The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  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 movemen
ts 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 Peuther
t 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.