middle of the drawing-room floor. A stranger, if he didn’t know any better, might imagine Anastasia a peasant, with her newspapers laid on the floor for the cats to defecate into and the fermenting stink of the yard. But no, Jack insists to anyone who will listen, it is only the world’s refusal to believe that has turned her mind. Here was a woman who had survived the most horrific slaughter of the innocents; had been reviled by her own flesh and blood, and scorned by a sceptical world. Had she not the right to be a little odd? More importantly for Jack, a compulsive genealogist, here was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Botkin had turned up at one of Jack’s genealogical society meetings. Jack enjoyed these little soirées, though the matrons of Charlottesville were not as keen as their chairman would have liked. For them it was a social occasion, a chance to sit around Jack’s elegantly worn dining room and be served tea and small cakes by James. They paid scant attention to his laboriously constructed charts and only perked up if their own names were mentioned. Gleb Botkin, when he turned up unannounced, was unusual in that he was a man and most of Jack’s acolytes were female. It was a warm evening and Gleb lingered after the meeting came to a close and even the most tenacious lady members had reluctantly left for home. James had already started clearing as Jack steered Gleb towards the door. Behind them the testy tinkle of teaspoons and the irritated clack of plates testified to how late James considered the hour. The tall Russian stood on the threshold smoking furiously. He held the butt delicately like a novice and frowned as he inhaled, as if smoking were a highly skilled activity. The two men stood amidst the thrum of crickets. Botkin seemed uneasy, yet he was reluctant to leave.
‘Ah, the Milky Way, laid out for our delectation and how rarely we look up,’ Jack said by way of conversation, gazing at the arc of littered stars overhead. The Russian puffed away seriously. He toyed with the pebbles on Jack Manahan’s driveway with his foot.
‘Tell me, Dr Manahan,’ he said, sighing emphatically, ‘do you know anything of the name …’ he paused as if the whole subject wearied him, ‘Romanov?’
‘You mean the royal Romanovs?’
Gleb sighed again, as if lost in sorrowful thought. It was something Jack would come to know well, Gleb’s syncopated conversation. He continued as if Jack had not spoken.
‘I have a particular interest in the Romanovs, Dr Manahan. My father was their doctor. He perished with them in Siberia.’ Gleb gazed up at the night sky. ‘I was a playmate to the imperial children, one of whom still lives. Anastasia.’
Jack felt a shivering tingle of shock. Such were the jangling conjunctions of the world. Standing on his lawn in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was suddenly connected by the word of a stranger to the slaughter of a royal family in a long-ruined empire a half-century before.
If Gleb had not mentioned Anastasia, he might have walked off into the summer’s night and the two men would never have met again. It was Jack who cultivated the friendship. He immediately set about drawing up the Romanov family tree and the next time he met Gleb he was able to show off his handiwork. It was both a labour of love and a task coloured by genealogical envy. Jack might have been able to trace Anastasia’s ancestry back through three hundred years of Romanov rule, but Gleb had played in the sands of the Crimea with a grand duchess in the summer of 1914. Jack would never be able to compete with that.
An echoing arrivals hall was to be Grand Duchess Anastasia’s only audience when she arrived at Dulles Airport. She flew in under an alias – Anna Anderson – the name she had adopted during her previous visit to the United States in 1929 to escape the curious crowds and the phalanx of newspaper reporters who followed her tirelessly. Then, of course, she had looked the part, a frail but imperious young woman bearing the pallor of her recent bout of TB, as she was squired around various well-connected families on Long Island. This time there was only Jack and a chain-smoking Gleb to greet her. Jack could feel his troublesome gut seized by nerves. He had plundered Gleb’s store of memories of Anastasia. Now he wanted to see for himself.
When Anastasia finally appeared, on the arm of a steward, Jack had to admit that he was disappointed. In truth she could have been a bag lady with her eccentric combination of clothes – a sleeveless flowered blouse, two silk scarves, maroon slacks, a pair of fluffy white slippers, all topped off by a threadbare fur coat slung around her shoulders. Several plastic bags were crushed into the trolley which the young man accompanying her steered awkwardly. A plume of dyed auburn hair escaped from a punctured hat. Jack watched as she and Gleb embraced, his large bear hug almost crushing her tiny, frail figure. Then Gleb stood back.
‘May I present her Imperial Highness, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna,’ Gleb announced importantly, ‘Dr John Manahan.’
The little woman stuck out a gloved hand and Jack, remembering his manners, kissed the rubbed-looking mitt she proffered. Master stroke, Gleb told him later, Anastasia does not hold with shaking hands.
Those first days were a blur of activity. Contrary to Gleb’s protestations that she only wanted peace and quiet, Anastasia started giving interviews the day after she arrived. The house was swamped with callers. James was on sentry duty fielding reporters. Jack found himself blinded by the explosion of their flash bulbs when he ventured out. He was alarmed by this unexpected development. Here he was giving shelter and protection to a hunted royal while she was issuing invitations to all and sundry to come to his house and listen to her bizarre stories – she had been abused by her German relatives, who had tried to poison her, the lawyers in the court case had made a fortune out of her, the French press ridiculed her. Jack turned to Gleb for help, but as he was to discover, Gleb and Anastasia would frequently fall out over some perceived slight by one or the other. They were like children in this, long sulks followed by extravagant makings-up.
‘What can I say?’ Gleb said, shrugging miserably. ‘She is crazy sometimes.’
Jack settled her in one of the guest bedrooms at the back of the house. It was a large, airy room. The morning sun streamed through the slatted blinds, although James remarked that their new guest kept the drapes drawn all day, plunging the room into permanent twilight. Jack saw little of her in her first few days in Charlottesville. She stayed in the dark cocoon of her new quarters, where she received a stream of curious callers. James drew her baths, brought her meals on a tray and furnished the various guests with tea. Jack felt a little cheated. The readers of the local newspaper saw more of the ‘mystery woman’, as they had dubbed her, than he did. He need not have worried. After a week, in a pattern he was to become familiar with, she threw a tantrum, stamping out of her room and down the corridor. She marched into the living room startling Jack, who was taking forty winks.
‘Mach ein Ende,’ she screamed. ‘I will see no one else. Absolut niemand. Nicht mehr!’
And she stormed out again and into her room, banging the door so hard that a picture in the hall slid from its perch and shattered. So Jack stepped into the breach. He realised then that what Anastasia needed most was to be saved from herself.
Six months later they were married. It was what they called a marriage of convenience. Jack hated the term. Convenience indeed, as if the institution of marriage could be reduced to the status of a public lavatory. He had offered Anastasia hospitality, a civilised haven. Marrying her was merely the logical and chivalrous next step.
It had been Gleb’s idea. He had summoned Jack to his sick bed. Recently widowed and ailing, he was barely able to look after himself, not to speak of the exigencies of caring for Anastasia. Jack recognised the power of Gleb’s connection with Anastasia – those summers in the Crimea, or towards the end (Jack still considered the imprisonment of the royal family in Siberia as the end) when Gleb, by then a lanky teenager, would stand in the snowy street below Anastasia’s prison and wave to her. Now he lay in a high bed propped magisterially on a bank of pillows, an ashtray balanced precariously on his drawn-up knees, nursing a weak heart and wheezing with worry about her. Gleb’s room was crowded and brown, steeped in the halo of a bedside lamp which gave off the waxy pallor of candlelight. Icons of the Madonna, large and small, hung around the bed; several more in hinged cases sat on the bedside locker. Gold and blue, they glinted in the low light. It was like entering a medieval chapel. Instead of incense, though, there was a pall of cigarette smoke and the smell of stale nicotine.
‘Sit, sit,’ Gleb commanded as he lit up.
Jack drew up a hard-backed chair to the high-built bedside. Gleb stroked his white beard pensively.
‘Anastasia’s visa is almost expired, Jack. She should really go to Washington and see if the German embassy could negotiate an extension. Trouble is, the way she’s been bad-mouthing the Germans, they mightn’t be in the mood to conciliate …’
‘Well, perhaps I could go to Washington and plead on her behalf,’ Jack offered.
Then he halted. The thought of leaving James alone with Anastasia, even for a couple of hours, seemed too risky. She just about tolerated Jack taking charge, but she would never submit to the rule of a butler.
‘Or I could bring her with me,’ he mused.
‘No, Jack, don’t do that. You know what she’s like. There’ll be an international incident. And if they refuse she’ll be claiming that Prince Friedrich is a murderer because he did away with her cats. And, believe me, that’s something to avoid.’
‘But if nothing is done they will arrive one day on the doorstep to deport her, Gleb. Her nerves would never stand that.’
‘I know, Jack, I know. But we’re in a real bind here.’ Gleb lay back and closed his eyes.
Jack noted the use of the royal plural. Gleb looked thin and exhausted.
‘There is one way to avoid all of this,’ he said finally and Jack knew from the way he said it that this had been his proposition from the start. ‘Someone could marry her.’
Jack strolled home through an autumnal dusk. Newly fallen leaves lay in drifts on the sidewalks, overhead the glowing embers of a mackerel sky. He knew that what he was about to do was momentous. Gleb was entrusting to him a magnificent relic, a holy totem, his Anastasia. The notion quickened Jack. He would be a consort to a queen. He imagined with a frisson of delight inscribing his own name beside hers on the Romanov family tree. He would enter the royal domain. As Gleb had been connected by proximity, he would be related by kin. Kinship was important to Jack. It was why, he guessed, he had spent most of his adult life mapping the intricate patterns of family connections. To see a genealogical chart laid out in black and white was to witness the equations of living, the distillation of the untidy sprawl of generations into a magnificent but pleasingly minute order. Even the dead ends had their logic, the sad petering out of family lines of whom he was one. And Anastasia another. Ah yes, he muttered to himself as he thrashed through the crackling leaves, the great tree of life.
She had taken to Jack’s proposal as calmly as if he had been offering a drive in the country.
‘It is my dream to live in America,’ she said. ‘And my name, finally, will be recognised. No one can say that I am not Anastasia Manahan. Niemand!’
She would always have this capacity to surprise. She had suffered so many upheavals that major life changes had ceased to hold terror for her. Jack’s own life had been so steady, so tied to one landscape, that he could only marvel at the movements and changes in Anastasia’s. An imperial childhood in Russia, a series of clinics in Germany, a stint on Long Island, the war years in Hanover, two decades in an isolated Black Forest village … her life seemed as volatile as the century itself. She was a chameleon, capable of taking on the hues of her surroundings without even breaking step, while a minor irritation – a power cut which plunged the house into darkness, the doorbell ringing too often – would send her into a frenzy. She was particularly sensitive to noise. A car backfired on the avenue one evening and she practically jumped out of her skin. Jack would never forget the look on her face. Terror and resignation.
‘Hans, they have come for me,’ she said simply.
There were times when her paranoia would infect Jack. Once when the phone rang at three a.m., they met robed in the hallway and stood shivering as the phone shrilled. Anastasia was breathing rapidly, her eyes ablaze, her bony hand clutching the stuff of her dressing gown, another holding a handkerchief to her mouth (she didn’t have her teeth in, he suspected). Jack became mesmerised by the incoherence of her unspoken fear. Who could it be at three in the morning? At best some European acquaintance who had mistaken the time difference. At worst, a drunk or a nuisance caller. And yet looking at Anastasia he believed firmly that he would find some voice from her past if he picked up the receiver. A voice from the dead. And so they both stood there until the phone exhausted itself and fell silent.
The scandal-mongers had, of course, ruled out the possibility that theirs might have been a love match. They would not have understood the nature of Jack’s desire. It was not about lust, it was about veneration. He worshipped her. And it was she who had come to him the night after they were married, a small, slightly hunched figure, a cluster of dyed hair around a childish face.
‘Hans,’ she whispered. It was the first time she had used the nickname that would stick to him for the rest of their lives together. ‘Kann nicht schlafen. Can I share? When I was young, my sisters and I … Did I tell you? I am afraid of the dark.’
She crept into bed beside him, a shawl wrapped around her white cotton nightdress. He found himself trembling as she settled like a child into the crook of his arm and wound her arms around his waist. Here in his arms, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna. They lay clasped together. Through the blinds he could see a blurred moon. The trees dripped from an earlier shower. She pushed back the straps of her nightgown and there, there just as she had always said, was the trace of a bayonet wound, inflicted by the soldiers at the House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinburg. The sight of it almost made him weep. He traced his fingers over her ruined body. The blade’s ruptured wounds around her chest and belly, the puncture marks on her thighs, even her sad feet. He felt himself in the presence of a martyr, as if by showing her wounds to him he would really believe. He was stung by an overwhelming pity for her. He pressed his lips reverentially on each of her scars. His tongue explored the whorls of her ears. He traced her whole sorry history on the geography of her skin. It was in this way he came to know her.
For Jack it has always been a question of faith. He believed. He did not need their proofs. For the court case, she had been poked and pulled at. They used measurements and gauges. Her handwriting, the bone structure of her face, the hidden crevices of her ears, her bunioned feet. All these they used against her. And her memory, of course. They wanted coherence, a narrative. And she had only her hotchpotch, patchy memory to offer.
He has trouble with the recent past, the days blurring into one another. He cannot justify the veracity of his own recall, particularly of his happy, documented childhood. The glorious contentment of infancy, the security of being a loved – and in his case – an only child, these do not comply with cataloguing. A family tree is one thing, but memory? It leaks and flows and shimmers, it fills the space provided. Anastasia is the only storm in Jack’s life; while he is the placid port at the end of hers. He does not dwell on what he cannot imagine. He recognises that for Anastasia the violent rupture of Yekaterinburg, so monstrous and traumatic – her parents dying in a volley of bullets, her sisters skewered by bayonets, her beloved brother shot before her eyes – means that for her to recall the happiness is inevitably to relive the terror. Her memory, all memory, has been corrupted.
‘Hans,’ she says one evening as they sit out on the deck at Fairview Farm, Scottsville. It is a balmy summer’s night, a clear sky overhead, moths fluttering at the open windows. She loves the farm – the chickens, in particular, whom she clucks at like a farm wife. She fetches eggs from the henhouse and produces them from her pockets mischievously as if she has magicked them up. Straw-flecked, they are treated with as much delight as if they were the work of Fabergé. Eggs and gold, this is Anastasia’s story.
‘Yes?’ he asks.
In these soft, reflective moments, they are Mr and Mrs Jack Manahan, in their twilight years, sitting on the stoop. She is the long-suffering wife who grumbles mildly about ‘this husband of mine’. Mach ein Ende, she mutters at him when he takes up her cause hotly, trying to justify her claims to strangers. Do other men treat their wives like this, she asks, when he leans crossly on the car horn, anxious to be on the road, while she fusses about the house. She has no concept of time; the clock in her room is always wrong. Departures trouble her; all of them seem sudden as ambushes, no matter how much Jack has flagged them.
‘I want to live a long life,’ she says dreamily.
‘You already have, my dear,’ he replies, covering her liver-spotted hand with his own.
‘No,’ she retorts as if he has contradicted her. She whips her hand away as if he has burned her. She is strange about being touched, some royal protocol, Jack thinks.
‘I want to see 1986,’ she declares.
The arc of eight years hence spans before them. It is an airy sensation, unlike the heavy torpor of the past that constantly weighs her down.
‘Why 1986, sweetheart?’
‘The comet,’ she says crossly.
‘Comet?’
‘It comes back’, she says, ‘in 1986.’
Jack is perplexed. She talks in riddles, sometimes. Another legacy of royalty, her cryptic language, the lack of necessity to explain.
‘Halley’s Comet,’ she says. ‘Papa showed it to me. He knew he would never see it again. Only Baby would live long enough to see it return, he said. So I must see it for him.’
Jack looks up at the vast heaven. A falling star flares and sinks.
‘Baby,’ she murmurs, ‘poor Baby.’
Jack watches silently as she sheds her generous old woman’s tears. If only the judges, the lawyers, a century of doubters could see her thus, he thinks. Then they, too, like him, would believe.
It seemed the world punished her because she had lived. Her presence, her hard-won survival was a thorn, a regal, off-putting rebuke. Jack remembered the TV interview she had given. He does not hold with television, it is too greedy for spectacle. It cannot suffer hesitation; Anastasia’s silences were edited out. She looked small and mad on the screen, Jack thought, swamped in her pillar-box-red coat and matching hat – with a gold feather cocked jauntily in its band. The camera’s avaricious gaze reduced her to a bent old lady staring myopically at the lens. A jutting chin, her moist and toothless pout, shielded by a Kleenex. She absolutely refused to smile.
‘How shall I tell you who I am?’ she demanded crossly, when asked to declare herself. ‘In which way? Can you tell me that?’ She buttonholed the reporter. ‘Can you really prove to me who you are?’
Touché, Jack thought.
After all the years of facts and measurements, decades of interrogation, yards of testimony, the faulty lies of eyewitnesses, not to speak of those bloody Romanovs, as stubborn as she was – could they not recognise, at least, a common family trait in that? – Anastasia had finally come up with an existential argument, a question of her own.
Dalldorf Asylum, Berlin, January 1922
SHE HAS CONFESSED! The Unknown Woman has confessed. Clara Peuthert rushes from Ward B, her good hand aflutter, her heart thumping with a queer excitement. It is not the breathy agitation that usually precedes one of her seizures, lightness in the head, a heaviness of breath as if a heavy black anvil is lodged on her chest. No, this is a strange, clammy lump in her throat which feels like fear, and a tripping murmur in her breast which feels like love. Doused in the rinsed, lemony light of early afternoon, she lurches down the corridor of House 4 towards the director’s office. She has a palsied gait. Her right arm is frozen, the buckled hand turned outwards like the sly reach of a pickpocket, her leg drags lazily. Stripes of weak sunlight flood through the French windows, throwing a fretwork of light and shade at her feet. It is like walking through corn marigold. Usually, it is necessary to make an appointment to see the director, and in Clara’s case it would be more normal for her to be frogmarched to the small windowless room at the end of the low block. But this is an exceptional circumstance and Clara is an old hand. She knows when the rules can be broken. After all, she is the only sane one here. She has a certificate to prove it – not mad, it declares, only pathological. Anyway, none of this is of any import in comparison to the startling news she is carrying.
Clara Peuthert is a tall woman, fifty-one years of age, large-boned but lean. Her unruly head of red hair clustering around her square jaw is one clue to the spitting rages which have brought her to the Dalldorf Asylum, not once but several times. That and her green goitred gaze and the taut cords of her neck. But in repose she has a glassy, seductive air; she has the capacity to mesmerise with the intensity of her flawed attention. Her interest in others feels to them like lavish flattery, as if she has bestowed grandeur on them. It is in this way she has gained the confidence of Fräulein Unbekannt, the unknown woman.
No one else had the patience. The doctors had long since given up. Her dogged muteness had defeated them. All their inquiries had come to naught. The questions had started two years before at the Elisabeth Hospital on Lützowstraβe, where she was taken first after being dragged from the canal, wrapped in a rough blanket, her fingers numb, her teeth chattering. Who are you? What were you doing? Did you jump or were you pushed? Why did you do it? Where are your papers? Who are you? The nurses peeled off her seeping clothes. She resisted at first, flinching as they touched her, shutting her eyes tight. They realised why when she stepped into the white enamel tub. Her body was covered in scars, long, deep incisions and blistered weals on her stomach and torso.
‘Who has done this to you?’ one of the nurses asked urgently.
She was brisk and heavy-set with a cracked red face, a motherly woman. But the young woman, who had not uttered a single word, simply shut her eyes and shook her head. The nurse stood guard while she bathed.
‘Can’t trust you near water,’ she said heartily, her laughter echoing in the white-tiled bathhouse.
Her merry voice was the only human sound, though the pipes gurgled and the bath tap dripped. The young woman made no move to stop it. She lay in the water like a corpse until the steaming water grew tepid. On the nurse’s urging she stepped out onto the wooden pallet by the bath. The nurse noticed another wound on her instep. And another thing which made her smart with fellow feeling. Hallux valgus. The mysterious patient, like herself, had bunions. She allowed herself to be wrapped in a towel and dried gently, the nurse mindful of her wounds, though by the look of them they were several years old. She did not struggle when the nurse slipped a white chemise of bleached hessian over her head. She was as biddable as an overtired child at bedtime.
The nurse led her by the hand to a desk on the night ward. She made a list of her sodden clothes. Black skirt, black stockings, white linen blouse, underwear, laced boots, a brown shawl.
‘No coat,’ the nurse murmured in rebuke as she entered these details in a large ledger, ‘in this weather!’
She sifted through the clothing, examining each item and shaking her head mournfully at the end of the process. There were no labels or laundry marks. They provided no clues to the wearer’s identity. She bundled the clothes into a large linen basket and led the young woman to a bed near the desk so that she could keep an eye on her. In the morning, she was sure, when the shock had worn off, whatever had happened to the poor creature would become clear. A predicament of love, the nurse suspected, why else would a pretty young woman try to kill herself?
The nurse checked on her through the night. Scrubbed and clean and released from scrutiny, the young woman’s sleeping features had eased into a pallid innocence. Some mother had crushed this face to her breast, a man might have gazed here with desire.
‘But now, my dear,’ the nurse ruminated aloud, ‘you are as much yourself as you will ever be.’ The graveyard hours had made her pensive.
In the morning, before going off duty, she brought the young woman breakfast, a bowl of coffee, a slice of white bread. She ate wordlessly but with relish. Her face had lost its night’s ease. In its place was a blank and haughty defiance.
It is this look that greets the doctor who approaches the bed during the morning rounds. He is alone. From the admission notes he has gleaned that groups of people agitate the patient. When she came to on the canal bank the night before stretched at the feet of a crowd of onlookers, all babble and alarm, she cowered and clapped her hands over her ears as if to shut out the noise. He has told the police officer who has arrived to question her to wait outside.
‘Fräulein,’ he says gingerly.
She does not raise her eyes from what seems intense contemplation of her hands. He draws up a chair, a rickety bentwood. The legs scrape along the speckled floor of the ward. She winces at the tiny scream.
‘Fräulein,’ he starts again, ‘you must tell us who you are. Your family will be concerned. Surely?’
She looks up, but not at him. Her eyes follow the progress of a nurse bearing a jug and basin for a bed bath further down the ward.
‘They will wonder where you are, if some harm has befallen you. Your mother … Papa?’
The word seems to jar. She looks at him swiftly, an afflicted glance no more, then looks away again.
‘Come, come, Fräulein.’ He tries a hearty tone. ‘You must let us help you. We need to know what brought you to such drastic action.’
She sits stony-faced, eyes down.
‘It’s a crime, you know,’ he says sternly.
Certain words seem to unnerve her. Crime makes her draw the coverlet up in a grim bunch to her face.
‘You can’t expect to get away with it, Fräulein.’
She bunches the counterpane into a rosette at her mouth.
‘Trying to kill yourself … well, the authorities may want to pursue it. You would do better to co-operate with us rather than trust to the tender mercies of the Berlin police department.’
Police. Another jagged word.
‘Tell us, we can help you. Who are you?’
She shakes her head.
‘Do you work, Fräulein?’ he persists. He makes to take one of her hands. She withdraws it sharply as if his touch might burn.
‘In a factory, perhaps?’
A tiny frown wrinkles her high brow. He is not sure if it is a furrow of concentration or distress.
‘Would it be fair to describe you as a working woman?’
He is beginning to sound desperate, sitting there with his pen poised and a sheaf of papers on his knee, like a disconsolate fisherman hauling in empty nets. And then, slowly, she nods.
‘Yes?’
Too keen. She turns away and buries her face in the pillow. The interview is over. He has been dismissed.
He came back every day for weeks. He was like a dog, eager and hopeless by turns. He would get exasperated by her silence, exploding into a kind of helpless anger, immediately followed by a respectful apology, afraid of exciting her ire. She seemed to watch his antics with an indulgent fondness. Sometimes he thought she was laughing at him, enjoying this cat and mouse game, toying with him. At other times he believed her baffled muteness was genuine. And it seemed that she grew used to, if not to like, his daily visits, his tenderly persistent interest in her. He could not understand why it disturbed him that he didn’t know who she was. It didn’t disturb her. Other things did – the sight of the policeman who, in the early days, had sat in on a few sessions, a clumsy, incompetent oaf by the name of Krug. She clammed up completely then. He laughed at himself. Only he would recognise the difference between her general silence and the recalcitrance she reserved for Inspector Krug. In the end, though, she exhausted Dr Finsterl. (That was his name; in the absence of information about her he had talked about himself.) Willi Finsterl, aged twenty-nine, newly qualified intern at the Elisabeth Hospital. He had served at the Front. Wounded at Verdun, he said. Verdun. She did not want to hear about that, her hands went over her ears.
After six weeks of fruitless questioning, Dr Finsterl surrendered. One Monday morning he arrived at her bedside as usual, but instead of sitting down companionably he stood rather formally at the end of the bed.
‘Fräulein,’ he said, with an upward inflection so that it sounded like a query.
She plumped up the pillows behind her, a prelude to their halting routine of unanswered questions.
‘Today you are going to be taken to another place. To Dalldorf.’
She cocked her head quizzically.
‘It’s an asylum.’
She cleared her throat. Dr Finsterl realised that this was the first sound he had heard her make. He felt ridiculously proud as if she were an infant uttering her first word. And then she rewarded him with a full sentence.
‘I have done nothing.’
So used was he to her silence that he looked around, sure that somebody else had spoken. When he looked back at her, her features were set in determined repose.
‘Who are you? Please, tell me,’ he pleaded.
But after the brief sunburst he had lost her to the enveloping fog.
‘We cannot keep you here any longer,’ he said irritably. ‘We have many sick people to care for. And you refuse to help yourself.’
He backed away and then he remembered.
‘I have given you a name, by the way. I had to put something on the papers. I’ve called you Fräulein Unbekannt,’ he declared, ‘the unknown one.’
Fräulein Unbekannt. She liked the sound of it. She was grateful to Willi Finsterl; he had given her a little gift. Maybe now the questions would stop.