I Was Anastasia

by Ariel Lawhon

  “Can we be sure that woman is really Anastasia Romanov?” Maria von Kleist’s voice is little more than a whisper in the front seat, and Anna has to strain to hear her husband’s reply.

  “No. We can’t,” the Baron says.

  “So there’s no way to really know who we’ve invited into our home?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “We’re fools,” she hisses. “We’ll be the laughingstock of this entire city.”

  The Baron sighs. “Listen, this is a risk worth taking. If that woman is the Grand Duchess we will be at a great advantage when the old order is restored.”

  “If it’s restored.”

  “It will be. There’s no other option. I doubt Lenin will remain in power. The other Romanovs will be found as well.” The Baron has one of those calm, reassuring voices. So level and sincere that he makes others feel as though all is right in the world.

  “We don’t even know if the tsar or his family is still alive. No one has seen any of them in four years. The rumors about what happened in Ekaterinburg are ghastly.”

  “They’re rumors.”

  The gentle tapping of a long fingernail on the window fills the silence. Maria von Kleist is thinking. Anna holds her breath and stays very still, afraid of being caught eavesdropping.

  Finally, she asks, “And if that isn’t Anastasia? If we’ve been duped?”

  Anna imagines him shrugging, unconcerned, behind the wheel. “Then we find a way to get rid of her. It won’t matter in the end. We’ll be considered heroes and patriots either way.”

  “Or fools.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the others are dead. It’s tragic, certainly, but even that works in our favor. If that young woman is the last surviving Romanov it means we’ve rescued an empress.”

  A sly change of tone. “And she will be indebted to us.”

  “Exactly.”

  At least Anna understands what they’re getting at now. She isn’t so much worried about their machinations as she is intrigued by them. She’s not unfamiliar with politics. Moves and countermoves. If the Kleists plan on using her, Anna is more than happy to return the favor.

  A few minutes later they pull to the curb beside a tall, ornate building with wrought-iron flower boxes beneath each window. The car door opens so abruptly that Anna almost spills into the street. She barely catches herself before landing on the feet of a doorman, and then makes a show of stretching and yawning to convince the Kleists that she’s just woken up.

  “Fräulein,” he says, extending a hand and offering to help her out.

  Anna hesitates only a moment before taking his hand. The girls slide across the seat, giggling as the doorman lifts them by their little waists and plants them gently on the sidewalk, then moves on to help Maria von Kleist out as well. Baron von Kleist unfolds his long body from the car and stretches while the doorman retrieves Anna’s bag from the trunk.

  “Welcome to our home,” the Baron says, sweeping his arm toward the enormous, grand facade.

  The building is eight stories tall and swallows nearly half the block.

  Anna gapes. “This is your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of it?”

  He laughs then, genuine and good-humored. “Of course not.”

  “Only the top floor,” his wife adds.

  There is barely enough room inside the elevator for Anna, the Kleists, and the doorman. She shrinks into the corner, trying not to panic as the grate slams shut and the cage rises with a clang and a squeal toward the eighth floor. When it stops thirty seconds later she finally exhales. They pile into an elegant foyer with parquet floors and wall sconces that frame a gilded mirror hung above a console table set with a vase of fresh spring flowers.

  The Kleists’ apartment has vaulted ceilings, polished floors, and arched windows with leaded panes. There are three bedrooms and three bathrooms, all of them flooded with light and draped with expensive fabrics. There is a dining room, a drawing room, a family room, an office for the Baron, and a kitchen somewhere at the back that Anna never sees. But it is the guest room that nearly brings Anna to tears.

  “This is where you will stay,” Maria von Kleist tells her, swinging the door open to a bright, lovely room with a four-poster bed, a dressing table, and an armoire. It has its own furnished balcony and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. “Why don’t you freshen up? Make yourself at home. Rest for a while. I know this is all very overwhelming.”

  “Thank you.” Anna touches her dry cheeks and cracked lips. Runs her fingers through her knotted hair. Looks around for her satchel.

  “I’ll have your things washed. But you won’t need them right away.” Maria opens the armoire and reveals an entire wardrobe of new clothing—complete with tags—hanging inside. There are slippers and undergarments neatly stacked at the bottom. She looks a little embarrassed. “I guessed your size. We can exchange anything that doesn’t fit.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s the least we can do. You were in that horrid place for so long. If we’d only known we would have come sooner.”

  “But I can’t—”

  “Let us help you. Please. You don’t owe us anything.” Her words are kind, but her body is stiff and ill at ease. “Take your time.”

  And then the great mahogany door to her room closes and Anna is alone—really, truly alone for the first time since that night on the Bendler Bridge.

  She can hear the Kleist family chatting in German with some faceless member of the household—a woman with a deep voice—but the sounds are muffled and distant. Anna takes her boots off and sets them against the wall. Her stockings have holes in the toes, so she peels them off as well and tucks them into the toe of one boot. They are not nice enough to go in the armoire with her new things. Perhaps not even worth keeping now that she has new things.

  Anna hasn’t owned anything store-bought since she was seventeen; everything since then has been handmade. She runs her fingers along the fine stitching and gauzy material of the new clothing. She inhales the deep, earthy, coriander fragrance of silk and cotton. Anna strokes the pillows on her bed and the curtains at her window. She walks barefoot across the Oriental carpet. Anna sheds her clothing on the way to the bathroom the way a snake sheds its skin in spring: one long, continuous peel falling to the ground. She doesn’t notice the dirt beneath her toenails or the grime at her ankles until she stands naked on the polished white marble. The air is cool and smells of towels dried in the sun. Anna doesn’t care that the curtains are open or that anyone in the apartments across the street could see her if they only looked out their own immaculate windows. All she sees or cares about or notices are the deep, curving lines of the bathtub.

  Expensive soap and soft towels are at her disposal. The bath mat is plush, and a heavy robe hangs on a hook at the door. The label inside the robe reads Le Pavillon de la Reine. A favorite hotel in Paris, no doubt. A purchase made on one of the Kleists’ many Parisian holidays. The robe probably costs more than the average Berlin factory girl makes in a month, but Anna can’t quite bring herself to judge them for the excess when she drops it across her narrow shoulders. It’s heavy like an expensive blanket, and soft like a kitten’s ear. It falls all the way to the floor and pools at her feet. Anna sighs audibly and turns on the tap.

  Anna draws one finger along the faint, striated lines that run vertically below her belly button. It’s been so long they are almost invisible now. She drops her hand. Takes a deep breath. Refuses to wander down that mental path.

  Anna shrugs out of the robe and lowers herself into the soapy water beneath the open window. Below her are the sounds of city life, the early evening commotion of businesses closing for the day. Cars and horns and delivery trucks. Wealthy women chatting in French and German and Russian as they leave the shops below, little affluent cliques of émigrés bent beneath the weight of
their shopping bags. Laughter drifts up from the cafés and mixes oddly with the crying of a child in the courtyard across the street. The water in this tub is still warm, and she is clean. It’s all a miracle. Anna relaxes finally, ridiculously happy for the first time in years.

  · 24 ·

  Anastasia

  THE HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE

  1918

  Trans-Siberian Railway, Halfway to Ekaterinburg

  May 24

  Once, before the revolution, my siblings and I studied ancient Rome. Gilliard led the expedition beginning with the conquest of the Sabines in the eighth century BC and ending when Rome burned to the ground in AD 64. He took that opportunity to foist Latin upon us, insisting it was the foundation of literature and without it we would be illiterate. I might have taken to the language if not for a single word learned early in our review of the Sabines: raptio.

  Rape.

  The Rape of the Sabines. A singular moment in history made famous by Renaissance painters and sculptors: Romulus’s mass kidnapping of women from villages surrounding Rome. The poor daughters of Sabine were lured to a festival hosted by the men of Rome and, once there, were taken away and compelled to marry their captors. Human plunder. Along with the Latin and the history, we studied the paintings themselves. Gilliard argued—supported by the writings of a number of scholars, Livy among them—that what transpired in Rome was better translated as conquest than violation. And to prove his point he took us on a field trip.

  It took days to reach Paris on the imperial train, but upon our arrival, Gilliard wasted no time in shuffling us directly to the Louvre, where he had arranged a private viewing of Nicolas Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women. So obsessed was the artist with this subject that he painted it twice in his lifetime. And to Poussin’s credit, I respected the fact that he depicted the women fully clothed. Pietro da Cortona, Jacques Stella, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, and Peter Paul Rubens all rendered the women in various stages of voluptuous nudity. Almost all of them titled their paintings The Rape of the Sabine Women.

  Raptio.

  Rape.

  Rapacious.

  Rapine.

  Raptor.

  Ravish.

  Only in Latin can one root word be the basis for myriad appalling descriptors. Horrible, vulgar, violent words. Brutish and masculine. I hate them all and the language from which they originated. Latin deserves to be a dead language, and I do not mourn it.

  Now, as the train rattles west toward Ekaterinburg, I think it’s a pity that Nicolas Poussin and his contemporaries did not open their fields of artistic expression to women. I am certain female painters would have eradicated the themes of masculine valor from those bright, chaotic canvases. They would have illustrated, as legend did in the end, that the Sabines and not the soldiers were the saviors of Rome.

  The train is silent now, and the night’s terrors are replaced by an eeriness that settles heavily in the air. Beside me the thin cushion shifts and the soldier who lies there slides from the berth. Pretending to be asleep, I listen as he slips quietly from our compartment. Only when he is gone do I roll over and look out the window. The sky is cold, the color of gunmetal, and I can see only broken glimpses of it as we pass through a towering forest. Above me Alexey and Joy snore in soft, whistling harmony. My brother fell asleep in the night, too exhausted and traumatized to stay alert any longer. It was a relief, to be honest. He could offer no protection, and I didn’t want him remembering anyway.

  I lie awake until Semyon slides the door open and shoves Olga back into the compartment. She flinches when the door slams closed again. Olga seems like a ghost, standing there in the gloom, wringing her hands. When she finally looks at me, her eyes are glassy, bottomless.

  “Are you okay?” I whisper, knowing that she’s not. I want to embrace her. I want to weep. But she appears so fragile in her rumpled clothing, so temporal that I am afraid she will disintegrate at the slightest touch.

  “No,” Olga says and crawls into the berth directly across from mine. She draws the thin blanket across her shoulders, pulls her knees into her chest, and closes her eyes. Sleep is her only refuge and she races toward it. Within seconds the rise and fall of her chest is slow and rhythmic.

  “Please, God,” I whisper. “Do not let her dream.”

  Tatiana stumbles in on her own a few minutes later. She goes straight to the window, her face slick with tears, her lips swollen. Tatiana adjusts her clothing, checking the buttons on her blouse, and then straightening her skirt. She runs her hands through her tangled hair, combing it with her fingers, then spreads them across the fabric of her blouse, over and over, trying to press the wrinkles away. Finally, when her sobs became so hard she cannot catch a breath in between, she lays her forehead against the window. I fear she might shove it aside and throw herself out.

  “I am so sorry about Ortimo,” I say. My voice is ragged from all the crying I’ve done myself, but I have to say something, and everything else feels unmentionable.

  “I wish I’d drawn the short straw,” Tatiana says, her voice empty of all emotion. “I wish I’d been the one to go with Mother and Father.”

  I had wished this for myself a hundred times during the night and cannot escape the guilt I feel for having done so. The only comfort I can offer Tatiana is to confess it. “So do I.”

  When Tatiana finally turns from the window she looks hollowed out. Whereas Olga’s eyes were filled with sorrow, hers are altogether empty. My sister stands before me, but she is missing somehow, removed from her body. So I lift my blanket and she climbs in beside me, rigid and straight, as though fearing human contact. We lie there, back to back, unspeaking, as the train slowly rocks her back to sleep.

  I think about the daughters of Sabine as I drift away myself. The purpose of art, Gilliard had said as we stood on the polished marble floors of the Louvre, is to tell the truth. He waved an arm at the canvas, at the boldly painted forms of tangled humans crowding that Roman courtyard. Without those women there would be no Rome, he said. The greatest empire on earth would never have existed. That great city would have been left to decay within a generation. Yet I knew now that both Gilliard and Nicolas Poussin were mistaken about the most fundamental aspect of the story: There is nothing artistic about rape. Taking a woman by force makes a man no better than the rooster in Tobolsk. It simply makes him an animal.

  * * *

  —

  We arrive in Ekaterinburg at midnight. The soldiers immediately file from the train and crowd onto the platform for instruction. Within moments dim electric lights flicker on and we can see them head to the freight cars and begin to unload our belongings. We watch, faces pressed to the window as they grab boxes and trunks and pieces of furniture and toss them onto the droshkies— open, four-wheeled carriages pulled by enormous draught horses. It begins to rain within the hour, and the temperature drops soon after. Twice I catch a glimpse of Tomas and Ivan, shivering in the cold, their lips forming curse words that I am forbidden to speak aloud.

  At some point my siblings and I fall asleep again, huddled together for warmth on one of the lower berths. We are woken intermittently by the stomping and cursing of the soldiers. Every time the door to our car slams open we cringe. Every time we hear footsteps in the hallway we grab one another tighter. But the soldiers leave us alone that night, and when morning dawns, hours later, we get the first real glimpse of our new home.

  Despite it being late May, snow is still on the ground in Ekaterinburg. It is piled high against the sides of buildings and shoveled into dirty heaps in the gutters. The streets are filled with mud and the sidewalks lined with spectators. Beyond the train station is a sprawling city of square stone buildings with small windows and sloping roofs. The city is built, not on a grid as one would expect, but on a system of meandering streets and narrow dead-end lanes that remind me of the deer trails outside Tsarskoe Selo. The Iset River runs
through the middle of the city, forming a respectable lake at its widest point, and then narrows again as it turns to the south. Around this lake are built the wealthiest homes. But we can see only the barest glimpse of the broad, silver water from where we stand on the platform.

  Alexey holds on to Olga and Tatiana, and I think that the three of them look like a tiny, despondent island amid the activity. Heads bent together. Eyes downcast. Shoulders rounded. Exhausted. Weepy. Hungry. Demoralized. My siblings are broken, and the only thing that can help is being delivered safely into the arms of our parents.

  Gilliard stands beside me and I turn to ask how much longer we have to wait, but his attention is at my feet, his frown causing that spectacular mustache to droop at the corners. He blinks three times, then bends his mouth to my ear and asks quietly, “What is that? Please, for the love of God, do not say it is a knife.”

  My laces have come undone, and in the process Father’s paper knife has come loose from its hiding spot, the mother-of-pearl handle standing out against the black leather of my boot. “No,” I say, shaking my head slowly so as not to draw attention from the guards who swirl around us. “It is a paper knife.”

  “A letter opener? Have you lost your mind? Do you think these men will make a distinction between a paper knife and a regular knife? They will only see a weapon. And they will punish you for having it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should. Your life is worth more than you think. And angering these men to make a point is unwise.”

  “You have a high estimation of my life. I do not think these men share it.”

  “Then that is all the more reason for you to guard it ferociously.”

  “Now you want me to be ferocious. I wish that freedom extended to the schoolroom.”